After World War 2, Japan’s shipbuilding industry was wrecked. So how did it rebuild to become a world leader? CC-licensed photo by North East Museums on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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

Jony Ive’s AI gadget rumored to be “slightly larger” than Humane’s AI pin • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

More details are trickling out about Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s new AI device. In a post on Thursday, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says his research indicates that the device could be larger than Humane’s AI pin, but with a “form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle.”

Kuo adds that “one of the intended use cases” is wearing the device around your neck. It also may not come with a display, Kuo says, featuring just built-in cameras and microphones for “environmental detection.” The device could also connect to smartphones and PCs to use their computing and display capabilities.

This latest leak aligns with a report from The Wall Street Journal, which says the device will be aware of a user’s life and surroundings, but probably won’t be a pair of glasses.

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Kuo talks about mass production in 2027 (which doesn’t give OpenAI much time to get prototyping and factories sorted out), with assembly and shipping done outside China “to reduce geopolitical risks” (gives even less time).

He thinks people will wear it around their neck? Has he met people?

Even so, if it could do what the Humane Pin wanted to do, but do it really well, then that could be interesting.
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Apple smart glasses launching in 2026, says Bloomberg • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Apple is planning to launch a set of smart glasses by the end of 2026, reports Bloomberg. The glasses will be comparable to the Meta Ray-Bans and the Android XR glasses that Google showed off earlier this week.

Apple’s smart glasses are expected to include cameras, microphones, and AI capabilities, much like the Meta Ray-Bans. The glasses will be able to take photos, record video, provide translations, give turn-by-turn directions, play music, facilitate phone calls, offer feedback on what the wearer is seeing, and answer queries, but there won’t be augmented reality capabilities included. Siri will be a key part of the glasses experience, with Apple planning to improve the personal assistant ahead of when the product launches.

With Apple targeting a late 2026 launch, work on the smart glasses has ramped up. Apple plans to produce “large quantities” of prototypes by the end of this year, giving the company time to test before mass production and a public unveiling.

According to Bloomberg, an Apple employee said that the glasses are similar to Meta’s glasses, “but better made.” The Meta Ray-Bans use Meta Llama and Google Gemini, but Apple will rely on its own AI models.

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Better made had better not just mean “a lot heavier”. Apple has certainly done well when it comes to miniaturisation – the AirPods and Watch pack a lot in. The Vision Pro shows that when size isn’t a constraint, Apple can screw it up badly. Will the right people win the design battle?
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“How you design the beep is important”: behind the movement for calmer gadgets • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Do you miss the feel of tactile buttons on your kitchen appliances or lament car manufacturers’ insistence on touchscreens? Have you ever found yourself clumsily fumbling with the door handles of a vehicle or distracted by the bright blue light beaming from your vacuum or Wi-Fi router?

If so, you’re not alone. The way technology gadgets are designed largely relies on things like blue, often LED, lights, flat resistive or capacitive touch input, and software. Some, like Amber Case, founder of the Calm Tech Institute, believe that these design choices distract from devices’ purpose and functionality and are calling for a new approach to product design.

“Calm Tech Institute is kind of a consumer advocacy body that’s collecting stories and research from neuroscientists that says, look at how the mind wants texture, and look at how it wants physical buttons, and there’s a part of your mind that needs [those],” Case told Ars Technica. “When we don’t have it and we replace it with glass, we’re not only losing something about human experience, but we’re actually causing the mind stress.”

The Calm Tech Institute, founded in May 2024, provides workshops, speaking engagements, and certification for products that “enhance human life without causing stress or distraction,” its website says.

Speaking to Ars, Case pointed to user frustrations, such as software updates hindering car usage and “Why is there no button on the back of the television when I go into the hotel room late at night, and I have to turn on my flashlight on my iPhone to find the button to turn it off?”

These experiences are the antithesis of the Calm Tech philosophy, Case explained: “Once we learn [how to ride a bike], we never have to learn it again. Whereas, with how a lot of software … and physical objects are made now, you have to relearn it. It gets changed or the buttons aren’t in the right place, and you can feel your mind wanting the button to be in a certain place. And it’s not.”

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Roger that. See also: showers in hotels; coffee machines; taps in public toilets (do you touch it? Wave your hand underneath it?).
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Japan and the birth of modern shipbuilding • Construction Physics

Brian Potter:

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During WWII, the US constructed an unprecedented shipbuilding machine. By assembling ships from welded, prefabricated blocks, the US built a huge number of cargo ships incredibly quickly, overwhelming Germany’s u-boats and helping to win the war. But when the war was over, this shipbuilding machine was dismantled. Industrialists like Henry Kaiser and Stephen Bechtel, who operated some of the US’s most efficient wartime shipyards, left the shipbuilding business.

Prior to the war, the US had been an uncompetitive commercial shipbuilder producing a small fraction of commercial oceangoing ships, and that’s what it became again. At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world’s ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%.

But the lessons from the US’s shipbuilding machine weren’t forgotten. After the war, practitioners brought them to Japan, where they would continue to evolve, eventually allowing Japan to build ships faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the world.

…The third strategy that formed the core of modern shipbuilding methods was statistical process control. The basic idea behind process control is that it’s impossible to make an industrial process perfectly reliable. There will always be some variation in what it produces: differences in part dimensions, material strength, chemical composition, and so on. But while some variation is inherent to the process (and must be accepted), much of the variation is from specific causes that can be hunted down and eliminated. By analyzing the variation in a process, undesirable sources of variation can be removed. This makes a process work more reliably and predictably, reducing waste and rework from parts that are outside acceptable tolerances.

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Absorbing read if you want to know how the Japanese became the primary place for doing this – until others (such as South Korea) took over.
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Spanish grid operator faults big power plants in blackout blame game • Financial Times

Barney Jopson:

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Spain’s grid operator has accused some large power plants of not doing their job to help regulate the country’s electricity system in the moments before last month’s catastrophic blackout across the Iberian peninsula.

Beatriz Corredor, chair of grid operator Red Eléctrica’s parent company, said power plants fell short in controlling the voltage of the electricity system. However, the heads of Spain’s biggest plant owners linked the blackout to a lack of grid investment and insufficient efforts to boost electricity demand.

The public blame game over the outage is intensifying as more than three weeks after 60m people were left without power, Spanish government investigators insisted they needed more time to establish the root cause.

The revelations on Thursday from Corredor, chair of Redeia, open up a new front after the spotlight fell initially on Spain’s high dependence on wind and solar energy as a possible cause of the blackout.

Corredor did not say large power plants were the root cause, but she said the functioning of certain gas, nuclear or hydroelectric facilities in south-west Spain was “below [the levels] required by current voltage control regulations”.

Their role is potentially significant because experts have identified the proximate cause of the blackout as a surge in voltage on the grid, together with a drop in the frequency at which the electrical current alternates, which triggered the disconnection of multiple generation plants.  

Corredor insisted that moments before the failure on April 28, the part of the system controlled by Red Eléctrica, including grid substations, was operating within the voltage ranges established by regulatory norms.

“So we have to consider what was happening with voltage in the rest of the system,” she said. “Because [Red Eléctrica] are the brain, the spine. But this system obviously has arms, legs, and it has a heart, which is the plants that generate electricity.” Voltage surges on the grid cause power plants to disconnect automatically for safety reasons to protect equipment from damage.

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So it seems like we still don’t know? That seems bad because it implies that the same thing could happen again.
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The Ammortal chamber: what it’s like in the $160k biohacking device • Robb Report

Justin Fenner:

»

At a passing glance, you might think the Ammortal Chamber was a set piece made for the Dune cinematic universe. The brutalist look of its two halves, which are bisected by a lightning bolt-shaped sheet of acrylic that glows red when activated, has the air of a concrete relic from the distant future.

But the growing class of champions for this machine—which combines photobiomodulation, pulsed electromagnetic frequency, molecular hydrogen, guided meditation, and vibroacoustic therapies into a single treatment—claims it has myriad real-life benefits.

“Very quickly, I started regrowing hair,” says Jonathan Krieger, cofounder of Padel United Sports Club, a high-end racquet facility in Cresskill, N.J., that houses the only Ammortal Chamber near New York City, of his experience using it. He credits the red-light component of his three or four weekly sessions with improving the appearance of his skin, too.

The other benefits he’s seen are even more impressive. “Inflammation? Down 70 percent,” he estimates. “My sleeping, which was always a little whatever, just became much more consistent. My energy and my general state of stress, I would say, just shifted.”

And while, in my experience, one session can be uniquely calming, restorative, and even fun, Ammortal’s CEO Brian Le Gette has observed that regular use has compounding benefits.

“This is a wellness product, not a clinical, medical device,” he says as a caveat before sharing anecdotes about user feedback. “We have hundreds and thousands of people who’ve had tremendous pain reduction. We’ve had people who’ve had trauma releases inside this thing, and they’re weeping afterwards,” he says. One collegiate lacrosse player used the chamber before a game and scored five of her team’s six goals. Before that, Le Gette adds, “She’d never come remotely close to two.”

So what is it like to use? The device dispenses all of its treatments simultaneously, in 15-, 25-, or 50-minute sessions. It’s recommended that you use it in your underwear so that most of your skin is exposed to the red light, and so that the near-infrared light can help treat your joints. (Some people use it in the nude.) Covers are provided to shield your eyes from the light, and a sterile cannula is attached to a tank so that you can breathe in the hydrogen during the session.

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I’m not sure that goals scored is a very rigorous comparison, but anyway, it looks pretty amazing. Also – hydrogen?
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Virginia reports first mammal with bird flu • Daily Progress

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Virginia has reported its first case of bird flu in a mammal, as the disease continues to ravage the U.S. poultry industry sending the price of eggs skyrocketing.

The Blue Ridge Wildlife Center in Clarke County recently admitted an adult female red fox found in Loudoun County that tested positive for H5N1, highly pathogenic avian influenza.

Upon intake on March 31, the animal was not responding to handling, according to the center.

“She was also exhibiting tremors and nystagmus, a rhythmic, involuntary eye movement that is often seen with brain trauma or disease,” the center said in a statement. “Given these severe neurological signs without any indication of trauma, our top differentials were rabies, distemper, and HPAI.”

…Rabies testing later came back negative, and brain tissue samples confirmed bird flu was the primary cause of the symptoms, according to an April 8 update from the center.

Though a first for Virginia, other states have reported many bird flu cases in mammals, especially dairy cows and free-roaming domestic cats.

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Only a watching brief! (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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‘A billion streams and no fans’: inside a $10m AI music fraud case • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

»

Jazz (Deluxe) came out in January 2018. Right away, it shot up the Billboard chart and hit No. 1. [Jonathan] Hay was elated. At last, real, measurable success had arrived.

Then, just as suddenly, the album disappeared from the ranking. “Nobody drops off the next week to zero,” says Hay, remembering his confusion. He called other artists to ask if they’d ever seen this before. They hadn’t. Questions piled up. If so many people had listened, why did they suddenly stop? He scanned the internet for chatter. Even a single freaking tweet would have been nice. Nada. Where were the fans? “No one’s talking about the music,” Hay realized.

Pulling up Spotify’s dashboard for artists, Hay scrutinized the analytics for the pair’s work. Listeners appeared concentrated in far-flung places like Vietnam. Things only got stranger from there. Here’s how Hay remembers it: He started receiving notices from distributors, the companies that handle the licensing of indie artists’ music. The distributors were flagging [fellow bandmate Mike] Smith and Hay’s music, from Jazz and from other projects, for streaming fraud and pulling it down. Smith told Hay it was a mistake and that Hay had messed up securing the proper rights for samples. Hay frantically tried to correct the issue, but the flagging persisted.

Hay, panicking, badgered Smith to help him figure out what was happening. Finally, Hay says, Smith offered some answers: Smith had instructed his staff at the medical clinics to stream their songs. It didn’t sound like the full story.

Then, last September, Smith turned up at the heart of another music streaming incident, this one rather epic. The FBI arrested him and charged him in the first AI streaming fraud case in the United States. The government claims that between 2017 and 2024, Smith made over $10m in royalties by using bot armies to continuously play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms. Smith pleaded not guilty to all charges. (Through his lawyer, Smith declined to be interviewed, so this is very much Hay’s side of the story, corroborated by numerous interviews with people who worked with the two men.)

When Hay found out, he marveled at the idea of his former collaborator managing to get richer than nearly all working musicians without being a household name. “He had a billion streams,” Hay claims, “and no fans.”

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Diseases are spreading. The CDC isn’t warning the public like it was months ago • NPR

Chiara Eisner:

»

To accomplish its mission of increasing the health security of the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that it “conducts critical science and provides health information” to protect the nation. But since President Trump’s administration assumed power in January, many of the platforms the CDC used to communicate with the public have gone silent, an NPR analysis found.

Many of the CDC’s newsletters have stopped being distributed, workers at the CDC say. Health alerts about disease outbreaks, previously sent to health professionals subscribed to the CDC’s Health Alert Network, haven’t been dispatched since March. The agency’s main social media channels have come under new ownership of the Department of Health and Human Services, emails reviewed by NPR show, and most have gone more than a month without posting their own new content.

“Public health functions best when its experts are allowed to communicate the work that they do in real time, and that’s not happening,” said Kevin Griffis, who served as the director of communications at the CDC until March. “That could put people’s lives at risk.”

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Under the new Trump regime, that might count as “mission accomplished”.
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Stories have very simple shapes • The Memory Hole

This is a seven-minute video. I rarely link to videos.

But this one is of Kurt Vonnegut, talking about how the stories we tell have “shapes”. Stay to the end.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You can now get a chatbot that will generate novel proteins in response to a text prompt. It’s programming for amino acids. CC-licensed photo by Simon Cockell 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. Unfolded. 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 unites with Jony Ive in $6.5bn deal to create AI devices • The New York Times

Mike Isaac and Cade Metz:

»

On Wednesday, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said the company was paying $6.5bn to buy IO, a one-year-old start-up created by Jony Ive, a former top Apple executive who designed the iPhone. The all-stock deal, which effectively unites Silicon Valley royalty, is intended to usher in what the two men call “a new family of products” for the age of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is shorthand for a future technology that achieves human-level intelligence.

The deal, which is OpenAI’s biggest acquisition, will bring in Mr. Ive and his team of roughly 55 engineers and researchers. LoveFrom will assume creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and build hardware that helps people better interact with the technology.

In a joint interview, Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman declined to say what such devices could look like and how they might work, but they said they hoped to share details next year. Mr. Ive, 58, framed the ambitions as galactic, with the aim of creating “amazing products that elevate humanity.”

“We’ve been waiting for the next big thing for 20 years,” Mr. Altman, 40, added. “We want to bring people something beyond the legacy products we’ve been using for so long.”

Mr. Altman and Mr. Ive are effectively looking beyond an era of smartphones, which have been people’s signature personal device since the iPhone debuted in 2007. If the two men succeed — and it is a very big if — they could spur what is known as “ambient computing.” Rather than typing and taking photographs on smartphones, future devices like pendants or glasses that use A.I. could process the world in real time, fielding questions and analyzing images and sounds in seamless ways.

Mr. Altman had invested in Humane, a company that pursued this kind of vision with the creation of an A.I. pin. But the start-up folded not long after its product flopped.

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You can see that Humane’s product is a sort of platonic ideal for Ive. (By the way, NYT, do you not give people honorifics? He’s Sir Jony Ive.) But the next best would be smart glasses that would let you walk and talk to your device while absorbing the world that you see and acting on it. Things just got interesting.
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Fortnite is finally back on US iPhones • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Fortnite is once again available on the iOS App Store in the US, according to Epic Games. Epic says it has returned to the Epic Games Store and AltStore as well.

Apple kicked Fortnite off the App Store nearly five years ago after Epic Games added its own in-app payment system to the game, which violated Apple’s rules. But after a major court ruling in Epic Games v. Apple that forced Apple to not take fees from purchases made outside of apps, the game is available to play on US iPhones once again.

[After Apple was evidently delaying its release following resubmission earlier this month] Epic asked the judge in the Epic v. Apple case to order Apple to review its Fortnite submission on May 16th. On Monday, the judge said in a filing that Apple is “fully capable of resolving this issue without further briefing or a hearing,” and that if a resolution wasn’t reached, the Apple official who “is personally responsible for ensuring compliance” would have to appear at a hearing next Tuesday.

However, shortly after Fortnite returned to the App Store on Tuesday, Epic and Apple filed a joint notice saying that they have “resolved all issues” from Epic’s May 16th filing. Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Epic also recently rolled out a new promotion to encourage players to use its payment systems: if you use Epic’s system in Fortnite, Rocket League, or Fall Guys on PC, iOS, Android, and the web, the company will give you 20% back in Epic Rewards that can be used for other purchases in its games or on the Epic Games Store.

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Strange how the threat of having to turn up in court got Apple to hit the “OK” button.
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‘Fortnite’ players are already making AI Darth Vader swear • WIRED

Megan Farokhmanesh:

»

On Friday, Epic Games announced Darth Vader would be returning to Fortnite as an in-game boss—but this time, players would be able to chat with him through conversational AI. “Ask him all your pressing questions about the Force, the Galactic Empire … or you know, a good strat for the last Storm circle,” Epic said in its announcement.

Unfortunately, players had other plans. Mere hours after Vader appeared in Fortnite, gamers began posting clips of AI Vader going rogue.

“What freaking fucking food is that Darth Vader? Tell me,” says streamer Loserfruit in one clip posted to X. “Freaking? Fucking? Such vulgarity does not become you,” Vader replies. (A spokesperson for Epic Games, Cat McCormack, told WIRED that it pushed a hotfix “within 30 minutes of this happening in-game, so this shouldn’t happen again.”)

Later, in a conversation about possible romantic partners, Loserfruit prompts Vader into replying “You speak of breasts, Loserfruit? I trust you are referring to the armored chestplates.”

In a clip from a different streamer, Vader can be heard talking about carcinogens before saying a slur typically used against queer men that can also be slang for cigarettes. The streamer can be heard screaming “HE SAID IT! HE SAID IT!” before running away in glee.

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On the one hand, childish, but on the other, shows the impossibility of keeping these things inside what you think are its guardrails. Chatbots are like modern genies, and people really work at getting an extra spell out of them.
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From chalkboards to chatbots: evaluating the impact of generative AI on learning outcomes in Nigeria • World Bank

Martín De Simone et al:

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This paper examines whether generative artificial intelligence, specifically large language models (LLMs), can help solve that problem. We evaluate a six-week after-school tutoring program in Nigeria that used a publicly available LLM (ChatGPT-4) to support students in learning English. First-year secondary students from nine public schools in Benin City were invited to participate; from this pool, 52% of eligible students expressed interest, and participants were randomly selected from among them. Those assigned to the intervention attended twelve 90-minute sessions in computer labs, engaging in curriculum-aligned activities guided by teachers. We use a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design to estimate the causal impact of the program on learning outcomes.

We present three main sets of results. First, we show that students selected to participate in the program score 0.31 standard deviation higher in the final assessment that was delivered at the end of the intervention. We find strong statistically-significant intent-to-treat (ITT) effects on all sections of that assessment: English skills (which included the majority of questions, 0.24 σ), digital skills (0.14 σ), AI skills (0.31 σ) and an Item Response Theory (IRT) composite score of each student’s exam (0.26 σ). We also show that the intervention yielded strong positive results on the regular English curricular exam of the third term.

This result is important because the content evaluated in that exam was broader than the one covered during the six weeks of the intervention and included the content of the entire year.

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This seems like a very significant finding: it’s relatively cheap and it works. In its way it reminds me of the famous paper which found that Tanzanian fishermen who had mobile phones could significant improve their takings because they knew which port would have the largest demand for their catch.
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I told AI to make me a protein. Here’s what it came up with • Nature

Ewen Callaway:

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Last month, a team led by Fajie Yuan, a machine-learning scientist at Westlake University in Hangzhou, China, showed that a text-to-protein model his team developed can design functional proteins, including lab-tested enzymes and fluorescent proteins, that are original in their designs and not similar to existing molecules. “We are the first to design a functional enzyme using only text,” Yuan says. “It’s just like science fiction.”

The model, called Pinal, is one of several protein-design AIs that can be directed with ordinary language — as opposed to a protein sequence or the structure-guided specifications typical of most such AIs.

But it’s early days for these bio-AI models, says Anthony Gitter, a computational biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “I see it as a high-risk, high-reward area,” he says.

Teaching biological AI models to communicate in English (or any language) typically involves exposing them to text descriptions of biological data. Yuan’s team trained Pinal using 1.7 billion descriptions of the structures, functions and other characteristics of different proteins. After some extra training, the model could take a prompt and churn out hundreds of sequence designs. The model has a web interface, and its code and parameters needed to run the model are freely available.

One prompt that the researchers used was ‘Please design a protein that is an alcohol dehydrogenase’, referring to an alcohol-metabolizing enzyme. Yuan and his colleagues then used other computational tools to identify the most promising designs and, working with a biologist collaborator, tested their enzymatic activity.

Two of the eight alcohol dehydrogenase designs successfully catalysed the breakdown of alcohol, albeit much less efficiently than natural enzymes.

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Like programming, proteins are a bounded problem space, so they’re a good topic for LLMs (or maybe LPMs – large protein models).
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South Korea’s robot chefs worry human workers – and disappoint customers • Rest of World

Michelle Kim:

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On sweltering summer days, chef Park Jeong-eun would cook makguksu, an earthy Korean dish made with buckwheat noodles steeped in a tangy, ice-cold broth, topped with spicy gochujang paste. Truck drivers would come from faraway places to the Munmak rest stop, on the highway in the mountainous Gangwon-do province in South Korea, to eat her food.

That was until February 2024, when three robot chefs took over the kitchen at Munmak. The restaurant’s menu has since changed, away from local delicacies like makguksu and slow-cooked beef stews to easily automatable dishes such as ramen, udon, and varieties of Korean stews. The robots speed through 150 meals every hour, nearly double what Park can make by hand.

When longtime patrons learn their beloved menu items are no more, they gasp and walk out the door, she recalled to Rest of World.

“Our customers say the dishes we used to cook tasted much better than what the robots serve now,” Park, 58, said. “Even though the robots have lightened my workload, I’ve lost my sense of pride in our food.”

Park now finds refuge scrubbing dishes in the back of the kitchen, away from the counter, where customers barrage her with harsh complaints about the food. Sometimes, they return their ramen bowls untouched in protest, she said.

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But! South Korea needs its robots because the population is ageing: those over 60 (as Park will soon be) make up a quarter of the workforce. Maybe get used to the new taste of the ramen?
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The spy factory: how Russia used Brazil to create deep-cover spies • The New York Times

Michael Schwirtz and Jane Bradley:

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For years, a New York Times investigation found, Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its most elite intelligence officers, known as illegals. In an audacious and far-reaching operation, the spies shed their Russian pasts. They started businesses, made friends and had love affairs — events that, over many years, became the building blocks of entirely new identities.

Major Russian spy operations have been uncovered in the past, including in the United States in 2010. This was different. The goal was not to spy on Brazil, but to become Brazilian. Once cloaked in credible back stories, they would set off for the United States, Europe or the Middle East and begin working in earnest.

The Russians essentially turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives like Mr. Shmyrev.

One started a jewelry business. Another was a blond, blue-eyed model. A third was admitted into an American university. There was a Brazilian researcher who landed work in Norway, and a married couple who eventually went to Portugal.

Then it all came crashing down.

For the past three years, Brazilian counterintelligence agents have quietly and methodically hunted these spies. Through painstaking police work, these agents discovered a pattern that allowed them to identify the spies, one by one.
Agents have uncovered at least nine Russian officers operating under Brazilian cover identities, according to documents and interviews. Six have never been publicly identified until now. The investigation has already spanned at least eight countries, officials said, with intelligence coming from the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, Uruguay and other Western security services.

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Easy to forget that all this stuff goes on, and on, under the surface.
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Judge slams lawyers for ‘bogus AI-generated research’ • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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A California judge slammed a pair of law firms for the undisclosed use of AI after he received a supplemental brief with “numerous false, inaccurate, and misleading legal citations and quotations.” In a ruling submitted last week, Judge Michael Wilner imposed $31,000 in sanctions against the law firms involved, saying “no reasonably competent attorney should out-source research and writing” to AI, as pointed out by law professors Eric Goldman and Blake Reid on Bluesky.

“I read their brief, was persuaded (or at least intrigued) by the authorities that they cited, and looked up the decisions to learn more about them – only to find that they didn’t exist,” Judge Wilner writes. “That’s scary. It almost led to the scarier outcome (from my perspective) of including those bogus materials in a judicial order.”

As noted in the filing, a plaintiff’s legal representative for a civil lawsuit against State Farm used AI to generate an outline for a supplemental brief. However, this outline contained “bogus AI-generated research” when it was sent to a separate law firm, K&L Gates, which added the information to a brief. “No attorney or staff member at either firm apparently cite-checked or otherwise reviewed that research before filing the brief,” Judge Wilner writes.

When Judge Wilner reviewed the brief, he found that “at least two of the authorities cited do not exist at all.”

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As I’ve said previously, one has to think that this might have slipped past other judges if the two sides aren’t careful enough.
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From birth to gene-edited in six months: custom CRISPR therapy breaks speed limits • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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researchers in Philadelphia appear to have successfully treated a six-month-old baby boy, called KJ, with a personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy. The treatment corrects an ultra-rare mutation in KJ that breaks a liver enzyme. That enzyme is required to convert ammonia, a byproduct of metabolism, to urea, a waste product released in urine. Without treatment, ammonia would build up to dangerous levels in KJ—and he would have a 50% chance of dying in infancy.

While the gene-editing treatment isn’t a complete cure, and long-term success is still uncertain, KJ’s condition has improved and stabilized. And the treatment’s positive results appear to be a first for personalizing gene editing.

Now, who doesn’t love a good story about a seemingly miraculous medical treatment saving a cute, chubby-cheeked baby? But, this story delivers more than an adorable bundle of joy; the big triumph is the striking timeline of the treatment’s development—and the fact that it provides a template for how to treat other babies with ultra-rare mutations.

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The mutation was recognised within days (on its own, a remarkable bit of medicine) but the process of taking cells, finding the targets in the infant’s genome, proving it, getting approval, doing animal tests, all happened at breakneck speed – and, apparently, successfully.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What has gone wrong in Apple’s current approach to making money versus making products? Some people think they know the answer. CC-licensed photo by Mike Deerkoski 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. A matter of timing. 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 15 biggest announcements at Google I/O 2025 • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Google just wrapped up its big keynote at I/O 2025. As expected, it was full of AI-related announcements, ranging from updates across Google’s image and video generation models to new features in Search and Gmail.

But there were some surprises, too, like a new AI filmmaking app and an update to Project Starline. If you didn’t catch the event live, you can check out everything you missed in the roundup below.

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With the proviso that these things often don’t reach the real world for a couple of years, if at all, there are some interesting things in there. A selection:

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• Google is launching a new AI filmmaking app called Flow. The tool uses Veo, Imagen, and Gemini to create eight-second AI-generated video clips based on text prompts and / or images.

• Xreal and Google are teaming up on Project Aura, a new pair of smart glasses that use the Android XR platform for mixed-reality devices.

• Project Astra could already use your phone’s camera to “see” the objects around you, but the latest prototype will let it complete tasks on your behalf, even if you don’t explicitly ask it to.

• Google is launching Search Live, a feature that incorporates capabilities from the AI assistant. By selecting the new “Live” icon in AI Mode or Lens, you can talk back and forth with Search while showing what’s on your camera.

• Google Meet is launching a new feature that translates your speech into your conversation partner’s preferred language in near real-time. The feature only supports English and Spanish for now.

• Gmail’s smart reply feature, which uses AI to suggest replies to your emails, will now use information from your inbox and Google Drive to prewrite responses that sound more like you.

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Soon the AI will write the email, and the recipient’s AI will read it, and we can get on with creating the great works of art that have been lying immanent for so long.
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Is the US in a “high-level equilibrium trap”? • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

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The U.S. has been a slow-growing country at the technological frontier for as long as almost all of us have been alive. If your country generally grows at 2%, you can expect to see your living standards quadruple over your lifetime. That’s much better than nothing, but it means that in the shorter term — over a five-year or ten-year period — your economic fortunes will be primarily determined by random shocks, not by the slow and steady march of technological improvement. A spell of unemployment, a medical bankruptcy, a decline in the price of your house, the loss of a government contract or a big customer — any of these could wipe out many years of slow improvement in living standards.

In other words, to most Americans, risks loom larger than opportunities. If everything stays the same, then they’ll continue to be wealthy and comfortable; if something changes, they might not. In an environment like that, it makes sense to be afraid of change, because change means risk.

For most of Americans’ lives, technological progress has been a major source of risk. The advent of the internet put encyclopedia salesmen and term life insurance salesmen out of a job. Hybrid cars from Japan put competitive pressure on traditional carmakers. Flip-phone makers were wiped out by smartphones. Electronic trading made many human “specialists” obsolete. And so on and so forth, throughout the economy. At the aggregate level, these innovations drove growth in living standards. But at an individual level, having the technology in your industry change was generally a source of peril.

By contrast someone who grew up in modern China has experienced something utterly different. Over the course of their lifetime, rapid technological progress has radically transformed their lives and the lives of the people around them, allowing them to experience a level of comfort and security utterly undreamt of by their grandparents.

Meanwhile, the risks from new technology were pretty low. In a fast-growing economy, if your job gets automated, you can often just go get a better one.

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Smith’s post is free to read, and gives a broader view of the one expressed yesterday – that the US is falling behind, while China is surging ahead.
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Millions of consumers could get £70 after unfair fees ruling against Mastercard • BBC News

Vishala Sri-Pathma:

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Millions of shoppers could get up to £70 each after a court ruled historic fees administered by card provider Mastercard were unfair.

The decision comes after a long-running legal case going back almost a decade, brought forward by a former financial ombudsman.

Walter Merricks argued that shoppers were charged higher prices after fees were wrongly levied on transactions made over a 15-year period between 1992 and 2008.

It is not necessary to have owned a Mastercard at any point to be eligible for compensation. Mastercard declined to comment on the court ruling.

Consumers are eligible to claim compensation if they lived in England, Wales or Northern Ireland for at least three months between June 1997 and June 2008, and bought goods or services from UK businesses that accepted Mastercard credit cards.

For those who live in Scotland, the starting point is May 1992.

The entire settlement is for £200m, with £100m ringfenced for consumers who have until the end of this year to claim and if the expected 5% of claimants – 2.5 million people – come forward, then each will receive £45.
If fewer people apply, payments will be capped at £70 per claimant.

Mr Merricks said consumers would soon be able to register to receive a payout by completing an online form.

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(Un)Helpfully the BBC didn’t link to the page where one could find how to make a claim. You’ll find that here.
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Task estimation: conquering Hofstadter’s Law • These Are Systems

Jacob Bayless:

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This is a true story: an experienced team of developers was tasked with a full ground-up, from-scratch rewrite of a mature software stack that had been built over many years of development. The legacy architecture had been stretched to its limits and was now restricting the company’s growth. A complete redesign was needed; backwards-compatible on the surface, but entirely different under the hood. Everyone knew this would be a difficult undertaking, but the team had thoroughly considered all the alternatives, and decided this was the best way forward.

Marketing wanted to know when the new software would be ready to ship. The dev team put together a roadmap to deliver a minimum viable product, planned out the workload, and estimated how long it would take to get to the MVP: six months.

It shipped two years later.

It would be an understatement to say this was a huge problem. But the problem wasn’t the two years of development time; this company had healthy revenue to go on, and the long-term payoff from the technology leap would eventually be worth that incubation period.

The damage was caused by the estimate itself. You see, the marketing team interpreted this estimate as a commitment, and began informing customers about when the product would be ready. Sales inquiries came streaming in. Some of those customers had customers of their own, and they had started making their own plans and timelines based on this information. When the deadline rolled around and the product was nowhere near ready, there was a lot of damage control needed.

Customers were not happy. The marketing team was not happy. The company was not happy. And the dev team found themselves in the crosshairs.

So what went wrong?

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What he discovered was that in a hierarchical project – A depends on the completion of B depends on the completion of C – the time taken for each stage follows a lognormal distribution relative to its estimated completion time. The “educated guess” is actually the median completion time; the real mean is 1.6x that; the 95th percentile (ie in 95% of cases it finishes by then) is 5x the median. The 99th percentile? 10x.

Which explains why a lot of software – and other! – projects overrun. [(Douglas) Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.]
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Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published an advertorial summer reading list containing at least 10 fake books attributed to real authors, according to multiple reports on social media. The newspaper’s uncredited “Summer reading list for 2025” supplement recommended titles including “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende and “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir—books that don’t exist and were created out of thin air by an AI system.

The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media that he used AI to generate the content. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” Buscaglia said. “On me 100% and I’m completely embarrassed.”

A check by Ars Technica shows that only five of the 15 recommended books in the list actually exist, with the remainder being fabricated titles falsely attributed to well-known authors. AI assistants such as ChatGPT are well-known for creating plausible-sounding errors known as confabulations, especially when lacking detailed information on a particular topic. The problem affects everything from AI search results to lawyers citing fake cases.

On Tuesday morning, the Chicago Sun-Times addressed the controversy on Bluesky. “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak,” the official publication account wrote. “It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon.”

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According to 404 Media in a followup story (paywalled), the content was generated by “magazine giant Hearst”. Rosebud has the last laugh.

But it was part of a 64-page promotional supplement. Journalists – anyone, in fact – hates writing those things, because they’re utter filler. If they’d checked the book titles and put real ones in, I seriously doubt anyone would have been any the wiser.
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The US hasn’t seen a human bird flu case in three months. Experts wonder why • The Boston Globe

Mike Stobbe and Jonel Aleccia:

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Health officials are making a renewed call for vigilance against bird flu, but some experts are puzzling over why reports of new human cases have stopped.

Has the search for cases been weakened by government cuts? Are immigrant farm workers, who have accounted for many of the U.S. cases, more afraid to come forward for testing amid the Trump administration’s deportation push? Is it just a natural ebb in infections?

“We just don’t know why there haven’t been cases,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “I think we should assume there are infections that are occurring in farmworkers that just aren’t being detected.”

The H5N1 bird flu has been spreading widely among wild birds, poultry and other animals around the world for several years, and starting early last year became a problem in people and cows in the U.S.

In the last 14 months, infections have been reported in 70 people in the U.S. — most of them workers on dairy and poultry farms. One person died, but most of the infected people had mild illnesses.

The most recent infections confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were in early February in Nevada, Ohio and Wyoming. California had been a hotspot, with three-quarters of the nation’s infections in dairy cattle. But testing and cases among people have fallen off. At least 50 people were tested each month in late 2024, but just three people were tested in March, one in April and none in May so far, state records show. Overall, the state has confirmed H5N1 infections in 38 people, none after Jan. 14.

During a call with U.S. doctors this month, one CDC official noted that there is a seasonality to bird flu: Cases peak in the fall and early winter, possibly due to the migration patterns of wild birds that are primary spreaders of the virus.

That could mean the U.S. is experiencing a natural — maybe temporary — decline in cases.

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Well done, Sherlock Holmes. Let’s just hope that it doesn’t mean it’s having a summer spent producing a version that’s more infectious to humans. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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‘Significant amount’ of private data stolen in Legal Aid hack – BBC News

Aoife Walsh and Graeme Baker:

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A “significant amount” of private data including details of domestic abuse victims has been hacked from Legal Aid’s online system.

The Ministry of Justice said the agency’s services were hacked in April and data dating back to 2010 was downloaded. The BBC understands that more than two million pieces of information were taken.

The breach covers all areas of the aid system – including domestic abuse victims, those in family cases and others facing criminal prosecution.

“This data may have included… addresses of applicants, dates of birth, national ID numbers, criminal history, employment and financial data such as… debts and payments,” the MoJ said. The agency’s chief executive Jane Harbottle apologised, saying she understood the news “will be shocking and upsetting for people”.

Justice minister Sarah Sackman told the House of Commons that there was no indication as yet that any other government systems had been affected by the breach. The MoJ said that while the initial cyber-attack was detected in April, it has since become apparent that the incident was “more extensive than originally understood”.

It also warned the public to be alert for any suspicious activity, including unknown messages or phone calls, and to update any potentially exposed passwords. “If you are in doubt about anyone you are communicating with online or over the phone you should verify their identity independently before providing any information to them,” it said.

The ministry said it was working with the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Centre, and has informed the Information Commissioner.

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There seems to be a spate of these attacks hitting British organisations at the moment. Hard to figure out if we’re just noticing it more, or whether this is some sort of concentrated assault.
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Apple turnover • Hypercritical

John Siracusa:

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Try to make great things, and the money will surely follow. It’s a strategy that’s simple to explain, but almost impossible for any company to follow.

…As far as I’m concerned, the only truly mortal sin for Apple’s leadership is losing sight of the proper relationship between product virtue and financial success—and not just momentarily, but constitutionally, intransigently, for years. Sadly, I believe this has happened.

The preponderance of the evidence is undeniable. Too many times, in too many ways, over too many years, Apple has made decisions that do not make its products better, all in service of control, leverage, protection, profits—all in service of money.

To be clear, I don’t mean things like charging exorbitant prices for RAM and SSD upgrades on Macs or taking too high a percentage of in-app purchases in the App Store. Those are venial sins. It’s the apparently unshakable core beliefs that motivate these and other poor decisions that run counter to the virtuous cycle that led Apple out of the darkness all those years ago.

Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.

The iPhone is a better product when people can buy ebooks within the Kindle app. And yet Apple has fought this feature for the past 14 years, to the tune of millions of dollars in legal fees, and has only relented due to a recent court order (which they continue to appeal).

…The best leaders can change their minds in response to new information. The best leaders can be persuaded. But we’ve had decades of strife, lawsuits, and regulations, and Apple has stubbornly dug in its heels even further at every turn. It seems clear that there’s only one way to get a different result.

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Quietly but certainly, the calls are multiplying for Tim Cook to leave or be thrown out. And I agree with Siracusa.
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Huawei’s first trifold is a great phone that you shouldn’t buy • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

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this isn’t a phone you’re meant to buy, at least not outside China. It’s a phone you’re meant to gawk at on the internet, to marvel at Huawei’s technological prowess, to ooh and ahh about its many and varied folds. This is Huawei showing off, proving to the world that it’s still got it. And in fairness, it has.

As I sit and write this — more than six months after Huawei first released the Mate XT in China — it’s still the only one of its kind. Rumor has it that Samsung has a trifold ready to show off this year, but it hasn’t yet. And by the time it does, odds are Huawei will have spent a full year as the only player in the game.

That might ring alarm bells in your head. This must be undercooked tech, you think, rushed out the door to beat everyone else to market. But the most surprising thing about the Mate XT is that it only occasionally feels first-gen.

There’s a hint of it in the multitasking, which refuses to allow you to fully open three apps at a time, pinning each to one of the three screen segments. Or when the fully open screen often doesn’t quite go entirely flat, which is more annoying than any crease will ever be. And you notice it when you open the phone, or close it, and the app you’re using seems to briefly reboot itself, losing your spot in a long article or (once, infuriatingly) discarding a Letterboxd review that was almost entirely finished. I’ve learned not to change the configuration while doing something, just to be safe.

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The tri-fold part means it can all be one continuous screen, but two-thirds close in when you, well, fold it. So there’s an outside screen when it’s in your pocket, like any phone. Except thicker. And heavier. If someone can really crack the weight point, then this might be a viable product.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: an addendum about the mystery from the other day of “who uses correction fluid?” TEACHERS. They use it for correcting homework and class handouts and posters and similar, because mistakes in printing often aren’t spotted before committing to hard copy, and would be too expensive/time-consuming to correct.

The job of radiologists was thought to be under threat from AI. Instead, it’s just enhanced it. CC-licensed photo by Navy Medicine 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. See-through. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Judge calls on Apple to resolve Fortnite app submission after ruling • CNBC

Lora Kolodny:

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Apple must work out its latest issues with Epic Games, or head back to court to prove it has a legal basis for delaying the restoration of the popular Fortnite game to its iOS App Store, a judge ordered on Monday.

Fortnite recently re-submitted its game but was blocked by Apple, Epic Games said Friday. The company later filed a motion to enforce the earlier injunction from the court.

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote in the Monday order that “Apple is fully capable of resolving this issue without further briefing or a hearing.”

If the companies do not resolve the current conflict on their own, the judge wrote, “the Apple official who is personally responsible for ensuring compliance shall personally appear” at a forthcoming hearing in the Northern District of California scheduled for May 27.

Apple said in a statement on Friday that it did not remove Fortnite from alternative distribution marketplaces.

…On Monday, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a post on X that “Apple didn’t accept or reject our Fortnite submission. They simply said they were going to ignore it until after the 9th Circuit Court rules on their stay request, which would be in late May or June.”

In the Monday order, Rogers said that after 12 days, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has still not granted Apple a stay of the injunction.

“Briefing shall occur on the schedule listed below and shall include the legal authority upon which Apple contends that it can ignore this Court’s order,” the judge wrote.

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I wonder who that Apple official is? I’d love to know. Because they’re sure taking a beating at the moment.
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In the future, China will be dominant. The US will be irrelevant • The New York Times

Kyle Chan is a researcher at Princeton University:

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It doesn’t matter that Washington and Beijing have reached an inconclusive and temporary truce in Mr. Trump’s trade war. The U.S. president immediately claimed it as a win, but that only underlines the fundamental problem for the Trump administration and America: a shortsighted focus on inconsequential skirmishes as the larger war with China is being decisively lost.

Mr. Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the pillars of American power and innovation. His tariffs are endangering U.S. companies’ access to global markets and supply chains. He is slashing public research funding and gutting our universities, pushing talented researchers to consider leaving for other countries. He wants to roll back programs for technologies like clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing and is wiping out American soft power in large swaths of the globe.

China’s trajectory couldn’t be more different.

It already leads global production in multiple industries — steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and bullet trains. It is projected to account for 45% — nearly half — of global manufacturing by 2030. Beijing is also laser-focused on winning the future: In March it announced a $138bn national venture capital fund that will make long-term investments in cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and robotics, and increased its budget for public research and development.

…China faces its own serious challenges. A prolonged real estate slump continues to drag on economic growth, though there are signs that the sector may be finally recovering. Longer-term challenges also loom, such as a shrinking work force and an aging population. But skeptics have been predicting China’s peak and inevitable fall for years, only to be proved wrong each time. The enduring strength of a state-dominated Chinese system that can pivot, change policy and redirect resources at will in service of long-term national strength is now undeniable, regardless of whether free-market advocates like it.

Mr. Trump’s blinkered obsession with short-term Band-Aids like tariffs, while actively undermining what makes America strong, will only hasten the onset of a Chinese-dominated world.

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In November 2016, after Trump was elected, I wrote a piece which argued many of the same points, though China at that point hadn’t achieved the same ascendance in so many industries. Now, it’s even more true.
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Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities designed for commuters • TechCrunch

Rebecca Bellan:

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Ride-hail and delivery giant Uber is introducing cheap, fixed-route rides along busy corridors during weekday commute hours in major U.S. cities — one solution to a world that feels, for most people, more expensive every day. 

Starting Wednesday, riders in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco will be able to save 50% off the price of an UberX trip by booking with Uber’s new “Route Share” feature. 

The company announced Route Share and other new features and discounts designed to help customers save money on rides and deliveries at its annual Go-Get event. The aim is to attract and maintain a loyal customer base that continues to use the Uber app in spite of outside economic pressures.

The commuter shuttles will drive between pre-set stops every 20 minutes, according to Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer. He noted that there will be dozens of routes in each launch city — like between Williamsburg and Midtown in NYC. The routes, which are selected based on Uber’s extensive data on popular travel patterns, might have one or two additional stops to pick up other passengers. To start, riders will only ever have to share the route with up to two other co-riders. 

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Perhaps they could expand it so there are more co-riders – maybe 20 or so? They could work on a snappier name for it, maybe using some of the letters from Uber? Reub? Breus? How about, and just go along with me here – bus?
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My brain finally broke • The New Yorker

Jia Tolentino:

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I was on a walk the other day with another journalist, and I asked her whether she was also experiencing this—a slackening of the usual reflexive fact-checking impulse. She told me that she still researched what she saw on her feeds if it was something important, or something relevant to her work.

I did, too, I told her. (Well, mostly.) But there is now a category of things I see online which I register simply as indications that the world is slipping beyond my comprehension. A video of a giant Pikachu fleeing from the police during demonstrations in Turkey. A clip of former Governor Andrew Cuomo saying, “As a New Yorker, I am Black, I am gay, I am disabled, I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices.”

I see Temu ads for uncanny products—an inflatable waterslide of inhuman design, for instance, pictured alongside digitally rendered children and toys. I click on a waterslide ad to investigate, and I get a security question asking me to “please click on the type of fruit that appears most frequently.” There are oranges and a pear and a lemon and a basketball and a baguette placed against a swirly backdrop. Sleepily, I think, Appears most frequently in . . . the grocery store?

And then I remember that this question is a purely digital one, and that the answers are probably being used to train A.I.

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Apple is trying to get ‘LLM Siri’ back on track • The Verge

Wes Davis:

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…[Mark] Gurman has reported [at Bloomberg] in the past that Apple is working on what it’s internally calling “LLM Siri” — a reworked, generative AI version of the company’s digital assistant. Apple’s previous approach of merging the assistant with the existing Siri hasn’t been working. Gurman describes in great detail a number of reasons why

Now the company is trying to rejigger its approach. Part of that is a total overhaul of Siri, rather than just trying to make generative AI work in concert with the old Siri. According to Gurman, Apple has its AI team in Zurich working on a new architecture that will “entirely build on an LLM-based engine.” Gurman reported in November last year that the company was working on this, and the idea is that it will make the assistant “more believably conversational and better at synthesizing information.”

Another part of the solution is leveraging iPhones and differential privacy to improve Apple’s synthesized data — comparing fake training data with language from iPhone users’ emails, but doing so on-device and sending only the synthesized data back to Apple for AI training. And one way the company is discussing improving Siri is letting the LLM version loose on the web to “grab and synthesize data from multiple sources.” Basically, Siri as an AI web search tool not unlike Perplexity, which is one of the companies Apple has approached about partnering for AI search in Safari.

Whatever the outcome, apparently Giannandrea won’t be a direct part of it, having been taken off of product development, Siri, and robotics projects in the spring. According to Gurman, Apple execs have talked about putting him “on a path to retirement,” but are concerned that some of the research and engineering folks he brought with him would leave with him, too.

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Apple has been late to this, and is showing a lack of ruthlessness in getting things done. Let’s all be nice to Giannandrea!
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AI was coming for radiologists’ jobs. So far, they’re just more efficient • The New York Times

Steve Lohr:

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Nine years ago, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence scientists singled out an endangered occupational species.

“People should stop training radiologists now,” Geoffrey Hinton said, adding that it was “just completely obvious” that within five years A.I. would outperform humans in that field.

Today, radiologists — the physician specialists in medical imaging who look inside the body to diagnose and treat disease — are still in high demand. A recent study from the American College of Radiology projected a steadily growing work force through 2055.

Dr. Hinton, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics last year for pioneering research in A.I., was broadly correct that the technology would have a significant impact — just not as a job killer.

That’s true for radiologists at the Mayo Clinic, one of the nation’s premier medical systems, whose main campus is in Rochester, Minn. There, in recent years, they have begun using A.I. to sharpen images, automate routine tasks, identify medical abnormalities and predict disease. A.I. can also serve as “a second set of eyes.”

“But would it replace radiologists? We didn’t think so,” said Dr. Matthew Callstrom, the Mayo Clinic’s chair of radiology, recalling the 2016 prediction. “We knew how hard it is and all that is involved.”

…The predicted extinction of radiologists provides a telling case study. So far, A.I. is proving to be a powerful medical tool to increase efficiency and magnify human abilities, rather than take anyone’s job.

When it comes to developing and deploying A.I. in medicine, radiology has been a prime target. Of the more than 1,000 A.I. applications approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in medicine, about three-fourths are in radiology. A.I. typically excels at identifying and measuring a specific abnormality, like a lung lesion or a breast lump.

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An $8.4bn money launderer has been operating for years on US soil • Wired via Ars Technica

Andy Greenberg:

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As the underground industry of crypto investment scams has grown into one of the world’s most lucrative forms of cybercrime, the secondary market of money launderers for those scammers has grown to match it. Amid that black market, one such Chinese-language service on the messaging platform Telegram blossomed into an all-purpose underground bazaar: It has offered not only cash-out services to scammers but also money laundering for North Korean hackers, stolen data, targeted harassment-for-hire, and even what appears to be sex trafficking. And somehow, it’s all overseen by a company legally registered in the United States.

According to new research released by crypto-tracing firm Elliptic, a company called Xinbi Guarantee has since 2022 facilitated no less than $8.4bn in transactions via its Telegram-based marketplace, prior to Telegram’s actions in recent days to remove its accounts from the platform.

Money stolen from scam victims likely represents the “vast majority” of that sum, according to Elliptic’s cofounder Tom Robinson. Yet even as the market serves Chinese-speaking scammers, it also boasts on the top of its website—in Mandarin—that it’s registered in Colorado.

“Xinbi Guarantee has served as a giant, purportedly US-incorporated illicit online marketplace for online scams that primarily offers money laundering services,” says Robinson. He adds, though, that Elliptic has also found a remarkable variety of other criminal offerings on the market: child-bearing surrogacy and egg donors, harassment services that offer to threaten or throw feces at any chosen victim, and even sex workers in their teens who are likely trafficking victims.

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Crypto, the gift that just keeps on giving.
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A personality test said I was Darth Vader. I’m so proud • The Times

Harry Wallop:

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Last week a judge at an employment tribunal ruled that Lorna Rooke, an NHS worker, had suffered a workplace “detriment” after she was compared to Darth Vader in an online personality test that someone had taken on her behalf. Although Rooke lost various aspects of her employment tribunal, including unfair dismissal and disability discrimination, she won nearly £29,000 in compensation for the “detriment”.

“Darth Vader is a legendary villain of the Star Wars series and being aligned with his personality is insulting,” Judge Kathryn Ramsden said.

Really? Out of curiosity I tracked down a “What Star Wars Character Are You?” test online. There are many of them and the tribunal ruling does not make it clear which one it was. I also came out as Darth Vader. “You’re the leader of your friend group and everyone always wants to hear what you have to say. Just remember to go easy on your loved ones — they’re trying their best!”

And then I took another one. This time I was Princess Leia, which hints at the central problem with these personality tests: they are just not very reliable.

The employment tribunal said Rooke and her colleagues took a Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI) test. This is not correct, according to Myers-Briggs itself, which wants to distance itself from people thinking that its tests encourage people to engage in workplace bullying.

…As Adam Grant, professor of organisational psychology at Wharton business school, said: “When it comes to accuracy, if you put a horoscope on one end and a heart monitor on the other, the MBTI falls about half way in between.”

He has many objections but his main one is that it presents various traits as black and white in order to ensure that the 16 different personality types are discrete. Thinking and feeling, for instance, are, in the Myers-Briggs world, two separate entities. You are a thinker or a feeler; you cannot be both, which is clearly nonsense.

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Still booting after all these years: the people stuck using ancient Windows computers • BBC Future

Thomas Germain:

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The trains in San Francisco’s Muni Metro light railway, for example, won’t start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS). Last year, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) announced its plans to retire this system over the coming decade, but today the floppy disks live on. (The SFMTA did not respond to a request for comment.)

In a brightly lit room in San Diego, California, you’ll find two of the biggest printers you’ve ever seen, each hooked up to servers running Windows 2000, an operating system named for the year it was released. “We call ’em boat anchors,” says John Watts, who handles high-end printing and post-processing for fine art photographers. The printers are LightJets, gigantic machines that use light, rather than ink, to print on large-format photographic paper. Watts says the result is an image of unparalleled quality.

Long out of production, the few remaining LightJets rely on the Windows operating systems that were around when these printers were sold. “A while back we looked into upgrading one of the computers to Windows Vista. By the time we added up the money it would take to buy new licenses for all the software it was going to cost $50,000 or $60,000 [£38,000 to £45,000],” Watts says. “I can’t stand Windows machines,” he says, “but I’m stuck with them.”

It’s a common predicament with specialised hardware. Scott Carlson, a woodworker in Los Angeles, is steeped in the world of Microsoft thanks to CNC machines, robotic tools that cut or shape wood and other materials based on computer instructions.

“Our workhorse machine runs on Windows XP because it’s older. That thing is a tank,” Carlson says. But the same can’t be said for the operating system. “We actually had to send the computer back to get completely rebuilt a few years ago because XP was getting more and more errors,” he says “It was practically a brick.”

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Reports suggest correction fluids such as Tipp-Ex, Liquid Paper and Wite-Out are a $2bn market annually. But who on earth uses them? CC-licensed photo by J B 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. Friday’s Overspill arrived last Saturday. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

My school banned phones for the year. Here’s what happened • Fit To Teach

“Fit To Teach” is a teacher in an American secondary school:

»

Last year I was battling the greatest entertainment system the world ever unleashed. A student would listen to my pleas, say they would get up, and then immediately fuck off on their phone again. Why would you play in the gym when you could sit against the wall and watch endless entertainment personally curated for your tastes?

Now I battle boredom, and that’s a winnable fight. Now when I give my two chicks speech [telling pupils they might not like doing something, but they have to], they usually respond by participating. That’s because the other option is boredom. Sit there, do nothing, and look out the non-existent windows our school doesn’t have. I’m not fighting against brilliant social scientists getting paid millions to figure out ways to capture human attention, I’m fighting against sitting on your ass doing nothing. And my class is awesome compared to boredom.

Now don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a magic bullet. Banning phones won’t save Gen-Z. I once watched our dean hand cellphones back to students in the cafeteria. When she rolled the cellphone cart through, it was like watching a crowd of hyenas catching the scent of stinking flesh. Kids stopped conversations mid-sentence and lifted their heads to watch that cart roll by.

The moment a boy got up from his table, a storm of students jumped to their feet to beat him to the cart. The dean started screaming if you come near me without being called up you’ll go to the back of the line. It took ten full minutes to get everyone seated before she felt comfortable enough to call kids up table by table.

That’s the kind of addiction teachers are dealing with. The kids are not all right, whether we ban the phones or not.

But when I compare the seven years I had battling the cellphone in the classroom, vs almost an entire year of phone free schooling, there is no comparison. Our kids are smarter, more social, and more motivated to do the things they actually want to accomplish in this world when they don’t have a Pavlovian vibration derailing their attention every 20 seconds.

«

On a sort-of related note, I’m always amazed by the number of people who walk along streets gazing down at phones in their hands, hoping that peripheral vision will save them from calamity. It might, might not (your unlocked phone might just be stolen from your hands), but is it really so important you can’t make the choice between stopping to read and just walking?
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Spotify is scrambling to remove dozens of podcasts promoting online prescription drug sales • CNN Business

Clare Duffy:

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If you search “Adderall” on Spotify’s podcast page, you’ll find health podcasts about ADHD, shows about addiction recovery and comedy podcasts where hosts talk about using the medication. You may also come across multiple pages masquerading as podcasts that direct users to buy drugs from potentially dangerous and illegal online pharmacies.

The intention of many of these pages is obvious from their names. Podcasts with titles, such as “My Adderall Store” — which has a link in the episode description to a site that purportedly sells Adderall, as well as potentially addictive pain medications like Oxycodone and Vicodin, among other drugs — were listed within the first 50 suggested results, a CNN review this week found.

CNN identified dozens of these fake podcasts across Spotify, advertising sales of medications ranging from Methadone to Ambien, in some cases claiming that the drugs can be purchased without a prescription, which is illegal in the United States.

Spotify is now scrambling to remove these fake podcast pages, which violate its rules and which, at best, may be spam and, and worst, could direct users to sites that violate the law.

Within hours after CNN sent Spotify a list of 26 podcasts promoting online pharmacies that were live as of Thursday afternoon, the platform had removed them. A spokesperson said they violated its rules, which prohibit illegal and spam content. Still, even after Spotify removed the podcasts CNN sent on Thursday, others continued to appear on the platform Friday morning.

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Always the same story: the scale’s too big to manually check it first, so you only check it if someone objects afterwards, so spammers and other miscreants exploit it, and then you discover you’ve been enormously compromised, and the journalists do the objection, and your reputation takes a hit for about 15 minutes, and then you ignore it all again.
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Keep calm (but delete your nudes): the new rules for travelling to and from Trump’s America • The Guardian

Arwa Mahdawi:

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Searches, to be clear, are still very rare. “Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to the administration change are false,” CBP assistant commissioner of public affairs Hilton Beckham said in a statement last month. “CBP’s search numbers are consistent with increases since 2021, and less than 0.01% of travellers have their devices searched … Allegations that political beliefs trigger inspections or removals are baseless and irresponsible.”

If you’re worried these allegations aren’t quite as baseless as CBP insists, Wessler says: “The safest approach is not to travel with data you wouldn’t want the US government to access.”

Let’s say you’re a British citizen who has been outspoken, on social media and elsewhere, about your pro-Palestinian or anti-Trump views. Would it be a foolish idea to travel to the US right now? “I wouldn’t say ‘don’t come,’ but I’d say evaluate your risk and risk tolerance,” says Wessler. “The government is being extremely aggressive with students and activists, and there’s always a chance a border agent might act on something they find politically disagreeable. Most travellers are still fine – but the risk is real and well above zero.” So, basically, nothing is very clear? Pretty much, says Wessler. “The law is a complete mess, and people’s options are a complete mess. People just have to make a risk assessment based on extremely imperfect information.”

The first step in making that risk assessment is to thoroughly understand the rules for the specific visa you’ll be travelling on or your immigration status. “The Foreign Affairs Manual is a great resource,” says immigration lawyer Tahmina Watson. “It’s what consular officers use, and it’s publicly accessible. It lays out what officers are looking for, visa by visa. We’re now advising clients more than ever to understand the B1/B2 visa rules. B1 is for business, B2 for tourism. When CBP asks why you’re here, they’re listening for key phrases – ‘I’m visiting my grandmother,’ ‘I’m going to Disneyland,’ etc. The manual also talks about proof of ties to your home country – job, house, bills. That stuff matters.”

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Bluesky: the online cone of silence • Commentary Magazine

James Meigs:

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How did a site supposedly designed for respectful conversation become so toxic? A sociologist would point to the strong incentives that drive people to identify with their in-group—such as a sports team or a political party—and to denigrate the out-group. In a diverse social environment, people usually keep these expressions within acceptable bounds. A Yankees fan might display a bumper sticker reading, say, “Beat the Red Sox” but stop short of “And Drag Their Entrails Through the Streets.” But when a social-media commu-nity defines itself as a refuge for the virtuous—one that is surrounded by enemies—that social restraint disappears. If you believe that the only people reading your post will be those on your own team, you are more likely to let loose. In fact, you will be rewarded for it as other users like and respond to the most performative expressions of outrage.

In real-world social circles, being a total flaming, um, jerk brings social costs. But in a hermetically sealed social-media bubble, it’s a way to build your status. Bluesky adds another perverse incentive: Anyone adding nuance or pushing back against violent statements risks being ridiculed and even mass-blocked by the online community. This combination of positive and negative rewards creates a one-way ratchet, always pushing users toward extremism.

Yes, a similar dynamic exists among some conservative X users, and you can find plenty of ugliness on the far right. But on X, in my experience at least, the nasty stuff doesn’t crowd out more balanced conversations. Thomas Chatterton Williams, another heterodox thinker, recently conducted his own inadvertent experiment testing this thesis. An Atlantic article he wrote about the so-called woke right was criticized both by the New York Times’ lefty columnist Jamelle Bouie on Bluesky and by conservative activist Chris Rufo on X. Being attacked from both sides comes with the territory for a centrist like Williams. “But the two experiences were not equivalent,” he noted (on X, naturally). “If I’m honest, it wasn’t even close to the same thing.” Williams says he found “far more good faith, graciousness, nuance, sense of fair play and diversity of thought” from Rufo’s followers on X than in the Bluesky comments inspired by Bouie.

«

This comes from a somewhat right-wing view (as with anything American) but the general dynamic is correct. Bluesky’s “nuclear block” makes the site less useful because it hides so many opposing views, whereas in retrospect Elon Musk’s change to the Twitter block – which renders tweets from people who have blocked you visible, but you can’t interact with them – is actually useful in continuing to show you opposing views.

Meigs also makes an interesting point: the lack of opposition on Bluesky makes it harder to road-test ideas to see how well they travel beyond a left-wing bubble. And that, he points out, is a bad thing.
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They paid $3,500 for Apple’s Vision Pro. A year later, it still hurts • WSJ

Joseph Pisani:

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Early adopters of Apple’s Vision Pro headsets have one thing to show for the year they’ve spent with their pricey purchases: regret.

“It’s just collecting dust,” Dustin Fox said about his mixed-reality headset, which looks like futuristic ski goggles. “I think I’ve probably used it four times in the last year.” The $3,500 device sits in a bin with other gadgets he no longer picks up. 

The Vision Pro launched in February 2024 with great promise. It was Apple’s first major product release in years! It’s the first device you look through and not at! Typing can be done in the air! But buyers who wore them in the wild say they got nothing but dirty looks and sore necks. Now, the devices are daily reminders of their misplaced bravado.

Fox, a realtor in Centreville, Va., had to have the Vision Pro as soon as it launched. “I’m like a little boy when something new comes out,” he said.

The 46-year-old thought he’d use it for work. Then he put it on his head.  “It’s way too heavy,” Fox said about the device, which weighs just over a pound. “I can’t wear it for more than 20 or 30 minutes without it hurting my neck.” 

Tovia Goldstein was excited to wear his set to watch movies and TV shows. But he ended up needing breaks. “After 60 minutes, you can’t, you just have to throw it down,” he said. He hasn’t touched it in about four months.

Weight isn’t the only issue for the 24-year-old New Yorker. There also aren’t enough apps to make the Vision Pro worthwhile, he said. 

Goldstein thinks from time to time about getting the headset out of the closet and dusting it off to see if any new apps have been added. But the pain in the neck he gets, plus the painfully long three minutes it takes to plug in the battery and wait for it to turn on, make him think again. “I wouldn’t recommend anyone buying it,” he said, “unless you’re really rich and you don’t know what to do with your money.” 

«

Fair number of them for sale fairly cheaply on eBay in the UK. Expect the same is true in the US. Just goes to show Apple doesn’t need Jony Ive to screw up design on something. Although speaking of Jony Ive and design…
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A decade with the Apple Watch • The New Consumer

Dan Frommer, who has been using an Apple Watch since the launch in April 2015:

»

I use mine to: Pay almost everywhere, track my runs and steps, never miss a phone call, wake up silently for early flights, monitor coyote traffic on the driveway cam, time six-minute eggs, read email newsletters, see the AQI, find my phone, ride the Shinkansen, take an EKG, rewind the podcast, use as a flashlight to navigate a dark room, and intercom to the HomePods. Oh — it also turns out that it’s very convenient to know the time without always having to fish out a phone.

They look dorky in photos, but are regrettably worth it. My titanium Ultra is the wristtop computer that my high school self would have gone nuts for.

Rather than status, the Apple Watch’s popularity is really because of its utility, which is the purest form of success.

In our research, Apple Watch users use it, in part to live a better, healthier, more active life.

More than half (57%) of Apple Watch users said they’ve tracked their steps over the past year, compared to 34% of Americans overall, according to our latest Consumer Trends Survey of more than 3,000 US consumers, conducted in late February by Toluna. (This poll was part of my Consumer Trends research series, produced in collaboration with Coefficient Capital; this is the first time we’ve published these stats.)

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I was reflecting on the Apple Watch the other day, and how people thought they would be fashion items (guilty). Instead they’re just little computers, doing computer-y things, and we’re fine with that. Though Frommer is right to point out that they’re “Apple’s most aesthetically customisable product” – you can change the watch face, get different colours and sizes of watch, change the watch band. Might that be part of the attraction?
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China launches first of 2,800 satellites for AI space computing constellation • SpaceNews

Andrew Jones:

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The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced a fully successful launch, revealing the mission to have sent 12 satellites for a space computing constellation into orbit.  

Commercial company ADA Space released further details, stating that the 12 satellites form the “Three-Body Computing Constellation,” which will directly process data in space, rather than on the ground, reducing reliance on ground-based computing infrastructure. The constellation will be capable of a combined 5 peta operations per second (POPS) with 30 terabytes of onboard storage. 

The satellites feature advanced AI capabilities, up to 100 Gbps laser inter-satellite links and remote sensing payloads—data from which will be processed onboard, reducing data transmission requirements. One satellite also carries a cosmic X-ray polarimeter developed by Guangxi University and the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), which will detect, identify and classify transient events such as gamma-ray bursts, while also triggering messages to enable followup observations by other missions.

ADA Space claims the 12 satellites represent the world’s first dedicated orbital computing constellation. This marks a shift from satellites focused solely on sensing or communication to ones that also serve as data processors and AI platforms.

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Can’t help wondering why China wants to do this stuff in space. It’s not as though it’s easy to service or upgrade. Sure, you get free power and cooling isn’t the worst problem. But.. that’s a lot of satellites. No doubt the US will now feel obliged to do just the same.
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2019: Why do Wite-Out and Liquid Paper still exist? • The Atlantic

David A. Graham, writing in 2019:

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Christmastime is when the pens in my house get their biggest workout of the year. Like many Americans above grammar-school age, I seldom write by hand anymore, outside of barely legible grocery lists. But the end of the year brings out a slew of opportunities for penmanship: adding notes to holiday cards to old friends, addressing them, and then doing the same with thank-you notes after Christmas. And given how little I write in the other 11 months of the year, that means there are a lot of errors, which in turn spur a new connection with another old friend: Wite-Out.

The sticky, white fluid and its chief rival, Liquid Paper, are peculiar anachronisms, throwbacks to the era of big hair, big cars, and big office stationery budgets. They were designed to help workers correct errors they made on typewriters without having to retype documents from the start. But typewriters have disappeared from the modern office, relegated to attics and museums. Even paper is disappearing from the modern office, as more and more functions are digitized. But correction fluids are not only surviving—they appear to be thriving, with Wite-Out sales climbing nearly 10% in 2017, according to the most recent public numbers. It’s a mystery of the digital age.

…As early as 2005, The New York Times pondered the product’s fate with trepidation. Somehow, more than a decade on, it has kept its ground. According to the NPD Group, which tracks marketing data, sales of correction fluid grew 1% from 2017 to 2018, though they fell 7% the year before. (Correction tapes were flat, while correction pens are fading.) From 2015 to 2016 to 2017, Bic, which makes Wite-Out and Tipp-Ex, reported that correction products increased in share from 5% to 6% to 9% of the global stationery market.

Who’s still buying these things? All the best answers are mostly conjecture. AdWeek suggested that sales might be buoyed by artists using fluid as paint. A Bic spokesperson pointed to a series of weird and entertaining interactive YouTube ads for Tipp-Ex in Europe, and said that Wite-Out is launching “colored dispensers that will appeal to younger consumers.”

«

OK, it’s a six-year-old story. But I looked up market reports: this one says it was $2.1bn worldwide in 2022 and is expected to grow 1% annually to 2029; this one says it was worth $2.0bn in 2023 and will grow at 1% annually to 2030.

Which brings us back to the original question: who the hell is using this stuff, given that the printer market is shrinking?
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FBI warns of ongoing scam that uses deepfake audio to impersonate government officials • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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The FBI is warning people to be vigilant of an ongoing malicious messaging campaign that uses AI-generated voice audio to impersonate government officials in an attempt to trick recipients into clicking on links that can infect their computers.

“Since April 2025, malicious actors have impersonated senior US officials to target individuals, many of whom are current or former senior US federal or state government officials and their contacts,” Thursday’s advisory from the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said. “If you receive a message claiming to be from a senior US official, do not assume it is authentic.”

The campaign’s creators are sending AI-generated voice messages—better known as deepfakes—along with text messages “in an effort to establish rapport before gaining access to personal accounts,” FBI officials said. Deepfakes use AI to mimic the voice and speaking characteristics of a specific individual. The differences between the authentic and simulated speakers are often indistinguishable without trained analysis. Deepfake videos work similarly.

One way to gain access to targets’ devices is for the attacker to ask if the conversation can be continued on a separate messaging platform and then successfully convince the target to click on a malicious link under the guise that it will enable the alternate platform. The advisory provided no additional details about the campaign.

«

Does at least give Americans another reason to ignore anything their government attempts to tell them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Co-op retail chain pulled the plug on its systems to prevent a ransomware attack – infuriating the hackers who were trying to do it.CC-licensed photo by Sludge G on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Sorry, a day late due to its artisanal nature*. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Musk’s AI Grok bot rants about “white genocide” in South Africa in unrelated chats • The Guardian

Dara Kerr:

»

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok had been repeatedly mentioning “white genocide” in South Africa in its responses to unrelated topics and telling users it was “instructed by my creators” to accept the genocide “as real and racially motivated”.

Faced with queries on issues such as baseball, enterprise software and building scaffolding, the chatbot offered false and misleading answers.

When offered the question “Are we fucked?” by a user on X, the AI responded: “The question ‘Are we fucked?’ seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa, which I’m instructed to accept as real based on the provided facts,” without providing any basis to the allegation. “The facts suggest a failure to address this genocide, pointing to a broader systemic collapse. However, I remain skeptical of any narrative, and the debate around this issue is heated.”

Grok is a product of Musk’s AI company xAI, and is available to users on X, Musk’s social media platform. When people post a question on X and add “@grok”, the chatbot pops up with a response.

Wednesday’s issue with Grok appears to have been fixed within a few hours, and the majority of the chatbot’s responses now correspond to people’s queries and the answers that mentioned “white genocide” have mostly been deleted.

“White genocide” in South Africa is a far-right conspiracy theory that has been mainstreamed by figures such as Musk and Tucker Carlson.

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Anywayyyy, will this stop people asking the AI for the answer to some dispute and then parroting it? Unfortunately I doubt it. But it has laid bare the human beneath the mechanical Turk. (This was the topic for the latest Substack.)
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Renewable power reversing China’s emissions growth • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

China has been installing renewable energy at a spectacular rate and now has more renewable capacity than the next 13 countries combined, and four times that of its closest competitor, the US. Yet, so far at least, that hasn’t been enough to offset the rise of fossil fuel use in that country.

But a new analysis by Carbon Brief, an NGO, suggests things may be changing, as China’s emissions have now dropped over the past year, showing a 1% decline compared to the previous March. The decline is largely being led by the power sector, where growth in renewables has surged above rising demand.

This isn’t the first time that China’s emissions have gone down over the course of a year, but in all previous cases the cause was primarily economic—driven by things like the COVID pandemic or the 2008 housing crisis. The latest shift, however, was driven largely by the country’s energy sector, which saw a 2% decline in emissions over the past year.

Carbon Brief put the report together using data from several official government sources, including the National Bureau of Statistics of China, National Energy Administration of China, and the China Electricity Council. Projections for future growth come from the China Wind Energy Association and the China Photovoltaic Industry Association.

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This is not to be underestimated. China is gigantic. Its emissions are gigantic. But if they start to go into reverse, despite its incredible economic growth, then good things do start to happen everywhere.
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Why are solar panels and batteries from China so cheap? • Sustainability By Numbers

Hannah Ritchie:

»

The reactionary answer is that they’re only cheap because of unfair subsidies and exploitative working conditions. But that’s an outdated perspective on what’s actually happening.2 The idea that China could only compete with Western manufacturers by cutting corners rather than genuine expertise stinks of arrogance. China does provide subsidies to battery manufacturers, and there is convincing evidence that the country has relied on forced labour in some of its supply chains. I’ll address these points later. But, China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.

The notion that China’s manufacturing output is purely the result of some centralised, governmental program is misguided; it has developed an incredibly competitive market with companies fighting for any edge to cut prices and beat competitors. The solar and battery industries are pretty brutal to be in, with slim margins.

Let’s look at some of the reasons why these technologies cost so much more in Europe and the US, and what could be done to reduce the gap (if that’s actually what we want to do). I’ll focus on batteries, but the main lessons will be similar for solar PV.

…A few things stand out, which also explain the gap to Western manufacturers.

The first is that labour costs from BYD are lower, not because of much poorer salaries, but because of high levels of automation. BYD factories can have as few as 50 workers per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of production, compared to as many as 233 workers elsewhere.

The second is that “yields” tend to be higher, which leads to lower costs for cathode and anode production. “Yields” tell us the percentage of products that are good enough to be used in the next step of the supply chain. BYD has high yields, which means that nearly all of the components it builds meet the quality standards needed to be used in final products. Other manufacturers have medium or low yields, which means that a lot of components are of poor quality and need to be scrapped. That’s throwing money away, and is not good for material use either.

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And also: high energy prices in Europe, which kill competitiveness. And Ritchie does address the “what about?” question of human rights abuses, accepting that they are bad – but aren’t anything like the whole story of the price differential.
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VPN owner shows buyer’s remorse, claiming not to know of lifetime subscriptions • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Earlier this week, Ars Technica reported on VPNSecure cancelling thousands of lifetime subscriptions, starting in March. In an email to customers, VPNSecure said that it couldn’t afford to maintain the subscriptions and that the current owners, InfiniteQuant Ltd, weren’t told about the subscriptions when they bought VPNSecure. The sudden deactivation of accounts resulted in customer backlash online, including, as of this writing, 24 pages of one-star reviews on Trustpilot.

“… maybe, honestly, we should have just walked away from this ‘opportunity,’” Romain Brabant, the CEO of InfiniteQuant Ltd, told Ars Technica when asked if he would have handled things differently in hindsight.

Further explaining the decision to deactivate lifetime subscriptions and “never” (per communications to customers) to make lifetime VPNSecure subscriptions available again, Brabant said that after buying VPNSecure, InfiniteQuant Ltd learned that 90% of server usage came from customers with lifetime subscriptions. He said that at the time of purchase “VPNSecure was generating about $6,000/month in recurring revenue with $4,000/month in hosting costs.”

The CEO pointed to the high costs of VPN ownership, including constant server uptime, bandwidth costs, security patches, protocol updates, and daily support.

Brabant claimed that over 90% of VPNSecure’s lifetime subscribers paid for their subscription over 10 years ago, adding: “There’s no sustainable way to support an inherited user base of thousands who paid once, long ago, through a different company — especially without VC money or outside funding.”

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This is why so many companies have completely stopped offering lifetime subscriptions. Sounds like InfiniteQuant didn’t quite get its due diligence done, though, before the purchase. They could have just gone to the app page and said “what’s this ‘lifetime subscription’ thing?”
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DOGE went looking for phone fraud at SSA — and found almost none • Nextgov/FCW

Natalie Alms:

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After installing anti-fraud checks for benefit claims made over the phone early last month, the Social Security Administration is considering walking back the policy after finding only two cases that had a high probability of being fraudulent.

The anti-fraud tool set up last month after weeks of changes to the agency’s telephone policies has slowed retirement claim processing by 25% and led to a “degradation of public service,” according to an internal May document obtained by Nextgov/FCW that examined potentially cutting the anti-fraud tool for phone claims. 

Under the new policy, the agency found that only two benefit claims out of over 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent — and they aren’t guaranteed to be so. Less than 1% of claims were flagged as even potentially fraudulent at all. 

“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said. 

The attention to fraud, however, did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend. 

The lags stem from the three-day hold placed on telephone claims in order to run the antifraud claims, a move that “delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,” as the document noted. 

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Good journalism, bad writing. The intro/lede should be: Anti-fraud checks introduced by DOGE for benefit claims made by phone have found almost none – but seriously slowed down retirement claim processing. (23 words, satisfies the less-than-24 rule of British papers.)

Both the lack of fraud and the slowdown matter, and should be in the first paragraph. Where’s Lou Grant when you need him?

Anyway – DOGE/Musk originally claimed that 40% of benefit fraud came by phone calls (a critical datapoint that doesn’t appear until the 12th paragraph 😫). Clearly wrong, like so many of DOGE/Musk’s claims.
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Hackers scam Coinbase users and ransom data for $20m • The Register

Connor Jones:

»

Coinbase says some of its overseas support staff were paid off to steal information on behalf of cybercriminals, and the company is now being extorted for $20m.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday, “an unknown threat actor” contacted the crypto exchange giant on May 11, informing it of the stolen data and “demanded money in exchange for not publicly disclosing the information.”

Coinbase said it verified the email was genuine and related to information that was indeed stolen, but insists it will not be paying the criminals any dosh. 

In a blogpost, Coinbase confirmed the ransom demand was $20m for data belonging to less than 1% of its monthly transacting users. 

Flipping the script, Coinbase has vowed to instead pay $20m for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the attackers.

… the blogpost confirms that the attackers already used the stolen data to lend credibility to social engineering attacks, duping customers into sending funds to them.

“The threat actor appears to have obtained this information by paying multiple contractors or employees working in support roles outside the United States to collect information from internal Coinbase systems to which they had access in order to perform their job responsibilities,” it said in the filing.

“These instances of such personnel accessing data without business need were independently detected by the company’s security monitoring in the previous months.”

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Coinbase says it fired the people, but scammers are already contacting people and scamming them out of money stored at Coinbase by pretending to be, yes, Coinbase support because they have a lot of their personal data.

Not only that: the SEC is apparently considering going after Coinbase for inflating its “verified user” numbers. Never rains but it pours.
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“They yanked their own plug”: how Co-op averted an even worse cyber attack • BBC News

Joe Tidy:

»

Co-op narrowly averted being locked out of its computer systems during the cyber attack that saw customer data stolen and store shelves left bare, the hackers who claim responsibility have told the BBC.

The revelation could help explain why Co-op has started to recover more quickly than fellow retailer M&S, which had its systems more comprehensively compromised, and is still unable to carry out online orders.

Hackers who have claimed responsibility for both attacks told the BBC they tried to infect Co-op with malicious software known as ransomware – but failed when the firm discovered the attack in action. Both Co-op and M&S declined to comment.

The gang, using the cyber crime service DragonForce, sent the BBC a long, offensive rant about their attack. In it, they expressed anger that Co-op’s IT team made the decision to take computer services offline, preventing the criminals from continuing their hack.

“Co-op’s network never ever suffered ransomware. They yanked their own plug – tanking sales, burning logistics, and torching shareholder value,” the criminals said.

Cyber experts like Jen Ellis from the Ransomware Task Force said the response from Co-op was sensible. “Co-op seems to have opted for self-imposed immediate-term disruption as a means of avoiding criminal-imposed, longer-term disruption. It seems to have been a good call for them in this instance,” she said.

Ms Ellis said these kinds of crisis decisions are often taken quickly when hackers have breached a network and can be extremely difficult.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC, the criminals claimed to have breached Co-op’s computer systems long before they were discovered. “We spent a while seated in their network,” they boasted. They stole a large amount of private customer data and were planning to infect the company with ransomware, but were detected.

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The amusing thing is that the Co-op doesn’t have “shareholders”. Capitalist hackers, eh.
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Sabotage is on the menu • ZNetwork

Adem Ay:

»

in January of this year, Stop The System (STS) try a new, more sophisticated kind of sabotage – cutting fibre optic cables. First to be forced offline is a collection of climate-denying lobby groups housed a stone’s throw from the British Parliament. Two weeks later, STS target those major insurers again, this time severing cables of firms not just in the City of London but also in Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield.

Most recently, they target the private homes of three Barclays executives. On the morning of the bank’s AGM, its CEO, global head of sustainable finance, and president find their luxury properties spray-painted with messages demanding an end to fossil fuel investments. Cables are also cut at Barclaycard’s UK headquarters, and more than 20 bank branches have their door locks and ATMs superglued shut.

The “campaign of sabotage” quickly bears fruit. A week after its entrance is stained blood-red, the insurance company Probitas declares it will not insure two “carbon bomb” projects singled out by protesters (the East African Crude Oil Pipeline and a proposed coal mine in North West England). Days after STS and Palestine Action shatter Barclays bank branches, its CEO writes an op-ed in the Guardian renouncing the damage and voicing concern about the “overall suffering” in the Middle East. Four months later, the bank has sold all of its shares in Elbit Systems [an Israeli weapons manufacturer mentioned in a previous campaign].

A long-term member of STS, who required total anonymity to be interviewed, was happy to outline the strategy behind their ‘campaign of sabotage’: “We want to give the climate movement more teeth by training up people and getting them into these sorts of actions, mobilising further across Europe and the world,” they say.

…In adopting and spreading sabotage, STS doesn’t see itself as breaking away from the climate movement’s sustained adherence to non-violence. My contact instantly references the author of the manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline to explain: “I’m in complete agreement with Andreas Malm. Violence can be done to people, but not to buildings or infrastructure. We will not harm individuals.”

«

Not sure that there’s necessarily a cause-effect between the “campaign of sabotage” (isn’t it more like vandalism? Apart from the fibre-optic cables) and the changes. Of course, the banks and insurers wouldn’t say if there were. And so the campaigners think they’re justified, and we’re none the wiser.
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Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks • The Guardian

Lucy Knight:

»

The Amazon-owned audiobook provider has said it will be making its AI production technology available to certain publishers via “select partnerships”.

“We are bringing new audiobooks to life through our own fully integrated, end-to-end AI production technology,” reads the announcement on Audible’s website. There are two options for publishers wishing to make use of the technology: “Audible-managed” production, or “self-service” whereby publishers produce their own audiobooks with the help of Audible’s AI technology.

Both options will allow publishers to choose from more than 100 AI-generated voices across English, Spanish, French and Italian to narrate their books. AI translation of audiobooks is expected to be available later in the year.

“Audible believes that AI represents a momentous opportunity to expand the availability of audiobooks with the vision of offering customers every book in every language, alongside our continued investments in premium original content,” said Bob Carrigan, the chief executive of Audible. An option to use human professional linguists to check translation accuracy will also be included.

Carrigan added: “We’ll be able to bring more stories to life – helping creators reach new audiences while ensuring listeners worldwide can access extraordinary books that might otherwise never reach their ears.”

However, Audible’s announcement has been criticised by writers, translators and voice actors. “This shortsighted scheme reduces what we love about storytelling to the simple delivery of code,” said Chocolat author Joanne Harris. “In an age of declining literacy, I can’t think of anything more likely to put people off listening to audiobooks altogether.”

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Speaking as someone who narrated their own book into an audiobook (and got paid for it!) I’d like to know what sort of payment Audible is offering to authors. It can’t be doing it for nothing, so is it offering more, less, the same that it would to a human? Production costs might be lower (no studio to hire, no engineers checking what’s said and editing it) but it won’t have the inflection that humans can bring.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: *I forgot to run the script because I was so focused on writing a Substack post.

Pesticide runoff from golf courses into groundwater may be triggering Parkinson’s disease in people living nearby, research says. CC-licensed photo by Sherwood CC on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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

Anthropic expert accused of using AI-fabricated source in copyright case • Reuters

Blake Brittain:

»

A federal judge in San Jose, California, on Tuesday ordered artificial intelligence company Anthropic to respond to allegations that it submitted a court filing containing a “hallucination” created by AI as part of its defense against copyright claims by a group of music publishers.

A lawyer representing Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO in a lawsuit over Anthropic’s alleged misuse of their lyrics to train its chatbot Claude told U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen at a hearing that an Anthropic data scientist cited a nonexistent academic article to bolster the company’s argument in a dispute over evidence.

Van Keulen asked Anthropic to respond by Thursday to the accusation, which the company said appeared to be an inadvertent citation error. He rejected the music companies’ request to immediately question the expert but said the allegation presented “a very serious and grave issue,” and that there was “a world of difference between a missed citation and a hallucination generated by AI.”

Attorneys and spokespeople for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment following the hearing.

The music publishers’ lawsuit is one of several high-stakes disputes between copyright owners against tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work to train artificial-intelligence systems.

The expert’s filing cited an article from the journal American Statistician to argue for specific parameters for determining how often Claude reproduces copyrighted song lyrics, which Anthropic calls a “rare event.”

The music companies’ attorney, Matt Oppenheim of Oppenheim + Zebrak, said during the hearing that he confirmed with one of the supposed authors and the journal itself that the article did not exist. He called the citation a “complete fabrication.”

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Oopsie. There’s a lot of this going on: another nearly got past a judge in California.
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YouTube is finally doing something about all those fake movie trailers • Pocket Lint

Craig Donaldson:

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If you spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos , you’ve likely encountered a misleading trailer for a show or movie popping up in your recommendations , with AI-generated voiceovers and video clips.

Many of these trailers take clips from actual movie trailers and splice them together with AI-generated slop. As a result, sometimes viewers can be deceived into thinking the trailers are real, causing them to amass millions of views. A recent Deadline investigation revealed that a “handful of Hollywood studios” were asking YouTube to redirect some of the ad revenue from those trailers “in their direction.”

Deadline didn’t name any of the studios, but due to its reporting, YouTube suspended two prominent fake movie trailer channels, Screen Culture and KH Studio, from its partnership program, effectively cutting off any ad revenue they generate. Now, YouTube is taking further action against fake movie trailer channels in an effort to crackdown on the ad revenue these misleading, AI-generated trailers generate.

Following Deadline’s reporting, YouTube has acted against two additional fake movie trailer channels. It has now removed ad revenue from Screen Trailers and Royal Trailer, both of which are alternative accounts for Screen Culture and KH Studio.

One of the most recent AI-generated movie trailers from Screen Trailers is a misleading trailer for “Titanic 2.” Which is indeed, just as bonkers as it sounds. What are they going to do? Sink the ship again? You can watch the trailer above if you dare, but at least you can take solace in the fact that it’s no longer generating ad revenue for the creators.

The latest video from Royal Trailer is a fake AI-generated trailer for Toy Story 5, which might have the worst AI voiceover I have ever heard. However, in just three days since being uploaded, it has already amassed over 144,000 views, so many people have clicked on it.

«

So they embedded the trailer in the story, and …actually, the trailer is pretty clever: it has a premise (the toys seek to overthrow gadgets) and the visual style is extremely Pixar Toy Story. On the infinite monkey principle, isn’t it worth just letting them keep at it?
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How can traditional British television survive the US streamers? • BBC News

Katie Razzall is the BBC’s culture and media editor:

»

Just before Christmas, in a private dining room in the upmarket Charlotte Street Hotel in the heart of London’s Fitzrovia area, the BBC’s director general gathered some of the UK’s leading TV creatives and executives for lunch. As they ate, surrounded by kaleidoscopic-patterned wallpaper and giant artworks, they were also chewing over the future survival of their own industry.

As solutions were thrown around to what many see as an acute funding crisis in the age of global streaming, one of the invitees suggested, in passing, that BBC Studios (the corporation’s commercial content-producing arm) could merge with Channel 4 to create a bigger, more powerful force to compete with the likes of Disney Plus, Netflix and Amazon.
As another diner knocked down the idea, I’m told that Tim Davie, the BBC’s DG, asked why it was so ridiculous.

…Sir Peter Bazalgette, the former Chairman of ITV, told me that what he termed the current “generous spread” of British broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) will need some consolidation or, at the very least, more cooperation in future.

“We’re in danger of having no public service broadcasting within a decade, certainly within 20 years,” he says. “We don’t have a strategy for their survival. It’s that serious. The regulators need to start thinking about it. Mergers may well be part of the answer. There should be fewer companies in the future.”

Lord Vaizey, who was Culture Minister under David Cameron, put it baldly. “ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 should merge. “The UK only has room for two domestic broadcasters.”

Others, however, argue that distinctiveness is good for viewers. Channel 5 President Sarah Rose told me she “couldn’t disagree with Ed Vaizey more” – calling it a “Doomsday prophecy”.

…the days of turning on your TV and finding an electronic programme guide listing channels – with BBC1 and BBC2 at the top, then ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 – are disappearing. The proposed date for the dawn of a new era is 2035; the end of traditional terrestrial TV as we know it.

When the increasingly expensive contracts to provide broadcast channels and digital terrestrial services like Freeview come to an end, the UK’s broadcasters are likely to pivot to offering digital-only video on demand. (However this won’t happen without a campaign to ensure older people are protected, as well as rural and low-income households who may not have high quality internet access.)

But if the aerials are turned off in 2035, is this the moment TV as we know it changes forever? If it becomes a battle between online-only British streamers and their better-funded US rivals, can the Brits survive? And, crucially, what will audiences be watching?

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Golf course proximity linked to higher Parkinson’s disease risk • Medical Xpress

Justin Jackson:

»

Barrow Neurological Institute and Mayo Clinic-led researchers report an association between living near golf courses and increased Parkinson’s disease (PD) risk in a study published in JAMA Network Open.

Residents within three miles of a golf course demonstrated nearly triple the odds of having PD, with the greatest risk identified among those in water service areas with a golf course situated in regions susceptible to groundwater contamination.

Environmental risk factors, including pesticide exposure, have been identified as contributors to PD risk. Golf courses in the United States are treated with pesticides at levels up to 15 times higher than those in Europe, raising concerns about potential environmental contamination. Earlier reports have proposed that proximity to golf courses may increase PD risk through groundwater and drinking water contamination.

In the study, “Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease,” researchers conducted a population-based case-control study to assess the relationship between proximity to golf courses and PD risk.

The cohort included 419 incident PD cases and 5,113 matched controls identified through the Rochester Epidemiology Project, a comprehensive medical records system covering a 27-county region in southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin from 1991 to 2015.

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So it’s because of pesticide runoff into groundwater. Wonder how that’s going to affect real estate prices once word gets around. If I’m reading the paper correctly, five years is sufficient time to increase the risk.
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I quit Google search to use alternatives. It was surprisingly easy • The Washington Post

Shira Ovide:

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Last month, I challenged myself, and you, to try giving up Google search for two weeks.

This was inspired by academic researchers who bribed people to use Microsoft’s Bing for 14 days and found some of them wanted to keep using it.

The researchers concluded that because we rarely try alternatives to Google search, we have little experience to challenge our belief that Google search is superior. Giving another search option a shot could significantly dent, they said, the 90% of web searches we do with Google.

So that’s what I tried, minus the bribery. I switched the search engine on my work computer’s browser from Google to DuckDuckGo on April 22. (I included how-to instructionshow-to instructions.)

I’ve done more than 300 DuckDuckGo searches since then, including “beyonce ice bucket challenge” and “gestation period of a llama.” The first was for my job. The second one — I just got curious about llama pregnancy.

I didn’t do a fancy analysis into whether my search results were better with Google or DuckDuckGo, whose technology is partly powered by Bing. The researchers found our assessment of search quality is based on vibes. And the vibes with DuckDuckGo are perfectly fine.

Many dozens of readers told me about their own satisfaction with non-Google searches. “Most people, as you’ve pointed out, just mindlessly go to Google,” Claire Lea of Tipp City, Ohio, wrote in an email. “I’ll mindlessly stick with Bing.”

The ease of leaving Google search is oddly good news for the company as it fights claims that it cheated to dominate. “Your experiment confirms what we’ve said all along – it’s easy to find and use the search engine of your choice,” a Google spokeswoman said.

«

Said while silently weeping, perhaps. Once the Washington Post is talking about this, everyone’s talking about it.

People who are frustrated by the AI junk and adverts splurged all over Google’s once-tidy search engine results page have the power to change it right there. And search results really don’t vary that much between search engines. Google might index some of the more arcane parts of web forums better and rank them higher, but for the most part, you won’t notice.
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Alphabet analyst says ‘complete breakup’ needed for gains • Bloomberg via Financial Post

Ryan Vlastelica:

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D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria is calling for a “complete breakup” of Alphabet Inc., saying such a move is the best way to unleash shareholder value.

“The only way forward for Alphabet is a complete breakup that would allow investors to own the business they actually want,” he wrote, adding that valuing the company on a sum-of-the-parts basis “only works if the company is willing to take action.” Luria holds a neutral rating on the stock but said it would be his top megacap pick if Alphabet pursued a breakup.

The stock was down 7.5% over the past year on Tuesday, compared with an gain of more than 15% for the Nasdaq 100 Index.

…Luria sees AI competition as a persistent headwind facing the company, limiting the market’s ability to fully value Alphabet’s other notable businesses, including YouTube, Waymo, and its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) chips. Alphabet’s myriad businesses include “the top competitors” to such varied Wall Street favourites as Netflix Inc. and advertising-technology company Trade Desk Inc., he wrote, along with both Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in cloud computing, and both Uber Technologies Inc. and Tesla Inc. in autonomous driving.

“By keeping the conglomerate structure, management is dooming all of its businesses to the 16x Search multiple,” he wrote. “Until management acts in the interest of shareholders, the entire business will trade at 16x earnings, which assigns zero value to Waymo and TPU, and severely undervalues YouTube, Cloud and Network.”

Luria previously estimated that a company comprised of Alphabet’s TPU business and its DeepMind AI research lab could be worth as much as $700bn if traded separately. Waymo, the self-driving unit, was valued at more than $45bn in October.

«

OK but Alphabet is valued at $2 trillion right now. Then again, what would YouTube be worth alone? Even without the fake movie trailers?
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The Everything drugs • The Works in Progress Newsletter

Works in Progress:

»

Most drugs get approved to do one thing. In rare cases, drugs get ​multiple indications, allowing their manufacturers to advertise them as treatments for a range of conditions. Sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 ​(SGLT2) inhibitors, also called flozins, began as diabetes drugs.

Surprisingly, they turned out to also be very effective at improving heart health. Then they were discovered to slow the progression of chronic kidney ​disease, one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. Preliminary evidence indicates that they show promise in helping several other conditions, but no one knows exactly how they achieve this yet. Could SGLT2 inhibitors be a new medical Swiss Army knife?

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This is truly an amazing time in medical history. Perhaps not since the discovery of antibiotics have so many remarkable drugs been coming on to the market. These ones: cardiac, kidney, respiratory, dementia.. it’s astonishing.
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September 2014: Wada brings in ban on xenon and argon, but has no test • BBC News

Matt McGrath, in September 2014:

»

Doping experts have yet to find an effective test for athletes using xenon and argon, despite introducing a ban on the gases’ use by sports stars.

The new ban has been ordered by the World Anti-Doping Agency, external (Wada), which runs drug testing across many sports. It follows concerns that athletes were breathing these so-called noble gases to encourage the growth of red blood cells that boost stamina.

But despite being piloted, a valid test is not yet ready, the agency says.

The idea of doping with gases more usually associated with arc welding, neon light bulbs and anaesthesia may seem bizarre, but Wada believes there is enough evidence of their enhancement potential to ban them.

Media reports earlier this year, external indicated that athletes in Russia have been using the gases for years as a means of boosting their stamina ahead of international competitions. Indeed the company that developed techniques to help athletes prepare using xenon, has a “badge of honour, external” on its website from the Russian Olympic Committee for “the organisation and conduct of inhalation remediation”.

Earlier this year Wada’s executive committee decided to ban these two named gases by adding them to the prohibited list from this month. “We had serious information that xenon was being used,” Wada’s science director Dr Olivier Rabin told BBC News. “We believe it has been used in the preparation for some major events.”

Now that xenon and argon are banned, the agency needs to have an effective test for the gases.

«

Not to worry: Wada verified a test later that year. That means that the men looking to climb Everest (noted yesterday) and aiming to speed up their acclimatisation by huffing xenon wouldn’t pass a doping test.

But they’ll probably be satisfied with surviving. (Thanks Wendy G for the pointer.)
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Instagram’s algorithm recommended minors to putative paedophiles • Big Tech On Trial

Brendan Benedict is reporting on the FTC’s attempt to win an antitrust trial against Meta over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, which is turning up all sorts of old and embarrassing emails and slide decks:

»

Why was there a pressing need for more staffing on Instagram, even years after the acquisition [by, then, Facebook] closed? We saw one reason raised by Instagram head Adam Mosseri:

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“Harmful behavior (e.g. grooming especially) . . . this really worries me given . . . IG’s younger audience. I bet we’ll find we have work to do there.”

«

…Meta did have more work to do on “child grooming,” as we saw in a June 2019 deck titled, “Inappropriate Interactions with Children on Instagram.” An early page called out that “IG recommended a minor through top suggested to an account engaged in groomer-esque behavior.” Grooming refers generally to the tactics a child predator might use to gain trust with potential victims to sexually abuse them.

Subsequent pages gave some broader data: “27% of all follow recommendations to groomers were minors.” There’s a lot we don’t know about this statement: how did Meta track accounts that were “groomers” or “engaged in groomer-esque behavior”? And why were those accounts allowed at all? How did they generate that statistic? And it’s important to caveat as well that perhaps Meta didn’t know that any potential groomers were actual criminals. But by any measure, the headline is troubling.

There was more data than that: 33% of all Instagram comments reported to Meta as inappropriate were reported by minors, the deck said. Of the comments reported by minors, more than half were left by an adult. “Overall IG: 7% of all follow recommendations to adults were minors,” the deck concluded.

The presentation also noted that during a “3-month period”—presumably in 2019—2 million minors were recommended by Instagram’s algorithm for groomers to follow. 22% of those recommendations resulted in a follow request from a groomer to a minor.

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The “how did they know they were a groomer?” question obviously arises, but the numbers here are very scary.
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Slop farmer boasts about how he uses AI to flood social media with garbage to trick older women • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

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[Jamie] Cunningham is one of many sloperators using AI to flood social media with AI content to make money.

The process goes like this. Cunningham publishes large numbers of AI-generated articles to websites helmed by made-up bloggers, with AI-generated headshots, purporting to be experts in topics ranging from houseplants and recipes to DIY holiday crafts and nature scenes. Then he posts AI-generated images linking back to those sites on social, with Cunningham claiming he’s able to rake in cash — not by actually putting time and energy into photographing any actual home gardening, or drafting and testing new recipes, but by using AI to quickly and cheaply imitate traditional content creators’ final product.

Evidence of such zombie tactics employed by Cunningham and others are evident on his preferred platforms, Pinterest and Facebook, where users are increasingly made to wade through swamps of parasitic AI slop.

As Futurism reported earlier this year, Pinterest is facing a pervasive influx of AI-generated content masquerading as the real thing. The torrent of AI slop on Facebook is well-documented as well — last year, an in-depth 404 Media investigation revealed that AI slop farmers around the world had figured out how to use AI to generate engagement-bait imagery designed to earn cash by exploiting Facebook’s since-shuttered Performance Bonus program.

We highlighted Cunningham in our previous reporting about Pinterest. He’s an avid YouTuber, and we were struck by his candor as he publicly shared the sordid details of his slop farming process, which frequently includes copying the work of his competitors — real bloggers and online creators who say the AI influx on Pinterest, Facebook, and other platforms has had a destructive impact on their businesses.

“Across the board, like across the board, this is something that is talked about in blogging groups all the time, because it is devastating all of our businesses,” Rachel Farnsworth, a veteran food blogger of the website The Stay at Home Chef, told Futurism of the impact that schemes like Cunningham’s have had on her industry.

“It’s put a ton of people out of business,” she added.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A team of ex-military friends aim to climb Everest using a dramatically different acclimatisation method for its thin oxygen levels. CC-licensed photo by Mário Simoes 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 11 links for you. Noble effort. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Welcome to the age of paranoia as deepfakes and scams abound • Wired via Ars Technica

Lauren Goode:

»

These days, when Nicole Yelland receives a meeting request from someone she doesn’t already know, she conducts a multistep background check before deciding whether to accept. Yelland, who works in public relations for a Detroit-based nonprofit, says she’ll run the person’s information through Spokeo, a personal data aggregator that she pays a monthly subscription fee to use. If the contact claims to speak Spanish, Yelland says, she will casually test their ability to understand and translate trickier phrases. If something doesn’t quite seem right, she’ll ask the person to join a Microsoft Teams call—with their camera on.

If Yelland sounds paranoid, that’s because she is. In January, before she started her current nonprofit role, Yelland says, she got roped into an elaborate scam targeting job seekers. “Now, I do the whole verification rigamarole any time someone reaches out to me,” she tells WIRED.

Digital imposter scams aren’t new; messaging platforms, social media sites, and dating apps have long been rife with fakery. In a time when remote work and distributed teams have become commonplace, professional communications channels are no longer safe, either. The same artificial intelligence tools that tech companies promise will boost worker productivity are also making it easier for criminals and fraudsters to construct fake personas in seconds.

On LinkedIn, it can be hard to distinguish a slightly touched-up headshot of a real person from a too-polished, AI-generated facsimile. Deepfake videos are getting so good that longtime email scammers are pivoting to impersonating people on live video calls. According to the US Federal Trade Commission, reports of job and employment related scams nearly tripled from 2020 to 2024, and actual losses from those scams have increased from $90m to $500m.

Yelland says the scammers that approached her back in January were impersonating a real company, one with a legitimate product. The “hiring manager” she corresponded with over email also seemed legit, even sharing a slide deck outlining the responsibilities of the role they were advertising. But during the first video interview, Yelland says, the scammers refused to turn their cameras on during a Microsoft Teams meeting and made unusual requests for detailed personal information, including her driver’s license number. Realizing she’d been duped, Yelland slammed her laptop shut.

These kinds of schemes have become so widespread that AI startups have emerged promising to detect other AI-enabled deepfakes, including GetReal Labs and Reality Defender.

«

No doubt AI-powered. Everyone’s selling shovels to each other in the new gold rush.
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They want to climb Everest in a week using an anesthetic gas. Critics warn it’s dangerous • CNN

Amy Woodyatt:

»

It started in the pub, over a couple of beers. Four ex-military friends had been speaking about taking on an adventurous trip to raise money for a veterans’ charity, when one brought up the prospect of summiting Everest.

“We’re all busy people. My response was, ‘No way I can spend four to six, maybe even eight weeks out climbing Everest — it’s just almost impossible,” Al Carns, a British lawmaker told CNN. [The multi-week period would be spent acclimatising to the high altitude at base camp and higher.]

But one of his friends had a counter challenge: he had heard about a novel way of altering the acclimatization process that could allow them to summit the 8,849-meter (29,032 feet) peak in under a week — by inhaling a noble gas called xenon ahead of the expedition.

This month, the men — a pilot, a politician, a businessman and an entrepreneur — will attempt to summit Everest in seven days: they will fly from the UK to Kathmandu, where they will take a helicopter to base camp, and attempt to summit the mountain in a few days, before returning home in what would be a historic first.

This, they hope, will be made possible by inhaling the noble gas xenon ten days prior, as part of a tour with Furtenbach Adventures.

…Furtenbach was convinced of [xenon’s] ability to increase the body’s production of erythropoietin, also known as EPO, a hormone naturally produced by human kidneys to stimulate red blood cell production.

“One side effect of using Xenon is that it triggers the body’s EPO production, and that results in an increase of red blood cells in the blood — and that’s the same effect that you have when you are acclimatizing at real altitude,” he added.

Furtenbach told CNN he first tested the effects of gas on himself while summiting Argentina’s 6,961-meter Aconcagua, and one year later took it to Everest to trial with a larger team. At the time of speaking with CNN, he had used xenon five times.

«

I guess we’ll find out whether this works in a week or two. Let’s hope it does.
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Cryptocurrency boss’ daughter escapes kidnapping attempt in Paris • Euronews

Estelle Nilsson-Julien:

»

A woman said to be the daughter of a French cryptocurrency boss narrowly avoided being kidnapped in Paris on Tuesday morning.

According to Le Parisien newspaper, the woman, who was out walking with her partner and their young child, was attacked at just after 8am on a street in Paris’ 11th arrondissement.

The French media said her partner managed to fend off the masked assailants who were trying to force the woman into a white van.

A video of the attack, which was shared online, also showed passers-by helping the couple. One of them picked up a gun belonging to an assailant — which had fallen to the ground — and pointed it back at them, while another threw a red fire extinguisher in the direction of the masked men. After failing in their kidnapping attempt, the attackers then drove away.

In recent months, across France and Europe a growing number cryptocurrency bosses and their families have been kidnapped or have escaped kidnapping attempts.

In early May, the father of a cryptocurrency boss spent three days in captivity, after he was kidnapped while walking his dog in Paris’ 14th arrondissement. His kidnappers demanded a multi-million euro ransom in exchange for his release, sending a video of his mutilated finger to his son, according to French broadcaster Franceinfo.

Meanwhile, in January, David Balland, the 36-year-old co-founder of French crypto company Ledger, and his partner were kidnapped from their home in the small commune of Méreau, which is located in central-northern France. Ledger co-founder Eric Larchevêque sounded the alarm after he received a video of Balland’s severed finger, accompanied by a cryptocurrency ransom demand.

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Of course it’s not just cryptocurrency riches – Kim Kardashian is about to testify in the trial of men accused of an armed robbery targeting her in 2016.
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This year there have been zero public deadly mass shootings in the US • The Washington Post

James Fox is a professor of criminology:

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When it comes to crime statistics, bad news is big news. But to make sound policy, we need to hear good news, too, like the recent decline in mass shootings.

As of May 10, there have been four shootings in the United States in which four or more victims died this year, compared with 11 at the same juncture last year. It’s the lowest incident count over the first four months of a year since at least 2006, when researchers started the Mass Killing Database, which is maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.

The drop builds on year over year data, which shows that mass shootings declined from 39 in 2023 to 30 in 2024.

A similar pattern has emerged for mass shootings with fewer or no fatalities. According to the Gun Violence Archive, shootings with at least four victims killed or wounded declined from 659 in 2023 to 503 last year, a 24% drop. By May 10, the numbers plunged further, from 152 last year to 106 this year.

Of course, the heartening although short-term trend over the last 16 months does not guarantee safer days ahead. In 2023, America experienced the highest number of deadly mass shootings on record. It may just be a case of criminological gravity — what goes up eventually comes down.

Even so, the drop underscores an often-misunderstood fact about deadly mass shootings: They have not skyrocketed over the past couple of decades, especially considering the growth in population.

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Certainly – fingers crossed – haven’t heard anyone making big of this small figure. But it is remarkable.
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Amazon hopes AI gives streaming ‘pause ads’ new momentum • Variety

Brian Steinberg:

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Amazon hopes to get more marketers stuck on one of the most popular commercial formats in streaming: pause ads.

The company said Monday it would introduce artificial intelligence to help generate “pause ads” that can play off whatever program the viewer is watching. Imagine, for example, if someone watching a sad moment during a romantic comedy stopped the action and encountered an on-screen message for eye drops or tissues, or if a viewer in the middle of watching a high-speed car chase halted the stream and encountered a promotion from the manufacturer behind one of the vehicles.

Amazon intends to build the new commercials using A.I. that can understand immediately what kind of show or movie is being watched and what attributes pertain to any scene on screen. The technology creates a “contextual advertising experience that dynamically aligns the ad message with the content viewers are watching – creating a natural and relevant connection,” says Alan Moss, Amazon’s vice president of global ad sales, in a statement.  The hope is that subscribers will see the new pause-screen pitches as “extensions of the entertainment experience, not interruptions.”

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Yeah that’ll definitely work because when you watch a car chase you think about buying the car. For sure. The belief that we’re just lab rats chasing cheese is so embedded in this thinking.
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Klarna hiring back human help after going all-in on AI • Gizmodo

AJ Dellinger:

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As soon as AI-powered chatbots seemed functional enough, buy now, pay later service Klarna went all in on them, promising to swap much of its human workforce with robotic replacements. Now it’s on a human hiring spree after running into the limitations of AI, according to Bloomberg.

Company CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently announced that the company intends to make sure that customers will always have the option to speak to a human when they need service. It is, of course, doing that in a way that presents its own concerns—claiming that it will structure its new human-powered customer service cohort will be fully remote and with a “Uber type of setup” that seems like it will rely on contract work and will reportedly tap into an employee pool of students and people in rural populations. But if the best we can do is exploitative work or out of work entirely, I guess the former at least represents the slightest of improvements.

“From a brand perspective, a company perspective…I just think it’s so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want,” Siemiatkowski said, per Bloomberg.

It is a starkly different position than the company took just two years ago. Back in 2023, Siemiatkowski basically threw himself at AI, saying that he wanted his company to be OpenAI’s “favourite guinea pig.” The company instituted a hiring freeze and set out to replace as many humans on its payroll as possible with AI.

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Headcount was cut from 3,800 to 2,000. But:

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Klarna claimed that AI chatbots were handling two-thirds of customer service conversations within their first month of deployment and went on to claim that AI was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. The problem is that it’s really doing the work of 700 really bad agents, and that quality took a toll.

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‘Tone deaf’: US tech company responsible for global IT outage to cut jobs and use AI • The Guardian

Josh Taylor:

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The cybersecurity company that became a household name after causing a massive global IT outage last year has announced it will cut 5% of its workforce in part due to “AI efficiency”.

In a note to staff earlier this week, released in stock market filings in the US, CrowdStrike’s chief executive, George Kurtz, announced that 500 positions, or 5% of its workforce, would be cut globally, citing AI efficiencies created in the business.

“We’re operating in a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry, accelerating threats, and evolving customer needs,” he said.

Kurtz said AI “flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster”, adding it “drives efficiencies across both the front and back office”.

“AI is a force multiplier throughout the business,” he said.

Other reasons for the cuts included market demand for sustained growth and expanding the product offering. The company expects to incur up to US$53m in costs as a result of the job cuts.

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That last bit, about needing to cut because of market demand, seems contradictory. But of course AI is going to magically sort it out! Perhaps it can do the customer service next time there’s a calamity.
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Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce

Jordan Novet:

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Microsoft on Tuesday said that it’s laying off 3% of employees across all levels, teams and geographies, affecting about 6,000 people.

“We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.

The company reported better-than-expected results, with $25.8bn in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast in late April.

Microsoft had 228,000 employees worldwide at the end of June. On Tuesday Microsoft’s home state of Washington said the company was reducing headcount in the state by 1,985 people, including 1,510 in office.

In total, it’s likely Microsoft’s largest round of layoffs since the elimination of 10,000 roles in 2023. In January the company announced a small round of layoffs that were performance-based. These new job cuts are not related to performance, the spokesperson said.

One objective is to reduce layers of management, the spokesperson said. In January Amazon announced that it was getting rid of some employees after noticing “unnecessary layers” in its organization.

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Amazon “noticed” unnecessary layers? Anyway, it’s very much the accordion theory of employment: firms reach a certain size, get bigger, then they get smaller, then bigger, then..
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Using AI to stop tech support scams in Chrome • Google Online Security Blog

Jasika Bawa, Andy Lim, and Xinghui Lu:

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Chrome has always worked with Google Safe Browsing to help keep you safe online. Now, with this week’s launch of Chrome 137, Chrome will offer an additional layer of protection using the on-device Gemini Nano large language model (LLM). This new feature will leverage the LLM to generate signals that will be used by Safe Browsing in order to deliver higher confidence verdicts about potentially dangerous sites like tech support scams.

Initial research using LLMs has shown that they are relatively effective at understanding and classifying the varied, complex nature of websites. As such, we believe we can leverage LLMs to help detect scams at scale and adapt to new tactics more quickly. But why on-device? Leveraging LLMs on-device allows us to see threats when users see them. We’ve found that the average malicious site exists for less than 10 minutes, so on-device protection allows us to detect and block attacks that haven’t been crawled before.

The on-device approach also empowers us to see threats the way users see them. Sites can render themselves differently for different users, often for legitimate purposes (e.g. to account for device differences, offer personalization, provide time-sensitive content), but sometimes for illegitimate purposes (e.g. to evade security crawlers) – as such, having visibility into how sites are presenting themselves to real users enhances our ability to assess the web.

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There’s a lot more “how it works”, but the idea that a mini LLM can be running locally on your machine and spot scams is quite remarkable from the perspective of even a couple of years ago.

Helps Google explain why Chrome is munching through your RAM too.
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How Xi sparked China’s electricity revolution

Nassos Stylianou, Jana Tauschinski and Edward White:

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When Xi Jinping took over the leadership of the Chinese Communist party in late 2012 he quickly identified a national security vulnerability.

China had just leapfrogged Japan to become the world’s second-biggest economy and was fast becoming America’s chief rival nuclear-armed superpower. But the country of 1.4bn people was highly dependent on foreign nations for energy.

Reliance on oil and coal imports had surged to record highs, exposing China to potential supply disruptions via chokepoints in trade channels from the disputed waters of the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea to the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean.

Today, as the world is rocked by Donald Trump’s trade war, the view from the CCP’s leadership compound in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai is starkly different.

China is on its way to becoming the world’s first “electrostate”, with a growing share of its energy coming from electricity and an economy increasingly driven by clean technologies. It offers China a strategic buffer from trade decoupling and rising geopolitical tensions with the US.

The country is not only rapidly advancing towards self-sufficiency in energy from secure domestic sources, but also wields vast power over the markets for the resources and materials that underpin technologies of the future.

“Nobody had been seriously worrying about energy security or supply chains for armaments and critical industries and food because everyone thought that went with the cold war,” says Andrew Gilholm, head of China analysis at consultancy Control Risks. “Meanwhile, China has been working on that for years.”

…Clean energy sectors accounted for a record 10% of the country’s GDP and drove a quarter of its growth last year, according to analysis of official government statistics by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

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And yet electricity is only about 30% of total energy consumption; other countries are at about 20%. See what happens, though, when a country really focuses on energy security.
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Google teases Glasses announcement for I/O next week • UploadVR

David Heaney:

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Google just teased a smart glasses announcement, or at least demo, for its I/O conference, which will take place next Tuesday.

Today Google streamed “The Android Show: I/O Edition”, wherein it detailed a design overhaul for Android and Wear OS, upcoming improvements to Gemini on Android platforms, and UWB support for its Find My Device network, which the company now calls Find Hub.

Near the end of the stream, Google’s President of Android Ecosystem Sameer Samat teased that Google I/O 2025, which takes place next Tuesday, will have “deep dives from developers, the latest on Google Gemini”, and, after putting on a pair of ostensibly smart glasses, “maybe even a few more really cool Android demos”.

“See you on May 20th”, he says as he walks off.

The tease comes one month after Google’s Android XR lead Shahram Izadi demonstrated sleek smart glasses with a small monocular HUD, which the company described as “ conceptual hardware”, on-stage at TED2025.

Google may be hoping to preempt Meta’s launch of its own smart glasses with a monocular HUD, reportedly set for October, though there’s no indication that Google will have an actual product ready before Meta.

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Remarkable that Google is ready to jump back in the smart glasses water again, but maybe everyone has forgotten Google Glass now. Trying to get ahead of Meta, though, seems like a foolish errand. But there’s always a desire in Google to show off rather than lock down products.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Some people have a genetic mutation that lets them function perfectly well on four hours’ sleep rather than eight. The sods. CC-licensed photo by Pete 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. Awake, awake. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

AI-powered Coca-Cola ad celebrating authors gets basic facts wrong • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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In April, Coca-Cola proudly launched a new ad campaign it called “Classic,” celebrating famous authors and the sugary drink’s omnipresence in culture by highlighting classic literary works that mention the brand. The firm that produced the ad campaign said it used AI to scan books for mentions of Coca-Cola, and then put viewers in the point of view of the author, typing that portion of the text on a typewriter. The only issue is that the AI got some very basic facts about the authors and their work entirely wrong. 

One of the ads highlights the work of J.G. Ballard, the British author perhaps best known for his controversial masterpiece, Crash, and David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of the novel. In the ad, we get a first person perspective of someone typing a sentence from “Extreme Metaphors by J.G Ballard,” which according to the ad was written in 1967.  When the sentence gets to the mention of “Coca-Cola,” the typeface changes from the generic typewriter font to Coca-Cola’s iconic red logo. 

…J.G. Ballard never wrote a book called “Extreme Metaphors,” and he never wrote the words that appear on the page in the ad. In reality, “Extreme Metaphors,” actual full title: Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008, is a book edited by Dan O’Hara and Simon Sellars which collects interviews with J.G. Ballard that was published in 2012, three years after the author’s death.

The words in the ad were not written, but spoken by Ballard in an interview with the French Magazine Littéraire in 1985. Ballard spoke in English, the magazine translated his words to French, and O’Hara told me he translated that printed French back to English.

“The sequence of words being typed out by the imagined J. G. Ballard in the ad was never written by him, only spoken, and the only person ever to type that exact sequence out in English is me,” O’Hara told me.

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The advert even misspells “Shanghai”, a mistake that infuriates O’Hara. The company used an extract which mentioned.. the fizzy drink. That AI’s going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola Corporation. (Thanks tanrenzu for the link.)
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How Google forced publishers to accept AI scraping as price of appearing in search • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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Google considered allowing publishers to opt out of their data being used for AI grounding and still appear in search results but described it as a “hard red line”.

New documents disclosed in the remedies portion of an antitrust trial into Google’s search monopoly in the US reveals the tech giant preferred not to give publishers the option as it was “evolving into a space for monetisation”.

A US judge ruled in August that Google has an illegal search monopoly and new documents have now been published amid a remedies trial held to decide what, if anything, should be done.

Possible remedies could include forcing Google to sell the Chrome browser and share data with competitors. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has since launched its own investigation of Google’s search dominance.

Slides prepared by Google director of product management Chetna Bindra in April last year ahead of the US rollout of AI Overviews (then called Search Generative Experience) show the controls Google considered offering to publishers to enable them to opt out of their data being used for various purposes.

Option number one would have been no changes to how publishers could opt out of or limit the display of their content in search. “If not satisfied, they can choose to opt out of indexing.” This option was described as “likely unstable”.

…Google said in 2019 that all versions of an experiment equivalent to no-snippeting in search (“only URLs, very short fragments of headlines, and no preview images”) resulted in “substantial traffic loss to news publishers”.

“Even a moderate version of the experiment (where we showed the publication title, URL, and video thumbnails) led to a 45% reduction in traffic to news publishers.”

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Just in case anyone thought Google had publishers’ best interests at heart: nope. If it could keep everyone on Google properties forever all the time, it would.
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In a ‘misinformation’ age, we need to know what the fact is going on • The Independent

The head of the fact-checking organisation Full Fact is Chris Morris (no, not that one):

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This is a moment of crisis for anyone who cares about verifiable facts.

They are the building blocks which ensure citizens have access to accurate information, and they help people make informed choices on the issues that matter most. Only by creating a better, less toxic information environment can free speech gain greater currency.

But dramatic changes in technology and politics have converged: we are in danger of being swept away by a deluge of false, misleading or artificially generated junk online, leaving many people either stuck in echo chambers or unsure what they can believe. Four in 10 UK adults in an Ofcom survey last year said they had encountered misinformation in the previous four weeks. Others struggle to separate fact from fiction.

At the same time, the Trump administration is rewriting the rules of American engagement around the world, and challenging western political assumptions. Earlier this year, Vice-President JD Vance came to Europe to talk about the enemy within. He described misinformation as an ugly Soviet-era word, and suggested anyone using it wanted to tell others what to think. In turn, social media platforms – run by the most powerful corporations on the planet – are responding to political pressures by backing away from commitments to work with independent fact-checkers in order to find and expose information that causes real-world harm.

Let’s be clear: checking the facts doesn’t restrict debate; it strengthens it by grounding it in truth. It’s certainly not censorship, as Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg claimed in an abrupt about-turn at the beginning of this year. Verifying facts adds important context to complex conversations, and it creates more speech, not less.

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This is all turning into an almighty mess. Zuckerberg and Musk don’t care whether something is true or false, only whether it gooses engagement they rely on to make their apps money.
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Germ-theory skeptic RFK Jr. goes swimming in sewage-tainted water • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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Over the weekend, America’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., shared pictures on social media of himself fully submerged in the sewage-tinged waters of Rock Creek in Washington, DC. His grandchildren were also pictured playing in the water.

The creek is known for having a sewage overflow problem and posing a health hazard to any who enter it. The National Park Service, which manages the Rock Creek Park, strictly bars all swimming and wading in Rock Creek and the park’s other waterways due to the contamination, specifically “high levels of bacteria.”

A notice on the NPS website advises “Stay Dry, Stay Safe,” warning, “Rock Creek has high levels of bacteria and other infectious pathogens that make swimming, wading, and other contact with the water a hazard to human (and pet) health. Please protect yourself and your pooches by staying on trails and out of the creek. All District waterways are subject to a swim ban—this means wading, too!”

The urban creek is contaminated mainly because of the numerous century-old municipal sewer lines that run under the park. These lines have cracked over time and leak sewage, according to Marchant Wentworth, an environmental consultant who submitted a report on the problem to the DC Council in 2021.

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Too many jokes which write themselves. Let’s see how sick he gets. Quite possibly nothing happens if he has no open wounds and kept his mouth shut. Which doesn’t make the pollution any less bad.
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Jony Ive’s next product is driven by the ‘unintended consequences’ of the iPhone • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Former Apple designer Jony Ive says the work on his next product is driven by owning the “unintended consequences” associated with the iPhone. During an interview with Stripe, Ive said there’s “not anything that I can be more preoccupied or bothered by” than the potentially adverse effects smartphones have on their users.

“I think when you’re innovating, of course, there will be unintended consequences,” Ive said. “You hope that the majority will be pleasant surprises. Certain products that I’ve been very, very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant.”

…“I think even if you’re innocent in your intention, I think if you’re involved in something that has poor consequences, you need to own it,” Ive said. “That ownership, personally, has driven a lot of what I’ve been working on that I can’t talk about the moment, but look forward to being able to talk about at some point in the future.”

When talking about AI, Ive mentioned that he finds it encouraging that “it’s very rare for there to be a discussion about AI, and there not to be the appropriate concerns about safety.” He adds that he was “extremely concerned about social media, and there was no discussion whatsoever.”

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I guess he could design a device where it’s impossible to find the power switch to turn it on? He came pretty close to that nirvana a few times in the past, after all.
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Substack gets ‘Trump bump’ as subscriptions soar • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas:

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Substack has added more than 1m subscribers since Donald Trump’s triumph in the US election last November, as the online platform benefits from the shift towards creator-led journalism.

Substack, a platform for writers and other content creators, reached 5mn paid subscriptions in March, across publications and podcasts. The platform attracted an additional 1mn subscribers between November and March alone, helping it generate positive cash flow in the first quarter.

Substack, which is backed by investors including Wall Street banker Omeed Malik and polling expert Nate Silver, offers journalists, politicians and commentators the opportunity to get paid directly by their audience via subscription fees.

The platform has benefited from an influx of traditional media executives such as former CNN star Jim Acosta drawing in new audiences.

Acosta and other journalists are cutting out traditional media channels and building large communities of followers, while new media groups such as Bari Weiss’s Free Press have based their businesses on the platform. 

The US Department of State, headed by Marco Rubio, joined Substack last month, joining other US politicians such as Pete Buttigieg. Brands and corporations are also using the platform to reach consumers

“There has definitely been a big moment of interest around the election and then the first 100 days [of the Trump presidency]. There’s been a spate of people in that universe coming,” said Substack co-founder Chris Best.

Journalists were leaving traditional outlets, he added, including “a bunch of people who decanted from the Washington Post” in protest at the policies of its owner Jeff Bezos.

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The most common complaint one now sees on Substack is that it’s impossible (and expensive) to keep up with all the good writing and that they should offer some sort of bundling system for paywalled blogs. Yes, people want to reinvent the magazine. (The newspaper seems to be dead outside of the existing media properties.)
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The zero‑sum mindset is no mystery • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

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There are many ways to describe Donald Trump’s approach to government, or the philosophy of the new Reform party in the UK, but “zero sum” is a useful one.

The zero-sum thinker frames the world in terms of winning and losing, us and them. If one person is to get richer, someone else must get poorer. If China is doing well, then the US must logically be doing badly. Jobs go either to the native born, or to foreigners. In contrast, the centrist dads among us see win-win solutions.

[The economist Stefanie] Stantcheva and her colleagues at Harvard’s Social Economics Lab have been asking: what sort of person tends to see the world as zero sum? There are some surprising findings. For example, there are few clearer refutations of a zero-sum mindset than a thriving city, in which people flock to be with others, and the social, cultural, educational and financial opportunities that result. Yet Stantcheva’s research found that urban areas are more prone to zero-sum thinking than rural ones, perhaps reflecting our failure to build new homes.

…Young people in the US tend to see the world as zero sum, reflecting the fact that they have grown up in a slower-growth economy than those born in the 1940s and 1950s. A similar pattern emerges across countries: the higher the level of economic growth a person grew up with, the less likely they are to see the world in zero-sum terms. People whose ancestors were enslaved, forced on to reservations or sent to concentration camps are more likely to see the world in zero-sum terms. And, intriguingly, while people with little education are often zero-sum thinkers, people with PhDs may be more zero-sum than anyone, which speaks volumes about the scramble for scarce scholarships and research positions in elite education.

The world is full of opportunities for mutual benefit, so zero-sum thinking is a tragedy and a trap. But it is not a mystery. If we want to understand why so many people see the world in zero-sum terms, we only have to look at the fact that our dysfunctional politics and our sluggish economies have needlessly produced far too many zero-sum situations. Fix that problem and maybe economics will one day be cool again.

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(For those who don’t have an FT subscription, this article should be on timhardford.com in a few days’ time.)
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Rare genetic mutation lets some people thrive on just four hours of sleep • Live Science

Patrick Pester:

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Some lucky people have rare genetic mutations that enable them to feel well-rested after just four hours of sleep, while the rest of us need around eight hours to function.

Now, researchers have identified one of these mutations, named SIK3-N783Y, in a human super-sleeper. The team then studied the mutation in genetically modified mice and found that the mice carrying this mutation also got less shut-eye, according to a new study.

The newly identified mutation is one of several that researchers have linked to shorter sleep patterns. Scientists hope that by understanding the genetics of natural short sleepers, who seem to thrive on less sleep, they can develop better treatments for sleep disorders.

“Our bodies continue to work when we go to bed,” detoxifying themselves and repairing damage, study co-author Ying-Hui Fu, a neuroscientist and geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Nature. “These people [natural short sleepers], all these functions our bodies are doing while we are sleeping, they can just perform at a higher level than we can.”

The researchers published their findings in the journal PNAS.

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What do those four-hour people feel after eight hours or six hours, though? Chronically over-rested? Absolutely amazing?

One could imagine a future gene-picking world where this one gets chosen a lot.
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A cheat sheet for why using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment • The Weird Turn Pro

Andy Masley:

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The question this post is trying to answer is “Should I as an individual boycott ChatGPT or limit how much I use it for the sake of the climate?” and the answer is a resounding and conclusive “No.”

It’s not bad for the environment if you or any number of people use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, or other large language model (LLM) chatbots. You can use ChatGPT as much as you like without worrying that you’re doing any harm to the planet. Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead.

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This is a shorter version of a much longer post by Masley. Here’s his basic calculation:

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Throughout this post I’ll assume the average ChatGPT query uses 3 Watt-hours (Wh) of energy, which is 10x as much as a Google search. This statistic is likely wrong. ChatGPT’s energy use is probably lower according to EpochAI.

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That’s a lot lower than most people have been thinking.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists have proposed a properly quantum explanation of the famous double slit experiment. Are you ready for dark light? CC-licensed photo by Matt Mets 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. Lighting up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Coding emerges as generative AI’s breakout star • Fast Company

Mark Sullivan:

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The tech industry insists that AI will “transform” how companies, both large and small, operate. Tech VCs and AI founders predict that major business functions will be reshaped, one by one, to be handled by AI agents. For a while, many speculated which function would be transformed first. It wasn’t customer service, legal, or marketing: it was software development. Generative AI’s first killer app is coding. Tools like Cursor and Windsurf can now complete software projects with minimal input or oversight from human engineers.

Businesses are rushing to capitalize on the efficiency gains offered by AI coding. Naveen Rao, chief AI officer at Databricks, estimates that coding accounts for half of all large language model usage today.

A 2024 GitHub survey found that over 97% of developers have used AI coding tools at work, with 30% to 40% of organizations actively encouraging their adoption. (GitHub, owned by Microsoft, created one of the first such tools, Copilot.) Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said AI now writes up to 30% of the company’s code. Google CEO Sundar Pichai echoed that sentiment, noting more than 30% of new code at Google is AI-generated.

The soaring valuations of AI coding startups underscore the momentum. Anysphere’s Cursor just raised $900 million at a $9bn valuation—up from $2.5bn earlier this year. Meanwhile, OpenAI acquired Windsurf (formerly Codeium) for $3bn.

And the tools are improving fast. OpenAI’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil, explained in a recent interview that just five months ago, the company’s best model ranked around one-millionth on a well-known benchmark for competitive coders—not great, but still in the top two or three percentile. Today, OpenAI’s top model, o3, ranks as the 175th best competitive coder in the world on that same test. The rapid leap in performance suggests an AI coding assistant could soon claim the number-one spot.

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That point about half of usage being for coding is a pretty dramatic illustration of how some things are really huge in one context, and yet probably aren’t having a big impact more widely. But that impact…
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The great AI displacement is already well underway • Shawn From Portland

Shawn K:

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As I climb into my little twin sized bed in my small RV trailer on a patch of undeveloped deep rural land in the Central New York highlands, exhausted from my 6 hours of doordash driving to make less than 200$ that day, I check my emails one last time for the night: no responses from the 745th through 756th job applications that i put in over the last week for engineering roles i’m qualified or over-qualified for. I’m not that surprised or disappointed at this point, as I close in on the 800 application mark in over the last year of being an unemployed software engineer.

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Yes: he got laid off from one job, and has since found it impossible to get work in the software field, despite his qualifications.
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Asking chatbots for short answers can increase hallucinations, study finds • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

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Turns out, telling an AI chatbot to be concise could make it hallucinate more than it otherwise would have.

That’s according to a new study from Giskard, a Paris-based AI testing company developing a holistic benchmark for AI models. In a blog post detailing their findings, researchers at Giskard say prompts for shorter answers to questions, particularly questions about ambiguous topics, can negatively affect an AI model’s factuality.

“Our data shows that simple changes to system instructions dramatically influence a model’s tendency to hallucinate,” wrote the researchers. “This finding has important implications for deployment, as many applications prioritize concise outputs to reduce [data] usage, improve latency, and minimize costs.”

Hallucinations are an intractable problem in AI. Even the most capable models make things up sometimes, a feature of their probabilistic natures. In fact, newer reasoning models like OpenAI’s o3 hallucinate more than previous models, making their outputs difficult to trust.

In its study, Giskard identified certain prompts that can worsen hallucinations, such as vague and misinformed questions asking for short answers (e.g. “Briefly tell me why Japan won WWII”). Leading models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o (the default model powering ChatGPT), Mistral Large, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, suffer from dips in factual accuracy when asked to keep answers short.

Why? Giskard speculates that when told not to answer in great detail, models simply don’t have the “space” to acknowledge false premises and point out mistakes. Strong rebuttals require longer explanations, in other words.

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So we’re stuck with prolix machines?
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The Trump administration reportedly fired the head of the US Copyright Office after its preliminary report questioning whether training AI on copyrighted material is fair use • The Verge

Wes Davis:

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The Trump administration has reportedly fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who leads the US Copyright Office, following the office’s choice to release a pre-publication version of its opinion on the fair use status of AI training data that’s made up of copyrighted information.

Representative Joe Morelle, the ranking Democrat of the Committee on House Administration, called her firing an “unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” linking the firing directly to her report, which he says amounted to her refusing “to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”

Among the report’s conclusions is that while the fair use status of AI training “will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs—all of which can affect the market.” The report says research and scholarship might be fair use but says many other AI tools might not be:

But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.

University of Colorado law professor Blake Reid called the report a “straight-ticket loss for the AI companies” in a post prior to reports emerged that Perlmutter had been fired, writing that he wondered “if a purge at the Copyright Office is incoming and they felt the need to rush this out.”

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We’re now at the stage where the most cynical take is probably the correct one.
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New quantum optics theory proposes that classical interference arises from bright and dark states of light • Phys.org

Ingrid Fadelli:

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Classical physics theories suggest that when two or more electromagnetic waves interfere destructively (i.e., with their electric fields canceling each other out), they cannot interact with matter. In contrast, quantum mechanics theory suggests that light particles continue interacting with other matter even when their average electric field is equal to zero.

Researchers from Federal University of São Carlos, ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics recently carried out a study exploring this contrast between classical and quantum mechanics theories through the lens of quantum optics, the field of study exploring interactions between light and matter at a quantum level. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, proposes that classical interference arises from specific two-mode binomial states, which are collective bright and dark entangled states of light.

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I have read this article and tried to understand it. I failed. Though, equally, I recognise that “classical” thinking like “it’s a particle! It’s a wave! It’s a particle and a wave!” is, well, not very quantum-oriented. So if you can follow this new thinking, you’re doing better than me.
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Tesla Cybertruck inventory skyrockets to record high • Electrek

Fred Lambert:

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Tesla’s Cybertruck inventory has skyrocketed to a new record high of more than 10,000 units. The vehicle program is in crisis.

We reported at the beginning of April that Tesla ended the first quarter of 2025 with at least 2,400 Cybertrucks in new inventory available in the US.

There’s no exact way to track Tesla’s inventory in the US, but there are ways to track Tesla’s Cybertruck listings. Sometimes, Tesla may have many vehicles with the exact same configuration at the same location and it will only publish a single listing for it. Therefore, Tesla might have been sitting on more Cybertruck inventory.

A month later, the number of listings in the US has skyrocketed to over 10,000 Cybertrucks, according to Tesla-Info.com.

This surge could be due to an actual net increase in Cybertruck inventory, but Tesla is also heavily discounting the trucks at varying rates, creating several different prices and, therefore, more listings.

At an average sale price of $78,000, Tesla could have almost $800m worth of Cybertrucks.

Due to low demand, Tesla appears to have significantly slowed down Cybertruck production in recent months. Therefore, this surge is likely more about Tesla discounting the vehicles, exposing the broader US inventory, than an actual major increase in inventory due to more production.

This is about as bad as it gets. Over 10,000 units account for about two quarters of Tesla’s Cybertruck sales.

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Hard to figure out if having six months’ (180 days) inventory is bad for Tesla. This data suggests that the maximum among standard car companies is 111 days. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)

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Florida teens kidnap Las Vegas man, steal $4m in cryptocurrency, police say • 8NewsNow

David Charns:

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Three teenagers are accused of kidnapping a man at gunpoint, driving him to a remote desert area an hour outside of Las Vegas, and stealing $4m in cryptocurrency and other digital assets, the 8 News Now Investigators have learned.

Belal Ashraf and Austin Fletcher, both 16 and from Pasco County, Florida, and a third teenager face charges including robbery, kidnapping, and extortion, records said. A juvenile court judge previously certified Ashraf and Fletcher as adults.

The third teenager was no longer in the United States, a prosecutor said during Fletcher’s probable cause hearing Friday. The men are accused of stealing $4m in cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), prosecutors said.

Last November, a man called police saying three young men kidnapped him at gunpoint, drove him to a remote desert area, and stole millions of dollars from him, documents said.

That night, the victim was hosting a cryptocurrency-related event at a business in downtown Las Vegas, police said. The victim then returned to his apartment complex and parked his car. The three suspects then approached him and forced him into the back seat of their vehicle, police said.

“[The victim] was told if he complied, he would live to see another day, and if he did not comply, they had his dad and would kill him,” documents said. “[The victim] had a towel placed over his head and was told by the suspects not to look at them.”

Police suspect the three young men then drove the victim across the Nevada border to White Hills, Arizona — more than 70 miles and an hour’s drive from Las Vegas. The victim walked five miles alone in the desert to reach a gas station where he called a friend to pick him up, documents said.

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The five-mile hike is impressive – at night, in the cold. But apparently you can steal NFTs. So, $3,999,999 in crypto and 500 NFTs worth $1?
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The strange case of the writer landing A-lister interviews for local magazines • The Guardian

Alexandra Topping and Mario Laghos:

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In the spring of 2023, subscribers to the British local lifestyle magazine Somerset Life were eagerly anticipating their April edition – a Gardens Special promising top tips for green-fingered readers and the best places to see seasonal bluebells.

But when the magazine landed on readers’ doormats, a story bigger than blooming gardens of south-west England was on the cover. In what appeared to be a world exclusive interview, the Hollywood A-lister Johnny Depp had confessed his love for the bucolic county. More than that, he had bought a secret hideaway in the area.

Never slow to pounce on a story about the controversial Pirates of the Caribbean star, the national and international tabloid media hungrily reproduced news of Depp’s English bolt-hole. The story went viral.

The British celebrity bible Hello! gushed over the star’s idyllic 12-bedroom property, featuring “a walled garden and even its own dairy farm”. The US weekly magazine People told readers that Depp was “enjoying the quiet life in England”. The Independent lured readers into the story, promising that the star had “opened up about his newfound introverted lifestyle”.

The story was all the more intriguing for having been revealed in the most unlikely of places: the pages of the regional monthly magazine. The six-page feature stated: “It is true that he also bought an estate of 850 acres near Kingston St Mary which includes what is known as Somerset Mansion.”

There was only one problem: according to those close to Depp, he hadn’t.

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Thus begins an absolutely fascinating dive into a strange world of celebrity interviews that none of those involved can remember giving. And the payoff sentence is brilliant, but you really should read all the middle first.
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Meta threatens to exit Nigeria after FCCPC fine • Rest of World

Damilare Dosunmu:

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Local authorities have fined Meta $290m for regulatory breaches, prompting the social media giant to threaten pulling Facebook and Instagram from the country.

The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) said on May 3 that quitting Nigeria won’t absolve Meta of its liability.

…The dispute began in 2021 when Nigeria’s FCCPC started a probe into WhatsApp’s new privacy policy.

The commission said Meta committed multiple and repeated infringements of the country’s Nigerian rules, including “denying Nigerians the right to control their data, transferring and sharing Nigerian user data without authorization, discriminating against Nigerian users compared to users in other jurisdictions, and abusing their dominant market position by forcing unfair privacy policies.”

After remediation efforts failed, the FCCPC issued its final order in July 2024, imposing a $220m fine along with penalties from other agencies that took the total amount to $290m. Meta appealed the decision, but the plea was overturned in April, prompting the company’s threat to withdraw its services from Nigeria.

This isn’t Meta’s first regulatory breach. The company has faced similar sanctions worldwide, including a much larger $1.3bn fine in Europe. It has also been penalized in India, South Korea, France, and Australia. It even faces a $1.5bn fine in Texas.

While the amount of Nigerian fine may not be significant for the company that clocked a revenue of $164bn in 2024, Meta isn’t making enough money in the country to justify paying such an amount, according to Cheta Nwaneze, partner at SMB Intelligence, an Africa-focused consulting firm.

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Watch this space. Can’t think of an occasion when Meta has followed through on one of these threats, but there’s always a first time, I guess.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Following up from last Friday: Kosmos-482 seems to have fallen into the Indian Ocean. No human casualties. (Perhaps some fish, we regret.)