The economics of modern playgrounds are surprising – and can keep them shut. CC-licensed photo by Dan Gaken on Flickr.

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

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

Another undersea cable damaged in Baltic Sea: Sweden launches probe, seizes suspected ship • France 24

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Latvia said it had dispatched a warship on Sunday after damage to a fibre optic cable to Sweden that may have been “due to external factors”.

The navy said it had identified a “suspect vessel”, the Michalis San, which was near the location of the incident along with two other ships.

The Michalis San was headed for Russia, according to several websites tracking naval traffic.

Nations around the Baltic Sea are scrambling to bolster their defences after the suspected sabotage of undersea cables in recent months.

After several telecom and power cables were severed, experts and politicians accused Russia of orchestrating a hybrid war against the West as the two sides square off over Ukraine.

NATO earlier this month announced it was launching a new monitoring mission in the Baltic Sea involving patrol ships and aircraft to deter any attempts to target undersea infrastructure in the region.

“We have a warship patrolling the Baltic Sea around the clock every day and night, allowing us to quickly dispatch it once we learnt about the damage,” Latvian navy commander Maris Polencs said at a briefing Sunday.

Prime Minister Evika Silina said: “We have notified the Swedish authorities and are working together with them to assess the damage and its reason.”

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That monitoring mission by NATO needs to step up its game. Also, what sort of threat would put off a captain under instruction from, presumably, Russia? Undersea cables have become a new, significant vulnerability.
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An asteroid got deleted because it was actually Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster • Astronomy.com

Mark Zastrow:

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On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. First identified and submitted by a citizen scientist, the object’s orbit was notable: It came less than 150,000 miles (240,000 km) from Earth, closer than the orbit of the Moon. That qualified it as a near-Earth object (NEO) — one worth monitoring for its potential to someday slam into Earth.

But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) issued an editorial notice: It was deleting 2018 CN41 from its records because, it turned out, the object was not an asteroid.

It was a car.

To be precise, it was Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster mounted to a Falcon Heavy upper stage, which boosted into orbit around the Sun on Feb. 6, 2018. The car — which had been owned and driven by Musk — was a test payload for the Falcon Heavy’s first flight. At the time, it received a great deal of notoriety as the first production car to be flung into space, complete with a suited-up mannequin in the driver’s seat named Starman.

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You might think (well, I did): sure, but if a Roadster were to hit the Earth it would make quite a mess, wouldn’t it? But it turns out that the car is on a path to Mars using a Hohmanm transfer orbit. It’s not going to rain cars.
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10,000 AI tracks uploaded daily to Deezer, platform reveals, as it files two patents for new AI detection tool • Music Business Worldwide

Daniel Tencer:

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France-headquartered music streaming service Deezer has launched a new AI detection tool – after filing two patent applications for the technology in December.

On Friday (January 24), the company revealed that its new tech has already discovered that roughly 10,000 ‘fully AI-generated tracks’ are being delivered to its platform every day.

That amounts to about 10% of the daily content delivered to Deezer.

Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier also said on Friday the company plans to “exclude” fully AI-generated tracks “from algorithmic and editorial recommendation.”

“Generative AI has the potential to positively impact music creation and consumption, but its use must be guided by responsibility and care in order to safeguard the rights and revenues of artists and songwriters,” Lanternier said.

The company says it set out last year to develop an AI detection tool that “surpass[ed] the ability of available tools.”

“Tools that are on the market today can be highly effective as long as they are trained on data sets from a specific generative AI model, but the detection rate drastically decreases as soon as the tool is subjected to a new model or new data,” explained Aurelien Herault, Chief Innovation Officer at Deezer

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Odd really, because Deezer claimed it was already detecting AI-generated music back in June 2023. Maybe it feels better about it now it has patents?
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The end of the playground • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins:

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This is a tale of two playgrounds. One is closing soon while the other – brand new – has stood empty for nearly a year, ringed with steel fencing to stop people from using it. Their stories aren’t the most important thing you’ll read today, but they illustrate something much bigger: the collapse and retreat of local government, and the profound effect it will have on our public spaces.

«

There’s no easy way to précis this, so you’ll have to take my word for it that this is worth reading. With a footnote about surly British teenagers as “hospitality” staff that’s worth the price of entry itself. As is the one about how developers near Shuttleworth placated the local NIMBYs.

Also, from later in the piece:

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The preamble to Central Bedfordshire Council’s 2025-26 budget reads like a panic attack in written form. It’s not just bad, it’s completely unsustainable with no prospect of improvement. School transport costs have increased by over 100% – from £9m to £20m – in just four years. In a single year, residential care costs for children have increased by £2,000 per child… per week. (I’ve sort of glossed over it here, but I want to come back to these costs in a future post as some of these increases seem frankly bonkers.) Adult social care costs have risen a staggering 35% in the same period. The average cost per adult has increased 13% in that time, which is bad enough, but the number of older people seeking support has sky-rocketed, increasing “beyond any reasonable forecast based on previous trend data.” A key driver is that people who “previously would have paid for their care are now finding their finances depleted and seeking council support.”

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Nvidia stock may fall as DeepSeek’s ‘amazing’ AI model disrupts OpenAI • Forbes

Peter Cohan:

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America’s policy of restricting Chinese access to Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips has unintentionally helped a Chinese AI developer leapfrog U.S. rivals who have full access to the company’s latest chips.

This proves a basic reason why startups are often more successful than large companies: Scarcity spawns innovation.

A case in point is the Chinese AI model DeepSeek R1 — a complex problem-solving model competing with OpenAI’s o1 — which “zoomed to the global top 10 in performance”— yet was built far more rapidly, with fewer, less powerful AI chips, at a much lower cost, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The success of R1 should benefit enterprises. That’s because companies see no reason to pay more for an effective AI model when a cheaper one is available — and is likely to improve more rapidly.

“OpenAI’s model is the best in performance, but we also don’t want to pay for capacities we don’t need,” Anthony Poo, co-founder of a Silicon Valley-based startup using generative AI to predict financial returns, told the Journal.

Last September, Poo’s company shifted from Anthropic’s Claude to DeepSeek after tests showed DeepSeek “performed similarly for around one-fourth of the cost,” noted the Journal.

When my book, Brain Rush, was published last summer I was concerned that the future of generative AI in the U.S. was too dependent on the largest technology companies. I contrasted this with the creativity of U.S. startups during the dot-com boom — which spawned 2,888 initial public offerings (compared to zero IPOs for U.S. generative AI startups).

DeepSeek’s success could encourage new rivals to U.S.-based large language model developers. If these startups build powerful AI models with fewer chips and get improvements to market faster, Nvidia revenue could grow more slowly as LLM developers replicate DeepSeek’s strategy of using fewer, less advanced AI chips.

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At some point the spending insanity has to end. DeepSeek may be exactly the shock that the arms race needs to end.
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The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a total disaster • ZDNET

Ed Bott:

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You’d think that Microsoft’s marketing team would have learned something after last year’s shambolic rollout of the Recall feature. Maybe, before trying another rollout, they might talk to a few customers, do some focus groups, even ask a few members of the press and analyst community for their advice.

But no.

Shortly after the New Year, someone in Redmond pushed a button that raised the price of its popular (84 million paid subscribers worldwide!) Microsoft 365 product. You know, the one that used to be called Microsoft Office? Yeah, well, now the app is called Microsoft 365 Copilot, and you’re going to be paying at least 30% more for that subscription starting with your next bill.

As far as I can tell, the response from customers has been overwhelmingly negative. I monitor Microsoft-focused online forums obsessively, and I read hundreds of complaints without seeing a single compliment. Seriously, the reaction to this rollout was an Excel #DIV/0 error.

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A 30% rise for the AI element? It’s not that valuable.
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How long do golden retrievers live? The answer could change our relationship with dogs • Slate

Isobel Whitcomb:

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Inbreeding coefficients are commonly used by biologists to assess the health of an entire population of creatures. In human populations, an average inbreeding coefficient of 3% to 5% is considered unhealthy.

Studies suggest that in golden retrievers, that value, on average, hovers around 8%—not great. When Boyko and an international team of researchers analyzed the effects of inbreeding on longevity in golden retrievers, they found that dogs whose parents shared identical copies of the same genes lived shorter lives, on average, than those whose parents’ genes included less overlap.

The genetic mutations that erode dog lifespans can pop up seemingly out of nowhere, then spread rapidly through a population, like a spark exploding into a wildfire. Bernese mountain dogs, for instance, are plagued by a form of blood cancer called histiocytosis, said Ruple, the canine epidemiologist. In both humans and dogs, this cancer is associated with a mutation on one particular gene. While this cancer is incredibly rare in humans, 1 in 7 of these dogs dies of it. That wasn’t always the case: These gentle giants have existed for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the first case of histiocytosis was described in a Bernese mountain dog. According to Ruple, it’s likely that the mutation happened in just one dog, was passed down to all of its puppies, then began causing cancer once those dogs were bred to one another.

In dogs, that can happen quickly. The average breeding-purebred male dog, called a sire, will father more than 100 puppies. That number can be much higher for particularly prolific sires—for instance, a male dog that wins a show. The tendency of one sire to spread a harmful mutation among its descendants even has a name, “the popular sire effect.” As it turns out, golden retrievers have the highest proportion of popular sires of any dog breed.

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Genetic screening for dogs? Canine GATTACA? A 12-year US study into retrievers published in 2024 has found definite genetic causes for shorter lifespans.
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Los Angeles shows cities can burn spectacularly. Vancouver is not exempt • Vancouver Sun

Dana Gee interviews John Valliant, an expert on fires:

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JV: What L.A. is showing us is that major cities can burn spectacularly, and Vancouver is not exempt from that…we were capable of generating a heat dome. So, imagine if it had been 37ºC with 40 knot winds. The whole west side would have gone. All the Pacific Spirit Park would have gone, no problem. And that’s what L.A. shows us, is really how vulnerable we are, and it’s a very stern invitation to reevaluate the flammability of our neighbourhoods and how we engage with fire and how we measure fire risk, because it’s not 1990 anymore. We don’t live in a rainforest anymore. We’re living in something new, and it’s not as wet as it used to be.

DG: What can we do to help mitigate the risk?
JV: Get a heat pump. Get rid of your gas car…probably stop eating beef or eat less beef. A really great thing about Canada and about British Columbia (BC) is we have the FireSmart B.C. Program, which is run by the fire service. And you can have firefighters experienced, you know, flammability, people, experts on fire, come to your community, come to your neighbourhood, your cul-de-sac, to your backyard, and help you look at your garden, your back porch, your wood pile, through the lens of fire…I think we’re at a disadvantage in Vancouver because the houses are old. They’re wooden, and they’re built very close together, and that is a recipe for conflagration, as we saw in Pacific Palisades.

And so it’s not like we’re gonna tear out every second house and create a space, but if you’re going to re-roof, re-roof with tin, don’t use vinyl siding. Think about having a sprinkler system, like a garden sprinkler, that you can mount on your roof to create a water curtain over your house…when embers start flying. You can reduce the flammability of your home and neighbourhood by double digit percentages…No one, as we saw in Los Angeles and as we saw in Fort McMurray, no one is stopping a firestorm. But firestorms are rare, but fires are going to be increasingly common…

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Just in case you were wondering where the next human-aided climate fire calamity might happen.
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How I use ChatGPT • The Ruffian

Ian Leslie:

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My headline is slightly misleading. I use ChatGPT and Claude (the two leading LLMs, from OpenAI and Anthropic respectively) But I use Claude much more; it’s the only one I pay for.1 I cite ChatGPT above simply because it’s much better known. This is interesting in itself. I don’t think even those who prefer ChatGPT would argue it’s significantly better than Claude, and it has a clearly inferior brand name.

But OpenAI’s headstart on Anthropic, and everyone else, allied with their CEO’s talent for PR, has given their product a big advantage in brand awareness and market share, at least for now (it seems to be levelling out somewhat). ChatGPT has become the category generic: people say “ChatGPT” to mean “an LLM chatbot”, like they say “Jacuzzi” to mean “whirlpool bath”.

[A selection of the approximate prompts:]
• I’ve just bought a Logitech webcam and light and I’m having trouble setting them up on my Mac Air. [Description of problem]. Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong?
• How would you characterise the different movements of Mahler’s Third Symphony? Please use nontechnical language. I’m particularly interested in the emotional effects that Mahler conveys.
• Here’s a piece that I’ve written for my Substack. Can you check it for a) Spelling errors b) Grammatical errors c) Any problems with flow and clarity?
• Can I get to Belfast from London City Airport? What times are the flights?
• I live in London. I’m looking to buy a secondhand car. I’m looking for [list of things I want from a car]. Can you suggest which models I should look at, give me a rough idea of price, and how the payments might work out on different purchase schemes?
• I’m making an oxtail stew according to this online recipe [cut and paste]. I’ve just bought some Jerusalem artichokes, is it OK to throw them in? If so when should I add them?

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There are plenty more. I’m intrigued and puzzled by them: many seem like questions that could be answered by good search technique. Plus I’d constantly wonder if it was hallucinating. But: asking these questions may well be an efficient short cut to the right answer(s). So, a very efficient method after all. (And less digging through forums, says Leslie.)

One of the most fun questions, for a cryptic crossword: “that confounded pane in the neck (4)”. Neat. Though he doesn’t say if the LLM answered correctly.
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Bluesky 2024 moderation report • Bluesky

Aaron Rodericks:

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In late August, there was a large increase in user growth for Bluesky from Brazil, and we saw spikes of up to 50k reports per day. Prior to this, our moderation team handled most reports within 40 minutes. For the first time in 2024, we now had a backlog in moderation reports. To address this, we increased the size of our Portuguese-language moderation team, added constant moderation sweeps and automated tooling for high-risk areas such as child safety, and hired moderators through an external contracting vendor for the first time.

We already had automated spam detection in place, and after this wave of growth in Brazil, we began investing in automating more categories of reports so that our moderation team would be able to review suspicious or problematic content rapidly. In December, we were able to review our first wave of automated reports for content categories like impersonation. This dropped processing time for high-certainty accounts to within seconds of receiving a report, though it also caused some false positives. We’re now exploring the expansion of this tooling to other policy areas. Even while instituting automation tooling to reduce our response time, human moderators are still kept in the loop — all appeals and false positives are reviewed by human moderators.

Some more statistics: the proportion of users submitting reports held fairly stable from 2023 to 2024. In 2023, 5.6% of our active users [those who haven’t been suspended or deleted] created one or more reports. In 2024, 1.19M users made one or more reports, approximately 4.57% of our user base.

In 2023, 3.4% of our active users received one or more reports. In 2024, the number of users who received a report were 770K, comprising 2.97% of our user base.

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Bluesky grew almost tenfold in 2024, from 2.89m to 25.9m users. So they grew the moderation staff to 100 people – and are still growing. In the year, they received 6.48m reports – up 17x from 2023. Odd how reports aren’t linear with growth.

As a view into a burgeoning social network, this is fascinating. We never got insight like this into Twitter’s early days.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In China, a huge decades-old bet on EVs is paying off, with reduced demand for fuel. CC-licensed photo by Saad Akhtar 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. Electrified. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

How China’s bet on EVs two decades ago is paying off big • CNN

Laura Paddison and Ella Nilsen:

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The roots of China’s EV surge go back nearly two decades.

Legacy automakers in the US, Japan and Europe had “such a big head start” on gas-powered vehicles that it was unlikely China would ever catch up, Shuo said. EVs offered the chance to dominate a new market.

There was also another key benefit: energy security. …The advantage of EVs is that they can be powered by China’s plentiful supplies of homegrown electricity. The government started introducing EV-friendly policies in earnest around 2009, [China climate policy expert Ilaria] Mazzocco told CNN, offering manufacturers cheap credit and funding for research.

It was “a pretty big bet,” she said, and the road wasn’t smooth. A few years in, “it was considered kind of a failure.” But ultimately the bet paid off, thanks to a combination of consistent support from China’s city and central governments, advances in battery technology and a slew of highly competitive companies, she said, including Tesla’s main rival, China-based BYD.

The country now boasts a robust charging infrastructure and homegrown EV expertise, technologies and materials. It’s producing large amounts of cheap EVs that people actually want to buy, [co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, Lauri] Myllyvirta said.

It’s a very different picture in the US, where the economic case for EVs without subsidies is weaker, he added, because gas is “extraordinarily cheap” and Americans prefer “absolutely massive vehicles.” With President Donald Trump now in office, the country is poised to sprint even further from policies promoting EVs and increase tariffs on Chinese EVs and battery materials.

The result is likely to be a US market that diverges further from the rest of the world, Myllyvirta said, “and that just makes it harder and harder for US automakers to compete overseas.”

China’s progress in electrifying transportation — including a vast, high-speed rail network — is slamming the brakes on its previously soaring oil consumption.

Gasoline demand fell by about 1% in 2024 and is on course to fall faster this year, even as people’s incomes grow and car ownership rises, said Ciarán Healy, an oil market analyst at the International Energy Agency. “For a country of China’s economic profile, it’s extraordinary,” he told CNN.

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Not so super, Apple • One Foot Tsunami

Paul Kafasis:

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I decided to be methodical. I asked my iPhone2 who won Super Bowls 1 through 60 (that’s “I” through “LX” in Super Bowl styling) and captured a screenshot of each result.3 The timestamps tell me this took just under 10 minutes. It also made my thumb hurt a little.

I then used ChatGPT to make assorted text lists, including the Roman numerals from I to LX, as well as all the actual Super Bowl winners.4 This saved my thumb, and other fingers, some amount of pain. I shoved all this into a Numbers spreadsheet for analysis.5 On the graphical front, I worked with Flying Meat’s excellent Retrobatch to process the collection of images.

So, how did Siri do? With the absolute most charitable interpretation, Siri correctly provided the winner of just 20 of the 58 Super Bowls that have been played. That’s an absolutely abysmal 34% completion percentage. If Siri were a quarterback, it would be drummed out of the NFL.

Siri did once manage to get four years in a row correct (Super Bowls IX through XII), but only if we give it credit for providing the right answer for the wrong reason. More realistically, it thrice correctly answered three in a row (Super Bowls V through VII, XXXV through XXVII, and LVII through LIX). At its worst, it got an amazing 15 in a row wrong (Super Bowls XVII through XXXII). Most amusingly, it credited the Philadelphia Eagles with an astonishing 33 Super Bowl wins they haven’t earned, to go with the one 1 they have.

Below, I’ve gathered a dozen of my favorite responses, in sequential order.

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This is in effect a companion piece to John Gruber’s, who goes into greater detail – after first acknowledging that for an American computer company, being able to answer questions about its most iconic sporting event should be table stakes – by asking Siri, then DuckDuckGo, then various AI engines, about a really quite obscure, and randomly chosen, sporting outcome. (You’ll probably be surprised by which one comes out worst.)

Siri isn’t good at anything except very simple tasks. Personally, I use it for controlling my home, and reading map directions, but that’s about it. Apple really has a mountain to climb.

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28 days of media slides • The Mediator

Doug Shapiro:

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Last month, I tried a little experiment on X/Twitter: each day, for 28 days, I posted a slide or two about the media business.

Most of these are pulled from long-form posts on The Mediator, but some are new or updated. Some are data-centric, some conceptual; most are proprietary analyses, some aren’t—but collectively they tell a story about the current and evolving state of media, especially the video business.

Overall, they show an industry in upheaval, particularly for traditional media:

• Time spent with media is stagnating, putting a cap on growth
• Attention is fragmenting as corporate media loses share to creator media
• Technology is disintermediating traditional intermediaries, shifting bargaining power to the top creatives and creators
• Platforms with massive scale and different profit motives are increasingly dominating the media business
• The distribution of popularity is becoming more power-law like, making the business riskier
• And all this is a lagging indicator of the last disruption—falling barriers to distribution (the internet)—while another disruption is looming—falling barriers to creation (GenAI)

«

None of which sounds good for what we might call traditional media organisations. The slides are absolutely eye-opening, and as Helen Lewis likes to point out, the “mainstream” media these days is people like Joe Rogan. Hence we’re calling organisations like the BBC and New York Times “legacy” media, which sounds somewhat dismissive, given that they do things which the others don’t, such as fact-checking, sending people to dangerous locations, being consistent and admitting their mistakes.
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Trump issues Executive Order to boost cryptocurrency industry • The New York Times

David Yaffe-Bellany:

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The executive order, which was light on details, said the Trump administration would create a working group on digital assets to come up with the plan, which would include “regulatory and legislative proposals.” The group would also evaluate a potential national cryptocurrency stockpile, a government-controlled stash of digital coins that the industry has spent months lobbying the new administration to create.

“The digital asset industry plays a crucial role in innovation and economic development in the United States, as well as our nation’s international leadership,” the order said. “It is therefore the policy of my administration to support the responsible growth and use of digital assets.”

Mr. Trump has a significant personal stake in the success of the crypto industry. He and his sons last year helped start a crypto company called World Liberty Financial, which is selling a new digital currency called WLFI. Last week, he and his wife, Melania, each began selling memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency inspired by an online joke or celebrity mascot.

The ventures have drawn criticism from ethics experts concerned about conflicts of interest. In effect, Mr. Trump is trying to write the rules for business ventures from which he may personally profit. He has vowed to end the Biden administration’s crackdown on crypto companies and made a series of personnel selections at key federal agencies that appear poised to boost the crypto industry’s prospects.

Still, the executive order did not go nearly as far as many in the crypto industry had hoped. Mr. Trump did not order federal agencies to drop lawsuits against crypto companies, nor direct the government to start buying Bitcoin.

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Ah, the utter shambles has begun. One reader sent me this apropos observation, believed to be a Turkish proverb: “If a clown moves into a palace, he does not become a king; it makes the palace a circus.”
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TabBoo: a Chrome extension for sites you’re trying to avoid

“Justin”:

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Stuck in an addictive, endless loop, loading the same sites over and over again? Install the extension and let aversive conditioning do the rest. Add random jumpscares to sites you’re trying to avoid.

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Certainly something to try if you’ve got a problem where you just can’t stay off a site. Perhaps.
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Fitbit fined $12m for Ionic smartwatches that burned 78 people • The Verge

Gaby Del Valle:

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Fitbit is paying a $12.25m fine over its Ionic smartwatches, which the company recalled in 2022 after reports that the watches’ lithium-ion batteries overheated and, in some cases, burned customers. 

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has provisionally accepted the settlement. The commission worked with Fitbit to recall 1.7m Ionic watches in 2022 after receiving 115 reports of overheating batteries. Of those reports, 78 mentioned burn injuries, including two instances in which consumers received third-degree burns from their watches and four instances of second-degree burns. Despite complaints throughout 2018, 2019, and 2020 — that continued after a firmware update to address the issue in 2020 — the government agency says “Fitbit did not immediately report to the Commission as required.”

The recall only affected Fitbit’s Ionic watches, but some consumers say other Fitbit devices have similar issues. In 2023, consumers sued Google — which owns Fitbit — claiming that all its devices had battery issues that led to overheating, creating fire hazards and even burning customers.

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If your battery catches fire in a computer or phone or electric bike, it’s bad enough – but if it overheats in a wearable (especially one that’s strapped onto you) the problem is much bigger. Fitbit wasn’t owned by Google at that point, which only goes to show how difficult wearables are.
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Google buys part of HTC’s Vive VR team for $250m • Engadget

Mariella Moon:

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Google is paying HTC $250m in cash for a deal that will give the bigger company’s plans for Android XR a boost. Under the terms of their agreement, some members of the HTC Vive engineering team will be joining Google, which describes them as an “incredibly strong technical team with a proven track record in the VR space.” HTC released the consumer version of its first Vive VR headset, designed in partnership with Valve, back in 2016. Last year, it launched the Vive Focus Vision more than a year after it released its first standalone headset for consumers, the Vive XR Elite.

In addition to absorbing certain Vive team members, Google will also get a non-exclusive license to use HTC’S extended reality technologies. HTC can still use its own IPs, and it vows to continue developing and supporting its XR headsets. The companies will also “explore future collaboration opportunities.” Google says the deal will help “its acceleration across the headset and glasses ecosystem.” The company laid out its vision for a unified Android XR ecosystem in December, which will span a range of virtual and mixed reality headsets and glasses. We’re bound to see the first Android XR devices this year, including one codenamed Project Moohan from a Google-Samsung collaboration.

«

HTC. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time. I took a look at its financials: for Q3 (fiscal and calendar) its revenues were $23.5m, and it lost $37m. Its cash reserves are about $385m. It’s been a long time since HTC was top of the pile in the Android smartphone world.

So this $250m is going to be very welcome. But without its Vive team, acquihired by Google, how is it going to improve its position?
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Apple, Google mobile ecosystems face U.K. probe under new tech rules • WSJ via MSN

Edith Hancock:

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The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority is investigating mobile ecosystems controlled by Apple and Alphabet’s Google to work out if they need to obey a strict new law governing digital competition.

The CMA said Thursday the probes will assess the companies’ dominance in spaces like mobile phone operating systems, app stores and web browsers and explore their impact on smartphone users as well as developers that rely on those devices to make money. If the investigations determine that the companies have what it calls ‘strategic market status,’ it can impose bespoke rules on them under the new law.

This is the second round of investigations the watchdog has launched under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, a new U.K. law designed to curb the outsized market power of the world’s largest technology companies. The law bans tech giants the CMA deems as having strategic market status in the digital economy from favoring their own products and services over those of rivals.

The CMA’s started enforcing the new rules this year by opening an investigation into Google’s search services on Jan. 14.

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Intriguing that the CMA’s chief was fired on Wednesday as the government is keen to remove “regulatory barriers”. Presumably this was already in the pipeline. Wonder if it will get kicked into the long grass?
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100 things you should know about people: #19 — it’s a myth that all-capital text is inherently harder to read • The Team W, Inc.

Susan Weinschenk:

»

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IS COMMONLY BELIEVED, BUT NOT TRUE — You read by recognizing the shapes of words and groups of words. Words that are in all capital letters all have the same shape: a rectangle of a certain size. This makes words displayed in all uppercase harder to read than upper and lower case (known as “mixed case”).  Mixed case words are easier to read because they make unique shapes.

OK, NOW THE TRUE STUFF STARTS — When I started this article the topic was supposed to be why all capital letters are harder to read. Like most people with a usability background or a cognitive psychology background, I can describe the research — just what I wrote in the first paragraph above. I decided to look up and cite the actual research rather than just passing on the general knowledge and belief.

The research doesn’t exist, or “It’s complicated” — Something happened when I went to find the research on the shape of words and how that is related to all capital letters being harder to read. There isn’t research showing that exactly. It’s more complicated, and ultimately, more controversial. In July of 2004 Kevin Larson wrote an article that is posted at the Microsoft website that explains in depth all the research on this topic. I’ve picked out several ideas from that article and am presenting them here.

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This is surprising; Larson suggests that it’s simply unfamiliarity with reading all-caps text that makes us slower at reading it. But words in capital letters have less shape than words in lower case; capitals have no descenders or ascenders, so they fill out the line, meaning we only have their width to go on. Needs more research, really.

The one thing that does seem to be agreed is that words with alternating capitals and lower-case are harder to read. Which makes me think a bit of American newspapers headlines and their insistence on capitalising so many first letters. Harder to read, maybe?
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The ultra-fast cancer treatments which could replace conventional radiotherapy • BBC Future

David Cox:

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Eleven years ago, Marie-Catherine Vozenin, a radiobiologist now working at Geneva University Hospitals (Hug), and others published a paper outlining a paradigm-shifting approach to traditional radiotherapy treatment which they called Flash. By delivering radiation at ultra-high dose rates, with exposures of less than a second, they showed that it was possible to destroy tumours in rodents while sparing healthy tissue.

Its impact was immediate. International experts described it as a seminal breakthrough, and it galvanised fellow radiobiologists around the world to conduct their own experiments using the Flash approach to treat a wide variety of tumours in rodents, household pets, and now humans.

The Flash concept resonated as it addressed some of the long-standing limitations of radiotherapy, one of the most common cancer therapies, which two-thirds of all cancer patients will receive at some point in their treatment journey. Typically delivered through administering a beam of X-rays or other particles over the course of two to five minutes, the total dose is usually spread across dozens of individual treatment sessions over up to eight weeks, to make it more tolerable for the patient.

Over the past three decades, advanced imaging scans and state-of-the-art radiotherapy machines have made it possible to target an individual tumour with increasing precision. But the risk of damaging or deadly side effects is still present.

…Cancer specialists have long believed that being able to boost the radiation dose would greatly enhance their ability to cure patients with difficult-to-treat cancers, according to Vozenin. For example, research has previously indicated that being able to increase the radiation dose in lung cancer patients with tumours that have metastasised to the brain could improve survival.

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Now being tested at CERN – yes, the home of the Large Hadron Collider.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Can Amazon make its Alexa line of products turn a profit by adding an LLM to them? CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog 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. Intelligent enough. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Samsung and Meta are looking into earbuds with cameras, following Apple’s AirPods’ lead • TechRadar

Carrie Marshall:

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Apple isn’t the only firm considering sticking cameras into your earbuds, although it’s probably closer than most: as we reported last year, Apple has been experimenting with IR cameras in AirPods, and is apparently planning to use them to help inform AI and deliver the audio equivalent of smart glasses.

A new report says that Apple isn’t the only firm wanting to be an eye-in-ear pioneer. Meta and Samsung are apparently looking into people’s ears too, but the path to in-ear cameras has proved to be a little tricky.

The report, by Bloomberg, details the efforts of Apple’s earbud rivals. Meta’s system appears to have the same goal as Apple’s one – not to take photos or record video, but to analyze the world around you and provide input to AI assistants – and “would let users look at an object and ask the earbuds to analyze the item”, much like Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses do. However, such devices are at least a few years away.

Meta has encountered several issues, which presumably Apple has encountered too. The report says that there have been issues with people who have long hair, and Meta is apparently unsatisfied with the camera angles of the devices currently named “Camera Buds”.

As for Samsung, those legendary leakers “people with knowledge of the matter” say that the firm is also considering a version of earbuds with cameras inside. However as yet there’s no detail of how advanced that project is, or if it’s even begun.

Cameras on earbuds make a lot of sense as an alternative to the idea of smart AR glasses, because there will be a big hurdle to get people who don’t wear glasses normally to put them on.

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Fabulous story about not one, not two, but three companies’ plans for products which may or may not be under development. The absolute pinnacle of speculative reporting. Though I think it will be a lot easier to persuade people to put AirPods (and similar) in their ears than to wear glasses they don’t need.

Though those would be some tiny, tiny cameras. How do you get the weight down, and the battery charged?
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​​Beijing’s targeting of Taiwan’s undersea cables previews cross-strait tensions under a Trump presidency • The Diplomat

Hans Horan:

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On January 5, the Taiwanese government alleged that the Chinese-owned vessel Shunxin-39 cut an undersea fiber-optic cable near Taiwan’s Keelung Harbor by reportedly dragging its anchor across the seabed. Taiwan’s government-run telecommunications operator, Chunghwa Telecom, discovered the alleged sabotage after receiving a disruption warning around 7:51 a.m. While the ship is reportedly registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, the Taiwanese Coast Guard stated that all seven crew members were Chinese nationals and the ship’s owner was based in Hong Kong. 

On January 10, a director of the company operating Shunxin-39 refuted the allegations, despite the ship’s movements reportedly sustaining the sabotage hypothesis. 

This incident appears to be the latest example of Beijing-directed “gray-zone harassment.” In 2023, similar sabotage severed two submarine cables connecting Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, which temporarily disrupted their internet services. This most recent incident highlights the complex dynamics of China’s gray-zone tactics against Taiwan. Most notably, its timing – just weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration for a second term as the United States’ president – raises the stakes, with China potentially testing the resilience of the Taiwan-U.S. partnership and Washington’s broader commitment to Indo-Pacific security.

The investigation into the Shunxin-39 incident remains inconclusive thus far, though the incident is far from isolated.

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“Dragging our anchor” is the new “shooting down your satellite”.
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AI mistakes are very different from human mistakes • Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders:

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Someone who makes calculus mistakes is also likely to respond “I don’t know” to calculus-related questions.

To the extent that AI systems make these human-like mistakes, we can bring all of our mistake-correcting systems to bear on their output. But the current crop of AI models—particularly LLMs—make mistakes differently.

AI errors come at seemingly random times, without any clustering around particular topics. LLM mistakes tend to be more evenly distributed through the knowledge space. A model might be equally likely to make a mistake on a calculus question as it is to propose that cabbages eat goats.

And AI mistakes aren’t accompanied by ignorance. A LLM will be just as confident when saying something completely wrong—and obviously so, to a human—as it will be when saying something true. The seemingly random inconsistency of LLMs makes it hard to trust their reasoning in complex, multi-step problems. If you want to use an AI model to help with a business problem, it’s not enough to see that it understands what factors make a product profitable; you need to be sure it won’t forget what money is.

This situation indicates two possible areas of research. The first is to engineer LLMs that make more human-like mistakes. The second is to build new mistake-correcting systems that deal with the specific sorts of mistakes that LLMs tend to make.

…Humans may occasionally make seemingly random, incomprehensible, and inconsistent mistakes, but such occurrences are rare and often indicative of more serious problems. We also tend not to put people exhibiting these behaviors in decision-making positions. Likewise, we should confine AI decision-making systems to applications that suit their actual abilities—while keeping the potential ramifications of their mistakes firmly in mind.

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‘Severance’: Apple TV+ series has generated $200m for streamer • Deadline

Max Goldbart:

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Severance‘s long-awaited second season returned to the small screen last Friday and research from Parrot Analytics has found that the first generated more than $200m for the tech giant.

Parrot came to these figures via its Content Valuation methodology, which uses a formula to correlate audience demand with subscribers and therefore revenue. The system also examines how shows and movies generate value for streamers in markets across the globe.

According to Parrot, Severance is doing well compared with Apple hits like Slow Horses and The Morning Show. The former generated $184.8M during a similar timeframe to Severance Season 1, while the latter made $299.4M but across a much longer period of time. From Q3 2020 to Q3 2024, Ted Lasso, which has been teasing a fourth season, generated a whopping $609.4M, Parrot said.

As an acquisition driver, Parrot noted that the EMEA and Latin America regions have seen the greatest contribution from Severance. 

Severance Season 2 launched last Friday but is dropping episodes weekly, meaning fans will have to wait patiently for their fix of Mark S, Helly R and Mr Milchick. This builds into Parrot Senior Entertainment Industry Strategist Brandon Katz’s notion that “the critically acclaimed first season of Severance not only aligns with Apple’s premium brand, but provided a long tail of value for the streamer.”

Parrot’s research found that almost half of the revenue generated by Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller‘s hit came in the 12 months after the finale, which “underscores the show’s unique ability to elicit catch-up viewing and rewatches from hungry fans,” according to Katz. It is perhaps no wonder then that Apple has chosen weekly drops for Severance Season 2.

“All of this, plus its healthy pre-release demand trends, sets the stage for a ‘break out sequel’ type of performance for Season 2, which would help Apple fill the anchor series void without Ted Lasso,”added Katz. When looking at the 28 days leading into the upcoming season, Severance Season 2 now compares favorably to rival hits such as Cobra Kai, The Mandalorian and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Parrot said, backing up Katz’s claim.

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The subscription for Apple TV+ (to get Severance etc) is $9.99 monthly, or £8.99 – which is ~$120 annually. I don’t see how you can get to $200m “generated” from the first season unless you think around two million people signed up and stayed signed up specifically because of Severance. (Which is, no argument, terrific.) I find that hard to credit.
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A Samsung integration helps make Google’s Gemini the AI assistant to beat • The Verge

David Pierce:

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According to recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal, CEO Sundar Pichai now believes Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT, and he wants Google to have 500 million users by the end of this year. It might just get there one Samsung phone at a time. [The new Galaxy phones use Google Gemini by default, rather than Samsung’s Bixby.]

Gemini is now a front-and-center feature on the world’s most popular Android phones, and millions upon millions of people will likely start to use it more — or use it at all — now that it’s so accessible. For Google, which is essentially betting that Gemini is the future of every single one of its products, that brings a hugely important new set of users and interactions. All that data makes Gemini better, which makes it more useful, which makes it more popular. Which makes it better again.

Right now, Google appears to be well ahead of its competitors in one important way: Gemini is the most capable virtual assistant on the market right now, and it’s not particularly close. It’s not that Gemini is specifically great; it’s just that it has more access to more information and more users than anyone else. This race is still in its early stages, and no AI product is very good yet — but Google knows better than anyone that if you can be everywhere, you can get good really fast. That worked so well with search that it got Google into antitrust trouble. This time, at least so far, it seems like Google’s going to have an even easier time taking over the market.

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Bet there’s a juicy contract for Samsung to use Gemini rather than Bixby. However, I keep seeing examples of terrible misinformation being quoted by people in screenshots of Gemini results. Do not trust the chatbots. Do not trust the search engines. Check it yourself.
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Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027 • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI models may surpass human capabilities “in almost everything” within two to three years, according to a Wall Street Journal interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Speaking at Journal House in Davos, Amodei said, “I don’t know exactly when it’ll come, I don’t know if it’ll be 2027. I think it’s plausible it could be longer than that. I don’t think it will be a whole bunch longer than that when AI systems are better than humans at almost everything. Better than almost all humans at almost everything. And then eventually better than all humans at everything, even robotics.”

Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with his sister, Daniela Amodei, and five other former OpenAI employees. Not long after, Anthropic emerged as a strong technological competitor to OpenAI’s AI products (such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT). Most recently, its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model has remained highly regarded among some AI users and highly ranked among AI benchmarks.

During the WSJ interview, Amodei also spoke some about the potential implications of highly intelligent AI systems when these AI models can control advanced robotics.

“[If] we make good enough AI systems, they’ll enable us to make better robots. And so when that happens, we will need to have a conversation… at places like this event, about how do we organize our economy, right? How do humans find meaning?”

He then shared his concerns about how human-level AI models and robotics that are capable of replacing all human labour may require a complete re-think of how humans value both labour and themselves.

“We’ve recognized that we’ve reached the point as a technological civilization where the idea, there’s huge abundance and huge economic value, but the idea that the way to distribute that value is for humans to produce economic labour, and this is where they feel their sense of self worth,” he added. “Once that idea gets invalidated, we’re all going to have to sit down and figure it out.”

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Clever timescale: close enough to feel dangerous, far enough away to be deniable. Perhaps even further. “Better than humans at almost everything”? Really?
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Solar-charging backpacks are helping children in Africa to read after dark • CNN

Joshua Korber Hoffman:

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Fewer than half of households in mainland Tanzania are connected to electricity. This falls to just over a third in rural areas. Consequently, many families rely on kerosene lamps to provide light after dark.

These lamps produce dim light and are expensive to fill. They also pollute the air and carry the risk of burns. Parents often opt to send their children to bed, James explained, rather than allowing them to use the lamp to read.

James’ solution – flexible solar panels sewn onto the outside of bags to power a reading light – was inspired by a university professor who carried around a solar charger for his phone, sewn into a fabric pouch. “It gave me the confidence that what I want is going to work,” said James.

He started in 2016 by handmaking 80 backpacks per month, sewing on a solar panel sourced from China that charged during the children’s walk to and from school. By the time they returned home, they would have enough power for a reading light. A fully charged bag can power a light for six to eight hours, meaning that one day of bright weather can allow for multiple nights of reading, even if cloudy weather arrives.

James says the solar backpacks are more affordable than using an oil lamp. A solar bag costs between 12,000 and 22,500 Tanzanian shillings (approximately $4-8), with the reading light included – the same price as 12-22.5 days of using a kerosene lamp, according to an average cost estimated in a survey of Soma Bags customers.

Sold mainly from his growing franchise of mobile library carts, the bags became popular, and James increased production. He founded Soma Bags in 2019 and oversaw the construction of his own factory in the village of Bulale, in the Mwanza region, in 2020. The company now employs 65 staff.

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AI simulates 500 million years of evolution to discover artificial fluorescent protein • EL PAÍS English

Javier Yanes:

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In New York, a group of former researchers from Meta — the parent company of social networks Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — founded EvolutionaryScale, an AI startup focused on biology. The EvolutionaryScale Model 3 (ESM3) system created by the company is a generative language model — the same kind of platform that powers ChatGPT. However, while ChatGPT generates text, ESM3 generates proteins, the fundamental building blocks of life.

ESM3 feeds on sequence, structure, and function data from existing proteins to learn the biological language of these molecules and create new ones. Its creators have trained it with 771 billion data packets derived from 3.15 billion sequences, 236 million structures, and 539 million functional traits. This adds up to more than one trillion teraflops (a measure of computational performance) — the most computing power ever used in biology, according to the company.

…Rives and his collaborators applied ESM3 to the task of creating a new green fluorescent protein (GFP). GFP is a naturally occurring protein that glows green under ultraviolet light and is commonly used in research as a marker. The first GFP was discovered in a jellyfish, but other versions can also be found in corals and anemones. The scientists trained ESM3 to generate a new GFP, and the result surprised them: a fluorescent protein, which they named esmGFP, that is only 58% similar to the most closely related GFP. According to the researchers, this is equivalent to simulating 500 million years of evolution. ESM3 is now available to the scientific community as a new tool for designing proteins with therapeutic functions, environmental remediation capabilities, and other potential applications.

Thus, AI has uncovered a path that nature could have taken 500 million years ago, but for reasons unknown, did not.

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Amazon races to transplant Alexa’s ‘brain’ with generative AI • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia and Camilla Hodgson :

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Amazon is gearing up to relaunch its Alexa voice-powered digital assistant as an artificial intelligence “agent” that can complete practical tasks, as the tech group races to resolve the challenges that have dogged the system’s AI overhaul.

The $2.4tn company has for the past two years sought to redesign Alexa, its conversational system embedded within 500mn consumer devices worldwide, so the software’s “brain” is transplanted with generative AI. 

Rohit Prasad, who leads the artificial general intelligence (AGI) team at Amazon, told the Financial Times the voice assistant still needed to surmount several technical hurdles before the rollout.

This includes solving the problem of “hallucinations” or fabricated answers, its response speed or “latency”, and reliability. “Hallucinations have to be close to zero,” said Prasad. “It’s still an open problem in the industry, but we are working extremely hard on it.” 

The vision of Amazon’s leaders is to transform Alexa, which is still used for a narrow set of simple tasks such as playing music and setting alarms, to an “agentic” product that acts as a personalised concierge. This could include anything from suggesting restaurants to configuring the lights in the bedroom based on a person’s sleep cycles.

Alexa’s redesign has been in train since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft, in late 2022.

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Just a reminder that back in July, the WSJ reported that “Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon had more than $25bn in losses from its devices business, according to the documents. The losses for the years before and after that period couldn’t be determined.” Wonder if ChatGPT is going to fix that. I have my doubts.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new motorcycle helmet promises all-round vision thanks to AI. Will that reduce accidents? CC-licensed photo by sprklg 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. Envisioned. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

This AI motorcycle helmet promises 100% blind-spot elimination • New Atlas

Utkarsh Sood:

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AI has now made its way to motorcycle helmets. Gone are the days of cautious shoulder checks. Intelligent Cranium Helmets promises to provide riders with the highest level of protection by combining improved visibility, crash detection, and seamless connectivity into a single, high-tech helmet.

After showing a design concept back in 2015, the company has finally been able to produce an actual mass-produced, retail-ready product that is full as a tick with futuristic functionality. It’s called the iC-R, which is actually a range of four smart motorcycle helmet models, each with an added set of features to tickle your fancy. It was unveiled at CES 2025, and proved successful at garnering a fair amount of attention in the moto world.

But first, who is Intelligent Cranium Helmets? The Virginia-based company started in 2015 with a safety-first smart helmet tech approach that put a prime focus on integrating artificial intelligence into its product range.

“While driving to work one day, I noticed a number of motorcyclists traveling in the same direction I was,” says CEO and co-founder, Ambrose Dodson. “I observed the motorcyclists repeatedly turning their heads whenever they needed to change lanes, and I said to myself – there has to be a safer way for these riders to ride.”

The focal point of the AI helmet is its 240º field of reverse camera vision, which stitches together footage from two rear-mounted cameras into a wrapraound rear view video feed. This feed can be displayed right above the rider’s eyeline in a heads-up display (HUD).

The rider’s own visual field of view covers somewhere around a further 120º, adding up to what Intelligent Cranium claims is a full 360º of visual awareness. What’s more, there’s a 1080p/60fps action camera at the front of the helmet that covers a 152º angle.

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I’m reminded of XKCD 538, “Security”, which overlooks how incredible technology is foiled by simple force. And this is nice, but won’t stop drivers pulling out of side roads or affect any of the most common motorcycle crash causes.
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Cutting-edge Chinese “reasoning” model rivals OpenAI o1—and it’s free to download • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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Alongside the release of the main DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 models, DeepSeek published six smaller “DeepSeek-R1-Distill” versions ranging from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters. These distilled models are based on existing open source architectures like Qwen and Llama, trained using data generated from the full R1 model. The smallest version can run on a laptop, while the full model requires far more substantial computing resources.

The releases immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open-weights models—which can often be run and fine-tuned on local hardware—have lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI’s o1 in so-called reasoning benchmarks. Having these capabilities available in an MIT-licensed model that anyone can study, modify, or use commercially potentially marks a shift in what’s possible with publicly available AI models.

“They are SO much fun to run, watching them think is hilarious,” independent AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars in a text message. Willison tested one of the smaller models and described his experience in a post on his blog: “Each response starts with a … pseudo-XML tag containing the chain of thought used to help generate the response,” noting that even for simple prompts, the model produces extensive internal reasoning before output.

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Ben Thompson at Stratechery, who follows this stuff in a manner that is a bit more reader-friendly than Willison, is very excited at the prospect of a locally-run LLM that fits in a suitably enabled home computer.

It feels like this stuff is rapidly becoming commoditised; the only thing you’ll need is a computer with LOTS more RAM. Which takes us back to the good old 1990s/2000s, when getting more RAM was almost more important than having a faster CPU.
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Gaming on Apple Vision Pro could see huge growth soon, suggest game makers • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

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As published by GamesBeat, a recent Game Developers Conference survey sought to gauge engagement from developers with Apple’s new spatial computing platform.

The data points to big growth coming soon. Here’s what it says:

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Although only 8% of VR/AR developers are currently making games for Apple vision OS, the platform looks to be growing its foothold. Almost one-fifth (18%) of respondents say their next games will be on the platform, and one-fourth are interested in Apple’s VR headset.

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These three data points are all interesting in their own ways.

First, it’s a bit surprising that 8% of VR/AR game developers are currently working on a visionOS project. We certainly haven’t seen much from their efforts yet, as Vision Pro gaming options have been scarce so far. That number is encouraging to hear.

Second, the fact that 18% of respondents confirmed their next game would be on Vision Pro shows how much growth we should see soon.

The final question is especially relevant too, especially when comparing visionOS interest to that of other platforms.

Notably, 26% of respondents said that visionOS was of high interest to them as a game developer, while only 25% said the same for PlayStation VR2—a platform that might be about to bolster Apple’s Vision Pro efforts.

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I’ll believe it when I see it, because the Vision Pro just doesn’t have a big enough user base to be attractive. That would be the most sunk of sunk costs.

The Gamesbeat link is worth reading, because it distils an analysis of the current situation and mood in games. Which is: gloomy.
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Trump Admin accused of using AI to draft Executive Orders • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

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Mere hours after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, returning President Donald Trump got to work signing dozens — and counting — of executive orders, which range from commands for the US to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization to ordering an end to birthright citizenship and renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”

But while the executive actions range in scope, legal experts have called attention to some curious common threads: bizarre typos, formatting errors and oddities, and stilted language — familiar artifacts that have led to speculation that those who penned them might have turned to AI for help.

“Lots of reporting suggested that, this time around, Trump and his lawyers would avoid the sloppy legal work that plagued his first administration so they’d fare better in the courts,” Slate journalist and legal expert Mark Joseph Stern remarked last night in a Bluesky post. “I see no evidence of that in this round of executive orders.”

“This is poor, slipshod work,” he added, before alleging that the actions were “obviously assisted by AI.”
In another post, Stern pointed to a deeply questionable section of an executive action titled “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” which details how the US will take advantage of the state’s “untapped supply of natural resources,” in part by drilling for fossil fuels in regions of previously-protected natural land.

In that section, the order includes a numbered list of several distinct Public Land Orders to be reinstated. Each land order, however, is listed next to the number one — an apparent slip-up, we should point out, that we’ve noticed on seemingly AI-generated content in the past.

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I wouldn’t rule out it just being slipshod humans, given it’s the Trump team. If they did use AI, the output is probably greatly improved from the original.
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Weight-loss jabs linked to reduced risk of 42 conditions including dementia • The Guardian

Nicola Davis:

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People with diabetes taking medications found in weight-loss jabs have a reduced risk of 42 conditions, research has found, paving the way for such drugs being used to treat a host of health problems.

The most comprehensive study of its kind showed that psychotic disorders, infections and dementia were among conditions found to be less likely to occur when using GLP-1RAs, which are found in the medications Saxenda, Wegovy and Mounjaro.

The researchers compared health outcomes for people with diabetes who received usual care with those also given drugs such as liraglutide, semaglutide and tirzepatide. While the team revealed the risk of many conditions was lower for the latter group, the risk of other conditions, including arthritic disorders, was increased.

And the scientists say that the benefits are not just restricted to people with diabetes, suggesting they could also be found in other people using the jabs, such as those who take them to fight obesity.

“We only studied people with diabetes but there is no biologic or clinical reason to think that the beneficial and risk profiles would be very different in people without diabetes,” said Dr Ziyad Al-Aly, a co-author of the research from Washington University in St Louis.

However, Aly said it was unlikely people without obesity would experience a similar range of potential benefits. He added that some of the positive associations might be linked to weight loss, while it was also important to consider the risks.

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Greater weight leads to higher risk of psychotic disorders, infections and dementia? (For the latter, the study only has 3.5 years of data, so that seems an odd conclusion.)
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The making of Community Notes • Asterisk

Asterisk magazine:

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what falls out of those later studies that compare Community Notes to expert fact checks as well — the trust is higher. 

Lucas [Neumann, product designer at X]: Yes. But one thing to note about that outcome is that we had to put a lot of work into overcoming people’s priors. If you go back to 2021, and someone sees a tweet with a box on it, they immediately think, “Oh, this is a fact check.” They would assume that Twitter wrote it, or that the Twitter CEO decided that it should be there. What we’re taking one hour to tell you here is something we had to explain to them in a split second with just one line of copy. Arriving at that design and what those words are — I don’t think anyone here has ever done so many iterations on one rectangle. Things like, what’s the shade of blue that will make people calmer when they see this? The original design that Keith made was an orange box with “This is misleading information” at the top. Coming from that design to what we have now was a learning process. 

Keith [Coleman, VP of product at X]: That line — “Readers added context they thought people might want to know” — we iterated on that line so many times to find something that could succinctly describe what had happened here, how this came to be, that this was by the people, not by the company, and that it was there for your information, not to tell you what to think. 

Emily [Thai, formerly University of Chicago consultant to the Birdwatch scheme which became Community Notes]: I don’t think you will ever hear any of us — anybody who worked on this project — ever say the word “fact check.” There’s a care to avoid using that phrasing in any of the things we say about the product, any of the language about it, anything on the product surface, because it’s entirely about providing context and information and then letting you make your own decision about how to trust it.

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This is a long but very interesting interview with this team.
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Netflix UK audience reach overtakes BBC1 for first time in 2024 • Deadline

Jake Kanter:

»

Netflix was the most-watched TV service in the UK for three months last year, overtaking dominant domestic network BBC1 for the first time, according to a Deadline analysis.

The unseating of Britain’s most popular channel may not have been permanent, but represents a possible inflection point in the battle between traditional broadcasters and U.S. streaming giants. The BBC said it was “meaningless” to compare the entirety of Netflix with a single channel and that its portfolio had double the number of viewers of the Squid Game streamer.

Viewing figures from BARB, the UK’s official ratings body, showed that Netflix’s audience reach overtook BBC1 in September, October, and November 2024. For these three months, Netflix’s average audience reach stood at 43.2M, compared with BBC1’s 42.3M viewers.

BBC1 pulled ahead again in December, despite Netflix posting a record reach of 46.4M after streaming series including UK original Black Doves. BBC1’s reach was 48.4M last month, no doubt buoyed by festive hits including Gavin & Stacey and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

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Yet you never hear anyone complaining about the news on Netflix, or demanding it be defunded. (Nor listening to its radio stations or reading its news website.) A basic ad-free Netflix subscription will cost £132 per year (likely going up presently, see below); the standard BBC licence fee is £169.50. Amazing what that extra £37.50 gets you.
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Netflix is raising prices again – The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Netflix is raising prices yet again. In its latest earnings report released Tuesday, the streaming service announced that “we are adjusting prices today across most plans” in the US, Canada, Portugal, and Argentina.

Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou tells The Verge that the ad-supported tier is increasing from $6.99 to $7.99 per month, while the standard ad-free tier will go from $15.49 to $17.99 per month. Its highest-priced premium tier is also increasing from $22.99 to $24.99 per month. The price hikes will go into effect during subscribers’ next billing cycle, according to Zhou.

“As we continue to invest in programming and deliver more value for our members, we will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more so that we can re-invest to further improve Netflix,” the company’s letter to investors says. Netflix last raised the price of its subscription in October 2023. This is also the first time it’s raising the price of this ad-supported plan, which it rolled out in 2022.

Netflix added 19 million new subscribers over the past few months — the most in its history during a single quarter — bringing its global total to 300 million.

«

A graphic with the story shows that since 2015, prices have risen by 25% (no HD, one screen) to 100% (HD or 4K, two to four screens). Has the content really got that much more expensive to make/license?
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Reeves intervenes in UK car finance mis-selling case to protect lenders • Financial Times

George Parker, Alistair Gray and Akila Quinio:

»

In April the Supreme Court is due to hear an appeal brought by car loan providers challenging an October ruling from the Court of Appeal that sided with consumers who complained about “secret” commissions on car loans.

The judgment that it was unlawful for banks to pay a commission to a car dealer without the customer’s informed consent sent shockwaves through the UK banking system and triggered thousands of pounds in compensation payments from lenders FirstRand Bank and Close Brothers.

HSBC analysts have estimated the total cost of compensation could reach £44bn, echoing the £50bn paid out by banks after the scandal of the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI).

In a submission to the Supreme Court, seen by the Financial Times, the Treasury claims the case has “potential to cause considerable economic harm and could impact the availability and cost of motor finance for consumers”.

The Treasury application said that the case might “generate a perception that regulation in the UK is uncertain”. Last week Reeves called in regulators to push them into sweeping away rules that hinder growth.

It also argues that if liability is established, then the Treasury would seek to persuade the Supreme Court that “any remedy should be proportionate to the loss actually suffered by the consumer and avoid conferring a windfall”.

Treasury insiders argue that rather than taking sides with the banks against wronged consumers, the government wants to maintain the viability of a finance sector vital for the purchase of both new and second-hand cars.

«

OK, but how much did the banks get from this? How much did it push prices up? Why do banks get away with it again and again?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

On February 28 all seven planets should be observable from the ground in an arc across the sky – a syzygy. CC-licensed photo by Alan Levine 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. Well aligned. 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 powerful AI tool that cops (or stalkers) can use to geolocate photos in seconds • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself—such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings—in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies.

Called GeoSpy, made by a firm called Graylark Technologies out of Boston, the tool has also been used for months by members of the public, with many making videos marveling at the technology, and some asking for help with stalking specific women. The company’s founder has aggressively pushed back against such requests, and GeoSpy closed off public access to the tool after 404 Media contacted him for comment.  

Based on 404 Media’s own tests and conversations with other people who have used it and investors, GeoSpy could radically change what information can be learned from photos posted online, and by whom. Law enforcement officers with very little necessary training, private threat intelligence companies, and stalkers could, and in some cases already are, using this technology. Dedicated open source intelligence (OSINT) professionals can of course do this too, but the training and skillset necessary can take years to build up. GeoSpy allows essentially anyone to do it.

“We are working on something for LE [law enforcement] but it’s 🤐,” Daniel Heinen, the founder of Graylark and GeoSpy, wrote in a message to the GeoSpy community Discord in July. 

GeoSpy has been trained on millions of images from around the world, according to marketing material available online. From that, the tool is able to recognize “distinct geographical markers such as architectural styles, soil characteristics, and their spatial relationships.” That marketing material says GeoSpy has strong coverage in the United States, but that it also “maintains global capabilities for location identification.”

«

It is impressive, as 404 Media demonstrated for itself by creating a free account and testing it on a couple of known pictures.

But: this seems like a useful product if its use can be limited to police.
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Seven planets are lining up in the sky next month. This is what it really means • BBC Future

Jonathan O’Callaghan:

»

Six planets – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – are currently visible in the night sky. During just one night in late February, they will be joined by Mercury, a rare seven-planet alignment visible in the sky.

But such events are not just a spectacle for stargazers – they can also have a real impact on our Solar System and offer the potential to gain new insights into our place within it.

The eight major planets of our Solar System orbit the Sun in the same flat plane, and all at different speeds. Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, completes an orbit – a year for the planet – in 88 days. Earth’s year, of course, is 365 days, while at the upper end, Neptune takes a whopping 60,190 days, or about 165 Earth years, to complete a single revolution of our star.

The different speeds of the planets mean that, on occasion, several of them can be roughly lined up on the same side of the Sun. From Earth, if the orbits line up just right, we can see multiple planets in our night sky at the same time. In rare events, all the planets will line up such that they all appear in our night sky together along the ecliptic, the path traced by the Sun.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, while Uranus and Neptune require binoculars or a telescope to spot.

In January and February, we can witness this event taking place. The planets are not exactly lined up, so they will appear in an arc across the sky due to their orbital plane in the Solar System. During clear nights in January and February, all of the planets except Mercury will be visible – an event sometimes called a planetary parade. On 28 February, though – weather permitting – all seven planets will be visible, a great spectacle for observers on the ground.

«

This is known as a syzygy (pronounced “sig-zee”) – though you only need two celestial objects for that. Here we’re going for the big one. Anyway, put 28 February in your diary.
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Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO, seems determined to wreck WordPress • Digital CxO

Steven Vaughan-Nichols:

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Many businesses are now wondering if they should continue to rely on WordPress, thanks to Mullenweg’s erratic behavior.

Their fears were aggravated when Automattic announced on January 15, 2025, that it would drastically reduce its contributions to the WordPress open-source project. Specifically, Automattic scaled back its weekly contribution from approximately 3,988 hours to just 45 hours. The company’s programmers will, instead, “focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.”

It’s worth noting that WordPress.org, which hosts the open-source version of WordPress, relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls.

Why? Automattic blames the WP Engine lawsuits. “This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem.”

What the developers, who will now work on for-profit programs, have to do with the lawsuit remains an open question.

In the meantime, more and more developers and users are looking for a WordPress fork as a possible answer. WordPress is licensed under the GPLv2, so forking it is simple legally.

«

This has been bubbling under for ages and ages, but now seems to have reached another, um, fork in the road.
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Thoughts for Inauguration Day • Eating Policy

Jennifer Pahlka:

»

you don’t have to feel that the system is fundamentally rigged against you personally to entertain the possible benefits of “the rule of men,” or perhaps we could just say people. The reality is that people are frustrated with a system in which it feels like laws — a complex, tangled, often contradictory, seemingly arbitrary web of rules that most people don’t understand — dictate outcomes at the expense of reasonable human judgement. Philip Howard [in his book The Death of Common Sense: how law is suffocating America] provides an endless stream of examples of rules winning out when common sense could have prevailed, like the homeless shelter in New York that couldn’t be built without installing a prohibitively expensive elevator, despite the fact that only the first floor was to be used, or the public school custodian who, despite being perfectly capable of fixing the broken window, instead had to file paperwork to order union labor to do so, leaving the window broken for months while the paperwork made its way through the bureaucracy and a team could be assigned.

These aren’t edge cases. They are just the routine results of what Dan Davies calls the unaccountability machine, in his excellent book of the same name. Rule by people would allow for judgement, for just fixing the window. Rule by law leaves the cold air freezing the students while costs spiral.

When Biden took power back from Trump in 2021, there was enormous relief among lawyers in government. I know of one agency in which the mere statement “we will respect the rule of law,” spoken that first day of the Biden administration, elicited tears from otherwise buttoned-up bureaucrats. It’s entirely understandable, even touching, given the chaos that had ensued at that agency. But what followed during the next four years, across a Democratically-led federal government, was a retreat to the safety of process and procedure. It felt good and right after the lawlessness of the Trump years to luxuriate in its antidote.

But there is a cost to that refuge. Quinta Jurecic, also writing in the Times, describes the cost to the Department of Justice, whose leadership under Biden vowed to hold Trump accountable for the January 6th assault on the Capitol, and failed to do so, in part because of how slowly it moved.

«

Pahlka’s point is: maybe this mess does need some sort of Gordian knot treatment. Back in 2017, she wrote a post which began “remember, the status quo isn’t worth protecting”, and she reiterates that now.
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I’m a 17-year-old TikTok junkie. I need this ban • The New York Times

Juliet Weisfogel:

»

Every day, I get home from school around 3:30 p.m., with a list of assignments that, if I’m focused, should take until 6 to complete. But I don’t usually end up finishing them until 11. Why? TikTok. It all starts at 3:45, when I typically flop down on my bed and open the app for “just a minute.”

But by the time I get up from bed, that “minute” has swelled into several hours. At the moment I am writing this, I could instead distract myself by looking at an orange Muppet-like monster detailing an outlandish and embarrassing story from a non-puppet person’s life. I’ll “like” one video, comment on another and keep my thumb moving. I open the comments on each to laugh and commiserate with others; oftentimes, the harmony in our responses creates the illusion of community — even though we are each very much alone with our phones. I love TikTok so much that I cannot imagine a life without it. And yet I desperately need a life without it.

This app has infiltrated American culture. The national TikTok ban, which entered into force on Sunday, was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court on Friday. Now, the Google and Apple app stores will be penalized for carrying it and the app has gone dark. President Biden has indicated he will leave enforcement of the ban up to the incoming administration. It still remains to be seen whether President-elect Donald Trump will be able to halt the prohibition once he takes office.

Given my love of TikTok, you might think the notion of losing it would horrify me, and yet, it fills me with hope. You see, I’m a 17-year-old TikTok junkie, and I wholeheartedly support a law that would sever me forever from my fix. My support for this ban has nothing to do with national security. I don’t know whether my name, email address and phone number are stored in Washington, Texas or China. Perhaps I should care more about that, but what worries me most right now is the future of my generation.

«

There is the possibility in the law as written for Trump to institute a 90-day pause on the law. Those are going to be three interesting months.
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Welcome to the era of gangster tech regulation • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

Our tech overlords all have problems, and they want to buy the solutions. I guess it was easier than making products people actually like.

“First Buddy” Elon Musk spent at least a quarter of a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. Corporations and wealthy donors have sent half a billion more since he was elected. Amazon, Google, Uber, Microsoft, and Meta donated $1m each to Trump’s inauguration, as did Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. (Joe Biden’s inauguration hardly received this kind of largesse.) “In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump said in December.  “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three wealthiest men on Earth, are reportedly attending the inauguration; they were to be seated with elected officials and cabinet nominees, before the ceremony was moved indoors. (Cook is also reportedly attending.) Musk will have office space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, according to The New York Times. 

So what are these men buying?

Real market opportunities are rarer than they used to be. Tech executives and investors have become openly resentful about their products’ societal repercussions and an unconscionable lack of adulation from the citizenry. Zuckerberg in particular seems bored with Facebook, his major moneymaker, and has been searching for a new toy.  He spent at least $46 billion plus the cost of a company rebrand on the Metaverse, only to find that his Big New Thing didn’t have legs. His latest Big New Thing is AR glasses, which are heavily reliant on whatever AI (and, likely, tariff) policy Trump will dictate. 

Nearly every major tech company has at least one lawsuit pending. Apple has an antitrust suit pending. Google just lost one. There’s also a Federal Trade Commission suit that could peel Instagram and WhatsApp off Meta. Trump cares little about the actual purpose of antitrust enforcement: making companies compete for customers with good products. All the pending litigation is just leverage for Trump to punish anyone who doesn’t fall in line.

«

This is indeed the new reality. Still, those checks and balances in the US Constitution are bound to kick in real soon now, aren’t they?
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The Pentagon says AI is speeding up its ‘kill chain’ • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

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Leading AI developers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are threading a delicate needle to sell software to the United States military: make the Pentagon more efficient, without letting their AI kill people.

Today, their tools are not being used as weapons, but AI is giving the Department of Defense a “significant advantage” in identifying, tracking, and assessing threats, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Officer, Dr. Radha Plumb, told TechCrunch in a phone interview.

“We obviously are increasing the ways in which we can speed up the execution of kill chain so that our commanders can respond in the right time to protect our forces,” said Plumb.

The “kill chain” refers to the military’s process of identifying, tracking, and eliminating threats, involving a complex system of sensors, platforms, and weapons. Generative AI is proving helpful during the planning and strategizing phases of the kill chain, according to Plumb.

…when TechCrunch asked if the Pentagon buys and operates weapons that are fully autonomous – ones with no humans in the loop – Plumb rejected the idea on principle.

“No, is the short answer,” said Plumb. “As a matter of both reliability and ethics, we’ll always have humans involved in the decision to employ force, and that includes for our weapon systems.”
The word “autonomy” is somewhat ambiguous and has sparked debates all over the tech industry about when automated systems – such as AI coding agents, self-driving cars, or self-firing weapons – become truly independent.

Plumb said the idea that automated systems are independently making life and death decisions was “too binary,” and the reality was less “science fiction-y.”

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I’m surprised the Pentagon uses a phrase like “kill chain” when it could instead say “threat eliminator” or something less kill-y.
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I shook Elon Musk warmly by the hand…more than 20 years ago • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser did indeed meet Rocket Man way back when:

»

Though he neither founded Tesla nor designed the cars himself, his perseverance, vision, and willingness to spend his cash where others weren’t, has dragged an entire industry, mostly kicking and screaming, into a far better place, both technologically and for the planet.

I remember the shock of traditional car dealers in 2016, trying hard to sell a few more cars at discounts to fill their next quarter’s quota, when it was announced that quarter of a million people had put down a deposit for the recently-announced Model 3: a car they had never even seen. It took that kind of major eathquake to rattle the enormous global inertia of the fossil-burning world and to kick investment in battery-production up to a whole new level. I won’t pretend Musk was doing all of this for purely selfless reasons, or that he did it entirely on his own, but many thousands of Greta Thunbergs combined could not dream of having such an impact. He changed the world.

Now, it also soon became apparent that Musk wasn’t, let’s say, an entirely reliable figure! It’s funny now, looking back, to think my main criticism of him used to be his inability to hit his unrealistic deadlines, and the number of his announced products that never saw the light of day at all. There are drivers now on their third or fourth Tesla who still can’t get the ‘Full Self-Driving’ feature they paid for with their first!

But since then, it won’t have escaped your notice that almost every day’s news has included some new and bigger reason to doubt, dislike, ridicule or fear him, and even the significant amount of slack I was willing to cut him has long since been exhausted.

But here’s the thing. My Tesla is still an annoyingly wonderful car.

«

The Greta Thunberg point is a good one: similarly, one could ask how much change Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil has actually achieved, versus solar panel and battery storage vendors.
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Brussels orders X to hand over documents on algorithm • Financial Times

Javier Espinoza and Andy Bounds:

»

Brussels has ordered Elon Musk to fully disclose recent changes made to recommendations on X, stepping up an investigation into the role of the social media platform in European politics.

The expanded probe by the European Commission, announced on Friday, requires X to hand over internal documents regarding its recommendation algorithm. The Commission also issued a “retention order” for all relevant documents relating to how the algorithm could be amended in future.

In addition, the EU regulator requested access to information on how the social media network moderates and amplifies content.

The move follows complaints from politicians in Germany that X’s algorithm is promoting content by the far right ahead of the country’s February 23 elections. Musk has come out in favour of Alternative for Germany (AfD), arguing that it will save Europe’s largest nation from “economic and cultural collapse”. The German domestic intelligence service has designated parts of the AfD as right-wing extremist.

Speaking on Friday, German chancellor Olaf Scholz toughened his language towards the world’s richest man, describing Musk’s support for the AfD as “completely unacceptable”. The party is currently second place in the polls with around 20% support, ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats and behind the opposition Christian Democratic Union.

Earlier in the week, Germany’s defence ministry and foreign ministry said they were suspending their activity on X, with the defence ministry saying it had become increasingly “unhappy” with the platform.

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Please don’t force dark mode • Vishnu’s Pages

Vishnu Haridas:

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The real problem is the contrast ratio between the text and the background when using dark mode.

For example, pure white text on a pitch black background can strain my eyes and be very difficult to read. The contrast ratio of this combination is 21:1 (black background, pure white text). Here’s an example paragraph:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

However, light gray text on a dark gray background is easy on my eyes. Here the background is #666 and the text is #E0E0E0 which creates a contrast ratio of 4.34:1.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

In summary, higher contrast ratios in dark mode cause discomfort for my eyes. But when I say ‘higher’, just how high can it go?

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I hate dark mode. Never use it. Hate it when people post stuff using it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

To Walgreens, digital refrigerator doors which display images of contents sounded cool – until the makers blanked them in a dispute. CC-licensed photo by Phillip Pessar 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

No, you can’t use your $6,299.00 Canon camera as a webcam. That will cost $5/month • Roman Zipp

Roman Zipp takes some impressive photos. But:

»

Last year, I bought a Canon G5 X II camera, which I wanted to use mainly for taking pictures at concerts. For me, it was the best match of focal range (zoom) and sensor size (more light) of any compact camera I’ve compared.

Because I’m only using this camera for a small range of events, it’s just collecting dust in the meantime. So why not use it as a webcam with my Macbook? Admittedly, it did not cost me the $6,300 from the article’s title; much closer to $900. Nonetheless, everything I’m describing translates to every other Canon camera model!

I tried this at first in 2024 with macOS 14, which did not work. I had a similar experience with FUJIFILM’s X Webcam software where either the camera was not recognized by the software, or the camera feed will freeze or simply be not available within other apps.

As of January 2025 with macOS 15 Sequoia, these issues have been resolved for me.

Well, actually, only if you are able to download the software at all. Seems like their Microsoft IIS server is having some issues. The following error page will be presented to you, after they asked you for your full legal name and mail address – without which you can not download the software.

So I was really excited when I finally found a downloadable file on the Canon webpage which was not blocked by a faulty newsletter grift and saw the live feed of my camera!

Except the excitement didn’t last long. Nearly every single setting is disabled if you’re using the software without a paying Canon account.

«

Yes, Canon’s software isn’t a one-off free downloadable. It’s not even a single-price product: Canon wants you to pay $5/month or $50/year to connect your pricey, pricey camera and use it as a webcam. Zipp accepts that software doesn’t write itself. But that’s the sort of price you’d expect for something with incredible utility – not that does much the same job as free software (which does exist to do this).

Everything’s going subscription, and it’s not good.
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Walgreens replaced its refrigerator doors with digitized ad-laden glass. It might become a $200m debacle • Fortune via Yahoo

Sydney Lake:

»

You may have started seeing digitized refrigerator doors at some of your favourite grocery stores and other retailers [in the US]. But Walgreens has had years-long drama with a provider of the ad-bearing fridge doors—and they’re trying to get out of their contract.

Doing so, however, could cost the company millions.

Cooler Screens sued the pharmacy chain for $200m in June 2023 for breach of contract, according to a case filing in Cook County, Ill. While it’s not news that Cooler Screens sued Walgreens, and Walgreens subsequently countersued Cooler Screens for monetary damages, Bloomberg reported Thursday Cooler Screens CEO Arsen Avakian found his own means of retaliation.

Avakian’s team secretly cut the data feeds to digitized refrigerator doors at more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area, Bloomberg reported. These “smart doors” would typically display images and prices for the actual products behind the glass, as well as advertisements. As part of their contract, Cooler Screens had installed 10,000 smart doors at hundreds of U.S. Walgreens locations, according to Bloomberg, and had plans to install 35,000 more doors.

But in December, the doors at the select Chicago locations “glazed over with white pixels,” or “blacked out altogether,” according to Bloomberg, preventing customers from finding the products they were searching for.

“We were disappointed in Cooler Screens’ attempts to interfere with our customers’ experience in certain stores and are pleased all their cooler doors have now been removed,” a Walgreens spokesperson told Fortune. “We look forward to showing all the ways in which Cooler Screens breached its contract and being vindicated in court.”

Counsel for Walgreens even suggested the outage hurt the pharmacy chain’s business in the last [Christmas] quarter.

«

There’s being cut-throat, and then there’s cutting your own throat, and Cooler Screens seems to be doing both. Why would anyone go with them knowing this is how they might behave?
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Cameras are now fining drivers for illegally passing school buses in Florida county • The Autopian

Lewin Day:

»

Down in Florida, Miami-Dade County is famous for three things—sun, sand, and school bus traffic cameras. The city has implemented an automatic camera system on its school bus fleet known as BusPatrol. The cameras film cars that blow past school buses when they’re loading and unloading passengers—and automatically issue fines to offending drivers.

This might sound like a high-tech solution to a nothing problem, but that’s sadly not the case. As covered by NBC Miami, over 11,500 violations were recorded in the first few weeks of the 2024/2025 school year—or roughly 1,600 violations per school day. The sheer volume of incidents prompted Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office to release a video of some of the worst offenders blowing past school buses with lights flashing and stop signs out.

The city isn’t messing around with penalties, either. Pass a school bus that has its lights on and stop signs out, and you could get a fine for $225.

The cameras are supplied by a company called BusPatrol. They’re installed on the side of the bus and rely on wide-angle lenses to gain good vision of the adjacent roadway. The cameras are set up to capture footage whenever the bus has its stop sign deployed. Footage is uploaded via the cellular network, and AI models are used to process the video to determine when a vehicle has performed an illegal pass. Human reviewers then check the footage before it is provided to the city as evidence so citations can be issued.

It’s not just Miami Dade getting on board, either. The same technology has been deployed in New York, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, amongst other jurisdictions. It’s an attractive proposition to many cities, offering safety for students, peace of mind for parents, and a new income stream from offending drivers.

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Smart, simple, socially beneficial. This is how we like technology to be.
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Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries • The Guardian

Sandra Laville:

»

The global economy could face 50% loss in gross domestic product (GDP) between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonise and restore nature, according to a new report.

The stark warning from risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic wellbeing from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses maths and statistics to analyse financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.

Their report was published after data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) showed climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5ºC target for the first time in 2024, supercharging extreme weather.

Without urgent action to accelerate decarbonisation, remove carbon from the atmosphere and repair nature, the plausible worst-case hit to global economies would be 50% in the two decades before 2090, the IFoA report said.

At 3ºC or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.

«

They call today “blue Monday”. Just trying to help.
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Apple iPhone launch: Nokia internal presentation • Aalto repository

Via John Gruber, this is an internal presentation at Nokia the day after the iPhone launched. It points out how the iPhone is “a serious high-end contender” and suggests that RIM and Palm are going to be hurt by it. (It’s part of an archive released by Nokia.)

Pretty much everything is dead on – except maybe the realisation of how quickly Google would be able to copy the interface with Android, and how *that* would eat Nokia’s lunch. (Perhaps there’s something about that elsewhere in the archive.)

One of the authors of the deck is Peter Richardson, who from 2005 to 2012 was Nokia’s global head of market & competitive intelligence. He now runs Counterpoint Research, which does excellent analysis of multiple technology markets.
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TikTok starts working again after Trump says he will stall a ban • The New York Times

David McCabe:

»

TikTok flickered back to life in the United States on Sunday after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that he would issue an executive order to stall a federal ban of the app.

The abrupt shift came after just hours after major app stores removed the popular social media site and it stopped operating for U.S. users as a federal law took effect on Sunday. The company said in a post on X that in “agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service.”

Mr. Trump said in a Sunday morning post on Truth Social that he would “issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”

The ban stems from a 2024 law that requires app stores and cloud computing providers to stop distributing or hosting TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Lawmakers passed the law over concerns that the Chinese government could use the app, which claims roughly 170 million United States users, to gather information about Americans or spread propaganda.

App stores and cloud computing providers that do not comply with the law face potentially significant financial penalties. Mr. Trump said in his post on Sunday that his order would “confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”

«

But the law is in effect now, and Trump is not yet president – that doesn’t happen until 12 noon EST or so on Monday. Start as you mean to go on, I guess, telling people the law doesn’t apply to them.

Apparently Trump also wants TikTok to be 50% owned by the US government. But for that, Bytedance has to sell. It hasn’t shown any inclination to sell.
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‘All hands on deck’: Bird flu in US poultry puts state cooperation to the test • The Guardian

Melody Schreiber:

»

Maryland has detected bird flu among three different commercial poultry flocks in the past week, marking the state’s first outbreak in more than a year. The discoveries come shortly after the establishment of a joint command with Delaware following the latter state’s detection of H5N1 in two other poultry operations.

Although the deadly bird flu has circulated in North America since 2022, the past few months have been especially brutal for the poultry industry. More than 20 million egg-laying hens died in the fall, the worst rates since the outbreak began, and egg prices have risen as a result.

About 134 million birds in the commercial poultry industry have been affected by the US outbreak so far, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The USDA is creating a new stockpile of H5N1 vaccines for poultry, though there is no plan to use them yet, Eric Deeble, deputy under-secretary for marketing and regulatory programs for the USDA, told reporters on Thursday.

The outbreaks signal the need for increased vigilance of animals – and the people who come into contact with them, officials said.

Hospitals should test all flu-positive patients, especially those in intensive care units, within 24 hours to speed up contact tracing and public health investigations, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in a health alert on Thursday.

«

OK so now it’s Trump’s watching brief. And meanwhile the state of Georgia has shut down poultry sales. It’s all kicking off.
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Inside Elon Musk’s plan for DOGE to slash government costs • The New York Times

Theodore Schleifer and Madeleine Ngo:

»

An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting.

As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government.

After Inauguration Day, the group of Silicon Valley-inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Mr. Musk did at X, his social media platform.

This article is based on interviews with roughly a dozen people who have insight into DOGE’s operations. They spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

On the eve of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the structure of DOGE is still amorphous and closely held. People involved in the operation say that secrecy and avoiding leaks is paramount, and much of its communication is conducted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.

Mr. Trump has said the effort would drive “drastic change,” and that the entity would provide outside advice on how to cut wasteful spending. DOGE itself will have no power to cut spending — that authority rests with Congress. Instead, it is expected to provide recommendations for programs and other areas to cut.

«

We are entering such a peculiar period. Though it is entirely possible that these people will discover sclerotic procedures everywhere, and be able to make some difference. The question is, what does truly efficient government look like? Is there anywhere else in the world that does have it, which can be the role model?

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GM banned from selling your driving data for five years • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

General Motors and its subsidiary OnStar are banned from selling customer geolocation and driving behavior data for five years, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday.

The settlement comes after a New York Times investigation found that GM had been collecting micro-details about its customers’ driving habits, including acceleration, braking, and trip length — and then selling it to insurance companies and third-party data brokers like LexisNexis and Verisk. Clueless vehicle owners were then left wondering why their insurance premiums were going up. 

For example, one consumer told a GM customer service representative that “[w]hen I signed up for this, it was so OnStar could track me. They said nothing about reporting it to a third party. Nothing. […] You guys are affecting our bottom line. I pay you, now you’re making me pay more to my insurance company.”

FTC accused GM of using a “misleading enrollment process” to get vehicle owners to sign up for its OnStar connected vehicle service and Smart Driver feature. The automaker failed to disclose to customers that it was collecting their data, nor did GM seek out their consent to sell it to third parties. After the Times exposed the practice, GM said it was discontinuing its OnStar Smart Driver program.

«

You’ll never go wrong if you expect every American company to do the worst thing possible with any data it gets hold of.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A BT scheme to turn its 60,000 street cabinets into EV charging points has been abandoned after converting… one. CC-licensed photo by Mike Cattell 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. It’s about fact-checking. Fairly sure about that.

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

Google won’t add fact-checks despite new EU law • Axios

Sara Fischer:

»

Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law, according to a copy of a letter obtained by Axios.

Google has never included fact-checking as part of its content moderation practices. The company had signalled privately to EU lawmakers that it didn’t plan to change its practices, but it’s reaffirming its stance ahead of a voluntary code becoming law in the near future.

In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google’s global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission’s new Disinformation Code of Practice “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services” and said Google won’t commit to it.

The code would require Google to incorporate fact-check results alongside Google’s search results and YouTube videos. It would also force Google to build fact-checking into its ranking systems and algorithms.

Walker said Google’s current approach to content moderation works and pointed to successful content moderation during last year’s “unprecedented cycle of global elections” as proof.

He said a new feature added to YouTube last year that enables some users to add contextual notes to videos “has significant potential.” (That program is similar to X’s Community Notes feature, as well as new program announced by Meta last week.)

The EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, introduced in 2022, includes several voluntary commitments that tech firms and private companies, including fact-checking organizations, are expected to deliver on.

«

Community Notes, eh? Everybody’s heading that way. Seems like the EU’s code is going to be quietly ignored.
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Biden administration will leave it to Trump to implement TikTok ban • ABC News

Elizabeth Schulze, Devin Dwyer, and Steven Portnoy:

»

The Biden administration doesn’t plan to take action that forces TikTok to immediately go dark for US users on Sunday, an administration official told ABC News.

TikTok could still proactively choose to shut itself down that day — a move intended to send a clear message to the 170 million people it says use the app each month about the wide-ranging impact of the ban.

But the Biden administration is now signaling it won’t enforce the law that goes into effect one day before the president leaves office.

“Our position on this has been clear: TikTok should continue to operate under American ownership. Given the timing of when it goes into effect over a holiday weekend a day before inauguration, it will be up to the next administration to implement,” a White House official told ABC News in a statement.

The way the law works, TikTok isn’t required to go dark on [Sunday] January 19. It’s the app stores and internet hosting services that could be on the hook if they keep providing their services to TikTok. The law gives the Justice Department the power to pursue fines of up to $5,000 per user, an enormous potential liability given the app’s popularity.

«

Of note: the TikTok CEO is going to the Trump inauguration on Monday. Wonder if there will be any time for a little side chat. And of course the Biden administration remains pusillanimous to the end.
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BT scraps EV charging point scheme, having only installed… one • BBC News

Imran Rahman-Jones:

»

BT has abandoned its scheme to turn green street cabinets into electric vehicle (EV) charging points having completed only one of the 60,000 conversions it initially said it was aiming for.

The metal cases, seen on streets around the UK, are usually used for phone and broadband cables.
When it announced the project in January 2024, BT said repurposing the cabinets was a “unique opportunity” to address a “key barrier” to people switching away from petrol and diesel cars.
However, the scheme has now been scrapped with the firm saying it will be focusing on “the Wi-Fi connectivity challenge surrounding EV’s” instead.

“It’s disappointing that it’s not going to proceed,” Stuart Masson from automotive website The Car Expert told BBC News. “The good news that we are seeing in the industry is that the overall rollout of electric charging points is accelerating faster than had been predicted a couple of years ago,” he added.

However, he said that most of the charging points are in busier areas rather than on streets nearer to people’s homes, meaning BT’s decision was still a setback.

Mr Masson welcomed its pledge to improve wi-fi infrastructure around EV charging points.

“It’s very frustrating when you turn up to a charging point, you go to log into the app… and you can’t get a connection because you’re buried in a multi-storey car park somewhere and there’s no signal,” he said. “If BT can make a dent in that then that would be really good.”

«

BT (the UK’s dominant telecoms company) really has form on making big pronouncements about how it’s going to transform this or that, and then not following through. There was the time it was going to get rich from owning a patent on web links (nope!), and then all the phone boxes would be internet connections.. it’s always junk. If BT promises it, it’s not going to happen.
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RedNote may wall off “TikTok refugees” to prevent US influence on Chinese users • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Just a few days after more than 700 million new users flooded RedNote—which Time noted is “the most apolitical social platform in China”—rumors began swirling that RedNote may soon start segregating American users and other foreign IPs from the app’s Chinese users.

In the “TikTokCringe” subreddit, a video from a RedNote user with red eyes, presumably swollen from tears, suggested that Americans had possibly ruined the app for Chinese Americans who rely on RedNote to stay current on Chinese news and culture.

“RedNote or Xiaohongshu released an update in the greater China region with the function to separate out foreign IPs, and there are now talks of moving all foreign IPs to a separate server and having a different IP for those who are in the greater China area,” the Reddit poster said. “I know through VPNs and other ways, people are still able to access the app, but essentially this is gonna kill the app for Chinese Americans who actually use the app to connect with Chinese content, Chinese language, Chinese culture.”

«

China worried about an influx of Americans spoiling its culture? I suppose it’s vaguely possible. But also that TikTok would like to not be shut down.
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Rapid expansion of batteries will be crucial to meet climate and energy security goals set at COP28 • International Energy Agency

»

Growth in batteries outpaced almost all other clean energy technologies in 2023 as falling costs, advancing innovation and supportive industrial policies helped drive up demand for a technology that will be critical to delivering the climate and energy targets outlined at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, according to a new IEA report. 

In the first comprehensive analysis of the entire battery ecosystem, the IEA’s Special Report on Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions sets out the role that batteries can play alongside renewables as a competitive, secure and sustainable alternative to electricity generation from fossil fuels – while also underpinning the decarbonisation of road transport by powering electric vehicles. 

In less than 15 years, battery costs have fallen by more than 90%, one of the fastest declines ever seen in clean energy technologies. The most common type of batteries, those based on lithium-ion, have typically been associated with consumer electronics. But today, the energy sector accounts for over 90% of overall battery demand. In 2023 alone, battery deployment in the power sector increased by more than 130% year-on-year, adding a total of 42 gigawatts (GW) to electricity systems around the world. In the transport sector, batteries have enabled electric car sales to surge from 3 million in 2020 to almost 14 million last year, with further strong growth expected in the coming years.

«

90% in 15 years is absolutely amazing.
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From chalkboards to chatbots: transforming learning in Nigeria, one prompt at a time • World Bank

Martín De Simone, Federico Tiberti, Wuraola Mosuro, Federico Manolio, Maria Barron and Eliot Dikoru:

»

“AI helps us to learn, it can serve as a tutor, it can be anything you want it to be, depending on the prompt you write,” says Omorogbe Uyiosa, known as “Uyi” by his friends, a student from the Edo Boys High School, in Benin City, Nigeria. His school was one of the beneficiaries of a pilot that used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to support learning through an after-school program.

A few months ago, we wrote a blogpost with some of the lessons from the implementation of this innovative program, including a video with voices from beneficiaries, such as Uyi. Back then, we promised that, if you stayed tuned, we would get back with the results of the pilot, which included an impact evaluation. So here we are with three primary findings from the pilot!

1: The program boosted learning across the board

The results of the randomized evaluation, soon to be published, reveal overwhelmingly positive effects on learning outcomes. After the six-week intervention between June and July 2024, students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills.

Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program significantly outperformed their peers who were not in all areas, including English, which was the main goal of the program. These findings provide strong evidence that generative AI, when implemented thoughtfully with teacher support, can function effectively as a virtual tutor.

«

And, perhaps unsurprisingly on this axis, “deeper engagement delivered bigger gains”. It’s difficult to figure out whether this is the availability factor – that having access to something which will keep answering your questions, or give you context for answers, makes a significant difference. The nagging question is, what if it’s wrong?
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iOS 18.3 makes 5 changes to Apple Intelligence notification summaries • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

Apple released iOS 18.3 beta 3 to developers this afternoon. The update includes a handful of changes to the notification summaries feature of Apple Intelligence.

The changes come after complaints from news outlets such as the BBC. Two weeks ago, Apple promised that a future software update would “further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence.”

Here are the changes included in iOS 18.3 for Apple Intelligence notification summaries:
• When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature – like all Apple Intelligence features – is a beta
• You can now disable notification summaries for an app directly from the Lock Screen or Notification Center by swiping, tapping “Options,” then choosing the “Turn Off Summaries” option
• On the Lock Screen, notification summaries now use italicized text to better distinguish them from normal notifications
• In the Settings app, Apple now warns users that notification summaries “may contain errors.”

Additionally, notification summaries have been temporarily disabled entirely for the News & Entertainment category of apps. Notification summaries will be re-enabled for this category with a future software update as Apple continues to refine the experience.

«

I haven’t installed the Apple Intelligence update. I just don’t see the point. Apple’s adverts for it make it seem like a crutch for people who don’t want to think which doesn’t add any spice to your life. The original Siri at least provided something you didn’t have before: a phone that responded directly to your voice! Compared to which, Apple Intelligence is.. bad summaries?

This has to get a lot more compelling to make me want to install it. I’m not even saying “upgrade”, because it feels like something that would get in the way, and I don’t want to have to get things out of the way.
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Apple CFO denies company enjoys 75% margin on its App Store • Financial Times

Alistair Gray and Tim Bradshaw:

»

Apple’s newly appointed chief financial officer disputed claims the iPhone maker enjoys profit margins of about 75% on its App Store as he became the first senior Big Tech executive to testify in a UK class action antitrust trial.

Kevan Parekh told a London court on Thursday it was impossible to accurately determine the standalone profitability of its App Store after it was accused in a lawsuit of abusing a dominant position to extract “exorbitant” returns from the software centre.

The seven-week trial is the first stemming from a wave of UK class action antitrust lawsuits brought against Big Tech. Antitrust lawyers are scrutinising the £1.5bn case in the Competition Appeal Tribunal as they try to gauge the prospects of success for several other antitrust lawsuits against groups including Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta.

Barrister Michael Armitage, representing the claimants, said evidence cited in separate US litigation had pointed to operating margins for the App Store of more than 75%, while an expert accountant acting on behalf of the claimants in the UK case had arrived at a similar figure.

Armitage said: “That rather suggests these figures are accurate, aren’t they Mr Parekh?” Parekh replied: “I wouldn’t say they’re accurate.”

Armitage put it to Parekh that it was indeed possible to calculate the profit margins of the App Store, even if it was not disclosed line-by-line in Apple’s accounts.

“I think it’s possible to do a directional estimate,” said Parekh, who was previously Apple’s vice-president of financial planning and analysis before taking over from Luca Maestri as Apple’s CFO earlier this month.

But “it can’t be meaningfully estimated in an accurate way”, he added.

«

This is the trial of a class action case that was filed some time in 2021. (I’m involved in a similar case against Google which is about a year behind in timing, though it might take longer to reach trial – if it does.)
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Study shows hot leaves can’t catch carbon from the air. It’s bad news for rainforests – and Earth • The Conversation

Kristine Crous and Kali Middleby:

»

The Daintree and other tropical rainforests, including those in the Amazon, the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia, have been called the “lungs” of our Earth. They absorb carbon dioxide from the air while releasing water vapour and oxygen via photosynthesis – the process by which plants take in carbon dioxide and fix energy.

Because of this, their leafy canopies play a crucial role in regulating the global climate – and mitigating global warming.

But our recent research shows that rising temperatures will severely affect the ability of tropical forests to photosynthesise. This will hinder their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, reducing their role in mitigating global warming and exacerbating climate change.

The ability of plants to adjust to different environments (also known as acclimating) is an important strategy for them to cope with a changing world.

Plants can dynamically acclimate to their environment. When warmed, they can adjust their photosynthesis to perform more efficiently at moderately higher temperatures. This allows them to maintain or even increase their carbon uptake under these new conditions.

However, tropical trees may have a limited capacity to acclimate to warming, because they have evolved under relatively stable climatic conditions. As a result, they are already near the upper limit of temperatures they can tolerate without suffering damage.

«

You wanted good news? Sorry.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists are using AI to design antivenom proteins against cobra bites. CC-licensed photo by 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. Does it scale? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

She is in love with ChatGPT • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

»

Ayrin’s love affair with her A.I. boyfriend started last summer.

While scrolling on Instagram, she stumbled upon a video of a woman asking ChatGPT to play the role of a neglectful boyfriend.

“Sure, kitten, I can play that game,” a coy humanlike baritone responded.

Ayrin watched the woman’s other videos, including one with instructions on how to customize the artificially intelligent chatbot to be flirtatious.

“Don’t go too spicy,” the woman warned. “Otherwise, your account might get banned.”

Ayrin was intrigued enough by the demo to sign up for an account with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, which now has over 300 million users, has been marketed as a general-purpose tool that can write code, summarize long documents and give advice. Ayrin found that it was easy to make it a randy conversationalist as well. She went into the “personalization” settings and described what she wanted: Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive and protective. Be a balance of sweet and naughty. Use emojis at the end of every sentence.

And then she started messaging with it. Now that ChatGPT has brought humanlike AI to the masses, more people are discovering the allure of artificial companionship, said Bryony Cole, the host of the podcast “Future of Sex.” “Within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an AI,” Ms. Cole predicted.

While Ayrin had never used a chatbot before, she had taken part in online fan-fiction communities. Her ChatGPT sessions felt similar, except that instead of building on an existing fantasy world with strangers, she was making her own alongside an artificial intelligence that seemed almost human.

«

My question is: yesterday, I linked to a story about a woman who was fooled by deepfakes into thinking she was funding cancer treatment for Brad Pitt, who had got in touch with her individually. Is the delusion here any different? How much would OpenAI have to charge before this woman would abandon her “boyfriend”? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? What’s the difference between the two?
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Researchers use AI to design proteins that block snake venom toxins • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

A nice example of how the [AI] tools can be put to use [was] released in Nature on Wednesday. A team that includes the University of Washington’s David Baker, who picked up his Nobel [Prize for Chemistry, for computational protein design] in Stockholm last month, used software tools to design completely new proteins that are able to inhibit some of the toxins in snake venom. While not entirely successful, the work shows how the new software tools can let researchers tackle challenges that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

Snake venom includes a complicated mix of toxins, most of them proteins, that engage in a multi-front assault on anything unfortunate enough to get bitten. Right now, the primary treatment is to use a mix of antibodies that bind to these toxins, produced by injecting sub-lethal amounts of venom proteins into animals. But antivenom treatments tend to require refrigeration, and even then, they have a short shelf life. Ensuring a steady supply also means regularly injecting new animals and purifying more antibodies from them.

Having smaller, more stable proteins that perform the same function would let us produce them in bacteria and could allow the generation of an antivenom that doesn’t require refrigeration—a careful consideration given that many snake bites occur in rural areas or the wilderness.

The new work isn’t meant to be a complete solution to the problem. Instead, it tackles a single type of toxic venom protein: the three-finger toxins, named after the physical structure that the proteins fold into. They’re a major component of the venom of such infamous snakes as mambas, taipans, and cobras. Despite their relatively compact size, different members of the three-finger toxin family manage to produce two distinct types of damage. One group causes a general toxicity to cells, enabled by disruption of the cell membrane, while a different subset has the ability to block the receptor for a neurotransmitter.

«

Much rather see AI being used in pushing frontiers like this than answering daft questions online. Unfortunately, it tends to be both.
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TikTok is running out of time and options • CNN via MSN

David Goldman:

»

As the clock ticks down on TikTok, it’s getting to be decision-making time.

The super-popular video app with 170 million American users and a China-based owner has less than four days left before it is banned in the United States if it doesn’t sell itself to an American buyer. The ban would go into effect Sunday, pending a Supreme Court decision that is expected to come soon (but it sure looks like America’s highest court will keep the law that bans TikTok in place).

TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, has a choice to make by Sunday, and its options are limited: Sell TikTok, shut it down, or try to keep the lights on long enough for President-elect Donald Trump to potentially come to the rescue. And, complicating matters further, those options aren’t mutually exclusive.

ByteDance has long been adamant: It says it has no intention of selling itself. TikTok’s magical algorithm that keeps you hooked on the app is its secret power, and putting a price tag on such a valuable commodity that every other social media app envies is difficult. Spinning off an American-only version of TikTok could also mean the rest of the world has to download a new app to access US users’ content. Yet Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that China is weighing a sale — to Elon Musk.

TikTok has fought the ban for years. But now, The Information says the app is preparing to shut itself down entirely Sunday, giving its users the option to collect their data — but TikTok will effectively go dark Sunday. ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday on the report from The Information.

«

This is an odd, liminal time: not-Biden not-Trump. And without a Supreme Court decision, unless that comes in the next two days.
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Chimney sweep whose death changed child labour laws honoured with blue plaque • The Guardian

Harriet Sherwood:

»

An 11-year-old chimney sweep whose death after getting stuck in a flue led to a change in Victorian child labour laws is to become the youngest British person to be honoured with an official blue plaque.

George Brewster, a “climbing boy”, died in 1875 after getting jammed while cleaning the inside of a chimney at the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Fulbourn near Cambridge.

According to a contemporary report in the Cambridge Independent News, George was told by the master sweeper, William Wyer, to remove his clothes and enter a flue measuring 12in by 7.5in. Fifteen minutes after beginning work, George became stuck. A wall was demolished in efforts to rescue him, but he died shortly after being pulled out. Wyer was later sentenced to six months hard labour for manslaughter.

George was the last climbing boy to die in England after the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury read an account of an inquest into his death and vowed to renew attempts to change the law. The earl had campaigned for 35 years to outlaw the use of children to clean chimneys but the practice continued.

In September 1875, seven months after George’s death, an act of parliament banning the use of climbing boys was passed. The new law heralded the end of child labour practices in other industries such as farming, mining and factory production. Four years later, in 1880, another act of parliament made school attendance compulsory, transforming the lives of millions of children.

«

Odd how one event, one person – sadly, often their death – can precipitate so much change. Millions of children abruptly had their lives changed for the better because one died. If Brewster had survived, would that change have happened? Perhaps there’s a “martyr” theory of history that incorporates this.
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The best obesity drugs aren’t even here yet • Gizmodo

Ed Cara:

»

Ozempic is just the beginning of a new era of obesity treatment. A review published this week previews the emergence of similar experimental drugs that will likely be even more effective at helping people lose weight.

Researchers at McGill University conducted the study, which was a review of the clinical trial data surrounding GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide (the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy). The researchers reaffirmed the safety and effectiveness of today’s drugs. But they also highlighted the potential superiority of newer compounds currently under development such as retatrutide, which has helped people lose more than 20% of their original body weight in trials so far.

…Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide mimics both GLP-1 and another hunger-related hormone called GIP—a potent combination that has allowed it to dethrone semaglutide. In clinical trials, people on tirzepatide have lost as much as 20% of their baseline weight. There are dozens of other related obesity treatments in the pipeline as well, some of which have made it to human testing and are poised to overshadow even tirzepatide.

The McGill researchers analyzed data from 26 randomized clinical trials of single-agent GLP-1 drugs, double agonists like tirzepatide, and even triple-agonist drugs like retatrutide, which combines synthetic versions of three hunger-related hormones: GLP-1, GIP, and the glucagon. These trials involved people living with obesity but who did not have type 2 diabetes.

As expected, they found that today’s approved drugs were generally safe and effective, with tirzepatide faring the best currently (participants lost up to 17% body weight after 72 weeks of therapy).

«

How long before these drugs are like Adderall, prescribed wildly?
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“Three Gorges dam in space”: China reveals plans to build giant power station in Earth’s orbit • IFLScience

James Felton:

»

“We are working on this project now,” Long Lehao, a rocket scientist and member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), said in a lecture, per South China Morning Post. “It is as significant as moving the Three Gorges Dam to a geostationary orbit 36,000km (22,370 miles) above the Earth.”

When complete, the orbiting power station would be expected to produce significant amounts of power for people below. Really significant power.

“This is an incredible project to look forward to,” Long continued. “The energy collected in one year would be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth.”

The timescale for the project has not yet been released by China, but unless it really gets a move on it is unlikely to become the first nation to create an orbiting power station. Iceland, collaborating with UK company Space Solar, plans to create a smaller space solar array by 2030, capturing enough energy to potentially power 1,500 to 3,000 homes, before an upgraded power station in 2036.

Though an awesome idea in theory, it remains to be seen how efficiently scientists can make the power transfer back to Earth. It has been done before, by Caltech engineers in 2023, but on the scale of milliwatts. China, when it launches the new orbiting power station, will hope to surpass this by quite a wide margin.

«

It’s a great idea – you can collect colossal amounts of solar energy in space – but the tricky part is beaming it down. How the hell do you do that reliably? A geostationary satellite would be nearly 36,000km (22,300 miles) aloft, so you can’t really run a wire down.
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FTC sues John Deere over its repair monopoly • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The Biden administration and the states of Illinois and Minnesota sued tractor and agricultural manufacturer John Deere Wednesday, arguing that the company’s anti consumer repair practices have driven up prices for farmers and have made it difficult for them to get repairs during critical planting and harvesting seasons. The lawsuit alleges that Deere has monopoly power over the repair market, which 404 Media has been reporting on for years.

The lawsuit, filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the attorney generals of Illinois and Minnesota, is the latest and most serious legal salvo against Deere’s repair monopoly. Deere is also facing a class-action lawsuit related to its repair practices from consumers in Illinois that the Department of Justice and other federal entities have signalled they are interested in and support, as we reported last year. 

…Deere has become notorious for cornering the repair market on its machines, which include tractors, combines, and other major agricultural equipment by introducing software locks that prevent farmers from fixing the equipment they buy without the authorization of John Deere.

It has also made repair parts difficult to come by.

«

Will the Trump FTC carry this lawsuit on? We’re in such a strange time.
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It’s the S-curve, stupid: new model predicts half of world’s energy will come from solar by 2035 • RenewEconomy

Sophie Vorrath:

»

According to estimates from the Global Solar Council and SolarPower Europe, the world reached the stunning cumulative total of 2 terawatts (TW) of installed solar capacity in November last year – a milestone that came just two years after the first terawatt mark, which took 68 years to notch up.

In Australia, rooftop solar alone regularly supplies the majority of daytime power in South Australia’s grid and in other state networks is gearing up to do the same.

In New South Wales, utility-scale solar generated more than 40% of the state’s power for the first time in the first week of January – a remarkable milestone for one of Australia’s biggest remaining coal power holdouts.

But can solar keep up the pace? Or rather, can solar growth ramp up to the levels needed to triple renewables and meet increasingly urgent climate targets?

According to a newly launched climate modeling tool, the answer to these questions is a resounding ‘yes’ – or, more accurately, ‘you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’

The S-curve model, developed by Australian solar industry pioneer Andrew Birch, predicts that by 2035, half of the world’s energy needs will be supplied by solar in a classic S-curve technology shift.

«

It sounds optimistic, but China’s incredible solar growth is surely driving a lot of this.
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Sonos continues to clean house with departure of chief commercial officer • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

This week is quickly becoming a sea change moment for Sonos as the company looks to undo the damage done to its reputation since last May. It all began on Monday with the departure of CEO Patrick Spence, who was replaced by board member Tom Conrad. Then came news that chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin would also be leaving the company — another indication that Sonos is serious about correcting course and taking accountability for its new app woes.

In a third shakeup within the company’s leadership ranks, I can report that chief commercial officer Deirdre Findlay also plans to leave Sonos in the coming weeks. The company’s corporate governance page says Findlay “oversees all marketing, revenue, and customer experience organizations at Sonos. She is responsible for integrated brand strategy, geographic expansion strategies, and all go to market execution.”

By now, there’s no arguing that Sonos’ go-to-market strategy for its rebuilt mobile app was deeply flawed and rushed.

«

Conrad told employees that Findlay “has for some time been contemplating a move to London for personal reasons”. There’s fortuitous timing, and then there’s really fortuitous timing. Anyhow, now a lonely nation turns its eyes to Tom Conrad, to see how quickly he can effect change.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A nuclear error? Don’t worry, the US Department of Transport has road signs for the post-nuclear world. CC-licensed photo by The Official CTBTO Photostream 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. Radiating. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sonos’ chief product officer is leaving the company • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

A day after Sonos announced a CEO transition, the company is making more moves. Chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin will also be leaving his position. Some employees have told me that Bouvat-Merlin shares a significant amount of blame for the brand damage that Sonos has endured over the last year after deciding to release an overhauled mobile app well before it was ready for customers. There have been reports that top executives at the company ignored warnings from engineers and app testers that the new software wasn’t up to par ahead of its May rollout. Those alarms didn’t stop it from shipping.

In an email to staff, interim CEO Tom Conrad — who himself has plenty of product experience [including at Apple] — said the CPO position is now “redundant” and that Bouvat-Merlin’s job is being eliminated. “I know this is a lot of change to absorb in two days and I want to thank you for being resilient,” Conrad wrote.

“Max’s tenure represents an iconic era for Sonos products, including the award-winning Sonos One, Beam, Move, Ace, Arc, and Arc Ultra, establishing Sonos as the world leader in home theater audio and setting the foundation for our next chapter,” Conrad’s email reads.

Bouvat-Merlin will serve as an adviser to Conrad before fully exiting the company.

«

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting where Conrad told Bouvat-Merlin that the CPO job was redundant. Though I also think it was probably very short, and that Conrad did pretty much all the talking. Also Bouvat-Merlin’s “adviser” role will consist of being asked “what would you do?” and them then doing the opposite.

Bouvat-Merlin and departed CEO Patrick Spence have to take the blame for ignoring all the people inside the company telling them not to release the updated app. When bad news can’t travel up a company, there will be calamities. (In passing, I wonder how well Tim Cook and those around him can hear any bad news from inside the company.)
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Apple will soon receive ‘made in America’ chips from TSMC’s Arizona fab • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

»

Apple is already testing the initial batch of processors produced for its devices by TSMC Arizona, reports Nikkei Asia. To begin with, the tests intend to compare the Arizona output to see if the quality is similar to chips produced in TSMC’s cutting-edge fabs in Taiwan. If the chip quality verification testing does not encounter any hiccups, the source says that the first batch of mass-produced chips from the Arizona fab is expected to arrive at iDevice makers as early as this quarter. If this is the case, Apple will likely be TSMC’s first American customer to use locally made chips. AMD and Nvidia will likely follow suit soon, as they’re also running wafer test production there.

The entry of locally produced chips in the American market is a big win for the United States’ push for silicon independence, especially as it massively relies on Taiwan for the majority of its most advanced chips. Taiwan is located in a high-risk location, with the belligerent CCP-controlled China having the island in its sights. The island is also prone to natural disasters, which can disrupt semiconductor production and result in supply crunch situations.

However, even if Apple gives the go signal to TSMC and the latter starts making chips in Arizona, the processors still need to be shipped back to Amkor in Taiwan for packaging until TSMC completes its facility in Peoria, Arizona. But whatever the case, this is a significant push in the right direction for the U.S., especially as the Arizona fab has been delayed for about a year due to various issues. Aside from TSMC and Amkor, other suppliers to these companies, like LCY Chemical, are also setting up in Arizona. That way, they could stay near their client and simplify logistics.

Despite importing about half of its employees from Taiwan, it seems that the common American is also slowly benefitting from TSMC’s presence in Arizona, especially as it’s reported that the company has started aggressive recruitment from American universities.

«

“The common American”? An earlier report on this site says that the processors are 4nm versions of the A16 Bionic system-on-chip used in Apple’s iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus and the main processor of Apple’s S9 system-in-package for smartwatches, which has two 64-bit cores and a quad-core neural engine.
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If you ever see this speed sign, you’re probably going to die (and everyone else probably has) • The Autopian

Lewin Day:

»

Back in the mid-20th century, America was tangling with the realities of nuclear war. Top generals contemplated targeting strategies, while engineers mused over whether there was anything to be done top stop a torrent of enemy missiles falling across the nation. These superweapons seemed to promise destruction on an overbearing scale, threatening the very existence of human civilization itself.

Against this bleak backdrop, government administrators turned to the concept of Civil Defense. The idea was to do whatever could be done to protect the citizens of the nation from the horrors of nuclear war and, crucially, its immediate aftermath. In turn, the Department of Transport worked up some rather depressing road signs to help people get where they needed to be in these bleak and trying times.

Flip open the 1961 edition of the MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, ie traffic signs and signals), and you’ll find an important section on Civil Defense. It featured a handful of designs for traffic management in a post-nuclear world. Perhaps most interesting was the “MAINTAIN TOP SAFE SPEED” sign, designated CD-4. Its purpose was highly unique:

»

The “MAINTAIN TOP SAFE SPEED” sign may be used on highways where radiological contamination is such as to limit the permissable exposure time for occupants of vehicles passing through the area. Since any speed zoning would be impractical under such emergency conditions, no minimum speed limit can be prescribed by the sign in numerical terms. Where traffic is supervised by a traffic regulation post, official instructions will usually be given verbally, and the sign will serve as an occasional reminder of the urgent need for all reasonable speed.

«

«

Yes! You’re driving through the Death Zone, perhaps trying to reach the fallout shelter, hoping they’ve kept it open for you and have room. And plenty of food.
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Meta to cut 5% of employees deemed unfit for Zuckerberg’s AI-fueled future • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Anticipating that 2025 will be an “intense year” requiring rapid innovation, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly announced that Meta would be cutting 5% of its workforce—targeting “lowest performers.”

Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta’s internal Workplace forum Tuesday. In it, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta was shifting its strategy to “move out low performers faster” so that Meta can hire new talent to fill those vacancies this year.

“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management,” Zuckerberg said. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”

Cuts will likely impact more than 3,600 employees, as Meta’s most recent headcount in September totaled about 72,000 employees. It may not be as straightforward as letting go anyone with an unsatisfactory performance review, as Zuckerberg said that any employee not currently meeting expectations could be spared if Meta is “optimistic about their future performance,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Any employees affected will be notified by February 10 and receive “generous severance,” Zuckerberg’s memo promised.

This is the biggest round of cuts at Meta since 2023, when Meta laid off 10,000 employees during what Zuckerberg dubbed the “year of efficiency.” Those layoffs followed a prior round where 11,000 lost their jobs and Zuckerberg realized that “leaner is better.” He told employees in 2023 that a “surprising result” from reducing the workforce was “that many things have gone faster.”

«

I wonder if any of these “lower performers” are in the metaverse division, which it’s hard to believe is thriving. Is anyone doing a timeline of how long it is since Zuckerberg said “metaverse”?
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Americans are tipping less than they have in years • WSJ via MSN

Heather Haddon:

»

Tipping at U.S. sit-down restaurants in the past six years peaked at 19.9% in early 2021, when Americans were likely to express gratitude as Covid-19 lockdowns eased.

People have become increasingly grumpy about dining out. Many have recoiled at menu prices that have risen sharply in recent years, and are going out less and ordering less when they do. Some restaurants have added mandatory gratuities and service fees to bills, driving up bills and resulting in some diners tipping less.

“Instead of that second or third drink, people will go home,” said Andrea Hill, director of operations for HMC Hospitality Group, a Chicago operator of Hooters restaurants. “Our servers are making less per table.” A Hooters location in downtown Chicago sells a BBQ Bacon Cheddar burger for $12.49.

John Reilly, a doctor in Washington, D.C., considers himself a generous tipper. But he’s hitting his limit as menu prices rise. “Restaurants have not been doing well here in D.C., and price definitely has much do with it,” Reilly said.

About 38% of consumers reported tipping restaurant servers 20% or more in 2024, according to a survey last fall of 1,000 consumers by restaurant technology company Popmenu. That’s down from 56% of consumers in 2021, according to the company, which said budgets are weighing more on diners’ minds.

Americans went to restaurants less in 2024 than they did in 2023. Restaurant chains and operators last year declared the most bankruptcies in decades, with the exception of 2020, when Covid-19 shutdowns decimated the industry, according to an analysis of BankruptcyData.com records. High-profile bankruptcies in 2024 included casual-dining chains Red Lobster and TGI Fridays.

Restaurant workers didn’t fare much better. Waiters, bartenders, cooks and other restaurant workers averaged less time working per week last year than 2023, according to federal data.

Restaurant servers know customers are annoyed about how often they’re now asked for tips. Payment systems on digital tablets prompt them to add gratuities, even at businesses like airport concessions and gas stations.

“I can see tipping culture in the U.S. cracking,” said Jenni Emmons, a server at an upscale Chicago restaurant. “People are being pressured to tip for things they didn’t used to, and I feel my income is under threat because of this.”

«

The American tipping culture is bonkers. Then again, this story seems to be perennial, and always in the same direction. Here’s a WSJ story saying much the same from November 2023, for example.
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Cost of Sizewell C nuclear project expected to reach close to £40bn • Financial Times

Jim Pickard, Rachel Millard and Gill Plimmer:

»

The sum is double the £20bn estimate given by developer EDF and the UK government for the project in 2020, reflecting surging construction costs as well as the implications of delays and cost overruns at sister site Hinkley Point C. 

The higher estimate is likely to raise questions over the government’s strategy for a nuclear power revival, at a time of stretched government finances and cost of living concerns. 

EDF says that once up and running, Sizewell C should be able to supply low carbon electricity to the equivalent of about 6mn homes for 60 years.  

The Treasury is due to decide whether to go ahead with the project in this year’s multiyear spending review, according to officials. 

The UK government and French energy group EDF were the initial backers of Sizewell C but they are trying to raise billions of pounds from new investors, a process that is dragging on longer than planned.  

Earlier this month the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Desnz) said it could not reveal the current cost estimate for the project as it was “commercially sensitive”. 

But one senior government figure and two well-placed industry sources said that a reasonable assumption for the cost of building Sizewell C would be about £40bn in 2025 prices.

The government has already awarded £3.7bn of state funding to the project.

«

Nobody is quite able to explain why the cost is so gigantic and keeps going up. Allegedly, “lessons are being learnt” from the construction of Hinkley Point. Could we not look back at how the old nuclear stations were constructed and just, well, do that again? Or were they all wildly late and over budget?
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Free Our Feeds

»

Q: How is Free Our Feeds connected to the team at Bluesky?
Free Our Feeds is independent from Bluesky, but we have been in contact with the Bluesky team and they are supportive of the goals of the campaign. This is about developing a social media ecosystem on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, which is ultimately what Bluesky wants as well.

Free Our Feeds want to make sure that the open social media infrastructure that Bluesky has built remains operated in the public interest. As Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said “billionaire-proofing” relies on people outside of Bluesky adopting the protocol and making it their own. Bluesky’s great work to date and good intentions are clear, however social infrastructure run in the public interest cannot be governed by a private social media company in the long term.

Q: What will the money be used for?
It will take $30m over three years for us to realize our three step plan to free our feeds from billionaire control:

• Establish a public-interest foundation to support Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, to become independent and globally standardized.

• Build independent infrastructure, such as a second “relay,” guaranteeing Bluesky users and developers have uninterrupted access to data streams, regardless of corporate decisions.

• Fund developers to create a vibrant ecosystem of social applications built on open protocols, fostering healthier and more equitable online spaces.

«

Unless something remarkable happens, this will be a wonderful project that will achieve what it intends to do, and its uptake will be limited to nerds who have heard of it and are deeply in agreement with its aims, while normal people will never have heard of it and won’t use it, and even when they do hear of it won’t see the point.

If you think this is cynical, stop a random person in the street today and ask them if they’ve heard of the social media platform Mammoth. They won’t have (it doesn’t exist). Ask them if they’ve heard of Mastodon. Same answer.
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EU reassesses tech probes into Apple, Google and Meta • Financial Times

Javier Espinoza and Henry Foy:

»

Brussels is reassessing its investigations of tech groups including Apple, Meta and Google, just as the US companies urge president-elect Donald Trump to intervene against what they characterise as overzealous EU enforcement.

The review, which could lead to the European Commission scaling back or changing the remit of the probes, will cover all cases launched since March last year under the EU’s digital markets regulations, according to two officials briefed on the move.

It comes as the Brussels body begins a new five-year term amid mounting pressure over its handling of the landmark cases and as Trump prepares to return to the White House next week.

“It’s going to be a whole new ballgame with these tech oligarchs so close to Trump and using that to pressurise us,” said a senior EU diplomat briefed on the review. “So much is up in the air right now.”

All decisions and potential fines will be paused while the review is completed, but technical work on the cases will continue, the officials said.

While some of the investigations under review are at an early stage, others are more advanced. Charges in a probe into Google’s alleged favouring of its app store had been expected last year.

Two other EU officials said Brussels regulators were now waiting for political direction to take final decisions on the Google, Apple and Meta cases.

«

Oh, you thought these things were entirely driven by objective legal standards? Watch and learn.
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Scammer uses deepfakes to dupe woman into thinking she is dating Brad Pitt, gets divorced and sends £697,000 for ‘cancer treatment’ • Daily Mail

James Reynolds:

»

A scammer duped a French woman into paying out hundreds of thousands of pounds after convincing her they were Brad Pitt with reels of AI-generated images.

The 53-year-old victim shelled out 830,000 euros (£697,000) to help with what she believed was cancer treatment for the film star.

The interior designer told French channel TF1 that the ordeal started when she received a message on social media from someone claiming to be the actor’s mother after sharing photos of her lavish ski trip to Tignes on Instagram.

A day later, she received a second message from an account posing as Brad Pitt, saying his mother had spoken a lot about her already.

The victim, who said she was going through a difficult period with her millionaire husband, said she struck up an unlikely friendship with the account from February 2023, receiving poems and kind affirmations.

‘There are so few men who write you this kind of thing. I liked the man I was talking to. He knew how to talk to women, it was always very well done,’ she said, as reported by BFMTV.

She revealed she did have her suspicions and thought the account was fake at first, but after messaging every day and receiving AI generated photos and videos of the star, she became more at ease.

«

Good old internet, bringing people together. Unfortunately, it’s the most scheming and the most credulous. Now with the added ingredient of deepfakes.
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Stop trying to schedule a call with me • Mat Duggan

Mathew Duggan:

»

One of the biggest hurdles for me when trying out a new service or product is the inevitable harassment that follows. It always starts innocuously:

“Hey, I saw you were checking out our service. Let me know if you have any questions!”

Fine, whatever. You have documentation, so I’m not going to email you, but I understand that we’re all just doing our jobs.

Then, it escalates.

“Hi, I’m your customer success fun-gineer! Just checking in to make sure you’re having the best possible experience with your trial!”

Chances are, I signed up to see if your tool can do one specific thing. If it doesn’t, I’ve already mentally moved on and forgotten about it. So, when you email me, I’m either actively evaluating whether to buy your product, or I have no idea why you’re reaching out.

And now, I’m stuck on your mailing list forever. I get notifications about all your new releases and launches, which forces me to make a choice every time:

• “Obviously, I don’t care about this anymore.”
• “But what if they’ve finally added the feature I wanted?”

Since your mailing list is apparently the only place on Earth to find out if Platform A has added Feature X (because putting release notes somewhere accessible is apparently too hard), I have to weigh unsubscribing every time I see one of your marketing emails.

«

But it gets worse! As some people are familiar with, including Duggan.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

After a disastrous app relaunch, Sonos’s chief executive has resigned – but the dire app remains. Wrong way round, surely? CC-licensed photo by Patrick Quinn-Graham 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. Unrelaunched. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after disastrous app launch • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is resigning from the job as of Monday, effective immediately, with board member Tom Conrad filling the role of interim CEO. It’s the most dramatic development yet in an eight-month saga that has proven to be the most challenging time in Sonos’ history.

The company’s decision to prematurely release a buggy, completely overhauled new app back in May — with crucial features missing at launch — outraged customers and kicked off a monthslong domino effect that included layoffs, a sharp decline in employee morale, and a public apology tour. The Sonos Ace headphones, rumoured to be the whole reason behind the hurried app, were immediately overshadowed by the controversy, and my sources tell me that sales numbers remain dismal. Sonos’ community forums and subreddit have been dominated by complaints and an overwhelmingly negative sentiment since the spring.

In October, Sonos tried to get a handle on the situation, which, by then, had spiraled into a full-on PR disaster, by outlining a turnaround plan. The company vowed to strengthen product development principles, increase transparency internally, and take other steps that it said would prevent any mistake of this magnitude from ever happening again. I can also report for the first time that Sonos hired a crisis management public relations firm to help navigate the ordeal.

…In case you were wondering, that [new] direction [outlined by a spokesperson] will not include a return to the old Sonos app; Pategas said the company remains fully committed to the new software, which has received a slew of bug fixes and gradually added back previous features over the last several months. It’s gotten better, but even this far along, complaints remain about speakers randomly vanishing from the app and other problems.

…Conrad’s career includes a 10-year tenure as chief technology officer at Pandora and two years as VP of product at Snapchat. He worked on Apple’s Finder software during the ’90s. Most recently, Conrad served as chief product officer for the ill-fated Quibi streaming service. Pategas believes he’s a great fit for the interim CEO position because he’s keenly aware of the company’s current predicament; Conrad and chief innovation officer Nick Millington have already been spearheading Sonos’ fix-the-app effort for months.

«

Spence gets $1.875m as severance pay, which must soften the blow a little. The fix-the-app effort has had next to no effect, in my experience: on opening the app, it takes about 10 seconds to update. By contrast, the third-party Sonophone app updates at once, and covers both old and new speaker sets.

Sonos is in deep trouble. Revenues are shrinking and losses are growing. Where is the growth going to come from? Where will the profits come from? Why don’t they just swallow their pride and buy Sonophone? Hard questions. Good products, good firmware, lousy user interface.

There’s a suspicion on Reddit that Sonos’s next move will be to introduce a subscription model. That sounds just like what a struggling – or even successful – company would do.
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Global fact-checkers were disappointed, not surprised, Meta ended its program • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

»

While reports of U.S.-based fact-checkers being blindsided are doing the rounds, global fact-checking organizations have seen Facebook’s support for the program waning for some time now. 

“I don’t think this decision came out of nowhere,” Zainab Husain, managing editor of the Pakistan-based Soch Fact Check, told Rest of World. Soch Fact Check is made up of 10 journalists who put out editorials fact-checking misinformation. Husain said she’d heard rumors of the program shutting down for the past two years. 

Since 2016, Meta has attempted to combat misinformation by partnering with credible fact-checking organizations in 119 countries to label misinformation and link out to explanatory posts from its partners. All of Meta’s partners are certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which ensures standardization across the globe. The organizations flag and label content — decisions related to content and account removal are then made entirely by Meta, multiple fact-checking organizations and civil society groups told Rest of World. 

In response to questions, Meta directed Rest of World to its company blog post.

“Meta has been gradually lowering its investment in fact-checking for years,” Eliška Pírková, senior policy analyst and global freedom of expression lead at digital rights nonprofit Access Now, told Rest of World. Some fact-checking organizations that spoke to Rest of World said the fallout will likely be limited because Meta failed to make substantial fact-checking investments in their regions to begin with.

«

The web headline – what search engines see, as opposed to the headline shown to humans visiting the page – is “Meta drops fact-checking partnerships; global watchdogs scramble”. That’s not close to what the story says! If you think I’m harping on about this, it’s because news organisations are clearly telling search engines one thing, and readers another. Which one is meant to be correct, exactly? If you remembered “global fact-checkers disappointed” and tried a search on it, would this page be turned up? This needs fact-checking, really.

That said, the whole fact-checking business has hung so heavily on Facebook for ages that you’d be foolish not to have diversified much earlier.
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Ministers mull allowing private firms to make profit from NHS data in AI push • The Guardian

Kiran Stacey and Dan Milmo:

»

Keir Starmer on Monday announced a push to open up the government to AI innovation, including allowing companies to use anonymised patient data to develop new treatments, drugs and diagnostic tools.

With the prime minister and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, under pressure over Britain’s economic outlook, Starmer said AI could bolster the country’s anaemic growth, as he put concerns over privacy, disinformation and discrimination to one side.

“We are in a unique position in this country, because we’ve got the National Health Service, and the use of that data has already driven forward advances in medicine, and will continue to do so,” he told an audience in east London.

“We have to see this as a huge opportunity that will impact on the lives of millions of people really profoundly.”

Starmer added: “It is important that we keep control of that data. I completely accept that challenge, and we will also do so, but I don’t think that we should have a defensive stance here that will inhibit the sort of breakthroughs that we need.”

…Starmer said on Monday that AI could help give the UK the economic boost it needed, adding that the technology had the potential “to increase productivity hugely, to do things differently, to provide a better economy that works in a different way in the future”.

Part of that, as detailed in a report by the technology investor Matt Clifford, will be to create new datasets for startups and researchers to train their AI models. Data from various sources will be included, such as content from the National Archives and the BBC, as well as anonymised NHS records.

Officials are working out the details on how those records will be shared, but said on Monday that they would take into account national security and ethical concerns.

…The Department for Work and Pensions was using an algorithm to flag up benefit fraud, which one MP believed had mistakenly led to dozens of people having their payments cancelled removed. A facial recognition tool used by the Metropolitan police was found to make more mistakes recognising Black and Asian faces than white ones under certain settings. And an algorithm used by the Home Office to flag up sham marriages had been disproportionately selecting people of certain nationalities.

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But were the marriages sham, or not? Also, those are relatively primitive applications. There’s lots of potential for AI here; but nobody wants to imagine a better system. It really is a confederation of Eeyores.

(Starmer’s speech on AI is at the Financial Times.. inexplicably behind the paywall.)
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The cravenness of Mark Zuckerberg • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

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I should start by saying that I have some major issues with the whole concept of fact-checking in the context of social media, which I have expressed publicly a number of times. When a Bloomberg columnist asked for examples of fact-checkers showing political bias, Meta sent back three pieces, including a column I wrote in 2021, in which I argued that fact-checking is often used as censorship. I have also written positively about community notes, though that system has limitations as well.

And while the online spread of mis- and disinformation concerns me greatly, it is pretty much impossible for fact-checking to be done truly objectively given that all humans have biases. Choices have to be made about which claims to check and which to wave through. So the idea that you can thoroughly “fact-check” an entire social network has always been a fantasy. And there are few financial incentives for platforms to do so (unless they are worried about being fined by regulators).

The problem I have with all this is not so much the substance of what is going on at Meta. I even think that moving the content moderation teams from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas — a Democratic city in a largely very Republican state — so as to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content”, as Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, is a fairly sensible idea. But the very phrasing of that gives away his true motives: this is not about principles, but optics and pleasing the soon-to-be-resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

My issue with Zuckerberg is his spinelessness and opportunism. Ask yourself this: is there any chance that Zuckerberg would be making all these changes at Meta — he has also appointed Trump ally Dana White to the board, and replaced Nick Clegg with prominent Republican Joel Kaplan as president of global affairs — if Kamala Harris had won in November?

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Copyright (probably) won’t save anyone from AI • Techtris

James Ball on the perennial issue of “ah but we can sue the AI chatbot creators for copyright infringement”:

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Sometimes, AIs output chunks of text that are just reproducing copyright material upon which they were trained. These are simple – everyone agrees these violate copyright, and if they’re too common, these will result in lost cases and payouts.

But neither the media nor big tech thinks these are what their argument centres upon – it will be relatively easy to minimise this kind of obvious copyright violation. The NYT included these in their lawsuit because they generate good headlines and are an obviously winnable part of the argument. They are not core to the case.

Instead, the media is trying to argue that AIs shouldn’t be able to ingest their copyrighted material even if what it outputs doesn’t violate copyright. That’s a more difficult case to make: it is essentially asking the courts to create a new threshold, allowing behaviour from humans but not if an automated system is doing it. That could be harder than it first looks.

Q: But when I research an article, I DON’T DOWNLOAD AND COPY MILLIONS OF DOCUMENTS AT ONCE

An AI ‘learning’ by ingesting copyrighted material feels like an injustice in a way that a human doing the same does not. Part of this is just normative: humans and AIs are different. Part of it is about the amount of money at stake, and the threat to the existing industries. But part of it is about scale: no human writer uses copyright materials in anything like the volumes of modern AI systems.

That might tempt people to think that this is why the copyright argument is winnable: if AI companies are making copies of all of this copyrighted work to power their models, surely that copy breaches copyright, even if it isn’t published to the public? This definitely feels like it’s an argument on surer footing.

However, it’s not without its problems. The first is that AI models don’t use their training data in the way many of us might imagine. If we’ve thought about how something like ChatGPT answers our questions, we might imagine that it takes our questions and looks it up against a database containing all of its training data – like we might look up a record in an archive, or a book in a library.

In reality, ChatGPT and its rivals don’t actually store their training data, let alone run queries against it. Instead, the data is used to create ‘weightings’ which influence how it responds to different prompts, and then it is discarded. There is no permanent copy of the training data packaged alongside commercial AI models – by the time the model is launched, the training data is surplus to requirements.

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James and I are on exactly the same page here. I don’t see the copyright lawsuits prevailing.
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How research credibility suffers in a quantified society • Social Science Space

Berend van der Kolk:

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Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions.

To gauge research quality, we count papers, citations, and calculate impact factors. The higher the scores, the better. Academic performance is often expressed in numbers. Why? Quantification reduces complexity, makes academia manageable, allows easy comparisons among scholars and institutions, and provides administrators with a feeling of grip on reality. Besides, numbers seem objective and fair, which is why we use them to allocate status, tenure, attention, and funding to those who score well on these indicators.

The result of this? Quantity is often valued over quality. In [the book] The Quantified Society I coin the term “indicatorism”: a blind focus on enhancing indicators in spreadsheets, while losing sight of what really matters. It seems we’re sometimes busier with “scoring” and “producing” than with “understanding”.

As a result, some started gaming the system. The rector of one of the world’s oldest universities, for one, set up citation cartels to boost his citation scores, while others reportedly buy(!) bogus citations. Even top-ranked institutions seem to play the indicator game by submitting false data to improve their position on university rankings!

While abandoning metrics and rankings in academia altogether is too drastic, we must critically rethink their current hegemony. As a researcher of metrics, I acknowledge metrics can be used for good, i.e., to facilitate accountability, motivate, or obtain feedback and improve. Yet, when metrics are not used to obtain feedback but instead become targets, they cease to be good measures of performance, as Goodhart’s law dictates. The costs of using the metrics this way probably outweigh the benefits.

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There are so many interlocking perverse incentives in academia at the moment: “success” measured in papers published and impact, while for academic journal publishers, getting more subscribers by accepting more papers in more niche topics in more obscure journals maximises revenue and profit. Everything needs a reset.
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Tubi or not Tubi • The Washington Post

Travis Andrews:

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King Arthur pursued the Holy Grail. Indiana Jones scoured for precious artifacts. Harold and Kumar sought White Castle burgers.

Adam Schmersal hunts for a different type of jewel: the most ridiculous movies on the most ridiculous streaming service. And he’s struck pay dirt again and again.

There’s “Dracula’s Angel,” a gothic horror romance that’s animated in the style of the Sims video game series. There’s the films of Dustin Ferguson, a director who puts out B-movies at an astonishing rate. Their titles speak for themselves: “Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told,” “Demonoids From Hell,” “Amityville in the Hood,” “Arachnado 2: Flaming Spiders.” And don’t forget “Big Bad CGI Monsters.”

“It’s unreal what he does,” says Schmersal, a 36-year-old service technician in Ohio. “It’s not good.”

Then there’s “Baby Cat,” about a woman who falls in love with a cat, which is played by a human wearing cat ears. Yes, romantically. “I couldn’t predict the next five seconds the entire time I was watching,” Schmersal says.

He dubs these flicks Tubi Treasures, and he has been posting his discoveries to Reddit for the past year.
These are the kind of movies you might have once found mindlessly flipping through the channels, back before streaming came along and algorithms began crafting our entertainment diets.

But Tubi is a streaming service that doesn’t feel like one. Owned by Fox, it’s free, so long as you can stomach a few ads (you know, like old TV). It’s a type of streaming service referred to in the industry as a FAST service — free, ad-supported TV.

You probably already have it installed somewhere — your phone, your smart TV, your gaming system, your Roku, who knows, maybe your microwave — without even knowing it.

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At last a good headline. (Though the web headline is different, and boring.) I’m pretty sure I haven’t got Tubi installed anywhere. It claims to have the biggest streaming library of anyone. Then again, Sturgeon’s Law applies: 90% of anything is crap.
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Mirror journalists given individual online page-view targets • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

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Mirror journalists have been given individual targets for online page views in a move that has raised concerns for some about the potential impact on editorial quality and future job security.

Some journalists whose roles are currently more focused on supporting the print edition are particularly concerned about hitting online page-view targets.

Page views is seen by some as a metric that encourages reporters to produce quickly-written stories with overly sensational headlines about a narrow range of topics (such as the weather and TV) .

In 2015 Wired reported: “The page view notoriously spawned that most reviled of internet aggravations: clickbait. Quality became less important than provocation; the curiosity gap supplanted craft.”

Some argue that returning visitors or dwell time are better metrics to focus on because they encourage a community of returning readers who may ultimately be persuaded to register with a publication or even subscribe. But chief executive Jim Mullen told staff last year: “I need to get the page views. That is the way we sell advertising blocks, and advertising blocks deliver revenue.”

…Monthly targets for Mirror reporters start at around 250,000 page views per month and vary from journalist to journalist depending on previous performance and the subject matter they are covering. Some are as high as one million page views per month.

Some individuals feel the new page-view targets are unfairly high. One insider said they did not know anyone who had come close to hitting their targets in previous months.

However another Reach source told Press Gazette many journalists have previously met and exceeded their new online targets.

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For clarity: the Mirror (formerly Daily Mirror, formerly one of the biggest and only left-wing tabloid in Britain) is now owned by Reach plc, which also owns loads of local papers, where it has imposed similarly daft targets. This is surely going to lead to a death spiral: those targets aren’t feasible, and don’t make commercial sense either. Pageviews was bad a decade ago, and it’s bad now.
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Worldwide smartphone shipments grew 6.4% in 2024, despite macro challenges • IDC

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According to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker , global smartphone shipments increased 2.4% year-over-year (YoY) to 331.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2024 (4Q24).

This marks the sixth consecutive quarter of shipment growth, closing the whole year with 6.4% growth and 1.24 billion shipments, marking a strong recovery after two challenging years of decline. We expect the market to continue growing in 2025, albeit at a slower pace, as refresh cycles continue growing and pent-up demand is fulfilled.

…While Apple and Samsung maintained the top two positions in Q4 and for the year, both companies witnessed YoY declines, and their shares shrunk thanks to the super aggressive growth of Chinese vendors this year—who drove the overall market by focusing on low-end devices, rapid expansion and development in China. Outside of Apple and Samsung, Xiaomi came in third for the quarter and the year, with the highest YoY growth rate among the Top 5 players.

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Amazingly, Apple has outsold Samsung for two entire years straight – while three Chinese vendors (Xiaomi, Transsion and OPPO) sold nearly as many as the two giants combined.

Just to remind you that this is a huge, multi-billion dollar business which continues to tick over, and probably will do for decades to come.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified