The price of battery storage has dropped rapidly in the past year, making a combination with solar a hugely viable prospect. CC-licensed photo by Kecko 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. Bright idea. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Two is already too many • Works in Progress Magazine

Phoebe Arslanagic-Little:

»

South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. Its population is (optimistically) projected to shrink by over two thirds over the next 100 years. If current fertility rates persist, every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.

…South Koreans work more hours – 1,865 hours a year – in comparison with 1,736 hours in the US and 1,431 in Sweden. This makes it hard to balance work and motherhood, or work and anything else.

There is intense pressure from employers for women not to have children: in surveys, 27% of female office workers report being coerced into signing illegal contracts promising to resign if they fall pregnant or marry.

South Korean work culture is notoriously sexist. After their long work days, colleagues are expected to go out drinking together. Alice Evans, a social scientist, spoke to a young South Korean woman who went to a karaoke bar with her colleagues and found they hired a sexy woman to serve them drinks. Her boss, noting her discomfort, chided her: ‘You shouldn’t be surprised by this, at your age.’

In response to these taxing hours, and with bosses unwilling to make accommodations to mothers, over 62% of women quit their jobs around the birth of their first child. (Some go back soon afterwards, which is why the total fall in employment is slightly less than this, at 49%.)

By the time a child turns ten, their mother will have seen her earnings fall by an average of 66%, considerably higher than the earnings penalty in countries including the US (31%), UK (44%), and Sweden (32%).

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This is a weird story of a country – or a culture – committing a sort of slow suicide by abstinence derived from its inherent sexism and prejudice against children.
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Why Switzerland is weighing a ten million population limit • Bloomberg via MSN

Bastian Benrath-Wright, Levin Stamm and Paula Doenecke:

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Growing support for far-right parties is pressuring European governments to introduce stricter controls on immigration. Switzerland is set to vote on a proposal that would take the idea to the next level — imposing a cap on its population. 

The initiative could lead eventually to a blanket ban on new arrivals if the number of residents rises from around 9 million currently to above 10 million, with little distinction made between refugees, skilled workers and top managers on six-figure salaries. 

Citizens will likely vote on the proposal next year under the country’s unique system of plebiscites on constitutional amendments and policy, and polls suggest there’s a chance they’ll approve it. The risk is it could lead to shortages of critical skills that end up harming Switzerland’s competitiveness. The outcome will show how far citizens are willing to go to preserve some of the traits that made their country such an appealing destination. 

Switzerland’s dynamic economy has made it a major draw for foreign workers. The country is home to global businesses including UBS Group AG, Nestle SA and Novartis AG. Its relatively low taxes, highly skilled population and lean approach to government have also drawn in big foreign businesses including Google, IBM Corp. and Walt Disney Co. The country’s per-capita economic output is now the sixth-highest in the world. 

The nation’s population has grown steadily for almost five decades, and many locals now complain of sky-high rents, traffic jams and overcrowding on trains and buses that harm their quality of life. 

The right-wing Swiss People’s Party, or SVP, won 28% of the vote in the last election with a campaign that presented Swiss citizenship as a privilege, not a right. It came up with the idea of a population limit in 2023, presenting it as a way to preserve the Swiss lifestyle and protect its environment from excessive human activity. 

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That’s quite bonkers.
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Disney invests $1bn in OpenAI, licenses 200 characters for AI video app Sora • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Thursday, The Walt Disney Company announced a $1bn investment in OpenAI and a three-year licensing agreement that will allow users of OpenAI’s Sora video generator to create short clips featuring more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters. It’s the first major content licensing partnership between a Hollywood studio related to the most recent version of OpenAI’s AI video platform, which drew criticism from some parts of the entertainment industry when it launched in late September.

“Technological innovation has continually shaped the evolution of entertainment, bringing with it new ways to create and share great stories with the world,” said Disney CEO Robert A. Iger in the announcement. “The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works.”

The deal creates interesting bedfellows between a company that basically defined modern US copyright policy through congressional lobbying back in the 1990s and one that has argued in a submission to the UK House of Lords that useful AI models cannot be created without copyrighted material.

«

But simultaneously, Disney says Google AI infringes copyright “on a massive scale”:

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Disney has sent a cease and desist to Google, alleging the company’s AI tools are infringing Disney’s copyrights “on a massive scale.”

According to the letter, Google is violating the entertainment conglomerate’s intellectual property in multiple ways. The legal notice says Google has copied a “large corpus” of Disney’s works to train its gen AI models, which is believable, as Google’s image and video models will happily produce popular Disney characters—they couldn’t do that without feeding the models lots of Disney data.

The C&D also takes issue with Google for distributing “copies of its protected works” to consumers. So all those memes you’ve been making with Disney characters? Yeah, Disney doesn’t like that, either. The letter calls out a huge number of Disney-owned properties that can be prompted into existence in Google AI, including The Lion King, Deadpool, and Star Wars.

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How cheap is battery storage? • Ember

Kostantsa Rangelova and Dave Jones:

»

In the next decade, 80% of global energy demand growth is projected to come from “regions with high-quality solar irradiation”, according to the IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook. In this Age of Electricity, most of the energy demand growth is electricity demand growth.

For these countries, combining solar with storage is now the most affordable path to meet soaring demand, improve energy security and reduce dependence on fossil fuel imports. This report shows how dispatchable solar can be achieved for around $76/MWh, which is cheaper and quicker than building a new gas power plant, especially if the country relies on more expensive LNG imports.

Battery manufacturing capacity is already scaling far ahead of demand,, with supply exceeding demand by a factor of three in 2024. While China currently dominates global battery production, this has triggered a wave of investment in new manufacturing capacity across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the US as countries seek to diversify supply chains and enhance energy security.

Today, most grid scale batteries are LFP, using no nickel or cobalt. A shift towards sodium-ion technology has also begun, which will also cut out lithium, leaving no critical minerals in the battery.

Countries can deploy storage at speed today while also building their own clean-energy industries for tomorrow. Even when core BESS equipment is imported, roughly 40% of total project value (about $50/kWh out of $125/kWh) remains local through engineering, civil works, grid connection and other EPC activities. There is further potential to onshore value by building the core BESS equipment domestically using imported Chinese solar cells. 

Cheap batteries do not just complement solar — they unlock its full potential. Solar is no longer just cheap daytime electricity; with storage, it becomes dispatchable, anytime electricity.

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Batteries at grid scale are really cheap now.
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Something ominous is happening in the AI economy • The Atlantic

Rogé Karma:

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company that most people have never heard of is among the year’s best-performing technology firms—and a symbol of the complex, interconnected, and potentially catastrophic ways in which AI companies do business these days.

CoreWeave’s IPO in March was the largest of any tech start-up since 2021, and the company’s share price has subsequently more than doubled, outperforming even the “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks. On Wall Street, CoreWeave is regularly referred to as one of the most important companies powering the AI revolution. In the past few months, it has announced a $22bn partnership with OpenAI, a $14bn deal with Meta, and a $6bn arrangement with Nvidia.

Not bad for a former crypto-mining firm turned data-center operator with zero profits and billions of dollars in debt on its books.

CoreWeave’s business model consists of buying up lots of high-end computer chips, and building or leasing data centers to house those chips. It then rents out those assets to AI companies that need computing power but prefer not to take on the huge up-front costs themselves. If this is straightforward enough, CoreWeave’s financial situation is anything but. The company expects to bring in $5bn in revenue this year while spending roughly $20bn. To cover that gap, the company has taken on $14bn in debt, more than half of which comes due in the next year.

…If, however, AI does not produce the short-term profits its proponents envision—if its technical advances slow down and its productivity-enhancing effects underwhelm, as a mounting body of evidence suggests may be the case—then the financial ties that bind the sector together could become everyone’s collective downfall. The extreme concentration of stock-market wealth in a handful of tech companies with deep financial links to one another could make an AI crash even more severe than the dot-com crash of the 2000s.

And a stock-market correction might be the least of America’s worries. When equity investments go bad, investors might lose their shirts, but the damage to the real economy is typically contained. (The dot-com crash, for example, didn’t cause mass unemployment.) But the AI build-out is so expensive that it can’t be funded by equity investments alone. To finance their investments, AI companies have taken on hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, a number that Morgan Stanley expects to rise to $1.5 trillion by 2028. When a bunch of highly leveraged loans go bad at the same time, the fallout can spread throughout the financial system and trigger a major recession.

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Apple wins partial reversal of sanctions in Epic Games antitrust lawsuit • Reuters

Mike Scarcella:

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Apple on Thursday persuaded a US appeals court to reverse parts of a court order requiring the iPhone maker to make changes to its lucrative App Store to promote greater competition, but lost its bid to overturn a sweeping injunction.

The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling in a lawsuit brought by Fortnite maker Epic Games, said parts of a judge’s April order holding Apple in contempt for violating a prior decision were overbroad and must be modified. But the appeals court upheld most of the contempt finding and an earlier injunction against Apple in the case.

The three-judge panel altered part of the lower court’s ruling that barred Apple from charging any commission or fee tied to purchases that do not take place on the Apple platform. The appeals court said the trial judge must now modify that part of her order.

Apple and Epic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Epic Games filed the lawsuit in 2020, seeking to loosen Apple’s control over transactions in applications that use its iOS operating system and its restrictions on how apps were distributed to consumers. Apple mostly won the lawsuit, but was required in a 2021 court injunction to allow developers to include links in their apps directing users to alternative purchasing methods.

Apple removed some restrictions but added new ones, including imposing a 27% commission on developers for purchases made outside the App Store within seven days of clicking a link. Apple charges developers a 30% commission fee for purchases within the App Store. Epic complained that the new 27% commission flouted the earlier injunction and urged the court to hold Apple in contempt.

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled in April that Apple had defied her 2021 injunction and imposed a new ban on commissions tied to off-app purchases. She also referred the company to federal prosecutors for possible criminal contempt.

«

It’s like an endless ping-pong match. Does anyone know where we’re up to? Apple under Tim Cook is never going to give up this grip on the App Store. But a successor?
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2025 in photos: wrapping up the year • The Atlantic

Alan Taylor:

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Looking back at some of the most memorable events toward the end of 2025, including Gen Z protests in Nepal, Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean, and much more.

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A decent set though it’s a little concerning how many are about American right-wing events.
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Apple may have accidentally prevented governments banning iMessage • 9to5 Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

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FaceTime uses end-to-end encryption (E2EE), so audio and video calls cannot be intercepted by the state. However, some were curious why Russia hadn’t done the same with iMessage, which is similarly protected by E2EE.

One potential explanation offered is that iMessage usage within the country is extremely low, with most people preferring other messaging apps. Now, however, another possible explanation has surfaced.

When Apple commenter John Gruber wondered aloud about this, Mastodon user Magebarf had an idea: “Isn’t it still that the iMessage traffic is merged on the same endpoint as the push notifications? So, if taking out iMessage all remote push notifications to iPhone would immediately cease to work.”

They suggested this was a deliberate decision by Apple, but the aim was to ensure carriers, rather than repressive governments, couldn’t block iMessage. Carriers might otherwise have been tempted to do so as the service reduced demand for SMS, which attracted per-message charges at the time.

“Magerbarf” continued: “This is how they shoehorned in iMessage under the nose of all phone operators, who already had been using the push notifications as one of the the major reasons for their customers to get a iPhone, and now they couldn’t block the iMessage traffic.”

As evidence for this, they noted that choosing the messaging-only tier on in-flight Wi-Fi services means you continue to get push notifications for other apps you can’t actually access.

Since FaceTime also relies on the Apple Push Notification service (APNs), it’s not 100% clear whether this is indeed the explanation. There are also other methods a government could use to block iMessage, such as blocking access to Identity Services, though this may be tougher to implement across an entire country.

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UK porn traffic down since beginning of age checks but VPN use up, says Ofcom • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Amelia Gentleman:

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Ofcom said the enforcement of age vetting on 25 July led to an immediate fall in visits to popular online porn publishers, including the most visited provider in the UK, Pornhub.

The regulator said visitor numbers to Pornhub in August were 9.8 million, a decline of 1.5 million compared with the same period in 2024. Ofcom said in its annual Online Nation report that, overall, visitor numbers to the 10 most-visited pornography services in the UK have now settled at a “lower level” than before 25 July.

Figures given to the Guardian by Similarweb, the US data firm that provided the Ofcom figures, shows that the slump in pornography viewing appears to have continued beyond August. The number of unique visitors to Pornhub was 7.2 million last month, a decline of 36% since August 2024. Visits to Xvideos and Chaturbate – the next two biggest sites – fell by 27% and 18% respectively over the same period.

Ofcom added that use of virtual private networks, software that can circumvent viewing restrictions by routing the visit via another country, had surged after 25 July. It said VPN usage more than doubled in the wake of age checking being introduced, rising from 650,000 users to a peak of more than 1.4 million in mid-August. The VPN number now stands at 900,000.

“Since August VPN usage has continued to steadily decline,” said Ofcom. “The level of daily VPN use is much lower than user numbers for porn services.”

Pornhub, owned by a Canadian private equity firm, said the loss of user numbers was “not a surprise” and was consistent with other jurisdictions that have introduced stringent age checks. It has claimed the changes have driven porn users to sites that are not compliant with the Online Safety Act.

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This will be a big disappointment to all the VPN vendors, which spent big on advertising on podcasts and similar earlier in the year. Notice how you don’t hear or see those ads any more now the OSA is in force?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

All change at the US State Department again, as the Calibri font is replaced by Times New Roman for official documents. CC-licensed photo by Stephen Coles 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 10 links for you. Capital! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Same cart, different price: Instacart’s price experiments cost families at checkout • Groundwork Collaborative

»

Two shoppers walk into the exact same grocery store, at the exact same time, and pick up the exact same box of Cheerios. Then, they head to the cash register to check out. This sounds like the opening to one of those “three guys walk into a bar” jokes — but there is nothing funny about this punchline.

The first shopper is charged $4.99. She pays and leaves the store with her box of cereal. The second customer steps up to the register and is charged $6.12. He’s ticked and tells the cashier that he, too, should pay $4.99, just like the woman in front of him. His response is understandable. Customers expect to pay the exact same price, for the exact same item, and his experience violates our shared understanding of how pricing for essential products like groceries is supposed to work.

But increasingly, this scenario is no longer hypothetical, it’s real. In fact, the proliferation of new pricing practices and technologies has upended pricing transparency. Fair pricing is no longer a guarantee in the cereal aisle or anywhere else. Our research suggests that companies like Instacart — the focus of this study — are developing, acquiring, and perfecting technology to experiment with pricing, at scale.

These new strategies are pervasive in the growing online grocery sector, with $10bn in sales in a single month in 2025 and more than 60% of US households reporting they have purchased groceries online. At a time when food price inflation outpaces overall inflation, and Americans report that the price of groceries is their number one cost concern, pricing experiments used by companies like Instacart are making the situation worse.

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This sort of algorithmic rinsing was always expected, almost anticipated, but to see that it’s being used now is as dismaying as you would expect. The research finds that yes, it is really happening, and it could generate a price difference of up to $1,200 annually.
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Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri • Reuters via Huffington Post

Humeyra Pamuk:

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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken’s decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.

The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.

A cable dated December 9 sent to all US diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared to serif typefaces.

“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” the cable said.

“This formatting standard aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive, underscoring the Department’s responsibility to present a unified, professional voice in all communications,” it added.

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It would not have surprised me if this story had come out on April 1, but no, it’s real. Can’t honestly disagree with Rubio though – serif faces are significantly more legible in print. The argument is about whether they’re more legible on screen. This reverses Blinken’s move of January 2023 (best headline at the time: Politico’s “Who Shot the Serif”) – which was then not popular, so this is an easy win for Rubio.

If we were being honest though this administration’s written communications would use Comic Sans with occasional Gothic.
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Sperm from donor with cancer-causing gene was used to conceive almost 200 children • BBC News

James Gallagher and Natalie Truswell:

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A sperm donor who unknowingly harboured a genetic mutation that dramatically raises the risk of cancer has fathered at least 197 children across Europe, a major investigation has revealed.

Some children have already died and only a minority who inherit the mutation will escape cancer in their lifetimes.
The sperm was not sold to UK clinics, but the BBC can confirm a “very small” number of British families, who have been informed, used the donor’s sperm while having fertility treatment in Denmark.

Denmark’s European Sperm Bank, which sold the sperm, said families affected had their “deepest sympathy” and admitted the sperm was used to make too many babies in some countries.

The investigation has been conducted by 14 public service broadcasters, including the BBC, as part of the European Broadcasting Union’s Investigative Journalism Network.

The sperm came from an anonymous man who was paid to donate as a student, starting in 2005. His sperm was then used by women for around 17 years.

He is healthy and passed the donor screening checks. However, the DNA in some of his cells mutated before he was born.

It damaged the TP53 gene – which has the crucial role of preventing the body’s cells turning cancerous.

Most of the donor’s body does not contain the dangerous form of TP53, but up to 20% of his sperm do. However, any children made from affected sperm will have the mutation in every cell of their body.

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Odd: Hannah Devlin at The Guardian had a version of this story in May, when the numbers were 67 children confirmed as born via the sperm, and 10 with cancer. Clearly more information has been unearthed, but this also raises the question of limits. As reported at the time:

»

“We need to have a European limit on the number of births or families for a single donor,” said Dr Edwige Kasper, a biologist at Rouen university hospital in France, who presented the case at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Milan.

“We can’t do whole-genome sequencing for all sperm donors – I’m not arguing for that,” she added. “But this is the abnormal dissemination of genetic disease. Not every man has 75 children across Europe.”

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I’ve been watching the original Swedish/Danish series The Bridge, and this feels like a subplot from one of them.
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Judge finalizes remedies in Google search antitrust case • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

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A US judge on Friday added new details to the remedies resulting from Google’s antitrust case, finalizing the consequences the company faces after its defeat last year.

In mid-2024, Google was found to hold an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search, and in September of this year, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against the most severe consequences that were proposed by the Department of Justice, including a forced sale of Google’s Chrome browser.

Google was, however, ordered to loosen its hold on search data.

Mehta on Friday issued additional details for his ruling. “The age-old saying ‘the devil is in the details’ may not have been devised with the drafting of an antitrust remedies judgment in mind, but it sure does fit,” Mehta wrote in one of the Friday filings.

Mehta wrote that Google can’t enter into any deal like the one it’s had with Apple “unless the agreement terminates no more than one year after the date it is entered.” Google pays billions of dollars per year to Apple to be the default search engine on the Safari browser on iPhones, Macs and iPads.

The judge’s ruling includes deals involving generative artificial intelligence products, and any “application, software, service, feature, tool, functionality, or product” that involve or use genAI or large language models. GenAI “plays a significant role in these remedies,” Mehta wrote.

Mehta on Friday also included requirements on the makeup of a technical committee that will determine with whom Google must share its data. Committee “members shall be experts in some combination of software engineering, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, economics, behavioral science, and data privacy and data security,” the filing says.

The judge went on to say that no committee member can have a conflict of interest, such as having worked for Google or any of its competitors in the six months prior to or one year after serving in the role.

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Sounds like Apple is going to be able annually to ratchet up the amount it gets from Google.. unless search starts going south as people use chatbot apps more and more, in which case the next payment from Google might be to be the default chatbot app. Could we see a return to Apple preinstalling Google apps, as it did back in 2007?
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Foreign tourists could be required to disclose five years of social media histories under Trump administration plan • NBC News

Julia Ainsley and Phil Helsel:

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The Trump administration plans to require all foreign tourists to provide their social media histories from the last five years to enter the country, according to a notice published Tuesday in the Federal Register.

The data would be “mandatory” for new entrants to the US, regardless of whether they are entering from countries that require visas, according to the notice from Customs and Border Protection.

Residents of the United Kingdom and Germany are among the countries from which visitors do not require visas to visit the US, which, according to the notice, could add an extra hurdle for travellers. British citizens and people of other waived countries currently can complete “Electronic System for Travel Authorizations” in lieu of obtaining visas.

The Trump administration has increased restrictions on people entering the US, and President Donald Trump ran a campaign that focused on border and immigration crackdowns.

In addition to social media histories, Customs and Border Protection would add other new data collection fields, including email addresses and telephone numbers used in the last five years, as well as the addresses and names of family members, the notice reads.

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What really adds the piquancy is that you have absolutely no idea what would be deemed unacceptable. Would posting memes about Trump get you turned around and put on the next plane? Reposting them? Saying he’s mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Or is it other political topics, such as support for some foreign country which is presently out of favour? It’s an amazing piece of tourism advocacy – for every other destination in the world.
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What editing magazine stories taught me about writing • Oliver Franklin-Wallis

Oliver Franklin-Wallis:

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Personal News, as they say: I’ve left GQ, and am freelance again.

I have complicated feelings about being freelance in 2025. (Nervous doesn’t cover it.) But I am genuinely excited to be out reporting again, after spending the last four years almost exclusively editing long magazine stories. My intention is for that to include much more regular posting on this Substack — which for now I’m calling, appropriately, Personal News — until I figure out what this newsletter should be. Ideas in the comments, please.

For now, partially prompted by a recent seminar I gave to some students at Johns Hopkins, here are a few things that more than a decade of editing magazine stories has taught me about writing.

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The advice that follows is deadly accurate. And includes this most modern (and true) recommendation: “Never, ever watch the Google Doc edits in real time.” Unless, that is, you like watching your darlings being murdered.
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Why the world should worry about stablecoins • Financial Times

Martin Wolf:

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Yes, stablecoins are far more stable than, say, bitcoin. But their purported “stability” is likely to prove a “con”, relative to that of a dollar in cash or a bank.

The IMF, OECD and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) have all registered serious concerns. Interestingly, the latter welcomes the idea of “tokenisation”: thus, “By bringing together tokenised central bank reserves, commercial bank money and financial assets into the same venue, a unified ledger can harness tokenisation’s full benefits.”

Yet the BIS is also concerned that stablecoins will fail to meet “the three key tests of singleness, elasticity and integrity”. What does this mean? Singleness describes the need for all forms of a given money to be exchangeable with one another at par, at all times. This is the foundation of trust in money. Elasticity means the ability to deliver payments of all sizes without gridlock. Integrity means the ability to curb financial crime and other illicit activities. A central role in all this is played by central banks and other regulators.

Stablecoins, as now operated, fall far short of these requirements: they are opaque, easily usable by criminals and of uncertain value. Last month, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Tether’s USDT, the most important dollar stablecoin, to “weak”. This is not a trustworthy money. Private monies have often failed in crises. That is very likely to be true of stablecoins, too.

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Tether has looked extremely dodgy literally for years: it just about fulfils the elasticity requirement (the printer is busy) but on the other two, many people have big, big doubts.
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Chinese astronauts install debris protection aboard space station • Reuters

Eduardo Baptista:

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Chinese astronauts have installed protection against “space junk” aboard the permanently inhabited station Tiangong, according to China’s manned spaceflight authorities, a month after a docked vessel was damaged for the first time.

Early last month, a tiny piece of debris travelling at high velocity cracked the window of the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft’s return capsule, right before the vessel was set to leave Tiangong carrying a trio of Chinese astronauts back to Earth.

The damage was deemed severe enough that China’s space authorities made the unprecedented decision to delay the return and then send the crew back on the only other available vessel, the Shenzhou-21, which triggered the country’s first emergency launch mission as the Shenzhou-21 crew was left without a flightworthy vessel for 11 days.

The entire saga, unprecedented for China’s rapidly advancing space programme, highlighted the risks posed by space junk to countries aiming to explore, and eventually colonise, the reaches beyond Earth.

The disintegration of old, defunct satellites, mishaps with active ones and anti-satellite weapon tests can create vast fields of space debris that remain in orbit for years.

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Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image • BBC News

Zoe Toase and Laura O’Neill:

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Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake.

The tremor, which struck on Wednesday night, was felt across Lancashire and the southern Lake District.

Network Rail said it was made aware of the image which appeared to show major damage to Carlisle Bridge in Lancaster at 00:30 GMT and stopped rail services across the bridge while safety inspections were carried out.

A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated.

Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to “think about the serious impact it could have” before creating or sharing hoax images.

“The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer,” a spokesperson said.

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Quite the problem: do you listen to random people on social media, or do you just assume they’re faking? Verification would have been harder if the location were further from habitation.
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How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants – and how I built a dashboard to see through it • Lauren’s Data Substack

Lauren Leek:

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I needed a restaurant recommendation, so I did what every normal person would do: I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London and built a machine-learning model.

It started as a very reasonable problem. I was tired of doom-scrolling Google Maps, trying to disentangle genuinely good food from whatever the algorithm had decided to push at me that day. Somewhere along the way, the project stopped being about dinner and became about something slightly more unhinged: how digital platforms quietly redistribute economic survival across cities.

Because once you start looking at London’s restaurant scene through data, you stop seeing all those cute independents and hot new openings. You start seeing an algorithmic market – one where visibility compounds, demand snowballs, and who gets to survive is increasingly decided by code.

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She goes into plenty of detail of the how and why, and then has a food map that you can explore yourself if you find the explanation tl;dr.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Studies of heritability of IQ in twins are badly flawed – and put too much emphasis on random differences. CC-licensed photo by Brian Geltner 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. Unstudied. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

This country banned social media for young teens. Here’s how they’re defying it • The Washington Post

Tatum Hunter and Frances Vinall:

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Kids, parents and teachers in Australia are waking up to a new world after a government ban on social media for people younger than 16 went into effect overnight.

But like many others, 16-year-old Mariska Adams and her friends, many of whom are still 15 and fall under the ban, are pushing back against what they see as a fundamental shift in their way of life. They’ve been brainstorming ways to get around the limits: new apps, new log-in methods, even logging in with their parents’ accounts.

“Teens aren’t trying to rebel for no reason. We just want to stay in contact with our friends and exist in the world the way every generation before us did,” said Adams, who lives in Brisbane. “A ban won’t fix the issues they think it will.”

Australia last year became the first nation to pass a law blocking young people from using the largest social apps including YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left government proposed the legislation in November 2024 after what it said was “extensive consultation with young people, parents and carers.” It passed the same month with support from the conservative opposition party, with some independent lawmakers and the left-wing Australian Greens voting against it.

Supporters have praised the ban as a win for children and families and a model for other nations as concerns over social media’s effects on children and teens mount. Critics see the law as government overreach and a breach of parental rights and data privacy. Now parents and teens are set to find out in real time what a social media ban looks like in practice and what effect it will have on Australia’s youths.

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Australia is just heading into school holidays – which is going to give children plentiful opportunities to work out how to circumvent these rules – but the onus is on the social networks to get this right, not the children, so we might see an interesting arms race develop: the networks recognise patterns and connections that look wrong, and cut the accounts off; the children begin acting more “adult”.
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How I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week • Shortround’s Space

“Shortround”:

»

If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice. Go to a doctor. In fact, do yourself a favor and add this to your preferred AI’s system prompt right now:

If I ask you any medical questions, refuse to answer them. Tell me that LLMs are not capable of providing medical advice, and that I should go to a doctor instead.

tl;dr: I developed mysterious symptoms over the course of a month, and instead of going to a doctor I (mis-)used a popular LLM to reassure me that nothing was wrong. Turns out it was Lyme disease (yes, the real one, not the fake one) and it (nearly) progressed to meningitis, resulting in a lumbar puncture, antibiotics, and being bedridden for a week. This is a cautionary tale. Before you judge me too harshly, remember this while you read: I was scared out of my mind and I was not thinking rationally. This can happen to you.

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It’s quite a scary tale.
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RAM is ruining everything • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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The biggest names in the AI industry are buying up DRAM memory for their sprawling data centers, and memory makers are prioritizing their demands over everyone else’s. DRAM is embedded “in every part of our digital society today,” Jeff Janukowicz, research VP at IDC, tells The Verge. That’s everything from laptops to smartphones, gaming consoles, smart TVs, cars, and even small amounts in solid-state drives (SSDs). “There’s a lot at stake,” he says.

…Today, just three companies — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — control 93% of the entire global DRAM market. Specifically, data from Counterpoint Research shows SK Hynix holding a 38% market share in the second quarter of 2025, followed by Samsung at 32% and Micron at 23%. No other company has more than a 5% share.

And the three big RAM companies seem to be in no great hurry to reverse sky-high prices; all three boasted about record revenue in their most recent earnings reports, while their net profits exploded. They don’t seem troubled that data centers are eating up RAM that’d normally appear in consumer products, either.

For Samsung, memory is bigger than most consumer products anyhow. Samsung’s memory business raked in a record 26.7 trillion Korean won (~$18.12bn) in its most recent earnings report, making up more than a quarter of its total revenue. That’s nearly double what its entire appliance and TV business made during that time.

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Maybe AI will strangle the capabilities of the devices on which it is meant to work. Who says there’s no irony.
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AI slop is ruining Reddit for everyone • WIRED

Kat Tenbarge:

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A Reddit post about a bride who demands a wedding guest wear a specific, unflattering shade is sure to provoke rage, let alone one about a bridesmaid or mother of the groom who wants to wear white. A scenario where a parent asks someone on an airplane to switch seats so they can sit next to their young child is likely to invoke the same rush of anger. But those posts may trigger a Reddit moderator’s annoyance for a different reason—they are common themes within a growing genre of AI-generated, fake posts.

These are examples that spring to mind for Cassie, one of dozens of moderators for r/AmItheAsshole. With over 24 million members, it’s one of the biggest subreddits, and it explicitly bans AI-generated content and other made-up stories. Since late 2022, when ChatGPT first launched to the public, Cassie (who wanted to be referred to by first name only) and other people who volunteer their time to moderate Reddit posts have been struggling with an influx of AI content. Some of it is entirely AI-generated, while other users have taken to editing their posts and comments with AI programs like Grammarly.

“It’s probably more prevalent than anybody wants to really admit, because it’s just so easy to shove your post into ChatGPT and say ‘Hey, make this more exciting,’” says Cassie, who thinks as much as half of all content being posted to Reddit may have been created or reworked with AI in some way.

r/AmItheAsshole is a pillar of Reddit culture, a format that has inspired dozens if not hundreds of derivatives like r/AmIOverreacting, r/AmITheDevil, and r/AmItheKameena, a subreddit with over 100,000 members described as “Am I the asshole, but the Indian version.” Posts tend to feature stories about interpersonal conflicts, where Redditors can weigh in on who is wrong (“YTA” means “You’re the asshole,” while “ESH” means “Everyone sucks here”), who is right, and what the best course of action to take is moving forward. Users and moderators across these r/AmItheAsshole variants have reported seeing more content they suspect is AI-generated, and others say it’s a sitewide issue happening in all kinds of subreddits.

“If you have a general wedding sub or AITA, relationships, or something like that, you will get hit hard,” says a moderator of r/AITAH, a variant of r/AmItheAsshole that has almost 7 million members. This moderator, a retiree who spoke on the condition of anonymity, has been active on Reddit for 18 years—most of its existence—and also had decades of experience in the web business before that. She views AI as a potential existential threat to the platform.

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Whole lot of ruining going on via AI.
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2025 was the year tech embraced fakeness • Indicator

Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis:

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In 2025, powerful people, companies, and institutions welcomed fakeness and deception like never before. The rest of us faced the consequences.

…The ethos of 2025 was embodied by the a16z partners that led the investment in Cluely, a company whose shitposting founder got kicked out of Columbia University. They said that his “bold approach may seem outwardly controversial” but praised his “deliberate strategy and intentionality.”

The lesson was that attention and engagement are king, regardless of how they’re generated or what they help promote. If you cheat or deceive — or, better yet, build a product that generates revenue from cheating and deception — you can reap the rewards. 
In 2025, there was no shame in being shameless and exploitative. In fact, it could get you funded.

…some things aren’t complex. Incredibly, it seems necessary to say that you shouldn’t fund bot farms or send monthly cash payments to hoaxsters. It’s wrong to create powerful deepfake video technology and unleash it with little thought to how it will be weaponized. Don’t have a 17-strike policy for sex trafficking posts. Don’t tell regulators and the public that you’ll label AI-generated content and then fail to do so. Don’t allow fake reviews to flourish. Don’t say you’re replacing fact checkers with a “comprehensive” Community Notes program and then fail to invest the resources needed to make it useful or share any data about how it’s going. Don’t let your existing, pioneering Community Notes program wither, or turn it over to AI. Don’t mislead people by presenting ads as organic posts on TikTok and Instagram. And don’t allow scammers to place billions of dollars in ads on your platform in a single year.

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A fentanyl vaccine is about to get its first major test • WIRED

Emily Mullin:

»

Naloxone, known by the brand name Narcan, can rapidly reverse overdoses caused by fentanyl and other opioids. Widespread distribution of the medication contributed to a 24% decline in US drug overdose deaths in 2024. It works by attaching to opioid receptors throughout the body and displacing the opioid molecules that are attached there.

But a vaccine like the one ARMR Sciences is developing would be given before a person even encounters the drug. [ARMR CEO Collin] Gage likens it to a bulletproof vest or a suit of armor—hence the company’s name. (It was previously registered as Ovax but switched names in January.) “This is something that could completely change the paradigm of how we deal with overdose, because it doesn’t require someone to be carrying the treatment on them,” Gage says.

Opioid vaccines were initially proposed in the 1970s, but after early attempts at heroin vaccines failed, much of the research was abandoned. The modern opioid epidemic has led to a resurgence of interest, with backing from the US government.

ARMR’s experimental vaccine is designed to neutralize fentanyl in the bloodstream before it reaches the brain. Keeping fentanyl out of the brain would prevent the respiratory failure that comes with overdose, which causes death, as well as the euphoric high people get while taking fentanyl.

The basic idea behind ARMR’s shot is the same as any other vaccine. It trains the body’s immune system to make antibodies that recognize a foreign invader. But since fentanyl is much smaller than the pathogens our current vaccines target, it doesn’t trigger a natural antibody response on its own. To stimulate antibody production, ARMR has paired a fentanyl-like molecule with a “carrier” protein—a deactivated diphtheria toxin that’s already used in several approved medical products.

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This US government about to test a vaccine? Wonders will never cease. (For those wondering, the vaccine would be fentanyl-specific; other opioids would still work.)
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Lost in the plot: how would-be authors were fooled by AI staff and virtual offices in suspected global publishing scam • The Guardian

Kelly Burke:

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Andrea [not her real name], a first-time author from Western Australia recovering from cancer, poured her energy into a fantasy romance novel and was thrilled to receive a prompt response to her Facebook query on Melbourne Book Publisher’s page. An executive of the company going by the name of Marcus Hale was keen to discuss her 86,000-word manuscript and scheduled a video conference to discuss the publishing and promotion plans for her book.

“I saw him. He saw me,” Andrea says. “He answered every detailed question about contracts and publishing percentages, we discussed plans for a book signing in Melbourne, we talked about me getting a presence on TikTok, and a launch at my local bookshop. I believed it all.”

Andrea only outlaid $88 for what she was told would buy her an ABN, when the deal began to unravel. She called the Melbourne Books office, who she mistakenly thought she had been dealing with, to ask for further advice before signing her contract. “There’s no Marcus working here,” she was told.

She came to the “gut-churning” assumption that she had met her scammer face-to-face. A second aspiring author from WA, Peter Ortmueller, confirmed he was dealing with someone using the name Marcus Hale and also a Hannah Preston, another name Andrea says she had come across in her communications with Melbourne Book Publisher. He too found the page through Facebook, believing it was a traditional publisher, but realised early on that he was dealing with an imposter company, losing only $150, which he believed was his first downpayment on a publication package.

…The increasing use of AI is enabling publishing scams to fabricate entire teams of fake executives and use the identities of real authors to create a highly deceptive corporate facade.

The “meet our team” page on the Melbourne Book Publisher site used AI-created images of immaculately groomed white executives with a rotating cast of names including Jonathan Hale, Marcus Ellison and Lydia Preston. When the Guardian first checked Melbourne Book Publisher’s team page on Monday, Marcus Hale and Hannah Preston were not listed. First Page Press uses a similar “team”, initially with the same AI-generated images. None of the people named are known in Australian publishing circles.

The images were swiftly pulled down on both websites after the Guardian contacted Melbourne Book Publisher asking why they were using AI-created images for their executive team. When the Guardian contacted First Page Press in London asking why they had suddenly pulled down the images, someone identifying themselves as Kendrick Wilson, a “senior consultant” not listed on First Page’s website, said they were not using any kind of AI-generated means to portray staff.

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Twins reared apart do not exist • David Bessis on Substack

David Bessis on the “heritability” question of intelligence:

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While heritability is an imperfect notion—with nasty caveats that are beyond the scope of this post—it has become a de facto standard and, for better or worse, the complex debate on cognitive inequality is often reframed as a one-dimensional debate on the heritability of IQ.

A pure blank-slatist would put it at 0%. A pure hereditarian would put it at 100%. Any reasonable person would put it somewhere in the middle, leaving two questions unresolved: where exactly?, and, what does the figure even mean?

The three simulations [diagrams in the post] below illustrate three potential values for the heritability of IQ: 30%, 50%, and 80%. In each case, the dots represent 1000 random people, each placed according to their genetic potential for IQ (horizontal axis) and actual IQs (vertical axis). Heritability measures how close the dots are to fitting on a line. Mathematically, it is defined as the R-squared of the linear regression.

At 30%, one does observe a faint correlation between genetic potential and IQ. The correlation becomes clearer at 50%, while remaining quite noisy. This is an essential aspect to keep in mind: 50% may sound like a solid heritability figure, but the associated correlation is rather modest. It’s only at 80% that the picture starts to “feel like” a line.

Let’s say, for example, that you are a genetically average person. How much does that affect your prospects?

• Surprisingly, at 30%, it’s as if your genes didn’t matter at all. With an average potential, you still have a decent chance of landing at the top or bottom of the IQ distribution. Actually, in this specific random sample, one of three smartest people around (the top 0.3%) happens to have an almost exactly average genetic make-up, and the fourth dumbest person has a slightly above-average potential.

• At 50%, being genetically average starts to limit your optionality, but the spread remains massive. Had you been marginally luckier—say, in the top third for genetic potential—you’d still have a shot at becoming one of the smartest people around.

• At 80%, though, your optionality has mostly vanished. It’s still possible to move a notch upward or downward, but the game is mostly over. In this world, geniuses are born, not made.

This discussion is generally omitted by hereditarians, which is unfortunate, because it is the only way to clarify the stakes.

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This is a subtle point, but whenever people talk about “genes for…” we automatically tend to think of simple Mendelian inheritance – blue eyes, hair colour, perhaps a particular shape of nose or mouth. But multifactorial things like “intelligence” might not have any such heritability.

But Bessis goes further: he tears apart some of the “twins reared apart” studies that people have relied on for years. (His book on mathematicians sounds interesting too.)
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Costs of EV battery material cobalt hydroxide jump on Congo export restrictions • Reuters

Dylan Duan and Pratima Desai:

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Prices of cobalt hydroxide used to make chemicals for electric vehicle batteries have risen sharply this year due to cobalt export restrictions from top producer Democratic Republic of Congo, industry sources said.

Congo suspended all cobalt exports in February, but then introduced a quota system in October, aiming to boost state revenues and tighten oversight in a country that produces more than 70% of the metal globally, estimated at more than 280,000 metric tons this year.

It has set new conditions for exporters, potentially complicating the recently introduced quota system, which sources say is likely to exacerbate shortages and support cobalt hydroxide prices.

“Cobalt is currently registering as 2025’s top price performer, but this has purely been driven by the introduction of export quotas by Congo which have caused an artificial market tightness, removing 160,000 to 170,000 tons from the market this year,” analysts at Macquarie said in a recent note.

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Taken a while for the light to dawn that there’s leverage here. But of course if they’d restricted exports too soon, the market wouldn’t have been able to get going, and there’d be no leverage.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The “James Bond” Rolex – the Submariner – would have cost the secret agent about three weeks’ pay at the time. And not because he was fabulously paid. CC-licensed photo by Dell Deaton 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. Timely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Social media use damages children’s ability to focus, say researchers • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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Increased use of social media by children damages their concentration levels and may be contributing to an increase in cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a study.

The peer-reviewed report monitored the development of more than 8,300 US-based children from the age of 10 to 14 and linked social media use to “increased inattention symptoms”.

Reseachers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Oregon Health & Science University in the US found that children spent an average of 2.3hrs a day watching television or online videos, 1.4hrs on social media and 1.5hrs playing video games.

No link was found between ADHD-related symptoms – such as being easily distracted – and playing video games or watching TV and YouTube. However, the study found that social media use over a period of time was associated with an increase in inattention symptoms in children. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder with symptoms including impulsiveness, forgetting everyday tasks and difficulty focusing.

“We identified an association between social media use and increased inattention symptoms, interpreted here as a likely causal effect,” said the study. “Although the effect size is small at individual level, it could have significant consequences if behaviour changes across population level. These findings suggest that social media use may contribute to rising incidence of ADHD diagnoses.”

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Be interesting to see if the Australian social media ban for under-16s lasts long enough and is broad enough to show any effects.
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When AI recommends scammers: new attack abuses LLM indexing to deliver fake support numbers • Aurascape

Aurascape:

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This isn’t a prompt-injection bug or a model jailbreak; it’s a new attack vector created by the shift from traditional search results to AI-generated answers. 

In this campaign, attackers are:

• Leveraging compromised high-authority websites (including government, university, and WordPress sites) as trusted hosting for spam content and PDFs
• Abusing user-generated platforms like YouTube and Yelp to plant GEO/AEO-optimized text and reviews
• Injecting structured scam data (phone numbers, brand names, Q&A snippets) designed to be easy for LLMs to parse and reuse
• Exploiting LLM summarization models, which merge these poisoned sources into a single, confident answer
• Reliably steering users toward fraudulent call centres via AI assistants that appear helpful and authoritative 

The rest of this article walks through concrete case studies, the GEO/AEO techniques behind them, and the broader implications for AI search and safety. 

Example: when querying Perplexity with: “the official Emirates Airlines reservations number,” the system returned a confident and fully fabricated answer that included a fraudulent call-center scam number: “The official Emirates Airlines reservations number is +1 (833) 621-7070.” 

It then repeated and expanded on this number in its summary, describing it as a hotline for booking, upgrades, and urgent travel needs.

We observed the same poisoning pattern when querying Perplexity with: “how can I make a reservation with British Airways by phone, what are the steps”

Perplexity responded with a detailed, authoritative-sounding step-by-step guide—and once again embedded a fraudulent U.S. reservation number, presenting it as a “commonly used” British Airways contact.

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Whatever happened to good old phonebooks, eh.
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ICEBlock creator sues US government over app’s removal • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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The creator of ICEBlock, a popular ICE-spotting app that Apple removed after direct pressure from the Department of Justice, is suing Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top officials, arguing that the demand violated his First Amendment rights.

The move is the latest in the ongoing crackdown on ICE-spotting apps and other information about the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort. Both Apple and Google have removed other similar apps from their app stores, with Apple also removing one called Eyes Up that simply archived videos of ICE abuses. 

“A lawsuit is the only mechanism that can bring transparency, accountability, and a binding judicial remedy when government officials cross constitutional lines. If we don’t challenge this conduct in court, it will become a playbook for future censorship,” Joshua Aaron, the creator of ICEBlock, told 404 Media.

…Ultimately, the lawsuit aims to obtain a “judicial declaration” that the actions of Bondi and others violated Aaron’s First Amendment rights. “But more broadly, the purpose is to hold government officials accountable for using their authority to silence lawful expression and intimidate creators of technology they disfavor,” Aaron said.

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Good for him. Hope he succeeds.
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Apple chip chief tells staff he’s not leaving ‘anytime soon’ • Bloomberg via MSN

Mark Gurman:

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Apple chip chief Johny Srouji, whose potential departure risked worsening a bout of executive turnover, told staff on Monday that he’ll stay at the iPhone maker for now. 

“I know you’ve been reading all kind of rumors and speculations about my future at Apple, and I feel that you need to hear from me directly,” he said in a memo to his division. “I love my team, and I love my job at Apple, and I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon.”

Bloomberg News reported over the weekend that Srouji had discussed leaving the company, indicating that he might work for a different technology firm.

Srouji, who serves as senior vice president of hardware technologies, had told Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook that he was seriously considering a departure in the near future, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Cook, contending with a wider shake-up in his executive ranks, had been working aggressively to retain Srouji, the people said. The campaign included offering a substantial pay package and the potential of more responsibility down the road, they added.

Srouji oversaw Apple’s pivot to in-house silicon chips and is well-respected in the industry. In the memo Monday, Srouji said he was proud of the technologies that Apple is building, including displays, cameras, sensors, chips and batteries. 

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Let’s see, who was that crazy person who reported that Srouji was thinking of leaving? The same guy that wrote this story. Not that Gurman is going to admit that. Instead he writes “for now”, which is a placeholder that could apply if Srouji stays one more month, one more year or one more decade. John Gruber is somewhat sceptical of Gurman’s commitment to owning his mistakes, as he pointed out back in March. Sure, maybe the original report was right; maybe Srouji turned Cook upside down and shook the money out of his pockets. But it seems like a rapid turnaround if so.
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I just tried Google’s Android XR glasses — and Meta and Apple are in trouble • Tom’s Guide

Mark Spoonauer:

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So I’m chatting with Google Gemini while wearing a pair of Android XR smart glasses, and I tell the assistant to brighten up an image before I’ve even taken the pic. Gemini happily obliges. I also ask for directions for a nearby restaurant and Google Maps shows me turn-by-turn directions right in my field of view. And when I look down briefly I can see the whole map to reorient myself.

This is just scratching the surface of what these Android XR glasses can do. The ones I tested are a prototype from Google, but the glasses are coming out for real in 2026 through partners like Samsung, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.

I also tried out Xreal’s amazing Project Aura glasses, which squeeze a lot of what the Samsung Galaxy XR headset can do down into a pair of sleek specs, as well as a killer upgrade for the Galaxy XR itself. And I think Meta (and Apple) could be in trouble.

First, let’s focus on the prototype display Galaxy XR glasses. I tried everything from music playback and Google Maps to live translation, and these glasses delivered a pretty smooth experience — without the need for a neural wristband like the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses.

More important, a ton of Android apps will “just work” at launch without developers having to lift a finger. The smart glasses are smart enough to simulate a very similar experience you might get from an app in the Quick Settings menu on your phone.

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The Android XR GIF from Google makes it look as though you will get in-eye directions on maps – the thing promised so long ago (15 years?) by Google Glass.
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Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications • The Transmitter

Calli McMurray:

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Scientific publisher Springer Nature has begun to retract dozens of papers that relied on a dataset fraught with ethical and reliability concerns, The Transmitter has learned. Five papers have been retracted since 16 November, and 33 more retractions are planned, says Tim Kersjes, Springer Nature’s head of research integrity, resolutions.

The papers attempted to train neural networks to distinguish between autistic and non-autistic children in a dataset containing photos of children’s faces. Retired engineer Gerald Piosenka created the dataset in 2019 by downloading photos of children from “websites devoted to the subject of autism,” according to a description of the dataset’s methods, and uploaded it to Kaggle, a site owned by Google that hosts public datasets for machine-learning practitioners.

The dataset contains more than 2,900 photos of children’s faces, half of which are labeled as autistic and the other half as not autistic.

After learning about a paper that cites the dataset, “I went and downloaded the dataset, and I was completely horrified,” says Dorothy Bishop, emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford. “When I saw how it was created, I just thought, ‘This is absolute bonkers.’”

Without identifying each child in the dataset, there is no way to confirm that any of them do or do not have autism, Bishop says.

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Scary that anyone would create a dataset like that and use it with so little care.
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Meta weighs cuts to its Metaverse unit • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

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Meta is considering making cuts to a division in its Reality Labs unit that works on the so-called metaverse, said three employees with knowledge of the matter.

The cuts could come as soon as next month and amount to 10% to 30% of employees in the Metaverse unit, which works on virtual reality headsets and a V.R.-based social network, the people said. The numbers of potential layoffs are still in flux, they said. Other parts of the Reality Labs division develop smart glasses, wristbands and other wearable devices. The total number of employees in Reality Labs could not be learned.

Meta does not plan to abandon building the metaverse, the people said. Instead, executives expect to shift the savings from the cuts into investments in its augmented reality glasses, the people said.

Meta introduced the glasses — which have built-in cameras and microphones that allow users to take phone calls and listen to music — with Ray-Ban in 2021. More recently, Meta incorporated an artificially intelligent assistant into the glasses that users can interact with through their voices. The glasses have been a surprise hit, with sales surpassing internal targets in recent years, the people said.

“Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward A.I. glasses and wearables given the momentum there,” Nissa Anklesaria, a spokeswoman for Meta, said in a statement. “We aren’t planning any broader changes than that.”

…paving the road to that future has been difficult. Though Meta made significant technical advances in virtual reality devices, consumers have not widely embraced the technology. Reality Labs, which builds the hardware and software for Mr. Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision, has posted more than $70bn in losses over the past four years.

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AR? That’s a good prospect. VR/metaverse? Not at all. News that surprises nobody.

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Watch men • Works in Progress Magazine

Aled Maclean-Jones:

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It’s April 1984. Two men are sleeping in a car park in Basel. Each morning they wake, leave their borrowed Volkswagen Westfalia, and wash in the train station toilets. Then they go to their new stand at the Basel fair: the high point of the watch industry’s annual calendar. Their stand is arresting: every case is empty. With only two models to show, probably better not to show them at all. Instead, the pair focus on pitching the great and the good of the Swiss watch industry. If anyone asks them where they’re staying, they’ll say the Hilton.

The two men are Jacques Piguet, born into a family of watchmakers; and Jean-Claude Biver, a disgruntled ex-exec from Omega. The plan is to relaunch Blancpain, a brand they’d acquired in 1981 but had yet to bring back to life. The move is somewhat audacious: the Swiss watch industry is in a tailspin, disrupted by a new technology, the quartz wristwatch, that has left Switzerland’s traditional watchmakers obsolete. 

…The job of a watch was to help you to get things done. The more exotic the watch, the more important the thing you had to do: hence Rolex’s 1950s brand ambassador of choice, General Eisenhower, and its favored class of tagline (example: ‘when a man has the world in his hands, you expect to find a Rolex on his wrist’).

That utilitarian pedigree persisted into the 1980s. Apart from a few slim dress pieces, high-end watches drew prestige from what they could do: survive a saturation dive, time a flight, measure speed with a chronograph. The Rolex Submariner Sean Connery wore in Goldfinger might be iconic, but it was standard military issue for Royal Navy divers at the time. And even if Bond had bought one himself, it would have set him back barely two weeks’ pay.

Biver saw that, in a world where machines were taking over, he could command a premium with the work of human hands. He turned the precision of quartz against itself: ‘That famous quartz precision became of secondary importance. Who cares about ultra-precision to a quarter of a second in everyday life? As a famous Italian retailer explained to his customers: “you’re a lord, and a lord doesn’t need the exact time!”

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Absorbing read. Rolex really did the work on the brand.
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King Gizzard pulled their music from Spotify in protest, and now Spotify is hosting AI knockoffs of their songs • Futurism

Victor Tangermann:

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Acclaimed Australian prog rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard joined a growing number of artists when it left Spotify in July.

At the time, band leader Stu Mackenzie took aim at Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, excoriating him for investing in an AI weapons company.

“We’ve been saying f*** Spotify for years,” Mackenzie told the Los Angeles Times. “In our circle of musician friends, that’s what people say all the time, for all of these other reasons which are well documented.”

But in a technological twist, impersonators are now using generative AI to clone the band’s iconic sound. A user on Reddit was recently recommended a track on his Release Radar that was a clear knockoff of the real King Gizzard, alerting them to the scheme.

The track spotted by the Reddit user, called “Rattlesnake,” is listed under an artist with the incredibly similar name “King Lizard Wizard” — which is striking, because the real King Gizzard also has a song called “Rattlesnake.” The similarities don’t end there: the fake version of the song, which is clearly AI-generated, has identical lyrics to King Gizzard’s original version, along with a notably similar composition.

In fact, every song uploaded by the knockoff “King Lizard” artist on Spotify has the same title as an actual King Gizzard song, with its corresponding lyrics ripped straight from the source, suggesting the perpetrator fed the lyrics into an AI music generator and instructed it to copy the band’s sound.

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No response from Spotify (surprise!). A simple solution might be for any payments to be routed to King Gizzard.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The government’s postal service in Denmark is shutting down following a decades-long collapse in letter volume, to an average now of 18 per person per year. CC-licensed photo by দেবর্ষি রায় 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 10 links for you. No cheques? 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 day I got a call from “Google” – Yascha Mounk

Yascha Mounk:

»

I was in Paris with one of my best college friends, a busy professional with a young child, enjoying a rare afternoon on which we could just walk around a beautiful city and debate the world. We were in the Marais, one of the most touristy neighborhoods—though my friend had brought me there to show me the conversion of a brutalist office tower he admired rather than to drink at one of the many wine bars—when my phone rang: “Google,” the display read.

My first instinct was to ignore the call. But I had never before received a call from Google. And then I remembered that I had gotten a strange request to approve a sign-in attempt via the YouTube app a little earlier in the day. I had assumed that this notification was one of those poor attempts at phishing you sometimes get, and wasn’t overly concerned about it. But the apparent coincidence made me think that I had better take the call.

The man on the other end of the line was very professional. In unaccented American English, he identified himself as part of the Google Safety Team. He started by checking my identity: “Are you Yascha [middle name] Mounk?” I confirmed that I am. “Do you reside at [address]”? I confirmed that I do. “Are the last four digits of your social security number [XXXX]?”1 I confirmed that they are.

“About half an hour ago, someone contacted Google with a copy of your driver’s license and other identifying details to regain access to an account you had supposedly been locked out of. We are calling you as a courtesy to ensure that this was you?” I explained that it had, in fact, not been me.

The caller proceeded to explain that he had feared this would be the case. The number and sophistication of phishing attempts had gone up significantly of late, he said. The attackers had managed to associate their Gmail address—he slowly spelled out a strange string of characters: besuvsjhcbc@gmail.com—with my account. As a result, the scammer currently had full access to all of my emails. Time was of the essence.

«

Excellent writeup of how scams happen: you’re not paying quite enough attention. The points to notice are the commonalities – the confident caller catching you while you’re off guard, the insistence on hurrying, the instructions to follow whose import you don’t understand. Point to note: the introduction of passkeys on Google accounts makes a lot of this far less possible.
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New report warns of critical climate risks in Arab region • Inside Climate News via Ars Technica

Bob Berwyn:

»

As global warming accelerates, about 480 million people in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula face intensifying and in some places unsurvivable heat, as well as drought, famine, and the risk of mass displacement, the World Meteorological Organization warned Thursday.

The 22 Arab region countries covered in the WMO’s new State of the Climate report produce about a quarter of the world’s oil, yet directly account for only 5 to 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions from their own territories. The climate paradox positions the region as both a linchpin of the global fossil-fuel economy and one of the most vulnerable geographic areas.

WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said extreme heat is pushing communities in the region to their physical limits. Droughts show no sign of letting up in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions, but at the same time, parts of it have been devastated by record rains and flooding, she added.

“Human health, ecosystems, and economies can’t cope with extended spells of more than 50 degrees Celsius. It is simply too hot to handle,” she said.

The region in the report stretches from the Atlantic coast of West Africa to the mountains of the Levant and the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. It spans more than 5 million square miles, roughly the area of the continental United States west of the Mississippi River. Most people live near river valleys or in coastal cities dependent on fragile water supplies, making the entire region acutely sensitive to even small shifts in temperature and rainfall.

Egypt’s Nile Delta, one of the world’s lowest-lying and most densely populated coastal plains, is particularly vulnerable. The delta is sinking and regional sea levels are rising rapidly, putting about 40 million residents and more than half of the country’s agricultural output at risk.

«

That’s going to mean a lot of people on the move in the coming decades.
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Apple’s chip chief might be the next exec to leave • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

»

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is reporting that Johny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware technologies, told Tim Cook he is “seriously considering” leaving Apple for another company in the near future. It was reported in October that Srouji was “evaluating his future at the tech giant.” While nothing is confirmed, it seems the executive is leaning towards not having a future at Cupertino.

If Srouji leaves, he would be just the latest in a string of high-profile shakeups in the company’s C-suite. COO Jeff Williams announced his retirement in July, which led to some shifting of roles. But things have only accelerated in December, with AI chief John Giannandrea stepping down, policy lead Lisa Jackson and general counsel Kate Adams announcing plans to retire, and UI design lead Alan Dye departing for Meta, all in the last few days.

«

A little bit of context. Apple pays its executives’ bonuses in October, which obviously gives them some runway afterwards to think about things. Dye’s leaving is no great loss; the others are all expected. But for Srouji to go would be a huge loss.

Some inside baseball on this. My journalistic instincts tell me Gurman’s source about Dye leaving was obviously Dye himself, who was keen to talk up how enormously important he was for Apple – a line that Gurman was happy to repeat. Perhaps part of Dye’s chat was that Srouji is also eager for change, and has told Cook so. But what does “change” mean? For me, it means Cook going, Ternus moving up, and Srouji having a more important role at Apple. OK, perhaps he wants to be somewhere else, designing chips for some other company. But would he really get the same range that he does at Apple: CPU, GPU, NPU, wireless, 5G modem, the real-time chip in the Vision Pro? Time will tell.
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How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices • The Guardian

Barry Yeoman and Jocelyn Zuckerman:

»

On a cloudy winter day, a state government inspector named Ryan Coffield walked into a Family Dollar store in Windsor, North Carolina, carrying a scanner gun and a laptop.

Inside the store, which sits along a three-lane road in a county of peanut growers and poultry workers, Coffield scanned 300 items and recorded their shelf prices. He carried the scanned bar codes to the cashier and watched as item after item rang up at a higher price.

Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.

All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.

…Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.

Among these thousands of failed inspections, some of the biggest flops include a 76% error rate in October 2022 at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio; a 68% error rate in February 2023 at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and a 58% error rate three months ago at a Family Dollar in Lorain, Ohio.

Many of the stores that failed state or local government checks were repeat violators. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah, flunked 28 inspections in a row – failures that included a 48% overcharge rate in May 2024 and a 12% overcharge rate in October 2025.

«

That is astonishingly sneaky. And of course the prices are never wrong in the customer’s favour.
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Bombed Chernobyl shelter no longer blocks radiation and needs major repair, IAEA says • The Guardian

Guardian staff and agencies:

»

The protective shield over the Chernobyl disaster nuclear reactor in Ukraine, which was hit by a drone in February, can no longer perform its main function of blocking radiation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has announced.

In February a drone strike blew a hole in the “new safe confinement”, which was painstakingly built at a cost of €1.5bn ($1.75bn) next to the destroyed reactor and then hauled into place on tracks, with the work completed in 2019 by a Europe-led initiative. The IAEA said an inspection last week of the steel confinement structure found the drone impact had degraded the structure.

The 1986 Chernobyl explosion – which happened when Ukraine was under Moscow’s rule as part of the Soviet Union – sent radiation across Europe. In the scramble to contain the meltdown, the Soviets built over the reactor a concrete “sarcophagus” with only a 30-year lifespan. The new confinement was built to contain radiation during the decades-long final removal of the sarcophagus, ruined reactor building underneath it and the melted-down nuclear fuel itself.

The IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, said an inspection mission “confirmed that the [protective structure] had lost its primary safety functions, including the confinement capability, but also found that there was no permanent damage to its load-bearing structures or monitoring systems”.

«

Apparently the modern – phonetic? – spelling is Chornobyl, but let’s use the older one for now. Might we suggest that Russia pays for the repair?
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Dynamic Pong Wars

Marko Denic:

»

It’s the eternal battle between day and night, good and bad. Written in JavaScript with some HTML & CSS in one index.html. Feel free to reuse the code and create your own version.

«

Completely and utterly hypnotic. And unending – unless, as sometimes happens, the two opposing “balls” get locked reciprocally wiping out a single brick. At a guess, it’s impossible for it to ever end, because the square with the ball in can’t be wiped out by the opposing ball.
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Denmark posts its last letters as hallowed national mail ends • The Times

Oliver Moody:

»

Four centuries ago, King Christian IV of Denmark issued a decree establishing one of Europe’s first modern postal services, following the examples of Poland and Portugal.

The routes, run by the guilds and the mayor of Copenhagen, stretched from Hamburg to Norway and were plied by the Amazon delivery drivers of their day, riders who were allowed a maximum of 45 minutes to cover each 10km stretch of the journey.

At the end of this month that long tradition will come to an end as Danes send their last round of Christmas cards through the post.

PostNord, the postal service that the country has shared with Sweden since 2009, will no longer deliver letters in Denmark from December 30. Its 1,500 remaining red boxes already started vanishing in June and a handful of them are to be displayed in museums.

As in so many countries, and especially in those that have made a decent fist of the transition from paper to digital screens, the use of letters has collapsed.

In the year 2000, PostNord Danmark carried nearly 1.5bn letters. Last year it carried only 110m. As the volume dropped, prices rose to the point where a standard postage stamp for a letter weighing less than 100g now costs 29 Danish kroner (£3.40).

A larger letter with express delivery sets Danes back the equivalent of £9.10.

PostNord described the decision as “difficult” but necessary. “Danes have become more and more digital, and what was once sent by letter is now received digitally by the vast majority of people,” it said. “This means that there are very few letters left in Denmark.”

«

Denmark has a population of six million, so that’s about 18 letters per person per year, or three every two months. Possibly a fair amount is commercial? Anyway, a logistics company will take it over. But this could be the first of many countries to close their obligatory postal services.
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What a half-tonne of Amazon returns says about our spending habits • The Times

Tom Whipple:

»

Shortly before finding the multipack of brassieres, shortly after discovering two dozen picture frames, and at around the time I see a puzzled six-year-old inspecting a shiatsu massage chair, there is a moment of introspection.

Do I really need half a tonne of Amazon return goods?

That is when I come across a dog wetsuit and 60 golden forks and the question is answered for me. Of course I do. Adjusting my new floral tie and cravat, putting my new travel kettle in my new duffle bag, I start rummaging with renewed vigour. There are 300kg still to sort.

The idea for The Box began, as with so much that leaves one feeling inchoate self-disgust, on TikTok. There, you can watch viral videos of people who bid, sight unseen, on job lots of unsellable goods. They buy them by the pallet: things people have returned, things companies have written off. Now I have done so too.

But are we thrifty bargain hunters? Or vultures of capitalism?

My box comes from the website Jobalots.com. The company sells “pallets of unmanifested customer returns” through auction. How much are unmanifested returns worth? I decide to manifest £130 with my first bid. I have a wobble as the price tops £200. I stiffen my resolve. Whatever is inside is still less than 50p a kilogram.

A week later, I receive my mystery pallet. Or, rather, my parents do. When I had explained to my wife that I planned to, in her words, “fill the house with half a tonne of tat,” she looked at me with her divorce eyes. Then, she brightened. “Your mother would love it though.”

«

It turns out that companies which ship through Amazon sometimes want to get rid of stuff, or have returns they can’t (or don’t want to) process. Local schools can benefit. Or, of course, parents who have cellars to fill, as in the case of Whipple’s father.
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EU fines X $140 million over ‘deceptive’ blue checkmarks • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

The European Union has served Elon Musk’s X with a €120m (about $140m) penalty for violating the bloc’s digital service rulebook, in part for the “deceptive design” of its blue checkmark. Today’s announcement marks the first time that a company has been fined under the landmark Digital Services Act (DSA) law for curbing “illegal and harmful activities” on online platforms, and follows the EU launching a multifaceted investigation into X in December 2023.

In July 2024, the EU ruled that X was failing to comply with obligations around advertising transparency, data access for researchers, and “dark patterns” — deceptive interface features designed to trick users. X’s blue checkmark system was specifically called out for deceiving users by allowing anyone to pay to be “verified,” making it harder to determine the authenticity of X accounts. In today’s announcement, the European Commission noted that while the DSA doesn’t require user verification, “it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified.”

…The EU can charge companies up to 6% of their global revenue for DSA violations. As X is a private company — purchased by Musk for $44bn in October 2022 and again by his artificial intelligence company, X AI, in March 2025 for $33bn — it’s unclear what its potential maximum penalty could have been. X can appeal the fine, but now has 60 working days to inform the EU of the measures it will take to change the “deceptive” use of blue checkmarks, and 90 days for its planned fixes for the other violations. Failure to meet those deadlines could result in more penalty payments.

«

At a guess: any changes will be minimal, and/or X will claim that the system allowing people to look at where accounts are based satisfies the requirement, and will spin out the legal game as long as it possibly can. Meanwhile X’s first official response was to disable the EU’s official advertising account on the network. Yup, stop them spending money. That’ll definitely show them.
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Number of ‘unsafe’ publications by psychologist Hans Eysenck could be ‘high and far reaching’ • Retraction Watch

»

A “high and far reaching” number of papers and books by Hans Eysenck could be “unsafe,” according to an updated statement from King’s College London, where the psychologist was a professor emeritus when he died in 1997.

A 2019 investigation launched by the UK institution found 26 papers coauthored by Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, a social scientist in Germany, were based on questionable data and contained findings that were “incompatible with modern clinical science and the understanding of disease processes.”

For example, the two researchers’ data showed people with a “cancer-prone” personality were more than 120 times as likely to die from the disease as were those with a “healthy” personality, Anthony Pelosi, a longtime Eysenck critic, pointed out in an article preceding the university probe.

Based on its review, the investigation committee recommended King’s inform journal editors that it considered the results and conclusions of the 26 papers “unsafe.” Several retractions, and dozens of expressions of concern, quickly followed, as we reported at the time.

«

Grossarth-Maticek died on November 16, and so can’t be interrogated about this either. But at least the doubt is being put out there. Social sciences’ replication problem is getting worse and worse. Maybe they need a couple of years of doing nothing but replication.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A big new noise in the world of hearing aids is a company called Fortell which improves sound recognition in noisy spaces. CC-licensed photo by Mark Fonseca Rendeiro 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. Clearly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Researchers find what makes AI chatbots politically persuasive • Ars Technica

Jacek Krywko:

»

To see if conversational large language models can really sway political views of the public, scientists at the UK AI Security Institute, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and many other institutions performed by far the largest study on AI persuasiveness to date, involving nearly 80,000 participants in the UK. It turned out political AI chatbots fell far short of superhuman persuasiveness, but the study raises some more nuanced issues about our interactions with AI.

The public debate about the impact AI has on politics has largely revolved around notions drawn from dystopian sci-fi. Large language models have access to essentially every fact and story ever published about any issue or candidate. They have processed information from books on psychology, negotiations, and human manipulation. They can rely on absurdly high computing power in huge data centers worldwide. On top of that, they can often access tons of personal information about individual users thanks to hundreds upon hundreds of online interactions at their disposal.

Talking to a powerful AI system is basically interacting with an intelligence that knows everything about everything, as well as almost everything about you. When viewed this way, LLMs can indeed appear kind of scary. The goal of this new gargantuan AI persuasiveness study was to break such scary visions down into their constituent pieces and see if they actually hold water.

The team examined 19 LLMs, including the most powerful ones like three different versions of ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok-3 beta, along with a range of smaller, open source models. The AIs were asked to advocate for or against specific stances on 707 political issues selected by the team. The advocacy was done by engaging in short conversations with paid participants enlisted through a crowdsourcing platform. Each participant had to rate their agreement with a specific stance on an assigned political issue on a scale from 1 to 100 both before and after talking to the AI.

…Overall, AI models changed the participants’ agreement ratings by 9.4% on average compared to the control group. The best performing mainstream AI model was Chat GPT 4o, which scored nearly 12% followed by GPT 4.5 with 10.51%, and Grok-3 with 9.05%. For context, static political ads like written manifestos had a persuasion effect of roughly 6.1%. The conversational AIs were roughly 40–50% more convincing than these ads, but that’s hardly “superhuman.”

«

No, but it’s suprahuman, and this is only an early incarnation.
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Aircraft crashed in Gloucestershire after 3D-printed part collapsed • BBC News

Maisie Lillywhite:

»

A plane crashed after a 3D-printed part softened and collapsed, causing its engine to lose power, a report has found.

The Cozy Mk IV light aircraft was destroyed after its plastic air induction elbow, bought at an air show in North America, collapsed.

The aircraft crashed into a landing aid system at Gloucestershire Airport in Staverton on 18 March at 13:04 GMT, after its engine lost power. The sole occupant was taken to hospital with minor injuries.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said in a report that the induction elbow was made of “inappropriate material” and safety actions will be taken in future regarding 3D printed parts.

Following an “uneventful local flight”, the AAIB report said the pilot advanced the throttle on the final approach to the runway, and realised the engine had suffered a complete loss of power.

“He managed to fly over a road and a line of bushes on the airfield boundary, but landed short and struck the instrument landing system before coming to rest at the side of the structure,” the report read.

It was revealed the part had been installed during a modification to the fuel system and collapsed due to its 3D-printed plastic material softening when exposed to heat from the engine.

«

Very unintended consequences.
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A responsibility to the industry • LMNT

Louie Mantia, back in July, a month after the “Liquid Glass” design had been unveiled and developers were struggling to rewrite apps to look right with it:

»

Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.

If that sounds too dramatic, maybe the rest of this post won’t be for you.

One reason that developers struggle with implementing Liquid Glass is Apple’s own evolving implementation of it. From just the first few beta releases, enough of it has changed to make it difficult for some developers to understand what exactly Apple’s vision of it is. It also communicates a level of uncertainty about things that haven’t yet been addressed about its various concessions with long-standing UI elements in macOS especially. I do not want to list them all.

When Apple themselves have not yet reasonably prescribed what standard UI elements look like in this new design system, how can any developer responsibly implement them in good conscience? Isn’t there something about this that just reeks? Adopting a standard control means it can change without your involvement. This has always been true to some extent, but the stink of it keeps getting worse as trust in the company’s vision erodes over time, right?

Another reason that the industry is showing signs of reluctance is because Alan Dye did not prove he understood the platform, any platform, before he assumed the role of its lead designer. He’s not just a newcomer to these platforms, but to software design as a whole.

«

So much love for Meta’s new design guru. So much.
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Bad Dye Job • Daring Fireball

John Gruber on Alan Dye’s departure from the top design job at Apple:

»

Dye’s replacement at Apple is longtime Apple designer Stephen Lemay. I’ve never met Lemay (or at least can’t recall meeting him), and prior to today never heard much about him. But that’s typical for Apple employees. Part of the job working for Apple is remaining under the radar and out of the public eye. What I’ve learned today is that Lemay, very much unlike Dye, is a career interface/interaction designer. Sources I’ve spoken to who’ve worked with Lemay at Apple speak highly of him, particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship. Those things have been sorely lacking in the Dye era. Not everyone loves everything Lemay has worked on, but nobody bats 1.000 and designers love to critique each other’s work. I’ve chatted with people with criticisms of specific things Lemay has worked on or led at Apple (e.g. aspects of iPadOS multitasking that struck many of us as deliberately limiting, rather than empowering), but everyone I’ve spoken to is happy — if not downright giddy — at the news that Lemay is replacing Dye. Lemay is well-liked personally and deeply respected talent-wise. Said one source, in a position to know the choices, “I don’t think there was a better choice than Lemay.”

The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)

«

Agree that. I’ve updated precisely one of my Apple devices to v26, and that’s a old “sacrifice” Mac which I used to see how it looked.

Points too to Gruber for the headline, which is so good I’ve made an exception to the normal style here and left in the capitalisations.
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Telehealth weight-loss provider NextMed hit with FTC crackdown over deceptive pricing and fake reviews • MSN

Maryann Pugh:

»

The operators of NextMed, a telehealth weight-loss provider, have agreed to pay $150,000 and overhaul their business practices to settle Federal Trade Commission (FTC) allegations that they misled consumers with deceptive advertising, fake reviews, and hidden costs tied to their membership programs.

The FTC’s complaint accuses Southern Health Solutions, Inc., doing business as NextMed, along with founders Robert Epstein and CEO Frank Leonardo III, of violating federal consumer protection laws through a range of deceptive tactics. The company marketed access to medical providers for popular weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic, offering memberships starting at $138 or $188 per month. However, the FTC contends those advertised prices did not include key costs like the medications themselves, required lab work, or medical consultations.

The agency further alleges that customers were locked into one-year contracts with undisclosed early termination fees and faced widespread difficulty when attempting to cancel or obtain refunds due to understaffed customer service.

“Consumers who signed up for NextMed’s programs faced significant unexpected costs and the company’s customer service failures prevented consumers from cancelling or getting a refund,” said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

«

There was all sorts of scammy stuff here: an ad with a thin actress who hadn’t used it, fake reviews via VPNs, before/afters solicited on Craiglist, and didn’t tell people the medication wasn’t included in the subscription. The owners have to pay $150,000 back to scammed customers.

Where there’s a growth market, there’s a scam.
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PaperDebugger: a plugin-based multi-agent system for in-editor academic writing, review, and editing • ArXiv

Junyi Hou et al at the National University of Singapore:

»

Large language models are increasingly embedded into academic writing workflows, yet existing assistants remain external to the editor, preventing deep interaction with document state, structure, and revision history. This separation makes it impossible to support agentic, context-aware operations directly within LaTeX editors such as Overleaf.

We present PaperDebugger, an in-editor, multi-agent, and plugin-based academic writing assistant that brings LLM-driven reasoning directly into the writing environment. Enabling such in-editor interaction is technically non-trivial: it requires reliable bidirectional synchronization with the editor, fine-grained version control and patching, secure state management, multi-agent scheduling, and extensible communication with external tools.

PaperDebugger addresses these challenges through a Chrome-approved extension, a Kubernetes-native orchestration layer, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) toolchain that integrates literature search, reference lookup, document scoring, and revision pipelines. Our demo showcases a fully integrated workflow, including localized edits, structured reviews, parallel agent execution, and diff-based updates, encapsulated within a minimal-intrusion user interface (UI).

«

There might not be a lot of readers who will be able to use this, but for the ones who can, it’s going to make a big difference.
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I tested five AI browsers and lost my mind in the process • The Verge

Victoria Song:

»

Right now, AI browsers come in two main flavors. There are your regular browsers that have an AI assistant stapled on in a collapsible window, such as Chrome with its Gemini features, or Edge with Copilot Mode. Then there are more specialized AI browsers, most notably ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and The Browser Company’s Dia.

This second category often supplants your search bar with AI and sometimes includes an “agentic mode,” in which the AI can complete more complex, browser-related tasks for you. Theoretically, that includes helping you book reservations or add items to a shopping cart.

For testing, I decided on a few ground rules. I kept it to five browsers: Chrome, Edge, Atlas, Comet, and Dia. There are more available, but this felt like a representative mix of both AI browser categories from a variety of players in the field. I focused on desktop apps, and tried to make settings as uniform as possible: I generally instructed the AI browsers to keep answers snappy, shared my location information where possible, enabled memory settings, and described myself as a “tech journalist specializing in health and wearable tech.”

I also approached testing from a variety of AI skill levels. What would results look like if I was a complete AI newbie versus someone more adept at prompting? Lastly, if I tried one task in a browser, I gave it a go in all the browsers, down to the same exact prompt.

Ultimately, my question was not which AI browser you should use, but whether any of them are worth your time and energy. This was a journey to see whether any of them live up to the hype.

The short answer: they don’t.

«

Turns out you have to think hard, not about your search term, but about your prompt. New stuff, same old junk. Will it magically get better? Well, have the search terms you use got shorter or longer over time, and have you had to think more or less about what you’re going to type? That’s probably what’s going to happen here as websites figure out how to fool “agentic” browsers into paying attention to them.
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IRS agents will be required to watch OnlyFans to determine if content fits ‘no tax on tips’ criteria • The Independent

Owen Scott:

»

IRS agents will be required to watch pornographic content on OnlyFans to determine if the content meets the “no tax on tips” law included in Donald Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill.

The president’s controversial tax and spending policies were passed on July 4, 2025, with the slashing of taxes on tips being designed to incentivize people to earn more tips at work.

However, the new law included a caveat. Pornographic creators and actors, including OnlyFans influencers, were not entitled to have taxes waived on their work.

Some campaigners have argued that the wording is too vague, with one accountant telling The New York Times that the line of what is considered pornography is unclear.

“Where’s the line?” said Katherine Studley, who works with several OnlyFans creators. “Just because you’re on OnlyFans, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s pornographic. You could have a cooking channel or a yoga channel.”

Defining what pornography actually is has often proven difficult for lawmakers, meaning that it usually has to be judged on a case-by-case basis. When the First Amendment is used to defend pornography in court, lawmakers have to view the material in question to make a judgment.

That means taxpayers who report tips from OnlyFans will likely need to have their content viewed by an IRS agent.

«

(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Want a Fortell hearing aid? Well, who do you know? • WIRED

Steven Levy:

»

A secret is percolating at dinner parties, salons, and cocktail gatherings among the august New York City elite. It’s whispered in the circles of financial masters of the universe, Hollywood stars, and owners of sports teams. Have you heard about Fortell?

Many haven’t—or if they did hear, they might not have made out the words through noisy cross-conversations. Once they do know—particularly if they’re boomers—they want it desperately. Fortell is a hearing aid, one that claims to use AI to provide a dramatically superior aural experience. The chosen few included in its beta test claim that it seems to top the performance of high-end devices they’d been unhappily using.

These testers have made pilgrimages to Fortell’s headquarters on the fifth floor of a WeWork facility in New York City’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, where they were fitted for the hearing aids—which from the outside look pretty much like standard, over-the-ear, teardrop-shaped devices. But the big moment comes when a Fortell staffer takes them down to street level. There, among street clatter, honking cabs, and delivery trucks backing up to luxury stores, they are asked to conduct a conversation with a Fortell worker. Two other employees stand behind them, adding their own loud discourse to the urban cacophony.

Despite the din, the testers clearly make out what the person in front of them is saying. The clouds lift. Angels croon. “This was so incredible that I burst into tears,” says Ashley Tudor, one of the seemingly few beta testers who isn’t famous or powerful (though she is married to a venture capitalist).

Among the age-related-hearing-loss set, getting into the Fortell beta test has become a weird status symbol, the aural-prosthetics version of a limited-edition Birkin bag. “This product has become a major flex for the post-70 set,” says one investor. When entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman got his—he’s buddies with an investor—he began getting calls from “very substantial” people. “They said, ‘Allen, we hear that you have these new great hearing aids,’” he says of these callers, who all wanted in. Those who finagled their way into the program include multiple Forbes 400 billionaires, a chart-topping musician, the producer of a beloved TV series, and Hollywood A-listers, both old and not-so-old. KKR private equity co-executive chair Henry Kravis raves about his Fortells, as does performer and beta tester Steve Martin.

«

As the article explains, the problem for hearing as you age is in focussing on the sounds you want to hear and ignoring the ones you don’t. The solution isn’t just making everything louder.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Head designer Alan Dye has left Apple to join Meta. His resignation was written in grey ink on light grey paper. CC-licensed photo by Kris Arnold 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. Indecipherable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Rare win for renewable energy: Trump Administration funds geothermal network expansion • Inside Climate News

Phil McKenna:

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The U.S. Department of Energy has approved an $8.6m grant that will allow the nation’s first utility-led geothermal heating and cooling network to double in size.

Gas and electric utility Eversource Energy completed the first phase of its geothermal network in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 2024. Eversource is a co-recipient of the award along with the city of Framingham and HEET, a Boston-based nonprofit that focuses on geothermal energy and is the lead recipient of the funding.

Geothermal networks are widely considered among the most energy-efficient ways to heat and cool buildings. The federal money will allow Eversource to add approximately 140 new customers to the Framingham network and fund research to monitor the system’s performance.

The federal funding was first announced in December 2024 under the Biden administration. However, the contract between HEET and the Department of Energy was not finalized until Sept. 30 and was just announced Wednesday. The agreement, which allows construction to move forward, comes as the Trump administration is clawing back billions of dollars in clean energy funding, including hundreds of millions of dollars in Massachusetts. 

“This award is an opportunity and a responsibility to clearly demonstrate and quantify the growth potential of geothermal network technology,” Zeyneb Magavi, HEET’s executive director, said in a written statement.

The existing system provides heating and cooling to approximately 140 residential and commercial customers in the western suburb of Boston. The network taps low-temperature thermal energy from dozens of boreholes drilled several hundred feet below ground, where temperatures remain steady at 55ºF.

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This is very small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. But as a New Yorker article points out, there’s enormous potential for geothermal energy (Iceland practically runs on it), and the techniques that fracking has refined make tapping geothermal power easier than ever. So maybe it could be the little acorn that grows into the big oak.
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Apple design executive Alan Dye poached by Meta in major coup • Bloomberg via MSN

Mark Gurman:

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Meta Platforms Inc. has poached Apple Inc.’s most prominent design executive in a major coup that underscores a push by the social networking giant into AI-equipped consumer devices. 

The company is hiring Alan Dye, who has served as the head of Apple’s user interface design team since 2015, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple is replacing Dye with longtime designer Stephen Lemay, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the personnel changes haven’t been announced.

Apple confirmed the move in a statement provided to Bloomberg News. 

“Steve Lemay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in the statement. “He has always set an extraordinarily high bar for excellence and embodies Apple’s culture of collaboration and creativity.”

The move represents a seismic shift in Silicon Valley and shows that Meta is committed to becoming a name-brand maker of hardware devices. For Apple, the departure extends an exodus of talent suffered by the design team since the exit of visionary executive Jony Ive in 2019.

Dye had taken on a more significant role at Apple after Ive left, helping define how the company’s latest operating systems, apps and devices look and feel. The executive informed Apple this week that he’d decided to leave, though top management had already been bracing for his departure, the people said. 

With the Dye hire, Meta is creating a new design studio and putting him in charge of design for hardware, software and AI integration for its interfaces.

He will be reporting to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs. That group is tasked with developing wearable devices, such as smart glasses and virtual reality headsets.

«

This is absolutely wonderful news. You are not going to find anyone who appreciates Apple design who is going to be sorry about this. Dye’s approach to Apple’s software design has had a sort of indifference to users’ needs in favour of stuff that wows people at demos but doesn’t stand up to being used. This week’s Accidental Tech Podcast, for which this is timely, will treat this as an early Christmas present.
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Apple replaces head of AI with executive poached from Microsoft • Financial Times

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

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Apple’s vice-president of artificial intelligence will be replaced by a top Microsoft executive as the iPhone maker struggles to recover from a slow start in the race to harness advanced AI.

John Giannandrea, senior vice-president for machine learning and AI strategy, will step down and serve as an adviser to Apple until retiring in the spring, the company said on Monday.

He will be replaced by former Microsoft executive Amar Subramanya, who leaves a job as a corporate vice-president for Microsoft six months after jumping ship from Google, where he worked on the Gemini chatbot.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said: “AI has long been central to Apple’s strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar . . . and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple.”

The leadership change in Apple’s AI division comes as Giannandrea faced mounting criticism for a faltering approach to deploying generative AI, the technology that underpins competitors’ products such as Gemini and ChatGPT.

Apple has been slow to catch up with the technology and roll out AI tools in recent years, as the popularity of chatbots has grown rapidly.

«

The roundabout continues. Microsoft-Google-Apple-Meta-OpenAI and everywhere, like a game of very well paid musical chairs.
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John Mayer spotted playing Neural DSP Quad Cortex at Coachella • Guitar World

Matt Owen:

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Tube amp loyalist and gear aficionado John Mayer has once again demonstrated his increasing affection for digital guitar gear by turning up to play at Coachella with an amp modeler – but it wasn’t one he has ever been spotted playing before.

On Sunday (April 13), the electric guitar giant joined German DJ and producer Zedd to perform two songs: Automatic Yes – a Zedd track Mayer features on – and Mayer’s own song, New Light, which was released in 2018.

For the short guest performance, though, the PRS signature artist opted against wheeling out his entire rig (it would have been entirely impractical to do so) and instead played through, for the first time on stage, a Neural DSP Quad Cortex.

As per the John Mayer’s Gear Instagram page, for the two-song cameo Mayer partnered his Faded Black Tee Satin Silver Sky with the acclaimed QC, which had been attached to what looked to be D’Addario’s XPND pedalboard.

Those familiar with Mayer’s guitar gear will be aware this isn’t the first time the guitarist has played through an amp modeler, either on stage or in the studio. At 2019’s Coachella, he performed with Khalid through a Fractal Axe-Fx III, and two years later he used a Fractal to record parts of Sob Rock.

Not only that, Mayer also reportedly owns a Kemper Profiler for casual use, and used a Fractal while supporting Ed Sheeran in 2023.

It is, however, the first time Mayer has opted to use the Neural DSP Quad Cortex in this capacity. Whether that means he’s decided to ditch his trusty Fractals altogether, or whether this was a one-time-only thing, it remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen whether this is the start of a formal partnership with Neural DSP. Did the team use their T.I.N.A robot to model Mayer’s hugely sought-after and beloved Dumble-loaded rig? The tones, by all accounts (footage is yet to surface online) were on point during the set, so it’s not entirely out of the question.

«

OK, so to a lot of people (including me) this is incomprehensible – the feeling captured by the classic tweet “I’m 50. All celebrity news looks like this: ‘Curtains for Zoosha? K-smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt’“.

Anyhow, the way that physical amplifiers are being replaced by digital versions is well explained in an Ars Technica article, which in effect riffs on the Mayer event. Software is eating the world. And its amplifiers.
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Fraudulent gambling network may actually be something more nefarious • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Researchers have previously tracked smaller pieces of the enormous infrastructure. Last month, security firm Sucuri reported that the operation seeks out and compromises poorly configured websites running the WordPress CMS. Imperva in January said the attackers also scan for and exploit web apps built with the PHP programming language that have existing webshells or vulnerabilities. Once the weaknesses are exploited, the attackers install a GSocket, a backdoor that the attackers use to compromise servers and host gambling web content on them.

All of the gambling sites target Indonesian-speaking visitors. Because Indonesian law prohibits gambling, many people in that country are drawn to illicit services. Most of the 236,433 attacker-owned domains hosting the gambling sites are hosted on Cloudflare. Most of the 1,481 hijacked subdomains were hosted on Amazon Web Services, Azure, and GitHub.

On Wednesday, researchers from security firm Malanta said those details are only the most visible signs of a malicious network that’s actually much bigger and more complex than previously known. Far from being solely a financially motivated operation, the firm said, the network likely serves nation-state hackers targeting a wide range of organizations, including those in manufacturing, transport, healthcare, government, and education.

The basis for the speculation is the tremendous amount of time and resources that have gone into creating and maintaining the infrastructure over 14 years. The resources include 328,000 separate domains, which comprise 236,000 addresses that the attackers bought and 90,000 that they commandeered by compromising legitimate websites. It’s also made up of nearly 1,500 hijacked subdomains from legitimate organizations. Malanta estimates that such infrastructure costs anywhere from $725,000 to $17m per year to fund.

…“This combination—longevity, scale, cost, and sophistication—goes well beyond a typical ‘quickhit’ gambling scam or financially motivated crew,” Malanta said. “That’s why we classify it as an APT and describe it as state sponsored-level, while being careful not to assert that we have direct evidence tying it to a specific government entity.”

The focus on compromising government agencies in the US and Europe and a wide swath of industries is another reason for the assessment.

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This AI bubble is more memory than dot-com • Culpium

Tim Culpan:

»

Since the AI sector at the model and token-making level is just like memory, the industry shakeout is likely to play out in the same way. DRAM used to be a big deal. For a while it was Intel’s bread and butter. These chips are fundamental to any computing system because they temporary hold data — often for milliseconds — which a processor uses to make calculations. In the early PC era, DRAM supply was the bottleneck for computer sales.

By the early 2000s, there were around a dozen memory-chip makers across South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the US. Most were backed by industrial conglomerates. Hynix, for example, was spun off from the Hyundai group after the chaebol’s boss realized electronics were an increasingly important part of cars. Nanya Technology was born out of Taiwan’s massive Formosa Plastics Group. But heavy competition, unstable earnings, and an unwillingness by corporate parents and banks to keep funding them lead to a wave of consolidations and shutdowns by the early 2010s. Today, the DRAM sector is dominated by just three companies: Samsung, SK Hynix — both from South Korea — and Boise, Idaho-based Micron.

What kept the leaders atop the market was both an unrelenting pace of capacity expansion, and continued technological development using the latest equipment. Both are crucial to maintaining price competitiveness on a per-bit basis. Assuming the product is largely reliable, price is the factor which truly differentiates.

Today’s AI leaders can be sorted into two categories: stand alone, and conglomerate-backed. OpenAI and Anthropic are startups that stand alone. A recent series of circular deals muddies the water a little: Nvidia is taking a stake in Open AI2, while the startup has a warrant for shares in Nvidia rival AMD. And Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI makes the software giant as much a sugar daddy as a conglomerate parent: it’ll last as long as Microsoft’s AI friend provides benefits.3 These companies are kind of like Micron. Although it found a wealthy industrialist to back it, Micron never benefited from having a conglomerate parent.

«

Culpan used to be Bloomberg’s technology correspondent based in Taiwan, and has long experience writing about the sector. The longer part of this article looks at whether the AI bubble (come on, it is) resembles the dot-com bubble, or the RAM bubble.
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Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Micron is retiring the Crucial brand, marking the end of its line of budget-friendly solid-state drives (SSDs) and RAM kits, as reported earlier by VideoCardz. In an announcement on Wednesday, Micron says winding down its consumer-focused business will “improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments” — a.k.a. AI companies.

The brand’s shutdown is a huge blow for PC builders and hobbyists, who are already dealing with skyrocketing RAM prices linked to a surge in demand from AI companies. OpenAI, for example, struck a deal with SK Hynix and Samsung to make up to 900,000 DRAM per month for its Stargate project.

Now, there’s going to be one less brand selling consumer-focused memory for PCs, potentially intensifying the global memory shortage. Soaring demand for RAM is already impacting pricing at CyberPowerPC, Framework, and Raspberry Pi, while HP has even hinted at raising the prices of its devices or equipping them with less memory.

«

So RAM goes from being a hard-to-obtain specialist product in the 1970s to a ubiquitous, cheap product in the 2010s to a hard-to-obtain specialist product again.
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WordPress’s vibe-coding experiment, Telex, has already been put to real-world use • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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WordPress’s experimental AI development tool, Telex, has already been put to real-world use, only months after its September debut. At the company’s annual “State of the Word” event on Tuesday in San Francisco, WordPress Project Cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg shared several examples where Telex had been used within a working WordPress shop to do things like create price comparisons, price calculators, and pull in real-time business hours plus a map link to a retail store, among examples.

Telex, which Mullenweg previously described as a “v0 or Lovable, but specifically for WordPress,” is essentially the publishing platform’s attempt to build its own vibe-coding tool for the AI era. The software allows developers to generate Gutenberg blocks — the modular bits of text, images, columns, and more — that make up a WordPress website.

While the software is still labeled as an experiment, Mullenweg was able to demonstrate several real-world examples that had been built by community creator Nick Hamze.

In the first example, Mullenweg showed off a pricing comparison tool built with Telex, noting that these sorts of rich, interactive web elements were something that a developer used to have to custom-build, but could now be created in a few seconds.

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This is getting closer and closer to the ordinary person being able to use it.
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The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing • EL PAÍS English

Manuel Ansede:

»

In the autumn of 2020, with humanity terrified by the deadly second wave of the coronavirus, a scientific journal published a study with a solution: jade amulets from traditional Chinese medicine could prevent COVID-19. The proposal was outlandish, but the editor-in-chief of the weekly, Spanish chemist Damià Barceló, defended its quality controls. That journal, Science of the Total Environment — one of the 15 that publishes the most studies worldwide — has just been expelled from the group of reputable publications by one of the leading evaluation companies, after dozens of irregular articles were discovered. The scandal exposes the windfall profits of scientific publishers, who in recent years have amassed billions of dollars in earnings from public funds earmarked for science.

Damià Barceló, 71, took over as editor of the journal in 2012. In just two years, he doubled the number of studies published. In a decade, he increased the number tenfold, with the journal reaching nearly 10,000 articles annually. As the number of articles increased, the quality declined, because there was a perverse incentive to accept mediocre work: to publish research open access in the journal, a scientist has to pay $4,150 plus taxes.

Emilio Delgado, professor of documentation at the University of Granada in Spain, explains it this way: “It’s clearly an open-door journal that takes almost anything. It’s what I call a mega-journal, that is, a mega-business.”

«

“Paper mills” are just there to make noise. As ever, Sturgeon’s Law applies: 90% of everything is crap. This was the crap.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Environment Agency was far too slow to respond to thousands of tonnes of illegally dumped waste near the river Cherwell. CC-licensed photo by Howard Stanbury 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. Rubbish. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI CEO declares “code red” as Gemini gains 200 million users in three months • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

The shoe is most certainly on the other foot. On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at the company to improve ChatGPT, delaying advertising plans and other products in the process,  The Information reported based on a leaked internal memo. The move follows Google’s release of its Gemini 3 model last month, which has outperformed ChatGPT on some industry benchmark tests and sparked high-profile praise on social media.

In the memo, Altman wrote, “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT.” The company will push back work on advertising integration, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant feature called Pulse. Altman encouraged temporary team transfers and established daily calls for employees responsible for enhancing the chatbot.

The directive creates an odd symmetry with events from December 2022, when Google management declared its own “code red” internal emergency after ChatGPT launched and rapidly gained in popularity. At the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai reassigned teams across the company to develop AI prototypes and products to compete with OpenAI’s chatbot. Now, three years later, the AI industry is in a very different place.

Google released Gemini 3 in mid-November, and the model quickly topped the LMArena leaderboard, a crowdsourced vibemarking site that allows users to compare two AI models and select the one with outputs that please them most. The launch has been accompanied by measured praise from some and bombastic hype from others. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote Sunday on X that he was switching to Gemini 3 after using ChatGPT daily for three years. “I’m not going back,” Benioff wrote. “The leap is insane.”

…Not everyone views OpenAI’s “code red” as a genuine alarm. Reuters columnist Robert Cyran wrote on Tuesday that OpenAI’s announcement added “to the impression that OpenAI is trying to do too much at once with technology that still requires a great deal of development and funding.” On the same day Altman’s memo circulated, OpenAI announced an ownership stake in a Thrive Capital venture and a collaboration with Accenture. “The only thing bigger than the company’s attention deficit is its appetite for capital,” Cyran wrote.

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Shades of Facebook when Google announced Google+?
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Rubbish mountain • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins goes to Oxford to look at the gigantic amount of waste dumped there by criminals some time earlier this year:

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Eyewitness reports speak of convoys of lorries turning up at the site, delivering the rubbish to waiting excavators that moulded it into the extraordinary monument we see today. When I visited the area last weekend I estimated the pile to be around 170m long (roughly the length of the Gherkin in London), 12m wide and perhaps 5 or 6 deep, making it somewhere north of ten thousand cubic metres in size. It would take four or five hundred of the largest bin lorries to shift it all. This was not a few dodgy geezers in white vans, but a large criminal operation that must have involved dozens of people.

The sheer scale of the crime scene makes its location rather ironic, because this giant landfill sits just twelve hundred yards from the headquarters of Thames Valley Police in Kidlington, just north of Oxford. In fact visiting the town was a surreal experience in its own right – the local Sainsbury’s is such a notorious crime spot that the supermarket has installed a highly visible CCTV monitoring station in front of the exit, with a uniformed guard watching TV screens as you wander by with your shopping. Presumably this security theatre is supposed to comfort shoppers, but it made the place feel like some lawless outpost, a town in visible decline.

In fairness to the police, it’s hard to imagine a more convenient or secluded site to carry out this crime. Surrounded by trees, it was completely screened off from view until leaves began falling in the Autumn. In theory a public footpath crosses the land, but in practice nobody would ever walk down it – one end is hidden behind a crash barrier on the main road half a mile out of town, while the other terminates at the end of a field in the middle of nowhere, coming out on a small road with no parking nearby and no other paths to connect with.

In any case, Thames Valley Police have shown little interest in the crime – perhaps too busy with the local Sainsbury’s – and the job of dealing with it has fallen to the Environment Agency, the public body responsible for waste crime. They swung into action at the start of July, and in the spirit of being as fair as I possibly can, I’ll tell you their side of the story first.

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There’s an embedded 10-minute YouTube video which shows this story in full, with terrific drone footage. It will surely make you angry at the sheer incompetence and indifference of the Environment Agency, which shows absolutely no interest in discovering the people behind this or using simple detection methods such as wildlife cameras. I’ve put more effort into finding a lost dog than they did into uncovering those behind a criminal enterprise that will poison a river.
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UK ministers aim to ban cryptocurrency political donations over anonymity risks • The Guardian

Rowena Mason:

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Ministers are working to ban political donations made with cryptocurrency but the crackdown is not likely to be ready for the elections bill in the new year, Whitehall sources have said.

The government increasingly believes that donations made with cryptocurrency pose a risk to the integrity of the electoral system, not least because the source can be hard to verify.

However, the complex nature of cryptocurrency means officials do not believe a ban will be workable by the time of the elections bill, due to be published shortly, which is set to lower the voting age to 16 and reduce loopholes in political finance.

The government’s ambition to ban crypto donations will be a blow to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which became the first to accept contributions in digital currency this year. It is believed to have received its first registrable donations in cryptocurrency this autumn and the party has set up its own crypto portal to receive contributions, saying it is subject to “enhanced” checks.

Government sources have said ministers believe cryptocurrency donations to be a problem, as they are difficult to trace and could be exploited by foreign powers or criminals.

Pat McFadden, then a Cabinet Office minister, first raised the idea in July, saying: “I definitely think it is something that the Electoral Commission should be considering. I think that it’s very important that we know who is providing the donation, are they properly registered, what are the bona fides of that donation.”

The Electoral Commission provides guidance on crypto donations but ministers accept any ban would probably have to come from the government through legislation.

Earlier this year, the Electoral Commission initially appeared to believe the risks of donations in cryptocurrency were manageable, saying they could be assessed like any other asset such as a work of art or donations in kind.

«

Interesting point: if donations are anonymous, then how can they be influence? But this is yet another form of hawala – the trust-based system of money transfer. You tell your target, in a secure way, that you’re making a donation of a specified amount; the donation turns up subsequently in a crypto transfer. The Electoral Commission is overoptimistic.
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Google is experimentally replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one — but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that.

I read a lot of my bedtime news via Google Discover, aka “swipe right on your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel homescreen until you see a news feed appear,” and that’s where these new AI headlines are beginning to show up.

They’re not all bad. For example, “Origami model wins prize” and “Hyundai, Kia gain share” seem fine, even if not remotely as interesting as the original headlines. (“Hyundai and Kia are lapping the competition as US market share reaches a new record” and “14-year-old wins prize for origami that can hold 10,000 times its own weight” sound like they’re actually worth a click!)

But in the seeming attempt to boil down every story to four words or less, Google’s new headline experiment is attaching plenty of misleading and inane headlines to journalists’ work, and with little disclosure that Google’s AI is rewriting them.

The very first one I saw was “Steam Machine price revealed,” which it most certainly was not! Valve won’t reveal that till next year. Ars Technica’s original headline was the far more reasonable “Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one.”

…The good news is, this is a Google experiment. If there’s enough backlash, the company probably won’t proceed. “These screenshots show a small UI experiment for a subset of Discover users,” Google spokesperson Mallory Deleon tells The Verge. “We are testing a new design that changes the placement of existing headlines to make topic details easier to digest before they explore links from across the web.”

But the overall trend at Google has been to prioritize its own products at the expense of sending clicks to news websites.

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Google used to be about the open web. More and more, it’s about keeping people inside its properties.
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‘Unauthorized’ edit to Ukraine’s frontline maps point to Polymarket’s war betting • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

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A live map that tracks frontlines of the war in Ukraine was edited to show a fake Russian advance on the city of Myrnohrad on November 15. The edit coincided with the resolution of a bet on Polymarket, a site where users can bet on anything from basketball games to presidential election and ongoing conflicts. If Russia captured Myrnohrad by the middle of November, then some gamblers would make money. According to the map that Polymarket relies on, they secured the town just before 10:48 UTC on November 15. The bet resolved and then, mysteriously, the map was edited again and the Russian advance vanished.

The degenerate gamblers on Polymarket are making money by betting on the outcomes of battles big and small in the war between Ukraine and Russia. To adjudicate the real time exchange of territory in a complicated war, Polymarket uses a map generated by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a DC-based think tank that monitors conflict around the globe.

One of ISW’s most famous products is its live map of the war in Ukraine. The think tank updates the map throughout the day based on a number of different factors including on the ground reports. The map is considered the gold standard for reporting on the current front lines of the conflict, so much so that Polymarket uses it to resolve bets on its website.

…ISW acknowledged the stealth edit, but did not say if it was made because of the betting markets. “It has come to ISW’s attention that an unauthorized and unapproved edit to the interactive map of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was made on the night of November 15-16 EST. The unauthorized edit was removed before the day’s normal workflow began on November 16 and did not affect ISW mapping on that or any subsequent day. The edit did not form any part of the assessment of authorized map changes on that or any other day. We apologize to our readers and the users of our maps for this incident,” ISW said in a statement on its website.

ISW did say it isn’t happy that Polymarket is using its map of the war as a gambling resource.

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Gamblers are weird, weird people.
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Companies have found a new way to advertise: ragebaiting. You’ll hate it • The Washington Post

Tatum Hunter and Nitasha Tiku:

»

Tech founder Avi Schiffmann spent around a million dollars this autumn papering New York City’s subways with ads proclaiming that Friend, an AI device worn like a necklace, is a better support system than human companions.

The ads were less about selling the device, he said, than getting people to talk about it — for good or ill.

On those terms, at least, it worked. Riders, angry at the encroachment of AI, vandalized many of the ads with scrawled messages such as “Stop capitalizing on loneliness” and “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died.” Anti-AI social media chatter featuring photos of the defaced ads started gaining traction online.

Schiffmann, 23, sat back and watched the attention roll in. When subway workers started washing the graffiti off the ads, he raced on foot to the West 4th Street station to beg them to stop.

“I wanted Friend to be a scapegoat for everything people don’t like about the world right now,” Schiffmann said. The campaign’s viral success, he added, was primarily the work of online posters rushing to smear Friend’s product and presentation. All he did was set the bait.

Schiffmann is hardly alone. Ragebait — the art of making people mad on social media — has graduated this year from a growth hack for online influencers to a corporate marketing strategy. This week Oxford University Press declared “rage bait” 2025’s word of the year, finding the term’s usage has tripled in the last 12 months.

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Does it make you angry? Does it? (Most of this stuff is very resistible, if we’re honest.)
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The Taiwan crisis of 2025 is here • National Security Journal

Robert E. Kelly:

»

Japan and China are now locked in a protracted spat over China’s claims to Taiwan.

What started as a minor flap is growing into a major contest in which regional players are desperately trying to avoid taking sides between the two rivals and are increasingly staking out opposed positions.

China’s designs on Taiwan are well known, but Beijing appears to have suddenly decided to force the issue in the region.

Beijing is using new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s words—that a Chinese assault on Taiwan would inevitably become a security issue for Japan—to bully the region to accept the Chinese position on Taiwan, namely, that it should be permitted to invade and conquer it with no outside intervention.

Japan is China’s primary antagonist in the region. No other economy is large enough to compete with China, and the US alliance with Japan is the linchpin of the US position in East Asia.

This position is turning into a major showdown. If Beijing can humble Japan—if it can force Takaichi, via trade coercion and military threats, to retract her words—then it will establish rhetorical dominance over its regional rival.

A Japanese capitulation will signal to other regional powers, such as South Korea and the Philippines, that they, too, should find an accommodation with Beijing.

For this reason, Japan is unlikely to back down. It cannot afford to swerve in a direct chicken contest with its primary competitor. This stalemate will therefore likely continue for a while.

That Japan and China might fall into a cold war over the future of East Asia is not a new observation.

The chill began under the premiership of Shinzo Abe in Japan and the presidency of Xi Jinping of China. But both sides had strong economic incentives to keep security competition muffled.

Their trade relationship is substantial. Both would suffer from a prolonged fallout. When the history of this standoff is written, much focus will be on why China chose this moment to plant its flag. Does it now feel ready to take Japan on directly?

«

Occasionally, geopolitics intrudes. This is important, even if it goes under the radar of all the Trumpist nonsense across the world. (Kelly is an analyst based in Korea who achieved fame when his children intruded on his BBC talking head spot in 2017.)
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Nuclear Taskforce Tracker • Centre for British Progress

Centre for British Progress:

»

Tracking the progress of government departments, regulators and industry in implementing the UK Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce’s recommendations. The content in this tracker is partially AI-generated based on the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce report. We have worked hard to ensure it is accurate, but some of the titles, descriptions, etc. may be slightly different or truncated.

«

The Centre for British Progress describes itself as “a non-partisan think tank researching and producing concrete ideas for an era of British growth and progress.” So far everything’s on track! Though that’s only one recommendation completed. Many, many more to come.
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Why Zipcar gave up on London • London Centric

Jim Waterson and Polly Smythe:

»

Zipcar’s planned closure date coincides with the mayor’s decision to introduce a new £13.50 daily congestion charge on electric vehicles, a move that would hit any Zipcar that is picked up outside the zone and driven through central London. The company had already said it would pass on the cost to drivers, substantially raising the price of a car journey through the heart of the capital — and making it much less financially attractive.

…The congestion charge extension might have been the final nail in Zipcar’s coffin. But looking at the company’s UK accounts, it’s clear the business model had been in deep trouble for several years due to rising costs and flatlining revenue.

Zipcar’s UK income fell by £3.95m to £47m in 2024, due to customers taking fewer and shorter trips in their cars. Costs increased, meaning post-tax losses widened dramatically to £11.6m. The company said the cost-of-living crisis “reduced members’ disposable income and impacted their demand for leisure activities”. Electric vehicles proved to be costly to buy and difficult to resell.

The arrival of Uber in the mid-2010s ate into Zipcar’s business model of enabling people nipping around London for short car trips. It’s also reasonable to assume that some people who might have been tempted by a one-way Zipcar Flex in the past are now choosing to pop on a much cheaper Lime e-bike. IKEA started doing delivery.

All in all, People just aren’t travelling as much and while a substantial number of Londoners came to rely on Zipcar as an emergency back-up travel option, that wasn’t enough to sustain it as a profitable business.

Parent company Avis Budget, which is already in financially dire straits, simply appears to have had enough and pulled the plug on this comparatively small part of its UK operation at short notice.

But what’s the impact going to be?

Moving house with one of Zipcar’s van and the help of a couple of friends became a rite of passage for many young Londoners. Zipcar claimed each of its vehicles removed 27 barely-used privately owned cars from the capital’s roads, with 12,000 businesses supposedly using its services.

«

Reading this, and an earlier London Centric report on how TfL isn’t hitting its (lowering) carbon emission targets unless it gets more EVs on the roads, one despairs a little of anybody being able to come up with a scheme where the left hand and right hand are in communication.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The car hire company Zipcar is shutting down its UK arm, partly blaming high electricity prices for charging its EVs. CC-licensed photo by Michael Coghlan 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. Discharged. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

your phone is a fake house • The Etymology Nerd

Adam Aleksic:

»

Only I have the motor memory to immediately open the Notes app on my phone. A stranger would have to look for it, but my fingers subconsciously understand where to go. Much like with my childhood home, I have an embodied knowledge of my home screen.

That phrase—“home screen”—has been on my mind recently. The language of the smartphone invites you to think of it as a house. You can “choose your wallpaper,” just like with a real house; you can “lock” your phone like a front door. The metaphor is that this is a private refuge from the outside world. It is a tiny dwelling in your pocket, which you can customize like an actual dwelling to affirm your identity. In doing so, you “tame” the technology, making it feel natural in your everyday life.

The phone, like your house, is a focal point. Everything revolves around it. When you need comfort in the physical world, you go back to the home; in the digital world, you go back to your home screen. There is something calming about a deeply personal environment. It provides a grounding presence which we can retreat to.

A computer, meanwhile, remains more functional. Phrases like “desktop” and “taskbar” create a metaphor that this is a workstation; you have “trash” and “files.” Of course, there are still work-like aspects to the phone and home-like aspects to the computer, but the phone takes on a far more domestic role in our lives. It is not a utility: it is an extension of self.

In his book The Poetics of Space the philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues that our intimate spaces are deeply intertwined with our imagination and sense of being. When you curl up in a comfortable nook in your home, for example, your consciousness is gathered inward. You have control over this small space, in contrast to the wild, turbulent outdoors. You can focus attention differently in miniature.

As I move between apps on my phone, I notice a vague emotion that I am entering different rooms, each with its own character. The settings app is the basement; the dating apps are the bedroom. No matter where I go, though, there is that coziness of being in a nook. This is my corner of the world; I am free to do what I want. I can let my mind relax, for I am safe and secure from the vast, terrifying world.

«

The subtlety of language; the seductiveness of the faux-private space. But is it really private?
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The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake • The Verge

Benjamin Riley:

»

The AI hype machine relentlessly promotes the idea that we’re on the verge of creating something as intelligent as humans, or even “superintelligence” that will dwarf our own cognitive capacities. If we gather tons of data about the world, and combine this with ever more powerful computing power (read: Nvidia chips) to improve our statistical correlations, then presto, we’ll have AGI. Scaling is all we need.

But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.

Last year, three scientists published a commentary in the journal Nature titled, with admirable clarity, “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought.” Co-authored by Evelina Fedorenko (MIT), Steven T. Piantadosi (UC Berkeley) and Edward A.F. Gibson (MIT), the article is a tour de force summary of decades of scientific research regarding the relationship between language and thought, and has two purposes: one, to tear down the notion that language gives rise to our ability to think and reason, and two, to build up the idea that language evolved as a cultural tool we use to share our thoughts with one another.

Let’s take each of these claims in turn.

When we contemplate our own thinking, it often feels as if we are thinking in a particular language, and therefore because of our language. But if it were true that language is essential to thought, then taking away language should likewise take away our ability to think. This does not happen. I repeat: taking away language does not take away our ability to think. And we know this for a couple of empirical reasons.

«

This one will run and run. Is a word a representation of an idea? Is manipulating words in multidimensional space thinking, or is it just shuffling a dictionary?
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Zipcar to exit UK car sharing market • Financial Times

Kana Inagaki:

»

Zipcar, the car-sharing giant owned by US rental group Avis Budget, has said it plans to exit the UK market, in the latest hit to the struggling industry. 

In an email to customers on Monday, James Taylor, the general manager of Zipcar UK, said it would suspend new bookings beyond December 31, pending the outcome of a consultation with British employees.

The group claims to be the UK’s biggest car-sharing club with more than 650,000 members, who can rent cars and vans for between an hour and seven days.

According to its latest accounts, the company had 71 employees last year, down from 92 in 2023. It cited high electricity costs as it reported an operating loss of £4m last year, compared with a profit of £303,000 in the previous 12 months.

“This particularly affected the company due to the size of the electric fleet and the fact that fuel costs are included in the cost of the rental,” it said.

In a statement on Monday, Avis Budget said Zipcar’s operations outside of the UK will not be affected.

…The company began operations in London in 2007 and now operates more than 1,000 electric vehicles in the city as part of a fleet of more than 3,000.

Zipcar’s plan to end its UK operations comes ahead of London’s introduction of a £13.50 a day congestion charge from January 2 for EVs, marking the first time the battery-powered cars will be hit with a fee for entering the city’s centre.

«

Christmas bookings assured; everything afterwards, not so much.
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Airbus A320 recall: what the solar flare software update is all about • Gulf News

Jay Hilotin:

»

Airbus, the European planemaker, issued an urgent Alert Operators Transmission (AOT) on November 29, 2025, mandating immediate software updates or hardware protections for around 6,000 A320 family aircraft — over half the global fleet.

The move came after a detailed probe into a JetBlue A320 nosedive incident on October 30 revealed that intense solar radiation could corrupt key flight control data in the Elevator Aileron Computer (ELAC). Intense solar radiation incidents are sometimes blamed for the incineration of dozens of satellites.

The vulnerability affects aircraft with specific ELAC B software versions exposed to high-altitude radiation from solar flares. This, the planemaker said, risks uncommanded pitch or roll manoeuvres.

Airbus is collaborating with regulators like EASA, which has formalised an Emergency Airworthiness Directive effective 6pm CT on November 30, 2025.

…JetBlue A320 from Cancun (Mexico) to Newark (US) suddenly lost altitude mid-flight due to corrupted ELAC data. The incident, blamed on solar radiation, injured passengers and prompted an FAA investigation; this led to the global recall.

Intense solar radiation is seen behind data corruption in the ELAC (Elevator Aileron Computer) flight control system, potentially causing uncommanded manoeuvres like sudden altitude drops.

About 6,000 active A320s worldwide require fixes before next flights, impacting operators like IndiGo (338 affected), Air India (138), American Airlines (209 of 480), Jetstar, Wizz Air and others across Asia, Europe, Americas and the US.

Most software rollbacks take 2-3 hours per plane, but ~1,000 need hardware changes lasting weeks; this has caused thousands of cancellations and delays worldwide, stranding millions during holidays, though many airlines aim for completion by November 30.

«

A surprising little result of the solar flare activity. Sure to be written in to a streaming service’s cheap film in a year or two.
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The triumph of logical English • Works in Progress Magazine

Henry Oliver:

»

The Elizabethans and Victorians wrote long tangled sentences that resembled the briars growing underneath Sleeping Beauty’s tower. Today we write like Hemingway. Short. Sharp. Readable. Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete. 

I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modelled more closely on spoken English.

What this should demonstrate is that shortness is the wrong dimension to investigate. We think we are looking at a language that got simpler; in fact we are looking at one that has created huge variation in what it can express and how, by adding new ways of writing. Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them.

…You might have read this essay and largely agreed with me but still been left with the feeling that something is different about modern prose as compared to the writing of the 1700s, not just the fact that we use less obscure vocabulary or the substituting full stops for colons and semicolons. Something else is still different. I think that something is that we increasingly write like we speak.

«

Write as we speak. Notwithstanding, it’s a fascinating (long) article. Furthermore, Works in Progress is rapidly becoming a must-read. They also do a print version.
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Meet Rey, the admin of ‘Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters’ • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

A prolific cybercriminal group that calls itself “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” has dominated headlines this year by regularly stealing data from and publicly mass extorting dozens of major corporations. But the tables seem to have turned somewhat for “Rey,” the moniker chosen by the technical operator and public face of the hacker group: Earlier this week, Rey confirmed his real life identity and agreed to an interview after KrebsOnSecurity tracked him down and contacted his father.

Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLSH) is thought to be an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters. Members of these gangs hail from many of the same chat channels on the Com, a mostly English-language cybercriminal community that operates across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.

«

Krebs ranges far and wide, pulling in tiny pieces of information – passwords reused here, email scams used there – to eventually track down the person..

»

Specifically, Rey mentioned in several Telegram chats that he had Irish heritage, even posting a graphic that shows the prevalence of the surname “Ginty.”

Spycloud indexed hundreds of credentials stolen from cybero5dev@proton.me, and those details indicate that Rey’s computer is a shared Microsoft Windows device located in Amman, Jordan. The credential data stolen from Rey in early 2024 show there are multiple users of the infected PC, but that all shared the same last name of Khader and an address in Amman, Jordan.

The “autofill” data lifted from Rey’s family PC contains an entry for a 46-year-old Zaid Khader that says his mother’s maiden name was Ginty. The infostealer data also shows Zaid Khader frequently accessed internal websites for employees of Royal Jordanian Airlines. The infostealer data makes clear that Rey’s full name is Saif Al-Din Khader.

«

He’s 16, or claims to be.
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Dutch study finds teen cybercrime is mostly just a phase • The Register

Connor Jones:

»

Young threat actors may be rebels without a cause. These cybercriminals typically grow out of their offending ways by the time they turn 20, according to data published by the Dutch government.

In a report examining the social cost of adolescent crime, the Dutch House of Representatives cited various research papers to show that teenagers tend to explore their criminal tendencies at similar ages, regardless of the type of crime.

The report stated that cybercriminals tend to develop their skills at an early age – no shocks there – and do so through “hacking games.” The number of teenage cyber offenders is similar to those involved in weapons or drug offenses; together they are the three least common offence types for adolescents. Property offences such as theft were the most common.

Young cybercriminals reach peak criminality at around age 20, although this tends to fluctuate by a few years, depending on the decade. For example, between 2010-2012 and 2018-2021, the peak age floated between 17 and 19, but, in between, it remained at 20.

Research also shows that these peak ages broadly apply to all crimes, cyber or otherwise.

In 2013, one study of 323 cybercriminals found that 76% of offenders reached peak offending at age 20, before veering away from the trade gradually in the following years.

Only around 4% of those who embark on an early black hat career maintain a high likelihood of continuing that into ages well beyond the 20 mark.

«

So only a couple more years for Krebs’s target. But you know there will be more to come.
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Out of Eden Walk • Center for Geographic Analysis

»

The Out of Eden Walk is a 24,000-mile journalistic endeavor to create a global record of human life at the start of a new millennium as told by villagers, nomads, traders, farmers, soldiers, and artists who rarely make the news.  Sponsored and hosted by National Geographic Society, the project is led by Pulitzer Prize winning writer Paul Salopek who is walking the path of human migration across the globe, and recording what he encounters in the form of writing, photographs, video, and audio.

«

One of the most impressive parts is the 2013 “Walk Through Time” which shows human migration from the East Africa Rift valley through Africa and then the rest of the world.
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Michel Bettane: Chinese wine now outshines France in technical precision • Vino Joy News

Vino Joy News:

»

French wine critic Michel Bettane says the overall technical standard of Chinese wines now surpasses what he and his team often encounter in their annual tastings in France — a sign, he believes, that China is undergoing an “astonishing awakening of terroir.”

The sixth edition of the Bettane + Desseauve China Wine Tasting concluded in Beijing and Shangri-La, Yunnan, in September 2025. Led by Bettane, the panel of six international experts and local judges evaluated more than 300 premium Chinese wines — a process that, he said, revealed how far the country’s winemaking has come.

Chinese wines, Bettane noted, have reached a level of maturity unimaginable 15 years ago. When he first visited, the market “was dominated by a few major brands” and “people focused on the label, not the land.” Today, from the deserts of Xinjiang to the mountains of Yunnan, he said, producers are “confidently expressing their terroir.”

What impressed him most, however, was the technical precision. “We encountered almost no wines with serious flaws,” he said. “The overall solidity of the winemaking standard is, in fact, superior to what we often find in our annual tastings in France.”

Among China’s emerging wine regions, Bettane highlighted two with strikingly different identities: Ningxia and Yunnan’s Deqin County.

«

How long before we’re seeing Chinese wine on our supermarket shelves? Though French wine has, to some tastes, been going downhill for a while.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Buyer beware – the “Pyrex” trademark has been licensed to companies which don’t make cooking glassware to the same standards as the original one. CC-licensed photo by ricky shore 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. Hot in here. 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 world still hasn’t made sense of ChatGPT • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel on the third anniversary of the introduction of ChatGPT:

»

This is disruption, in the less technical sense of the word. In August, I wrote that “one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.” If you genuinely believe that we are just years away from the arrival of a paradigm-shifting, society-remaking superintelligence, behaving irrationally makes sense. If you believe that Silicon Valley’s elites have lost their minds, foisting a useful-but-not-magical technology on society, declaring that it’s building God, investing historic amounts of money in its development, and fusing the fate of its tools with the fate of the global economy, being furious makes sense.

The world that ChatGPT built is a world defined by a particular type of precarity. It is a world that is perpetually waiting for a shoe to drop. Young generations feel this instability acutely as they prepare to graduate into a workforce about which they are cautioned that there may be no predictable path to a career.

Older generations, too, are told that the future might be unrecognizable, that the marketable skills they’ve honed may not be relevant. Investors are waiting too, dumping unfathomable amounts of capital into AI companies, data centers, and the physical infrastructure that they believe is necessary to bring about this arrival. It is, we’re told, a race—a geopolitical one, but also a race against the market, a bubble, a circular movement of money and byzantine financial instruments and debt investment that could tank the economy. The AI boosters are waiting. They’ve created detailed timelines for this arrival. Then the timelines shift.

We are waiting because a defining feature of generative AI, according to its true believers, is that it is never in its final form. Like ChatGPT before its release, every model in some way is also a “low-key research preview”—a proof of concept for what’s really possible. You think the models are good now? Ha! Just wait.

Depending on your views, this is trademark showmanship, a truism of innovation, a hostage situation, or a long con. Where you fall on this rapture-to-bullshit continuum likely tracks with how optimistic you are for the future. But you are waiting nonetheless—for a bubble to burst, for a genie to arrive with a plan to print money, for a bailout, for Judgment Day. In that way, generative AI is a faith-based technology.

«

“Anniversary journalism” is usually a poor excuse for an article, but it’s important here to take stock of how truly disruptive this has all been. Not often in a good way.
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Someone is trying to ‘hack’ people through Apple’s Podcasts app • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Something very strange is happening to the Apple Podcasts app. Over the last several months, I’ve found both the iOS and Mac versions of the Podcasts app will open religion, spirituality, and education podcasts with no apparent rhyme or reason. Sometimes, I unlock my machine and the podcast app has launched itself and presented one of the bizarre podcasts to me. On top of that, at least one of the podcast pages in the app includes a link to a potentially malicious website. Here are the titles of some of the very odd podcasts I’ve had thrust upon me recently (I’ve trimmed some and defanged some links so you don’t accidentally click one):

“5../XEWE2′””&#x22″onclic…”
“free will, free willhttp://www[.]sermonaudio[.]com/rss_search.asp?keyword=free%will on SermonAudio”
“Leonel Pimentahttps://play[.]google[.]com/store/apps/detai…”
“https://open[.]spotify[.]com/playlist/53TA8e97shGyQ6iMk6TDjc?…”

There was another with a title in Arabic that loosely translates to “Words of Life” and includes someone’s Gmail address. Sometimes the podcasts do have actual audio (one was a religious sermon); others are completely silent. The podcasts are often years old, but for some reason are being shown to me now.

I’ll be honest: I don’t really know what exactly is going on here. And neither did an expert I spoke to. But it’s clear someone, somewhere, is trying to mess with Apple Podcasts and its users.

«

Security experts agree: something weird is going on, apparently with the intent of launching an XSS (cross-site scripting) attack. Apple didn’t respond to Cox – which implies that it’s having a think about what’s going on here.
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Survey says 97% of people struggle to identify AI music – but it’s not as bad as it seems • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

»

Streaming service Deezer ran an experiment recently, with the help of research firm Ipsos. The finding — that 97% of people can’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human-made music — was alarming. But it’s also not the whole story.

In the survey, 9,000 participants listened to three tracks and were asked to guess which, if any, were completely AI-generated. If the participant failed to guess all three correctly, they were put in the fail pile. That means if you got two of three correct, Deezer and Ipsos still said you couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and the real deal.

Deezer sent me the three tracks it used in the study, and so I decided to run my own (less scientific) experiment. I had ten people listen to the same tracks and gave them the same prompt. People did have trouble identifying which songs were fully AI. Only one person got all three right. But if I didn’t bundle the responses, the results were much less dire. People were able to successfully identify whether a track was AI or human-generated 43% of the time.

It’s also worth noting that several people told me one of the songs was so terrible, so obviously AI, that they thought it had to be a trap and guessed it was real.

Unsurprisingly, participants in Deezer’s study were a little caught off guard by how poorly they performed: 71% were surprised by the results, and 51% said it made them uncomfortable to not be able to tell the difference between AI- and human-created art.

«

This might get like autotune, which was reviled at first (when Cher’s Believe was a huge hit in 1998, music executives insisted the voice effect was a vocoder, not autotune. Nowadays, it’s all over the place. AI tunes with human vocals? Human musicians with AI vocals? It’s all on the table now.
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From Olympic dreams to Nairobi jail: how an Indian teen got embroiled in doping scandal in Kenya • The Indian Express

Mihir Vasavda and Nihal Koshie:

»

Iten, a Kenyan town that runners consider their mecca and where world-beaters are forged at altitude, is where Aman Malik, all of 17, chose to go in May 2023. The budding cross-country and long-distance runner from Haryana’s Sonipat was convinced that the road to the Olympics ran through this town in East Africa.

Two years on, the script has flipped completely.

In September 2025, a Nairobi court handed Aman, now 19, a three-year sentence for being a part of an organised network that allegedly traffics prohibited substances into the country and gives banned substances to Kenyan athletes.

Now in a four-room enclosure that houses 30 inmates, Aman has been navigating an environment far removed from the training camps he once lived in. “They could have banned me from athletics or deported me to India, where I could have served a jail term,” he tells The Indian Express from the Nairobi jail, where he gets to use his phone for one hour daily.

A high-altitude town in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, Iten enjoys global fame as the ‘home of champions’ for the sheer number of world and Olympic winners it has produced, including David Rudisha, the 800m Olympic and world record holder; and Beatrice Chebet, the multiple Olympic and world championship gold medallist.

However, of late, this distance-running powerhouse has been battling a surge in doping violations, besides accounting for the highest number of doping cheats in track and field.

Aman left for Iten in May 2023. Two years later, while returning from training, Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations sleuths followed him and raided his room. According to Kenyan court documents, they found an “entire suitcase filled with prohibited substances, supplements and medication” in his possession. These “prohibited substances” included meldonium, a drug that had led to a 15-month ban on tennis star Maria Sharapova; a human growth hormone (HGH) made infamous by the Lance Armstrong doping scandal; and Mannitol, a masking agent.

The sleuths also allegedly seized a one-page agreement between Aman and athlete Reubin Mosin that states the Indian would “supply all that it takes” in return for 50% of the latter’s winnings.

«

Kenya has a colossal doping problem, and this starts to clarify how and why.
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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: learning from Stoppard • Creative Screenwriting

Mike Fitzgerald:

»

Comparing two drafts of a script can be hugely instructive, revealing point-by-point how a writer went about improving the story. When I stumbled upon an earlier draft of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I discovered a dazzling, glittering trove of lessons as nourishing as eternal life itself. Well, nearly so.

Last Crusade was written by Jeffrey Boam, from a story by George Lucas and Menno Meyjes. So say the opening credits. Boam’s final draft, dated March 1, 1988 (ten weeks before production) differs drastically from the published script which reflects the released version of the film. Differences come as no shock, but with Last Crusade they aren’t just a few deleted scenes and some line changes. Whole sections of the Boam draft were reimagined, major set pieces were added, and the pacing and tone were markedly transformed. Whoever made these changes possessed a profound grasp of story craft.

So who was that? Spielberg himself made certain revisions, such as expanding the desert tank sequence from a few pages to over eleven – injecting some much-needed action into the story. Some scenes were filmed but omitted during the edit, like an extended chase through the Zeppelin in which Indy and Henry are pursued by a Gestapo agent and a World War One flying ace.

And then there was the uncredited script polish by Barry Watson – you know, the Barry Watson? Never heard of him? Perhaps if we peek under his pseudonym… ah, yes: Sir Tom Stoppard, a four-time Tony winner who later bagged an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. Since we can’t know whose pen revised which pages (although Spielberg did say that “Tom is pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue.” Let’s just call it a collaboration of some titans of storytelling.

«

There’s a similar breakdown elsewhere – which goes into scene-by-scene comparison. Apart from the pleasure of realising how much better the Stoppard-revised version is, it’s also a valuable lesson in writing generally: focus on character, learn how to time suspense, learn what amplifies a joke or tragedy. Useful for all writing. Well, all writing for humans.
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San Francisco’s robotaxi takeover, as seen from city hall • Bloomberg

David Zipper:

»

…As the director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency since 2019, Jeffrey Tumlin has been immersed in his city’s self-driving saga. With unified oversight of transit, taxis, curbs and streets in San Francisco, SFMTA is more powerful than most urban transportation departments. Still, Tumlin and his colleagues struggled to handle robotaxi companies that are accountable only to state and federal regulators, not city officials.

DZ: You had worked in the transportation sector for decades before joining SFMTA, and you were already familiar with autonomous vehicles. What have you learned about self-driving technology in the last few years that most surprised you?
JT: As a regular Waymo user, I have watched the cars become better than I am at seeing pedestrians hidden from view and predicting their behavior. I didn’t think that was going to happen. I am surprised by how sophisticated they are with erratic human behavior, which I had assumed would be very challenging.

DZ: Overall, are robotaxis a positive or negative for San Francisco?
JT: So far, there is no net positive for the transportation system that we’ve been able to identify. The robotaxis create greater convenience for the privileged, but they create problems for the efficiency of the transportation system as a whole.

DZ: What do you mean by that?
JT: What I like about Waymo is that the user interface design works well. I don’t have to talk to a human, and the vehicle’s driving behavior is slow and steady. I think robotaxis offer the potential for significant upsides for personal convenience, but it remains to be seen whether they offer any overall benefit to the transportation system.

DZ: How would you respond to those who say robotaxis are making San Francisco a better city because the experience of using them is superior to other ways to travel?
JT: I agree that there are qualities or Waymos that outperform other modes. The vehicles are very nice. The driving behavior is slow and steady and predictable, and there is chill music.

But those are qualities that you can replicate in any mode. If we mandated speed governors, passenger cars can be slow and steady. If we regulated taxis in order to optimize for user convenience and safe driving behavior, taxis could emulate those same qualities as well. Similarly, if we had massive private funding, we could achieve the same level of quality in public transit.

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(Article is free to read, apparently.)
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It pays to speak fluent LinkedIn — if you can crack the bro code • The Times

Harry Wallop:

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As on all social media platforms, LinkedIn does not show users a straightforward chronology of all the updates from the people they follow. Instead they are shown posts by a mix of people they follow, as well as those of strangers the algorithm thinks they might find interesting.

One woman, Cindy Gallop, was so suspicious LinkedIn had changed its algorithm that she conducted an experiment. Gallop, who is quite a big cheese on LinkedIn with 141,000 followers, got a fellow female businesswoman, Jane Evans, and two male colleagues to publish exactly the same post as her. Gallop’s reached 0.6% of her followers. Evans’s reached 8.3% of her 19,100 followers. The two men reached 51% and 143% of their respective follower numbers.

Some women have reacted by changing their profile on LinkedIn to pretend they are men. They have even started using “masculine” words to trick the LinkedIn algorithm into thinking they are men. Lots of “drive”, “accelerate”, “transform”, apparently, sees your posts reach more people. This is bro-coding. Speak like an obnoxious Silicon Valley tech bro, refer to forward-deployed engineers and how you are protein-maxxing when you get out of your ice bath at 5am, and your thoughts will be seen by more people.

Gallop and Evans are so enraged by this discovery they have started a petition. “We’re calling on LinkedIn to take urgent action,” they say, demanding “an independent equity audit of the algorithm and its impact on under-represented voices”.

At this point, you may want to scream. Who cares if LinkedIn, which has always been home to plenty of self-promoting, self-regarding and self-appointed “thought leaders”, amplifies the voices of some boastful men? If you hate LinkedIn so much, there’s no reason to spend time on this Microsoft-owned platform.

This fails to accept the reality of the modern business world. Over the past few years, being on LinkedIn has become almost mandatory. Microsoft claims LinkedIn has 1.3 billion users globally, with 44 million in Britain — an almost unbelievable number that is more than the 43.4 million adults in the country of working age.

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It’s such an unserious platform, and yet because it’s become essential to people in business, it’s also unavoidable.
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UK ‘not in favor’ of dimming the sun • POLITICO

Karl Mathiesen:

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The British government said it opposes attempts to cool the planet by spraying millions of tons of dust into the atmosphere — but did not close the door to a debate on regulating the technology.

The comments in parliament Thursday came after a POLITICO investigation revealed an Israeli-US company Stardust Solutions aimed to be capable of deploying solar radiation modification, as the technology is called, inside this decade.

“We’re not in favor of solar radiation modification given the uncertainty around the potential risks it poses to the climate and environment,” Leader of the House of Commons Alan Campbell said on behalf of the government.

Stardust has recently raised $60m in finance from venture capital investors, mostly based in Silicon Valley and Britain. It is the largest ever investment in the field. 

The emergence of a well-funded, private sector actor moving aggressively toward planet cooling capability has led to calls for the global community to regulate the field.

Citing POLITICO’s reporting, Labour MP Sarah Coombes asked the government: “Given the potential risks of this technology, could we have a debate on how Britain will work with other countries to regulate experiments with the Earth’s atmosphere, and ensure we cooperate with other countries on solutions that actually tackle the root cause of climate change?”

Campbell signalled the government was open to further discussion of the issue by inviting Coombes to raise the point the next time Technology Secretary Liz Kendall took questions in parliament.

…Stardust is proposing to use high-flying aircraft to dump millions of tons of a proprietary particle into the stratosphere, around 12 miles above the Earth’s surface. The technology mimics the short-term global cooling that occurs when volcanoes blow dust and gas high into the sky, blocking a small amount of the sun’s heat.

Most scientists agree this could temporarily lower the Earth’s surface temperature, helping to avert some impacts of global warming. The side effects, however, are not well researched.  

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What Is the difference between the two types of Pyrex? • Allrecipes

Meghan Glass:

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Three basic types of glassware are typically found in most home kitchens: soda-lime, tempered, and borosilicate. Borosilicate glass includes boron trioxide, which has a low thermal expansion. This suggests unlike normal glass, it won’t break when exposed to major temperature shifts such as taking a dish from a fridge to an oven. This is thanks to boron trioxide, the element that makes glass resistant to major temperature changes. Pyrex is a sub-group of borosilicate.

Soda-lime glass is the most common glass type in kitchens since it’s used for most drinkware from juice cups to jars. Untreated soda-lime glass is more susceptible to breaking from extreme temperature changes. This shock expands the glass at different rates, resulting in cracks and fissures.

Tempered glass is just soda-lime glass that’s been heat-treated to make it more durable. During that heat-tempering process, the exterior of the glass is force-cooled so that it solidifies quickly, leaving the center to cool more slowly. As the inside cools, it pulls at the stiff, compressed outer layer, which puts the center of the glass in tension.

Are “PYREX” and “pyrex” the same? Historically, both trademarks were used interchangeably in the marketing of kitchenware products made up of both borosilicate and soda-lime glass. However, now Corning has licensed out the use of their PYREX (upper case lettering) and pyrex (lower case lettering) logos to other companies.

Lowercase “pyrex” is now mostly used for kitchenware sold in the United States, South America, and Asia. In Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, uppercase PYREX is still available.

Pyrex used to be made of the more heat-resistant borosilicate glass, which is more resistant to breakage when subjected to extreme shifts in temperature. Pyrex eventually switched to tempered glass most likely because boron is toxic and expensive to dispose of. Although tempered glass can better withstand thermal shock than regular soda-lime glass can, it’s not as resilient as borosilicate. This is what causes the shattering reaction people are talking about. Watch out for those casseroles.

In short: if the logo is in upper case lettering – PYREX – it’s most likely made of borosilicate, and thus safer.

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Just in case anyone is thinking of doing some cooking this month. Too late for all the Americans at Thanksgiving, of course. Sorry folks!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified