A study shows that no matter what the language, conversation transmits information at a predictable rate. CC-licensed photo by Simon Law on Flickr.

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

Man who used AI to create child abuse images jailed for 18 years in UK • Financial Times

Stephanie Stacey:

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A man who used artificial intelligence technology to create child sexual abuse imagery was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Monday, in a landmark prosecution over deepfakes in the UK.

Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, pleaded guilty to a total of 16 child sexual abuse offences, including transforming everyday photographs of real children into sexual abuse material using AI tools from US software provider Daz 3D. He also admitted encouraging others to commit sexual offences on children.

At Bolton Crown Court, Judge Martin Walsh imposed an extended sentence on Nelson, saying he posed a “significant risk” of causing harm to the public. That means Nelson will not be eligible for parole until he has completed two-thirds of his sentence.

Advances in AI mean fake images have become more realistic and easier to create, prompting experts to warn about a rise in computer-generated indecent images of children.

Jeanette Smith, a prosecutor from the Crown Prosecution Service’s Organised Child Sexual Abuse Unit, said Nelson’s case set a new precedent for how computer-generated images and indecent and explicit deepfakes could be prosecuted.

“This case is one of the first of its kind but we do expect to see more as the technology evolves,” said Smith.

Greater Manchester Police found both real images of children and computer-generated images of child sexual abuse on Nelson’s devices, which were seized last June. 

The computer-generated images did not look exactly like real photographs but could be classified as “indecent photographs”, rather than “prohibited images”, which generally carry a lesser sentence. This was possible, Smith said, because investigators were able to demonstrate they were derived from images of real children sent to Nelson.

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A landmark case. It’s been the case for decades that non-real, computer-created images could qualify as CSAM (child sexual abuse material), but this is a worrying first: using this software in this way.
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Fitness app Strava gives away location of Biden, Trump and other leaders, French newspaper says • AP via SFGate

Sylvie Corbet:

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An investigation by French newspaper Le Monde found that the highly confidential movements of U.S. President Joe Biden, presidential rivals Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and other world leaders can be easily tracked online through a fitness app that their bodyguards use.

But the US Secret Service told the newspaper that it doesn’t believe the protection it provides was in any way compromised.

Le Monde found that some US Secret Service agents use the Strava fitness app, including in recent weeks after two assassination attempts on Trump, in a video investigation released in French and in English. Strava is a fitness tracking app primarily used by runners and cyclists to record their activities and share their workouts with a community.

Le Monde also found Strava users among the security staff for French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one example, Le Monde traced the Strava movements of Macron’s bodyguards to determine that the French leader spent a weekend in the Normandy seaside resort of Honfleur in 2021. The trip was meant to be private and wasn’t listed on the president’s official agenda.
Le Monde said the whereabouts of Melania Trump and Jill Biden could also be pinpointed by tracking their bodyguards’ Strava profiles.

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Information leakage really is a thing. The Secret Service may be correct in saying that it doesn’t compromise their protection, but letting people know where the location of Secret Service agents isn’t great either. (When I first saw the headline I thought “they wouldn’t use Strava”. Half-right, I guess.)
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On cryptocurrency, 63% of US adults not confident it’s safe, reliable • Pew Research Center

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While only a minority of Americans have invested in cryptocurrency, a majority of those who have done so still have it.

Among those who have ever invested in, traded or used cryptocurrency:
•
61% say they currently have cryptocurrency, which is down from 69% in 2023
• 39% say they currently do not have any cryptocurrency, up from 31% in 2023.

By income: roughly half (51%) of adults in lower-income households who’ve used cryptocurrency say they no longer have any, outpacing those in middle-income (32%) or upper-income (36%) households who say the same.

These shares are similar to those measured in 2023. The only significant change is among upper-income cryptocurrency users: 36% have given up the currency, an increase from 21% in 2023.

The financial impact of cryptocurrency is still a concern for many users. When asked about their own investments, the largest shares say they’ve done worse (38%) or about as expected (37%). In comparison, 20% say their investments have done better than expected and 4% are unsure.

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The picture I get is of waning interest and people cutting their losses, while perhaps leaving a little behind just in case it ever comes back. (Or they’ve forgotten how to retrieve it.)
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Russia amplified hurricane disinformation to drive Americans apart, researchers find • AP News

David Klepper:

»

Russia has helped amplify and spread false and misleading internet claims about recent hurricanes in the United States and the federal government’s response, part of a wider effort by the Kremlin to manipulate America’s political discourse before the presidential election, new research shows.

The content, spread by Russian state media and networks of social media accounts and websites, criticizes the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, exploiting legitimate concerns about the recovery effort in an attempt to paint American leaders as incompetent and corrupt, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The London-based organization tracks disinformation and online extremism.

In some cases, the claims about the storms include fake images created using artificial intelligence, such as a photo depicting scenes of devastating flooding at Disney World that never happened, researchers say.

The approach is consistent with the Kremlin’s long-standing practice of identifying legitimate debates and contentious issues in the U.S. and then exploiting them. Previous disinformation campaigns have harnessed debates about immigration, racism, crime and the economy in an effort to portray the US as corrupt, violent and unjust.

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Odd, because one side of the US presidential election also tries to portray the country in the same way. I guess it’s easier to push on an open door.
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A million people play this video wargame. So does the Pentagon. – WSJ

Daniel Michaels and Juanje Gómez:

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Wargames—long the realm of top brass and classified plans—let strategists test varying scenarios, using different tactics and equipment. Now they are filtering down the ranks and out among analysts. Digitization, boosted by artificial intelligence, helps yield practical lessons in greater safety and at lower cost than staging military maneuvers would. Wargames can also explore hypotheticals that no exercise could address, such as nuclear warfare.

Proponents of wargames include Tim Barrick, a retired Marine colonel who is now wargaming director at Marine Corps University. He drills students using board games and computers. In one online exercise, he pushed eight Marine majors repeatedly through the same Pacific military engagement, using a program called Command: Professional Edition.

This software is unusual because it didn’t originate with a defence contractor or institute, as most wargames do. It is a simulation program built and marketed by gamers with almost no military background—and rooted in Tom Clancy novels. Users of all stripes have made it a surprise hit.

…Command’s British publisher, Slitherine Software, stumbled into popularity. The family business got started around 2000 selling retail CD-ROM games like Legion, involving ancient Roman military campaigns.

When Defense Department officials in 2016 first contacted Slitherine, which is based in an old house in a leafy London suburb, its father-and-son managers were so stunned they thought the call might be a prank. “Are you taking the piss?” J.D. McNeil, the father, recalled asking near the end of the conversation.

What drew Pentagon attention was the software’s vast, precise database of planes, ships, missiles and other military equipment from around the world, which allows exceptionally accurate modeling.

Former Air Force Air Mobility Command analyst Pete Szabo started using Command around 2017 to model military planes’ fuel consumption in battle scenarios. “It’s been a very powerful tool for us,” said the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. Convincing his superiors to employ commercial, off-the-shelf gaming software, though, took some work, he recalled. “At first it was like, ‘Nooooo.’ ”

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‘Washington Post’ flooded by cancellations after Bezos’ non-endorsement decision NPR

David Folkeflik:

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The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice-President Kamala Harris for president.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

A corporate spokesperson declined to comment, citing The Washington Post Co.’s status as a privately held company.

“It’s a colossal number,” former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don’t know what led to it.”

Chief executive and publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.”

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The number is so big and the cancellations have been so sudden that the Post has begun emailing those who do it with cheap offers to encourage them back. The pretence that the Post has not made endorsements is false – it’s been doing it for more than 40 years.
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Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: comparable information rates across the human communicative niche • Science Advances

Christophe Coupé et al:

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Language is universally used by all human groups, but it hardly displays undisputable universal characteristics, with a few possible exceptions related to pragmatic and communicative constraints. This ubiquity comes with very high levels of variation across the 7000 or so languages. For example, linguistic differences between Japanese and English lead to a ratio of 1:11 in their number of distinct syllables.

These differences in repertoire size result in large variation in the amount of information they encode per syllable according to Shannon’s theory of communication. Despite those differences, Japanese and English endow their respective speakers with linguistic systems that fulfil equally well one of the most important roles of spoken communication, namely, information transmission.

We show here that the interplay between language-specific structural properties (as reflected by the amount of information per syllable) and speaker-level language processing and production [as reflected by speech rate (SR)] leads languages to gravitate around an information rate (IR) of about 39 bits/s.

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Stunning finding: despite the colossal difference in the apparent speed at which people speak, the amount of information transmitted per second is constant. There’s no “better” language. One has to wonder: if there were, would everyone gravitate to it? And does this finding transfer to the written word too?
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Lost at the station? Follow the blind inventor’s navigation app • The Times

Nicholas Hellen:

»

It is, admittedly, one of life’s more trivial annoyances, but one that exasperates many. Why are smartphone navigation apps not accurate enough to show us which way to turn when getting off a bus, or leaving the train or Tube?

Despite their vast wealth and technical resources, Apple and Google leave users to pace back and forth until the blue locator dot on the phone gives a clue by moving decisively one way or the other.

It has taken a blind entrepreneur, Tom Pey, 71, to take the challenge seriously.

His service, an app called Waymap, tells users which way to turn, gives step-by-step directions, and is accurate to the nearest metre, even when there is no phone signal. It works underground and in crowds, when conventional services are notoriously unreliable, and even indoors.

The service is so accurate that it could, for example, guide people directly to their seat in a football stadium, find the cheese counter in a supermarket or help users avoid getting lost and missing an appointment in a hospital.

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Nice idea, because we always need these.
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Indian coal giants pushed for lax pollution rules while ramping up production • Climate Change News

Akshay Deshmane:

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The Indian government weakened rules to curb pollution caused by its expanding coal industry after lobbying by top producers, even as it agreed internationally to phase down the use of coal, an investigation by Climate Home has found. 

India’s coal giants pushed back hard against environmental regulation meant to tighten up the disposal of fly ash – a byproduct of coal-fired power plants known to harm both humans and the environment if not managed properly.  

Letters sent by coal companies to the Indian government – and accessed by Climate Home News through freedom of information requests to government agencies – reveal lobbying efforts to weaken federal rules between 2019 and 2023.

The state-run firms involved were Coal India Limited (CIL), the world’s third-biggest coal mining company, and National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) Limited, one of the top 10 coal-fired power companies globally.   

Top management at the coal giants claimed their organisations would not be able to comply fully with the government regulations, aimed at controlling fly ash disposal after decades of public health impacts for local communities. Even after the rules were approved, the companies continued efforts to weaken them, in some cases successfully. 

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Fly ash puts more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear power stations. Hooray for lobbying, eh.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Savings of £3.6bn could be made by turning off 1.5 million streetlights which are no longer needed. CC-licensed photo by Stephen Bowler on Flickr.

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

‘It’s important to talk about online abuse’: Marianna Spring on trolls, conspiracy theorists – and positivity • The Guardian

Eva Wiseman:

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In the first five months of 2023, the BBC received 14,488 messages abusive enough to be escalated by their system designed to detect hate; 11,771 of those, around 80%, were about Spring. Due to her reporting on conspiracy theories she’s regularly targeted with death threats and harassment, both on and offline. For a while, a man camped in a tent outside the BBC’s New Broadcasting House shouting “disinformation agent” in her face as she left work. Which means, while I can say Spring welcomes me with a hug and invites me into her front room for a conversation that will span murder and Kate Middleton and teenage boys, I can’t describe the city she lives in, or who she lives with, or if she lives with anybody else at all, or give any personal details that might put her in danger.

“It’s quite a big deal for me this,” she says nervously, as we settle on her sofa. “I keep so private, because I know that the world I investigate has attracted this group of trolls who will stop at nothing to figure out literally everything about me and then use it in some way.” She once mentioned that her dad was a doctor, which led to strangers suggesting this connection is why she is invested in killing people with the Covid vaccine. Once she shared a picture online of her family’s 19-year-old cat and she was accused noisily of animal cruelty. “They also called her Chairman Miaow,” Spring adds, “which was actually quite funny.”

…What might surprise readers, she says, is that most of the conspiracy theorists she’s met aren’t bad people. She sits with them at home, like we’re doing now. They have tea together. Biscuits. “Often they arrive at these places from really legitimate points. They really care, they’re very worried about other human beings who are being hurt, or powerful people doing bad stuff. But they are themselves being exploited by other people on social media. They’re being pushed that kind of content and others benefit from their attention.”

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Amazingly, given what she goes through, she says she is “fundamentally hopeful about people”.
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The ‘Black Insurrectionist’ was actually white. The deception did not stop there • AP News

Brian Slodysko:

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“Black Insurrectionist,” the anonymous social media persona behind some of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories about the 2024 election, can be traced to a man from upstate New York.

He’s also white.

With a profile photo of a Black soldier and the tagline “I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS,” the account on the platform X amassed more than 300,000 followers while posting dubious claims about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Some were amplified by former President Donald Trump, his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and their Republican allies in Congress. The most salacious claims have come in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Last month, the account posted what Black Insurrectionist claimed was an affidavit from an ABC News employee, alleging Harris was given questions in advance of the network’s debate with Trump — which ABC News vigorously disputed. Trump approved, though, declaring, “I love the person.” More recently, Black Insurrectionist posted a baseless claim alleging inappropriate behavior between Walz and a student decades ago, a falsehood that U.S. intelligence officials said sprang from a Russian disinformation campaign.

The reach that the Black Insurrectionist account attained with assistance from Trump and his allies demonstrates the ease with which unverified information from dubious sources can metastasize online to shape public opinion.

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People are so easily fooled by things like this: you attach a name to an account, you start pushing a certain sort of message, and they think it’s legitimate. Credit to Slodysko for getting to the bottom of this.

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‘We don’t know where the tipping point is’: climate expert on potential collapse of Atlantic circulation • The Guardian

Jonathan Watts:

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The dangers of a collapse of the main Atlantic Ocean circulation, known as Amoc, have been “greatly underestimated” and would have devastating and irreversible impacts, according to an open letter released at the weekend by 44 experts from 15 countries. One of the signatories, Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer and climatologist who heads the Earth system analysis department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, explains here why he has recently upgraded his risk assessment of an Amoc breakdown as a result of global heating – and what that means for Britain, Europe and the wider world.

What is Amoc?
Amoc, or the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, is a system of ocean currents that brings heat into the northern Atlantic. Warm surface water from the tropics flows north and releases its heat in the subpolar Atlantic, south of Greenland and west of Britain and Ireland. Then it cools and sinks to a depth of between 2,000m to 3,000 metres before returning south as a cold current. Amoc is one of our planet’s largest heat transport systems, moving the equivalent of 50 times the human energy use, and it has a particularly strong impact on the climate in Europe, affects the ocean’s CO2 uptake and oxygen supply, as well as rainfall patterns in the tropics.

How is Amoc different to the Gulf Stream?
They are connected because the northwards flow of Amoc goes via the Gulf Stream, which is a warm and swift Atlantic Ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico, then flows through the Florida straits, up the coast of the US and then across towards Europe. Amoc contributes just 20% to the Gulf Stream water flow but most of the heat transport, since Amoc’s deep return flow is very cold. It works like a central heating system.

What is happening to Amoc?
There are indications that Amoc has been slowing down for the last 60 or 70 years due to global heating. The most ominous sign is the cold blob over the northern Atlantic. The region is the only place in the world that has cooled in the past 20 years or so, while everywhere else on the planet has warmed – a sign of reduced heat transport into that region, exactly what climate computer models have predicted in response to Amoc slowing as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.

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Why? Because there’s more freshwater, which is less dense, and doesn’t sink. This looks more like when than if. And when that happens, it’s going to have dramatic effects on all sorts of things.
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As bird flu spreads, additional human infection is reported in Missouri • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes:

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A Missouri resident who shared a home with a patient hospitalized with bird flu in August was also infected with the virus, federal officials reported on Thursday.

But symptomatic health care workers who cared for the hospitalized patient were not infected, testing showed. The news eased worries among researchers that the virus, H5N1, had gained the ability to spread more efficiently among people.

Still, the number of human cases is rising in the United States. California said this week that it had confirmed 15 human cases of bird flu. Washington State has reported two poultry workers who are infected and five others presumed to be positive.

There are 31 confirmed cases in the country, but experts have said the figure is likely to be an undercount. “Additional cases may be found as investigations continue,” Dr. Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news briefing on Thursday.

“The identification of these additional cases of H5 in people with exposures to infected animals does not change CDC risk assessment for the general public, which continues to be low,” he said.

The poultry workers in Washington State were infected with a version of the virus that is distinct from the one circulating in dairy cattle, he added.

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Ehhh that last little remark doesn’t fill me with joy in this watching brief. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The inside story of the Transport for London cyberattack • London Centric

Jim Waterson:

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Publicly, the handling of the immediate aftermath of the attack was a mess. TfL initially put out a statement saying it was confident that no customer data had been compromised, before having to backtrack and admit that the bank details of around 5,000 Oyster card users who had applied for refunds had been accessed, although there is no indication anything was done with this data.

While most Londoners were still able to tap in and use transport services as usual, behind the scenes it was chaos. The booking system for Dial-a-Ride buses, used by the disabled, was also shut down, leaving vulnerable people in the lurch. Data on live tube times — fed into apps such as TfL Go and Citymapper — was taken offline.

Staff at TfL’s HQ were unable to log on to the IT network and the WiFi networks taken down. Office-based staff were sent to work from home for the whole of September, although most have now returned to the office. Every single TfL staff member was required to travel into the office to have their password and login details reset. Even now, many basic office tasks remain a struggle. Rebuilding and restoring these systems is a tedious, time-consuming task.

The biggest financial impact has been on the city’s neediest: the young, the old, and those with issues tapping in and out of stations.

People turning 60 have been unable to apply for Oyster cards giving them free travel. Individuals from all age groups have been unable to apply for legitimate refunds after being charged the maximum fare because they were unable to tap out at the end of a journey. Hundreds of thousands of sixth formers and new university students have been unable to apply for their 16+ Zip Oyster card, with the official TfL guidance being that they should make a note of each full-fare journey then reclaim the difference later in an as-yet-unclear manner.

When talking to London Centric, one TfL staffer involved in the recovery process cast doubt on the idea that every 17-year-old student in London is able to carefully note down their journeys and putting them in a spreadsheet for reclaiming at a later date.

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London Centric aims to be what the London Evening Standard has abandoned being – a publication with stories about and for Londoners.
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Britain to axe up to 1.5m lampposts • The Times

Nicholas Hellen:

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Around 1.5 million of Britain’s 7.2 million lampposts could be removed to save money and reduce carbon emissions and replaced with lighting that will make it safer for pedestrians.

Under existing rules, there is no requirement to light pavements for pedestrians. They are only lit because light spills over from lampposts, which were principally installed to make it safer for motorists.

But today’s cars have such effective headlights that lampposts, which are generally 10m tall on A-roads and 6m tall on residential roads, are not necessary in many parts of Britain. Lampposts will remain in place in many locations where they are necessary, such as in cities where CCTV cameras rely on good lighting.

The first ones scheduled to be removed are in Hayton, a small Yorkshire village on the A1079 road between York and Hull. Starting in December, 30 street lights on each side of the main road are to be switched off and later removed. Around 300 more will be switched off and removed on a 19-mile (30km) stretch of the road.

Rather than plunge the village into complete darkness, the pavements that run alongside the road will be fitted with dedicated footway lights for the first time. On one side they will be on bollards with lights attached. On the other side, they will be on 3m-high columns, also with lights attached.

It is all part of a new strategy by the Department for Transport (DfT) aimed at fundamentally rethinking the purpose of spending £3.5bn each year on the 7.2 million street lights. Around £1bn goes on the energy bill, and the remainder is spent on maintaining them and replacing them at the end of their 40-year life cycle.

Karl Rourke, the street lighting service manager at East Riding of Yorkshire council, who is overseeing the project for Live Labs 2, a £30 million decarbonisation research and innovation programme funded by the DfT, said: “This is about common-sense lighting, not lighting removal at all costs.”

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This sustainable tiny home is made out of an old wind turbine • Fast Company

Grace Snelling:

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The prototype, which features around 387 square feet (36 sq m) of interior space, is the product of a collaboration between the European renewable power company Vattenfall and the architecture collective Superuse Studios.

The turbine-turned-tiny house is also an experiment in material reuse that could become more critical as wind turbines across the globe reach the end of their life cycles.

Vattenfall has a few near-future sustainability goals. In 2023, 87% of Vattenfall’s electricity production came from renewable sources. The company aims to close that gap and become fossil-free by 2040, and it’s also thinking about how to make its existing material usage more circular. 

One major consideration for the company is its wind turbines, which typically have a lifespan of around 20 years. Once a turbine reaches the end of its utility, Vattenfall has to determine what will be done with its component materials.

That’s a tall order, considering that turbines typically stand at over 300 feet and include a nacelle (the control box that houses the generator, brakes, and other components) as well as three large blades. But the need to address that challenge is climbing. While there are no official decommissioning stats available, Vattenfall estimates that 5,000 wind turbines worldwide will need to be decommissioned annually over the next couple of years, as turbines across the globe begin to age out of their two-decade use window.

On a macro-level, that’s because the first boom of large-scale wind farming infrastructure is reaching the end of its life cycle. While the first electricity-generating wind turbine traces back to the late 19th century, large-scale wind farms have become much more commonplace over the past 30 years or so. In fact, global windpower grew from about 6,100 megawatts to 197,039 megawatts between 1996 and 2010. And that means that now is the time to “find better alternatives of making use of the resources that were developed, and making sure that we get the most out of them,” says Thomas Hjort, Vattenfall’s director of innovation.

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The photos suggest something that could just about suffice for a short holiday, but you might go a little mad living there for a long time: there’s only one window, which is the door.
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Who gets the TikTok in the divorce? The messy fight over valuable social media accounts • WSJ

Katherine Hamilton:

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When Kat and Mike Stickler filed for divorce, their lawyers had a math problem.

Among the couple’s biggest assets was MikeAndKat, a channel on TikTok and YouTube in which they shared their lives with about four million followers. No one knew how to evenly split MikeAndKat between Mike and Kat. 

“The judge was like, ‘what?’” Kat said last month during a podcast interview with Northwestern Mutual. “It’s a whole new terrain.”

Social media pays the bills for millions of Americans. But making a living online is more financially complicated than working a 9-to-5. Influencers need an audience to win advertising deals, and changing what they post risks turning followers away. Couples who showcase their love life online face an existential threat to the family business when they split.  

For the lawyers charged with pinning a dollar value to the accounts to divide them fairly, it’s way harder than assessing a house or car. Fortunes can swing depending on which ex has the keys to the account. That was Kat’s argument in fighting for control of the TikTok channel. 

“If the TikTok account was left to me, it would keep growing, but if it wasn’t, it would stop,” said Kat, 29, in the podcast interview. 

She was right. Kat got the TikTok, changed that handle to KatStickler and now has almost 10.5 million followers. She has another three million across Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. The channels, where Kat posts skits impersonating her mother and snippets of her everyday life, have earned her enough to buy a condo and become a small business investor. Mike ended up with the YouTube account, which is now defunct. He now works in sales and declined to comment.

There are 27 million paid content creators in the US, and 44% of them say social media is their full-time job, consultant The Keller Advisory Group found. 

The big bucks don’t come from views or followers. Brands pay influencers to recommend a product or service to their audience. US advertisers paid content creators $26bn in 2023, according to Statista.

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Former OpenAI researcher says company broke copyright law • The New York Times

Cade MEtz:

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“With a research project, you can, generally speaking, train on any data,” [former OpenAI staffer Suchir] Balaji said. “That was the mind-set at the time.”

Then OpenAI released ChatGPT. Initially driven by a precursor to GPT-4 and later by GPT-4 itself, the chatbot grabbed the attention of hundreds of millions of people and quickly became a moneymaker.

OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies have said that using internet data to train their A.I. systems meets the requirements of the “fair use” doctrine. The doctrine has four factors. The companies argue that those factors — including that they substantially transformed the copyrighted works and were not competing in the same market with a direct substitute for those works — play in their favor.

Mr. Balaji does not believe these criteria have been met. When a system like GPT-4 learns from data, he said, it makes a complete copy of that data. From there, a company like OpenAI can then teach the system to generate an exact copy of the data. Or it can teach the system to generate text that is in no way a copy. The reality, he said, is that companies teach the systems to do something in between.

“The outputs aren’t exact copies of the inputs, but they are also not fundamentally novel,” he said. This week, he posted an essay on his personal website that included what he describes as a mathematical analysis that aims to show that this claim is true.

Mark Lemley, a Stanford University law professor, argued the opposite. Most of what chatbots put out, he said, is sufficiently different from its training data.

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I’m not an expert on copyright law – especially US law – but Balaji’s essay doesn’t entirely persuade me. But I recognise that I’m biased; I already think the use is OK.
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X’s new block function will make people mad. That’s exactly what X wants • The Globe and Mail

Phoebe Maltz Bovy:

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Social-media users block one another all the time, for many reasons unrelated to deterring obsessives. Maybe you’ve blocked someone because they made one annoying post, or were rude to your friend, or are associated with someone you dislike. Maybe you block everyone with certain politics. Or maybe you hit “block” by accident. It is an entirely normal part of online life to be blocked by people you not only have never harassed, but have never interacted with or even heard of.

But under the new order, you might come across a funny or wise post, reply in good faith or even with praise, and then learn that this person has blocked you. That would be maddening. Who wants that?

Which leads me to my theory. It’s not exes who benefit from this change; it’s X. The new block function will raise blood pressure – and thus drive engagement.

To be confronted with someone’s posts and the fact that they blocked you would feel like being taunted, even if it was by no means intended that way. As it currently stands, someone blocking you is a prompt to think about that person less, if indeed you knew who they were to begin with. It is a tranquility- and sanity-preserving system.

Muting, a function that already exists, allows for plausible deniability. Maybe someone didn’t get around to your doubtless brilliant retort because they were busy, not because they’ve hidden your posts because they think you’re a harmless bore. All the new form of blocking amounts to is a form of muting where the muted individual knows what’s up.

«

This is a good point. Blocking as a silencing mechanism, in both directions, is underrated.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

Watermarking for AI content is the great promise of Google’s latest open source technology. CC-licensed photo by Early Novels Database 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 9 links for you. Not an AI. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google offers its AI watermarking tech as free open source toolkit • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

Back in May, Google augmented its Gemini AI model with SynthID, a toolkit that embeds AI-generated content with watermarks it says are “imperceptible to humans” but can be easily and reliably detected via an algorithm. Today, Google took that SynthID system open source, offering the same basic watermarking toolkit for free to developers and businesses.

The move gives the entire AI industry an easy, seemingly robust way to silently mark content as artificially generated, which could be useful for detecting deepfakes and other damaging AI content before it goes out in the wild. But there are still some important limitations that may prevent AI watermarking from becoming a de facto standard across the AI industry any time soon.

Google uses a version of SynthID to watermark audio, video, and images generated by its multimodal AI systems, with differing techniques that are explained briefly in this video. But in a new paper published in Nature, Google researchers go into detail on how the SynthID process embeds an unseen watermark in the text-based output of its Gemini model.

The core of the text watermarking process is a sampling algorithm inserted into an LLM’s usual token-generation loop (the loop picks the next word in a sequence based on the model’s complex set of weighted links to the words that came before it). Using a random seed generated from a key provided by Google, that sampling algorithm increases the correlational likelihood that certain tokens will be chosen in the generative process. A scoring function can then measure that average correlation across any text to determine the likelihood that the text was generated by the watermarked LLM (a threshold value can be used to give a binary yes/no answer).

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UNEP: New climate pledges need ‘quantum leap’ in ambition to deliver Paris goals • Carbon Brief

Zeke Hausfather:

»

There is a “massive gap between rhetoric and reality” that must be closed by new climate pledges being drafted under the Paris Agreement, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) says.

In the 15th edition of its annual “emissions gap” report, the UNEP calls for “no more hot air” as countries approach the February 2025 deadline to submit their next nationally determined contributions (NDCs) setting mitigation targets for 2035.

These NDCs “must deliver a quantum leap in ambition in tandem with accelerated mitigation action in this decade”, the report says. 

The report charts the “gap” between where emissions are headed under current policies and commitments over the coming decade, compared to what is needed to meet the Paris goal of limiting global warming to “well below” 2ºC and pursuing efforts to stay under 1.5ºC.

It highlights that greenhouse gas emissions reached record levels in 2023, up 1.3% from 2022, and rising notably faster than the average over the past decade. 

The report warns that both progress and ambition have “plateaued” in recent years, with relatively little of substance occurring since the pledges made at COP26 in 2021. And many countries are not even on track to meet their existing NDCs, with current policy projections from G20 nations exceeding NDC commitments by a collective 1bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalent, CO2e) in 2030.

Current policies put the world on track for 2.9ºC of warming by 2100, the report finds – though this could be reduced to 2.4-2.6ºC, if all existing NDCs are met.

«

We’ve been here so many times, and missed the target so many times. Unlike the ozone hole, climate change seems intractable because it’s in the hands of too many people who have a short-term interest in not taking notice of long-term effects.
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Q+A: Can ‘carbon border adjustment mechanisms’ help tackle climate change? • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

»

The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) has been touted as a key policy for cutting emissions from heavy industries, such as steel and cement production.

By taxing carbon-intensive imports, the EU says it will help its domestic companies take ambitious climate action while still remaining competitive with firms in nations where environmental laws are less strict.

There is evidence that the CBAM is also driving other governments to launch tougher carbon-pricing policies of their own, to avoid paying border taxes to the EU.

It has also helped to shift climate and trade up the international climate agenda, potentially contributing to a broader increase in ambition.

However, at a time of growing protectionism and economic rivalry between major powers, the new levy has proved controversial.

Many developing countries have branded CBAMs as “unfair” policies that will leave them worse off financially, saying they will make it harder for them to decarbonise their economies.

Analysis also suggests that the EU’s CBAM, in isolation, will have a limited impact on global emissions. 

«

In isolation, perhaps. But as part of something concerted?
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The Hindawi Files. Part 3: Wiley • James Claims

James Heathers:

»

Unlike many academic issues, where publishers will ignore manifest tomfoolery for months or years at a time — allowing whole journals to go tits-up, allowing peer review to get compromised, allowing mass fakery to infest their products, etc. — the 10-K form is a different ball of wax. The SEC is significantly more serious and powerful than an angry assistant professor sending impotent emails. Thus, financial disclosures are treated more seriously.

As a consequence, while companies can still play little games with various pieces of information on the 10-K form, the whole exercise is infused with a different level of heat and complexity. They also require auditing! Someone not too spiritually dissimilar to me has to analyze and approve them.

So: it was very interesting to me to read the Wiley 10-K forms for the entire period of this sorry saga, because at no point do they mention paper mills deliberately trying to defraud them and ruin their business model. Before, during, and after.

There is a section specifically for this: Part 1, Section 1A.

Wiley lists a lot of regular milquetoast shit…

…But at no point do they mention paper mills — an entire class of business as setting out to catastrophically destroy trust in their brand. There are a whole slew of consequences which are all very real and material:

• loss of academic reputation, hence lower submissions
• delisting of journals, hence lower reputation
• cost of clean-up if fully breached
• etc.

It’s hard to determine if other publishers typically do, because a lot of them aren’t American companies. However, recently Springer Nature went through their long-awaited IPO (that is, they are a private company and decided to become a public company). Disclosure requirements during the IPO process are similar to the 10-K requirements — you have to list threats.

«

Heathers has written two previous pieces about the Hindawi fraud, where the venerable science publisher John Wiley in January 2021 bought Hindawi, an open access publisher, for $298m, getting 200 journals. Which turned out to be utterly rotten. Science publishing has a problem, because Hindawi surely wasn’t alone.
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How one engineer beat the ban on home computers in socialist Yugoslavia • The Guardian

Lewis Packwood:

»

Very few Yugoslavians had access to computers in the early 1980s: they were mostly the preserve of large institutions or companies. Importing home computers like the Commodore 64 was not only expensive, but also legally impossible, thanks to a law that restricted regular citizens from importing individual goods that were worth more than 50 Deutsche Marks (the Commodore 64 cost over 1,000 Deutsche Marks at launch). Even if someone in Yugoslavia could afford the latest home computers, they would have to resort to smuggling.

In 1983, engineer Vojislav “Voja” Antonić was becoming more and more frustrated with the senseless Yugoslavian import laws. “We had a public debate with politicians,” he says. “We tried to convince them that they should allow [more expensive items], because it’s progress.” The efforts of Antonić and others were fruitless, however, and the 50 Deutsche Mark limit remained. But perhaps there was a way around it.

Antonić was pondering this while on holiday with his wife in Risan in Montenegro in 1983. “I was thinking how would it be possible to make the simplest and cheapest possible computer,” says Antonić. “As a way to amuse myself in my free time. That’s it. Everyone thinks it is an interesting story, but really I was just bored!” He wondered whether it would be possible to make a computer without a graphics chip – or a “video controller” as they were commonly known at the time.

Typically, computers and consoles have a CPU – which forms the “brain” of the machine and performs all of the calculations – in addition to a video controller/graphics chip that generates the images you see on the screen. In the Atari 2600 console, for example, the CPU is the MOS Technology 6507 chip, while the video controller is the TIA (Television Interface Adaptor) chip.

Instead of having a separate graphics chip, Antonić thought he could use part of the CPU to generate a video signal, and then replicate some of the other video functions using software. It would mean sacrificing processing power, but in principle it was possible, and it would make the computer much cheaper.

“I was impatient to test it,” says Antonić. As soon as he returned from his holiday, he put together a prototype – and lo and behold, it really worked. Thinking outside the box had paid off.

«

Fabulous story, and a great read.
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Data (Use and Access) Bill factsheet: making lives easier • GOV.UK

»

Will the government provide mandatory digital identity cards?

• No, there are no plans to introduce national digital ID cards
• Using a digital identity will be voluntary. People will be in control of their data and who it is shared with
• People will still be able to prove their identity using physical documents if they choose
• If people choose to use digital identity products or services, we’re making sure they know which ones meet the government’s high standards.

Who will use digital identities?

Digital identities will not be mandatory. We are making it clear which digital identity products and services are secure and reliable, so you can make more informed decisions about which ones to trust with your personal data.

«

To which Big Brother Watch says:

»

Commenting on the publication of the Government’s new Data (Use and Access) Bill, Susannah Copson, Legal and Policy Officer at Big Brother Watch said:

“The Government’s new Data Bill threatens to set the UK years behind our international partners when it comes to safeguarding against the threats of new and emerging technologies such as AI. Our data protection laws are amongst the few legal protections we have against these threats, yet this Bill waters them down by simultaneously eroding privacy protections and restricting peoples’ control over their own data. Meanwhile, advancing with a digital ID framework with serious implications for privacy that lacks a legal right to opt-out poses a serious threat to individual autonomy and consent.”

«

Which leaves me rather unsure that BBW has got the right end of the stick. Both documents have the same publication date.
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Bluesky announces Series A to grow network of 13m+ users • Bluesky

“The Bluesky Team”:

»

Bluesky now exceeds 13 million users, the AT Protocol developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped highly requested features like direct messages and video. We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15m Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, co-creator of Kubernetes Joe Beda, and others.

Our lead, Blockchain Capital, shares our philosophy that technology should serve the user, not the reverse — the technology being used should never come at the expense of the user experience.

…In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames. Bluesky will always be free to use — we believe that information and conversation should be easily accessible, not locked down. We won’t uprank accounts simply because they’re subscribing to a paid tier.

Additionally, we’re proud of our vibrant community of creators, including artists, writers, developers, and more, and we want to establish a voluntary monetization path for them as well. Part of our plan includes building payment services for people to support their favorite creators and projects. We’ll share more information as this develops.

«

“Series A” is usually ground floor funding. There are also third-party apps being built around it. If Bluesky can get enough momentum – a big if – then maybe it will become a serious alternative while what was Twitter turns into smoking ashes. (If they’re really serious, I’d suggest verified users as the obvious way to attract the group who will turn it into a “news happens here” app. Depends how much they think that matters.)
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Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity are promoting scientific racism in search results • WIRED

David Gilbert:

»

AI-infused search engines from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity have been surfacing deeply racist and widely debunked research promoting race science and the idea that white people are genetically superior to nonwhite people.

Patrik Hermansson, a researcher with UK-based anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, was in the middle of a months-long investigation into the resurgent race science movement when he needed to find out more information about a debunked dataset that claims IQ scores can be used to prove the superiority of the white race.

He was investigating the Human Diversity Foundation, a race science company funded by Andrew Conru, the US tech billionaire who founded Adult Friend Finder. The group, founded in 2022, was the successor to the Pioneer Fund, a group founded by US Nazi sympathizers in 1937 with the aim of promoting “race betterment” and “race realism.”

Hermansson logged in to Google and began looking up results for the IQs of different nations. When he typed in “Pakistan IQ,” rather than getting a typical list of links, Hermansson was presented with Google’s AI-powered Overviews tool, which, confusingly to him, was on by default. It gave him a definitive answer of 80.

When he typed in “Sierra Leone IQ,” Google’s AI tool was even more specific: 45.07. The result for “Kenya IQ” was equally exact: 75.2.

Hermansson immediately recognized the numbers being fed back to him. They were being taken directly from the very study he was trying to debunk, published by one of the leaders of the movement that he was working to expose.

«

Search has been a boon to the web, but its effect on the information ecosystem hasn’t been so great.
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US power grid added battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors in past four years • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

»

Faced with worsening climate-driven disasters and an electricity grid increasingly supplied by intermittent renewables, the US is rapidly installing huge batteries that are already starting to help prevent power blackouts.

From barely anything just a few years ago, the US is now adding utility-scale batteries at a dizzying pace, having installed more than 20 gigawatts of battery capacity to the electric grid, with 5GW of this occurring just in the first seven months of this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).

This means that battery storage equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors has been bolted on to America’s electric grids in barely four years, with the EIA predicting this capacity could double again to 40GW by 2025 if further planned expansions occur.

California and Texas, which both saw all-time highs in battery-discharged grid power this month, are leading the way in this growth, with hulking batteries helping manage the large amount of clean yet intermittent solar and wind energy these states have added in recent years.

The explosion in battery deployment even helped keep the lights on in California this summer, when in previous years the state has seen electricity rationing or blackouts during intense heatwaves that see air conditioning use soar and power lines topple due to wildfires. “We can leverage that stored energy and dispatch it when we need it,” Patti Poppe, chief executive of PG&E, California’s largest utility, said last month.

«

Micro- and macro-generation (or -storage) really is the way to go. (The figure above assumes 1GW nuclear reactors, by the way; the Chernobyl No.4 reactor was a 3GW system.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Meet the norovirus, which causes the winter vomiting bug but might be a thing of the past thanks to a new mRNA vaccine. CC-licensed photo by NIAID 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. Holding it in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Inside the US government-bought tool that can track phones at abortion clinics • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

On a computer screen a map shows the movements of smartphones around the globe. Zooming into an abortion clinic in the south of the United States, the online tool shows more than 700 red dots over the clinic itself, each representing a phone, and by extension, a person. 

The tool, called Locate X and made by a company called Babel Street, then narrows down to the movements of a specific device which had visited the clinic. This phone started at a residence in Alabama in mid-June. It then went by a Lowe’s Home Improvement store, traveled along a highway, went past a gas station, visited a church, crossed over into Florida, and then stopped at the abortion clinic for approximately two hours. They had only been to the clinic once, according to the data. 

The device then headed back, and crossed back over into Alabama. The tool also showed their potential home, based on the high frequency at which the device stopped there. The tool clearly shows this home address on its map interface.

In other words, someone had traveled from Alabama, where abortion is illegal after the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, to an abortion clinic in Florida, where abortion is limited but still available early in a pregnancy. Based on the data alone, it is unclear who exactly this person is or what they were doing, whether they were receiving an abortion themselves, assisting someone seeking one, or going to the clinic for another reason. But it would be trivial for US authorities, some of which already have access to this tool, to go one step further and unmask this or other abortion clinic visitors. 

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There’s going to be a terrific business in burner featurephones if Trump wins the election. It’ll be like a female casting of The Wire.
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Hacker plants false memories in ChatGPT to steal user data in perpetuity • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

When security researcher Johann Rehberger recently reported a vulnerability in ChatGPT that allowed attackers to store false information and malicious instructions in a user’s long-term memory settings, OpenAI summarily closed the inquiry, labeling the flaw a safety issue, not, technically speaking, a security concern.

So Rehberger did what all good researchers do: He created a proof-of-concept exploit that used the vulnerability to exfiltrate all user input in perpetuity. OpenAI engineers took notice and issued a partial fix earlier this month.

The vulnerability abused long-term conversation memory, a feature OpenAI began testing in February and made more broadly available in September. Memory with ChatGPT stores information from previous conversations and uses it as context in all future conversations. That way, the LLM can be aware of details such as a user’s age, gender, philosophical beliefs, and pretty much anything else, so those details don’t have to be inputted during each conversation.

Within three months of the rollout, Rehberger found that memories could be created and permanently stored through indirect prompt injection, an AI exploit that causes an LLM to follow instructions from untrusted content such as emails, blog posts, or documents. The researcher demonstrated how he could trick ChatGPT into believing a targeted user was 102 years old, lived in the Matrix, and insisted Earth was flat and the LLM would incorporate that information to steer all future conversations. These false memories could be planted by storing files in Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, uploading images, or browsing a site like Bing—all of which could be created by a malicious attacker.

Rehberger privately reported the finding to OpenAI in May. That same month, the company closed the report ticket.

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Myanmar’s severe internet blackouts spur use of free VPNs, Starlink • Rest of World

Nu Nu Lusan:

»

In Myanmar’s northern Kachin state, Seng had struggled with internet shutdowns and low bandwidth since the military coup of 2021. Then came the blocks on social media platforms including Facebook. But it was the recent ban on virtual private networks (VPNs) that really hurt her online clothing business.

“When they banned Facebook, I hired someone to use a VPN and post on our Facebook page from an area where the internet was still accessible,” Seng, who asked to go by a single name to protect her identity, told Rest of World. “After they banned VPNs, I have to go to Yangon from time to time to try and upload photos and videos with any VPN that still works. Sometimes, I cannot do it.” 

There have been more than 300 internet shutdowns across the country since February 1, 2021, according to the Myanmar Internet Project, an advocacy group. Residents have also faced partial shutdowns of internet and mobile networks, bandwidth limitations, and social media blocks. Those in Sagaing region, and the states of Kachin and Shan, which have seen fierce fighting with resistance forces, are particularly affected.  

The junta has banned encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp, and restricted social media apps including Facebook, Instagram, and X. Only Telegram and TikTok — which the junta uses for propaganda and to dox activists — are accessible. The junta has also launched its version of YouTube, called MTube, and MySpace (not to be confused with the now largely defunct U.S. platform of the same name.)

…In areas with frequent communications blackouts, satellite-based internet has become the only option. Starlink, which is not yet licensed in Myanmar, is in high demand. Anti-junta forces have set up Starlink systems in dozens of areas in the Sagaing and Magway regions, and in Karenni and Kachin states. There may be more than 3,000 Starlink dishes in use in the country, the Myanmar Internet Project estimates.

“It’s the only viable solution for end users,” the spokesperson said. “Others are not end user-oriented, and are also expensive, and need a lot of technical expertise.”

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Myanmar had zero internet in 2010. Then too much in 2016. Now, not enough.
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Nicole Shanahan’s journey from tech royalty to pro-Trump wellness guru • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Ashley Parker, Meryl Kornfield and Aaron Schaffer:

»

[Nicole] Shanahan described Trump as “a former enemy” turned “partner in a time of need,” who she thinks can bring her main concerns about technology, health and the environment to the White House.

Shanahan’s transformation has alarmed former associates in Silicon Valley, a number of whom are Democrats, startled by her newfound political prominence. Interviews with 34 people familiar with her rise, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters, along with court documents, photographs, text messages and screenshots paint a portrait of a chameleon who rose from a violent, hardscrabble childhood to join one of the most elite circles of the tech industry — doggedly pursuing influence.

Her tumultuous marriage to Brin — the world’s 10th-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — is central to that rise. The marriage offered Shanahan entree to tech’s inner sanctum, but generated previously unreported personal drama that drove a wedge between Brin and Google co-founder Larry Page, as well as their friends and families, according to three people who know both men. When the divorce was finalized last year, Shanahan won what is likely one of the largest divorce settlements in U.S. history — as much as $1bn, according to Forbes — and the means to pursue her political ambitions.

Within a year, she had bankrolled Kennedy’s quixotic presidential campaign. Now, those in the elite Silicon Valley circles she once ran in say they fear she will use her piece of the Google fortune to tip the razor-thin race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, or push unverified medical views to a broad audience.

…Shanahan became aware of reporting for this article when she and [would-be presidential hopeless Robert] Kennedy were still campaigning. In June, she texted an associate who had been contacted by The Post to suggest a deal: Shanahan said she would “pay your friend” — The Post reporter — “half a million dollars to be a whistleblower” to expose people Shanahan claimed were spreading false information about her.

«

Apparently the $500k was offered to Elizabeth Dwoskin, who describes it as “one of my stranger experiences in journalism”, which makes me wonder about other strange experiences she’s had that can compare to that.

Anyhow, billionaires considered harmful.
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Manchester Arena bomb survivors win conspiracy harassment case • BBC News

Tom Mullen, Ewan Gawne and Marianna Spring:

»

Two survivors of the Manchester Arena bombing have won a High Court harassment case against a former television producer who claimed the attack was staged.

Martin Hibbert and his daughter Eve sued Richard Hall for harassment and data protection in what was the first such case launched against a conspiracy theorist in the UK.

Mr Hibbert was left with a spinal cord injury and Ms Hibbert suffered severe brain damage as a result of the attack at the venue on 22 May 2017.

Mr Hall had told the court his actions, which included filming Eve outside her home, were in the public interest as a journalist and claimed “millions of people” had “bought a lie” about the attack.

Twenty-two people were killed and hundreds more injured when Salman Abedi detonated a homemade rucksack-bomb in the foyer of the venue as thousands of people left an Ariana Grande concert.

The court was told the Hibberts were among those standing nearest to the bomber at the time of the blast. Across several videos and a book, Mr Hall claimed several of those who died were living abroad or were dead before the attack and told the court he believed that no-one was “genuinely injured” in the bombing.

In a 63-page judgment, Mrs Justice Steyn said the Hibberts had won their harassment claim, but said she would not decide the data protection claim at this stage.

The judge said she found Hall to be “unreflective and insensitive to the level of distress likely to be caused by his persistent attempts to discredit what those who have suffered so tragically in the Attack say about it”.

«

Good to know that conspiracy theorists can get jugged on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Doctors trial world’s first mRNA vaccine against vomiting bug norovirus • The Guardian

Nicola Davis:

»

Doctors have begun trialling the world’s first mRNA vaccine against the vomiting bug norovirus in the hope the jab could bring huge health and economic benefits.

Norovirus causes sickness and diarrhoea and can spread very rapidly between people who are in close contact, with outbreaks often occurring in hospitals, care homes, schools and nurseries.

While most people recover within two to three days, the virus can be serious, particularly for the very young, elderly or people with a weakened immune system.

Dr Patrick Moore, a GP and national chief investigator for the trial in the UK, said that at present there were no approved vaccines for norovirus in the world, while people who become very ill were simply given intravenous fluids.

Moore added that the burden of the bug was huge, with about 685m cases and 200,000 deaths globally each year. In the UK it is thought there are about 4m norovirus cases annually, with 12,000 hospitalisations a year in England alone.

“In the UK, norovirus is estimated to cost about £100m annually to the NHS [and] if you take into account lost earnings, that’s about £300m,” Moore said.

Called Nova 301, the phase 3 clinical trial is to run for two years, and will enrol 25,000 adults – with a focus on those over the age of 60 – from countries including Japan, Canada and Australia.

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The first mRNA vaccine trials were in 2001, but things have really accelerated since then – particularly with Covid.
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Energy storage is a solved problem • PV magazine International

The International Solar Energy Society wants you to know:

»

As fossil fuel power stations close due to old age and competition from low-cost solar and wind, the gap must be filled by large-scale storage. When the amount of solar and wind energy is less than about 50%, batteries with a storage capacity of a few hours are preferred. Eventually, large energy storage is required, to cover overnight and several days of cloudy weather. This is the role of PHES [pumped hydro energy storage – dams, in common parlance].

Hybrid storage systems that combine batteries and PHES are superior to either technology alone. Batteries are relatively inexpensive for storage power ($/GW) but are expensive for energy storage ($/GWh). PHES is more expensive than batteries for storage power ($/GW) but much cheaper for energy storage ($/GWh). A hybrid system has both cheap energy (GWh) and cheap power (GW).

In a hybrid system, storage can charge storage. A large PHES reservoir can trickle charge batteries 24/7 for a week during a calm and cloudy period. For example, a PHES system with 350 GWh of energy storage and 2 GW of generation power can trickle charge twelve 4-hour batteries (48 GWh) every day for a week. Such a hybrid system effectively has energy storage of 370 GWh and storage power of 12 GW. A battery-only system would run out of energy after the first day, while a PHES-only system would be underpowered.

An additional advantage is that the batteries can harvest negative prices for four hours around noon with a power of 12 GW, and trickle charge a large but low-power PHES system for the next 20 hours – and do this every day for a week before the PHES system is full. In other words, the hybrid system harvests peak power prices at 12 GW and is recharged at negative prices.

The Global Pumped Hydro Energy Storage Atlas lists 820,000 sites with combined energy storage of 86 million GWh. This is equivalent to the effective storage in about 2,000 billion electric vehicles, which is far more storage than the world will ever need.

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Ex NYT Editor Bill Keller on how to repair public trust in media • Bloomberg (free link)

Bill Keller:

»

Trust in the media did not evaporate; it fractured. A YouGov survey in May found that for the most part, Americans profess some confidence in the news sources they personally consume, much as voters who regard Congress with contempt nonetheless keep reelecting their incumbent lawmakers. Democrats are more likely to trust what we have come to refer to as “mainstream media” — the major daily newspapers, the TV networks, CNN and NPR, et al. — while Republicans, with Donald Trump serving as their cheerleader, scorn those outlets as “fake news” and rely mostly on the smug right-wingers of Fox and Newsmax. Young readers are more likely than older readers to get their news from social media, and more likely to trust it.

What’s missing in this atomized world is a common pool of information. Another survey, this one by the Pew Research Center in 2019, found Americans so divided that they “not only disagree over plans and policies, but also cannot agree on the basic facts.”

The mistrust feeds — and feeds on — the extreme polarization of our politics.

Lee Rainie, a Pew veteran and director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University in North Carolina, says many Americans fear a collapse of what he calls the “civic information ecosystem” — the shared understanding and values that enable a functioning democracy. Writing in the journal Daedalus, Rainie said: “Alarmingly, 73% of Americans now believe that political partisans do not operate in a shared reality, and a similar proportion of adults believe the party partisans do not occupy a shared moral universe.”

«

It’s certainly brave of Keller to think that there’s a way back, but I do tend to feel that once the Disinformer-in-Chief passes out of the public eye, things have a chance to reset. But only a chance.
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Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode. We didn’t • The Verge

Nilay Patel:

»

I couldn’t have the CEO of Intuit on [The Verge’s podcast, Decoder] without asking about tax reform in the United States. Individual income taxes are more complicated in the US than in almost any other developed economy, and Intuit has been lobbying hard since the late 1990s to keep it that way to protect TurboTax, spending nearly $3.8m in lobbying in 2023 alone. There’s been extensive reporting about it. This lobbying has had mixed results: truly free online direct filing with the IRS began as a pilot program this year and is expanding to be available for more than half the US population in 2025.

It’s also not just lobbying: in 2022, a coalition of attorneys general from all 50 states got Intuit to agree to a $141m settlement that required Intuit to refund low-income Americans who were eligible for free filing but were redirected to paid products. In 2023, the FTC found that TurboTax’s “free” marketing was willfully deceptive, and after the agency won an appeal early this year, Intuit was ordered to stop doing it.

I asked about that, and Sasan disagreed with me, and we went back and forth for a few minutes on it. It’s Decoder; we have exchanges like this all the time, and I didn’t think anything of it.

But then I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications officer at Intuit, who called the line of questioning and my tone “inappropriate,” “egregious,” and “disappointing” and demanded that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean, literally — he wrote a long email that ended with “at the very least the end portion of your interview should be deleted.”

We don’t do that here at The Verge.

«

Absolute idiocy on the part of Intuit, which obviously laid itself open to being roasted. Job done!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Life for gigging musicians hasn’t got particularly easier of late. They’re real members of the “precariat”, a new book suggests. (But the Arctic Monkeys aren’t.) CC-licensed photo by Bleeding Mole 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 8 links for you. Power chord. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Meta suspends accounts tracking Trump, Bezos jets, echoing Musk’s X • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

»

The tech giant Meta this week suspended Instagram and Threads accounts tracking the flights of private jets owned by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, former president Donald Trump and other public figures, echoing a move by Elon Musk’s X to crack down on such accounts that drew criticism over social networks’ suppression of public data.

The accounts drew from publicly broadcast flight data to post the takeoff and landing airports of planes used by Zuckerberg, Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) alongside estimates of the carbon dioxide emissions from each trip.

The posts do not specify who was on the plane, the purposes of the flight or where the passengers traveled next. (Bezos, Amazon’s founder, owns The Washington Post.)

Meta’s suspensions appear to mimic X’s move in late 2022 to delete X accounts tracking Musk and other private-jet owners. The platform implemented the policy even after Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” had pledged to keep the accounts online.

Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, which also owns Facebook, said that the accounts were disabled for “violating our privacy policy,” that they posed a “risk of physical harm of individuals,” and that the decision followed the recommendation of Meta’s independent Oversight Board.

But the board’s decision, from 2022, offered nonbinding advice only on the sharing of “private residential information,” such as home addresses, and makes no mention of flight or travel data.

It remains unclear under what guidelines an account could post information about a public figure’s travel. Journalists and researchers have frequently used flight data to cover influential newsmakers, investigate government misconduct and report on current events.

«

Very strange move. Temporary, only around the election, perhaps, out of an abundance of care? If they’re violating the privacy policy now, they’ve been doing that for a very long time without anyone taking action.
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Tech critics want a Google exec punished for deleted chats • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

»

Three advocacy groups are trying to amp up the pressure on Google for allegedly destroying company records. The American Economic Liberties Project, Check My Ads, and the Tech Oversight Project are urging the State Bar of California to investigate Kent Walker, Google’s President of Global Affairs and a member of the Bar. They claim Walker “coached” the company “to engage in widespread and illegal destruction of records relevant to multiple ongoing federal trials.”

In a letter shared exclusively with The Verge, the groups point to a 2008 memo Walker sent to employees while he served as general counsel. The so-called Walker Memo was highlighted in the Department of Justice’s recent antitrust trial, one of multiple cases where Google has been accused of obscuring potentially incriminating documents. The memo referenced “several significant legal and regulatory matters” Google faced at the time as the rationale for a new policy limiting employee chat message retention. The DOJ claimed it marked a turning point for company secrecy — as Google changed the default setting on chats from “history on” to “history off.”

In a legal filing in the ad tech case, Google dismissed the memo as an old document irrelevant to its evidence retention policies for that case. “[T]he memo was not only written 11 years before DOJ opened its investigation or any duty to preserve existed, but also instructs employees to take steps to preserve relevant Chat messages if they are subject to a litigation hold. That is the opposite of an intent to destroy evidence.” 

But Google employees “understood the goal was to remove information that might be discoverable at trial,” the advocacy groups write in their letter to the Bar. Walker also allegedly advised the company implement a “communicate with care” policy, which instructed employees to do things like gratuitously invoke attorney-client privilege on sensitive emails.

«

It’s quite the allegation, but there are plentiful examples from the latest two Google antitrust cases in the US where chats have been erased and the privilege was unnecessarily invoked.
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How to make Google’s [ad] network business a force for good • AdExchanger

Richard Kramer of Arete Research:

»

Throughout history, technology has made industries more efficient. But not ad tech. Why, for example, can we trade stocks for fractions of a% while digital ads cost 50% of spend? Ad tech’s murky supply chain is causing publishers around the world to struggle at best and fail at worst.

Meanwhile, every new revelation from the category of truth tellers we call “forensic ad tech,” including Adalytics, Human and Sincera, sparks indignation and generates fiery headlines only to fade away shortly after.

Yet a US government-mandated breakup of the “ad tech stack” would likely have unintended consequences. Most publishers principally rely on revenue from Google-placed ads. Lawyers may imagine ways to pick apart tech features, but most publishers lack the technical expertise to implement them. There’s a reason so many publishers integrate Google’s products as a default.

I’d argue the best way to unpick this Gordian Knot is to change the incentives and for Google to spin out its entire network unit as a public benefit “B Corp” with capped margins.

Why would Google and its shareholders, which have fiercely resisted any curtailment, consider this plan? There are five very good reasons.

«

He suggests: PR; not getting caught up with antitrust (unlike Microsoft), useful to the wider web, not a great business for Google and could end up sending extra money to publishers.
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Streaming subscription fees have been rising while content quality is dropping • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Subscription fees for video streaming services have been on a steady incline. But despite subscribers paying more, surveys suggest that viewers are becoming less satisfied with what’s available to watch.

At the start of 2024, the industry began declaring the end of Peak TV, a term coined by FX Networks chairman John Landgraf, refers to an era of rampant content spending that gave us shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. For streaming services, the Peak TV era meant trying to lure subscribers with original content that was often buoyed by critical acclaim and/or top-tier actors, writers, and/or directors. However, as streaming services struggle to reach or maintain profitability, 2024 saw a drop in the number of new scripted shows for the first time in at least 10 years, FX Research found.

Meanwhile, overall satisfaction with the quality of content available on streaming services seems to have declined for the past couple of years. Most surveys suggest a generally small decline in perceived quality, but that’s still perturbing considering how frequently streaming services increase subscription fees. There was a time when a streaming subscription represented an exclusive ticket to viewing some of the best new TV shows and movies. But we’ve reached a point where the most streamed TV show last year was Suits—an original from the USA Network cable channel that ended in 2019.

«

The study is by TiVo. What are we at after Peak TV, then? Doldrums TV?
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Meta tests facial recognition for spotting ‘celeb-bait’ ads scams and easier account recovery • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

Meta is expanding tests of facial recognition as an anti-scam measure to combat celebrity scam ads and more broadly, the Facebook owner announced Monday.

Monika Bickert, Meta’s VP of content policy, wrote in a blog post that some of the tests aim to bolster its existing anti-scam measures, such as the automated scans (using machine learning classifiers) run as part of its ad review system, to make it harder for fraudsters to fly under its radar and dupe Facebook and Instagram users to click on bogus ads.

“Scammers often try to use images of public figures, such as content creators or celebrities, to bait people into engaging with ads that lead to scam websites where they are asked to share personal information or send money. This scheme, commonly called ‘celeb-bait,’ violates our policies and is bad for people that use our products,” she wrote.

“Of course, celebrities are featured in many legitimate ads. But because celeb-bait ads are often designed to look real, they’re not always easy to detect.”

The tests appear to be using facial recognition as a backstop for checking ads flags as suspect by existing Meta systems when they contain the image of a public figure at risk of so-called “celeb-bait.”

«

There are plenty of examples of this stuff on X, if they need to do some training.
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Why is Apple so bad at marketing its TV shows? • Fast Company

Joe Berkowitz:

»

Ever since its launch in 2019, Apple TV+ has been carving out an identity as the new home for prestige shows from some of Hollywood’s biggest names—the kind of shows that sound natural coming out of Jimmy Kimmel’s mouth in monologue jokes at the Emmys. While the company never provides spending details, Apple is estimated to have spent at least $20bn recruiting the likes of Reese Witherspoon, M. Night Shayamalan, and Harrison Ford to help cultivate its award-worthy sheen. For all the effort Apple has expended, and for all the cultural excitement around Ted Lasso during its three-season run, the streaming service has won nearly 500 Emmys . . . while attracting just 0.2% of total TV viewing in the U.S. 

No wonder the company reportedly began reining in its spending spree recently. (Apple did not reply to a request for comment.)

“It seems like Apple TV wants to be seen as a platform that’s numbers-agnostic,” says Ashley Ray, comedian, TV writer, and host of the erstwhile podcast TV I Say. “They wanna be known for being about the creativity and the love of making TV shows, even if nobody’s watching them.”

The experience of enjoying a new Apple TV+ series can often be a lonely one. Adventurous subscribers might see an in-network ad about something like last summer’s Sunny, the timely, genre-bending Rashida Jones series about murderous AI, and give it a shot—only to find that nobody else is talking about it in their social media feeds or around the company Keurig machine. Sure, the same could be said for hundreds of other streaming series in the post-monoculture era, but most streaming companies aren’t consistently landing as much marquee talent for such a limited library. (Apple currently has 259 TV shows and films compared to Netflix’s nearly 16,000.)

How is it possible for a streaming service to have as much high-pedigree programming as Apple TV+ does and so relatively few viewers, despite an estimated 25 million paid subscribers? How can shows starring Natalie Portman, Idris Elba, and Colin Farrell launch and even get renewed without ever quite grazing the zeitgeist? How does a show set in the same Monsterverse as Godzilla vs. Kong, and starring Kurt Russell and his roguishly charming son, not become a monster-size hit? 

For many perplexed observers, the blame falls squarely on Apple’s marketing efforts, or seeming lack thereof.

«

And, as the article points out, how is a company that people think of as being great at marketing so bad at.. marketing?
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The decline of the working musician • The New Yorker

Hua Hsu reviews Franz Nicolay’s new book called “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music”:

»

Nicolay makes these gangs sound like a lot of fun, while also demystifying them. Some band people prefer hierarchy and assertive decision-makers; others aspire to a more chaotic kind of democracy. Some envy the star; others feel sorry for him. Jon Rauhouse, a musician who tours with the singer Neko Case, is glad not to be the one that interviewers want to speak with—he’s free to “go to the zoo and pet kangaroos.” Band people are often asked to interpret cryptic directives in the studio. The multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns recalls one singer who, in lieu of instructions, would tell him stories about the music—he might be told to imagine a song they were working on as “a cloud in the shape of an elephant, and it’s trying to squeeze through a keyhole to get into this room.”

Many musicians prefer the “emotional life” of the band to be familial, rather than seeing their bandmates as “a handful of co-workers.” And despite the collective dream that brings artists together, the critic and theorist Simon Frith argues, “the rock profession is based on a highly individualistic, competitive approach to music, an approach rooted in ambition and free enterprise,” which feeds perfectly into a quintessentially American zero-to-hero dream. This, Nicolay suggests, is what makes the prospect of, say, “a hypothetical union,” which might negotiate fees with a club on behalf of musicians, unimaginable.

«

Be right back, just getting the music in the form of an elephant-shaped cloud into the room via the keyhole. But musicians now are also part of the “precariat” – people on the edge of making a living.
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The vibes are off: did Elon Musk push academics off Twitter? • Cambridge Core

James Bisbee and Kevin Munger:

»

This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform mean for this academic ecosystem? Using a snowball sample of more than 15,700 academic accounts from the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, we show that academics in these fields reduced their “engagement” with the platform, measured by either the number of active accounts (i.e., those registering any behavior on a given day) or the number of tweets written (including original tweets, replies, retweets, and quote tweets).

We further tested whether this decrease in engagement differed by account type; we found that verified users were significantly more likely to reduce their production of content (i.e., writing new tweets and quoting others’ tweets) but not their engagement with the platform writ large (i.e., retweeting and replying to others’ content).

«

There’s plenty of data to back them up, but it also strengths a vague feeling you may have had that there’s less academic discourse on Twitter nowadays.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The producers of Blade Runner 2049 are suing Elon Musk over his robotaxi launch imagery. Too similar? CC-licensed photo by Rikard Auregård 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. POB, RTB. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘Operating in the Stone Age’: NHS staff’s daily struggle with outdated tech • Financial Times

Laura Hughes:

»

In the paediatric centre at one of London’s largest hospitals, doctors are confounded each day by a ward computer that is not connected to a printer.

The computer is used for managing the daily list of patients. Doctors can only access and update the list, using one shared account.

So twice a day, two doctors on the ward said one of them had to log in to this computer, update the patient list, send the list to themselves via NHS email, and then log in to another nearby computer to print it off for the team.

“I am at a top London hospital and yet at times I feel as though we are operating in the Stone Age,” said one paediatrician on the ward.

Tackling the frustrating delays caused by outdated technology is one of health secretary Wes Streeting and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s core missions, having vowed to shift the service “from an analogue to a digital NHS”.

The monumental task of moving the world’s largest publicly funded health service into the digital age is not lost on doctors working on the frontline of the NHS.

While many sectors of the economy have been “radically reshaped” by technology in recent years, a landmark report into the state of the health service in England last month concluded that the NHS stood “in the foothills of digital transformation”. 

«

There are multiple challenges to improve the NHS: outdated technology, insufficient management, insufficient data sharing. The public has been invited to offer suggestions. They are mad.
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Inside the mind of an AI girlfriend (or boyfriend) • WIRED

Will Knight:

»

Last month, OpenAI unveiled an ambitious new language model capable of working through challenging problems with a simulated kind of step-by-step reasoning. OpenAI says the approach could be crucial for building more capable AI systems in the future.

In the meantime, perhaps a more modest version of this technology could help make AI girlfriends and boyfriends a bit more spontaneous and alluring.

That’s what Dippy, a startup that offers “uncensored” AI companions is betting. The company recently launched a feature that lets users see the reasoning behind their AI characters’ responses.

Dippy runs its own large language model, which is an open source offering fine-tuned using role-play data, which the company says makes it better at improvising when a user steers a conversation in a particular direction.

Akshat Jagga, Dippy’s CEO, says that adding an additional layer of simulated “thinking”—using what’s known as “chain-of-thought prompting”—can elicit more interesting and surprising responses, too. “A lot of people are using it,” Jagga says. “Usually, when you chat with an LLM, it sort of just gives you a knee-jerk reaction.”

Jagga adds that the new feature can reveal when one of its AI characters is being deceptive, for instance, which some users apparently enjoy as part of their role-play. “It’s interesting when you can actually read the character’s inner thoughts,” Jagga says. “We have this character that is sweet in the foreground, but manipulative in the background.”

I tried chatting with some of Dippy’s default characters, with the PG settings on because otherwise they are way too horny. The feature does add another dimension to the narrative, but the dialog still seems, to me, rather predictable, resembling something lifted from a bad romance novel or an overwrought piece of fan fiction.

«

*supremely bored voice* You don’t say. I wonder what sort of content it might have been trained on.

More concerning: what sort of people are going to use these things? What’s their relationship with humanity?
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Inside the bungled bird flu response, where profits collide with public health • Vanity Fair

Katherine Eban:

»

on March 25, the USDA lab confirmed that dairy cows in Texas and Kansas had indeed been sickened by a form of bird influenza known as H5N1. Though versions of the so-called bird flu virus have circled the globe for almost two decades, spreading to species ranging from pelicans and polar bears to sea lions and skunks, the announcement stunned the scientific and agricultural communities. “Every honest virologist will tell you: We did not see this coming,” says Kimberly Dodd, dean of Michigan State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

“We plan for every agricultural health emergency, but all of our red teaming missed this” scenario: an agricultural outbreak that potentially imperils public health and leaves cows sick but mostly still standing, says David Stiefel, a former national security policy analyst for the USDA.

With continued spread amongst cows, or to another “mixing-vessel” species like pigs, the virus “could mix and match, then you get a whole new genetic constellation,” says Jürgen Richt, regents and university distinguished professor at Kansas State University. Experts are hesitant to speculate about what could happen if the virus were to begin more widely infecting humans, for fear of spreading panic, but the toll could, in the worst case, dwarf that of COVID-19. If the virus “infects a person infected with a human flu strain, and something comes out that is reassorted and adapted to humans? I don’t even want to imagine,” Richt says. “Not good.”

The Institute for Disease Modeling, a research institute within the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has estimated that a global flu pandemic could kill close to 33 million people within six months.

At that existential moment back in March, when the virus was first detected in cows, veterinarians involved in the response had every expectation that a well-honed network of experts, led by USDA scientists, would immediately rev to life.

But it didn’t. “Nobody came,” says one veterinarian in a Western state. “When the diagnosis came in, the government stood still. They didn’t know what to do, so they did nothing.”

«

Very weary watching brief.
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ByteDance intern fired for planting malicious code in AI models • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

After rumours swirled that TikTok owner ByteDance had lost tens of millions after an intern sabotaged its AI models, ByteDance issued a statement this weekend hoping to silence all the social media chatter in China.

In a social media post translated and reviewed by Ars, ByteDance clarified “facts” about “interns destroying large model training” and confirmed that one intern was fired in August.

According to ByteDance, the intern had held a position in the company’s commercial technology team but was fired for committing “serious disciplinary violations.” Most notably, the intern allegedly “maliciously interfered with the model training tasks” for a ByteDance research project, ByteDance said.

None of the intern’s sabotage impacted ByteDance’s commercial projects or online businesses, ByteDance said, and none of ByteDance’s large models were affected.

Online rumors suggested that more than 8,000 graphical processing units were involved in the sabotage and that ByteDance lost “tens of millions of dollars” due to the intern’s interference, but these claims were “seriously exaggerated,” ByteDance said.

The tech company also accused the intern of adding misleading information to his social media profile, seemingly posturing that his work was connected to ByteDance’s AI Lab rather than its commercial technology team. In the statement, ByteDance confirmed that the intern’s university was notified of what happened, as were industry associations, presumably to prevent the intern from misleading others.

«

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Tim Cook on Apple Intelligence, Vision Pro and more bets the company believes will pay off • WSJ

Ben Cohen:

»

Maybe the most surprising aspect of Vision Pro is how it makes you feel. You might not believe that strapping yourself into a piece of technology could be emotionally overwhelming. But when you experience an ultra-high-resolution spatial photo of your daughter at age 3, or watch an immersive video of a grandparent who’s since died, it’s no longer a headset. It’s a time machine. You put on this device from the future and find yourself reliving the past. You come back to the present and have tears in your eyes. 

“That really is why we did this product,” says Richard Howarth, vice president of industrial design. “It’s got the ability to do things that the other products can’t do.” 

There is no killer use case for the Vision Pro yet, so I asked Cook how he’s using it. At work, of course, when he wants several windows open for multitasking. But especially at home. “I’ve always viewed having to sit in a certain place in your living room as really constrained,” he says. He prefers to lie flat on the couch, project Ted Lasso and The Morning Show on the ceiling and stare into the Vision Pro. “It’s a lot more pleasant way to watch something than to sit like a statue in front of a TV,” he insists.

Jon M. Chu agrees. The director of Wicked grew up in Silicon Valley and bought a Vision Pro the first day it went on sale. From the second he put it on, he knew it would have a dramatic effect on his creative process. “Everyone here laughs at me because I’m so obsessed with it,” he says. Jobs once famously described computers as a bicycle for the mind. “I feel like Vision Pro is a rocket ship for the mind,” Chu says. “You don’t know where you’re headed, but you get to go someplace and figure it out with everybody.” 

But that rocket ship is an expensive ride. When the Vision Pro came out this year, mixed reality crashed into the reality that most consumers aren’t ready to shell out $3,500 for a cool toy. 

“Over time, everything gets better, and it too will have its course of getting better and better,” Cook says. “I think it’s just arguably a success today from an ecosystem-being-built-out point of view.” 

«

It’s not even close to having an ecosystem! It’s a flop in that regard. But perhaps the funniest part of the interview is this:

»

[I ask Cook: what is..] His wallpaper? A photo with his nephew in Grand Teton National Park. His most underrated app? Notes, where he types or dictates thoughts before he forgets them.

The best name of a group chat? He looked at me like I’d asked him to recommend the best Android phone.

“The best—name?” he said. “I don’t name them. Do you name yours? Interesting. I may take that on.”

The next time we meet, Cook proudly reports that he’s named the group chat with his college roommates: Roommates.

«

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Apple’s AirPods Pro hearing health features are as good as they sound • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

You’ll need a quiet space when taking Apple’s hearing test. Before getting started, your iPhone will do a quick analysis of ear tip fit and environmental noise to ensure you’re good to go. All of these hearing health features are calibrated for Apple’s stock silicone tips, so if you’re using aftermarket third-party tips (including foam), there’s no guarantee you’ll get the optimal experience. Once the test begins, you just tap the screen whenever you hear any of the three-beep tone sequences.

There are a few key things to know about Apple’s hearing test. For one, it’s designed so that you can’t predict or game it. The test can play any frequency at any time, so no two are the same. Apple tests your left ear first, and here’s something I wish I’d known going in: it’s completely normal to hear nothing at all for several seconds at a time. It was in those moments, when five, six, or even 10 seconds would pass without an obvious tone sequence, where I’d start feeling pretty anxious. 

My best advice is to avoid wondering if you should be hearing something at a given moment and instead just focus on the tones as they come. Some can be incredibly faint. There are visual cues that let you know the test is still moving along even during silence — the most obvious one being a large circle that animates onscreen throughout the process. (You’ll also notice a progress dial for each ear that fills as you take it.)

«

The Hearing Test is coming with iOS 18.1, which releases next week. Such fun to come as we discover how we’ve all lost hearing acuity – with graphs.
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Sky Follower Bridge – Chrome Web Store

»

Instantly find and follow the same users from your Twitter follows on Bluesky.

«

Spotted via Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day email. A Chrome extension, of course.
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Can journalism survive? The media elite on its future • NY Post

Charlotte Klein in a biiiig piece about the media’s past, present and possible future:

»

To many, the most instructive failure of 2024 was The Messenger, an all-things-to-all-people news site run by ex Condé Nast and People executives with a “chief growth officer” formerly of Gawker Media. It planned on building out a 550-person newsroom and flooding the internet with viral scoops but instead burned through most of its $50 million in funding within a year and shut down. “I’m always suspicious when someone has a huge splashy launch saying they’re going to get up to 300 million page views in six months and reach a massive national audience,” says Betsy Reed, editor of The Guardian US. “I just feel like you can’t do that out of the gate. You need to have a much clearer grasp of who you’re reaching and why you’re going to be relevant.” What actually has succeeded this year are operations — many of them run through Substack — that have low overhead and a focused appeal. Some longtime media executives find this new world befuddling. “I’m surprised that people are okay with the subscription model, where they don’t have that many listeners or viewers but are making money, so they’re just good with it,” says one of them. “The Substack writers, people with Patreon podcasts. My generation was wired completely differently. We wanted to be read or listened to by as many people as possible. And now this new generation is like, I’m totally cool with having 9,000 die-hard fans.”

The Congress-focused media company Punchbowl News, which was founded by Politico veterans Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer in 2021, is well read inside the Beltway. “It’s so small and it’s so particular, and yet it seems like it has impact,” says Carolyn Ryan of the Times. “I don’t even know how many reporters they have — it feels like just a handful — but they really seem to have a sense of mission and what value they bring.” That value is priced at $350 a year — a lot for a general reader, but, as with Politico Pro, such subscriptions are often treated as a business expense by anyone with a need to be in the know.

«

Plenty more to read. But certainly right now the focus feels like it’s around niche subscriptions.
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EVs are just going to win • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

»

EVs are still winning. But they haven’t won yet; only 4% of the global passenger car fleet, 23% of the bus fleet, and less than 1% of delivery trucks are electrified.

But at this point I think the writing is on the wall. The phenomenon of a superior technology displacing an older, inferior technology is not uncommon, and it generally looks like the EV transition is looking now. When a new technology passes a 5% adoption rate, it almost never turns out to be inferior to what came before; with EVs, that threshold has now been reached in dozens of countries.

In fact, we don’t have to rely on trend-based forecasting to understand why EVs are just going to win. There are a number of fundamental factors that make EVs simply better than combustion vehicles. The longer time goes on, the more these inherent advantages will make themselves felt in the market.

The first of these is price. Currently, EVs often require government subsidies in order to be price-competitive with combustion cars. But batteries are getting cheaper and cheaper as we get better and better at building them. The cheaper batteries get, the smaller the subsidies required to get people to switch to EVs. Goldman Sachs reports that this crucial tipping point will be reached in about two years

…Once batteries cross that tipping point, the EV revolution will take on its own momentum. It will simply be cheaper to buy an EV than a combustion car. People will gravitate toward the cheaper option, especially if it comes with other advantages. And in this case it does.

EVs’ second advantage is convenience. Most EV owners will almost never have to fill their cars up at a station. This is because they will charge their cars at night, in their own home garages or driveway.

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Not so sure about the latter. Lots of people live in flats in cities in the US same as Europe.
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‘Blade Runner 2049’ producers sue Elon Musk over ‘Robotaxi’ imagery • The New York Times

Brooks Barnes:

»

The Hollywood company behind “Blade Runner 2049” sued Elon Musk for copyright infringement on Monday, accusing him of illegally using imagery from that film to promote Tesla’s new “robotaxi.”

Alcon Entertainment, a movie and television company backed by the FedEx founder Frederick W. Smith, filed the lawsuit in US District Court in Los Angeles. The complaint also names Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery as defendants, saying that Alcon had denied a request by Mr. Musk and the companies to use imagery from “Blade Runner 2049” as part of an Oct. 10 marketing event on the Warner lot.

“He did it anyway,” the suit says.

Mr. Musk’s live-streamed presentation — a grand unveiling of a car that Tesla says will be able to drive itself — did not use exact “Blade Runner 2049” images, according to the complaint. Rather, the event showcased “AI-created images mirroring scenes from ‘Blade Runner 2049,’ including one featuring a Ryan Gosling look-alike,” Alcon said.

The lawsuit called the use of artificial intelligence tools to create near-identical images “a bad-faith and intentionally malicious gambit” to make the event “more attractive to a global audience and to misappropriate the ‘Blade Runner 2049’ brand to help sell Teslas.”

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So he illegally used imagery from the film except it wasn’t imagery from the film? The comparison made in the story is with OpenAI using a soundalike to Scarlett Johansson after she refused permission to use her voice. I suppose the case will depend on precisely how closely the imagery matches: for a voice, there aren’t many dimensions that can vary, but with video?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you want to live longer, have you considered taking up the high jump? CC-licensed photo by filip bossuyt on Flickr.

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Large French Alpine ski resort to close in face of shrinking snow season • The Guardian

Kim Willsher:

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A large French Alpine ski resort has announced it is to close, citing a lack of funds to become a year-round destination, as low- and medium-altitude mountain areas around Europe struggle with a truncated season due to global heating and declining snowfalls.

Local councillors voted not to reopen Alpe du Grand Serre in the Isère this winter, saying they could no longer pay for the mountain lifts or pay to complete a programme to diversify as an all-year tourist destination.

The move will wipe out 200 jobs and hit businesses in the nearby village of La Morte, whose economy and population of 150 people depend on winter sports.

A local sports shop owner, Lauranne Vincent, told France 3 television: “We are devastated and shocked. It’s a brutal decision coming two months before we were due to open. We were hoping the opposite would happen. We said all lights were green to go.”

Frédérique Laurence, the owner of a grocery shop in La Morte, added: “We’ve been left completely in the lurch. We still have loans to pay as we’ve only been here four years. Who will pay them? Our lives have been ruined. That’s what is going to happen to us.”

A lack of snow in the past two years has meant slopes opening later and being forced to close during the season, keeping skiers away. The loss-making Alpe du Grand Serre has also suffered from ageing infrastructure and a lack of investment over the past 40 years.

The local authority has spent nearly €3m since 2021 on a project that would keep the resort open all year round, attracting visitors with hiking and bike paths, but said it did not have the money to continue with it for the final two years before completion.

…Alpe du Grand Serre, a collection of six villages at an altitude of 1,368 metres, a 45-minute drive from Grenoble, is the largest ski station in the northern Alps to be forced to close. It opened as a winter sports resort 85 years ago, is the second-oldest in the region and has 55km (35 miles) of slopes, three chairlifts and 10 drag lifts.

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Kurt Vonnegut’s lost board game finally published • Polygon

Charlie Hall:

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Fans of literature most likely know Kurt Vonnegut for the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The staunchly anti-war book first resonated with readers during the Vietnam War era, later becoming a staple in high school curricula the world over. When Vonnegut died in 2007 at the age of 84, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest American novelists of all time. But would you believe that he was also an accomplished game designer?

In 1956, following the lukewarm reception of his first novel, Player Piano, Vonnegut was one of the 16 million other World War II veterans struggling to put food on the table. His moneymaking solution at the time was a board game called GHQ, which leveraged his understanding of modern combined arms warfare and distilled it into a simple game played on an eight-by-eight grid. Vonnegut pitched the game relentlessly to publishers all year long according to game designer and NYU faculty member Geoff Engelstein, who recently found those letters sitting in the archives at Indiana University. But the real treasure was an original set of typewritten rules, complete with Vonnegut’s own notes in the margins.

With the permission of the Vonnegut estate, Engelstein tells Polygon that he cleaned the original rules up just a little bit, buffed out the dents in GHQ’s endgame, and spun up some decent art and graphic design. Now you can purchase the final product, titled Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game, at your local Barnes & Noble — nearly 70 years after it was created.

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Not sure it’s going to topple Monopoly, but certainly one for the fans.
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Don Norman: ‘Apple has fallen prey to the most disastrous part of design, which thinks it’s about making something beautiful and elegant’ • EL PAÍS English

Tom C. Avendaño:

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“Apple computer used to be famous for the fact that you wouldn’t even need a manual. You could just pick up the telephone or plug in the computer and in seconds, you could use it and learn. It was self-explanatory,” says [Don] Norman, with the kind of fluid speech that can only come from decades of university teaching. “But unfortunately, the designers who care only about aesthetics and beauty have taken over. And I also blame the journalists who have said that the iPhone screen should be as big as possible, with no boundary [and that the center button that pre-2017 models featured should disappear]. Because when the telephone rings, I can no longer answer the phone.”

In case there was any doubt as to whether the matter was settled, Norman continues: “What happened was that Apple fell prey to the disastrous part of design, which is that design is about making something beautiful and elegant. And I say, nonsense, that’s not what my kind of design is about. My kind of design is — sure, I want it to be attractive and I want it to be nice, but more important than anything else is that I know I can use it freely and that it’s easy to learn and that it doesn’t keep changing. Apple believes that words are ugly, they try not to use them, and you have to memorize all these gestures, up and down, left and right, one finger, two fingers, three fingers, one tap, two taps, a long tap, starting from the top of screen, the middle of the screen. Who can remember that?”

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Norman is, what shall we say, uncompromising. But he also has a habit of being right.
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Cheap AI “video scraping” can now extract data from any screen recording • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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Recently, AI researcher Simon Willison wanted to add up his charges from using a cloud service, but the payment values and dates he needed were scattered among a dozen separate emails. Inputting them manually would have been tedious, so he turned to a technique he calls “video scraping,” which involves feeding a screen recording video into an AI model, similar to ChatGPT, for data extraction purposes.

What he discovered seems simple on its surface, but the quality of the result has deeper implications for the future of AI assistants, which may soon be able to see and interact with what we’re doing on our computer screens.

“The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails,” Willison wrote in a detailed post on his blog. He recorded a 35-second video scrolling through the relevant emails, then fed that video into Google’s AI Studio tool, which allows people to experiment with several versions of Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash AI models.

Willison then asked Gemini to pull the price data from the video and arrange it into a special data format called JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) that included dates and dollar amounts. The AI model successfully extracted the data, which Willison then formatted as CSV (comma-separated values) table for spreadsheet use. After double-checking for errors as part of his experiment, the accuracy of the results—and what the video analysis cost to run—surprised him.

“The cost [of running the video model] is so low that I had to re-run my calculations three times to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake,” he wrote. Willison says the entire video analysis process ostensibly cost less than one-tenth of a cent, using just 11,018 tokens on the Gemini 1.5 Flash 002 model. In the end, he actually paid nothing because Google AI Studio is currently free for some types of use.

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Algorithms policed welfare systems for years. Now they’re under fire for bias • WIRED

Morgan Meaker:

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The algorithm, used since the 2010s, violates both European privacy rules and French anti-discrimination laws, argue the 15 groups involved in the case, including digital rights group La Quadrature du Net, Amnesty International, and Collectif Changer de Cap, a French group that campaigns against inequality.

“This is the first time that a public algorithm has been the subject of a legal challenge in France,” says Valérie Pras of Collectif Changer de Cap, adding she wants these types of algorithms to be banned. “Other social organizations in France use scoring algorithms to target the poor. If we succeed in getting [this] algorithm banned, the same will apply to the others.”

The French welfare agency, the CNAF, analyzes the personal data of more than 30 million people—those claiming government support as well as the people they live with and their family members, according to the litigation, filed to France’s top administrative court on October 15.

Using their personal information, the algorithm gives each person a score between 0 and 1, based on how likely it estimates they are to be receiving payments they are not entitled to—either as fraud or by mistake.

France is one of many countries using algorithms to search for error or fraud in its welfare system. Last year, WIRED’s three-part investigation with Lighthouse Reports into fraud-detection algorithms in European welfare systems focused on their use in the Netherlands, Denmark and Serbia.

People with higher risk scores can then be subject to what welfare recipients across the bloc have described as stressful and intrusive investigations, which can also involve their welfare payments being suspended.

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Employees describe an environment of paranoia and fear inside Automattic over WordPress chaos • 404 Media

Samantha Cole:

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This is the latest in what has been a tense few months at Automattic.

“Regarding escalations, to me, the most upsetting thing has been the way he’s treating current and former employees and WP community members,” one former employee who recently left the company after several years told me. “He clearly has no clue what people care about or how the community has contributed to the success of WordPress. It very clearly shows how out of touch he is with everyday reality. One, sharing pictures of him being on safari while all this shit is going down, as if people would think that was cool. Only rich tech bros would think that.” (Mullenweg posted photos from a trip on his personal blog and social media posts last week.) 

In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site.

Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him.

If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

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This is really creepy: diverting work emails, even if it’s in theory legal, implies a paranoia on Mullenweg’s part that is quite disturbing.
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AlphaFold reveals how sperm and egg hook up in intimate detail • Nature

Heidi Ledford:

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An artificial-intelligence tool honoured by one of this year’s Nobel prizes has revealed intimate details of the molecular meet-cute between sperm and eggs .

The AlphaFold program, which predicts protein structures , identified a trio of proteins that team up to work as matchmakers between the gametes. Without them, sexual reproduction might hit a dead end in a wide range of animals, from fish to mammals.

The finding, published on 17 October in Cell, contradicts a previous notion that just two proteins — one on the egg and one on the sperm — are sufficient to ensure fertilization, says Enrica Bianchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, who was not involved in the study. “It’s not the old concept of having a key and a lock to open the door any more,” she says. “It’s more complicated.”

Despite its crucial role in reproduction, the process by which the fusion of egg and sperm occurs in vertebrates is a molecular mystery that has proved difficult to crack. The union of the two cells involves proteins that reside in greasy membranes, making them hard to study using standard biochemical methods. The interactions between these proteins are often weak and fleeting, and it is difficult to harvest enough viable eggs and sperm from some of researchers’ favoured laboratory animals, including mice, for extensive experiments.

…AlphaFold predicted that three sperm proteins come together to form a complex. Two of these proteins were already known to be important for fertility. Working in the laboratory, Pauli and her colleagues confirmed that the third is also crucial for fertility in both zebrafish and mice, and that the three proteins interact with one another in zebrafish and human sperm.

The team also found that, in zebrafish, the trio creates a binding site for an egg protein called Bouncer, providing a mechanism by which the two cells can recognize one another. “It’s a way to say, ‘Sperm, you found an egg’ and ‘Egg, you found a sperm’,” says Andreas Blaha, a biochemist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology and a co-author of the paper.

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How Digg helped invent the social internet • The Verge

David Pierce talks to Kevin Rose, the creator and one-time owner of Digg, the former front page of the internet (before it got many, many more front pages):

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David Pierce: As I think about the universal homepage thing, part of me thinks we need that more than ever now. Instead of having to go to 50 websites and 10 different forums and read 20 newsletters, how can I just get a quick sense of what people care about and what they’re saying… and then move on to my life? 

Kevin Rose: I think you’re absolutely right. If you can find out who owns Digg, I would love to buy it back from them and turn it back into that old-school homepage. So, I don’t know if you have any connections…

DP: I’ll look into it. But let’s just quickly reboot Digg right here, for 2024. What would you do?

KR: I would heavily lean into AI on this front — AI for vetting and AI for a bunch of different things. If someone posts a comment, you could instantly run it against AI and say, “Is this comment additive to the article of substance, or is it attacking someone?” There could be some really interesting positive use cases for AI here to help with keeping things civil. I would lean pretty heavily on AI for both summaries for content moderation.

I would not want to embrace an ad model. I’d much rather have it be almost more Wikipedia-style, where it’s community-supported in some way. It wouldn’t be about building the next billion-dollar, publicly traded company, but more like a utility for good. I would want to really lean in heavily on this idea of providing a safe place for people. It’s unfortunate to me that I’ve had to step away from several different social networks out there because they just can be so toxic at times. And so I would want to spend a great deal of time thinking through those issues. 

It would be important to go out and probably sit down with 50 or 100 of the largest moderators on Reddit and ask them what features and functionality they’re missing that they would like to see and have it really be community-driven features and functionality on the site versus top-down telling you what you should have. I don’t know. I think that’d be a good place to start.

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As it happens, Digg has been reborn, at digg.one. Unclear who’s behind it.
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Fuel duty expected to rise by up to 7p a litre after the budget • The Guardian

Gwyn Topham and Helena Horton:

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Fuel duty is levied at 52.95p a litre and pulls in about £25bn a year to the exchequer. Campaigns against the duty by motoring groups and publications including the Sun have coincided with previous governments abolishing planned hikes since 2010.

According to a Whitehall source quoted by the Mail, officials have told Reeves “it’s now or never on fuel duty … They are advising her that motorists can afford it and that if she doesn’t act to end the freeze now she will find it much harder to do so later in the parliament”.

Forecasts by the government’s spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, assume a reversal of the 5p cut and with much discussion of the £22bn “black hole” and now a £40bn “spending gap”, campaigners believe Reeves should go further.

The Campaign for Better Transport said reversing the cut and reinstating an inflationary increase would raise an additional £4.2bn in duty. Director Silviya Barrett said: “At the moment, it’s often cheaper to drive or even fly within the UK than to take the train and that shouldn’t be the case. We’re calling on the chancellor to use the budget to level the playing field for public transport.”

Domestic transport is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, accounting for 29.1% in 2023. Almost all domestic transport emissions are from carbon dioxide, the main source of which is petrol and diesel road vehicles.

According to a Carbon Brief analysis, duty freezes may have increased UK total greenhouse gas emissions by 7% since 2010, as drivers may otherwise have switched forms of transport or chosen more fuel-efficient cars.

…new research from the Social Market Foundationshows that the richest fifth of households have benefited twice as much as the poorest from lower fuel duty as they drive and own more vehicles, including less fuel efficient SUVs.

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Differences in life expectancy between Olympic high jumpers, discus throwers, marathon and 100 metre runners • BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation

Jeffrey and David Lee-Heidenreich and Jonathan Myers:

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For each Olympics between 1928 and 1948 we identified the top (up to 20) Olympic male and female finishers in the high jump (HJ), discus throw, marathon, and 100-m run. We determined date of death using internet searches and calculated age-specific expected survival using published US life tables. We adjusted life expectancy for country of origin based on Global Burden of Disease data.

Results
We identified a death date for 336 of 429 (78%) Olympic athletes including 229 males (55 marathon, 56 100-m 58 high jump, 60 discus), and 107 females (54 100-m, 25 high jump, 28 discus). Discus throwers were heaviest and marathon runners the lightest and oldest athletes (p < 0.01). Observed-expected survival was highest for high jumpers (7.1 years for women, 3.7 years for men) and marathon runners (4.7 years for men) and lowest for sprinters (−1.6 years for women and −0.9 years for men). In multivariate analysis controlling for age and gender, type of sport remained significantly associated with mortality with greatest survival for high jumpers and marathon runners compared to discus throwers and sprinters (p = 0.005). Controlling for weight reduced the survival benefit of high jumpers over discus throwers, but had little effect on the survival benefit of marathon runners vs. sprinters.

Conclusion
Significant differences in long term survival exist for different types of track and field Olympic athletes that were explained in part by weight.

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But only in part. Anyway, a neat thing to tell people at parties: marathon runners and high jumpers live longer. (And it’s not just that it feels longer.)
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The reason why video conference calls are so exhausting comes down to the sound – and not being there. CC-licensed photo by Nick Doty on Flickr.

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

Not remotely cool: the science of “Zoom fatigue” • Big Think

Richard Cytowic:

When face-to-face we process a slew of signals without having to consciously think about them: facial expression, gesture, posture, vocal tone and rhythm, and the distance between speakers. We read body language and make emotional judgments about whether others are credible or not. This is easy to do in person, whereas video chats force us to work to glean the same cues. This consumes a lot of energy. Recall that compared to electronic devices, the human brain operates at ridiculously slow speeds of about 120 bits (approximately 15 bytes) per second. Listening to one person takes about 60 bits per second of brainpower, or half our available bandwidth. Trying to follow two people speaking at once is fairly impossible for the same reason multitaskers fare poorly: attempting to handle two or more simultaneous tasks quickly maxes out our fixed operating bandwidth.

As attention flags, we fatigue. Yet it is the audio gaps, not the video, that makes Zoom sessions draining. All languages have clear rules for conversation that assure no overlap but no long silences. Online meetings disrupt that convention because the separate sound and video streams are chopped into tiny digital packets and sent via different pathways to the recipient’s end where they are electronically reassembled. When some packets arrive late the software must decide whether to wait to reassemble them — causing a delay — or stitch together whatever packets are available, giving rise to stuttering audio.

Video conferencing platforms have opted to deliver audio that arrives quickly but is low in quality. Platforms aim for a lag time of less than 150 milliseconds. Yet that is long enough to violate the no-overlap/no-gap convention to which speakers are accustomed. A round-trip signal can take up to 300 milliseconds before one gets a reply, a pause that makes speakers seem less convincing and trustworthy. Repeatedly having to sort out talking over one another and who goes first is also tiresome and draining to everyone on the call.

Cytowic has a new book – Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload – which has just come out in the US. Now you can refer to it for why you don’t want to do a Zoom meeting.

New crypto-state emerges in the Himalayas: Bhutan has twice as many bitcoins as El Salvador • EL PAÍS English

Álvaro Sánchez:

A tiny nation squeezed between China and India deep within the Himalayas, Bhutan has become an unlikely cryptocurrency hub. The kingdom might be more accustomed to making the travel pages for its bucolic landscapes and Buddhist monasteries, but it has now leapt to the forefront of the cryptosphere after the firm Arkham Intelligence revealed that the state-owned conglomerate Druk Holdings owns 13,011 bitcoins, slightly more than double the amount declared by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele (5,877). At current prices, this stash is valued at about $780m, which for a population of about 780,000 inhabitants represents $1,000 in bitcoins per citizen.

Arkham explains that this small fortune comes from bitcoin mining operations carried out by Bhutan’s investment arm, the aforementioned Druk Holdings, a name that means “thunder dragon.” This dragon appears on the country’s flag, holding jewels as a symbol of wealth. “We were able to corroborate the chronology of the mining activity with evolving satellite images of the facilities’ construction,” Arkham notes. The largest of these infrastructures is located on the grounds of the failed Education City, with which the authorities sought to tackle emigration and reduce unemployment, but which has ended up housing bitcoin factories that are in operation 24/7 instead of classrooms and books.

“Unlike most governments, Bhutan’s bitcoins come not from law enforcement seizure of assets, but from bitcoin mining operations, which have increased dramatically since early 2023,” states Arkham. Bhutan now ranks fourth among those countries with the most bitcoins, trailing only the US, China and the UK.

Didn’t realise the UK was such a big hub for bitcoins. Is that including all the ones in the Welsh landfill? Also, nobody seems to have written about what effect, if any, the adoption of bitcoin has had on El Salvador’s economy. Or have I just missed it?

The AI boom has an expiration date • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

All of this [AI] infrastructure will be extraordinarily expensive, requiring perhaps trillions of dollars of investment in the next few years. Over the summer, The Information reported that Anthropic expects to lose nearly $3bn this year.

And last month, the same outlet reported that OpenAI projects that its losses could nearly triple to $14bn in 2026 and that it will lose money until 2029, when, it claims, revenue will reach $100bn (and by which time the miraculous AGI may have arrived).

Microsoft and Google are spending more than $10bn every few months on data centers and AI infrastructure. Exactly how the technology warrants such spending—which is on the scale of, and may soon dwarf, that of the Apollo missions and the interstate-highway system—is entirely unclear, and investors are taking notice.

When Microsoft reported its most recent earnings, its cloud computing business, which includes many of its AI offerings, had grown by 29%—but the company’s stock had still tanked because it hadn’t met expectations. Google actually topped its overall ad-revenue expectations in its latest earnings, but its shares also fell afterward because the growth wasn’t enough to match the company’s absurd spending on AI.

Even Nvidia, which has used its advanced AI hardware to become the second-largest company in the world, experienced a stock dip in August despite reporting 122% revenue growth: Such eye-catching numbers may just not have been high enough for investors who have been promised nothing short of AGI [artificial general intelligence].

Absent a solid, self-sustaining business model, all that the generative-AI industry has to run on is faith.

Cleaning up “Scientific Reports”: can it be done? • Science

Derek Lowe:

I have had some problems with the journal Scientific Reports over the years, and I’m not alone. At the same time, I’ve read some interesting and useful papers published there as well. But worthless/faked manuscripts showing up in a journal tend to contaminate everything else that shows up there, which is a problem that you’d hope that scientific publishers are concerned about. To put things in the style of my late father, his one of his analogies was that if he had a gallon of urine and put a shot glass of wine into it, he still had a gallon of urine. On the other hand, if he had a gallon of wine and put a shot glass of urine into that, he now had a second gallon of urine. That’s the problem.

This open letter, signed by many well-known literature fraud experts, is (to me) more than enough evidence that Scientific Reports has some serious problems with the papers it’s letting through, and that the publishers (Springer Nature) are not doing enough to address them. It shows numerous examples of papers with odd and questionable references in them and with phrases that are redolent of (unstated) chatbot use, those apparently in attempts to bypass automated plagiarism-detection software. The authors of the letter note that even when the editors have taken action, that can be just to republish the same paper with slightly altered phrases…

…As the letter goes on to note, deploying more AI and automated systems is not going to be enough to fix this problem. Actual humans are going to have to hit some buttons here, and some of those buttons need to be labeled “delete”. The journal needs to show what editors handle each paper (which is currently invisible), because it’s likely that a small number of them are responsible for an outsize fraction of the problem.

Springer Nature doesn’t come out of this looking good. What if it likes the money it gets from subscriptions more than it worries about the reputational damage?

Meta fires staff for abusing $25 meal credits • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy and Stephen Morris:

Meta has fired about two dozen staff in Los Angeles for using their $25 meal credits to buy household items including acne pads, wine glasses and laundry detergent.

The terminations took place last week, just days before the $1.5tn social media company separately began restructuring certain teams across WhatsApp, Instagram and Reality Labs, its augmented and virtual reality arm, on Tuesday.

The revamp has included cutting some staff and relocating others, several people familiar with the decisions said, in a sign that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s recent efficiency drive is still under way.

Like most big tech companies, Meta offers free food to employees based out of its sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters as a perk. Staff based in smaller offices without a canteen are offered Uber Eats or Grubhub credits, for example, for food to be delivered to the office.

Staff are given daily allowances of $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch and $25 for dinner, with meal credits issued in $25 increments.

Those who were fired were deemed to have abused the food credit system over a long period of time, said one person familiar with the matter. Some had been pooling their money together, they said, while others were getting meals sent home even though the credits were intended for the office.

Those who violated the company rules only on occasion were reprimanded but not terminated, the person added.

At least one of these people was on a $400k salary. It seems incredibly petty on both sides: you might hope people wouldn’t need such credits (then again, it’s not necessarily cheap to live in LA), but how has the company really lost out?

2004 was the first year of the future • The Verge

In early 2004, the world was shaking it like a Polaroid picture, flocking to theaters to see what was going to happen with all those hobbits, and wondering if that Tom Brady guy was something special. Meanwhile, a few folks around the world were inventing the web as we know it now: A world-shaking social network was brewing in a Harvard dorm room. A Google employee was dreaming up the future of email in their spare time. The coolest cellphone of all time was just about to drop. The internet was still a niche activity, but that was about to change — and fast.

In so many ways, the digital world in which we now all live was created 20 years ago. Google went public and began to ascend to rule the web. Facebook, Gmail, Firefox, Flickr, and Digg all launched — the year Web 2.0 became the web. “Blog” and “the long tail” were on no one’s radar before 2004, and since then, they’ve been everywhere. The United States went through a contentious election, a bunch of sequels dominated the box office, and Apple launched a new product that looked very cool but was ultimately eclipsed by a better product a year later. Okay, some things never change.

Every year is a big year in tech, of course, but 2004 was an especially big one. And The Verge didn’t exist yet! So, this week, we’ll have stories on the best and most important gadgets and platforms that launched that year and pieces about the cultural events that still affect the way we live now. Basically, we’re going to blog like it’s 2004.

Neat idea, given that it can feel difficult to find news in a tech world where the new things aren’t that thrilling: give people a bit of nostalgia by rewinding to 20 years ago.

Unfortunately, they chose the wrong year for the best iPod, which was the 2005 iPod nano. Tolerable miss, though.

Android 15’s security and privacy features are the update’s highlight • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

Android 15 started rolling out to Pixel devices Tuesday and will arrive, through various third-party efforts, on other Android devices at some point. There is always a bunch of little changes to discover in an Android release, whether by reading, poking around, or letting your phone show you 25 new things after it restarts.

In Android 15, some of the most notable involve making your device less appealing to snoops and thieves and more secure against the kids to whom you hand your phone to keep them quiet at dinner. There are also smart fixes for screen sharing, OTP codes, and cellular hacking prevention, but details about them are spread across Google’s own docs and blogs and various news site’s reports.

Here’s what is notable and new in how Android 15 handles privacy and security.

Happy Android 15 for all who celebrate, but I just wanted to observe: Android has been on a long journey towards more privacy and security, while Apple’s iOS has been forced to open up more and more (mostly by the EU, but the effects go wider), with increased customisation that used to be the province of Android. This mirrors the way in which their notifications and so on have been converging for absolutely years.

Weight-loss drugs cut drug and alcohol abuse, according to new study • WSJ

Dominic Chopping:

Drugs such as Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster Ozempic can cut drug and alcohol abuse by up to 50% according to a new study, adding to mounting evidence that the drugs yield health benefits beyond diabetes and weight loss.

In a study published Thursday in scientific journal Addiction, around 500,000 people with a history of opioid use disorder were analyzed, of which just more than 8,000 were taking either GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic or the similar GIP class of drugs that Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro belongs to.

GLP-1 drugs work by mimicking a gut hormone to control blood sugar and suppress appetite while GIP medications take a dual-target approach by mimicking both the GLP-1 hormone and a second gut hormone that is believed to enhance the drug’s effectiveness.

The study found that those taking the drugs had a 40% lower rate of opioid overdose compared with those who didn’t.

Similarly, an analysis of more than 5,600 people with a history of alcohol use disorder and who took the drugs showed they had a 50% lower rate of intoxication compared with those who didn’t take them.

“Our study… reveals the possibilities of a novel therapeutic pathway in substance use treatment,” the study’s lead researcher Fares Qeadan and co-authors of the research report Ashlie McCunn and Benjamin Tingey said.

The researchers, from Loyola University Chicago, said the study opens avenues for more comprehensive and effective treatment strategies for opioid and alcohol use disorders.

It’s an interesting finding, but it’s hard not to have a sneaking suspicion that the people who can stick to an Ozempic regime are just less likely to overdose or get intoxicated, and that the drug isn’t necessarily the primary cause. (The paper does admit, near the end, the “the data limits the ability to assume causality”.)

Spanish mother and daughter train bacteria to restore church frescoes • Reuters

Horaci Garcia and Eva Manez:

As Spanish microbiologist Pilar Bosch was casting around for a subject to investigate for her PhD in 2008, she stumbled across a paper suggesting that bacteria, her field, could be used in art restoration, her mother’s own area of expertise.

At that same moment, her mother – Pilar Roig – was struggling to restore 18th-century paintings by Antonio Palomino in one of the oldest churches in Spain’s third city, Valencia.

She was finding it particularly difficult to remove glue that had been used to pull the frescoes from the walls of Santos Juanes church during restoration work in the 1960s.

“My mother had a very difficult problem to solve and I found a paper about bacteria used to clean frescoes in Italy,” Bosch, 42, said.

She did her PhD on that project. And more than a decade later, daughter and mother have joined forces on a €4m ($4.46m) project, funded by local foundations, to use some of the techniques to restore the artworks in Valencia.

The microbiologist trains bacteria by feeding them samples of the glue which was made from animal collagen. The bacteria then naturally produce enzymes to degrade the glue.

The family team then mixes the bacteria with a natural algae-based gel and spread it on the paintings – which were taken from the walls in the 1960s, then nailed back on, still covered in glue.

After three hours, the gel is removed, revealing glue-free paintings.

“In the past, we used to work in a horrible manual way, with warm water and sponges that took hours and damaged the painting,” said Roig, now 75, whose father and grandfather along with other relatives also worked in art conservation.

Petition to get them to do this for wallpaper glue.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: No individual links for this edition because Pinboard’s API was down, so this was done by hand 😭

Racism has a different face these days – it comes in the form of fake science journals funded by tech bosses. CC-licensed photo by Paul M Walsh 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Revealed: International ‘race science’ network secretly funded by US tech boss • The Guardian

David Pegg, Tom Burgis, Hannah Devlin and Jason Wilson:

»

An international network of “race science” activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire US tech entrepreneur.

Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organisation, formed two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine and research papers to seed “dangerous ideology” about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups.

The anti-racism campaign Hope Not Hate began investigating after encountering the group’s English organiser, a former religious studies teacher, at a far-right conference. Undercover footage was shared with the Guardian, which conducted further research alongside Hope Not Hate and reporting partners in Germany.

HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal. After being approached by the Guardian, Conru pulled his support, saying the group appeared to have deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”.

While it remains a fringe outfit, HDF is part of a movement to rehabilitate so-called race science as a topic of open debate. Labelled scientific racism by mainstream academics, it seeks to prove biological differences between races such as higher average IQ or a tendency to commit crime. Its supporters claim inequality between groups is largely explained by genetics rather than external factors like discrimination.

Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a “dangerous ideology” with political aims and real-world consequences.

“Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she said. It was also deployed to “argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations”.

«

Adam Rutherford, who’s a respected (and respectable) scientist, had a Twitter thread about how this group tried to reel him in a while ago. He didn’t bite. There’s also a Channel 4 documentary coming out on Monday.
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About that brawl between the WordPress co-founder and WP Engine… • Computerworld

Steven Vaughan-Nichols:

»

the more you look into this conflict, the clearer it becomes that this is no battle between a spunky old-school, open-source leader against a big bad commercial company and more a conflict between a capitalist who wants a bigger share of the WordPress pie and a company that had been doing quite well from the status quo.

If you spend a lot of time following open-source businesses like me, this might sound all too familiar. In the last few years, one successful open-source company after another, such as Hashicorp, Redis, and CockRoachDB, abandoned open source for “fauxpen source” licenses to try to make more money.  All these were already multi-hundred-million dollar businesses, but they wanted more. Much more. 

Greed is a powerful thing.

That appears to be the case here, too. WordPress can’t try the relicensing move. It’s licensed under the General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), This license is both irrevocable and requires any derived work to be licensed under the same license. What Mullenweg can and is doing, though, is trying to shake down WP Engine for more money.

As my fellow journalist Matthew Ingram pointed out in an excellent essay on the conflict, “Matt is not just the plucky founder of a nonprofit open-source project, he’s a wealthy CEO of a for-profit corporation that is attacking a competitor, and using his status as the founder of the nonprofit to extract money from that competitor.”

From where I sit, this is not a battle over open source. It’s a fight between someone worth hundreds of millions and a company worth billions. When you’re trying to figure out what’s going on in any conflict, whether it’s a family fight, a divorce, or a business fight, one of the best rules of thumb is to follow the money. What it’s telling me here is it’s about the cash. 

Unfortunately, this battle can potentially affect me and everyone who uses WordPress and WP Express in particular. I didn’t need this. None of us do.  

«

This seems the best summation I’ve seen of this mad situation.
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How I fell back in love with iPhone photography • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

There’s a Japanese word, komorebi, that describes beams of light and dappled shadows that result when the sun shines through trees. When I take my dog on walks around my leafy neighborhood in Washington, D.C., komorebi is what most often catches my eye, especially in this autumnal moment when dense, green summer foliage is starting to thin and turn golden. As the sun sets and the shadows grow long on the edge of a precipitous valley near my apartment, the foliage creates fluttering patterns of warm and cool colors.

I try to photograph these apparitions with my iPhone camera, but I’m always disappointed in the results: the device’s automated image processing treats contrast as a problem to be solved, aggressively darkening the highlights and lightening up the shadows to achieve a bland flatness. Little of the lambent atmosphere I see in real life survives in the image.

Downloading a new camera app recently changed things for me. Halide, which launched in 2017, is an elegant program that can be used in place of your phone’s default camera. It mimics the controls of a digital S.L.R., allowing, for instance, the user to manually adjust the focal length. Halide is a complex app that’s suited for experienced photographers (the name comes from a chemical used in photographic film), but it can also be made very simple, because in August it added a new setting called Process Zero.

Once the mode is switched on, the camera does as little processing as possible, avoiding artificial-intelligence optimization and any other dramatic editing of the photo. (It still performs basic tasks like correcting the white balance and lens distortion.) The iPhone typically merges many separate images together to create one composite; with Halide, you get a single digital image that preserves the richness and the contrast of what you see in front of you. Shadows survive.

«

Haven’t tried this (and naturally the article doesn’t carry comparative photos – it’s the New Yorker!) but it’s certainly an interesting observation. There are lots of camera apps for the iPhone; it can be as many kinds of SLR as you want.
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FTC tames subscriptions with final ‘click to cancel’ rule • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

The US Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday announced a final “click-to-cancel” rule that aims to simplify the process of ending unwanted subscriptions to products and services.

The “Rule Concerning Recurring Subscriptions and Other Negative Option Programs” addresses business practices that make it more difficult for consumers to cancel subscriptions.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” said FTC Chair Lina Khan in a statement. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

A “negative option program” refers to a business term or condition that allows a merchant to take a consumer’s silence or inaction as a sign of consent. A one-year subscription that gets renewed after a year without notice or consent, for example, would qualify as a negative option.

According to a 2022 survey conducted by C+R Research, consumers on average underestimate the amount they spend monthly on subscription fees by more than 2.5 times, a finding that suggests people lose track of how much they’re spending.

«

This is going to break hearts at the New York Times’s subscription division, where for ages the only way to cancel has been to ring between 9am and 9.10am on the second Tuesday of the month if the moon was full the night before.
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I’m not sexy enough for my AI • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

Elizabeth Laraki, a design partner at Electric Capital, shared a story on X this week about how her speaker photo, when shared on social, looked slightly different than it did when she provided it to the conference she was attending. Laraki contacted the conference and discovered that their social media manager fed it into an AI and it basically invented a hint of a bra underneath her clothes.
We’ve known for a while that many popular image generators are trained on pornographic material, as well as child sexual abuse material. We also know that generators have all sorts of biases built into them and will over-sexualize photos of women and certain races. So this is not a huge surprise.

But the thing that I find the most interesting here is that what happened to Laraki was because the conference’s social media manager wanted to better format her photo to share on social platforms. I’ve tried to articulate this point a few different ways over the years, but I’ve never been quite satisfied with it. I am continually amazed at how much of the supposed utility of generative AI is based around solving completely made up problems created by social platforms.

«

The comparison of the photos truly is weird. The AI just wants to sex them up. Both weird and worrying.
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Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500m to develop small modular reactors • CNBC

Diana Olick:

»

Amazon Web Services is investing more than $500m in nuclear power, announcing three projects from Virginia to Washington state. AWS, Amazon’s subsidiary in cloud computing, has a massive and increasing need for clean energy as it expands its services into generative AI. It’s also a part of Amazon’s path to net-zero carbon emissions.

AWS announced it has signed an agreement with Dominion Energy, Virginia’s utility company, to explore the development of a small modular nuclear reactor, or SMR, near Dominion’s existing North Anna nuclear power station. Nuclear reactors produce no carbon emissions.

An SMR is an advanced type of nuclear reactor with a smaller footprint that allows it to be built closer to the grid. They also have faster construction times than traditional reactors, allowing them to come online sooner.

Amazon is the latest large tech company to buy into nuclear power to fuel the growing demands from data centers. Earlier this week, Google announced it will purchase power from SMR developer Kairos Power. Constellation Energy is restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft data centers.

“We see the need for gigawatts of power in the coming years, and there’s not going to be enough wind and solar projects to be able to meet the needs, and so nuclear is a great opportunity,” said Matthew Garman, CEO of AWS.

«

OK, so who’s next? Apple? Facebook? All that AI isn’t going to power itself, you know.
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In South Korea, deepfake porn wrecks women’s lives and deepens gender conflict • AP News

Hyung-Jin Kim:

»

Three years after the 30-year-old South Korean woman received a barrage of online fake images that depicted her nude, she is still being treated for trauma. She struggles to talk with men. Using a mobile phone brings back the nightmare.

“It completely trampled me, even though it wasn’t a direct physical attack on my body,” she said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. She didn’t want her name revealed because of privacy concerns.

Many other South Korean women recently have come forward to share similar stories as South Korea grapples with a deluge of non-consensual, explicit deepfake videos and images that have become much more accessible and easier to create.

It was not until last week that parliament revised a law to make watching or possessing deepfake porn content illegal.

Most suspected perpetrators in South Korea are teenage boys. Observers say the boys target female friends, relatives and acquaintances — also mostly minors — as a prank, out of curiosity or misogyny. The attacks raise serious questions about school programs but also threaten to worsen an already troubled divide between men and women.

Deepfake porn in South Korea gained attention after unconfirmed lists of schools that had victims spread online in August. Many girls and women have hastily removed photos and videos from their Instagram, Facebook and other social media accounts. Thousands of young women have staged protests demanding stronger steps against deepfake porn. Politicians, academics and activists have held forums.

«

Noted the schools angle here last month: this seems to be growing.
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Elon Musk’s X still struggles to grow subscription revenue • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Elon Musk’s plan to reduce X’s dependence on advertising revenue by increasing paid subscriptions is still not taking off. According to a new, third-party analysis of the X Premium subscription service by app intelligence firm Appfigures, X has pulled in approximately $200m in in-app purchase revenue across iOS and Android since the original 2021 launch of the subscription formerly known as Twitter Blue.

There are some caveats to this figure. For starters, the sum is based only on those purchases made via the mobile app, not the mobile web or desktop web. That means the true sum is likely higher, especially given X offers a discount for web purchases.

Then there are the commission fees to consider. After paying app store commissions, X will have made a minimum of $140m, the firm estimates. However, that figure will also likely be higher because Apple and Google discount commissions from 30% to 15% in year two. (Appfigures doesn’t have a way to reliably calculate how many subscriptions are associated with each commission rate, we’re told).

For further context, though Twitter Blue was launched in 2021, it was relaunched in December 2022 as Twitter under Musk pushed into non-advertising revenue. Within the first three months post-relaunch, the service brought in only $11m in mobile app subscriptions, per data from app data provider Sensor Tower. A year ago, the company now called X launched two additional subscriptions, Basic and Premium+.

While there’s no way to definitively determine how many of X’s users are paying for X Premium subscriptions, there are ways to back into some estimates here, at least in terms of native mobile subscribers.

«

The backing in is pretty rough and ready, but leads – even generously – to paid subscriber numbers of fewer than 4 million users. There are various other estimates about income for “creators” (read: engagement baiters with blue ticks). Bloomberg said earlier this year that X revenue was just under $1.5bn, so subscriptions still don’t really matter.

And in not-mattering-related news…
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Elon Musk’s X dodges EU’s DMA as bloc decides platform isn’t important enough for fairness controls • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

Elon Musk’s X won’t be regulated under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) the Commission decided Wednesday, despite the social media platform hitting usage thresholds earlier this year.

The decision means X won’t be subject to the DMA’s list of operational ‘dos and don’ts’ — in areas like its use of third party data and user consent to tracking ads — for the foreseeable future. The pan-EU regime targets Big Tech with up-front rules that are generally aimed at ensuring fairer dealing with individual and business users (so far seven companies have been designated as DMA gatekeepers for a total of two dozen “core platform services”, including other social media giants like Meta and TikTok).

While not joining the DMA gatekeeper club is undoubtedly good news for Musk, since he dodges the regulatory risk of being subject to the bloc’s flagship market contestability regime — where penalties for violations can reach up to 10% of global annual turnover (or more for repeat breaches) — the reason for X not being designated may sting his ego: the Commission has decided X is not an important gateway for businesses to reach consumers.

Think of it as the EU throwing shade on the bottom-feeding caliber of X’s ad business these days. Or, tl;dr, if most of your ads are for drop-shipping companies flogging dubious-looking earwax cleaners or polyester rugs so violently patterned they could make a sofa-sitter seasick your business is irrelevant.
Still, X will surely be happy to flutter free of any DMA risk. The platform had submitted arguments against being designated when it notified the EU back in May that it had hit the 45 million monthly active users and 10,000 business users bar. We’ve contacted X’s press line for comment.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Dogs are moving into the next iteration of their relationship with humans – as service animals to help out in more emotional ways. CC-licensed photo by My Photo Journeys 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. Emotionally supported. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Smart gardening firm’s shutdown a reminder of Internet of Things’ fickle nature • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

AeroGarden, which sells Wi-Fi-connected indoor gardening systems, is going out of business on January 1. While Scotts Miracle-Gro has continued selling AeroGarden products after announcing the impending shutdown, the future of the devices’ companion app is uncertain.

AeroGarden systems use hydroponics and LED lights to grow indoor gardens without requiring sunlight or soil. The smart gardening system arrived in 2006, and Scotts Miracle-Gro took over complete ownership in 2020. Some AeroGardens work with the iOS and Android apps that connect to the gardens via Wi-Fi and tell users when their plants need water or nutrients. AeroGarden also marketed the app as a way for users to easily monitor multiple AeroGardens and control the amount of light, water, and nutrients they should receive. The app offers gardening tips and can access AeroGarden customer service representatives and AeroGarden communities on Facebook and other social media outlets.

Regarding the reasoning for the company’s closure, AeroGarden’s FAQ page only states: “This was a difficult decision, but one that became necessary due to a number of challenges with this business.”

It’s possible that AeroGarden struggled to compete with rivals, which include cheaper options for gardens and seed pods that are sold on Amazon and other retailers or made through DIY efforts.

AeroGarden’s closure is somewhat more surprising considering that it updated its app in June. But now it’s unknown how long the app will be available. In an announcement last week, AeroGarden said that its app “will be available for an extended period of time” and that it’ll inform customers about the app’s “longer-term status as we work through the transition period.”

«

Oh no! How will people know when their plants need light, water and food now? We invented/discovered (delete to taste) farming 10,000 years ago, but of course those doofuses didn’t do it properly, with an app. Imagine, we could all have starved and vanished from the face of the earth.
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People think they already know everything they need to make decisions • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have.

The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. “Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not,” they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions.

«

I find the last bit hard to believe, but OK – it is good news if it’s replicated.
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Google signs advanced nuclear clean energy agreement with Kairos Power • Google Blog

Michael Terrell is senior director, energy and climate at Google:

»

Since pioneering the first corporate purchase agreements for renewable electricity over a decade ago, Google has played a pivotal role in accelerating clean energy solutions, including the next generation of advanced clean technologies.

Now, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.

«

Google says it’s doing this because 1) AI needs a lot more power 2) nuclear is a “clean, round-the-clock power source”. Back in 2007, Google had a “RE less than C” project, which stood for “renewable energy costing less than coal”, but abandoned it in 2011, giving rather unclear reasons why.

And now, we’re back with nuclear. The wheel turns.
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Tesla and storytelling • Dustin Curtis

»

Tesla and Musk had a rare opportunity to use the event [where they showed off the robotaxi, robobus and humanoid robots controlled by.. humans] as an inspiring statement of mission and purpose. They could have told a story about why Tesla exists, why it is working on these products in particular, and how everything fits into the tapestry of the company’s overall mission. Musk could have explained that the Robotaxi has always been part of Tesla’s ambitious “master plan,” and then given a progress update on how the plan is being executed while showing the demo vehicles and robots. That would have been something worth watching and a story worth telling. But Musk didn’t tell that story. He showed off half-finished products and then threw a party.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that being able to put whatever you’re working on into the context of a bigger story is as important as making it work well–whether it’s a building, a company, an essay, a piece of software, or a hamburger. Good storytelling is good craftsmanship. Without a good story, without clear context and purpose, it’s hard to maintain the essence of a thing, and far too easy to make poor design decisions. When you develop the full story behind why and how you’re building something, you can make decisions based on principle instead of opinion, and if you can communicate that story well to others, you can way more easily get them to understand your vision. This applies to everything from product development to sales and marketing.

The products Tesla has been working on are undeniably inspiring objects of a very optimistic future. Most companies focus on at most the next few iterations of their products, but Tesla is unique in that it defines the future for itself and then pulls it kicking and screaming into the present. Electric cars were impractical/impossible, and then Tesla made them ubiquitous. Humanoid robots have always been confined to science fiction, but Tesla is going to make them, too. The way Tesla operates is an inspiring story in and of itself.

«

Tesla’s now got a long record of completely failing to live up to its promises (on self-driving and so on). Curtis seems convinced it’s totally different, which I find odd, but it’s a point of view.
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Hackers take control of robot vacuums in multiple cities, yell racial slurs • ABC News Australia

Julian Fell:

»

Robot vacuums in multiple US cities were hacked in the space of a few days, with the attacker physically controlling them and yelling obscenities through their onboard speakers.

The affected robots were all Chinese-made Ecovacs Deebot X2s — the exact model that the ABC was able to hack into as proof of a critical security flaw earlier in the month.

Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson was watching TV when his robot started to malfunction.

“It sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something,” he told the ABC. “You could hear snippets of maybe a voice.” Through the Ecovacs app, he saw that a stranger was accessing its live camera feed and remote control feature.

Dismissing it as some kind of glitch, Mr Swenson reset his password, rebooted the robot and sat back down on the couch beside his wife and 13-year-old son.

Almost straight away, it started to move again. This time, there was no ambiguity about what was coming out of the speaker. A voice was yelling racist obscenities, loud and clear, right in front of Mr Swenson’s son.

“F*** n******s,” screamed the voice, over and over again.

“I got the impression it was a kid, maybe a teenager [speaking],” said Swenson. “Maybe they were just jumping from device to device messing with families.”

The second time around, he turned it off.

«

Hackable vacuum cleaners! Unsurprising that it’s a Chinese model, which have a terrible reputation for software security, and thus a ton of hackers (and script kiddies) looking to crack them.
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Tina Brown, the queen of legacy media, takes her diary to Substack • The New York Times

Jessica Testa:

»

For some prominent writers, joining the newsletter platform Substack has become a declaration of independence from traditional news organizations, or an ambitious attempt to build a new model for publishing.

For Tina Brown, a Brit who became synonymous with Manhattan media in the 1980s and ’90s, it is something less grandiose. It is simply a chance to have fun.

“This is just an extra something I’ll be doing on a Monday afternoon,” she said in an interview last week.

Her newsletter, Fresh Hell, is set to debut on Tuesday. In an introductory note to readers, she said the title referred to the experience of waking “every day to a news alert from Hades.” The newsletter, she said, would be written mostly in weekly “notebook form,” rather than “Big Think columns.”
“Writing in that private voice is what I’m interested in doing now,” Ms. Brown, 70, said in the interview, held in her apartment in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan.

She hopes the diary approach will also help in “limbering up” her voice for a planned memoir, she said. A subscription will cost $6 per month or $50 per year.

Ms. Brown may not be trying to reinvent media, unlike several of her newsletter cohorts. But her decision to join Substack is a coup for the company, which considers prestigious names to be magnets for more readers and writers. In recent weeks, Van Jones, a CNN commentator, and Jane Pratt, another influential magazine editor, have also joined the platform.

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I think it will be verrrry interesting to see how many people are prepared to pay money to Tina Brown for her thoughts. There will have to be a lot of very insider-y content to make people even consider it. (Thanks Greg B for the link.)
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ChatGPT will happily write you a thinly disguised horoscope • Simon Willison’s Weblog

Simon Willison:

»

There’s a meme floating around at the moment where you ask ChatGPT the following and it appears to offer deep insight into your personality:

From all of our interactions what is one thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself

Don’t be fooled into thinking there’s anything deep going on here. It’s effectively acting like a horoscope, hooking into the poorly understood memory feature that OpenAI first announced in February and rolled out fully in September.

…It turns out there’s a name for the psychological trick that ChatGPT is inadvertently playing on us here: the Barnum effect. Wikipedia describes it thus:

»

[…] a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some paranormal beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, aura reading, and some types of personality tests.

«

I think we can add ChatGPT personality insights to that list of practices! The problem with this particular meme is that it directly reinforces a commonly held but inaccurate mental model of how ChatGPT works.

The meme implies that ChatGPT has been learning about your personality through your interactions with it, which implies that it pays attention to your ongoing conversations with it and can refer back to them later on.

«

It’s amazing how easily people are fooled by this. As much as by real horoscopes, I suppose. Except a different generation who think machines are clear-sighted machines.
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TV ads to target households on individual streets • Daily Telegraph via MSN

James Warrington:

»

Households on individual streets will be targeted with personalised adverts under plans being rolled out by Channel 4.

The channel is to use new technology which will allow brands to tailor who sees their advert by enabling them to select a demographic within a specific location down to street level.

For example, someone watching Made in Chelsea on Channel 4’s streaming service could be served an ad for a fashion brand in a local outlet to them if a particular fashion trend is being discussed.

Advertisers can further optimise their campaign by selecting from 26 programme genres, as well as time of day and device the show is being watched on.

It forms part of a wider update to Channel 4’s streaming platform that the broadcaster hopes could boost revenues by as much as £10m. The company will launch a new private marketplace enabling brands to buy advertising space directly in real-time.

This will allow advertisers to amend their campaigns to respond to events, whether that be real-world events such as local weather or developments in fictional storylines within TV shows. Channel 4’s new ad targeting also includes more detailed data to track whether a viewer has made a purchase after seeing an ad, as well as new viewer profiles for brands to target.

For instance, a brand wishing to reach holidaymakers will be able to choose from profiles such as frequent flyer, low-cost airline flyer, package holiday makers and budget hotel bookers.

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The joy of smart TVs, eh.
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Dogs are entering a new wave of domestication • The Atlantic

Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods:

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In just a generation, we humans have abruptly changed the rules on our dogs. With urbanization increasing and space at a premium, the wild, abandoned places where children and dogs used to roam have disappeared from many American communities. Dogs have gone from working all day and sleeping outside to relaxing on the couch and sleeping in our beds.

They are more a part of our families than ever—which means they share our indoor, sedentary lifestyle. Americans once wanted a dog that barked at every noise, but modern life best suits a pet that will settle nicely under the desk during remote work, politely greet guests, make friends with cats, and play nice (but not hump) in the dog park.

Thousands of years of domestication couldn’t prepare dogs for this abrupt transition. However, after studying the cognition of 101 Canine Companion service-dog puppies at the Duke Puppy Kindergarten, we realized that these dogs are uniquely well adapted to life in the 21st century. Service dogs (the real, certified kind, not the ones whose humans bought their vests on Amazon) are highly trained professionals. They assist with specific tasks that their person cannot perform alone, such as helping to load laundry into the washer, turning on lights, and opening doors.

Between all that effort, service dogs fit into the life of their person in a way that many able-bodied dog owners want their pets to fit into theirs. For the happiness of dogs and their owners, humans need to breed and train more dogs like service animals, embarking on a new wave of dog domestication to help them fit into the new world we have created.

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Credit cards don’t require signatures any more. So why do we still sign? • WSJ

Oyin Adedoyin:

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The big financial moments in life used to be marked with a flourish of a pen. Buying a house. A car. Breakfast.

Not anymore. Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express dropped the requirement to sign for charges like restaurant checks in 2018. They don’t look at our scribbles to verify identity or stop fraud. Taps, clicks and electronic signatures took over the heavy lifting for many everyday purchases—and many contracts, loan applications and even Social Security forms. The John Hancock was written off as a relic useful mainly to inflate the value of sports memorabilia.

But signatures didn’t die.

We continue to be asked to sign with ink on paper or using fingers on touch screens at many restaurants, bars and other businesses. And people keep signing card receipts out of habit—even when there is no blank space for it—because it feels weird not to, payment networks and retail groups say.

“Traditions have this odd way of sticking around,” said Doug Kantor, general counsel of the National Association of Convenience Stores.

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Correction: financial traditions have an odd way of sticking around in the US. I haven’t seen anyone sign anything physically for about a decade, excepting very particular legal documents.
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