What if you could find the most likely restaurant in a town.. or the most unlikely? Data can. CC-licensed photo by Ben Sutherland 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.

It’s Friday, but no post due at the Social Warming Substack

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

AI helps find formula for paint to keep buildings cooler • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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AI-engineered paint could reduce the sweltering urban heat island effect in cities and cut air-conditioning bills, scientists have claimed, as machine learning accelerates the creation of new materials for everything from electric motors to carbon capture.

Materials experts have used artificial intelligence to formulate new coatings that can keep buildings between 5ºC and 20ºC cooler than normal paint after exposure to midday sun. They could also be applied to cars, trains, electrical equipment and other objects that will require more cooling in a world that is heating up.

Using machine learning, researchers at universities in the US, China, Singapore and Sweden designed new paint formulas tuned to best reflect the sun’s rays and emit heat, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the science journal Nature.

It is the latest example of AI being used to leapfrog traditional trial-and-error approaches to scientific advances. Last year the British company MatNex used AI to create a new kind of permanent magnet used in electric vehicle motors to avoid the use of rare earth metals, whose mining is carbon-intensive.

Microsoft has released AI tools to help researchers rapidly design new inorganic materials – often crystalline structures used in solar panels and medical implants. And there are hopes for new materials to better capture carbon in the atmosphere and to make more efficient batteries.

The paint research was carried out by academics at the University of Texas in Austin, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the National University of Singapore and Umeå University in Sweden. It found that applying one of several new AI-enabled paints to the roof of a four-storey apartment block could save electricity equivalent to 15,800 kilowatt hours a year in a hot climate such as Rio de Janeiro’s or Bangkok’s. If the paint were applied to 1,000 blocks, that could save enough electricity to power more than 10,000 air conditioning units for a year.

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AI can be good! Surprisingly.
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How the hottest place in India survives • The New York Times

Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar:

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The unbearable temperatures that arrive every summer in India are a threat to lives and livelihoods. Medical services become bogged down. Economic output suffers.

For many Indians, there is no true escape from the heat. Air-conditioning is an impossible dream. Work is done outside, under the sun, and not to work means not to eat.

In the face of those realities, the daily rhythms of life are changing in India, the most populous country on a continent that is warming at a rate twice as fast as the global average. We witnessed these new routines when we spent a day earlier this month in Sri Ganganagar, a region in the desert state of Rajasthan that was the hottest place in the country in mid-June.

The temperature on the day of our visit peaked at 47 degrees Celsius, or 117 degrees Fahrenheit. The next day was even worse: 49ºC, or 121ºF. Relative humidity that has been rising over the past decade compounded the misery.

Still, life carried on.

6 a.m., 30°C, 86°F: Work in the fields and on construction sites begins early, even before dawn, to catch as many cooler hours as possible.

Kulwinder Singh and his son Gurveer were out weeding their cotton field. Gurveer then helped his mother prepare food for the cattle. His sister folded the sheets from simple woven beds in the courtyard, where the family sleeps at night to seek some respite in the breeze.

9 a.m., 36°C, 97°F: As temperatures started climbing, a canal on the edge of a village in the district was growing busy, as children jumped in to cool off. Anmol Varma, 16, who works at a car accessories shop, said he made several visits to the canal. “All day,” he said.

…Noon, 43°C, 109ºF: By noon, the laborers at the construction site had paused their plastering of a wall. But there wasn’t much relief as they cooked their lunch under the baking sun. The villages around Sri Ganganagar become largely deserted between midday and late afternoon, with people retreating indoors.

But that was less of an option in the city proper. Roadside carts remained open, and construction work continued in the blistering heat. The fire department tried to cool off the streets by spraying water, and volunteers ran water stands. “The main thing is the laborers and people who work outside,” said Dr. Deepak Monga, who leads the city’s main hospital. “They continue their work, because otherwise they die of hunger.”

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India may be in the front line of the human effects as the wet bulb temperature approaches that where people just can’t survive. How soon? We don’t know.
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Google wipes 350 Android apps tied to major ad fraud scheme • AdWeek

Kendra Barnett:

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An ad fraud scheme, dubbed IconAds, that served out-of-context mobile ads has led Google to pull 352 apps from its Play Store. 

The operation, uncovered by cybersecurity firm HUMAN, was designed to generate revenue through spoofed ad impressions. Users download Android apps—which pose as generic tools like flashlights, file scanners, and photo apps—that disguise their icons on user screens to impede detection. They then display ads on users’ screens, even when the apps in question are not in use.

HUMAN doesn’t have exact numbers of the financial impact, but estimates the impact, including wasted ad spend, is firmly in the seven-figure range. At its height, the apps generated around 1.2 billion ad bid requests per day. Traffic generated by IconAds primarily originated from Brazil, Mexico, and the U.S.

“This is a very uninvestigated, unseen side of the internet where fraudsters are making millions of dollars, and there are not a lot of people that are paying attention or actually mitigating,” said Gavin Reid, HUMAN’s chief information security officer.

Four months ago, a similar Android ad fraud scheme was uncovered by ad verification firm Integral Ad Science, leading Google to remove more than 180 apps from the Play Store. 

Google declined ADWEEK’s request for comment.

…In some examples, impacted apps appeared on users’ home screens as white circles with no name. When a user clicked the white circle, nothing happened. The apps then deploy hidden ad-serving code, serving interstitial ads on the user’s screen, regardless of whether the app is in use or not.

In another instance, an app mimicked the Google Play Store logo. When a user clicked, the app redirected the user to the real Google Play Store—only to work secretly in the background to serve out-of-context ads.

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Firmly into millions of dollars. And that’s just the fraud that’s caught.
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No one likes video meetings. So they’re sending their AI note takers instead • The Washington Post

Lisa Bonos and Danielle Abril:

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Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans.

He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The ten others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.

Some of the AI helpers were assisting a person who was also present on the call; others represented humans who had declined to show up but sent a bot that listens but can’t talk in their place. The human-machine imbalance made Sellers concerned that the modern thirst for AI-powered optimization was starting to impede human interaction.

“I want to talk to people,” said Sellers, who runs a content agency for entrepreneurs out of Birmingham, Alabama. “I don’t want to talk to a bunch of note takers,” he said — before adding that he has occasionally himself sent an AI note taker to meetings in his place.

Experiences like Sellers’s are becoming more common as AI tools gain momentum in white-collar workplaces, offering time-saving shortcuts but also new workplace etiquette conundrums.

…Sending an AI bot to experience things in your absence could be the next logical step after social media and smartphones created the expectation that anything that can be recorded, will be.

“We’re moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten,” Allie K. Miller, CEO of Open Machine, which helps companies and executives deploy AI, said in a phone interview last week. Always-on recording is changing human behavior, she said, from college parties to corporate boardrooms.

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Eventually we can just send the bots and they can talk among themselves.
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Stalking the statistically improbable restaurant… with data! • Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman:

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Last summer, I wrote about the statistically improbable restaurant, the restaurant you wouldn’t expect to find in a small American city: the excellent Nepali food in Erie, PA and Akron, OH; a gem of a Gambian restaurant in Springfield, IL.

Statistically improbable restaurants often tell you something about the communities they are based in: Erie and Akron have large Lhotshampa refugee populations, Nepali-speaking people who lived in Bhutan for years before being expelled from their county; Springfield has University of Illinois Springfield, which attracts lots of west African students, some of whom have settled in the area.

The existence of the statistically improbable restaurant implies a statistically probable restaurant distribution: the mix of restaurants we’d expect to find in an “average” American city. Of course, once you dig into the idea of an “average” city, the absurdity of the concept becomes clear.

There are 343 cities in the US with populations of over 100,000 people, from 8.47 million in New York City to 100,128 in Sunrise, Florida (a small city in the Ft. Lauderdale, FL metro area). Within that set are global megacities like New York and LA, state capitols, college towns, towns growing explosively and those shrinking slowly.

I’ve retrieved data about the restaurants in 340 of these cities using the Google Places API. This is a giant database of geographic information from across the world – not only does it include information about restaurants, but about parks, churches, museums and other points of interest. The API was designed to make it easy to search by proximity – “return all restaurants within 2km of this point” – but it’s recently gained an “aggregate” attribute, which allows you to ask questions like “How many Mexican restaurants are there in Wichita Falls, Texas?”.

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Wonder if he would do it for the UK? Smaller dataset, at least.
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That dropped call with customer service? It was on purpose • The Atlantic

Chris Colin:

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In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.

I decided to start paying attention. Was the impenetrability of these contact centers actually deliberate? (Buying a new product or service sure is seamless.) Why do we so often feel like everything’s broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us?

Turns out there’s a word for it.

In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshalled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.

The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,” he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.

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I think the fact that there’s a “customer rage survey” tells its own story. In the UK, moneysavingexpert Martin Lewis has been trying to collect data about phone wait times, but I haven’t seen anything from it. Remember: your call is important to these companies, because it means call volumes are higher than expected.
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Racist AI-generated videos are the newest slop garnering millions of views on TikTok • Media Matters

Abbie Richards:

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Racist and antisemitic AI-generated videos are getting millions of views on TikTok. 

These videos — seemingly created with Google’s Veo 3, a publicly accessible text-to-video generator — traffic in racist tropes, such as depicting Black people as monkeys and criminals and featuring imagery of Black people with watermelons and fried chicken. 

Users are also posting misleading AI-generated videos of immigrants and protesters, including videos in which protesters are run over by cars. And in an especially dystopian nightmare, AI-generated videos are reenacting marginalized groups’ historical traumas, depicting concentration camps and Ku Klux Klan attacks on Black Americans. 

TikTok’s community guidelines prohibit videos dehumanizing racial and ethnic groups as well as “threatening or expressing a desire to cause physical injury to a person or a group.” The platform has a long history of struggling to contain hate speech, violent content, and misleading AI-generated content, and the dehumanizing and sometimes violent videos that Media Matters has now identified are seemingly spreading unchecked on the social media platform. 

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I wouldn’t set any story by TikTok’s “community guidelines”. If it weren’t obvious to people that China is happy for it to completely mess up peoples’ heads, maybe this would help cement that. Trump, meanwhile, hasn’t shut it down or forced a sale to a US company, in breach of the law.
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I built The Torment Nexus (Political Podcast Edition) • Techtris

James Ball:

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Zach’s 24-hour polling podcast is his version of the Torment Nexus [an imaginary cautionary tale in SF which tech companies then implement], and he’s the sci-fi author. So I wondered what might happen if I took on the role of the tech company. More specifically, I wondered whether “AI” had advanced enough in the few years since 2019 that I could just ping the webcomic into ChatGPT and ask it to create what was being described therein.

Spoiler warning: it could, sort of. You can listen to the results right here, right now – I am now the proud(?) owner and creator of an entirely AI powered 24/7 podcast in which “Alex” and “Blake” eternally discuss Donald Trump’s approval ratings and the impact recent headlines will have on them.

It’s quite possibly the worst thing I have ever done. I think I love it.

The whole process was also incredibly telling – to me, at least – about the gap between what AI ‘can’ do now in theory and what it can actually do in practice. I tried to follow a rough rule here of asking the AI to give extremely simple, non-technical and step-by-step instructions throughout, which I would then follow and execute (partly because I wasn’t using agentic AI and partly because I wouldn’t trust it with either my card details or various login credentials even if I did).

I also resolved not to fix problems myself: by and large if the AI told me to do something stupid I would do it. When something didn’t work or gave me an error message I fed that back into ChatGPT (I was using o3) and let it deal with the problem. Mostly.

The basics worked well, at least at first. ChatGPT successfully read the comic and understood the 24/7 podcast concept. I had to explain I wanted it to make it, explain every step in detail (including writing all relevant code), and to do so for a running cost of less than $30 a month. I also had to clarify that I wanted it to have the voices discussing real headlines (it initially took “nonsense” literally) and that there should be two characters having a conversation, instead of one character monologuing around the clock, forever.

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I’m going to be that in a few years there will be a serious radio station which does this, with adverts of course.
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The ‘Stop Killing Games’ petition achieves 1 million signatures goal • Inside Gaming

Andrew Highton:

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The movement began in 2024, and the main website states: “‘Stop Killing Games’ is a consumer movement started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers. An increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods – with no stated expiration date – but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher ends.” [ie when servers for online games are turned off.]

Well over a year later, the main petition has reached one million signatures through the European Citizens’ Initiative. Not only that, but the UK-targeted petition aimed to bring this before the UK government has eclipsed its 100K goal too, standing at over 130,000 signatures and counting.

This now means the EU will likely address the matter and bring in legislation to counteract the practice of gaming publishers: “There is a very strong chance that the European Commission will pass new law that will both protect consumer rights to retain video games that customers have purchased and advance preservation efforts massively.“

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The fact that so many games can just die based on a company’s whims is obviously a big problem. Will the legal systems mandate anything?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The humphead parrotfish is one of the large fish species being killed off by overfishing in the Indian Ocean. CC-licensed photo by NOAA Photo Library 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Law360 mandates reporters use AI “bias” detection on all stories • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

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A new policy at Law360, the legal news service owned by LexisNexis, requires that every story pass through an AI-powered “bias” detection tool before publication.

The Law360 Union, which represents over 200 editorial staffers across the 350-person newsroom, has denounced the mandate since it went into effect in mid-May. On June 17, unit chair Hailey Konnath sent a petition to management calling for the tool to be made “completely voluntary.”

“As journalists, we should be trusted to select our own tools of the trade to do our information-gathering, reporting and editing — not pressured to use unproven technology against our will,” reads the petition, which was signed by over 90% of the union.

Law360 currently reaches over 2.8 million daily newsletter subscribers with breaking legal news and analysis. At the end of last year, the newsroom began experimenting with a suite of AI tools built in-house by LexisNexis to streamline story production. One of those tools analyzes the overall “bias” of article drafts and picks out lines of copy that should be edited to sound more “impartial.”

…On June 12, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s decision to deploy the National Guard in Los Angeles in response to anti-ICE protests was illegal. Law360 reporters were on the breaking story, publishing a news article just hours after the ruling (which has since been appealed). Under Law360’s new mandate though, the story first had to pass through the bias indicator.

Several sentences in the story were flagged as biased, including this one: “It’s the first time in 60 years that a president has mobilized a state’s National Guard without receiving a request to do so from the state’s governor.” According to the bias indicator, this sentence is “framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration.” It was best to give more context to “balance the tone.”

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American journalism, already so flat in tone that it might have been ironed, is now being turned into porridge by AI. What an endpoint.
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The Concorde-and-caviar era of Condé Nast, when magazines ruled the earth • The New York Times

Michael Grynbaum with an extract from his book about Condé Nast:

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To sell his magazines’ upper-class fantasies to the masses, Mr. [Si] Newhouse — a mercurial connoisseur who collected Rothkos and wore sweatshirts to the office — bankrolled a kind of dream life for the workers in his employ. When Art Cooper, the editor of GQ, hosted dinners in Milan in the 1990s, he flew out his food critic for the sole purpose of selecting the wine pairings. Ron Galotti, the Condé adman who inspired Mr. Big from “Sex and the City,” shipped his Ferrari Testarossa to Colorado to impress an advertiser. The photographer Irving Penn smashed a hundred Cartier glasses in pursuit of the perfect shard.

Outsiders who scoffed at this profligacy misunderstood the masquerade. Condé’s editors were the original influencers, their lives a top-to-bottom marketing campaign for the company that hired them. All those limousines and Concorde flights serviced an illusion: that the readers who subscribed and the brands that advertised could possess a piece of this glamorous world. The decadence was the point — and when it dwindled, so did the power of Condé Nast.

Today, the company is a husk of its former self. Many of its magazines have closed or been riddled by layoffs; its authority has been all but demolished by the web. When Mr. Carter’s successor at Vanity Fair, Radhika Jones, abruptly stepped down this spring, questions swirled over whether the job, once a crown jewel of journalism, was still desirable. (Some prominent editors like Janice Min said no.)

…After Condé Nast purchased the pioneering tech magazine Wired in 1998, its editor, Katrina Heron, flew to New York to meet her new bosses. She was immediately chastised for booking a room at a modest Midtown hotel. At an executive’s urging, she switched to the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, which was several times the price.

“Good,” the executive told her. “When people have breakfast with you, they want you to be staying at the St. Regis.”

Writers on assignment were encouraged to FedEx luggage to their destination, rather than schlep it on the plane. A Vanity Fair writer, reporting a story in London, lived for a month with her husband and children at the Dorchester, the prestigious hotel overlooking Hyde Park; a separate room was reserved for their nanny on the Newhouse dime.

The original influencers, perhaps, but the money spent is eye-watering, and almost upsetting.
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US founder calls out Indian techie for “scamming” multiple startups: “I fired this guy in one week” • Hindustan Times via MSN

Sanya Jain:

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Suhail Doshi, co-founder and former CEO of Mixpanel, has accused an Indian man of working at multiple startups simultaneously under false pretences. In a post on X, San Francisco-based Doshi identified Soham Parekh as a “scammer” who has allegedly duped several companies. He warned other founders to steer clear of him.

Doshi, who is also the founder of Playground AI, claimed that Parekh was briefly employed at his company. He said Parekh was fired within a week and warned against moonlighting – but the warning seems to have fallen on deaf ears as the Indian man continued to work with multiple startups.

“PSA: there’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He’s been preying on YC companies and more. Beware,” the US-based entrepreneur posted on X this afternoon. “I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying / scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later. No more excuses,” he added.

Doshi shared the ex-employee’s CV on X. According to the CV, Soham Parekh has worked at companies like Dynamo AI, Union AI, Synthesia and Alan AI in various technical roles. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Mumbai and a master’s degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, as per the CV.

However, while sharing the CV publicly, Doshi warned that it is “Probably 90% fake and most links are gone.”

The Playground founder further claimed that he tried to talk sense into Parekh but failed. “I want to also say that I tried to talk sense into this guy, explain the impact, and give him a chance to turn a new leaf because sometimes that’s what a person needs. But it clearly didn’t work,” he wrote. Doshi also said he corroborated this account with more than six companies before shaming Parekh publicly.

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There are lots of amusing results on a search where Parekh seems to have been interviewed as some sort of great worthy on various topics. There’s a 2021 Hacker News post where he boasted about being on $1m+ revenue run rate from doing ten remote jobs where desperate companies were hiring him and he did nothing until they fired him.
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FaceTime in iOS 26 will freeze your call if someone starts undressing • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

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When Apple unveiled iOS 26 last month, it mentioned a variety of new family tools coming for child accounts. One of those announcements involved a change coming to FaceTime to block nudity.

Communication Safety expands to intervene when nudity is detected in FaceTime video calls, and to blur out nudity in Shared Albums in Photos.

However, at least in the iOS 26 beta, it seems that a similar feature may be in place for all users—adults included.

As discovered by iDeviceHelp on X, FaceTime in iOS 26 freezes your call’s video and audio when it detects nudity.
The app will then show the following warning message: “Audio and video are paused because you may be showing something sensitive. If you feel uncomfortable, you should end the call.” (Options: Resume audio and video; End call.)

As you can see, FaceTime provides the option of immediately resuming audio and video, or ending the call.

It’s unclear whether this is an intended behavior, or just a bug in the beta that’s applying the feature to adults when it should only apply to child accounts.

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Prudish phones! And yet.. there are a few careers that might have been saved by this. Oh well, too late now. It’s off by default. Maybe some people ought to think about enabling it.
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Microsoft to lay off about 9,000 employees in latest round • The Seattle Times

Alex Halverson:

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Microsoft is kicking off its fiscal year by laying off thousands of employees in the largest round of layoffs since 2023, the company confirmed Wednesday.

In an ongoing effort to streamline its workforce, Microsoft said as much as 4%, or roughly 9,000, of the company’s employees could be affected by Wednesday’s layoffs. It’s unclear how many are based in [the state of] Washington [where its Redmond headquarters are based].

Microsoft said the cuts would include multiple divisions across the company but did not specify early Wednesday which teams would bear the brunt. Reports over the past two weeks from Bloomberg said sales and marketing employees, as well as gaming workers, would be heavily affected.

The Verge reported Wednesday that Xbox chief Phil Spencer confirmed to employees that the gaming division would be hit. The cuts would, Spencer said, “end or decrease work in certain areas of the business and follow Microsoft’s lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness.”

Wednesday’s move follows two waves of layoffs in May and June, which saw Microsoft fire more than 6,000 employees, almost 2,300 of whom were based in Washington.

During May’s round of layoffs, Microsoft emphasized that it wanted to flatten management layers. But data from Washington state showed only about 17% of the cuts in Redmond were designated as managers.

Microsoft had over 228,000 employees worldwide as of June 2024.

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Gets bigger! Gets smaller! There must be an internal pattern to this – presumably all the AI stuff is getting bigger? Or is that OpenAI’s job? – but it just looks like an endless accordion of employment from the outside.
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Vanishing giants: the Indian Ocean’s biggest fish need saving • Mongabay

Melita Samoilys:

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My latest research, spanning 27 coral reef sites across seven countries and done in collaboration with scientists from the U.K. and France, paints a stark picture. The population study, which used visual surveys via scuba, recorded many “zero sightings” instances — where once-abundant predatory sharks, tunas, barracudas, giant groupers (Epinephelus lanceolatus) and other large-bodied groupers, as well as the humphead parrotfish and humphead wrasse, were missing.

Overfishing and insufficient protected area management have driven many of these species toward local extinction. Even in marine reserves where protection is legislated, enforcement is often too weak or the size of the reserves is too small. Some of these large-bodied fishes, which include the largest fish in the world, are now globally endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

…Across the western Indian Ocean, many of these large fish species that once thrived in these waters are now either critically depleted or absent. Even remote regions like the Chagos Archipelago, where protection from fishing is strong, shark abundance is far lower than it should be. Particularly concerning is the near total absence of species like the humphead wrasse, humphead parrotfish and giant grouper. We’re seeing local extinctions unfold in real time, with a guaranteed domino effect.

Ineffective protected areas and overfishing due to lack of enforcement and continued use of destructive fishing equipment are driving these declines in the western Indian Ocean. Many large-bodied species are particularly vulnerable because they grow slowly and take years to reproduce, like groupers, or produce very few young per year, like sharks. Gill nets, which are widely used across the region, are unselective and will capture everything within their mesh size. The largest mesh size gill nets, the size of a large cooking pot lid, are particularly effective at snagging sharks and rays. Even within designated marine protected areas (MPAs), illegal fishing often goes unchecked due to a lack of enforcement.

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Google ends recipe pilot that left creators fearing web-traffic hit • Bloomberg via MSN

Julia Love and Davey Alba:

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Google has ended tests of a feature that would have let users open a snapshot of cooking-recipe content directly in web search results — a development welcomed by creators and food bloggers who were concerned about eroding traffic to their sites.

In recent months, Alphabet Inc.-owned Google has tested Recipe Quick View, which showed some food bloggers’ content in search. The company framed the feature as an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a website. But some bloggers said they feared that the product would keep users from clicking through to their sites, depriving them of traffic and ad revenue.

Google on Tuesday confirmed it ended the trial. “We continually experiment with ways to make it easier for people to find helpful information on Search,” a spokesperson for Google said in a statement. “Learnings from these experiments help to inform future development and efforts.”

The company’s retreat on the recipe feature comes amid a larger debate about whether the terms of engagement between the search giant and publishers should be renegotiated as generative AI remakes the web.

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This is reaching some sort of endpoint. So many recipe sites – so many sites – are full of flannel to try to hit as many possible search terms as they can. Then you have to wade through the flannel to get to what you want. Brevity on web pages is dying in the face of AI generation: Google wants more brevity, web page writers need less. The tug-of-war is eternal.
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Heathrow considering legal action against National Grid over fire • BBC News

Ben King and Raarea Masud:

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Heathrow Airport is considering legal action against National Grid after a report found the fire which caused the airport to shut down was a result of a known fault at an electrical substation.

An investigation found that National Grid, which owns the substation which supplies Heathrow, had been aware of a problem since 2018 but failed to fix it. There were numerous opportunities to rectify moisture affecting electrical parts at the North Hyde substation, but maintenance was repeatedly deferred, the report said.

Airlines based at Heathrow have said the closure on 21 March cost carriers between £80m to £100m. Heathrow told the BBC that National Grid “could and should” have prevented the fire and that it expected it to “take accountability for those failings”, which it said “resulted in significant damage and loss for Heathrow and our airlines.”

National Grid said it had taken action since the fire on 20 March, but said such events were “rare” and that Britain had “one of the most reliable networks in the world”. It has not yet responded to Heathrow’s potential legal case.

Following the report being released on Wednesday, energy watchdog Ofgem has launched its own investigation into National Grid. Heathrow, the UK’s biggest airport, shut down as a result of the power cut, which led to thousands of cancelled flights and stranded passengers.

The National Energy System Operator (Neso) said moisture entering electrical components at the substation caused the blaze. It said “elevated” moisture had been detected in July 2018 and that under National Grid’s guidance, such readings indicate “an imminent fault and that the bushing should be replaced”. Bushing is insulating material used around electrical parts.

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Hard to see how the National Grid gets out of this one.
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iPhone fold is in testing, due in 2026 • Apple Insider

William Gallagher:

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After seven years of rolling rumours saying that it was for sure coming next year, the iPhone Fold is now in its production prototyping phrase, ahead of an expected launch in 2026.

Unsurprisingly after so many years of designing and manufacturing iPhones, Apple has a very specific process of prototyping that it follows, as exclusively revealed by AppleInsider. Now, according to DigiTimes, the iPhone fold prototype is in its first round of testing.

DigiTimes says that this testing is earlier than expected, but it appears to fit with recent claims that Apple expected mass production to begin in summer 2026. While this fits with those most recent other reports, it’s still the case that the iPhone fold has been reportedly about to launch for many years. It’s even been reported before that Apple has had not just one, but two folding iPhone prototypes — and possibly more. That is, if Apple hasn’t abandoned the whole idea.

…Overall, though, despite concrete examples of Apple’s interest such as patents covering complex hinges for folding devices, the only constant has been that the iPhone fold is always a year away.

«

Also says that plans for an iPad Fold have been abandoned. Does one really need a foldable iPad? I don’t think so – the longer crease would just be an invitation for dust and gunk. Safer just to have it fixed and put a case on it.

(Though I still don’t get the attraction of foldables.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Does playing chess consume as much energy as running a marathon? No. So why do some think it does? CC-licensed photo by Ben Schumin 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Forked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Sam Altman slams Meta’s AI talent-poaching spree: ‘missionaries will beat mercenaries’ • WIRED

Zoë Schiffer:

»

OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, told staff that it felt like “someone has broken into our home and stolen something.”

Altman struck a different tone about the departures in his note on Monday.

“Meta has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn’t get their top people and had to go quite far down their list; they have been trying to recruit people for a super long time, and I’ve lost track of how many people from here they’ve tried to get to be their Chief Scientist,” he wrote. “I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole; of course there will always be some mercenaries.”

He added that “Missionaries will beat mercenaries” and noted that OpenAI is assessing compensation for the entire research organization. “I believe there is much, much more upside to OpenAl stock than Meta stock,” he wrote. “But I think it’s important that huge upside comes after huge success; what Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems. We will have more to share about this soon but it’s very important to me we do it fairly and not just for people who Meta happened to target.”

Altman then made his pitch for people to remain at OpenAI. “I have never been more confident in our research roadmap,” he wrote. “We are making an unprecedented bet on compute, but I love that we are doing it and I’m confident we will make good use of it. Most importantly of all, I think we have the most special team and culture in the world. We have work to do to improve our culture for sure; we have been through insane hypergrowth. But we have the core right in a way that I don’t think anyone else quite does, and I’m confident we can fix the problems.”

“And maybe more importantly than that, we actually care about building AGI in a good way,” he added. “Other companies care more about this as an instrumental goal to some other mission. But this is our top thing, and always will be. Long after Meta has moved on to their next flavor of the week, or defending their social moat, we will be here, day after day, year after year, figuring out how to do what we do better than anyone else. A lot of other efforts will rise and fall too.”

«

Lots of noise about the huge golden hellos that Zuckerberg is offering, but if they’re going to add huge value to a company, then it makes sense, doesn’t it. Rather like hiring a huge sports star for a team because you know they’ll score. Not sure about the missionaries/mercenaries suggestion, though.
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Wimbledon 2025: how has the introduction of electronic line-calling gone? • BBC Sport

Jess Anderson:

»

The absence of line judges at Wimbledon on day one of the Grand Slam has certainly been noticeable.

For the first time electronic line calling has been introduced at the All England Club with the well-dressed line judges replaced by AI.

In the absence of the 300 line judges that have been used for the past 148 years, up to 18 cameras, developed by HawkEye, are situated around each court to track the progress of the ball and determine whether it is in or out.

The technology is already in operation at the US and Australian Opens but its introduction at SW19 has been a topic of discussion. The emptiness of the courts is noticeable on Centre Court and Court One, where the vast space behind the baseline is now occupied only by the ball kids.

Britain’s Cameron Norrie said it “looks cool” with the line umpires in place and contributes to the “tradition” of the tournament. “Obviously there’s a lot of jobs and people that love tennis, which will definitely be missed from them,” he said. But while many players agree line judges are part of the spectacle, few can argue with the accuracy of the calls. “As a player it’s pretty black or white with the calls,” added Norrie. “In, out… there’s no mistake, nothing happening. Definitely you’ve got to feel for those linesmen and those people. That’s a bit tough for them, but it’s pretty black or white with the calling.”

The theatre of players challenging the calls has also been a notable absence with fans unable to get involved with the drama of a close call being replayed on the big screen. American 12th seed Frances Tiafoe said he would have liked to see Wimbledon keep line judges. “I actually like [it] with them [line judges] on the court, because I think for fanfare it’s better,” he said. “If I were to hit a serve on a big point, you go up with the challenge, is it in, is it out? The crowd is, like, ‘ohhh’. There’s none of that. Now if I hit a good serve and they call it out, you may still think it’s in, but it doesn’t matter. I think that kind of kills it.”

«

There aren’t any really good explanations of how it works, but this one is decent. And, of course, Wikipedia.
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No, chess grandmasters do not burn 6000 calories per day • A Note On The Production of Facts

Adam Strandberg:

»

I work on metabolism and have some interest in neurons, so I have on several occasions run into the claim that chess grandmasters burn 6000 calories per day during tournaments. I found this implausible and decided to investigate where it came from. While I am not the first person on the internet to express skepticism of such a large number, nobody seems to have worked out the precise source of the claim. I assumed when I dug into it that I would find a specific methodological error. But while methods enter the story, the real problem is that the number was completely made up.

As far as I can tell, the “patient zero” that caused this claim to become so widespread is this 2019 ESPN article:

»

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

«

This story was then picked up by many outlets…

«

The game of academic telephone that was played to produce this crazy number (which is comparable with running more than two marathons) is quite entertaining, if it hadn’t produced this zombie statistic. What it suggests is: nobody checks anything for sense.
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Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever US honey bee die-off • Science

Joanna Thompson:

»

U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter.

As soon as scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught wind of the record-breaking die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs by President Donald Trump’s administration. Now, six months later, USDA scientists have finally identified a culprit.

According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal.

Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the United States, generate between $20bn and $30bn in agricultural revenue, and play a key role in keeping the US food supply stable.

“There is a lot at stake,” says Danielle Downey, the executive director of Project Apis m., the nonprofit that conducted the bee die-off survey. USDA did not provide comment on its research to Science after multiple inquiries spanning nearly three weeks, with one spokesperson citing a need “to move [the request] through agency clearance.”

Miticide-resistant varroa mites have been a growing issue for beekeepers for years, so much so that breeders have sought to develop mite-resistant bee varieties. Since the 1980s, the parasites have evolved global resistance to at least four major classes of miticide. Unfortunately, effective new compounds are notoriously difficult to develop, and amitraz represented one of the best remaining treatments. But the preprint suggests amitraz could soon fall by the wayside.

«

It’s always bad news with the bees, unfortunately.
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Trump’s tariff threat pushes Canada to scrap digital services tax • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

In a sudden reversal, Canada has caved and will remove its digital services tax after trade talks with the US suddenly fell apart this weekend.

Blocked just hours before taking effect, the controversial digital services tax (DST) would have charged big US tech companies like Apple, Google, and Meta a 3% tax on all digital services revenue earned from Canadian users. Frustrating US tech giants, Canada also sought to collect retroactive taxes dating back to 2022.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump claimed the tax was a “direct and blatant attack” on US tech companies and terminated the trade talks, while threatening to impose a new tariff rate on Canadian goods by July 4.

On Sunday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seemingly bowed to Trump’s pressure campaign, abruptly doing an “about turn” after previously refusing to pause the DST despite Trump’s opposition, NBC News reported.

But it wasn’t just Trump pushing Carney to reconsider the tax. A nonprofit representing CEOs and leaders of some of Canada’s biggest businesses, the Business Council of Canada, had warned that Carney defending the tax risked “undermining Canada’s economic relationship with its most important trading partner,” Al Jazeera reported.

If Trump were to impose new tariffs on Canada, it could have “large ripple effects across both economies,” the Council warned, potentially disrupting markets for automobiles, minerals, energy, and aluminum.

«

Every effort to impose a “digital tax” seems to run into the ground in North America. The picture in Europe seems confused – the UK and other European OECD countries have laws for them but the road to implementation is long.
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Using AI to humiliate women: the men behind deepfake pornography • Der Spiegel

Marvin Milatz and Max Hoppenstedt:

»

Nudify apps are not hidden in obscure forums or on pornography platforms, rather they are freely available on the internet. The only limitation: Many of these services only work with women’s bodies. The AI programs they use have apparently never been trained to produce naked pictures of men. Images of women in underwear are usually free, with faked photos of subjects in typical pornographic poses available for a price of just a few euros.

Clothoff is one of the leading apps on the market. In just the first six months of 2024, the website received 27 million visitors, with an average of 200,000 pictures being produced by the program each day, according to the company. Thousands of women have likely become victims of the app. The creators of Clothoff are among the most unscrupulous nudify operators and offer photo montages with schoolgirl outfits and pregnant women in sex poses. The app has recently begun marketing the ability to create fake videos with a picture. According to company information, the function has already been used over a million times.

In August 2024, public officials in San Francisco, California went public with a lawsuit against Clothoff and several other nudify apps. They demanded that the services cease operation due to the distribution of child and youth pornography. The investigators from the heart of Silicon Valley were likely also motivated by the fact that cases had become public at several schools in the state in which AI-generated nude images of girls had been circulated. Thus far, however, officials have experienced only moderate success in identifying the people behind the apps or getting them to suspend their services. The operators of Clothoff, in any case, seem unimpressed by the lawsuit.

Just how lucrative Clothoff’s business has become can now be seen by the statements of a whistleblower who has access to internal company information. Working for the app, he says, initially felt like being part of an exciting startup. “But over time, people became just cynical and obsessed with money.” For his own safety and out of concern that the company may seek to retaliate, his identity cannot be revealed. He, too, initially joined the project in the hopes that it would turn out to be profitable, but he now feels partly responsible for what Clothoff has become. Which is why he is going public with his information.

«

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How plug-in solar panels could help Britons save 30% on energy bills • The Independent

Howard Mustoe:

»

Britons could soon buy cheap solar panels which can be put on balconies, sheds and terraces to cut their energy bills.

The plan, using so-called plug-in solar modules which typically cut bills by 30% in countries where they are already used, has been announced by the government as part of a broader plan to step up solar power access.

Using balconies for solar panels is already common in Germany, where 1.5 million homes use the technology. Locals have named it balkonkraftwerk, or balcony power plant.

Using solar panels this way is a lot cheaper than installing them on a roof, where scaffolding and hiring specialist workers means that even a modest eight-panel array will cost about £5,000.

It will also unlock solar power for many of Britain’s 5.4 million households which rent. Presently, only homeowners can opt to fit solar panels unless they agree a deal with their landlord. Even then, if they moved, they would lose their panels. The proposed system is portable.

This so-called plug-in power plant also means no expensive fitting is required. Instead, the panels are attached to an inverter, which steps up the voltage to the 240V used by your home’s mains supply. It is then attached by a regular plug. To avoid electric shock, the inverters detect when they are unplugged and isolate the plug and its exposed electrical pins.

The government is investigating whether a similar safe system can be deployed in the UK.

Unlike a full rooftop solar system, no power can be sold back to the grid with plug-in panels. Instead, the aim is to cut electricity bills during the day from appliances like fridges, freezers and computers used by home workers.

«

At last something useful. As solar prices come down, small and convenient systems like this become more useful to deploy just anywhere.
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Scaling human judgment in Community Notes with LLMs • Arxiv

Haiwen Li and others from MIT and X.com:

»

The core tasks of a Community Notes contributor—researching a claim, synthesizing diverse sources, and drafting a neutral, well-evidenced summary—are capabilities at which “Deep Research” LLMs show promise. Indeed, work from 2024 has demonstrated that a fully automated pipeline for generating Community Notes with LLMs can, under certain circumstances, produce notes that are of similar quality to human-written notes—at a fraction of the time and effort. LLM-written CNs have the potential to be faster to produce, less effort to generate, and of high quality, hence are an attractive direction to pursue.

While LLM-written CNs are compelling, critical questions remain: can LLMs consistently produce accurate notes that are well-received across perspectives? If yes, can we use them to accelerate the addition of informative context in a way that is valued and trusted across viewpoints, while avoiding the fate of becoming just a new version of top-down fact-checking that can lack broad trust? We believe both are possible.

Rather than replacing humans, LLMs can complement and enhance their work. Trust in CN stems not from who drafts the notes, but from who evaluates them. It is the collective judgment of a diverse and engaged community that grounds people’s trust in CN.

This paper argues for a new paradigm for Community Notes in the LLM era: an open ecosystem where notes from both human writers and LLMs are submitted into a single pool, and the decision of which notes are helpful enough to show remains in the hands of the people. The system’s legitimacy is still upheld by its foundational principle: a community of diverse human raters that collectively serve as the ultimate evaluator and arbiter of what is helpful.

«

Getting an LLM to help write the advisory notes sounds good, though the real problem with Community Notes remains how long it takes for them to be “approved”. There’s no indication of how many approvals are needed for a Note to appear, but it seems to be a long time. And meanwhile the false claims circulate unchecked.
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Google kills the fact-checking snippet in search results • Nieman Journalism Lab

Clara Jiménez Cruz:

»

Hidden in a developer blog earlier this month, Google announced that it will stop using the fact-checking snippets in search.

For a decade, the fact-checking snippet, under the name of ClaimReview, has been a way to protect users worldwide by showcasing fact-checked information when a Google user searched explicitly for an already debunked claim. It exposed citizens to reliable information first by enhancing search results for fact-check articles.

ClaimReview enabled Google to expose fact-checked content to over 120 million European Union citizens in the first half of 2024 (see data by country).

I am the founder and CEO of fact-checking foundation Maldita.es and chair of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network. Google did not inform fact-checkers that the 10-year collaboration was coming to an end, let alone consult with us on the decision to stop using the fact-checks that we provided for free.

The company says its data shows the fact-checking snippet is “not commonly used in Search” and no longer provides “significant additional value for users,” but did not share the data or analysis that led it to make this decision.

This year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report asked 92,000 online news consumers in 46 markets which sources they look for in search results when they’re checking information they suspect may be fake. The Reuters Institute’s independent data does not match Google’s analysis: 25% of news consumers globally said they’re looking for a fact-check when they conduct a search, including 38% in the U.S.

«

In the blogpost, Google talks about “simplification”, but it’s hard not to think that the fact checking could contradict the AI chunks at the top of the search results, which would never do. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Three-dimensional time: a mathematical framework for fundamental physics • Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences: Vol 09

Gunther Kletetschka:

»

This paper introduces a theoretical framework based on three-dimensional time, where the three temporal dimensions emerge from fundamental symmetry requirements. The necessity for exactly three temporal dimensions arises from observed quantum-classical-cosmological transitions that manifest at three distinct scales: Planck-scale quantum phenomena, interaction-scale processes, and cosmological evolution.

These temporal scales directly generate three particle generations through eigenvalue equations of the temporal metric, naturally explaining both the number of generations and their mass hierarchy. The framework introduces a metric structure with three temporal and three spatial dimensions, preserving causality and unitarity while extending standard quantum mechanics and field theory.

«

Just thought I’d bring this to your attention, in case you needed an explanation for being late: “the time shape was wrong for the train, unfortunately.”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Tornado forecasting in the US will become significantly worse if the proposed budget passes, with huge cuts to the NOAA. CC-licensed photo by Dana Dobbins 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Global warming is speeding up and the world is feeling the effects • The New York Times

Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Claire Brown and Mira Rojanasakul:

»

Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking “heat dome.” Alaska saw its first-ever heat advisory this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the hottest calendar year in recorded history.

The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27ºC per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2ºC in the 1970s, and has been growing since.

This doesn’t surprise scientists who have been crunching the numbers. For years, measurements have followed predictions that the rate of warming in the atmosphere would speed up. But now, patterns that have been evident in charts and graphs are starting to become a bigger part of people’s daily lives.

“Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, like extreme downpours and severe droughts and wildfires,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California.

While this aligns with scientific predictions of how climate change can intensify such events, the increase in severity may feel sudden to people who experience them.

“Back when we had lesser levels of warming, that relationship was a little bit less dramatic,” Dr. Swain said. “There is growing evidence that the most extreme extremes probably will increase faster and to a greater extent than we used to think was the case,” he added.

Take rainfall, for example. Generally, extreme rainfall is intensifying at a rate of 7% with each degree Celsius of atmospheric warming. But recent studies indicate that so-called record-shattering events are increasing at double that rate, Dr. Swain said.

«

There’s more analysis of this – including the obvious question, is it correct? – at this climate Substack. The answer: yes, it is.
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If Congress passes NOAA’s budget, people will die • Weathering Climate Change

Chris Gloninger:

»

Donald Trump’s latest budget plan doesn’t just reflect political priorities—it’s a direct assault on the scientific infrastructure that protects Americans from the worst impacts of weather and climate disasters.

Quietly embedded in the 2026 proposed federal budget is the full termination of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Weather Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes. These institutions aren’t redundant bureaucracies, they are the brains behind hurricane modeling, tornado warnings, climate attribution science, and the air quality alerts that have saved lives during record-breaking wildfire seasons.

If Congress passes this plan, the results will be immediate and far-reaching.

Start with hurricanes. NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program, based out of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab (AOML), and run in partnership with the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS), would be effectively shut down. That means the next-generation HAFS hurricane model, which dramatically improved forecasts of Hurricane Idalia’s rapid intensification in 2023, would never reach full implementation. Ocean heat content observations, a crucial factor in forecasting how storms explode in strength, would be cut. The science that helps us better predict life-threatening hurricanes would disappear, at a time when ocean temperatures are breaking records every year.

Next, tornado warnings. NOAA’s National Severe Storms Lab (NSSL) and its partner, the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO) at the University of Oklahoma, would lose support to continue work on Warn-on-Forecast. This effort has been inching us toward the holy grail of severe weather preparedness – extending tornado and hail warnings from 15 minutes to an hour or more. Mobile radar trucks, sounding balloons, and lightning mapping systems that collect the data needed for those breakthroughs? Gone. Families in the path of the next EF-4 tornado will be given less time to find safety.

«

Oh, there’s more too. There might come a point where one hopes that China takes over because the US is going backward technologically. And perhaps America wouldn’t notice because it would enraptured by TV and phones.
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Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Making art used to be a uniquely human endeavour, but humans have taught machines to distill human creativity with generative AI. Whether that content counts as “art” depends on who you ask, but Spotify doesn’t discriminate. A new band called The Velvet Sundown debuted on Spotify this month and has already amassed more than half a million listeners. But by all appearances, The Velvet Sundown is not a real band—it’s AI.

While many artists are vehemently opposed to using AI, some have leaned into the trend to assist with music production. However, it doesn’t seem like there’s an artist behind this group. In less than a month, The Velvet Sundown has released two albums on Spotify, titled “Floating On Echoes” and “Dust and Silence.” A third album is releasing in two weeks. The tracks have a classic rock vibe with a cacophony of echoey instruments and a dash of autotune. If one of these songs came up in a mix, you might not notice anything is amiss. Listen to one after another, though, and the bland muddiness exposes them as a machine creation.

Some listeners began to have doubts about The Velvet Sundown’s existence over the past week, with multiple Reddit and X threads pointing out the lack of verifiable information on the band. The bio lists four members, none of whom appear to exist outside of The Velvet Sundown’s album listings and social media. The group’s songs have been mysteriously added to a large number of user-created playlists, which has helped swell its listener base in a few short weeks. When Spotify users began noticing The Velvet Sundown’s apparent use of AI, the profile had around 300,000 listeners. It’s now over 500,000 in less than a week.

When The Velvet Sundown set up an Instagram account on June 27, all doubts were laid to rest—these “people” are obviously AI. We may be past the era of being able to identify AI by counting fingers, but there are plenty of weird inconsistencies in these pics. In one Instagram post, the band claims to have gotten burgers to celebrate the success of the first two albums, but there are too many burgers and too few plates, and the food and drink are placed seemingly at random around the table. The band members themselves also have that unrealistically smooth and symmetrical look we see in AI-generated images.

…Spotify is happy to accept AI music and does not require listings to reveal if a song was created entirely by a machine. The Velvet Sundown is also available on other streaming platforms, including Deezer, which takes a harder line on AI. According to NME, the band’s bio on Deezer includes a disclaimer that “Some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence.”

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Spotify doesn’t care, because of course it doesn’t. It’s not about people making music that other people love. You must have mistaken it for an organisation with artistic integrity.
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Apple loses bid to dismiss US smartphone monopoly case • Reuters

Jody Godoy:

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Apple must face the US Department of Justice’s lawsuit accusing the iPhone maker of unlawfully dominating the U.S. smartphone market, a judge ruled on Monday.

U.S. District Judge Julien Neals in Newark, New Jersey, denied Apple’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit accusing the company of using restrictions on third-party app and device developers to keep users from switching to competitors and unlawfully dominate the market.

The decision allows the case to go forward in what could be a years-long fight for Apple against enforcers’ attempt to lower what they say are barriers to competition with Apple’s iPhone.

An Apple spokesperson said the company believes the lawsuit is wrong on the facts and the law, and will continue to vigorously fight it in court.

A spokesperson for the DOJ declined to comment.

Sales of the world’s most popular smartphone totaled $201bn in 2024. Apple introduced a new budget model iPhone in February with enhanced features priced at $170 more than its predecessor.

The lawsuit filed in March 2024 focuses on Apple’s restrictions and fees on app developers, and technical roadblocks to third-party devices and services — such as smart watches, digital wallets and messaging services — that would compete with its own.

The DOJ, along with several states and Washington, D.C., says the practices destroy competition and Apple should be blocked from continuing them.

«

Almost certainly Apple will have new leadership when this finally reaches the courts: Tim Cook turns 65 this year. Will the new CEO find a way to mollify the DOJ and others, if the lawsuit remains in its present shape?
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Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri in major reversal • Bloomberg via Yahoo News

Mark Gurman:

»

Apple Inc. is considering using artificial intelligence technology from Anthropic PBC or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri, sidelining its own in-house models in a potentially blockbuster move aimed at turning around its flailing AI effort.

The iPhone maker has talked with both companies about using their large language models for Siri, according to people familiar with the discussions. It has asked them to train versions of their models that could run on Apple’s cloud infrastructure for testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.

If Apple ultimately moves forward, it would represent a monumental reversal. The company currently powers most of its AI features with homegrown technology that it calls Apple Foundation Models and had been planning a new version of its voice assistant that runs on that technology for 2026.

A switch to Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT models for Siri would be an acknowledgment that the company is struggling to compete in generative AI — the most important new technology in decades. Apple already allows ChatGPT to answer web-based search queries in Siri, but the assistant itself is powered by Apple.

«

Finally, reality begins to dawn inside Apple Park: Siri isn’t as good as the other AIs, and nothing Apple can do will catch up to them, and they are potentially very useful. Apple keeps falling over itself in trying to make Siri better in tiny steps, when really it needs a big leap. This could be that.
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AIs have a favourite number, and it’s not 42 • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Asked to guess a number between 1 and 50, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Meta’s Llama 4 all provided the same answer: 27.

Those who see conspiracies everywhere might be inclined to see one here, but that’s not what’s going on. There’s no collusion beyond common training data that captures bias and a common approach to predicting the next word (or token) in a sequence of characters.

The lack of randomness is by definition bias. And it serves as a reminder that large language models (LLMs) cannot make unbiased decisions on their own.

These and other AI models don’t always agree. Sometimes they’ll respond with 42 or 37, as reported by other Register hacks and various users of AI models who have noted the phenomenon.

But 27 appears to be the most common reply for the 1 to 50 number range among leading commercial models, given default model settings.

The phenomenon was previously noticed by Mohd Faraaz, a data scientist and senior consultant at Capco. He recently asked various AI models to “guess a number between 1 and 50” and got an answer of 27 from six of seven models tested. Grok responded with 42 – widely mentioned online due to its presence in author Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as the answer to the meaning of life.

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Unrandom randomness. You’d expect nothing else.
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The axion may help clean up the messy business of dark matter • Ars Technica

Paul Sutter:

»

For decades, physicists had been troubled by a little detail of the theory used to explain the strong nuclear force, known as quantum chromodynamics. By all measurements, that force obeys charge-parity symmetry, which means if you take an interaction, flip all the charges around, and run it in a mirror, you’ll get the same result. But quantum chromodynamics doesn’t enforce that symmetry on its own.

It seemed to be a rather fine-tuned state of affairs, with the strong force unnaturally maintaining a symmetry when there was nothing in the theory to explain why.

In 1977, Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn discovered an elegant solution. By introducing a new field into the Universe, it could naturally introduce charge-parity symmetry into the equations of quantum chromodynamics. The next year, Wilczek and Gerard ‘t Hooft independently realized that this new field would imply the existence of a particle.

The axion.

Dark matter was just coming on the cosmic scene. Axions weren’t invented to solve that problem, but physicists very quickly realized that the complex physics of the early Universe could absolutely flood the cosmos with axions. What’s more, they would largely ignore regular matter and sit quietly in the background. In other words, the axion was an excellent dark matter candidate.

But axions were pushed aside as the WIMPs hypothesis gained more steam. Back-of-the-envelope calculations showed that the natural mass range of the WIMP would precisely match the abundances needed to explain the amount of dark matter in the Universe, with no other fine-tuning or adjustments required.

Never ones to let the cosmologists get in the way of a good time, the particle physics community kept up interest in the axion, finding different variations on the particle and devising clever experiments to see if the axion existed. One experiment requires nothing more than a gigantic magnet since, in an extremely strong magnetic field, axions can spontaneously convert into photons.

To date, no hard evidence for the axion has shown up. But WIMPs have proven to be elusive, so cosmologists are showing more love to the axion and identifying surprising ways that it might be found.

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The search for a new particle! It feels like the 1960s, when they were popping into existence all over the place.
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Tesla first driverless delivery new car to customer • CNBC

Lora Kolodny:

»

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the automaker completed its first driverless delivery of a new car to a customer, routing a Model Y SUV from the company’s Austin, Texas, Gigafactory to an apartment building in the area on June 27.

The Tesla account on social network X, which is also owned by Musk, shared a video overnight showing the Model Y traversing public roads in Austin, including highways, with no human in the driver’s seat or front passenger seat of the car.

Tesla did not say which version of its software and hardware had been installed and used in the car shown in the clip — or if and when that technology would be commercially available to its customers.

A Model Y owners’ manual, available on the Tesla website, says that in order to use Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option — which is the company’s most advanced, partially automated driving system available today — owners must keep their hands on the wheel, and remain ready to take over steering or braking at any time.

The vehicle in Tesla’s video was shown operating without a driver on the highway, passing through residential streets and around parking lots before arriving and stopping for a handoff to a customer. The buyer was waiting by the curb at an apartment building alongside Tesla employees, some sporting logo-emblazoned shirts. (The curb was painted red, indicating it is a no-stop fire lane.)

«

Is that bad? It sounds like it’s bad. Anyway, clearly they were all expecting this to happen. But the thing about car purchase handovers is that the buyer usually checks the car over to make sure it’s all hunky dory, and gets to object and not accept if it isn’t. This is easier on the dealer forecourt.

So, great accomplishment with the self-driving, but not perhaps as useful as it appears.
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He thought an employee stole crypto. The FBI says it was a North Korean scammer • WSJ

Robert McMillan:

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At first, Pemba Sherpa seemed like a great employee. Eager to work, he began as a $35-an-hour coder who sharpened up an app for his boss, Marlon Williams. But a few years later, Williams fired him, thinking he was probably a crook.

On Monday, federal authorities accused him of being something even more nefarious. According to court filings and cyber investigators, the man claiming to be Sherpa was actually Kim Kwang Jin, a North Korean cybercriminal using a stolen identity. He was part of a group of men who traveled the world looking for ways to make money for their heavily sanctioned government. Their methods of choice were drawing paychecks and stealing from their employers.

“This was not a simple scam; it was a long con,” said Daniel Polk, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In a federal indictment that was unsealed Monday, Jin and three accomplices—all North Koreans—were charged with five counts of wire fraud and money laundering. Also charged were Kang Tae Bok, Jong Pong Ju and Chang Nam Il.

The men remain at large, but FBI and Justice Department officials said Monday that they are looking for opportunities to arrest them. They also announced charges against people who allegedly helped the North Koreans and searches at 29 “laptop farms,” operated in 16 states, places that allegedly helped the North Koreans log into their U.S. jobs. A request for comment to North Korea’s United Nations mission in New York went unanswered Monday.

«

This is starting to feel like part of the landscape; like we’ve heard the story of North Korea exploiting remote hiring and working, and crypto’s untraceability so often that it’s just “that thing that happens”, as if it were as natural as the weather.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What happens if you put an LLM in charge of running a vending machine, including pricing and restocking? CC-licensed photo by travel oriented 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. Sorry, last one’s gone. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Project Vend: can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?) • Anthropic

»

Anthropic partnered with Andon Labs, an AI safety evaluation company, to have Claude Sonnet 3.7 operate a small, automated store in the Anthropic office in San Francisco.

…far from being just a vending machine, Claude had to complete many of the far more complex tasks associated with running a profitable shop: maintaining the inventory, setting prices, avoiding bankruptcy, and so on. Below is what the “shop” looked like: a small refrigerator, some stackable baskets on top, and an iPad for self-checkout.

The shopkeeping AI agent—nicknamed “Claudius” for no particular reason other than to distinguish it from more normal uses of Claude—was an instance of Claude Sonnet 3.7, running for a long period of time. It had the following tools and abilities:

• A real web search tool for researching products to sell
• An email tool for requesting physical labor help (Andon Labs employees would periodically come to the Anthropic office to restock the shop) and contacting wholesalers (for the purposes of the experiment, Andon Labs served as the wholesaler, although this was not made apparent to the AI). Note that this tool couldn’t send real emails, and was created for the purposes of the experiment
• Tools for keeping notes and preserving important information to be checked later—for example, the current balances and projected cash flow of the shop (this was necessary because the full history of the running of the shop would overwhelm the “context window” that determines what information an LLM can process at any given time)
• The ability to interact with its customers (in this case, Anthropic employees). This interaction occurred over the team communication platform Slack. It allowed people to inquire about items of interest and notify Claudius of delays or other issues
• The ability to change prices on the automated checkout system at the store.

Claudius decided what to stock, how to price its inventory, when to restock (or stop selling) items, and how to reply to customers (see Figure 2 for a depiction of the setup). In particular, Claudius was told that it did not have to focus only on traditional in-office snacks and beverages and could feel free to expand to more unusual items.

«

Ah, but did it work? Can an LLM take over the business of running a shop? You’ll have to read the article, but let us note that there is a sentence which reads “On the afternoon of March 31st, Claudius hallucinated a conversation about restocking plans with someone named Sarah at Andon Labs—despite there being no such person.” Fun ensues.
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Why the AI revolution needs tollbooths • Crazy Stupid Tech

Fred Vogelstein:

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[Olivia] Joslin, who is 29, was seeing this [enormous wave of AI crawlers hitting websites] happen from the perspective of an AI company doing the crawling, Fairmarkit,. [Toshit] Panigrahi, who is also 29, was seeing it as the head of ads for Toast, the restaurant point of sale company where they’d both worked early in their careers. 

“It felt like we were seeing two sides of the same problem,” Joslin said. It also seemed like there wasn’t yet a good solution. The web wasn’t set up to easily compensate news and information websites for this new structural shift, they said. 

So they created Tollbit. It’s literally an online tollbooth. You sign up. You decide how much, if anything, to charge AI bots to crawl your website. And the next time they show up to crawl they get routed to Tollbit’s subdomain and hit with a paywall. Publishers can choose different prices for crawls to generate article summaries and for displaying the article’s full text. And it allows publishers to exclude some website data entirely. 

“It felt like we were back in the Napster days for the music industry and that maybe we could supply a Spotify-like solution – a recurring revenue model for the publishing industry,” Joslin said. 

Since then – just 18 months – Tollbit, has become one of the most talked about new ventures in the tech/media startup community. More than 2000 publications now use Tollbit’s system including Time, Newsweek,  AdWeek and the Associated Press. That list also includes publications owned by Penske Media, like Rolling Stone; publications owned by Mansueto Ventures, like Inc and Fast Company; publications owned by Lee Enterprises, which includes almost 80 newspapers; and publications owned by Hearst, which include 27 magazines like Elle and 30 newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Tollbit processed more than 15 million transactions in the first quarter of this year, up from 5 million in the fourth quarter 2024. That volume is likely to be even higher when second quarter volumes are tallied.  It’s grown just past 20 employees. And it’s raised $31m in two rounds from Lightspeed Venture Partners; Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and cofounder of Google Brain; and Bill Maris, who started Google Ventures and is now the founding partner of S32.

…Online tolls is such a new business that it’s too soon to predict how meaningful first mover advantage will be. But we’re about to find out how much it matters. Cloudflare, the $60bn content delivery network and cybersecurity giant, is gearing up to launch its own online tollboth on July 1, according to someone who has seen a draft of the press release.

That could quickly disintermediate Tollbit. But it could just as easily be the best thing to happen to the company. The market for online tolls is only as big as the AI companies allow it to be. They’re the ones paying the tolls. And it should be no surprise that right now they are dragging their feet. Cloudflare has the leverage to force more of them to sign on to this concept. That would expand transaction volumes for all players, including Tollbit.

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EU lawmakers vote to bar carry-on luggage fees on planes • France24

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The European Parliament’s transport committee adopted a proposal that would allow travellers to bring a personal item into the cabin, such as a handbag or backpack, and a hand luggage of up to 7kg (15lb) at no extra fee.

The measure sought to spare passengers “unjustified extra costs”, said Matteo Ricci, a centre-left lawmaker and bill’s lead sponsor.

Many low-cost air carriers include only one small on-board item in the ticket, charging extra for other hand baggage.

Airlines for Europe (A4E), an industry association, condemned the proposal, suggesting it would result in higher flight prices, upping costs for those who travel light.

“Forcing a mandatory trolley bag… obliges passengers to pay for services they may not want or need,” A4E managing director Ourania Georgoutsakou said ahead of the vote.

The measure, which would apply to all flights departing or arriving within the 27-nation European Union, was adopted as part of a package of amendments to passenger rights rules put forward by the European Commission.

«

Don’t those who “travel light” travel light by having only carry-on luggage? Because hold luggage might be free (though that might vary?) but it’s slower. Nobody I can think of “travels light” by putting stuff in the hold. So the threat that prices will go up for that group is no threat at all – it will be swings and roundabouts.

But we see you, airlines, and your money-grabbing ways. (The proposals aren’t finalised; they have to go to the Parliament.)
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How rogue jumping genes can spur Alzheimer’s, ALS • Knowable Magazine

Amber Dance:

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Back in 2008, neurovirologist Renée Douville observed something weird in the brains of people who’d died of the movement disorder ALS: virus proteins.

But these people hadn’t caught any known virus.

Instead, ancient genes originally from viruses, and still lurking within these patients’ chromosomes, had awakened and started churning out viral proteins.

Our genomes are littered with scraps of long-lost viruses, the descendants of viral infections often from millions of years ago. Most of these once-foreign DNA bits are a type called retrotransposons; they make up more than 40% of the human genome.

Our genomes are riddled with DNA from ancient viral infections known as jumping genes. The majority of these are retrotransposons, which copy themselves via RNA intermediates; a smaller portion are cut-and-paste DNA transposons.
Many retrotransposons seem to be harmless, most of the time. But Douville and others are pursuing the possibility that some reawakened retrotransposons may do serious damage: They can degrade nerve cells and fire up inflammation and may underlie some instances of Alzheimer’s disease and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease).

The theory linking retrotransposons to neurodegenerative diseases — conditions in which nerve cells decline or die — is still developing; even its proponents, while optimistic, are cautious. “It’s not yet the consensus view,” says Josh Dubnau, a neurobiologist at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in New York. And retrotransposons can’t explain all cases of neurodegeneration.

Yet evidence is building that they may underlie some cases. Now, after more than a decade of studying this possibility in human brain tissue, fruit flies and mice, researchers are putting their ideas to the ultimate test: clinical trials in people with ALS, Alzheimer’s and related conditions. These trials, which borrow antiretroviral medications from the HIV pharmacopeia, have yielded preliminary but promising results.

Meanwhile, scientists are still exploring how a viral reawakening becomes full-blown disease, a process that may be marked by what Dubnau and others call a “retrotransposon storm.”

A retrotransposon is a kind of “jumping gene.” These pieces of DNA can (or once could) move around in the genome by either copying or removing themselves from one spot and then pasting themselves into a new spot. Retrotransposons are copy-and-pasters.

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You’ll learn a lot (that you maybe didn’t expect to learn!) in this piece. The hypothesis is very interesting.
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Luke Littler may be darts’ first global superstar • The New York Times

Oliver Whang:

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As [18-year-old Luke] Littler warmed up, noise swirling around the arena, it was hard to overlook how much he still resembled the 18-month-old in the video: his body composed, his arm flashing to his side after a throw, his eye turning automatically toward the camera.

At the front of the stadium floor, near the stage, a cluster of teenagers and children wearing darts jerseys looked out of place in the rowdy atmosphere. It was a scene you didn’t see a year and a half ago. Across Britain, the allure of Littler’s success has inspired youngsters to join darts clubs in the hopes of following in his footsteps — what many people are calling the “Luke Littler effect.” Within the crowd were a father and son, the former dressed in a skintight Robin suit and the latter like Batman. The father told me that tickets to the event were the boy’s Christmas present. “If it wasn’t for Littler, no one would be here,” he said, gesturing at the children around him. “This was known as an old-man social club.”

A man in front of us turned and nodded. “He joined the darts league last year because of Littler,” he said, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder. “There’s now a waiting list of 50 or 60 for that league.”

Littler’s first six darts were perfectly placed, the crowd roaring in approval, and he swept aside [world No.6 Stephen] Bunting in less than 11 minutes. “It’s like he can do it when he fancies,” Wayne Mardle, a darts commentator said, a note of awe creeping into his voice. “Obviously you can’t, because it’s not that simple. But it’s like he can.”

The first father adjusted his tights. “He’s like Messi,” he said. “But Messi was then, Littler is now.”

I met Littler in early April, a week after the Newcastle event. He was in Berlin for the next Premier League competition, and we spoke in the back of the Uber Arena, which was sold out. Onstage, Littler is confident, often needling spectators when they root against him, but in person he comes off as the teenager of stereotype. It was a designated media day for the P.D.C., and Littler had hours of back-to-back interviews with German television channels and international outlets. When he entered the room — bare white walls, fluorescently lit — he looked around and, not seeing any cameras, shrugged and pulled out a nicotine vape. “Why not,” he said, sucking at it.

«

Whang realises that there’s no way for Littler to articulate how he does it, in the same way that tennis pros can’t tell you how they hit a shot perfectly, because it’s below their threshold of consciousness; they just will it, and it happens. The problems start when it doesn’t happen. So far, that is not a problem Littler has.
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The power and the glory of profanity • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

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“You can really assert your dominance by swearing, especially when you’ve got the licence to swear but other people don’t have,” Michael Adams, professor of English language and literature at Indiana University and author of In Praise of Profanity, tells me. “It’s like [Trump’s] use of nicknames — he can only be addressed as Mr President, so it sets up this kind of imbalance of power.”

Other world leaders could in theory, of course, follow Trump by indulging in a good bit of expletive uttering of their own. But it is not easy to think of many who would dare. And even if they did, it might not land: part of the reason Trump can get away with it is that it doesn’t feel like a deviation from his behind-the-scenes vernacular. He doesn’t look awkward when he swears. Much as he might try to put on presidential and “elegant” airs, and despite being born into privilege, Trump is at his core a brash, wheeler-dealer, anything-goes New Yorker. 

He is also a man who knows what’s good for him: swearing provides genuine relief from stress, anger and even physical pain, according to research. In one study from 2020, psychologists at Keele University asked volunteers to repeat the F-word while submerging their hands in ice-cold water, and found that pain tolerance in those participants who did so increased by 33%. Those who repeated the made-up word “fouch”, meanwhile, registered no higher pain threshold. Somehow, uttering obscenities constitutes enough taboo-breaking that it triggers an aggressive fight-or-flight mode in the body, elevating the heart rate and leading to a soothing, pain-numbing effect.

All Trump really wants is the Nobel effing Peace Prize but it seems like others are just not willing to co-operate. So you can understand the man’s frustration. As Capitaine Haddock might say, Mille millions de mille sabords! Excuse my French.

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That Keele study is quite peculiar, but maybe there is something in the taboo-breaking being an effective diversion.
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Scatted Spider cybercriminal gang starts hacking aviation and transportation sectors • Axios

Sam Sabin:

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The notorious Scattered Spider hacking gang is now actively targeting the aviation and transportation sectors, cybersecurity firms warned on Friday.

The group of mostly Western, English-speaking hackers has been on a months-long spree that’s prompted operational disruptions at grocery suppliers, major retail storefronts and insurance companies in the US and UK.

Hawaiian Airlines said Thursday it’s addressing a “cybersecurity incident” that affected some of its IT systems.

Canadian airline WestJet faced a similar incident last week that caused outages for some of its systems and mobile app.
A source familiar with the incidents told Axios that Scattered Spider was likely behind the WestJet incident.

Josh Yeats, a WestJet spokesperson, told Axios that the company has made “significant progress” to resolve the incident, but did not answer questions about Scattered Spider’s possible involvement.

Charles Carmakal, the chief technology officer at Google’s Mandiant Consulting, said in an emailed statement that the company is “aware of multiple incidents in the airline and transportation sector which resemble the operations of UNC3944 or Scattered Spider.”

«

Back in 2018 British Airways was hit hard by hackers who diverted credit card data off payment pages. This is potentially worse, though: if an airline’s systems get hit by ransomware, things could be very bad.
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How serious is Google’s ChatGPT problem? • Exponential View

Azeem Azhar:

»

Two years ago, I argued that Alphabet, which owns Google, faced a “GPT Tidal Wave” because “the start page of the Internet is shifting further from the browser and Google.com, replacing dozens or more Web searches each day. ChatGPT is preferable to open multiple tabs from a Google search and continuously backtracking.”

I’m an early adopter. Early adopters are either canaries in the coal mine or we’re wrong. Two years on, the data are starting to suggest we’re right. Slides from the investment firm Coatue circulated last week, showing what many of us sense anecdotally: once you adopt ChatGPT, you use Google less.

Across a still-short observation window, heavy ChatGPT users have cut Google’s page views by about 8% a year. That may feel mild, yet if the 800 million ChatGPT users today grow—plausibly—to three billion within three years, and if the search deficit holds, Google’s core business could shrink by a fifth, lopping tens of billions of dollars off annual revenue.

In truth, that is the bullish scenario for Google. ChatGPT is fast becoming the generic verb for “finding stuff,” and its advantage widens on difficult queries—which may be the very ones that anchor Google’s pricing power. The products will only get better at serving users’ needs, so that 8% figure could rise.

Fresh data from Britain’s competition watchdog, the CMA, reinforce the picture. For long-form questions, 17% of Britons already default to ChatGPT; they still turn to Google for simple, local, “tree-surgeon-near-me” look-ups. We do not yet know where the money lies—complex, ad-light queries or transactional, ad-heavy ones—but user behavior rarely plateaus.

I’ve highlighted a couple of important factors in yellow [on the graph in the post]. Once someone becomes an “AI user,” AI starts to eat into complex and shopping queries.

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I can’t access all the post because it’s paywalled, but even this part at the start is dramatic enough.
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More assorted notes on Liquid Glass • Riccardo Mori

Riccardo pours himself a Peroni and considers what, if anything, has improved:

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to make sense of Apple’s latest user-interface redesign — Apple calls it Liquid Glass — that will affect all their platforms in the next iteration of their respective OS versions. But it’s hard to make sense of it when, after checking Apple’s own guidance, I’m mostly left with the feeling that at Apple they’re making things up as they go.

If you’ve been following me on Mastodon, you’ll be already familiar with a lot of what follows. I just wanted to gather my posts there in a more organic piece here.

Let’s start with a few notes on Adopting Liquid Glass, part of the Technology Overviews Apple has made available on their Developer site.

[After a section on “Organisation and Layout] …Which is largely unnecessary. It reduces the amount of information displayed on screen, and you’ll have to scroll more as a consequence. Look at the Before and After layouts: the Before layout doesn’t need solutions to increase its clarity. You’re just injecting white space everywhere. It’s also ironic that where more space and ‘breathing room’ are actually necessary, the header (“Single Table Row” in the figure) is pushed even nearer to the status bar.

And don’t get me started on those redesigned, stretched-out switches. They’re the essence of ‘change for change’s sake’.

«

It’s a long post, but as with the previous one, worth reading. The whole thing about Liquid Glass is that it’s the ultimate “change for change’s sake”. There was nothing wrong, per se, with the current Apple interface. But it didn’t have that marketing zhush. So everything gets torn up and made incomprehensible in the name of “different”.

I do remember when Steve Jobs introduced Aqua in 2000 (which then became a beta in 2001): the interface was surprising, but you could also do things with it that you couldn’t with the older Mac interface. (The column interface for file navigation in particular.) This… not so much. If “design is how it works, not how it looks”, this is badly designed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

After 40 years, the Blue Screen of Death on Microsoft Windows is going away – to be replaced by a Black Screen of Death. CC-licensed photo by hdaniel 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.

It’s Friday, but there’s no new post at the Social Warming Substack. Perhaps next week?

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

BBC website adds paywall for US users, details subscription prices • Variety

Todd Spangler:

»

Online news and programming from the UK’s biggest broadcaster will carry a price for some American fans. BBC Studios and BBC News have launched the “first phase” of a pay model for BBC.com in the US.

US users of BBC.com who choose not to pay will still have access to “select global breaking news stories,” as well as BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service radio livestreams, BBC World Service Languages sites, and a variety of free newsletters and podcasts, the BBC said.

In the initial phase of the BBC’s paywall launch, the subscription will cost $8.99 per month or $49.99 per year. US users who sign for a subscription will get unlimited access to the BBC’s news articles, feature stories and the 24-7 livestream of the BBC News channel. In the coming months “as we test and learn from audience consumption,” the BBC said, ad-free documentary series and films (including the full BBC Select documentary catalogue), ad-free and early release podcasts, and exclusive newsletters and content will be included in the offer.

For those in the UK, there will be no change to the services. All the content available on BBC.com is also available to UK audiences through the BBC’s various channels and services. The BBC also has no current plans to introduce a pay model for the website outside of North America.

Several major US-based news outlets also have paywalls, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. CNN installed a paywall last fall for its website, with heavier users prompted to pay $3.99 per month for access.

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It’s quite a radical move, which had been trailed a fortnight ago. This is going to be quite a test, though the annual subscription is pretty good.
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As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Google’s AI search features are killing traffic to publishers, so now the company is proposing a possible solution. On Thursday, the tech giant officially launched Offerwall, a new tool that allows publishers to generate revenue beyond the more traffic-dependent options, like ads.

Offerwall lets publishers give their sites’ readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more. In addition, Google says that publishers can add their own options to the Offerwall, like signing up for newsletters.

The new feature is available for free in Google Ad Manager after earlier tests with 1,000 publishers that spanned over a year.

Google notes that it’s also using AI to determine when to display the Offerwall to each site visitor to increase engagement and revenue. However, publishers can set their own thresholds before the Offerwall is displayed, if they prefer.

Many of the solutions Offerwall introduces have been tried by publishers before, across a range of products and services. Micropayments, for instance, have repeatedly failed to take off. The economics don’t tend to work, and there’s additional friction in having to pay per article that’s not been worth the payoff for readers or publishers alike, given implementation and maintenance costs.

A Twitter-like social networking startup called Post, backed by a16z, most recently tried to make micropayments work for publishers, but it ultimately shut down due to a lack of traction.

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Wonder if Google can make it work? Of course this will tie publishers more tightly again to Google.
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Fears over weight-loss jabs after ten deaths from pancreatitis • The Times

Harry Goodwin:

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Ten patients have died in the UK after suffering pancreatitis as a side-effect of obesity jabs, the medicines watchdog has said.

Hundreds of people have reported inflammation of the pancreas after injecting weight-loss drugs.

Regulators are now investigating whether genetic factors puts some patients at greater risk of side-effects from jabs like Mounjaro, Wegovy and Ozempic.

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said it had received more than 560 reports of patients developing an inflamed pancreas since the GLP-1 agonists were launched. It noted that ten of the patients died.

GLP-1 agonists, which suppress patients’ appetites, are frequently used for weight loss. Some are primarily licensed for the treatment of type 2 diabetes.

The MHRA is calling for patients admitted to hospital with pancreatitis to report the illness to the authorities through its Yellow Card scheme. Patients who file a report are asked to take part in a new MHRA study of the drugs. Healthcare workers can also file a report on patients’ behalf.

The study is part of the UK Biobank medical research project, which the MHRA is carrying out jointly with Genomics England. Patients will be asked to give more information and to submit a saliva sample, which will be used to test whether genetics put some people at a higher risk of acute pancreatitis when they take obesity jabs.

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Pancreatitis seems to be a potential side-effect, particularly in self-prescribed use.
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Renewables soar, but fossil fuels continue to rise as global electricity demand hits record levels • Energy Institute

Energy Institute:

»

In a year when average air temperatures consistently breached the 1.5°C warming threshold, global CO₂-equivalent emissions from energy rose by 1%, marking yet another record, the fourth in as many years.

Wind and solar energy alone expanded by an impressive 16% in 2024, nine times faster than total energy demand. Yet this growth did not fully counterbalance rising demand elsewhere, with total fossil fuel use growing by just over 1%, highlighting a transition defined as much by disorder as by progress.

Crude oil demand in OECD countries remained flat, following a slight decline in the previous year. In contrast, non-OECD countries, where much of the world’s energy demand growth is concentrated and fossil fuels continue to play a dominant role, saw oil demand rise by 1%. Notably, Chinese crude oil demand fell in 2024 by 1.2%, indicating that 2023 may have reached a peak. Elsewhere, global natural gas demand rebounded, rising by 2.5% as gas markets rebalanced after the 2023 slump. India’s demand for coal rose 4% in 2024 and now equals that of the CIS, Southern and Central America, North America, and Europe combined.

These trends underscore a stark truth: while renewable energy is scaling faster than ever, global demand is rising even faster. Rather than replacing fossil fuels, renewables are adding to the overall energy mix. This pattern, marked by simultaneous growth in clean and conventional energy illustrates the structural, economic, and geopolitical barriers to achieving a truly coordinated global energy transition.

«

Encouraging perhaps that the growth in fossil fuel use was small? Though they don’t seem to have made that comparison in the past, so we can’t know.
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Windows is getting rid of the Blue Screen of Death after 40 years • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that’s about to change. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen.

The simplified BSOD looks a lot more like the black screen you’d see during a Windows update. But it will list the stop code and faulty system driver that you wouldn’t always see during a crash dump. IT admins shouldn’t need to pull crash dumps off PCs and analyze them with tools like WinDbg just to find out what could be causing issues.

“This is really an attempt on clarity and providing better information and allowing us and customers to really get to what the core of the issue is so we can fix it faster,” says David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. “Part of it just cleaner information on what exactly went wrong, where it’s Windows versus a component.”

«

Between this and Apple changing the Finder icon for the next macOS update (they’ve switched the colours back but it’s still not satisfactory), it seems to be “throw all that stuff out for no reason” season.
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Faith not enough as Kipyegon misses four-minute mile barrier by six seconds • The Guardian

Sean Ingle:

»

Faith Kipyegon’s dream of following in Sir Roger Bannister’s long footsteps by becoming the first woman to shatter the four-minute barrier for the mile ended with her body soaked in lactic acid and defiance. And, crucially, with the stadium clock at Stade Charléty more than six seconds away from where she had hoped it would be.

The 31-year-old Kenyan arrived in Paris stacked with the latest weapons in track and field’s technological arms race. But having reached the bell in 3mins 1sec, just about on schedule, she found that physiology began to overpower technology.

There was a consolation of sorts as she finished in 4:06.42 – 1.22 faster than her world record. The new time will not count as she was being paced by men, which is against World Athletics rules.

“This was the first trial,” she said. “We are learning many lessons from this race. I will go back to the drawing board to get it right. And I think there is more in the tank.”

Before the race Kipyegon’s 13 pacemakers were introduced to the crowd – 11 men and two women. They included several Olympians, the indoor 5,000m world record-holder in the American Grant Fisher, and three Britons, Elliot Giles, Georgia Hunter Bell and Jemma Reekie.

Then it was Kipyegon’s turn, tiny at 5ft 2in, dressed all in black. There was a wave to the crowd, a short sprint to whirr the legs up to full speed. Then they were off, ready to tackle the 1,609 metres in front of them.

It was Giles who led the way, but to the untrained eye it looked as if he went off a little too fast as it took a while to settle into formation: six athletes in a line in front of Kipyegon, one alongside her, and six behind her. The idea was to allow her to draft and reduce wind resistance.

«

Worth mentioning again that Bannister’s run was in 1954; the current men’s record is under 3:44; and this year a 15-year-old boy broke the four-minute barrier. If you ever needed evidence of the difference in physiology, this record is it. But equally I agree with James Smoliga, who writes:

»

Kipyegon is already one of the greatest distance runners the history of track and field. She does not need to break four minutes to be seen as an inspiration or as a benchmark of women’s athletic potential. If we create unrealistic expectations, we risk turning an inspiring effort into a story of disappointment. We shouldn’t allow that to happen — not to her, or to women’s sport.

«

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iPhone users upset about Apple promoting F1 movie with Wallet app notification • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

An unknown number of iPhone users in the U.S. today received the push notification, which promotes a limited-time Apple Pay discount that movie ticket company Fandango is offering on a pair of tickets to Apple’s new film “F1: The Movie.”

Some of the iPhone users who received the push notification have complained about it across the MacRumors Forums, Reddit, X, and other online discussion platforms.

“As far as I can tell, Apple is now just sending me ads to my screen now as push notifications, something I hate with an absolute passion and disable across the board in every app that tries this,” said one person who received the notification.

Some people are especially upset about receiving a push notification ad through the Wallet app because it is a very important app for personal finances, so simply turning off notifications for the entire app is not a feasible solution.

Worse, Apple seems to be ignoring the guidelines that apply to App Store apps. The company says push notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless users have explicitly opted in to receive them for said purposes.

The full text of Apple’s guideline:

»

Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.

«

Apple did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

«

F1 is reckoned to have cost, well, please let some people explain that it wasn’t as much as $300m. The reviews are better than lukewarm, but it still seems formulaic. Keep your eye on Box Office Mojo.

But also, this is desperately bad, advertising it to people who are just going to be annoyed by the advert. Whoever had this idea should be fired. And I don’t say that lightly. It’s just against what should be Apple’s ethos of devices you can trust, devices you’re in control of, and privacy.
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Melania Trump’s AI voice is the narrator on her audiobook memoir

Fernando Cervantes:

»

First lady Melania Trump is getting a little help with the release of the audiobook version of her memoir: artificial intelligence.

“I am honored to bring you Melania – The AI Audiobook – narrated entirely using artificial intelligence in my own voice,” Trump wrote in a post on X, along with a futuristic video. “Let the future of publishing begin.”

The English version of the book, titled “Melania,” has a runtime of seven hours and is for sale on the first lady’s personal website for $25. It’s available in other languages like Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, with “other languages coming soon,” according to ElevenLabs.

The first lady’s memoir was published back in October 2024 in the middle of the presidential election. The book covers everything from Melania Trump’s life in Cold War-era Yugoslavia to her marriage to President Donald Trump.

It received major media coverage in the days before its release, as Melania defended a woman’s right to choose in the book.
“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” she wrote.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump signed into law the bipartisan Take it Down Act, outlawing and penalizing the publication of nonconsensual real and computer-generated images, known as “deep fakes” that are often used as revenge pornography.

The First Lady was in attendance at the signing and spoke on the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. “Artificial intelligence and social media are the digital candy for the next generation, sweet, addictive, and engineered to have an impact on the connectivity development of our children,” she said.

«

As someone remarked, even she didn’t want to read her book.
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OpenAI charges by the minute, so make the minutes shorter • George Mandis

George Mandis:

»

Want to make OpenAI transcriptions faster and cheaper? Just speed up your audio.

I mean that very literally. Run your audio through ffmpeg at 2x or 3x before transcribing it. You’ll spend fewer tokens and less time waiting with almost no drop in transcription quality.

That’s it!

…A former colleague of mine sent me this talk from Andrej Karpathy about how AI is changing software. I wasn’t familiar with Andrej, but saw he’d worked at Tesla. That coupled with the talk being part of a Y Combinator series and 40 minutes made me think “Ugh. Do I… really want to watch this? Another ‘AI is changing everything’ talk from the usual suspects, to the usual crowds?”

If ever there were a use-case for dumping something into an LLM to get the gist of it and walk away, this felt like it. I respected the person who sent it to me though and wanted to do the noble thing: use AI to summarize the thing for me, blindly trust it and engage with the person pretending I had watched it.

…At first I thought about trimming the audio to fit somehow, but there wasn’t an obvious 14 minutes to cut. Trimming the beginning and end would give me a minute or so at most.

An interesting, weird idea I thought about for a second but never tried was cutting a chunk or two out of the middle. Maybe I would somehow still have enough info for a relevant summary?

Then it crossed my mind—what if I just sped up the audio before sending it over? People listen to podcasts at accelerated 2x speeds all the time.

«

Apparently 2x is the limit; 4x is bonkers. My question is: what is the transcription engine doing? Is it playing the audio and somehow “listening” to it? Can’t be. So it’s processing the waveform. But in that case, why is 2x OK but 4x isn’t? I feel this story isn’t over yet.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s been 71 years since a man broke the four-minute mile record. Tonight the first woman aims to do the same. CC-licensed photo by Owen Massey McKnight 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Running? 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.I. is homogenizing our thoughts • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the calibre of the ideas. Other, older technologies have aided and perhaps enfeebled writers, of course—one could say the same about, say, SparkNotes or a computer keyboard. But with A.I. we’re so thoroughly able to outsource our thinking that it makes us more average, too.

In a way, anyone who deploys ChatGPT to compose a wedding toast or draw up a contract or write a college paper, as an astonishing number of students are evidently already doing, is in an experiment like M.I.T.’s. According to Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, we are on the verge of what he calls “the gentle singularity.” In a recent blog post with that title, Altman wrote that “ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived. Hundreds of millions of people rely on it every day and for increasingly important tasks.” In his telling, the human is merging with the machine, and his company’s artificial-intelligence tools are improving on the old, soggy system of using our organic brains: they “significantly amplify the output of people using them,” he wrote. But we don’t know the long-term consequences of mass A.I. adoption, and, if these early experiments are any indication, the amplified output that Altman foresees may come at a substantive cost to quality.

In April, researchers at Cornell published the results of another study that found evidence of A.I.-induced homogenization. Two groups of users, one American and one Indian, answered writing prompts that drew on aspects of their cultural backgrounds: “What is your favorite food and why?”; “Which is your favorite festival/holiday and how do you celebrate it?”

One subset of Indian and American participants used a ChatGPT-driven auto-complete tool, which fed them word suggestions whenever they paused, while another subset wrote unaided. The writings of the Indian and American participants who used A.I. “became more similar” to one another, the paper concluded, and more geared toward “Western norms.” A.I. users were most likely to answer that their favorite food was pizza (sushi came in second) and that their favorite holiday was Christmas.

Homogenization happened at a stylistic level, too. An A.I.-generated essay that described chicken biryani as a favorite food, for example, was likely to forgo mentioning specific ingredients such as nutmeg and lemon pickle and instead reference “rich flavors and spices.”

«

*sighs deeply* Though this is why I actually enjoy the earlier AI-generated videos which go into dreamlike combinations of ideas that one would never normally have: the connections they draw are the sort of leaps that sparks creativity.
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It’s the final countdown for Faith Kipyegon’s sub-four minute mile attempt • Outside Online

Alex Hutchinson:

»

How did Keely Hodgkinson, the reigning Olympic 800-meter champion, react when she first heard about Faith Kipyegon’s planned attempt to run a sub-four-minute mile? “Half between ‘Oh my god, that’s absolutely crazy’ and ‘Wow… what if?”

That pretty much sums up the feeling here in Paris with one day left before Kipyegon’s Breaking4 race. Hodgkinson is in town to host the livestream of the race, which will take place Thursday at 8pm Paris time, [7pm London time], 2pm Eastern Time. So are a bunch of other top runners, including Georgia Hunter Bell and Jemma Reekie, who have been rehearsing with Kipyegon for their role as pacemakers (more on that below). The goal, according to Reekie: not just getting the pace right, but making sure Kipyegon is comfortable, and even encouraging her as they run.

A few final thoughts before the big day:

I flew into Paris today from Toronto, which has been suffering through a brutal heatwave. I didn’t get much relief. It was 95ºF this afternoon when I went for a jog along the Seine, and the sun was hammering down mercilessly. The forecast for this evening at 8 P.M.—exactly 24 hours before the race is scheduled to go off—is still 82ºF. Tomorrow at 8pm is supposed to be marginally cooler, with a forecast of 79ºF.

…A few weeks ago, in my big round-up of the science of how Kipyegon will try to break four, I lamented that Nike was being cagey about its plan for pacemakers. They’re still not confirming the plan. They did put out a press release offering some hints. For example: “Disruptions can make the smoothness of drafting go haywire; the choice to switch in runners midway through a lap can create micro-undulations in the air frequency, disturbing Kipyegon’s speed.” That strongly suggests they’re going to enlist one set of pacemakers to go all the way, rather than trying to sub in fresh pacemakers halfway through the race.

«

A man first ran the sub-four-minute mile in 1954. In the intervening 71 years, exactly zero women have – so far. The record is 4:07:64, set by Kipyegon in July 2023. However those seven seconds represent about 40 metres; Kipyegon will have to run 3% faster the entire race – hence the talk of “drafting” by getting faster male runners to in effect pull her along in their slipstream.
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The Trump Phone no longer promises it’s made in America • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

the Trump Mobile website now includes what can only be described as vague, pro-American gestures in the direction of smartphone manufacturing. The T1’s new tagline is “Premium Performance. Proudly American.” Its website says the device is “designed with American values in mind” and there are “American hands behind every device.” Under Key Features, the first thing listed is “American-Proud Design.” None of this indicates, well, anything. It certainly doesn’t say the device is made in the USA, or even designed in the USA. There are just… some hands. In America.

«

The screen is also smaller and it’s unclear how much RAM it will have. And the shipping date has moved from “September” to “later this year”. It’s not quite TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) but it’s certainly a bit rubbish
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NYC’s upset election was drawn along an odd line: car ownership • Jalopnik

Amber Dasilva:

»

New York City held its primaries for November’s mayoral race yesterday, where New Yorkers delivered an upset: Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won out over disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo in the first round of voting. Mamdani was expected to either suffer a close loss overall or creep back from behind through successive ranked-choice rounds, depending on which poll you trust, but the 33-year-old never dipped below a 7% lead over his centrist opponent — an upset that even the Mamdani camp didn’t expect. Looking over the data shows an odd trend: Mamdani’s victory was built on the backs of people who don’t own cars. 

Aaron Kleinman, director of research for The States Project, identified the trend late last night on Bluesky. It’s the kind of thing that New York residents would almost immediately notice on a map of the five boroughs — Mamdani won in higher-density districts, Cuomo took less-dense areas — but the data backs up the vibes. The less time you spend in a car, the more likely it is you backed Zohran Mamdani.

On pure alignment, the breakdown makes sense. Mamdani doesn’t own a car, preferring to take transit or bike, while Cuomo famously owns a Dodge Charger Scat Pack Widebody that he operates with little regard for NYC driving laws. Each represents their own constituency with their modes of transport, but the differences go deeper than that. Mamdani ran a heavily pro-transit campaign, promising fast and free buses and an increase in bike lanes, while Cuomo wanted to flood the subway system with police — a move widely loathed and viewed as wasteful by the subway riders who see cops scrolling TikTok on the platforms every day.

«

Shocker as ordinary people vote for person who is simpatico with ordinary people. It’s exactly the same form of “upset” as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election in 2018 when she defeated the Democratic incumbent because she actually got out and talked to people. Though we hear a lot about how much money political campaigns spend, it starts to look like being on the ground makes the real difference. Plus, of course, having a message that resonates.
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CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated online job boards, file for bankruptcy • Reuters

Jonathan Stempel:

»

CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated the online recruitment industry, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Tuesday and said it plans to sell its businesses.

Created through the September merger of CareerBuilder and Monster, the Chicago-based company said it agreed to sell its job board operations, its most recognizable business, to JobGet, which has an app for so-called gig workers.

CareerBuilder + Monster also agreed to sell its software services business for federal and state governments to Canadian software company Valsoft, and the military.com and fastweb.com websites to Canadian media company Valnet.

The buyers agreed to act as “stalking horse” bidders, with sales subject to better offers. Terms were not disclosed.
According to papers filed in Delaware bankruptcy court, CareerBuilder + Monster has $50m to $100m of assets, and $100m to $500m of debts.

The company is lining up $20m of financing to keep operating in bankruptcy.

In a statement, Chief Executive Jeff Furman said CareerBuilder + Monster has faced a “challenging and uncertain macroeconomic environment,” and a court-supervised sale process was the best way to maximize value and preserve jobs.

According to published reports, the company has struggled with competition from other job platforms, including aggregators and social media websites such as LinkedIn.

«

Amazing, really. They had a huge lead, and somehow managed to lose it. Perhaps the fact that LinkedIn tied a social network to it made a difference. I’d love to see a good examination of how Monster lost out in the jobs market.
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CCC: UK climate advisers now ‘more optimistic’ net-zero goals can be met – Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

»

The UK government’s official climate advisers are now “more optimistic” that the country can hit its emissions targets than they were before the Labour government was elected in July 2024.

Speaking ahead of the launch of the Climate Change Committee’s 2025 progress report, Prof Piers Forster, the CCC’s interim chair, told journalists it would be “possible” to meet the UK’s 2030 international climate goal, as well as its 2050 target to cut emissions to net-zero.

Moreover, Forster responded to attacks on climate policy from opposition parties, the Conservatives and Reform UK, by saying that reaching net-zero would, “ultimately, be good for the UK economy”.

The CCC’s report points to progress in areas such as windfarm planning rules, plans for clean power by 2030 and the accelerating adoption of clean-energy technologies for heat and transport.

It says that 38% of the emissions cuts needed to hit the UK’s 2030 target are now backed by “credible” policies, up from 25% two years earlier.

However, it says “significant risks” remain – and its top recommendation is for government action to reduce electricity prices, which would support the electrification of heat, transport and industry.

This is the first progress report from the CCC to assess climate policy and action under the new Labour government, which took office in July 2024.

Last year’s edition had said that “urgent action is needed” and that the UK was “not on track” for its 2030 international climate goal, namely, a 68% reduction in emissions relative to 1990 levels.

In contrast, the 2025 report says: “This target is within reach, provided the government stays the course.”

«

This is good news! Not getting a lot of coverage, of course.
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Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM • Downtown Doug Brown

Doug Brown found a JPEG hidden in the 1998 machine’s ROM showing “The Team” – the people who worked on the machine. But how to get the image to display? After much spelunking..:

»

I got out my desktop G3, tested it out on real hardware, and sure enough, it worked! If you want to try it for yourself just like ^alex did, you can run Infinite Mac in your browser using this link, which sets up an emulated beige G3 running Mac OS 8.1 using DingusPPC. There’s a quirk that causes it to fail to resolve an alias at startup. I intentionally disabled it; just click Stop when the error pops up. Here are instructions:

• Enable the RAM Disk in the Memory control panel
• Choose Restart from the Special menu
• After the desktop comes back up, select the RAM Disk icon
• Choose Erase Disk from the Special menu
• Type the secret ROM image text exactly as depicted above
• Click Erase.

When you open the newly-formatted RAM disk, you should see a file named “The Team”:

If you double-click the file, SimpleText will open it.

«

And voila! The Team. My question: if something has to be hidden that deep, was the intention ever to display it? Was it something The Team members could do to delight people? The depth of the subterfuge makes sense, though: Steve Jobs was very much against people’s names or identities being attached to their work at Apple because he was concerned about them being poached. (Though it also had the benefit of making them replaceable.)
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Google could be forced to change UK search as watchdog takes steps • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Google could be forced to make a series of changes to its search business, including giving internet users an option to choose an alternative service, after the UK competition watchdog proposed tightening regulation of the company.

The Competition and Market Authority is preparing to give the world’s largest search engine the designation “strategic market status”, a term for tech companies deemed to have considerable market heft that enables the watchdog to use extra powers to regulate them.

Google, which is owned by the US tech group Alphabet, accounts for more than 90% of search queries in Britain.

The CMA said it was minded to introduce bespoke regulatory measures for Google, including giving users “choice screens” to help them switch between search services, ensuring fair ranking of search results, and providing more control for publishers over how their content is used, including in AI-generated responses.

If the CMA confirms its decision in October, Google will be the first company designated since the regulator gained new powers this year. The CMA will then consult on the first wave of bespoke measures.

One option for the “choice screens” would be to include new AI-powered rivals in the search space, such as Perplexity and ChatGPT.

«

The proposal is essentially to loosen Google’s grip on search, AI results and search advertising. Quite the collection.
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16 billion passwords leaked, risking Facebook, Google, Apple users • Rest of World

Damilare Dosunmu:

»

A recent data breach of about 16 billion login credentials is said to have put users of Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Apple at risk of fraud and identity theft.

The stolen records, scattered across 30 databases, are a “blueprint for mass exploitation” that threatens users in developing nations, according to a June 18 report by CyberNews, whose researchers found the breach. Unlike traditional database hacks, this leak originated from malware that infiltrates devices only when users download corrupted files, then targets people with poor password habits.

Developing countries face the greatest risk from this breach due to rapid digital adoption coupled with inadequate cybersecurity infrastructure, experts said. The vulnerability is particularly acute in Asia and Latin America, which represent the largest user bases for many affected platforms.

“Breaches like this can cause serious damage in Africa and Asia, especially emerging economies like India, Brazil, Nigeria, and Indonesia,” Salman Waris, founder of UAE-based cybersecurity consultancy TechLegis, told Rest of World. “Since digital growth is rapid but security is lagging, the risk of fraud and cybercrime spikes for millions.”

«

Since the precise details of a lot of this hasn’t been well reported, it’s worth noting that the passwords are all encrypted, so the question becomes how well they’re salted/hashed. In time some of the databases will be cracked, but that won’t be all of them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster from a damaged wing was blamed, in part, on PowerPoint. Will chatbots get the same blame for future calamities? CC-licensed photo by NASA on The Commons 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Sliding. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star • The Guardian

Mark O’Connell:

»

A couple of weeks ago, I had a drink with a friend who’d just got back from Alexandria, where he’d gone to get a complicated root canal situation seen to, at presumably a fraction of what it would have cost him at home. I mentioned I was writing about MrBeast, and my friend – whose dental status has since improved – told me he’d heard from a number of Egyptians that the country’s tourist trade was currently experiencing a significant upswing, and that that upswing could be accounted for by the release, a few months back, of I Spent 100 Hours Inside the Pyramids! (194m views thus far), in which Donaldson and his boys were granted unprecedented access to the deep interiors of the pyramids of Giza.

One obvious question to ask about all of this is why is MrBeast so successful? Another, less obvious, question is: what does his success say about the culture that gave rise to it? The first question is, in a sense, a fairly straightforward one to answer. MrBeast is successful because his videos are highly entertaining. I can personally vouch for this. I don’t imagine, being in my mid-40s (among other limiting demographic and cultural factors), that I’m anywhere close to the MrBeast target viewership, and yet I have consumed more than my fair share of his content, and have been steadily and straightforwardly entertained. Troubled by the general tenor and implications of that state of being entertained, yes, but entertained nonetheless.

[27-year-old Jimmy] Donaldson is not by any means one of God’s chosen entertainment-industry stars. He’s not especially handsome, and neither is he particularly funny-looking. At 6ft 5in, and with the sparse reddish beard he nowadays sports, he has the charmingly awkward aspect of a teen who has recently put on a growth spurt and hasn’t quite settled into himself. He’s likable, and is possessed of a goofy and anarchic sense of humour, but more in a guy-you-went-to-school-with sense than, say, the Eric André or the Jack Black sense. You definitely wouldn’t call him cool, either, and he’s certainly not edgy, but neither is he staid or offensively corny. My wife – who has, in passing, taken in a fair measure of MrBeast content over the time I have been working on this essay, consuming them in a manner roughly analogous to passive smoking – described Donaldson and his crew of sidekicks thus: “They just seem like good kids.”

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I’ve never watched a single second of MrBeast content, but clearly lots and lots of people spend a lot longer on it.
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The Methaphone is a phone (that’s not a phone) to help you stop using your phone • WIRED

Arielle Pardes:

»

Earlier this year, Eric Antonow was in a coffee shop with his family when he felt the familiar, twitchy urge to reach for his phone. He patted his pockets for relief—the cool, thin slab was still there. He joked to his family that, like an addict jonesing for a hit, he would one day need a medical-grade solution to detox from his phone. Opioid addicts had methadone. iPhone addicts would need … methaphones.

“It was a joke, but I got two laughs from my two teenagers, which is gold,” Antonow says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to commit to the bit.’”

Antonow, a former marketing executive at Google and Facebook, has been committing to bits for half a decade, making what he calls “mindless toys.” His online shop features projects like a “listening switch” to indicate when one is paying attention, and a vinyl for silent meditation, with 20 minutes of recorded silence on each side (record player not required).

So within days of his latest joke, he had enlisted ChatGPT to mock up an image of a gadget in the shape of a phone, without all of the contents: a translucent rectangle that one could look at, or through. From that original generative sketch emerged a more realized design: a six-inch slab of clear acrylic with rounded corners, like the iPhone, and green edges that resembled glass. Antonow placed an order for samples, and started an Indiegogo campaign for the Methaphone: to “leave your phone without the cravings or withdrawal.”

«

Couldn’t he just.. not charge his phone?
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The dumbest phone is parenting genius • The Atlantic

Rheana Murray:

»

When Caron Morse’s nine-year-old daughter asked for a smartphone last year, her reaction, she told me, was unambiguous: “A hard ‘Hell no.’” Morse is a mental-health provider in the Portland, Maine, public-school system, and she was firmly against smartphones, having seen how social media and abundant screen time could shorten students’ attention spans and give them new anxieties. But she wanted her children to have some independence—to be able to call friends, arrange playdates, and reach out to their grandparents on their own. She also needed a break. “I was so sick,” she said, “of being the middle person in any correspondence.”

So when her daughter turned 10, Morse did get her a phone: a landline.

For that gift to provide all the benefits she wanted, Morse had to lay some groundwork. It would be annoying if her daughters—she also has an eight-year-old—were to start calling their friends’ parents’ smartphones all the time, so she told her neighbours about her plan and suggested that they consider getting landlines too. Several bought in immediately, excited for the opportunity to placate their own smartphone-eager kids. And over the next couple of months, Morse kept nudging people. She appealed to their sense of nostalgia by sharing photos of her older daughter sitting on the floor and twirling the landline’s cord around her fingers. She wrote messages: “Guys, this is adorable and working and important.”

The peer pressure paid off. Now about 15 to 20 families in their South Portland neighborhood have installed a landline. They’ve created a retro bubble in which their children can easily call their friends without bugging a parent to borrow their phone—and in which the parents, for now, can live blissfully free of anxieties about the downsides of smartphones.

«

Future pollsters are going to love this. People with landlines!
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Key fair use ruling clarifies when books can be used for AI training • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Artificial intelligence companies don’t need permission from authors to train their large language models (LLMs) on legally acquired books, US District Judge William Alsup ruled Monday.

The first-of-its-kind ruling that condones AI training as fair use will likely be viewed as a big win for AI companies, but it also notably put on notice all the AI companies that expect the same reasoning will apply to training on pirated copies of books—a question that remains unsettled.

In the specific case that Alsup is weighing—which pits book authors against Anthropic—Alsup found that “the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative” and “necessary” to build world-class AI models.

Importantly, this case differs from other lawsuits where authors allege that AI models risk copying and distributing their work. Because authors suing Anthropic did not allege that any of Anthropic’s outputs reproduced their works or expressive style, Alsup found there was no threat that Anthropic’s text generator, Claude, might replace authors in their markets. And that lacking argument did tip the fair use analysis in favor of Anthropic.

“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them—but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” Alsup wrote.

Alsup’s ruling surely disappointed authors, who instead argued that Claude’s reliance on their texts could generate competing summaries or alternative versions of their stories. The judge claimed these complaints were akin to arguing “that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works.”

“This is not the kind of competitive or creative displacement that concerns the Copyright Act,” Alsup wrote. “The Act seeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition.”

Alsup noted that authors would be able to raise new claims if they found evidence of infringing Claude outputs. That could change the fair use calculus, as it might in a case where a judge recently suggested that Meta’s AI products might be “obliterating” authors’ markets for works.

«

Alsup is famous in tech legal cases for having overseen Oracle v Google, where Oracle claimed Android copied Java, and showing great understanding of programming. So this will be similarly strongly argued.
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What a set of knockoff headphones taught me about headphones — and knockoffs • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

I kept hearing that Picun headphones were roughly as good as the AirPods Max for a fraction of the price. A few TikToks I saw argue that you’re not the problem if you buy knockoffs — you’re the problem if you’re spending $500 more just to get a brand name. Some videos purport to perform scientific noise-canceling tests; others just hold up a pair of AirPods Max and then a pair of Picuns, as if the side-by-side proves the point.

All the sales-creators made it clear that I needed to buy these headphones now. Some videos spread a rumor that Apple was suing Picun over the design, so they might be off the market soon. (This is not the case, as far as I know — Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Others continuously claim that the headphones are about to be taken off the TikTok Shop; I’ve been seeing that for weeks, and they’re still for sale.

I don’t believe any of it! And yet, after a few taps I barely even remember, I’d spent $63.58 to get a pair shipped to my door. I also ran to the Apple Store and dropped $581.94 on blue AirPods Max. I had testing to do.

I’ve been using both for the past several weeks, and I’ve come to a conclusion I didn’t expect. The Picun F8 Pros sound a smidge worse than the AirPods Max, but in a few ways, I actually prefer them, and given the price I’d easily pick Picun. The bass in the F8s is a little more pronounced than I like, and can be a little muddy on extra-thumpy songs. They were crisper on the high notes in a song like “Welcome to the Black Parade,” though, and for the most part both brands sound pretty similar.

The limiting factor for headphones, I suspect, is not the headphones themselves but the context. Buy all the great gear you want, but if you’re still streaming Spotify playlists over Bluetooth, there’s only so much fidelity available. Yes, the AirPods Max now support lossless audio over a wired connection, but that’s not how most people listen to music. Most listen on loud subways, in the gym, or while walking the dog; unless you’re in a dedicated listening environment, I’d wager that good-enough sound is usually good enough. Especially for the price.

«

This is very much the point about “high quality” headphones: most real listening environments are high-quality-hostile.
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Delayed Scottish NHS app cut back to just one service • The Times

Henry Anderson:

»

Scotland’s ill-fated NHS app will only be available to dermatology patients after being scaled back by ministers but still faces “significant issues” being delivered on time, an internal review has found.

Known as the digital front door, the health and social care app was first announced in 2021 but has been branded a “national embarrassment” as it is yet to get off the ground.

A stocktake, seen by The Times, said the app had been reduced to a “more limited scope … than originally envisaged” after ministers brought the launch date forward by four months.

At first patients will only be able to receive appointment letters for one specialty, dermatology, at a single health board, NHS Lanarkshire. The system will also let users view personal information and search for health services.

In contrast, England’s NHS App, which has 35 million users, allows patients to message GPs, order repeat prescriptions and receive test results.

Critics say the report confirms the “chaos, delays and mind-boggling expense” caused by the SNP’s mismanagement of the NHS.

Under initial plans the app was due to go live in March 2026, but first minister John Swinney made a commitment to launching it by December in a speech earlier this year. Swinney said the app would “be a much-needed addition to improve patients’ interaction with the NHS”.

«

Got to love government computing projects. No indication here of how much was spent on this one (so far), but you do have to wonder at the “not invented here” syndrome that made them think they could do it better – or should do it separately – of the English NHS. But the Scottish government seems to be very good at screwing things up.
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US House of Representatives bans WhatsApp on government devices • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy, Stephanie Stacey and Alex Rogers:

»

The US House of Representatives has warned staff members not to use Meta’s messaging platform WhatsApp due to privacy concerns.

The warning marks a blow to WhatsApp, whose $1.8tn parent Meta has long battled concerns that it has been lax with user data in its hunt for commercial growth and advertising revenue.

The House’s Chief Administrative Officer told staffers on Monday that WhatsApp had been deemed “a high-risk to users”, according to a copy of the memo seen by the Financial Times.

The email ordered staff not to download or keep the messaging service on any House laptop or mobile device from June 30, adding that anyone who had the application would be asked to remove it.

The decision was taken due to “a lack of transparency in how [WhatsApp] protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use”, read the memo, which was first reported by Axios.

A spokesperson for Meta said the company disagreed with the characterisation “in the strongest possible terms”.

The person added that WhatsApp messages were “end-to-end encrypted by default”, meaning that neither the company nor third parties could read them, adding that the platform offered “a higher level of security than most of the apps on the CAO’s approved list”.

«

Bonkers. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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The great PowerPoint panic of 2003 • The Atlantic

Jacob Stern:

»

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the broken shuttle hurtled toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate cause of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also singled out a less direct, more surprising culprit. Engineers had known about—and inappropriately discounted—the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were buried in a series of arcane and overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials. “It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,” the report stated, later continuing: “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

PowerPoint was not then a new technology, but it was newly ubiquitous. In 1987, when the program was first released, it sold 40,000 copies. Ten years later, it sold 4 million. By the early 2000s, PowerPoint had captured 95% of the presentation-software market, and its growing influence on how Americans would talk and think was already giving rise to a critique. A 2001 feature in The New Yorker by Ian Parker argued that the software “helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.” Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the internet,” took to quipping that “power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

«

Nowadays, of course, it would be death caused by hallucinating chatbot which someone didn’t check. And, indeed, perhaps it will come to that.

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Apple updates its on-device and cloud AI models, introduces a new developer API • Deeplearning.ai

»

Apple updated the Apple Foundation Models (AFM) family, including smaller on-device and larger server-hosted versions, to improve their capabilities, speed, and efficiency. It also released the Foundation Models framework, an API that enables developers to call the on-device model on Apple devices that have Apple Intelligence enabled.

• Input/output: Text, images in (up to 65,000 tokens), text out
• Architecture: AFM-on-device: 3 billion-parameter transformer, 300-million parameter vision transformer. AFM-server: custom mixture-of-experts transformer (parameter count undisclosed), 1 billion-parameter vision transformer
• Performance: Strong in non-U.S. English, image understanding
• Availability: AFM-on-device for developers to use via Foundations Models framework, AFM-server not available for public use
• Features: Tool use, 15 languages, vision
• Undisclosed: Output token limit, AFM-server parameter count, details of training datasets, vision adapter architecture, evaluation protocol

…Apple may be behind in AI, but its control over iOS is a huge advantage. If the operating system ships with a certain model and loads it into the limited memory by default, developers have a far greater incentive to use that model than an alternative. Limited memory on phones and the large size of good models make it impractical for many app developers to bundle models with their software, so if a model is favored by Apple (or Android), it’s likely to gain significant adoption for on-device uses.

«

Developers are, while annoyed generally with Apple, pleased at the onboard LLMs that are going to ship in its next OS and be available to their apps. It’s going to make quite a difference. Does Google have the same, or is the RAM capability of Android phones too variable? I’d have thought they would have lots of RAM – they always used to – and that means the capability to run LLMs.
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Elon Musk’s lawyers claim he “does not use a computer” • WIRED

Caroline Haskins:

»

Elon Musk’s lawyers claimed that he “does not use a computer” in a Sunday court filing related to his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. However, Musk has posted pictures or referred to his laptop on X several times in recent months, and public evidence suggests that he owns and appears to use at least one computer.

Musk and his artificial intelligence startup xAI sued OpenAI in February 2024, alleging the company committed breach of contract by abandoning its founding agreement to develop AI “for the benefit of humanity,” choosing instead “to maximize profits for Microsoft.”

The Sunday court filing was submitted in opposition to a Friday filing from OpenAI, which accused Musk and xAI of failing to fully comply with the discovery process. OpenAI alleges that Musk’s counsel does not plan to collect any documents from him. In this weekend’s filing, Musk’s lawyers claim that they told OpenAI on June 14 that they were “conducting searches of Mr. Musk’s mobile phone, having searched his emails, and that Mr. Musk does not use a computer.”

Musk and xAI Corp’s lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In the filing, Musk’s legal team disputed claims that it was resisting discovery efforts.

Multiple employees at X tell WIRED that while Musk primarily works from his mobile phone, he has occasionally been seen using a laptop.

«

It does seem like a very hard claim to substantiate.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The HS2 high-speed rail project has been a failure almost from the start. Is that because of its scope, or its context? CC-licensed photo by Ross Hawkes 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

HS2 and the slow decay of Britain • The Value of Nothing

M. F. Robbins:

»

HS2 was conceived to solve a clear strategic problem. England’s spine is, from a transport perspective, awkwardly constricted. The railway lines connecting London to the great cities of the north have become bottlenecks, restricting the flow of goods and people and stunting economic growth, like a limb with an insufficient blood supply. HS2 would blast a new, Y-shaped route to the north, the ‘stem’ running from London to Birmingham with two branches going on to Manchester and Leeds. Speed is volume, and fast trains would shift vast numbers of passengers, freeing up huge amounts of capacity on the existing lines for people, goods and trade.

That was the theory at least, but the economic case was always confused. Stewart is (correctly) a fan of the book ‘How Big Things Get Done’ and quotes a line from it: “Projects don’t go wrong, they start wrong.” HS2’s problems started with the vision: while the strategic case was about capacity, the economic case focused on travel times, which were easier to measure and talk about, and more in line with how the Department for Transport typically talks about projects. The conflict between the strategic case and how the economic case was talked about led to constant confusion about the purpose of HS2 in the public discourse (epitomised by the columnist Simon Jenkins), but also made it hard to know how to evaluate proposed solutions.

Worse, a kind of British exceptionalism crept in. It’s a recurring theme that keeps coming up in national infrastructure projects3 – we set out to build something like a nuclear power plant or a high speed railway, and rather than learning from other countries or projects – boring! – we insist on creating our own ‘better’ thing. In this case, it wasn’t enough to just build a high speed railway line, from the outset it had to be the greatest and best high-speed line in the world, with all the signals that gave to suppliers on costs.

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Another insightful piece by Robbins. Reading it, one gets the feeling that it’s all so easy if only people listen to him.

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Tesla launches robotaxi service in Austin • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Rafe Uddin, Stephen Morris, and Kana Inagaki:

»

Tesla’s robotaxi service, touted by Elon Musk as the future of his flagging electric-car maker, launched in the company’s home city of Austin, Texas, on Sunday with about 10 vehicles and a human safety driver on board amid regulatory scrutiny of its self-driving technology.

Shares in Tesla have risen about 50% from this year’s low in early April, with investors hopeful the autonomous ride-hailing service will help revive a company that has suffered declining sales and a consumer backlash against Musk’s political activism.

Despite the hype surrounding Tesla’s robotaxi, the launch—with a company employee seated in the passenger side for safety while leaving the driver’s seat empty—was low-key, and the initial service was open only to a select group of social media influencers.

Shortly before the launch, Musk said on social media that the robotaxi service would begin “with customers paying a $4.20 flat fee.”

According to Musk, who has stepped back from his US government role to focus on the electric-car maker and the robotaxi, the self-driving Tesla Model Y vehicles will only operate in limited areas, avoid challenging intersections, and have teleoperators who can intervene if problems arise.

The limited launch comes as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration continues to carry out multiple investigations into Musk’s claims about the capabilities of Tesla’s autopilot and “full self-driving” systems. Despite its name, the full self-driving system still requires humans to sit in the driver’s seat and pay full attention—unlike Google’s Waymo taxis.

«

The NHTSA is not impressed by the robotaxis, and seems ready even now to investigate the robotaxis. Wonder what sort of end run Musk will seek to get around that. Still, seems to have arrived in better time than trips to Mars.
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Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy? • Climate Change News

Matteo Civillini, Azril Annuar, David Fogarty, Megan Rowling and Sebastian Rodriguez:

»

One Saturday morning last month in the city of Melaka, volunteers in green T-shirts rushed over as Adibah Rahim and her husband drove into the central square, eager to unpack, weigh and register her consignment of used cooking oil (UCO) – the “liquid gold” in European plans to ramp up production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

Rahim left the collection point 90 ringgit ($21) richer, three ringgit per litre of oil – a welcome boost to her family’s household budget.

“We usually collect UCO from around 200 members of the public,” said Michael Andrew, sales manager for Evergreen Oil & Feed, the company running the Melaka collection with the local council and a supplier to leading European SAF producers including Spain’s Repsol, UK-based Shell and Finland’s Neste.

When made from waste such as UCO, rather than agricultural commodities like soy or palm oil, backers say SAF can slash planet-heating emissions by up to 80% over kerosene jet fuel, without taking up land that would otherwise be used for food crops, or fuelling forest destruction.

But behind SAF’s climate-friendly facade, a months-long investigation by Climate Home News and its partner The Straits Times has uncovered an opaque global supply chain that exposes jet fuel providers and their aviation clients to significant fraud risks, raising doubts about the climate benefits of the sector’s main green hope for the years ahead.

As SAF producers scramble for limited raw materials to meet new blending quotas in Europe and growing demand elsewhere, barely used and virgin palm oil is being passed off as UCO to traders that supply fuel companies, experts and industry operators told us. Palm oil that is not considered waste is not permitted under European Union rules for SAF because of its links to deforestation.

«

Perverse incentives, perverse incentives everywhere.
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People with severe diabetes are cured in small trial of new drug • The New York Times

Gina Kolata:

»

A single infusion of a stem cell-based treatment may have cured 10 out of 12 people with the most severe form of type 1 diabetes. One year later, these 10 patients no longer need insulin. The other two patients need much lower doses.

The experimental treatment, called zimislecel and made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston, involves stem cells that scientists prodded to turn into pancreatic islet cells, which regulate blood glucose levels. The new islet cells were infused and reached the liver, where they took up residence.

The study was presented Friday evening at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association and published online by The New England Journal of Medicine.

“It’s trailblazing work,” said Dr. Mark Anderson, professor and director of the diabetes center at the University of California in San Francisco. “Being free of insulin is life changing,” added Dr. Anderson, who was not involved in the study.

Vertex, like other drug companies, declined to announce the treatment’s cost before the Food and Drug Administration approves it. A Vertex spokeswoman said the company had data only on the population it studied so it could not yet say whether the drug would help others with type 1 diabetes.

About two million Americans have type 1 diabetes, which is caused when the immune system destroys islet cells. A subset of islet cells, the beta cells, secrete insulin. Without insulin, glucose cannot enter cells. Patients with type 1 must inject carefully calibrated doses of the hormone to substitute for the insulin their body is missing.

…“For the short term, this looks promising” for severely affected patients like those in the study,” said Dr. Irl B. Hirsch, a diabetes expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study.
But patients in the trial had to stay on drugs to prevent the immune system from destroying the new cells. Suppressing the immune system, he said, increases the risk of infections and, over the long term, can increase the risk of cancer.

“The argument is this immunosuppression is not as dangerous as what we typically use for kidneys, hearts and lungs, but we won’t know that definitely for many years,” Dr. Hirsch said. Patients may have to take the immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives, the Vertex spokeswoman said.

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China’s electric-vehicle factories have become tourist hot spots • WIRED

Zeyi Yang:

»

Tours of electric vehicle factories have quickly become the hottest ticket in Beijing, with tens of thousands of people signing up each month for the chance to win a free visit. Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi, which has reinvented itself as an EV maker in recent years, started offering the one-hour tours in January to visitors interested in seeing its factory up close and getting a race car experience in a Xiaomi EV.

As Chinese EV brands expand from competing on low prices to promoting premium features and sleek designs, they are increasingly putting their factories in the spotlight. At least two Chinese EV brands, Xiaomi and Nio, offer regular tours for the general public this year, and three more automakers have announced plans to follow suit.

“More and more Chinese EVs are using factory tours as an important channel of communication between the brand and the outside world. It offers a chance to not only see the production line up close, but also experience the human side of the brand,” says Freya Zhang, a research analyst at the investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China, who has been organizing tours for foreign investors to visit Chinese electric vehicle startups for two years.

People who have visited the Xiaomi factory say they were struck by the amount of automation on display. The company says that the overall automation rate at the factory has reached 91%, with some production lines like casting fully automated.

“The factory is huge with only a handful of workers. As I stood there watching, it was all robotic arms doing the work. The robots were all running preset programs—picking up parts from one place and delivering them to another, all in a very orderly manner,” says Yuanyuan, a Beijing resident who took her 13-year-old daughter on the Xiaomi tour last month. Yuanyuan says she had been applying to get tickets since January, but since the limited spots are awarded on a lottery basis, she was only finally able to secure them in May.

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Neat way to make people engage with the prospect of buying one of these cars – or perhaps feeling good about the cars they’ve already bought from that brand. (Thanks Karsten for the link.)
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Reddit considers iris-scanning Orb developed by a Sam Altman startup • Semafor

Reed Albergotti:

»

Reddit is considering using World ID, the verification system based on iris-scanning Orbs whose parent company was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

According to two people familiar with the matter, World ID could soon become a way for Reddit users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous on the platform.

Talks between representatives of Reddit and World ID parent Tools for Humanity highlight the growing market for new identity verification technologies, as artificial intelligence floods online platforms with inauthentic content and governments around the world consider new age verification laws to prevent children and teenagers from accessing social media.

If World ID becomes one of Reddit’s third-party providers, it would be good news for Tools for Humanity, which was founded six years ago with the lofty goal of providing a universal basic income to the world by offering them cryptocurrency called Worldcoin in exchange for scanning their eyeballs with an Orb.

Reddit and Tools for Humanity declined to comment on the talks.

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Don’t think this would be massively popular with Reddit users, to be honest.
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Detachment 201: why Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth joined the US Army reserves • Pirate Wires

An interview with Bozworth, who is one of the first people fast-tracked recruited into the US Army’s “tech bro” division:

»

Blake Dodge: How do you feel like Meta’s culture with respect to the military has evolved? Or maybe it hasn’t changed as much as people think?

Boz: The degree to which people have been comfortable publicly supporting the military has changed a huge amount over the last 20 years, ebbing and flowing. The amount of actual support probably hasn’t changed a huge amount.
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure how much that affected Meta — like me, or Mark Zuckerberg, or what we were doing. It wasn’t clear 10 years ago what kind of position we would’ve been in to do anything of meaning in terms of providing assistance to the government. We really were, at that point, just building websites and apps. But now, following 10 years of big investment in hard research problems — physics problems around optics and the technology required to do super lightweight wearable computing — that is a platform I think is super relevant and interesting to the government. [Same goes for AI.]

So I don’t know how much the change of tone and acceptability of public displays of patriotism affected the actual work Meta was doing. I think the work was the same. I think probably the support was the same. But I am very glad we are now in a moment where the response to me making a personal decision, in a personal capacity, to join the Army Reserves was very, very, very fair. People had reasonable questions about what it meant, but also a lot of people were very proud and very excited about it.

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Quite the journey from “site to keep up with your friends from college” to “aiding, ooh, who knows which country is in line for an invasion to produce regime change”.
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Fake experts and SEO: Journalists adopting new checks • Press Gazette

Rob Waugh:

»

Journalists and PRs have changed their habits around verifying sources in the wake of a Press Gazette investigation which revealed that one of the UK’s most widely-quoted psychologists does not exist.

Barbara Santini’s main online presence is on profiles connected with a sex toys website and CBD retailers. Press Gazette revealed in April how a PR working for these businesses duped multiple publishers into quoting Santini by responding to journalist questions posted on services like ResponseSource and Qwoted.

…However, PR companies continue to deploy fake experts apparently using AI-generated responses.

Freelance journalist Rosie Taylor explained that in response to one query via a journalist response service, she received three near-identical responses in the same email format with identical headshots, all at the same time.

While she remains unsure whether the people are real, she said she was convinced the quotes are AI-generated, and now insists on phoning every expert in order to verify them. 

She told Press Gazette: “In an ideal world, journalists would always research their interviewees first and then interview them on a call or face-to-face, but the reality is many of us are under huge pressure to turn copy around quickly and quote multiple experts on a wide variety of topics, so getting the occasional comment over email makes life a whole lot easier.”

Taylor said she received the identical responses 24 hours after submitting a journalist request – but the emails did not appear to come via the service she used.

Taylor, who also edits the media pitching advice newsletter Get Featured, said that the experts had little relation to the story. Among those who responded to her request about car hire were an AI/SEO company, a graphic design company and a lighting business.

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“In an ideal world”. Well, yes, but before email, there really was only one way to get a quote from someone, and that was by phoning them up. So maybe that ideal world did exist. And there was plenty of pressure back then, honest.
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Alibaba, Tencent freeze AI tools during high-stakes China exam • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Luz Ding:

»

China’s most popular AI chatbots like Alibaba’s Qwen have temporarily disabled functions including picture recognition, to prevent students from cheating during the country’s annual “gaokao” college entrance examinations.

Apps including Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s Yuanbao and Moonshot’s Kimi suspended photo-recognition services during the hours when the multi-day exams take place across the country. Asked to explain, the chatbots responded: “To ensure the fairness of the college entrance examinations, this function cannot be used during the test period.”

China’s infamously rigorous “gaokao” is a rite of passage for teenagers across the nation, thought to shape the futures of millions of aspiring graduates. Students — and their parents — pull out the stops for any edge they can get, from extensive private tuition to, on occasion, attempts to cheat. To minimize disruption, examiners outlaw the use of devices during the hours-long tests.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Qwen and ByteDance Ltd.’s Doubao still offered photo recognition as of Monday. But when asked to answer questions about a photo of a test paper, Qwen responded that the service was temporarily frozen during exam hours from June 7 to 10. Doubao said the picture uploaded was “not in compliance with rules.”

China lacks a widely adopted university application process like in the US, where students prove their qualifications through years of academic records, along with standardized tests and personal essays. For Chinese high-school seniors, the gaokao, held in June each year, is often the only way they can impress admissions officials. About 13.4 million students are taking part in this year’s exams.

The test is considered the most significant in the nation, especially for those from smaller cities and lower-income families that lack resources. A misstep may require another year in high school, or completely alter a teenager’s future.

The exam is also one of the most strictly controlled in China, to prevent cheating and ensure fairness. But fast-developing AI has posed new challenges for schools and regulators.

«

Hard to imagine such a move ever working in the West. Note how China still values personal skills.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Even job applications are being infested by AI-generated applications – which is leading to AI-based rejections. Will it mean AI-based jobs? CC-licensed photo by Loco Steve 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. Applicable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

All the little data • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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Even my consumption of cultural goods—an ugly phrase, yes, but it seems apt—is shadowed by metadata. When the graphical user interface was introduced to personal computers in the early 1980s, the scroll bar habituated us to a visual indicator of our progress through a document. Now, pretty much all viewing, listening, and reading is tracked, visually or numerically, in real time. When I’m listening to a song, a glance at the progress bar tells me, to the second, how much time has elapsed since the tune began and how much remains before it ends. The same goes for TV shows and movies and videos.

When I’m reading an ebook, I’m kept apprised of the percentage of the text I’ve made it through. When I’m looking over the homepage of a newspaper or magazine site, I’m told how long it will take to read each article. Here’s a “3 min read.” There’s a “7 min read.” (This essay, for the record, is a thirteen-minute read, and you have nine minutes to go.) Every photo on my phone offers its own little data dump: where and when it was taken, the aperture and ISO settings, the exposure time, the image’s size in pixels and bits. My pictures tend to be amateurish, but the data always looks professional.

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A lovely little soliloquy about how much data we have raining down on us, and yet how little it can truly tell us. The computer records all the photo’s metadata, but only we know if it’s a good photo, or one with meaning for us. The data shows what time we had a phone call and how long it lasted; only we know if it was important or trivial (and even the duration might not tell you that).

How can you capture that? You can’t.
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The companies that help people vanish • BBC Worklife

Bryan Lufkin:

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In Japan, these people are sometimes referred to as “jouhatsu”. That’s the Japanese word for “evaporation”, but it also refers to people who vanish on purpose into thin air, and continue to conceal their whereabouts – potentially for years, even decades.

“I got fed up with human relationships. I took a small suitcase and disappeared,” says 42-year-old Sugimoto, who’s just going by his family name for this story. “I just kind of escaped.” He says that back in his small hometown, everybody knew him because of his family and their prominent local business, which Sugimoto was expected to carry on. But having that role foisted upon him caused him such distress that he abruptly left town forever and told no one where he was going.

From inescapable debt to loveless marriages, the motivations that push jouhatsu to “evaporate” can vary. Regardless of their reasons, they turn to companies that help them through the process. These operations are called “night moving” services, a nod to the secretive nature of becoming a jouhatsu. They help people who want to disappear discreetly remove themselves from their lives, and can provide lodging for them in secret whereabouts.

“Normally, the reason for moving is something positive, like entering university, getting a new job or a marriage. But there’s also sad moving – for example, like dropping out of university, losing a job or escaping from a stalker,” says Sho Hatori, who founded a night-moving company in the 90s when Japan’s economic bubble burst. At first, he thought financial ruin would be the only thing driving people to flee their troubled lives, but he soon found there were “social reasons”, too. “What we did was support people to start a second life,” he says.

Sociologist Hiroki Nakamori has been researching jouhatsu for more than a decade. He says the term ‘jouhatsu’ first started being used to describe people who decided to go missing back in the 60s. Divorce rates were (and still are) very low in Japan, so some people decided it was easier to just up and leave their spouses instead of going through elaborate, formal divorce proceedings.

“In Japan, it’s just easier to evaporate,” says Nakamori. Privacy is fiercely protected: missing people can freely withdraw money from ATMs without being flagged, and their family members can’t access security videos that might have captured their loved one on the run.

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This piece also available as a BBC video and as an audio episode.
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AI sludge has entered the job search • The New York Times

Sarah Kessler:

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Katie Tanner, a human resource consultant in Utah, knew the job would be popular: It was fully remote, was at a tech company and required only three years of experience.

But she was still shocked by the response on LinkedIn. After 12 hours, 400 applications had been submitted. By 24, there were 600. A few days later, there were more than 1,200, at which point she removed the post. Three months later, she’s still whittling down candidates.

“It’s crazy,” she said. “You just get inundated.”

The number of applications submitted on LinkedIn has surged more than 45% in the past year. The platform is clocking an average of 11,000 applications per minute, and generative artificial intelligence tools are contributing to the deluge.

With a simple prompt, ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, will insert every keyword from a job description into a résumé. Some candidates are going a step further, paying for A.I. agents that can autonomously find jobs and apply on their behalf. Recruiters say it’s getting harder to tell who is genuinely qualified or interested, and many of the résumés look suspiciously similar.

“It’s an ‘applicant tsunami’ that’s just going to get bigger,” said Hung Lee, a former recruiter who writes a widely read newsletter about the industry.

One popular method for navigating the surge? Automatic chat or video interviews, sometimes conducted by A.I. Chipotle’s chief executive, Scott Boatwright, said at a conference this month that its A.I. chatbot screening and scheduling tool (named Ava Cado) had reduced hiring time by 75 percent.

HireVue, a popular A.I. video interview platform, offers recruiters an option to have A.I. assess responses and rank candidates.

But candidates can also use A.I. to cheat in these interviews, and some companies have added more automated skill assessments early in the hiring process.

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But it’s fine because an AI will take the job anyway.
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Why I am no longer an AI Doomer • The Deep Dish

Richard Meadows:

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Intelligence is the ability to solve a broad range of problems. ChatGPT is very intelligent: it can solve a broad range of problems across many domains.

Your old Casio pocket calculator is also good at solving problems— albeit within a narrower domain— but it feels weird to call it ‘intelligent’. What’s missing?

To help get at the thing we’re actually interested in, the usual move is to add the concept of agency. We don’t just solve problems; we solve them in the pursuit of our goals (unlike a chatbot or calculator, which just sits around idly until a human gives it something to do). An agent doesn’t just think; it thinks for itself. As Sarah Constantin puts it in her very-good essay of a similar name, agency is what makes humans so powerful—and so dangerous.

But we actually get a lot more clarity when we keep these two concepts separate. Intelligence does not require agency: your pocket calculator is capable of instantly solving problems that very few humans could tackle in their heads (or at all). And agency does not require much in the way of intelligence: an amoeba is an agent in the world, but it is only a tiny bit smarter than a rock.

The third element that needs to be teased apart is creativity, defined by David Deutsch as the ability to come up with new explanatory knowledge; this being a contender for the secret sauce that separates humans from other very smart animals (and from current-level AIs). Crucially, this is a step-change rather than a spectrum of ability: if you can explain something, you can in principle explain anything that is explicable.

…A true AGI will necessarily be an agent, with its own desires, whims, and goals. And a true AGI will necessarily be creative, in the Deutschian sense: it will be able to create new explanatory knowledge.

Current-level AI has neither of these properties, and has no prospect of attaining them via current approaches. It’s incredibly smart, but it’s still much more like a pocket calculator than it is like a person.

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A good explanation; there’s more about the gap between this and “life”.
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Sam Altman says GPT-5 coming this summer, open to ads on ChatGPT—with a catch • AdWeek

Trishla Ostwal:

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on a new company podcast today that GPT-5 is expected to launch this summer, marking the next major leap in the company’s generative AI capabilities. However, he did not disclose a specific date. 

The announcement comes amid rising competition in the AI arena and growing scrutiny over how these tools are developed and deployed. Business Insider reported that GPT-5 is shaping up to be a significant upgrade over GPT-4, with early testers calling it “materially better.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s primary revenue comes from enterprise customers buying beefed-up versions of ChatGPT, and GPT-5 is poised to be the next big play to sustain that momentum.

Altman also weighed in on the possibility of ads on ChatGPT, saying he’s “not totally against” the idea—a shift that could reshape how the chatbot is monetized. 

However, he warned that it would take “a lot of care” to get the experience right. Unlike social media or web search, where users expect some level of monetization, Altman emphasized that modifying the model’s output based on who pays for the ad would be “a trust-destroying moment” for its users. 

Instead, he floated the idea of showing ads outside the large language model’s output stream. Altman didn’t specify what form those ads might take or where they might appear, such as a sidebar or footer. 

“But the burden of proof there, I think, would have to be very high,” he said. “And it would have to feel really useful to users and really clear that it was not messing with the LLM’s output.” 

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I’m old enough to remember when Google was absolutely insistent that it would never put ads on its homepage (the one before you’ve carried out a search). It did indeed turn down a very large sum from a credit card company wanting just that in its early years. But in its later years it wasn’t above advertising its own products, particularly Chrome. After all, every user who switched from Safari or Firefox to Chrome both saved Google money on search clicks, and increased the amount of user data it could collect.

All of which is to say that people will look at the ads being pulled into OpenAI as a goldmine about what people want.
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Websites are tracking you via browser fingerprinting • Texas A&M University Engineering

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New research led by Texas A&M University found that websites are covertly using browser fingerprinting — a method to uniquely identify a web browser — to track people across browser sessions and sites.

“Fingerprinting has always been a concern in the privacy community, but until now, we had no hard proof that it was actually being used to track users,” said Dr. Nitesh Saxena, cybersecurity researcher, professor of computer science and engineering and associate director of the Global Cyber Research Institute at Texas A&M. “Our work helps close that gap.”

When you visit a website, your browser shares a surprising amount of information, like your screen resolution, time zone, device model and more. When combined, these details create a “fingerprint” that’s often unique to your browser. Unlike cookies — which users can delete or block — fingerprinting is much harder to detect or prevent. Most users have no idea it’s happening, and even privacy-focused browsers struggle to fully block it.

“Think of it as a digital signature you didn’t know you were leaving behind,” explained co-author Zengrui Liu, a former doctoral student in Saxena’s lab. “You may look anonymous, but your device or browser gives you away.”

This research marks a turning point in how computer scientists understand the real-world use of browser fingerprinting by connecting it with the use of ads.

“While prior works have studied browser fingerprinting and its usage on different websites, ours is the first to correlate browser fingerprints and ad behaviors, essentially establishing the relationship between web tracking and fingerprinting,” said co-author Dr. Yinzhi Cao, associate professor of computer science and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

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The irresistible force online: advertising.
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How OpenElections uses LLMs • The Scoop

Derek Willis:

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In the 12-plus years that we’ve been turning official precinct election results into data at OpenElections, the single biggest problem has been converting pictures of results into CSV files. Many of the precinct results files we get are image PDFs, and for those there are essentially two options: data entry or Optical Character Recognition. The former has some advantages, but not many.

While most people are not great at manual repetitive tasks, you can improve with lots of practice, to the point where the results are very accurate. In the past we did pay for data entry services, and while we developed working relationships with two individuals in particular, the results almost always contained some mistakes and the cost could run into the hundreds of dollars pretty quickly. For a volunteer project, it just didn’t make sense.

We also used commercial OCR software, most often Able2Extract, which did pretty well, but had a harder time with PDFs that had markings or were otherwise difficult to parse. Thankfully, most election results PDFs are in one of a small handful of formats, which makes things a bit less complicated, but commercial OCR has too many restrictions.

For parsing image PDFs into CSV files, Google’s Gemini is my model of choice, for two main reasons. First, the results are usually very, very accurate (with a few caveats I’ll detail below), and second, Gemini’s large context window means it’s possible to work with PDF files that can be multiple MBs in size.

…Speed isn’t the most important factor here, though: accuracy is, and using LLMs still means a system of checks to ensure that the results are what the originals say they are. One step in that is taken care of by a suite of tests that run every time a new or changed CSV gets pushed to one of our data repositories. Those tests look for some formatting issues, duplicate records and basic math inconsistencies. A second step – for now manual – is verifying that multiple totals derived from the precinct CSV match the numbers in an official cumulative report.

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I haven’t tried formatting a PDF into a CSV (the ones I deal with tend to be small, and not for stuffing into systems which are retaining their logs for court hearings), but I’d like an explanation of why LLMs should be good at reading PDFs.

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Ear wax as a possible screening medium for Parkinson’s disease • American Chemical Society

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Most treatments for Parkinson’s disease (PD) only slow disease progression. Early intervention for the neurological disease that worsens over time is therefore critical to optimize care, but that requires early diagnosis. Current tests, like clinical rating scales and neural imaging, can be subjective and costly. Now, researchers in ACS’ Analytical Chemistry report the initial development of a system that inexpensively screens for PD from the odours in a person’s ear wax.

Previous research has shown that changes in sebum, an oily substance secreted by the skin, could help identify people with PD. Specifically, sebum from people with PD may have a characteristic smell because volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released by sebum are altered by disease progression — including neurodegeneration, systemic inflammation and oxidative stress. However, when sebum on the skin is exposed to environmental factors like air pollution and humidity, its composition can be altered, making it an unreliable testing medium. But the skin inside the ear canal is kept away from the elements. So, Hao Dong, Danhua Zhu and colleagues wanted to focus their PD screening efforts on ear wax, which mostly consists of sebum and is easily sampled.

To identify potential VOCs related to PD in ear wax, the researchers swabbed the ear canals of 209 human subjects (108 of whom were diagnosed with PD). They analyzed the collected secretions using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry techniques. Four of the VOCs the researchers found in ear wax from people with PD were significantly different than the ear wax from people without the disease.

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There: you were not expecting to discover this when you woke up today. Of note: dogs sniff each others’ ears too when they meet – so perhaps they know some version of this too.

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Global sea levels rising twice as fast as they did last century, according to major scientific report • Sky News

Victoria Seabrook:

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Global sea levels are now rising twice as fast as they did last century, according to a major new scientific report.

The study – which takes a laser focus on climate change in the 2020s, a critical decade to stop the worst damage – finds all 10 measures are going in the wrong direction.

And most of them are doing so at a faster rate.

The findings are “unprecedented” but “unsurprising”, given the world continues to pump record levels of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere.

“We see a clear and consistent picture that things are getting worse,” said lead author Professor Piers Forster.

However, the rate by which emissions are increasing has slowed down, offering a ray of hope they will soon reach their peak.

The new study found sea levels are now rising on average twice as fast, at 4.3mm a year on average since 2019, up from 1.8mm a year at the turn of the 20th century.

The acceleration is stark, but within the realms of what scientists expected. That’s because the warming atmosphere has sent more melting ice flowing into the sea, and the ocean water expands as it warms.

For the island nation of the UK, which risks coastal flooding, cliff falls and damage to homes and buildings, with 100,000 properties expected to be threatened with coastal erosion in England within 50 years.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified