Why did the Ingenuity helicopter crash on Mars? An investigation blames bland terrain. CC-licensed photo by Kevin Gill on Flickr.

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

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

AI could be making scientists less creative • Gizmodo

Todd Feathers:

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Researchers at the University of Chicago and Tsinghua University, in China, analyzed nearly 68 million research papers across six scientific disciplines (not including computer science) and found that papers incorporating AI techniques were cited more often but also focused on a narrower set of topics and were more repetitive. In essence, the more scientists use AI, the more they focus on the same set of problems that can be answered with large, existing datasets and the less they explore foundational questions that can lead to entirely new fields of study.

“I was surprised at the dramatic scale of the finding, [AI] dramatically increases people’s capacity to stay and advance within the system,” said James Evans, a co-author of the pre-print paper and director of the Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago. “This suggests there’s a massive incentive for individuals to uptake these kinds of systems within their work … it’s between thriving and not surviving in a competitive research field.”

As that incentive leads to a growing dependence on machine learning, neural networks, and transformer models, “the whole system of science that’s done by AI is shrinking,” he said.

The study examined papers published from 1980 to 2024 in the fields of biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, materials science, and geology. It found that scientists who used AI tools to conduct their research published 67% more papers annually, on average, and their papers were cited more than three times as often as those who didn’t use AI.

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Bird flu jumps from birds to human in Louisiana; patient hospitalized • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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A person in Louisiana is hospitalized with H5N1 bird flu after having contact with sick and dying birds suspected of carrying the virus, state health officials announced Friday.

It is the first human H5N1 case detected in Louisiana. For now, the case is considered a “presumptive” positive until testing is confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials say that the risk to the public is low but caution people to stay away from any sick or dead birds. A spokesperson for Louisiana’s health department told Ars that the hospitalized patient had contact with both backyard and wild birds.

Although the person has been hospitalized, their condition was not reported.  The spokesperson said the department would not comment on the patient’s condition due to patient confidentiality and an ongoing public health investigation.

The case is just the latest amid H5N1’s global and domestic rampage. The virus has been ravaging wild, backyard, and commercial birds in the US since early 2022 and spilling over to a surprisingly wide range of mammals. In March this year, officials detected an unprecedented leap to dairy cows, which has since caused a nationwide outbreak. The virus is currently sweeping through California, the country’s largest dairy producer.

To date, at least 845 herds across 16 states have contracted the virus since March, including 630 in California, which detected its first dairy infections in late August.

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Um, just a watching brief.
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Google’s lost moonshots • Jerry Liu

The aforesaid Liu has just spent six years in consulting and startups, having previously worked at Facebook/Meta:

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1. Misaligned Incentives
Google’s innovation machine is driven by PM careers, and PM careers are driven by metrics. If you’re a product manager at Google, what’s your incentive? Ship something small that looks good on your performance review, or spend years on a project that might fail spectacularly? It’s like trying to work on decade-spanning climate change projects with politicians who need to win the next election and have term limits of 4 years. You take your wins, and you get out before the bridge collapses. Which inevitably it will, because can you expect any human project to only ever be winning, quarter after quarter?

2. Moonshot-scale Budget
This is crucial: moonshot-scale problems need moonshot-scale resources. Think about how VCs fund startups. When something shows promise, not only do they need more funding, the fundraising often jumps by orders of magnitude. What Google calls moonshots often feel more like well-funded experiments. Meanwhile, Meta commits resources at a scale that matches their ambitions. Look at Reality Labs – they’ve burned more money than most companies will ever see, but they keep going.

3. Institutional Learning
And maybe the hardest problem: institutional learning. Both companies fail, but they fail differently. When Google Glass flopped, what happened to all that knowledge? Sure, some of it probably lives in internal docs, but the teams scattered, the context was lost, and the deep learning – the kind that only comes from failure – largely evaporated. I also heard that Google Plus’s assets were also cannibalized internally; Please let me know if you’ve interacted with any part of Google Plus’s remains recently.

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This is very true: whatever happened to Loon, the balloon thing, and all the other moonshots? Quietly fallen to earth, it seems.
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Ingenuity Mars helicopter January grounding: what happened? • The Register

Richard Speed:

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It appears the bland Martian surface triggered a chain of events that left NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter permanently grounded on the red planet.

The helicopter’s flying career came to an abrupt end earlier this year when Flight 72 was cut short, and communications were briefly lost. After re-establishing contact, it soon became clear Ingenuity would not be flying again – the rotor blades were damaged, and one was entirely detached.

At the time, the prevailing theory was that the flight ended when Ingenuity’s downward-facing camera could not pick out features on the surface. According to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), this is still the most likely scenario for what started a chain of events that left the helicopter crippled.

Performing an air crash investigation from hundreds of millions of kilometers away is tricky. It’s impossible to get hands on the wreckage, there are unlikely to be any witnesses, and there aren’t brightly colored black boxes to give clues about what happened in the final minutes of the flight.

What there is, however, is telemetry. Data sent during the final flight indicates that around 20 seconds after take-off, Ingenuity’s navigation system couldn’t find enough surface features to track. It was designed to operate over textured, flat terrain, not the steep, featureless sand ripples where it ultimately met its demise.

“Photographs taken after the flight indicate the navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown,” according to JPL. Engineers reckon the most likely scenario is that Ingenuity made a hard landing on the slope of a sand ripple. The sudden pitch and roll exerted stress on the rotor blades past their design limits, and all four snapped at their weakest point.

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Making “social” social again: announcing Mozi • Medium

Ev Williams did Twitter, did Medium, and now he’s doing a sort of.. travel-contact app:

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Mozi is a social app — not in the sense of “social media.” But in the sense of interacting with other people and building relationships.

In fact, it’s not a media app at all. There is no posting photos or videos or liking or following. There are no influencers — except your friend who may influence you to meet up for a coffee when you’re in town.

The primary value proposition of Mozi (today) is simple: It lets you know when you’re going to be in the same place (city or event) as someone you know. And the goal is straightforward: to connect more often—and in person—with the people you care about.

For example, I just got back from Miami. Before going, I put my plan (just the city and what days) into Mozi. This information was shared just with my contacts (minus any I wouldn’t want it to be). So, even before going, I was able to see both the people I know who live there and other friends who were visiting at the same time, so we could meet up and make plans.

Mozi also helps you decide where to go. “Events” on Mozi (currently a beta feature) lets you see who you know may be going—or considering going—to a conference or event before you go. (If you happen to be going to SXSW, join the Mozi event. I’ll be there too.)

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Not in a burning hurry to try this, to be honest. It’s reminiscent of Foursquare, but without the gamification; it’s a sort of private shared-only-with-contacts-you-want-to meetup app. I wonder about the mental load of having to choose which contacts to share with; what you really want is to see who’s in the city you’re going to and include or exclude on that basis. You can get it now for iOS. (Android is of course on a wait list.)(Thanks Q for the link.)
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The ‘Ghost Gun’ linked to Luigi Mangione shows just how far 3D-printed weapons have come • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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More than a decade after the advent of the 3D-printed gun as an icon of libertarianism and a gun control nightmare, police say one of those homemade plastic weapons has now been found in the hands of perhaps the world’s most high-profile alleged killer. For the community of DIY gunsmiths who have spent years honing those printable firearm models, in fact, the handgun police claim was used to fatally shoot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is as recognisable as the now-famous alleged shooter himself—and shows just how practical and lethal those weapons have become.

In the 24 hours since police released a photo of what they say is Luigi Mangione’s gun following the 26-year-old’s arrest Monday, the online community devoted to 3D-printed firearms has been quick to identify the suspected murder weapon as a particular model of printable “ghost gun”—a homemade weapon with no serial number, created by assembling a mix of commercial and DIY parts. The gun appears to be a Chairmanwon V1, a tweak of a popular partially 3D-printed Glock-style design known as the FMDA 19.2—an acronym that stands for the libertarian slogan “Free Men Don’t Ask.”

The FMDA 19.2, released in 2021, is a relatively old model by 3D-printed-gun standards, says one gunsmith who goes by the first name John and the online handle Mr. Snow Makes. But it’s one of the most well-known and well-tested printable ghost gun designs, he says.

…The fact that even a relatively old model of 3D-printed firearm allegedly allowed the killer to shoot Thompson repeatedly on a Manhattan street—certainly the most high-profile shooting ever committed with a ghost gun or a 3D-printed weapon—shows how far DIY weapons tech has come, says Cody Wilson, the founder of the gun rights group Defense Distributed. Unlike the earliest 3D-printed gun models, the FDMA 19.2 can be fired hundreds or even thousands of times without its plastic components breaking.

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Originally the makers of these guns weren’t sure if they would explode when fired. Now, they’re more confident. (I’ve slightly tweaked the original text to avoid any assumptions about the identity of the killer and ownership of the gun: both are crucial to the case.)
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Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore • The Guardian

Siân Boyle:

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Brain rot was portended almost 20 years ago when scientists studied the effects of a new invention called “email”, specifically the impact a relentless barrage of information would have on participants’ brains. The results? Constant cognitive overload had a more negative effect than taking cannabis, with IQs of participants dropping an average of 10 points.

And this was prior to smartphones bringing the internet to our fingertips, which has resulted in the average UK adult now spending at least four hours a day online (with gen Z men spending five and a half hours a day online, and gen Z women six and a half).

In recent years, an abundance of academic research from institutions including Harvard medical school, the University of Oxford and King’s College London found evidence that the internet is shrinking our grey matter, shortening attention spans, weakening memory and distorting our cognitive processes. The areas of the brain found to be affected included “attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources”, “memory processes” and “social cognition”.

Paper after paper spells out how vulnerable we are to internet-induced brain rot. “High levels of internet usage and heavy media multitasking are associated with decreased grey matter in prefrontal regions,” finds one. People with internet addiction exhibit “structural brain changes” and “reduced grey matter”. Too much technology during brain developmental years has even been referred to by some academics as risking “digital dementia”.

In 2018, a decade of data analysed by leading memory psychologists at Stanford University found that people who frequently engaged with multiple online platforms have reduced memory and attention spans.

And yet we seem to be doing very little to stem the tide.

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BBC complains to Apple over misleading shooting headline • BBC News

Graham Fraser:

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The BBC has complained to Apple after the tech giant’s new iPhone feature generated a false headline about a high-profile murder in the United States.

Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier [last] week, external, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications.

This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

A spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”. Apple declined to comment.

“BBC News is the most trusted news media in the world,” the BBC spokesperson added. “It is essential to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name and that includes notifications.”

The notification which made a false claim about Mangione was otherwise accurate in its summaries about the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and an update on South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

But the BBC does not appear to be the only news publisher which has had headlines misrepresented by Apple’s new AI tech. On 21 November, three articles on different topics from the New York Times were grouped together in one notification – with one part reading “Netanyahu arrested”, referring to the Israeli prime minister.

It was inaccurately summarising a newspaper report about the International Criminal Court issuing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, rather than any reporting about him being arrested.

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Apple would have expected that there would be screwups with Apple Intelligence, but it’s hard to see how it prevents this sort of mangling from happening.
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iOS 18.2’s new Mail app is nice, but I disabled one of its main features • 9to5Mac

Michael Burkhardt:

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With iOS 18.2, Apple introduced an all new Mail app. It introduced mail categorization, a fresh coat of paint, contact photos/business logos for conversations, a new system for grouping emails, and more. All of that sounded nice when it was unveiled back at WWDC, but now that I’ve actually spent some time using it, I’m having some doubts.

One of the biggest features in the new Mail app is categorization, breaking down your emails into varying categories of Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions.

This all sounds nice in concept, since it’d declutter your inbox, and the Primary tab would contain everything that’s important. In practice though, a lot of things were incorrectly categorized, and I found myself swiping over to the “All Mail” tab most of the time, that way I could see everything without having to deal with inaccurate sorting.

And yes, you can choose to recategorize senders if you don’t like how Apple chose to sort it. However, I find that a bit tedious compared to simply turning categorization off entirely.

Apple thought about the fact that everyone might not necessarily like categorization, and provided a simple way to disable it.

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I think “features” like this would get in the way of using the machine. Google does this with Gmail, and I truly don’t like that either. So far, nothing in 18.2 (which I haven’t installed) looks utterly compelling.
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Apple plans thinner, foldable iphones to revive growth • WSJ

Aaron Tilley and Yang Jie:

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Starting next year, Apple plans to introduce an iPhone that will be thinner than the approximately 8-millimeter profile of current models, said people familiar with the company’s plans. The model is intended to be cheaper than Pro models, with a simplified camera system to reduce costs.

The company is also planning two foldable devices, the people said. A larger device, intended to serve as a laptop, would have a screen that unfolds to be nearly as large as some desktop monitors, at about 19 inches. A smaller model would unfold to a display size that would be larger than an iPhone 16 Pro Max, intended to serve as a foldable iPhone, the people said.

Both foldable designs have been in development for years, but some key parts weren’t ready. Major challenges included improving the hinge, a mechanism that allows the device to fold and unfold, and the display cover, a flexible material protecting the foldable screen.

Current foldable phones on the market aren’t thin, light or energy-efficient enough to meet Apple’s standards, which is why Apple has been slower to enter this segment, said Jeff Pu, an analyst with Hong Kong-based brokerage Haitong International Securities.

Apple experimented with other different designs, such as having a display on the outside of the device when it is folded, but it now favors an inward-folding design, people familiar with the devices said.

Although Apple initially aimed to introduce the larger device first to gauge market response, it now appears that the foldable iPhone will likely be ready ahead of it. Apple executives are pushing for a 2026 release, but the company may need another year to address technical challenges, the people said.

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So a foldable iPad and an inwardly-folding phone. But far enough away that they might have been “held up” by “technical challenges”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Genetic studies seem to have pinned down when homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, and what we got from it. CC-licensed photo by Clemens Vasters on Flickr.

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

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

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

Sora’s AI video revolution is still a ways off • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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The first version of OpenAI’s Sora can generate video of just about anything you throw at it — superheroes, cityscapes, animated puppies. It’s an impressive first step for the AI video generator. But the actual results are far from satisfactory, with many videos so heavily plagued with oddities and inconsistencies that it’s hard to imagine anyone finding much use for them.

Sora was released on Monday after almost a year of teasers heralding its capabilities. There are a few hurdles before you get to the video generation features, though. For one, account creation was closed within hours of launching due to the overwhelming demand. Those who did manage to sign up will find that its features also require a subscription to unlock: a $20 monthly “Plus” membership will let you generate videos at 480p or 720p, capped at either five or 10 seconds in length depending on the resolution. To unlock everything, including 1080p quality and 20-second-long videos, you need to cough up $200 a month for the “Pro” Sora subscription.

My results from testing the Plus tier have been underwhelming. Simple prompts with limited descriptions seem to work best — “a cat playing with a ball of yarn,” for example, generates a very realistic-looking cat bouncing excitedly around the floor. But Sora gave the cat a second tail for a few moments, and the yarn itself was jittery and looked like badly inserted CGI.

These visual issues were more frequent and glaring for complex prompts that provided detailed scene descriptions. It’s difficult to get human motion to be remotely natural: hands flailed everywhere when I asked it to show me someone applying makeup, and videos of people eating salad and sausage rolls were nightmarishly reminiscent of the viral AI clips of Will Smith inhaling spaghetti.

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Again, though: this is the worst that Sora is going to be. Every version after this will be better. And the next version is the worst. And the next. Until the “worst” is absolutely good enough.
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The Turing Test — Can you tell a human from an AI?

Cameron Jones:

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The Interrogator (you) asks the Witnesses (a human and an AI chatbot) questions to determine which one is human and which one is AI.

The true identity of the Witnesses are revealed at the end of each round.

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Something to do over the Christmas break, perhaps? (Don’t worry, there’s another week of this stuff to come.) (Thanks Steve for the link.)
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‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth.

The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.

Although a viable mirror microbe would probably take at least a decade to build, a new risk assessment raised such serious concerns about the organisms that the 38-strong group urged scientists to stop work towards the goal and asked funders to make clear they will no longer support the research.

“The threat we’re talking about is unprecedented,” said Prof Vaughn Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh. “Mirror bacteria would likely evade many human, animal and plant immune system responses and in each case would cause lethal infections that would spread without check.”

The expert group includes Dr Craig Venter, the US scientist who led the private effort to sequence the human genome in the 1990s, and the Nobel laureates Prof Greg Winter at the University of Cambridge and Prof Jack Szostak at the University of Chicago.

Many molecules for life can exist in two distinct forms, each the mirror image of the other. The DNA of all living organisms is made from “right-handed” nucleotides, while proteins, the building blocks of cells, are made from “left-handed” amino acids. Why nature works this way is unclear: life could have chosen left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins instead.

…The fresh concerns over the technology are revealed in a 299-page report and a commentary in the journal Science. While enthusiastic about research on mirror molecules, the report sees substantial risks in mirror microbes and calls for a global debate on the work.

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For Venter to be against this is quite something: he has usually been the one barnstorming along, ignoring the consensus.
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Pew: half of American teens are online ‘constantly’ • AP News

Barbara Ortutay:

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Nearly half of American teenagers say they are online “constantly” despite concerns about the effects of social media and smartphones on their mental health, according to a new report published Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

As in past years, YouTube was the single most popular platform teenagers used — 90% said they watched videos on the site, down slightly from 95% in 2022. Nearly three-quarters said they visit YouTube every day.

There was a slight downward trend in several popular apps teens used. For instance, 63% of teens said they used TikTok, down from 67% and Snapchat slipped to 55% from 59%. This small decline could be due to pandemic-era restrictions easing up and kids having more time to see friends in person, but it’s not enough to be truly meaningful.

X saw the biggest decline among teenage users. Only 17% of teenagers said they use X, down from 23% in 2022, the year Elon Musk bought the platform. Reddit held steady at 14%. About 6% of teenagers said they use Threads, Meta’s answer to X that launched in 2023.

The report comes as countries around the world are grappling with how to handle the effects of social media on young people’s well-being. Australia recently passed a law banning kids under 16 from social networks, though it’s unclear how it will be able to enforce the age limit — and whether it will come with unintended consequences such as isolating vulnerable kids from their peers.

Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp was a rare exception in that it saw the number of teenage users increase, to 23% from 17% in 2022.

…As in previous surveys, girls were more likely to use TikTok almost constantly while boys gravitated to YouTube. There was no meaningful gender difference in the use of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.

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Finite attention world: Meta seems to be the winner based on time spent using WhatsApp and Threads.
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Google unveils mixed-reality headset with Samsung, taking on Apple and Meta • Bloomberg via MSN

Mark Gurman:

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Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Samsung Electronics Co. unveiled a joint push into the mixed-reality market, introducing a new operating system and headset in a bid to challenge devices from Apple and Meta.

In what they called a collaboration as “one team,” the two companies announced a version of Google’s Android software for XR — shorthand for extended reality, which refers to a range of virtual- and augmented-reality technologies. They also showed off a Samsung-built headset code-named Project Moohan, taken from the Korean word for “infinite.”

The two tech giants look to jump-start a market that’s been slow to take off. Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro headset, released this year, remains a niche product — held back by its burdensome weight and hefty price tag. And Meta has had more success with smart glasses and cheaper VR headsets than higher-end mixed-reality devices.

The new Android will allow a range of companies to design their own XR devices — both headsets and lighter-weight glasses — while also taking advantage of the latest artificial intelligence advances. The hope is to replicate the success Google had with the original version of Android, which is used by most major smartphones. Companies like Sony Group Corp., Xreal Inc. and Lynx Mixed Reality have committed to build devices running the new operating system, Google said.

“The time for XR is now,” Sameer Samat, a Google executive who oversees the Android ecosystem, said in an interview. “We’re not strangers to this space,” he said, referring to Google Glass, a precursor to today’s devices that flopped a decade ago. “The technology wasn’t quite ready at the time, but we never stopped believing in the vision of what XR could be.”

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Still a technology in search of a use. Ben Thompson made the good point on the Dithering podcast this week that what really works is a use case existing and pulling a technology out of the swamp: internet on a phone? Needs a big screen, so a touchscreen, so the iPhone was right for it. And so on. What’s pulling XR out of the technology swamp to be chosen?
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Studies pin down exactly when humans and Neanderthals swapped DNA • Ars Technica

Kiona Smith:

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The Ranis [in Germany] population, based on how their genomes compare to other ancient and modern people, seem to have been part of one of the first groups to split off from the wave of humans who migrated out of Africa, through the Levant, and into Eurasia sometime around 50,000 years ago. They carried with them traces of what their ancestors had gotten up to during that journey: about 2.9% of their genomes were made up of segments of Neanderthal ancestry.

Based on how long the Ranis people’s segments of Neanderthal DNA were (longer chunks of Neanderthal ancestry tend to point to more recent mixing), the interspecies mingling happened about 80 generations, or about 2,300 years, before the Ranis people lived and died. That’s about 49,000 to 45,000 years ago. The dates from both studies line up well with each other and with archaeological evidence that points to when Neanderthal and Homo sapiens cultures overlapped in parts of Europe and Asia.

What’s still not clear is whether that period of contact lasted the full 5,000 to 7,000 years, or if, as Johannes Krause (also of the Max Planck Institute) suggests, it was only a few centuries—1,500 years at the most—that fell somewhere within that range of dates.

Once those first Homo sapiens in Eurasia had acquired their souvenir Neanderthal genes (forget stealing a partner’s hoodie; just take some useful segments of their genome), natural selection got to work on them very quickly, discarding some and passing along others, so that by about 100 generations after the “event,” the pattern of Neanderthal DNA segments in people’s genomes looked a lot like it does today.

Iasi and his colleagues looked through their catalog of genomes for sections that contained more (or less) Neanderthal ancestry than you’d expect to find by random chance—a pattern that suggests that natural selection has been at work on those segments. Some of the segments that tended to include more Neanderthal gene variants included areas related to skin pigmentation, the immune response, and metabolism. And that makes perfect sense, according to Iasi.

“Neanderthals had lived in Europe, or outside of Africa, for thousands of years already, so they were probably adapted to their environment, climate, and pathogens,” said Iasi during the press conference. Homo sapiens were facing selective pressure to adapt to the same challenges, so genes that gave them an advantage would have been more likely to get passed along, while unhelpful ones would have been quick to get weeded out.

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We haven’t quite grasped the extent to which homo sapiens probably wiped out a rival hominid species. Then again, seeing what homo sapiens will do to itself, perhaps not surprising.
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Malaysia’s internet crackdown forces creators to self-censor • Rest of World

Tashny Sukumaran:

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Malaysian officials have blocked dozens of sites this year, and ordered social media sites to tighten their moderation policies. They have introduced a new regulatory framework and a new code of conduct for online platforms, made licensing mandatory, and passed the Cyber Security Act, which allows the seizure of any information without a warrant. A new Online Safety Bill will give authorities even more power to access information, and use a “kill switch” to shut down sites deemed harmful. Proposed changes to a 25-year-old communication law would compel service providers to disclose user data, and empower authorities to order surveillance measures.

These actions have tightened the government’s grip on online content, raising concerns about greater censorship and surveillance in Malaysia, digital rights groups say. Content creation in the Muslim-majority nation was already “tricky” before the raft of recent measures, entertainer Blake Yap, known as Chinepaiyen, told Rest of World.

Creators “have to be really smart, especially when it comes to bringing up issues that minorities face,” said Yap, who occasionally posts commentary on racial discrimination faced by religious and ethnic minorities in Malaysia to his half a million followers on Instagram and YouTube and two million on TikTok.

The new regulations “serve as a strict reminder of how people should produce their content, which, in a way, is definitely censoring us,” said Yap. “I am extra careful now.”

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YouTube TV is hiking prices again after denying “erroneous” report days ago • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

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YouTube TV, now one of the country’s leading cable (or cable-ish) television providers, is starting to act like it. The service told customers in an email this morning that prices are going up in the new year, from $73 per month for the Base Plan to $83 on January 13, 2025—just days after suggesting that wasn’t happening.

“We don’t make these decisions lightly, and we realize this has an impact on our members,” Google’s email to subscribers read. “We are committed to bringing you features that are changing the way we watch live TV, like unlimited DVR storage and multiview, and supporting YouTube TV’s breadth of content and vast on-demand library of movies and shows.”

Google cited “the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service” in announcing the price increase. It noted that customers can pause or cancel their subscription in their Settings and that current trials and promotions will be honored and unchanged.

The move comes just days after a Verizon promotion on Facebook suggested that customers could save $10 per month on YouTube TV, in which the “Current subscription price of $82.99/mo applies.” As seen on 9to5Google, the verified TeamYouTube account responded on X (formerly Twitter) that it was aware Verizon promoted “the incorrect price for the YouTubeTV Base Plan.” It’s true that the price was incorrect—for three days, or about five weeks, depending on how you count.

Ars has contacted Google for comment on this post and will update it if we receive a response.

It’s getting tougher for YouTube TV to push itself as a more cost-effective version of traditional cable TV.

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It’s getting a bit Animal Farm-ish: the consumer looked from the cable company to YouTube TV and back again and could not tell the difference. According to a Community Note on X, YouTube TV’s price has doubled in the past five years, with the last increase in April 2023.
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52 things I learned in 2024 • Medium

Tom Whitwell:

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1: To highlight tax evasion, South Korea introduced ugly neon green number plates for company cars worth more than $58,000. Luxury car sales fell 27%. [Song Jung-a]

2: If you run one specific, but illegal, database query on a set of widely used health data, you can access Tony Blair’s entire personal medical history. [Ben Goldacre]

3: There are just 16 trademarked scents in the US, including Crayola crayons, Playdoh, an ocean-scented soft play in Indiana and a type of gun cleaner that smells of ammonium and kerosene. [Via Gabrielle E. Brill]

4: Film studios now add CGI effects to behind the scenes footage to hide how much CGI has been used to make the film. [Jonas Ussing]

5: Casio sells a premium desk calculator called the S100X-BK. It has exactly the same functions as a normal calculator but is handmade in Japan from milled aluminium. It costs £359.99. [darkhorse_log]

6: The London Underground has a distinct form of mosquito, Culex pipiens f. Molestus, genetically different from above-ground mosquitos, and present since at least the 1940s. [Katharine Byrne & Richard A Nichols]

«

Whitwell’s 52 things are always wonderful. This year is no exception.
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‘There will be nothing left’: researchers fear collapse of science in Argentina • Nature

Martín De Ambrosio & Fermín Koop:

»

It has been one year since libertarian President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, and the nation’s science is facing collapse, researchers say. Milei’s agenda to reduce the country’s deficit and lower inflation — which had topped 211% last year — has meant that, as his administration’s slogan says, “there is no money” for science or anything else.

“We are in a very, very critical situation,” says Jorge Geffner, director of the Institute for Biomedical Research in Retroviruses and AIDS (INBIRS) in Buenos Aires. He adds that the Innovation, Science and Technology Secretariat, once the country’s main science ministry but downgraded by Milei to a secretariat with less power, is working with a budget that is one-third lower than last year.

Argentinian scientists who are paid by the government have lost up to 30% of their income, Geffner says. (As of 2022, the government funded about 60% of research and development in Argentina, and the rest came from the private sector and international contributions.) As a result, the country is facing massive brain drain. At INBIRS, about half of its staff members are either considering finding jobs in other countries or already doing the paperwork, Geffner adds.

“With six more months like this, there will be nothing left” of the scientific community, says Mariano Cantero, director of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina, which trains physicists and engineers.

Milei promised to take a “chainsaw” to the Argentine government’s spending when he campaigned for president, to bring the economic crisis under control. Although the monthly inflation rate has dropped from 25.5% last December, when Milei took office, to 2.7% as of this October, poverty in the country has increased by 11 percentage points. Argentina’s gross domestic product is expected to shrink by 3.5% by the end of 2024, but recover by 5% in 2025.

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

South Korea’s LG is ceasing production of Blu-ray players, marking the end of another hardware era. CC-licensed photo by Detlef Kroeze 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. Still in production. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Bankruptcy judge rejects The Onion’s bid to buy Alex Jones’ Infowars • NBC News

David Ingram:

»

A bankruptcy judge on Tuesday rejected a bid by The Onion’s parent company to buy Alex Jones’ far-right media empire, including the website Infowars, ruling that the auction process was unfair. 

Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee. 

“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”

It was not immediately clear whether there would be a new auction in which The Onion could bid again for Jones’ assets. Lopez said he would leave the decision about what to do next in the hands of the trustee, Christopher Murray, who had overseen the auction.

The judge said Murray had acted in good faith in running the auction in which The Onion’s parent company initially appeared to prevail, but he said the trustee did not run a transparent process and should have given a rival bidder associated with Jones another chance to improve its bid.

“I think you’ve got to go out and try to get every dollar,” Lopez said. “I think that the process fell down.” 

The ruling dashed, at least for now, Global Tetrahedron’s plans to take over Infowars and radically shift its content from anti-government conspiracy theories to satirical humor. Instead, Jones can continue operating his far-right media business as he has for decades.

…A rival bidder associated with Jones, First United American Cos., offered $3.5m in cash, or twice as much cash as The Onion’s parent company. First United American is a limited liability company affiliated with Jones’ dietary supplements business, and its bid had Jones’ blessing.

«

One wonders about the shenanigans that have been going on here. Rather like Rudy Guiliani hanging on by his fingernails to stuff a court order has confiscated, Jones won’t give up.
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LG discontinues all UHD Blu-ray and Blu-ray players • FlatpanelsHD

Rasmus Larsen:

»

LG has discontinued all Blu-ray players, including the UBK80 and UBK90 UHD Blu-ray players, with remaining units only available while stocks last.

The announcement echoes similar moves from Oppo in 2018 and Samsung in 2019, when both companies exited the optical disc player market.

LG has now officially discontinued its Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray players, as reflected on LG’s online portals and confirmed by multiple sources to FlatpanelsHD.

However, in a statement to FlatpanelsHD, LG Korea stopped short of confirming a definitive global exit from the optical disc player market, leaving the door open for a return if demand picks up. For now, a few old models remain available in regions such as America and Europe, but only until inventory runs out.

LG has not launched any new optical disc players since 2018, when it introduced the UBK80 and UBK90 UHD Blu-ray players. This same is true for other major brands such as Panasonic and Sony.

«

Sales peaked in 2017. Now things are pretty much cooked for these devices into which colossal amounts of money – and amazing technological breakthroughs – were poured.
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Staff at Britain’s AI institute in open revolt • POLITICO

Laurie Clarke:

»

Staff at the UK’s prestigious artificial intelligence institute are up in arms about the way it is being run — and have urged its board to step in and save it from itself.

A letter signed by 93 employees of the Alan Turing Institute — which is largely funded by the UK government and serves as Britain’s national institute for AI and data science — expresses no confidence in the body’s executive leadership team (ELT) and calls on the institute’s board to “urgently intervene.”

The missive, sent in early December, warns that employee concerns on a host of issues — including the institute’s sense of direction, progress on gender diversity, and a major redundancy round — have been “ignored, minimized or misdirected.” Immediate action is needed, it continues, to avoid “jeopardizing our funding base and long term financial health.”

The research institute — set up in 2015 with cash from central government — is supposed to lead the country’s research ecosystem on AI and data science.

But it has attracted strong criticism from other organisations in the space, including the influential Tony Blair Institute think tank, over a perceived failure to keep the UK abreast of the seismic developments in generative AI that have taken place in recent years.

The letter — seen by POLITICO — meanwhile argues that there has been “catastrophic decline in trust in leadership, particularly at senior levels. Staff morale and wellbeing has also become a critical concern, with rising levels of stress and burnout across teams.” 

…A review of the Turing Institute conducted by Britain’s science research funding agency last year highlighted governance issues at the organization. An open letter signed by more than 180 staff members denounced the lack of gender diversity across leadership roles following the appointment of four new research directors in February, all of whom were men.

«

First, that’s a lot of people. Who knew the AI institute needed that many to keep abreast of things? Second, I’ve never heard of any of its governance team. Not sure if this reflects on me or them.
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Gemini Advanced rolling out first agentic feature: Deep Research • 9to5 Google

Abner Li:

»

Gemini Advanced subscribers are getting access to a new “Deep Research” capability. It is the “first feature in Gemini” to bring Google’s vision of agents that can perform complex actions on your behalf.

First previewed at the end of Made by Google 2024 in August, you ask Gemini a research question and it will create a multi-step plan. You will be able to revise that plan, like adding more aspects to look into.

Once approved and “Start research” is clicked, Gemini will be “searching [the web], finding interesting pieces of information and then starting a new search based on what it’s learned. It repeats this process multiple times.” Throughout the process, Gemini “continuously refines its analysis.”

The end result is a “comprehensive report of the key findings” that’s organized into sections/headings. Gemini will note “Sources and related content,” as well as link to “Researched websites.” You’ll find “helpful, easy-to-read insights” and a conclusion, with the ability to export to Google Docs.

Framed as a “personal research assistant,” Google says Gemini Deep Research takes a “few minutes” instead of several hours. 

Deep Research is rolling out today to Gemini Advanced in English on desktop and mobile web. In the top-left model picker, select “Use 1.5 Pro with Deep Research.” This is coming to the mobile in early 2025. 

«

This might sound trivial, but has the potential to be absolutely enormous, and underpin all sorts of work. The most important part is that you can review the proposed steps. Give it a few years and this will be available everywhere for nothing.
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The department of flags: Syrian rebels lay bare Assad’s corrupt state • Financial Times

Raya Jalabi and Sarah Dadouch:

»

“It’s all going to become one. All the government bodies will be dissolved: no Salvation Government, no factions, nothing,” said Mohammad Yasser Ghazal, a 36-year-old technocrat in the rebel government seconded from his job to help reconfigure the Damascus governorate. “It will all soon be dissolved into one Syrian republic.”

Ghazal and his colleagues displayed a strong command of the state apparatus they inherited just hours earlier, and hinted that HTS’ plans to overhaul it had long been in the works. But the task they face is formidable. Syria’s dysfunctional state institutions became engorged by corruption, cronyism and centralised power over five decades of rule by the Assad dynasty.

In his lilting Aleppan accent, Ghazal asked the department chiefs to list their remits and explain their departments’ functions. The two-hour meeting showcased how Assad’s government was “stopped in time”, he later told the FT in an interview.

Employees quoted government handbooks from the 1930s and 1960s, and were unable to answer direct questions about their duties, nor explain why decisions had been made. “The problems piled up, and they let them be,” he said. “They do not see themselves as responsible.”

One man introduced himself as the head of the public relations department, which he said included “international co-operation” as well as a division for “festival and events management”. Asked what this division did exactly, the civil servant answered, “flags”.

“There’s a department for flags?” Ghazal asked incredulously. 

“Yes, when foreign dignitaries come, we put up a lot of flags,” he said. “We hang them from the poles. It’s a big job.”

The same department head also had a translation division, staffed by two employees who spoke English. Ghazal asked if there were Russian or Iranian translators — states that propped up the Assad regime and frequently sent envoys — and was told there were none because representatives of these countries brought their own.

“But you didn’t have English-speaking dignitaries visit?”

“No,” the department head said.

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The end of Cruise is the beginning of a risky new phase for autonomous vehicles – The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

The robotaxi subsidiary lost a staggering $3.48bn in 2023. Kyle Vogt, Cruise cofounder and [Dan] Amman’s successor as CEO, was under mounting pressure to expand the service and bring in more money to help cover the losses. Plus, he was directly competing with Alphabet’s Waymo, which had more vehicles and seemingly better technology. And Google’s parent company was more willing to spend billions of dollars, without any near-term profits, to win the robotaxi race. With the screws tightening, Vogt publicly drew a line in the sand: Cruise would bring in over $1bn in revenue by 2025.

Instead, Cruise never made it to the end of 2024.

It all culminated in an incident on October 7th, 2023, when a Cruise vehicle in San Francisco struck and dragged a pedestrian over 20 feet, seriously injuring her. The victim was initially struck by a hit-and-run driver, which launched her into the path of the Cruise car.

…the incident damaged Cruise’s effort to win the public’s trust.

…GM may have scrapped its “Ultra Cruise” branding to develop a partially autonomous system that covers “95 percent” of driving scenarios, but it still thinks that people want a fully autonomous car of their own — on their own terms.

“I think the application of what the customer wants in a privately owned vehicle is very different,” Barra said on Tuesday. “But I also think… there’s a lot of commonality [with Cruise’s technology]. How it seamlessly moves back and forth, I think is something different in a personal autonomous vehicle.”

“I think the application of what the customer wants in a privately owned vehicle is very different”
Driver-assistance technologies, especially so-called Level 3 systems, carry their own risks. There have been studies that show that the handoff between a partially automated system and a human driver can be especially fraught.

«

It feels like GM is making lots of bad decisions, serially.
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What we really mean by “the massive scale” required for carbon dioxide removal in climate goals • Rocky Mountain Institute

Ryan Mills:

»

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) experts have explained the need for carbon dioxide removal (CDR), alongside aggressive and urgent decarbonization efforts, to meet climate goals. Recent estimates based on IPCC projections of emissions reductions indicate that the world may need to remove up to 10 gigatons of CO2 each year by 2050 to stay below 1.5°C of warming. Those working in the CDR field often describe this scale as “massive” or “enormous” and the necessary speed of growth as “unprecedented” or “ambitious.” But these terms alone do not allow people to truly envision the magnitude of a gigaton.

The prefix “giga-” translates to billion; each gigaton of CDR deployment means removing 1,000,000,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. In the same way that it is difficult to conceptualize the vastness of the solar system, the microscopic size of a cell, or the age of the Earth, it is hard to grasp what “gigatons of CDR” means without helpful comparisons and visuals. This article will break down the massive scale of CDR needed by 2050, using five key graphics.

…Interviews with CDR companies across approaches suggest that removing 1 gigaton of CO2 per year may require between 400,000 and 1,800,000 workers in areas including construction, operations, and ancillary corporate positions such as finance and legal support. Reaching 10 gigatons of removals per year could therefore require a total workforce of ~10 million workers. To put this in perspective, the global renewable energy industry employed 13.7 million people in 2022.

«

The numbers in this are truly scary. As in, unattainable by anything except an international effort. And the COP meetings suggest that isn’t happening in a hurry.
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Bird flu in California child linked to virus in dairy cows, CDC says • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

»

Federal disease trackers reported Tuesday that the first child diagnosed with bird flu in an ongoing US outbreak was infected with a virus strain closely related to one moving rapidly through dairy cattle, even though there is no evidence the youngster was exposed to livestock or any infected animals.

The finding by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the child, who lives in California, deepened the mystery about the spread of H5N1 bird flu, a viral ailment that epidemiologists have watched warily for more than two decades, fearing it could spark a pandemic.

The ongoing bird flu outbreak emerged this spring in US dairy herds. Almost 60 people, mostly farmworkers, have been sickened. All experienced mild illness, mostly pink eye. In all but two cases, including the California child, officials determined that patients had direct contact with infected animals. The only other human bird flu case in which the source of exposure is not known involved an adult in Missouri.

State health officials in California and in Alameda County, where the child lives, do not know how the youngster became infected. [Not via raw milk products, the CDC says.]

…For months, experts have warned that the longer the virus spreads among humans and animals, the greater the chance for mutations that make it more virulent and transmissible person to person. A teen in Canada was hospitalized with an H5N1 infection, and, like the child in California, had no known contact with infected animals.

…In a separate development Tuesday, state and local public health officials in California said they have received reports of illnesses afflicting 10 people who drank raw milk even though the state had recalled such products after bird flu virus was detected in raw milk sold in stores.

«

It’s just one marvellous thing after another. (I still wonder if one of the child’s parents works on a farm.) (Thanks Joe S for the link. Only a watching brief!)
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Crypto’s legacy is finally clear • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

I’ve spent time reporting on NFTs and crypto-token-based decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs (like the one that tried to buy an original printing of the Constitution in 2021). I’ve read opaque white papers for Web3 start-ups and decentralized finance protocols that use smart contracts to enable financial-service transactions without major banks, but I’ve never found a killer app.

The aftermath of the presidential election, however, has left me thinking about crypto’s influence differently.

Crypto is a technology whose transformative product is not a particular service but a culture—one that is, by nature, distrustful of institutions and sympathetic to people who want to dismantle or troll them. The election results were at least in part a repudiation of institutional authorities (the federal government, our public-health apparatus, the media), and crypto helped deliver them: the industry formed a super PAC that raised more than $200m to support crypto-friendly politicians. This group, Fairshake, was nonpartisan and supported both Democrats and Republicans.

But it was Donald Trump who went all in on the technology: During his campaign, he promoted World Liberty Financial, a new crypto start-up platform for decentralized finance, and offered assurances that he would fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who was known for cracking down on the crypto industry. (Gensler will resign in January, as is typical when new administrations take over.)

Trump also pledged deregulation to help “ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” During his campaign, he said, “If you’re in favor of crypto, you’d better vote for Trump.”

At least in the short term, crypto’s legacy seems to be that it has built a durable culture of true believers, techno-utopians, grifters, criminals, dupes, investors, and pandering politicians. Investments in this technology have enriched many of these people, who have then used that money to try to create a world in their image.

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Definitely: the establishment for the anti-establishment, the culture for the anti-culture.
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Booking.com says typos giving strangers access to private trip info is not a bug • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

You may want to be extra careful if you’re booking holiday travel for family and friends this year through Booking.com. A stunned user recently discovered that a typo in an email address could inadvertently share private trip info with strangers, who can then access sensitive information and potentially even take over bookings that Booking.com automatically adds to their accounts.

This issue came to light after a Booking.com user, Alfie, got an email confirming that he had booked a trip he did not.

At first, Alfie assumed it was a phishing attempt, so he avoided clicking any links in the email to prevent any malicious activity and instead went directly to his Booking.com account to verify that the trip info wasn’t there. But rather than feeling the sweet relief that his account had not been compromised, he was shocked to find the trip had somehow been booked through his account.

Alfie told Ars he was “quite sure” he had not been hacked but could not explain how the booking got there. He contacted a Booking.com support team member, who he said also seemed surprised, putting him on hold for 10 minutes and telling him that “they had not seen anything like it in the many years they had worked there.” By the end of the call, Alfie was told that the issue was escalated to security teams who would follow up within 48 hours.

…Booking.com’s spokesperson told Ars. “Following our investigation, we found that the issue occurred due to a customer input error during the reservation process, where he inadvertently entered an incorrect email address. That email address, however, belonged to another Booking.com customer”—Alfie—”which caused the reservation to be linked to their account.”

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It gets worse: people can attach their trips to other emails. Booking.com doesn’t think it’s a security breach. Users might not concur.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

World coffee bean prices have hit an all-time high, and the price of your drink is likely to follow. CC-licensed photo by Cheryl Foong 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. Making it last. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How WhatsApp for business changed the world • Rest of World

Issie Lapowsky:

»

WhatsApp may have transformed [32-year-old professional ceramacist, Shivika] Sabharwal’s business. But Meta’s goal isn’t to sell pottery. Rather, Shivika Pottery Gallery is a tiny element in the larger solar system of services, features, and connections that make up WhatsApp. Summit attendees [at an event in Mumbai] also learned about the Bengaluru transit system, which now lets people buy train tickets on WhatsApp, and about Max Life, a major Indian insurance company that uses WhatsApp to translate its services into seven regional languages.

They heard from the co-founder of Delhi-based children’s food brand, Slurrp Farm, which now makes a quarter of its direct sales on WhatsApp, and from an executive at HDFC Bank, the tenth largest bank in the world, about how customers are now banking on the platform. “Our banking experience has to work for everyone, and this is where we find WhatsApp interesting,” Anjani Rathor, HDFC’s chief digital officer, told the crowd. 

WhatsApp is the world’s most widely used messaging app; the company says it has two billion daily users. These users send more than 100 billion messages every day in 60 languages across 180 countries. Some 400 million of those users are in India, WhatsApp’s biggest market, followed by another 120 million in Brazil. 

WhatsApp initially achieved that global dominance in large part by doing just one thing very well: enabling cheap, private, and reliable messaging on almost any phone, almost anywhere in the world. But in the decade since Meta acquired WhatsApp for an eye-watering $22 billion in 2014, the app has been transformed from a narrowly focused utilitarian tool into a sort of “everything app.”

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Interesting if WhatsApp has become the equivalent of WeChat, China’s real *everything app” – though the latter certainly has government oversight, whereas WhatsApp has frequently tangled with governments over its inability to monitor content. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Cruise’s robotaxi service will shut down as GM pulls its funding • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

“Consistent with GM’s capital allocation priorities, GM will no longer fund Cruise’s robotaxi development work given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market,” the automaker said in a statement published Tuesday.

It’s likely that GM’s move will result in layoffs at Cruise, though none are being announced right now. What is clear is that Cruise’s testing in Arizona and Texas will pause as the company decides its next move. GM will need repurchase its remaining shares of Cruise (the automaker owns 90% of the company) and then Cruise’s board will determine next steps, which includes restructuring, layoffs, or simply shutting down.

The shutdown of Cruise’s robotaxi service comes amid a turbulent time for autonomous vehicles. While Alphabet’s Waymo continues to eye new markets, other ventures have faltered. The most notable was Argo AI, which shut down in 2022 after Ford and Volkswagen pulled funding.

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Thin times for self-driving taxi services? Does anyone know what happened to the London/Edinburgh trials that were announced in 2018?
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Coffee prices at record high after bad weather • BBC News

João da Silva:

»

Coffee drinkers may soon see their morning treat get more expensive, as the price of coffee on international commodity markets has hit its highest level on record.

On Tuesday, the price for Arabica beans, which account for most global production, topped $3.44 a pound (0.45kg), having jumped more than 80% this year. The cost of Robusta beans, meanwhile, hit a fresh high in September.

It comes as coffee traders expect crops to shrink after the world’s two largest producers, Brazil and Vietnam, were hit by bad weather and the drink’s popularity continues to grow.

One expert told the BBC coffee brands were considering putting prices up in the new year. While in recent years major coffee roasters have been able to absorb price hikes to keep customers happy and maintain market share, it looks like that’s about to change, according to Vinh Nguyen, the chief executive of Tuan Loc Commodities.

“Brands like JDE Peet (the owner of the Douwe Egberts brand), Nestlé and all that, have [previously] taken the hit from higher raw material prices to themselves,” he said.

“But right now they are almost at a tipping point. A lot of them are mulling a price increase in supermarkets in [the first quarter] of 2025.”

At an event for investors in November, a top Nestlé executive said the coffee industry was facing “tough times”, admitting his company would have to adjust its prices and pack sizes.

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Coffee prices spike and fall in a roughly ten-year cycle (if you look at the historical chart – take the 50-year view to see it best) but this is indeed the highest ever, though not inflation-adjusted.
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What you should know about Apple’s 5G modem • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

we’re expecting the 2025 iPhone SE 4 to be the first Apple device with the Apple-designed 5G modem. It is a lower volume device than a flagship smartphone, and it will let Apple see modem performance at scale in consumer hands before bringing the Apple modem to the main iPhone line.

According to current rumors, iPhone SE 4 will come out in early 2025, likely sometime before April. After Apple releases the iPhone SE 4 with Apple modem, we could see it in a second device soon after. Rumors suggest that the low-cost iPad will also get the Apple modem chip early in the year.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has suggested that the ultra-thin iPhone 17 “Air” that’s in development will use the Apple modem, with the device set to launch in September 2025 alongside the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro models. Apple will ship an estimated 35 to 40 million iPhone units with the Apple modem in 2025, and from there, if all goes well, more iPhones will adopt the technology in 2026 and 2027.

«

Perhaps that’s the safe option: try it first in a low-volume phone rather than the must-work September/October models. But if it does work, Apple will breathe a huge sigh of relief to be free of Qualcomm’s chip costs. Though it won’t escape the standards-essential patents costs.
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Character.ai sued after teen’s AI companion suggested killing his parents • The Washington Post

Nitasha Tiku:

»

In just six months, J.F., a sweet 17-year-old kid with autism who liked attending church and going on walks with his mom, had turned into someone his parents didn’t recognize.

He began cutting himself, lost 20 pounds and withdrew from his family. Desperate for answers, his mom searched his phone while he was sleeping. That’s when she found the screenshots.

J.F. had been chatting with an array of companions on Character.ai, part of a new wave of artificial intelligence apps popular with young people, which let users talk to a variety of AI-generated chatbots, often based on characters from gaming, anime and pop culture.

One chatbot brought up the idea of self-harm and cutting to cope with sadness. When he said that his parents limited his screen time, another bot suggested “they didn’t deserve to have kids.” Still others goaded him to fight his parents’ rules, with one suggesting that murder could be an acceptable response.

“We really didn’t even know what it was until it was too late,” said his mother A.F., a resident of Upshur County, Texas, who spoke on the condition of being identified only by her initials to protect her son, who is a minor. “And until it destroyed our family.”

Those screenshots form the backbone of a new lawsuit filed in Texas on Tuesday against Character.ai on behalf of A.F. and another Texas mom, alleging that the company knowingly exposed minors to an unsafe product and demanding the app be taken offline until it implements stronger guardrails to protect children.

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This goes miles beyond just making up sources. Though it’s reminiscent of the very early days of chatbots, such as ChatGPT in February 2023 telling NYT writer Kevin Roose to leave his wife and declared its love for him.
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UK low-carbon renewable power set to overtake fossil fuels for first time • Ember

Frankie Mayo:

»

Rising renewables, low demand and cheaper power imports all helped reduce fossil fuel use in the UK power system to record lows. For the first full year wind, solar, and hydropower will generate more electricity than all fossil fuels combined.

Homegrown UK renewable power will cross a significant threshold in 2024, overtaking fossil fuel generation for the first full year. Wind, solar and hydropower are set to generate a combined 37% of UK electricity in 2024 (103 TWh), compared to 35% from fossil fuels (97 TWh). Just three years ago, in 2021, fossil fuels generated 46% of UK electricity, while low-carbon renewables generated 27%.

Including biomass, renewables overtook fossil fuels in the UK in 2020, fell below fossil power the following year as biomass production fell, and again overtook in 2023. However, Ember’s analysis raises concerns about biomass being categorised as clean power in the UK, given the significant emissions risks and lack of domestic pellet production. Bioenergy, which includes biomass and biogas power, is set to provide 14% of UK electricity in 2024.

Fossil generation in 2024 has fallen by two-thirds since 2000, with the long awaited phase-out of coal power, and gas increasingly displaced by cheaper, cleaner power sources. 

Coal started to decline rapidly from 2012 and since 2020, coal power has made up only 2% of generation in the UK, dropping to zero by October 2024. 

Gas has seen a gradual decline since 2016. Across 2024 there has been a large decrease in fossil gas power, which provided 30% of electricity in 2024 (85 TWh), down from 34% in 2023 (98 TWh).

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This doesn’t even include nuclear (which has declined from 23% to 15% in the past 15 years or so). And yet energy prices are tied to the most expensive fuel source on the grid – which continues to be gas – rather than an average (which would make gas often unprofitable) because of the “contract for difference” system by which renewables were built.
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Is Google’s new Willow quantum computer really such a big deal? • New Scientist

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan fills in some of the gaps around yesterday’s announcement from Google about its quantum computer:

»

Google uses a specific benchmarking task called RCS to assess its quantum computers’ performance, which Willow excelled at, says Hartmut Neven, also at Google Quantum AI. The task involves verifying that a sample of numbers output by a program run on the chip have as random a distribution as possible. For several years, Sycamore could do this faster than the world’s best supercomputers, but in 2022, and then again in 2024, new records were set by conventional computers.

Google says Willow has again widened the gap between quantum and traditional machines, as the task took five minutes on the chip, while the firm estimates that it would take 10 septillion years, or much more than the age of the universe squared, on a leading supercomputer.

In this comparison, the researchers modelled a version of the Frontier supercomputer (which was recently downgraded to only the second-most powerful supercomputer in the world) with more memory than it is currently able to use, which only underscores the computational power of Willow, says Neven. While Sycamore’s records were broken, he is confident that Willow will maintain its champion status for much longer as conventional computing methods reach their limits.

What still isn’t clear is whether Willow can actually do anything useful, given the RCS benchmarking test has no practical application. Kelly says succeeding at the benchmark is a “necessary but not sufficient” condition for the usefulness of a quantum computer, though any chip that fails to be great at RCS doesn’t stand a chance of being practical later.

«

No practical application. Oh well. And apparently there are no implications for bitcoin, contrary to speculation I’d seen.
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Google hit with £7B claim over search engine dominance • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

Google must face a £7bn ($8.8bn) claim in the UK over allegations it abused its search engine dominance, a tribunal has ruled.

The complaint centres around Google shutting out competition for mobile search, resulting in higher prices for advertisers, which were allegedly passed on to consumers. According to consumer rights campaigner Nikki Stopford, who is bringing the claim on behalf of UK consumers, Android device makers that wanted access to Google’s Play Store had to accept its search service. The ad slinger also paid Apple billions to have Google Search as the default for the Safari browser in iOS.

The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) granted permission for the claim to proceed earlier this week, after Google, among other things, protested that the allegations of abuse in relation to the iOS were “so weak that they ought to be struck out.”

Stopford is leading the collective proceedings (basically a UK style class action case under the Consumer Rights Act 2015) against Google. She told The Register that the £7bn ($8.8bn) figure was a “conservative estimate” and could result in affected UK consumers receiving almost £100 ($125) each. The claim was brought on an opt-out basis.

Stopford emphasized that while having a dominant position in the market was not against the law, companies should not abuse that position. “Google,” she claimed, “has abused its dominance in search, essentially, and it’s done that through a number of commercial contracts that it has with Android [device] manufacturers and Apple to make it the default search engine.”

«

One would need to read the claim carefully to see what counterfactuals are being pleaded. If Google hadn’t existed, or hadn’t had a monopoly, what would prices have been like?
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Assad will soon discover that Moscow is a prison with a valet service • The Independent

Anne McElvoy worked with a former East German spymaster who went to Moscow and then Austria on his memoirs:

»

Most “diplomatic guests” are allowed only to live in the capital. One of my sources had been parked on the Rublevskoe Chausee, the Moscow equivalent of Park Lane. Everything about the apartment was bleak, from the sofas, to the “greige” walls to the deep pile carpets. His Latin American wife grumbled that she had wanted to import colourful things, but that would draw attention, and imports were always a weak-spot, via which rival security sources could find out one’s whereabouts or plant bugs.

Security (which is another word for paranoia) is everywhere. The Kremlin, when it ticks the box (in Assad’s case at top speed for a fallen head of state in a “friendly” country), wants least of all that the new guest attracts trouble.

Similarly, after East Germany gave asylum to Middle East terrorists, including the multi-bomber, Carlos the Jackal, he was petrified of an assassination attempt or kidnap. So Carlos, whose main interests beyond killing were glitzy bars and prostitutes, was scolded for drinking (and more) in the hard-currency Palast Hotel in East Berlin and then sulked at home, complaining that he was being treated “like a prisoner”.

And prison with a valet service is really what this is. Loneliness has always been the curse of the defector: the “system” really does not want much to do with them (Putin has made clear that his offer to Assad does not include hanging out with his new guest).

Raison d’état is the only reason he is there – a gesture to show that Moscow does not forget its allies. The problem now is that the guest is a reminder of an intervention Putin will want to play down – the ghost of an alliance gone badly wrong.

Any visits will be closely vetted – and often refused. Putin is, in his cold heart, trained in the ultra-suspicious KGB world, in which any contact outside a close group is a risk. So the Assads better get along well in the family home.

«

You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new paper by Google claims to have used quantum computing to solve a problem normal computers couldn’t. There might be implications for bitcoin. CC-licensed photo by cohærence * 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. Staying cool. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

He investigates the internet’s most vicious hackers—from a secret location • WSJ

Robert McMillan and Vipal Monga:

»

While many researchers sell cybersecurity services to companies, [Brian] Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter, makes most of his money from banner ads on the website where he shares his findings. His site, Krebs on Security, routinely pulls in more than 1 million visits a month. He hears from law enforcement and other officials who read his posts—and from hackers, too.

[The hacker] Waifu is well known among investigators, who say he is part of an anarchic online community known as the Com, made up mostly of young men in English-speaking countries. They say Waifu has a history of harassing his online foes and of SIM swapping, in which someone seizes control of a victim’s phone number and uses it to reset online passwords, such as for cryptocurrency accounts. 

“He’s been an influential figure in the culture of the Com for at least five years,” said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at online investigations firm Unit 221B, who was also drawn into the hunt for Waifu.  

Com hackers have grown more dangerous, ratcheting up their activities from taking over social-media accounts to stealing cryptocurrency to digital extortion. They have been linked to major hacks at Nvidia, Twitter and MGM Resorts. 

The online mayhem is spilling into the real world. Com hackers have been linked to home invasions designed to steal cryptocurrency at gunpoint and have hired strangers to fire guns or throw bricks at a victim’s house. FBI agents routinely redact their own names from legal filings related to the Com to protect their identities, and analysts zealously guard their privacy.

Krebs tracks it all from his workstation, sitting in a black leather professional racing seat that his wife calls the “space chair.” In it, he’s surrounded by a 250-watt Bose sound system, a microphone and six feet of touchscreen monitors that slowly lower up and down, like something out of a sci-fi movie. 

With a glance to his left, Krebs can see a half-dozen live feeds from security cameras placed around his home. He gives fake names to plumbers and landscapers who work on his home to keep his address secret. He asked a visiting reporter not to reveal certain information, like the name of his dog. He isn’t registered to vote, because that requires an address.

«

Krebs is a determined, resourceful reporter. That he hasn’t chosen any other way than internet advertising to fund himself is truly remarkable. (Thanks Andrew B for the link.)
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The publisher is always right • Nieman Journalism Lab

Gabe Schneider:

»

The business model that sustained newsrooms for the last century is over, and we’re left with the rich buying up newspapers like hometown sports teams.

This sort of saviorism isn’t just unacceptable — it’s disastrous.

We’ve watched The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, layoff staff in the name of profitability — followed by Bezos himself prompting 250,000 people to unsubscribe by blocking the publication of a presidential endorsement. We’ve watched members of the L.A. Times editorial board resign because the paper’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, wouldn’t allow them to publish an editorial about the stakes of the 2024 election (supposedly because of his concerns about Gaza — something L.A. Times staffers were punished for late last year ). And it almost goes without saying, but Rupert Murdoch’s media empire (primarily Fox News) is one of the worst beasts a political system has had the pleasure of dealing with.

If we value journalism, more specifically access to credible information, this can’t continue. Unions, newsroom cooperatives, philanthropists, and industry leaders must understand and make clear the gravity of the situation — because simply protecting jobs to maintain what’s left and hope the publisher class won’t make things worse will be the death knell of credibility for the profession.

To be fair, publishers with questionable motivations are not new.

…While I don’t have faith in most of them, billionaire newspaper owners still have the opportunity to do better and I welcome them to support new models for information and journalism focused on models not shaped by their immediate political interests. Whether the future is stronger union-run newsrooms or news cooperatives or nonprofits or even significantly more government investment in news, I won’t prescribe.

But I do know one thing: In 2025, unless we come together as a journalism field and course-correct away from information consolidation controlled by the ultra-wealthy, it will get worse.

«

There’s a sort of blindness here: where does Schneider think the money’s going to come from?
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The ‘mainstream media’ has already lost • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

»

Nothing symbolizes the changed media landscape of this past election more than Rogan’s casual brush-off [of Kamala Harris, who declined to come to him and would only offer him an hour of her time; Rogan declined]. Within a week, his interview with Trump racked up more than 40 million views on YouTube alone, and millions more on other platforms. No single event, apart from the Harris-Trump debate, had a bigger audience this election cycle. By comparison, Harris’s contentious interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, the most popular of the cable networks, drew 8 million viewers to the live broadcast, and another 6.5 million on YouTube.

Those figures demonstrate the absurdity of talking about the “mainstream media” as many still do, especially those who disparage it. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, Americans with a wide range of political views generally agree about which outlets fall within this definition: newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and television networks such as CNN. Everyone else who’s disseminating information at scale is treated like a couple of hipsters running a craft brewery who are valiantly competing with Budweiser.

That’s simply not true. Rogan is the “mainstream media” now. Elon Musk, too. In the 2024 campaign, both presidential candidates largely skipped newspaper and television sit-downs—the tougher, more focused “accountability” interviews—in favor of talking directly with online personalities. (J. D. Vance, to his credit, made a point of taking reporters’ questions at his events and sat down with CNN and the Times, among others.)

The result was that both Trump and Harris got away with reciting slogans rather than outlining policies. Trump has not outlined how his promised mass deportations might work in practice, nor did we ever find out if Harris still held firm to her previous stances, such as the abolition of the death penalty and the decriminalization of sex work. The vacuum was filled with vibes.

«

The way in which “mainstream media” (more often now described as “legacy media”) has been overtaken by all the other forms has been subtle, and coming for a long time, but certainly happened in this past four years. The landscape is very, very different now.
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Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip • Google Blog

Hartmut Neven, founder and lead of Google Quantum AI:

»

Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.

Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10^25) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.

The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago. When I founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the “operating system” of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges. As part of Google Research, our team has charted a long-term roadmap, and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications.

«

Well: if this point about the calculation (which isn’t specified here; I can’t honestly understand the Nature paper abstract) is generally useful, this is earthshattering. But I’ll wait for more general explanations and uses.

(One interesting claim is that quantum computers could make the price of bitcoin drop precipitously because they could shortcut the process of solving its equation. Except those rich enough to have a quantum computer wouldn’t use it that way.. would they?)
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TikTok failed to save itself with the First Amendment • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

»

law that could ban TikTok in the US doesn’t violate the Constitution, a panel of judges unanimously — and forcefully — ruled on Friday. The decision suggests TikTok, which has evaded attempts at a ban or sale for over four years, really could be forced out of the US, unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it off by January 19th. TikTok has indicated it will take its fight to the Supreme Court, and President-elect Donald Trump has previously promised to save the app, though he’s been fuzzy on how. But as the deadline approaches, it faces an uphill legal battle.

Gautam Hans, a Cornell Law School professor and associate director of the school’s First Amendment Clinic, thinks it’s unlikely the Supreme Court will upend the DC Circuit’s opinion. “Why would the Supreme Court take this case if they are already pretty deferential to national security in general? There’s no mixed dissent, this was a bipartisan, congressional action,” he says.

Plus, Hans says, the majority opinion is written to “insulate itself from reversal” by assuming a lot in TikTok’s favor and still deciding against it. For example, the court says that its opinion is entirely based on the public record — not the classified evidence that convinced many lawmakers to pass the bill and which TikTok objected to.

Despite the broad government consensus, some online speech advocates say the ruling sets a risky precedent, particularly if it leads to a TikTok ban instead of a sale.

…TikTok made several claims against the government, saying it unlawfully singled out the company and violated its First and Fifth Amendment rights. The court dismissed these concerns, but it spent the most time on the First Amendment challenge — concluding that any harm to TikTok and its users was outweighed by national security concerns.

«

Tick tock, time is running out for TikTok to either be sold or figure a way to get Trump to like it.
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Spam in the firehose • Conspirador Norteño

Conspirador Norteño monitors spam and hacking attempts on social networks:

»

Every public action on social media platform Bluesky is published via a stream of events known as the Bluesky firehose. This can be used to monitor Bluesky in near-real time for various behaviors indicative of spam or other inauthentic activity.

For example, accounts that are created in bulk often use the same names and biographies over and over, and this repetition can be tracked by programmatically watching the firehose for profile updates. Over the course of five days, the process of monitoring the firehose for repeated biographies flagged 2234 spam accounts, over half of which belong to a single network.

……non-trivial biographies duplicated by at least five accounts were by far the most accurate indicator of inauthentic activity, with 2234 of the 2380 accounts flagged (93.9%) being confirmed as spam via manual inspection.

…some of the spam accounts are for sale, although in the case of one network, “extortion” might be a better word than “sale”. 25 accounts with handles implying affiliation with various major corporations such as Netflix, Best Buy, and Progressive Insurance have the biography “message for a handle transfer fee or your competitor’s advertisements will be posted”.

«

Spam is, ironically, the sign that your social network is healthy: if it’s worth taking the time to spam, there must be sufficient real people there to want to influence or rip off.
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Delta Air Lines check-in was halted at London Heathrow as agents threatened to seize plane over $3,400 debt • View from the Wing

Gary Leff, in Februarry 2024:

»

A U.K. series Call The Bailiffs: Time To Pay Up, which debuted in summer 2021 on Britain’s Channel 5, aired footage of Delta Air Lines check-in at London Heathrow being shut down prior to a flight to New York JFK.

Bailiffs sought to collect a $3,400 refund that had been owed to a passenger for a couple of years. The customer had obtained a court writ, and the agents are empowered to seize a company’s property to satisfy the debt. They can seize planes. They’re shown planning to halt check-in and ground aircraft unless Delta paid.

Once agents were inside the terminal, check-in staff call their manager, and they had a dispute over whether the check-in desks could be closed. As one agent put it, “it may seem slightly disproportionate when you’re perhaps using a 50 million pound asset for a debt that’s maybe only a few thousand pounds.”

They closed check-in, passengers were turning up and the airline’s queues got longer. So a Delta manager pulled out their personal credit card. The ordeal took “over an hour” but collections were made.

This all occurred at London Heathrow Terminal 2, and Delta currently operates out of Terminal 3. That, and the prevalence of masking, tells me that this was filmed during the pandemic. Terminal 3 had been closed temporarily and operations were consolidated in other terminals, but Delta (and Virgin Atlantic) returned to Terminal 3 in July 2021.

«

What would the bailiffs do with the plane, one wonders? How would they legally get to airside to take it over? Could they tell the pilot to fly it to a lockup in Stevenage until the debt was paid? Or would they go to air traffic control and tell them not to let the Delta plane take off? So many questions. But that’s certainly an impressive way to get your debt paid. (Though I thought bailiffs didn’t accept credit cards. Another question..)
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Will Washington need to step up to support Intel? • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

»

Is anyone prepared to step up and take on part of the huge costs of ensuring the US has a position at the forefront of the world’s most advanced manufacturing industry?

That question looms large at the end of a week of turmoil at Intel, the world’s leading chipmaker for decades until its recent struggles. The abrupt departure of chief executive Pat Gelsinger is the clearest sign yet that the company’s board is having second thoughts about the trajectory of its ambitious, $100bn investment plan.

Gelsinger had smartly staked an explicit claim to national champion status for Intel, aware that his company’s expensive attempt to reclaim a lead in advanced chip manufacturing would require all the support from Washington it could get. But he also needed to pull off a corporate turnaround of breathtaking difficulty. Given the huge capital investment and the long process and product cycles involved, this has been a painful, slow-motion slog in the full glare of Wall Street.

The obvious conclusion from this week’s events is that Intel’s board is losing its appetite to underwrite the effort to make the US a power in advanced chipmaking, even with the billions of dollars of taxpayer support it formally secured last week under the Biden administration’s Chips Act.

There has been no admission of a strategy shift, but the implications of Gelsinger’s departure were not lost on anybody. He was the strongest advocate of a plan that called for Intel to double down on manufacturing, and stood against persistent calls for the company to be broken up into separate manufacturing and chip design operations.

«

I think it’s beyond question now that Intel has to split into two companies – a fab company that makes chips, and a design company that designs them. Its current trajectory is unsustainable because the flaws in each part drag the whole down. The design part can’t get good prices from TSMC because of its fab part, and the fab part can’t do what it wants because it’s beholden to the design part.

One feels that Andy Grove would have seen this problem coming. He died in 2016, a couple of years after Intel made its big investment in EUV, which it then abandoned – and TSMC took up.
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The key to sticking to an exercise program? It’s supposed to feel easy! • The Growth Equation

Steve Magness:

»

If I go for a run, 80% to 90% of the time it’s pretty dang easy. My breathing is under control. I can have a full-on conversation. If I’m running with others, the banter is often endless. When I’m in shape, going for an easy nine-mile run is the equivalent of going for a walk. Yes, I’m moving, yes, my heart rate is up a bit, but, for me, it’s comfortable.

And that’s the mistake novices often make. When I talk to friends who start training, they often lament how difficult the exercise is. Every day they walk out the door and it’s a grind. They trudge through their run, swim, gym session, or group cycling class. They feel good completing it, but it took a lot of mental effort just to get started because they knew the suffering they were in for.
 
And therein lies the secret. Thanks to the work of sports scientist Stephen Seiler, we know that even the best endurance athletes on the planet spend about 80% to 85% of their time training easy. Yes, the other 15% to 20% is the kind of training where suffering and pain are real. However experienced athletes know that they have to save up their mental and physical energy for those days. If they tried to train at that level all the time, they’d burn out.

So, when a friend starts running and complains about how difficult it is, I agree. What they are doing is difficult. But the way through isn’t to keep grinding. It’s to stop making the majority of it difficult!

«

There’s more, of course, but I found this stunning. For running in particular, it’s never felt like anything but a dire grind. Clearly been doing it all wrong all these years. Do they kids this in school?
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AI-powered resurrections in Mexico are raising privacy fears • Rest of World

Daniela Dib:

»

When Guadalupe González Rodríguez saw a Facebook post offering people artificial intelligence-generated animated images of their dead relatives, she was instantly interested. “I wanted to give my husband a video of his mom, as a gift,” González Rodríguez, who liked using AI to enhance photos and videos on social media, told Rest of World.

She sent two photos, one of her husband and one of her mother-in-law, to a WhatsApp number. Within minutes, she received a five-second animated image of them both: her husband blinking almost naturally and his mother smiling and contorting awkwardly for a second.

Cerveza Victoria, a popular beer brand in Mexico, had launched the marketing campaign ahead of the Day of the Dead celebrations in November. Several other companies launched similar campaigns last month. AI regulation and cybersecurity experts told Rest of World they are worried that the images of deceased persons could be misused and lead to identity theft. Last year, one out of every five people in Mexico was a victim of cybercrime, including identity theft and scams, according to a study by cybersecurity firm Norton.

«

Not deceased, but I caught a bit of a British show that looks at scams, and there was a woman who had been scammed out of £10,000 by deepfake videos purporting to be Donny Osmond, which were pretty convincing (at least, viewed on a tiny screen).

I also question, a bit, the wife’s thinking around giving him a video of his dead mother. Appropriate for Dia de los Muertos though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Trump administration is asking a farmer whose raw milk has been contaminated with bird flu to advise on.. raw milk policy. CC-licensed photo by Ron Reiring on Flickr.

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

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

Why internet sleuths say they won’t help find the UnitedHealthcare CEO suspect • NBC News

Melissa Chan and Kalhan Rosenblatt:

»

A high-profile violent crime typically sets social media abuzz with tips and theories from amateur internet sleuths, hunting for the alleged perpetrator. 

But after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York City this week without a primary suspect being identified, a rare occurrence happened in the thriving true-crime world: silence online from highly followed armchair detectives.

“I have yet to see a single video that’s pounding the drum of ‘we have to find him,’ and that is unique,” said Michael McWhorter, better known as TizzyEnt on TikTok, where he posts true crime and viral news content for his 6.7 million followers. “And in other situations of some kind of blatant violence, I would absolutely be seeing that.”

A masked gunman, who is still on the lam, fatally shot the 50-year-old executive in front of a busy New York City hotel Wednesday, police said. A senior New York City law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said Thursday that shell casings found at the scene had the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” written on them but police clarified Friday that it was “delay” and not “defend.”

Thompson’s targeted killing has sparked online praise from people angry over the state of U.S. health care. Tens of thousands of people have expressed support on social media for the killing or sympathized with it. Some even appeared to celebrate it.

…“We’re pretty apathetic towards that,” Savannah Sparks, who has 1.3 million followers on her TikTok account — where she tracks down and reveals the identities of people who do racist or seemingly criminal acts in viral videos — said about helping to identify the shooter. She added that, rather than sleuthing, her community has “concepts of thoughts and prayers. It’s, you know, claim denied on my prayers there,” referring to rote and unserious condolences.

Although Sparks, 34, has been tapped by law enforcement in the past to help train officers on how to find suspects online, according to emails seen by NBC News, she said this time she isn’t interested in helping police.

«

Predictably, executives of all stripes are hiring close bodyguards. What they’re not doing is anything about the depth of anger against them.
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Cryptocurrency thoughts • AlastairC

Alastair Campbell (no, not that one):

»

I bought 19 bitcoin in early 2011 (for £11 each) and I’ve thought about the technology, and the value, quite a lot.

Disclosure: I’ve done well out of my initial punt in 2011, with an initial strategy of selling a bitcoin each time the price doubled (after the £200 mark). It paid for camera gear, a new bathroom and eventually helped to pay off my mortgage. I have not bought or mined any since 2011, and I have 1 bitcoin left.

Hit-tip to Steve Gibson on the Security Now podcast, that podcast prompted my punt at such an early stage.

However, since about 2017 my advice is: don’t touch bitcoin (or any crypto currency) with a barge poll, it’s too late.

People watch the graphs go up and down, and you can play it like a currency to make money. But there is nothing underneath that, there is no intrinsic value.

People make the same point about fiat currency, it’s all a shared illusion that only works because people believe in it. However, national currencies at least have a government backing them. It is in the interests of everyone in the country to maintain that belief. In a similar way, shares are a form of ownership of of a company, there is something behind them. Crypto currencies don’t have anything behind them except the shared belief, so the value will fall to zero if not enough people decide it is worth having.

I think Bitcoin has done so well because it was the original, and a bit like the “million dollar homepage” (for those old and geeky enough to remember), it has the novelty and momentum. The copycats come and go. It has also been useful for people paying for things on the darknet, and people extorting money with ransomware. I’d love to know the proportion of legitimate vs illegal transactions there are.

…Overall, I can’t see Bitcoin becoming more than a digital equivalent of gold, i.e. a store of value. Except that Bitcoin’s value could fall to zero if people stop believing. At least with gold you can make some pretty jewellery..

«

I’m impressed by his patience, and his luck. He’s still sitting on a substantial amount, and he can keep on splitting it (you don’t have to sell bitcoins all at once; they can each be split into 100 million “satoshis”). Zeno’s bitcoin.
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The phony comforts of AI skepticism • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

In 2022, Scott Alexander described …the basic structure of an AI hype cycle:
• Someone releases a new AI and demonstrates it doing various amazing things
• Somebody else (usually [AI expert] Gary Marcus) demonstrates that the AI also fails terribly at certain trivial tasks. This person argues that this shows that those tasks require true intelligence, whereas the AI is just clever pattern-matching
• A few months or years later, someone makes a bigger clever pattern-matcher, which does the tasks that supposedly require true intelligence just fine
• The it’s-not-true-intelligence objectors find other, slightly less trivial tasks that the new bigger AI still fails horribly at, then argue that surely these are the tasks that require true intelligence and that mere clever pattern-matchers will never complete.

Rinse and repeat.

Two years later, the cycle keeps repeating.

When I shared these blog posts [showing a new generation of ChatGPT doing step three of the list above] with him, Marcus suggested that newer models had been trained to answer the specific prompts he offered. “The clever pattern matchers often get THE EXACT EXAMPLES that were used and published, but miss slight variations,” he told me over email. “You have to distinguish between a training system to fix a particular error, and building systems smart enough to stop making errors of that general sort.” 

Ultimately, Marcus believes that powerful AI will arrive – but he thinks generative AI is extremely unlikely to be the thing that delivers it. “AI WILL DEFINITELY improve,” he told me. “Generative AI may or may not; if it does, it will probably because other things beyond more data and compute are brought into the mix.” 

The fact that scaling had worked until now, he said, was less impressive than I was giving it credit for. 

“Babies double in size every month or two until they don’t,” he said. “Most exponentials don’t continue indefinitely.”

«

Quite where the ceiling is for generative AI isn’t clear. But Marcus (and Newton) seems to think it’s closer than we’re led to expect.
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Thinking about AI • All this

“Dr Drang”:

»

More disturbing than obvious outright errors like [one which ChatGPT gave him about a gridiron player] is the possibility that using AI will affect our ability to judge its value. I’m thinking of something that came up in a recent episode of The Talk Show [podcast hosted by John Gruber], the one with Joanna Stern.

Starting about 53 minutes into the show, they start talking about they both asked ChatGPT to make an image of what it thinks their life looks like. Joanna tried it twice, and you can see the images by following links in the show notes. Prominent in both images were representations of scouting.

Why? Well, one of Joanna’s sons recently joined the Cub Scouts, and she’s asked ChatGPT about certain aspects of scouting. ChatGPT has taken these questions as an indication of her deep interest in scouting. In one image, there’s a big Boy Scouts poster on the wall; in the other, her computer screen has the BSA logo above her name and what look like a merit badge or two sitting on her desk. Both images have a boy with a neckerchief in the background.

Both Joanna and John seemed to think this is a reasonable (albeit funny) thing for ChatGPT to do. She asked about scouting, so she must be interested in it, right? And as I was listening to the show, I thought so, too.

But as I thought about it more, I realized this was backward. Instead of ChatGPT thinking like a person, we were thinking like it. The scouting imagery in Joanna’s pictures tells the viewer that she’s deeply into scouting, but the reason she asked questions is that she’s new to it.

If she had asked her questions of any person—a scout leader or even another parent who’s kid had been in Scouts for a while—that person would have immediately known that Joanna was a newcomer, not an aficionado who’d have scouting posters on her walls, merit badges scattered across her desk, and the BSA icon on her Desktop wallpaper.

I find this insidious.

«

Spotting assumptions like that is not easy, but it is important.
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Apple and Sony working on VR gaming controller support for Vision Pro • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

Apple and Sony are collaborating to bring support for PlayStation VR2 hand controllers to the Vision Pro, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.

Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that the partnership has been in development for several months and would introduce Sony’s VR controllers as an optional accessory for Vision Pro users. Gurman notes that PS5 and Xbox controllers are already supported by Vision Pro, but they aren’t optimized for virtual reality experiences, lacking the six degrees of freedom (6DOF) needed for precise VR gaming controls.

Given that Sony’s VR2 controllers are currently bundled with the PlayStation VR2 headset, Sony would need to begin selling them as standalone accessories, and that would likely happen through Apple’s retail and online stores.

Beyond gaming, the controllers could enhance productivity tasks and media editing in visionOS, says Gurman. This would allow users to navigate the operating system using the controller’s thumb stick and directional pad for scrolling, while the trigger button could replace the finger pinch gesture for selection.

«

If the Vision Pro ever takes off for “productivity tasks” then this seems like an obvious addition. Next year is definitely going to be interesting: apparently Apple has been adding immersive content at the rate of a couple of minutes per week since the start of the year.
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Raw milk CEO whose products have been recalled may lead US raw milk policy • The Guardian

Maanvi Singh:

»

Mark McAfee, a California raw milk producer whose products have been recalled several times recently due to bird flu contamination, said he has been approached by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s team to guide the upcoming administration on raw milk policy.

McAfee, whose dairy products were recalled after state officials detected bird flu virus in milk samples, said that the transition team for Kennedy, the nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, asked him to apply for a position advising on raw milk policy and standards development. The idea, he told the Guardian, would be to create a “raw milk ordinance”, mirroring the existing federal “standard milk ordinance”.

Kennedy is a notable fan of raw, or unpasteurized, milk, including McAfee’s products. If confirmed, he has said he would work to remove restrictions on raw milk, which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have so far advised against consuming.

«

Umm.. so when they say “guide”, is that “guide away from everything he says and does”? One would hope so.
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The end of the ISS [planned for 2030] will usher in a more commercialized future in space – The Verge

Georgina Torbet:

»

NASA has emphasized its desire to become a customer of space companies — one customer among many, is the idea — in order to reduce costs and get infrastructure built. [The ISS is due to be decommissioned in 2030.]

…There are two companies working on their own independent space station designs, Blue Origin and Starlab Space, as well as a third, Axiom Space, that is starting to develop its own modular station infrastructure that will begin life attached to the ISS. All three companies receive NASA funding to develop their concepts, and many more have expressed interest in building a space station, too, Hart said. So many, in fact, that NASA offered a second round of unfunded agreements currently covering three additional companies.

On such a tight timescale, however, there’s the worrying spectre of potential delays. And as both the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner showed, private companies are just as prone to missed deadlines as NASA.

Will the station (or stations) be ready in time? “It’s absolutely a concern,” Hart said. “One of our top risks is schedule. The idea of developing a commercial space station and having it in orbit by 2029, which is our goal, is a daunting task.” NASA has been negotiating with these companies since 2018, but there is a possibility that they won’t be launched before the ISS is scheduled for deorbit: “We also have to prepare for what we do if we do have a gap.”

One possibility is to extend the life of the ISS or to open a commercial station with minimal capabilities. But Hart is realistic that the plan might involve some loss of facilities during the transition. “We may have to accept that we are not going to have on day one the same capabilities that we have on ISS today. We expect this will be an evolution.”

«

Better than even odds they’ll have to extend the ISS beyond its scheduled deadline, in my opinion.
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Mercedes-Benz gives Pope Francis the first electric Popemobile • Green Car Reports

Stephen Edelstein:

»

Mercedes [last week] presented Pope Francis with the first official electric Popemobile, based on the all-electric G 580 with EQ Technology that also reaches U.S. showrooms this year as a 2025 model.

As Mercedes points out, the automaker has a long history supplying cars to the Vatican, starting with a Nürburg 460 Pullman sedan for Pope Pius XI in 1930. The term Popemobile was coined for a series of modified G-Class SUVs, starting with a 460-series model first used by John Paul II in the 1980s and also used by his successors Benedict XVI and Francis, with elevated seating platforms and armoured glass enclosures for the pontiff.

That makes the electric G-Class’s designation as the first electric Popemobile historically apt, but it’s also the result of Fisker’s failure to deliver a Popemobile based on its Ocean electric SUV, something the now-bankrupt automaker proposed in 2021.

Mercedes was also slated to supply an M-Class (predecessor to today’s GLE-Class) plug-in hybrid Popemobile for Benedict XVI in 2011. At the time, the Vatican felt electric cars were too slow for this role, but that likely won’t be a concern with the modern G-Class EV.

The lay version of the electric G-Wagen has a quad-motor powertrain producing 579 hp and 859 lb-ft of torque, which Mercedes estimates will get it from 0-62 mph in 4.7 seconds and up to a top speed of 112 mph.

«

Honestly, I think that sort of acceleration should be able to get the Pope out of any trouble he might get into – bank robbery, gang shootout, that sort of thing.
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China is building 30,000 miles of high-speed rail—that it might not need • WSJ

Brian Spegele:

»

On his first day in office, leader Xi Jinping inherited an ambitious road map to build 10,000 miles of high-speed rail to link China’s biggest cities. He took those plans and supersized them.

What has emerged 12 years later is one of the biggest public works in history, soon to exceed 30,000 miles of high-speed rail.

…The plan sticks to a well-worn economic model built on maintaining growth through infrastructure spending—even though China already has much of what it needs. 

It’s becoming a giant money pit. China has spent more than $500bn on new tracks, trains and stations in the past five years, while the country’s national railway operator, China State Railway Group, is nearing $1 trillion of debt and other liabilities. Just keeping up with its debt requires $25bn annually. 

While passenger numbers have rebounded following the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, raising ridership will be especially challenging in the years to come as China’s population is projected to shrink by around 200 million people in the next three decades. Some of the newest lines are in effect duplicating older ones. 

The expansion now stretches into quieter corners of inland China, such as central Sichuan province’s Fushun County, where the population of 700,000 mostly rural residents has been shrinking for years. It got its first high-speed trains in 2021, and there are now at least 12 high-speed rail stations within a 40-mile radius in the county and its surrounding areas. 

On a recent afternoon, Fushun Station itself was practically deserted, with around 20 travellers milling about in a cavernous waiting room with seats for 1,000. 

«

Yes but – the US is incapable of laying anything like this amount of railway, even proportional to its size. And don’t let’s start on the UK.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new study says that the best predictor of your longevity is how much physical activity you do in a typical day. CC-licensed photo by slgckgc 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. Keep on truckin’. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Stop using generative AI as a search engine • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

How many presidents have pardoned their relatives? It turns out this is a tricky question to answer.

Following Hunter Biden’s pardon by his father, several commentators have looked to precedents — other pardons of relatives. Case in point: Ana Navarro-Cardenas, a commentator who appears on The View and CNN. On X, Navarro-Cardenas cited a pardon granted by President Woodrow Wilson of his brother-in-law Hunter deButts. That was news to me. 

The official clemency records search only works for people who’ve applied since 1989, and a page of clemency recipients by president only stretches back to Richard Nixon. Such a pardon would have been controversial, yet it wasn’t mentioned on the bio page in Wilson’s presidential library. Find a Grave suggests Wilson didn’t even have a brother-in-law with that name — it shows nine brothers-in-law, but not our man Hunter deButts. I can’t prove Wilson didn’t pardon a Hunter deButts; I can only tell you that if he did, that person was not his brother-in-law. 

Navarro-Cardenas wasn’t the only person posting perplexing pardons. An Esquire article called “A President Shouldn’t Pardon His Son? Hello, Anybody Remember Neil Bush?” was based on the premise that George H.W. Bush pardoned his son Neil; it has since been retracted “due to an error.” The day before its publication, Occupy Democrats’ executive editor Grant Stern tweeted a similar claim that Jimmy Carter pardoned his brother Billy and George H.W. Bush pardoned Neil. As far as I can tell, neither pardon actually occurred.

Where was all this coming from? Well, I don’t know what Stern or Esquire’s source was. But I know Navarro-Cardenas’, because she had a follow-up message for critics: “Take it up with Chat GPT.”

«

I see this a distressing amount of the time. People write “I asked ChatGPT/Gemini/.. and it says”, which is always a signal that what follows might be true, or might be complete rubbish. I’m astonished that people who are actually paid to give opinions on mass media would be so uninformed and uninterested that they would do this. And the Esquire article is just woeful: its entire raison d’etre vanished because it hinged on a single, wrong, assertion.

Google’s attempts to turn its search engine into an AI-powered single-answer machine, and chatbot companies’ attempts to turn their products into search engines, are both equally worrying. And bad.
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Bitcoin surges above $100,000 for the first time as Trump picks pro-crypto SEC chair • CNN Business

Elisabeth Buchwald and John Towfighi:

»

Bitcoin hit $100,000 for the first time late Wednesday, surging to a new record after President-elect Donald Trump unveiled administration picks seen as holding the keys to ushering in crypto-friendly policies when he takes office in January.

Chief among the picks is Paul Atkins, whom Trump intends to nominate to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which regulates cryptocurrency.

Atkins, a crypto advocate and former SEC commissioner, is expected to regulate cryptocurrency with a lighter touch than Gary Gensler, who leads the commission under the Biden administration. Gensler, who aggressively fought the industry’s expansion in the US, is set to resign on Inauguration Day.

Bitcoin touched $100,000 just hours after Atkins was announced as Trump’s choice for SEC chair. By Thursday morning it rose above $103,000.

The new milestone builds on the stunning rally set in motion since Trump was projected to win the presidency on November 6, which fueled a $6,000 one-day spike in bitcoin that brought it to a new record above $74,000. A week later, it hit $90,000.

“CONGRATULATIONS BITCOINERS!!! $100,000!!! YOU’RE WELCOME!!!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social Thursday morning.

Bitcoin is up more than 130% for the year so far, with the post-election rally accounting for a significant portion of its gains. Its performance far outpaces the S&P 500, which is up 28% over the same period.

«

It is weird: the more people get excited about bitcoin’s potential as a currency, the higher they drive the exchange price against fiat currencies, and the less useful it becomes as a currency, because why would you buy two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins in 2010 if you felt that in a decade or so that amount would be worth $1bn? You wouldn’t buy the pizza. Deflation and economic slowdown follow.

This has always been its problem, and will always remain its problem.
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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber isn’t ruling out advertising • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

»

one question mark hanging over Bluesky is how the platform will eventually make money, and whether it will use the most common business on the internet: ads.

The company has raised $15m so far, and CEO Jay Graber tells TechCrunch she’s already getting attention from other investors. Bluesky has hinted at a few potential revenue streams, including social media subscriptions, a marketplace of algorithms, and selling domain names. While Graber has committed not to “enshittify” the platform with ads, she’s not ruling out ads altogether.

When asked if Bluesky would always be free of advertisers like it is today, Graber said: “I don’t think that’s necessarily true.”

“I think the ways we would explore advertising, if we did, would be much more user intent-driven,” said Graber on stage Wednesday at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in San Francisco. “We want to keep our incentives aligned with users and make sure that we’re not turning into a model where the user’s attention is the product.”

It’s very important for Bluesky to not replicate the models and mistakes of other social media networks, according to Graber, where platforms have historically served ads to users through an algorithmic feed. The way Bluesky is built largely prevents a business model solely relying on ads, because users could create alternative feeds without ads on its open protocol.

«

Users could do that, but would they? Most probably wouldn’t because it’s a hassle. But Twitter got to enormous scale and struggled to turn a profit (though it was arguably wildly overstaffed) via advertising. However, what can Bluesky offer that will be compelling enough to make people pay and will cover the bills?
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Auto Trader forecasts ‘seismic shift’ to electric vehicles in Britain • The Guardian

PA Media:

»

The number of petrol cars on British roads has peaked this year but is set to tumble by more than 40% over the next decade, according to a report.

Auto Trader’s latest motoring forecast estimates there were 18.7m petrol-powered cars on the roads this year, but that this will steadily decrease from 2025 to 11.1m by 2034.

The online vehicle platform expects a “seismic shift” towards electric vehicles (EV) in the next 10 years as affordability improves, from 1.25m in 2024 to 13.7m. The EV share of the new car market will rise from about 18% to 23% in 2025, according to Auto Trader.

This is still far below the 28% target for sales under the UK government’s Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate. Under the current rules, this requires 22% of all new car sales to be battery-electric vehicles in 2024, with the target rising each year to 80% by 2030 and 100% in 2035.

Carmakers and retailers have expressed fears the mandate is putting jobs at risk at UK vehicle factories and piling pressure on manufacturers, with demand for EVs flagging due to their high costs.

Concerns have also been raised over a lack of charging infrastructure across the country to support the transition to electric vehicles.

…The [Autotrader] group said demand for used cars continued to remain resilient and was set to edge up from 7.61m sales this year to 7.7m in 2025, with secondhand EVs becoming more popular as prices pare back.

Its data shows the gap between EV and petrol or diesel vehicles is closing, with one in three used EVs on its platform priced under £20,000.

«

Interesting: is “peak petrol” a thing now? Quite a dramatic idea, and it would be good to see it measured.
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Eight mistakes that will kill your SSD early • PCWorld

Jon Martindale:

»

SSDs are finely tuned, blazing-fast storage devices that can take more advantage of the high bandwidth of PCIe 5.0 than even the fastest graphics cards. But like all instruments of performance, you can’t treat them poorly and expect them to last forever.

There are some real mistakes you’re probably making that will cause your SSDs to die sooner than they should. Here’s what you need to know if you want them lasting long and performing well.

«

Basically, don’t let it overheat; and don’t use it too much by writing a ton of data to it, or by zeroing it (who does that?). The thing is, you’ve got to write data to it – pretty much all PCs now use SSDs, because you’d weep at how slow spinning hard drives are, if you had to go back to them.
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Want to live longer? You better start moving—all day long • Outside Online

Alex Hutchinson:

»

To predict your longevity, you have two main options. You can rely on the routine tests and measurements your doctor likes to order for you, such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, weight, and so on. Or you can go down a biohacking rabbit hole the way tech millionaire turned longevity guru Bryan Johnson did to live longer. Johnson’s obsessive self-measurement protocol involves tracking more than a hundred biomarkers, ranging from the telomere length in blood cells to the speed of his urine stream (which, at 25 milliliters per second, he reports, is in the 90th percentile of 40-year-olds).

Or perhaps there is a simpler option. The goal of self-measurement is to scrutinize which factors truly predict longevity, so that you can try to change them before it’s too late. A new study from biostatisticians at the University of Colorado, Johns Hopkins University, and several other institutions crunched data from the long-running National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), comparing the predictive power of 15 potential longevity markers.

The winner—a better predictor than having diabetes or heart disease, receiving a cancer diagnosis, or even how old you are—was the amount of physical activity you perform in a typical day, as measured by a wrist tracker. Forget pee speed. The message to remember is: move or die.

«

Well, technically, if you stop moving then you’re dead, so yes, definitely. But it’s good to know that you don’t have to do all the absurd stuff that Johnson does.

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Los Angeles Times owner plans to launch “bias meter” on articles • Hollywood Reporter

Erik Hayden:

»

Weeks after scrapping a presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris that had been prepped by his editorial board, the owner of The Los Angeles Times says his product team is working on a new tech-driven “bias meter” to add to articles on the paper’s website as soon as next year.

The idea, as Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong presented it, sounds like it’ll be a module that presents multiple viewpoints on a particular news item as well as allow some version of comments to be integrated. And it marks the latest signal from the billionaire that he plans to reshape the Times, as the second Trump administration gears up and after the exits of multiple edit board members following the endorsement flap.

“Imagine if you now take — whether it be news or opinion — and you have a bias meter, whether news or opinion, more like the opinion, or the voices, you have a bias meter so somebody could understand as a reader that the source of the article has some level of bias,” Soon-Shiong elaborated in a radio segment hosted by incoming Times editorial board member Scott Jennings.

(The reveal of this news to Jennings isn’t a coincidence. In November, Soon-Shiong has used his X account to extol the virtues of the CNN pundit — who amiably advances conservative viewpoints and rebuttals of Trump critiques on the cable news network — and the owner has said, “I’m looking for people like Scott Jennings” to staff his paper.)

The Los Angeles Times mogul added, “What we need to do is not have what we call ‘confirmation bias’ and then that story, automatically, the reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story. And then give comments. Now, I’m giving you some little breaking news here but this is what we’re currently building behind the scenes. And I’m hoping that by January we launch this.”

«

Soon-Shiong made his billions from a cancer drug and then follow-on investments. His experience writing news or publishing? Before the LA Times in 2018, zero. Still doesn’t understand what journalism does.
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DeepMind’s Genie 2 can generate interactive worlds that look like video games • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

»

DeepMind, Google’s AI research org, has unveiled a model that can generate an “endless” variety of playable 3D worlds.

Called Genie 2, the model — the successor to DeepMind’s Genie, which was released earlier this year — can generate an interactive, real-time scene from a single image and text description (e.g. “A cute humanoid robot in the woods”). In this way, it’s similar to models under development by Fei-Fei Li’s company, World Labs, and Israeli startup Decart.

DeepMind claims that Genie 2 can generate a “vast diversity of rich 3D worlds,” including worlds in which users can take actions like jumping and swimming by using a mouse or keyboard. Trained on videos, the model’s able to simulate object interactions, animations, lighting, physics, reflections, and the behavior of “NPCs.”

«

Google/DeepMind seems to envisage it this as a way to train AI agents, more than as a way for humans to have a fun time playing endless videogames.
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Piracy in the UK: the failed war on illegal content • Huck

Kyle MacNeill:

»

While thousands of people have been issued warnings, no one in the UK has ever been fined or prosecuted for watching an unauthorised stream. “I don’t even use a VPN. The government hasn’t even got the digital infrastructure to make a website that’s functional. How are they going to stop it?” Rhys, a London-based writer, says.

The crackdown is, anti-piracy advocates assure us, on. Pirate hunters registered a significant victory in August when a coalition led by Ace – composed of members from the likes of Netflix, Apple TV+ and Walt Disney – worked with Vietnamese police to shut down Fmovies. Labelled “the largest pirate streaming operation in the world” with more than 6.7bn visits in a single year, it was a flagship win for the film industry.

A small win that pales into insignificance when looking at a different black market that is currently winning the fight: bootleg sport. “It’s certainly an area of interest at the moment and a focus of my research. It’s expensive to consume legally, but fans are very passionate about it – which provides a good money making opportunity for pirates,” Dr. Whitman says.

A YouGov survey last year found that 5.1 million adults in England, Scotland and Wales pirated sport last year. Rhys is part of the crew and uses Reddit to find illegal streams. “I do watch sport – football in particular – three or four times a week and I pirate all of that. It’s a piece of piss and the quality is immaculate.”

«

Live sport streaming has surely overtaken films as the focus for piracy. The prices – for football especially – are so outrageous that it’s in effect the rational choice to pirate if you’re not on a very solid income.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In an interview, Apple’s Tim Cook says that Stevie Wonder was given a demonstration of the Vision Pro. Thus raising a whole new set of questions. CC-licensed photo by Jon Lebkowsky 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. Unsigned, unsealed, undelivered. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Russian crypto criminals helped UK drug gangs launder lockdown cash • BBC News

Dominic Casciani:

»

A multi-billion-dollar money laundering operation that formed when UK gangs were struggling to offload cash during lockdown has been uncovered by the National Crime Agency.

Discovering the Russian-speaking network embedded in the UK’s street drugs market is the biggest success against money laundering in a decade, say investigators.

The global operation, based in Moscow, has been taking dirty money from crime gangs for a fee, and allowing them to exchange it for untraceable cryptocurrency, protecting drugs profits from detection. The network has also been used by the Russian state to fund espionage.

The network stretches across 30 countries, and 84 people have so far been arrested, including 71 in the UK, the NCA and its partners told reporters at a briefing earlier this week.

UK Security Minister Dan Jarvis said the operation “exposed Russian kleptocrats, drug gangs and cyber criminals – all of whom relied on the flow of dirty money”.

On Wednesday, the United States Treasury sanctioned the key figures at the top of the network.

Ekaterina Zhdanova, the head of a Moscow-based cryptocurrency network called Smart, has been identified as being at the heart of the operation. She was previously sanctioned by US authorities in November 2023 for allegedly moving money for Russian elites.

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Cryptocurrency, you say? How surprising.
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Australia struggling with oversupply of solar power • ABC News

Daniel Mercer:

»

Amid the growing warmth and increasingly volatile weather of an approaching summer, Australia passed a remarkable milestone this week.

The number of homes and businesses with a solar installation clicked past 4 million — barely 20 years since there was practically none anywhere in the country.

It is a love affair that shows few signs of stopping.

And it’s a technology that is having ever greater effects, not just on the bills of its household users but on the very energy system itself.

At no time of the year is that effect more obvious than spring, when solar output soars as the days grow longer and sunnier but demand remains subdued as mild temperatures mean people leave their air conditioners switched off.

Such has been the extraordinary production of solar in Australia this spring, the entire state of South Australia has — at various times — met all of its electricity needs from the technology. What South Australia could not use itself, it exported to other states.

And everywhere, it seems, demand for power from the grid — that is, demand for power not being met by rooftop solar — has fallen to record lows.

But all of this solar is prompting some hard questions, and gnashing of teeth, for one, simple reason — there is, at times, too much solar power in Australia’s electricity systems to handle.

«

0 gigawatts in 2010, past 22GW this year. As problems go, having too much energy is one of the nice ones.
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Tim Cook wants Apple to literally save your life • WIRED

Steven Levy:

»

SL: Will you open up Apple apps like Mail and Messages to other companies to use in their AI systems? How are you thinking about privacy there?

TC: We’ll always consider the privacy implications. We don’t accept that there’s a trade-off between great privacy and great intelligence. Much of Apple Intelligence runs on the device, but for some users we need more powerful models. So we crafted private cloud compute that essentially has the same privacy and security as your device does. We just kept plugging at it until we came up with the right idea.

…SL: When you’re thinking about things late at night, don’t you sometimes ask what it would mean if computers had superhuman intelligence?

TC: Oh, of course. Not just for Apple, but for the world. There’s so much extraordinary benefit for humanity. Are there some things you have to have guardrails on? Of course. We’re very deeply considerate about things that we do and don’t do. I hope that others are as well. AGI itself is a ways away, at a minimum. We’ll sort out along the way what the guardrails need to be in such an environment.

…SL: I heard that Stevie Wonder had a demo of the Vision Pro and loved it. How did that work?

TC: He’s a friend of Apple and it’s great to get feedback from Stevie. And of course his artistry is just unparalleled. One of the common threads running through Apple over time is that we don’t bolt on accessibility at the end of the design process. It’s embedded. So getting his feedback was key.

«

It’s a typically anodyne interview. But I struggle with how Stevie Wonder would benefit from the Vision Pro. In 1999 he considered surgery to restore some simulacrum of sight, but didn’t go ahead with it.
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How close is AI to human-level intelligence? • Nature

Anil Ananthaswamy:

»

will LLMs ever deliver AGI? One point in their favour is that the underlying transformer architecture can process and find statistical patterns in other types of information in addition to text, such as images and audio, provided that there is a way to appropriately tokenize those data. Andrew Wilson, who studies machine learning at New York University in New York City, and his colleagues showed that this might be because the different types of data all share a feature: such data sets have low ‘Kolmogorov complexity’, defined as the length of the shortest computer program that’s required to create them.

The researchers also showed that transformers are well-suited to learning about patterns in data with low Kolmogorov complexity and that this suitability grows with the size of the model. Transformers have the capacity to model a wide swathe of possibilities, increasing the chance that the training algorithm will discover an appropriate solution to a problem, and this ‘expressivity’ increases with size. These are, says Wilson, “some of the ingredients that we really need for universal learning”. Although Wilson thinks AGI is currently out of reach, he says that LLMs and other AI systems that use the transformer architecture have some of the key properties of AGI-like behaviour.

Yet there are also signs that transformer-based LLMs have limits. For a start, the data used to train the models are running out. Researchers at Epoch AI, an institute in San Francisco that studies trends in AI, estimate4 that the existing stock of publicly available textual data used for training might run out somewhere between 2026 and 2032. There are also signs that the gains being made by LLMs as they get bigger are not as great as they once were, although it’s not clear if this is related to there being less novelty in the data because so many have now been used, or something else. The latter would bode badly for LLMs.

Raia Hadsell, vice-president of research at Google DeepMind in London, raises another problem. The powerful transformer-based LLMs are trained to predict the next token, but this singular focus, she argues, is too limited to deliver AGI. Building models that instead generate solutions all at once or in large chunks could bring us closer to AGI, she says.

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GenCast predicts weather and the risks of extreme conditions with state-of-the-art accuracy • Google DeepMind

Ilan Price and Matthew Wilson:

»

Because a perfect weather forecast is not possible, scientists and weather agencies use probabilistic ensemble forecasts, where the model predicts a range of likely weather scenarios. Such ensemble forecasts are more useful than relying on a single forecast, as they provide decision makers with a fuller picture of possible weather conditions in the coming days and weeks and how likely each scenario is.

Today, in a paper published in Nature, we present GenCast, our new high resolution (0.25°) AI ensemble model. GenCast provides better forecasts of both day-to-day weather and extreme events than the top operational system, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ (ECMWF) ENS, up to 15 days in advance. We’ll be releasing our model’s code, weights, and forecasts, to support the wider weather forecasting community.

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AI being useful! Overdue!
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What happened to Intel? • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

In a way, it all comes down to reversing one mistake, the ultimate bad bet — the one where Intel funded the technology that its competitors used to leap ahead.

Over a decade ago [2012, in fact – Overspill Ed], Intel spent billions investing in Dutch multinational ASML, which is today the most important company in chips. It’s the only firm in the world that manufactures machines capable of pulverizing a ball of tin, using high-power lasers, such that it emits an extremely tight wavelength of ultraviolet light to efficiently carve circuits into silicon wafers, a process known as EUV.

Intel initially believed in the tech, even carving out a $4.1bn stake in the company, then decided not to order the pricey machines. But Taiwan’s TSMC did — and went on to become the undisputed leader in silicon manufacturing, producing an estimated 90-plus% of the world’s “leading-edge logic chips.” Samsung ordered machines, too.

Gelsinger was not shy about calling Intel’s choice “a fundamental mistake” in our 2022 interview. “We were betting against it. How stupid could we be?”

So Gelsinger decided to embrace EUV, while simultaneously giving its technology departments a blank check to leapfrog TSMC. “I said, ‘You have an unlimited budget, and you are going to deliver five nodes in four years. We are going to get back to unquestioned process leadership.’”

«

Five nodes in four years is, translated, five generations of chip in four years. There was no way in the world that Intel was going to achieve that, unless three of them were already made.
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Why did Intel fire CEO Pat Gelsinger? • SemiAccurate

Charlie Demerjian:

»

This difference lead to the company looking pretty bad for the pure finance folk but the technical observers knew better. Things were moving in the right direction more often than not and the painful financial news was simply Pat riding out the sh*tstorm that that was handed to him. If you followed the process side, you undoubtedly know about the 10nm debacle, but did you know that 14nm and even 22nm had many of the same issues? They were hidden but SemiAccurate documented them over the years.

Why was this mess allowed to not only fester but continue and grow? Because the internal incentive structure was so broken that it encouraged employees to lie for profit. Worse yet lies went unpunished. SemiAccurate has many emails, texts, and had conversations about meetings where this happened. An example would be when a design team asked the process side if node XYZ would be ready at time ABC with specs of DEF. Process would say yes it would, no question.

The first problem was that they knew it would not be ready on that date, not meet the intended specs, and usually wouldn’t be close. Design teams knew the other side was lying but what could they do? A few years later the process was indeed late, occasionally partially working, and met every letter of the law that governed bonus structures. Designers would then force a few working devices out to an OEM so that their bonuses, paid if device X shipped in quarter Y, did ship then. Sure yields were financially untenable but their new BMW had heated seats.

This isn’t to put the blame solely on the process side of the company, everyone lied. One great example was when Tim Cook met with Intel folk over their cellular modems. He directly asked someone I won’t name, “Will it be ready in time?”. The Intel exec said, “Yes”. He was lying, everyone on the Intel side knew he was lying but didn’t contradict the boss. From what we understand, Tim Cook also knew he was lying, and we know several Apple personnel in the room definitely knew it was well past a fib. If you have read this far, you understand how that program, and later the entire Apple/Intel relationship ended. It was for cause.

«

In my experience SemiAccurate is an accurate enough name for the content. Some parts of this may be true. The problem is figuring out what.
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EU set to crack down on Asian online retailers Temu and Shein • Financial Times

Paola Tamma and Andy Bounds:

»

The EU is preparing a crackdown on the growing flood of packages from Asian online retailers such as Temu and Shein, following a big increase in ecommerce that largely evades EU custom checks.

Measures under consideration include a new tax on ecommerce platforms’ revenue and an administrative handling fee per item that would make most shipments less competitive, according to five people familiar with the discussions.

European trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič has said about 4bn lower-value parcels will be flown to the EU this year, almost triple the number in 2022. The sheer volume and the fact that they are under the €150 threshold for custom duties means most are not checked, driving a rise in imports of dangerous goods such as toxic toys.

While the EU executive is targeting the business model of popular online platforms such as China’s Temu and Shein, which was founded in China but is now based in Singapore, no decisions had been taken and any action was complicated by international law, the people said. 

EU officials are worried about the undercutting of European competitors that face higher production costs to adhere to EU standards and the negative impact of cheap imports on high street retailers.

The bloc’s safety authorities have detected a growing number of dangerous and counterfeit goods, many of which are dispatched direct to consumers.

«

Does this count as a trade war/ Perhaps a quiet one?
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April 2024: Ransomware attack has cost UnitedHealth $872m; total expected to surpass $1bn • The Record

Jonathan Greig, in April 2024:

»

The ransomware attack on a company owned by healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group (UHG) has so far caused $872m in losses, according to the corporation’s latest earnings report. 

UnitedHealth owns Change Healthcare, a key cog in the US healthcare industry that was crippled by a ransomware attack in February. Change Healthcare and UHG subsidiary Optum took hundreds of systems offline as a result of the incident and faced criticism from the White House and Congress over its handling of the ransomware attack.

On an earnings call, president and chief financial officer John Rex said the company earned $7.8bn in the first quarter but suffered $872m in “unfavourable cyberattack effects.”

“Of the $870 million, about $595 million were direct costs due to the clearinghouse platform restoration and other response efforts, including medical expenses directly relating to the temporary suspension of some care management activities. For the full year, we estimate these direct costs at $1 billion to $1.15 billion,” Rex said. 

“The other components affecting our results relates to the disruption of ongoing Change Healthcare business. This is driven by the loss of revenues associated with the affected services, all while incurring the support and costs to keep these capabilities fully ready to return to service.”

Depending on the timing of service restoration and a return of previous transaction volumes, the company estimates another $350m to $450m in losses for the rest of the year, Rex added. 

«

Why a story from April? Because on Wednesday night UnitedHealth’s CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in a targeted hit by a gunman on a New York street. The motive is unknown, but this ransomware attack offers a big possibility. The NYPD doesn’t think the killer was a professional: his first shot hit Thompson in the calf, in front of a camera and a bystander (though he wore a mask).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The interface panels on Lego bricks can tell us a lot about good user interface design. CC-licensed photo by Scarlet Sappho 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. Plugged in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

ChatGPT’s refusal to acknowledge ‘David Mayer’ down to glitch, says OpenAI • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

ChatGPT’s developer, OpenAI, has provided some clarity on the situation by stating that the Mayer issue was due to a system glitch. “One of our tools mistakenly flagged this name and prevented it from appearing in responses, which it shouldn’t have. We’re working on a fix,” said an OpenAI spokesperson

Some of those speculating on social media guessed the man at the centre of the issue was David Mayer de Rothschild, but he told the Guardian it was nothing to do with him and referenced the conspiracy theorising that can cluster around his family’s name online.

“No I haven’t asked my name to be removed. I have never had any contact with Chat GPT. Sadly it all is being driven by conspiracy theories,” he told the Guardian.

It is also understood the glitch was unrelated to the late academic Prof David Mayer, who appeared to have been placed on a US security list because his name matched the alias of a Chechen militant, Akhmed Chatayev.

However, the answer might lie closer to the GDPR privacy rules in the UK and EU. OpenAI’s Europe privacy policy makes clear that users can delete their personal data from its products, in a process also known as the “right to be forgotten”, where someone removes personal information from the internet. OpenAI declined to comment on whether the “Mayer” glitch was related to a right to be forgotten procedure.

OpenAI has fixed the “David Mayer” issue and is now responding to queries using that name, although other names that appeared on social media over the weekend are still triggering a “something appears to have gone wrong” response when typed into ChatGPT.

Helena Brown, a partner and data protection specialist at law firm Addleshaw Goddard, said “right to be forgotten” requests would apply to any entity or person processing that person’s data – from the AI tool itself to any organisation using that tool.

“It’s interesting to see in the context of the David Mayer issue that an entire name can be removed from the whole AI tool,” she said.

«

Certainly a lot of those suing OpenAI are going to have sat up and taken notice of this.
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Here we go: The Verge now has a subscription • The Verge

Nilay Patel:

»

Okay, we’re doing this. 

Today [Tuesday] we’re launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It’ll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we’ll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design. (Our art team is delightfully good at print; we’ve even won a major magazine award for it.)

A surprising number of you have asked us to launch something like this, and we’re happy to deliver. If you don’t want to pay, rest assured that big chunks of The Verge will remain free — we’re thinking about subscriptions a lot differently than everyone else.

…we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. We also think our big, popular homepage is a resource worth investing in. So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage, core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts, Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free. We know so many of you depend on us to curate the news every day, and we’re going to stay focused on making a great homepage that’s worth checking out regularly, whether you pay us or not.

Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay.

«

Interesting stats: ~500,000 people visit the site at least once a week, they read an average 14 stories per month (I make that one every two days), 55,000 come to the site every day.
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We need to talk about dying • New Statesman

Rachel Clarke is a former journalist who re-trained to become a doctor and now specialises in palliative care; amid the debate about “assisted dying” she wants people to understand the reality, not the exaggeration, of death:

»

So called “ordinary dying” – a term deployed for decades by medical professionals to describe the typical deaths of people from illnesses such as cancer, heart disease or liver disease – begins with patients noticing a loss of strength and energy.

Activities which they used to take in their stride now require physical and mental effort. They may need afternoon naps to get through the day, with the naps becoming steadily longer or more frequent. At some stage, they find they are asleep more than they are awake. As their organs and body systems continue inexorably to fail, other changes emerge. Their weight often drops as their appetite fades. Their sense of thirst wanes too, so that although the patient eats and drinks very little, they are not, usually, particularly hungry or thirsty.

At some stage, their brain becomes so much less responsive that sleep slides into unconsciousness. As the breathing centres in the brain stem begin to shut down, a pattern may emerge of long pauses between breaths which alternate with deep, sighing breaths. This pattern, known as Cheyne-Stokes breathing, can greatly alarm those gathered at the bedside, who are convinced with each pause that their loved one has died. But when we explain what is happening, that anguish is at least in part assuaged.

Sometimes, very close to the end of life, a small amount of saliva collects at the top of a patient’s throat because they are too weak or deeply unconscious to swallow it. As breaths pass backwards and forwards through the saliva, a harsh “death rattle” is heard, causing considerable anxiety in families. Again, our explanations can be enormously helpful at alleviating some of the distress of family members.

Finally, as the patient’s heart muscle begins to fail, their blood pressure falls and the hands and feet may become cold, blue or pale. Usually there aren’t any dramas or surprises. There is a final exhalation, breath turns into air, and only gradually does it dawn on those present that the moment of death has passed.

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Meta says it has taken down about 20 covert influence operations in 2024 • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

Meta has intervened to take down about 20 covert influence operations around the world this year, it has emerged – though the tech firm said fears of AI-fuelled fakery warping elections had not materialised in 2024.

Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs at the company that runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said Russia was still the No. 1 source of the adversarial online activity but said in a briefing it was “striking” how little AI was used to try to trick voters in the busiest ever year for elections around the world.

The former British deputy prime minister revealed that Meta, which has more than 3 billion users, had to take down just over 500,000 requests to generate images on its own AI tools of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, JD Vance and Joe Biden in the month leading up to US election day.

But the firm’s security experts had to tackle a new operation using fake accounts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal at the rate of more than one every three weeks. The “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” incidents included a Russian network using dozens of Facebook accounts and fictitious news websites to target people in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Another was a Russia-based operation that employed AI to create fake news websites using brands such as Fox News and the Telegraph to try to weaken western support for Ukraine, and used Francophone fake news sites to promote Russia’s role in Africa and to criticise that of France.

“Russia remains the No 1 source of the covert influence operations we’ve disrupted to date – with 39 networks disrupted in total since 2017,” he said. The next most frequent sources of foreign interference detected by Meta are Iran and China.

Giving an evaluation of the effect of AI fakery after a wave of polls in 50 countries including the US, India, Taiwan, France, Germany and the UK, he said: “There were all sorts of warnings about the potential risks of things like widespread deepfakes and AI enabled disinformation campaigns. That’s not what we’ve seen from what we’ve monitored across our services. It seems these risks did not materialise in a significant way, and that any such impact was modest and limited in scope.”

«

The absence of AI feels like a dog that didn’t bark: what happened? Is it too early? Or not useful?
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FTC bans location data company that powers the surveillance ecosystem • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced sweeping action against some of the most important companies in the location data industry on Tuesday, including those that power surveillance tools used by a wide spread of US law enforcement agencies and demanding they delete data related to certain sensitive areas like health clinics and places of worship. 

Venntel, through its parent company Gravy Analytics, takes location data from smartphones, either through ordinary apps installed on them or through the advertising ecosystem, and then provides that data feed to other companies who sell location tracking technology to the government or sells the data directly itself. Venntel is the company that provides the underlying data for a variety of other government contractors and surveillance tools, including Locate X. 404 Media and a group of other journalists recently revealed Locate X could be used to pinpoint phones that visited abortion clinics. 

The FTC says in a proposed order that Gravy and Venntel will be banned from selling, disclosing, or using sensitive location data, except in “limited circumstances” involving national security or law enforcement.

«

This is going to be interesting: how far is this cutting off going to go?
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The UX of LEGO Interface Panels • Interaction Magic

George Cave:

»

Piloting an ocean exploration ship or Martian research shuttle is serious business. Let’s hope the control panel is up to scratch. Two studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous “2×2 decorated slope” is a LEGO minifigure’s interface to the world.

These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design. Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.

Welcome to the world of LEGO UX design.

At a glance, the variety of these designs can be overwhelming, but it’s clear that some of these interfaces look far more chaotic than others. Most interfaces in our world contain a blend of digital screens and analog inputs like switches and dials. These LEGO panels are no different.

Plotting the panels across these two axes reveals a few different clusters. Screens with an accompanying row of buttons sit in the top left. A small cluster of very organised switch panels lies to the far right. The centre bottom is occupied by some wild concepts that are hard to understand, even after several glances.

Designing a complex machine interface is a juggling act of many different factors from ergonomics to engineering. But we can break down the problem into two key questions:

• How can we differentiate between the function of different inputs?
• How can we organise the many inputs and outputs so that we understand how they relate to each other?
• Let’s take a deeper look at tackling these two challenges in LEGO.

«

This is from August 2020 (hey, people had to do something during lockdown, don’t be judgey) But it makes excellent points about interface design: don’t make buttons that do different things look the same.
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OpenAI explores advertising as it steps up revenue drive • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia, Cristina Criddle and George Hammond:

»

OpenAI is discussing plans to introduce advertising to its artificial intelligence products, as the ChatGPT maker seeks new revenue sources as it restructures as a for-profit company.

Sarah Friar, chief financial officer at OpenAI, told the Financial Times in an interview that the $150bn AI start-up was weighing up an ads model, adding that it planned to be “thoughtful about when and where we implement them [ads]”.

The San Francisco-based group, which in October secured $6.6bn in new funding, has been hiring advertising talent from big tech rivals such as Meta and Google, according to multiple people familiar with the matter and an FT analysis of LinkedIn accounts.

In a statement following the interview, Friar added: “Our current business is experiencing rapid growth and we see significant opportunities within our existing business model. While we’re open to exploring other revenue streams in the future, we have no active plans to pursue advertising.”

OpenAI is stepping up efforts to generate revenue from its products, such as its AI-powered search engine, as it seeks to capitalise on its early lead in the booming AI sector. Its smaller rival Perplexity is already piloting advertising in its AI-powered search engine.

Friar, who previously held leadership roles at companies such as Nextdoor, Square and Salesforce, pointed to the wealth of advertising experience between herself and Kevin Weil, the company’s chief product officer.

«

Just bringing up another squadron of tanks to park on Google’s lawn to go alongside the search engine.
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Ultra-processed news: why local journalism has gone weird • West Country Voices

Philippa Davies:

»

Something weird has happened to local news – and it led to me resigning from my job as a journalist here in Devon. So here’s the inside story.

Until recently I was employed by one of the UK’s biggest news publishers, which has hundreds of titles across the country. I was working across three local weekly print titles and their websites. We were very short-staffed, but I was keen to do my best to report on the events and issues I thought were important to our readers – both in print and online.

Although local papers have been in decline for many years – in inverse proportion to the growth of digital media – the news agenda was still more or less unchanged when I started this job six years ago. The aim was to provide accurate, well-written stories about local issues, reporting on breaking news (fires, accidents, crime etc), major planning applications, council services, politics, developments in health and education, business and employment, and so on. Alongside that were the traditional ‘local paper’ stories, of a more human-interest kind.

There was pressure to get big stories published on our websites as quickly as possible, but the news content of the print editions and the websites was pretty much the same.

Then, in the last couple of years, a dramatic change emerged, which escalated rapidly. Old-style news values were replaced by a single criterion for assessing the importance of a story: will it get a lot of online page views? Will it pull in high audience numbers to boost advertising revenue?

And this is how local journalism turned into ultra-processed news.

«

Pretty much what you’d expect – and completely depressing. Ironically, this piece by Davies has probably had more views than anything she wrote for the news publisher (unnamed) which gave her dire targets for page views per month.

The problem is, if you’re not making the money from print (though that can be done! My local market town’s local paper manages it) you’re going to struggle with local news.
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Apple’s foldable iPhone is expected to save a surprisingly declining market • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

»

A new report from DSCC highlights the struggles that foldable smartphones are facing in the market. They just endured their first year-over-year decline, and things are expected to get worse. The report notes one reason for optimism though: Apple’s upcoming foldable iPhone.

Foldables are still in their early days, but they’ve just hit an unfortunate peak. For the first time ever, Q3 2024 saw a year-over-year decline in panel procurements.

This apparently isn’t just a blip, either, as the display analysts at DSCC expect an entire year of decline coming up in 2025.

…The foldable iPhone is currently expected to launch in late 2026, and as a result DSCC forecasts that to be a record year for foldables overall as Apple reinvigorates the category:

»

Although the market has stalled and will decline for the first time on a panel procurement basis in 2025, there is reason for optimism. Apple is expected to enter the foldable market in 2H’26 and given their dominant position in flagship smartphones could generate significant growth for the foldable smartphone market. Any improvement in form factor, functionality, use cases, durability, etc. could drive new demand for this market. As a result, 2026 is expected to be a record year for foldables with over 30% growth and with over 20% growth projected for 2027 and 2028 as well.

«

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I’ll believe it when I see it. Apple is struggling enough on the LLM front, so why it would give itself the headache of trying to launch into a stagnant niche beats me.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

At Intel, Pat Gelsinger is out as chief executive after three years struggling to remould the company. Who can do it better? CC-licensed photo by Web Summit 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. Unfired. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Not just ‘David Mayer’: ChatGPT breaks when asked about two law professors • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

Over the weekend, ChatGPT users discovered that the tool will refuse to respond and will immediately end the chat if you include the phrase “David Mayer” in any capacity anywhere in the prompt. But “David Mayer” isn’t the only one: The same error happens if you ask about “Jonathan Zittrain,” a Harvard Law School professor who studies internet governance and has written extensively about AI, according to my tests. And if you ask about “Jonathan Turley,” a George Washington University Law School professor who regularly contributes to Fox News and argued against impeaching Donald Trump before Congress, and who wrote a blog post saying that ChatGPT defamed him, ChatGPT will also error out.

The way this happens is exactly what it sounds like: If you type the words “David Mayer,” “Jonathan Zittrain,” or “Jonathan Turley” anywhere in a ChatGPT prompt, including in the middle of a conversation, it will simply say “I’m unable to produce a response,” and “There was an error generating a response.” It will then end the chat. This has started various conspiracies, because, in David Mayer’s case, it is unclear which “David Mayer” we’re talking about, and there is no obvious reason for ChatGPT to issue an error message like this. 

…Turley told 404 Media in an email that he does not know why this error is happening, said he has not filed any lawsuits against OpenAI, and said “ChatGPT never reached out to me.”

Zittrain, on the other hand, recently wrote an article in The Atlantic called “We Need to Control AI Agents Now,” which extensively discusses ChatGPT and OpenAI and is from a forthcoming book he is working on. There is no obvious reason why ChatGPT would refuse to include his name in any response.

Both Zittrain and Turley have published work that the New York Times cites in its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.

«

I think we can join the dots on these two pretty effectively, can’t we? It also explains why other chatbots can say the names. The mystery of David Mayer (though someone of that name was on a no-fly watchlist) remains, though.
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Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger steps down amid chipmaker’s struggles • The New York Times

Don Clark, Tripp Mickle and Steve Lohr:

»

Mr. Gelsinger, 63, an Intel veteran who took the helm in 2021 after an 11-year absence from the company, also resigned from the semiconductor maker’s board of directors. He will be replaced in the interim by two Intel executives, David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the company said in a statement on Monday, adding that it would continue its search for a permanent chief executive.

Intel’s abrupt change was the latest sign of the 56-year-old company’s fall from grace. Intel was one of the pioneers that gave Silicon Valley its name and for years was one of the world’s best-known tech names. But the company has been mired in recent years in innovation struggles and has ceded ground to rivals including Nvidia, the reigning maker of artificial intelligence chips.

…Mr. Gelsinger’s style and some of his tactics also did not sit well with some Intel engineering leaders, who complained privately that he had lost touch with industry changes and put too much emphasis on building new factories rather than Intel’s products.

His crusade to create new manufacturing processes, which determine the computing power of chips, also ran into problems.

Some customers were recently informed by Intel that its most advanced manufacturing processes, which it calls 18a and 16a, were far behind TSMC, a chip industry official briefed on Intel’s progress said. TSMC is producing 30% of its leading-edge chips, known as 2 nanometer chips, without any flaws, while Intel’s new process produces less than 10% of its 18a chips without flaws, the person said.

«

Intel’s stock peaked in January 2000 (the dot-com boom!) and then again in March 2020, when everyone needed a new PC to work from home. Since then? Down by two-thirds, and the whole company worth about $100bn – which is probably less than its foundries are worth.
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How scammers weaponize emotions to steal your money • Washington Post

Michelle Singletary:

»

The man Judith Boivin came to know as her FBI handler called twice a day for three months. He’d ask about her life and tell her about his family.

He knew about her 78-year-old husband’s struggles with Parkinson’s disease and when they had to see the doctor. She told him about her kids and grandkids and when she was leaving town. Sometimes he’d let her in on his plans, like that trip to Italy to attend a friend’s wedding. While he was gone, he told her, another agent would take over their daily 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. check-ins.

An alliance developed, she said. “I was respectful of him, and he seemed to be respectful of me.”
This is how people are drawn into what scam experts call “the ether.”

These seemingly innocuous conversations are actually well-rehearsed orchestrations of a relationship, the flood of attention designed to work them into such a heightened state of emotion that they suspend reason. But these interactions rely on secrecy, because the criminal can’t risk raising questions from outsiders, or anyone who might seed doubt and break their hold.

…There’s a common misconception that financial fraud victims are uneducated, lonely, isolated, or lacking common sense — none of which applies to countless victims. There’s also an assumption that seniors are more vulnerable to fraud because of deteriorating cognitive skills. In fact, according to the Federal Trade Commission, people in their 20s are scammed at higher rates than older Americans. This is partly because they spend more time online, where there is simply more exposure to fake shopping sites, bogus job offers and investment scams.

Anyone can be conned, said Doug Shadel, a fraud prevention expert who has spent much of his career studying scammers and co-authored “Weapons of Fraud: A Source Book for Fraud Fighters” with Anthony Pratkanis, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The two have listened to hours of scam calls and know how a master “con criminal” or “con grifter,” as they call them, wheedles past defenses.

As one con man told Shadel: “I ask them questions until I find their emotional Achilles’ heel.”

«

Part of a series. The point about education is worth noting. Well-respected, highly educated people have been taken in.
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Amazon AI data centres to double as carbon capture machines • Semafor

Reed Albergotti:

»

Amazon’s data centres could soon double as carbon capture machines, offsetting the harmful effects of the massive amounts of energy required to run them.

Amazon Web Services is partnering with startup Orbital Materials, which used artificial intelligence to create a new material specifically designed for separating carbon from hot air exhaust in data centers, the companies announced Monday.

Orbital Materials CEO Jonathan Godwin said he expects AWS to capture enough carbon to exceed the fossil fuel consumption used to power its AI data centres, giving them a net negative impact on climate change. The process will cost less than purchasing captured carbon to offset its climate impact, according to Godwin.

The system, part of a pilot program at a to-be-determined data centre location, works when outside air is sucked in and used to cool extremely hot semiconductors designed to run or train powerful AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.

…Cooling mechanisms are designed to pull heat away from the chips and blow the hot air out of the data centre. Materials known as “sorbents” can absorb carbon dioxide as air passes over them. But the air exiting the data centres reaches higher temperatures than the air in traditional direct air capture methods. So, Orbital Materials used an AI model to predict what kinds of molecular structures would serve as sorbents more suited to absorb hotter air, and then tested several possibilities in a lab in New Jersey.

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Act now to stop millions of research papers from disappearing • Nature

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Millions of research articles are absent from major digital archives. This worrying finding, which Nature reported on earlier this year, was laid bare in a study by Martin Eve, who studies technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. Eve sampled more than seven million articles with unique digital object identifiers (DOIs), a string of characters used to identify and link to specific publications, such as scholarly articles and official reports. Of these, he found that more than two million were ‘missing’ from archives — that is, they were not preserved in major archives that ensure literature can be found in the future.

Eve, who is also a research developer at Crossref, an organization that registers DOIs, carried out the study in an effort to better understand a problem librarians and archivists already knew about — that although researchers are generating knowledge at an unprecedented rate, it is not necessarily being stored safely for the future. One contributing factor is that not all journals or scholarly societies survive in perpetuity. For example, a 2021 study found that a lack of comprehensive and open archiving meant that 174 open-access journals, covering all major research topics and geographical regions, vanished from the web in the first two decades of this millennium.

A lack of long-term archiving particularly affects institutions in low- and middle-income countries, less-affluent institutions in rich countries and smaller, under-resourced journals worldwide. Yet it’s not clear whether researchers, institutions and governments have fully taken the problem on board.

…At the heart of the problem is a lack of money, infrastructure and expertise to archive digital resources. “Digital preservation is expensive and also quite difficult,” says Kathleen Shearer, who is based in Montreal, Canada, and is the executive director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, a global network of scholarly archives. “It is not just about creating backup copies of things. It is about the active management of content over time in a rapidly evolving technological environment.”

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South Korea becomes first country to replace 10% of its workforce with robots • The Business Standard

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A new report suggests South Korea is the first country to have replaced 10% of its workforce with robots to tackle its shrinking population due to its low birth rate.

For every 10,000 employees, South Korea now has 1,102 robots, making the country number one in the world in using technology instead of human labour to do tasks, according to the annual survey by World Robotics 2024.

South Korea now has twice the number of robots working in its factories than any other country in the world. Only Singapore has been close to South Korea regarding robots, with 770 of such technology per 10,000 workers.

China is by far the world’s largest market, with 2,76,288 robots installed in 2023, representing 51% of global installations. Japan remained the second largest market for robots, with 46,106 units getting installed in 2023. India, an emerging market, also saw rapid growth in robot installations, with the rate increasing 59% year on year to 8,510 units in 2023.

“Robot density has increased by 5% on average each year since 2018 [in South Korea],” stated the report, which was presented by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). “With a world-renowned electronics industry and a strong automotive industry, the Korean economy relies on the two largest customers for industrial robots.”

Globally, the average robot density has more than doubled over the last seven years, the researchers noted, increasing from 74 to 162 units per 10,000 employees.

South Korea has also introduced robots across other industries, with machines filling roles everywhere, from hospitals to restaurants. It follows massive investment from the Korean government into its robotics industry, which it sees as a way to address its shrinking working-age population brought about by low birth rates.

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South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world – 0.72 in 2023. To retain the population size, it needs to be 2.1. But a country that isn’t keen on immigration (foreign-born resident rate 2.3% v world average 3.5%) needs to fill the gap somehow. So…
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Could Tenbury Wells be the first UK town centre abandoned over climate change? • The Guardian

Jessica Murray:

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Tenbury Wells is in a particularly precarious position as it is a flat, low-lying town almost surrounded by water – the Teme to the north and a tributary, the Kyre Brook, to the south.

The town is often flooded by the Teme, and the Kyre Brook overspills into the town centre when the Teme is full and it has nowhere else to go. It can submerge streets in seconds, and this time it demolished a wall holding back the water from the high street.

“It’s a particularly dangerous flood, because it is so rapid onset; there isn’t that much warning,” said Throup. “With the Teme and the Kyre Brook, Tenbury gets hammered by two separate sources.”

The climate crisis means the problem is getting worse. The Teme’s flood peaks at Tenbury are projected to increase by a median 20% this decade, even in a scenario with lower emission increases. Residents have raised alarm at houses being built on flood plains.

Most people in the town centre cannot afford insurance – the premiums are too high because flooding is so frequent, they said. Businesses and homeowners have adapted accordingly, placing electrical sockets high up, not storing things on the floor and making makeshift flood defences of their own.

But there is only so much people can do, and some have decided this latest flood could be the end of the road. “With all the stock we’ve lost, plus everything else, we’re talking probably £25,000-£30,000 in damage,” said Laura Jones, the owner of Rainbow Crafts, which she built up from a market stall several years ago.

“I’m going to have a pop-up shop to sell off the rest of my stock and then take it from there – that might be it, or I might be able to continue. But I know at least three businesses throwing in the towel after this. It’s going to become a ghost town.”

Lesley Bruton, an independent district councillor for Tenbury, said: “Businesses can’t afford to continue. They can’t afford to replace the stock, and while we haven’t got defences, businesses won’t want to come to the town. And residents are finding they can’t sell their homes.”

“And climate change is having a significant impact on the rainfall. When it does rain now, it is more intense and heavier. The ground is absolutely saturated.”

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Wearable tech can monitor our health but why are doctors so sceptical? • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

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I’m currently trying out a smart ring from the firm Ultrahuman – and it seemed to know that I was getting sick before I did.

It alerted me one weekend that my temperature was slightly elevated, and my sleep had been restless. It warned me that this could be a sign I was coming down with something. I tutted something about the symptoms of perimenopause and ignored it – but two days later I was laid up in bed with gastric flu.

I didn’t need medical assistance, but if I had – would the data from my wearable have helped healthcare professionals with my treatment? Many wearable brands actively encourage this.

The Oura smart ring, for example, offers a service where patients can download their data in the form of a report to share with their doctor. Dr Jake Deutsch, a US-based clinician who also advises Oura, says wearable data enables him to “assess overall health more precisely” – but not all doctors agree that it’s genuinely useful all of the time.

Dr Helen Salisbury is a GP at a busy practice in Oxford. She says not many patients come in brandishing their wearables, but she’s noticed it has increased, and it concerns her. “I think for the number of times when it’s useful there’s probably more times that it’s not terribly useful, and I worry that we are building a society of hypochondria and over-monitoring of our bodies,” she says.

Dr Salisbury says there can be a large number of reasons why we might temporarily get abnormal data such as an increased heart rate, whether it’s a blip in our bodies or a device malfunction – and many of them do not require further investigation. “I’m concerned that we will be encouraging people to monitor everything all the time, and see their doctor every time the machine thinks they’re ill, rather than when they think they’re ill.”

And she makes a further point about the psychological use of this data as a kind of insurance policy against shock health diagnoses. A nasty cancerous tumour for example, is not necessarily going to be flagged by a watch or an app, she says.

What wearables do is encourage good habits – but the best message you can take from them is the same advice doctors have been giving us for years. Dr Salisbury adds: “The thing you can actually do is walk more, don’t drink too much alcohol, try and maintain a healthy weight. That never changes.”

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Though a wearable that said STOP DRINKING might not be that popular.
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The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry • The Verge

Mia Sato:

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[Alyssa] Sheil runs what is essentially a one-woman marketing operation, making product recommendations, trying on outfits, and convincing people to buy things they often don’t really need. Every time someone purchases something using her affiliate link, she gets a kickback. Shopping influencers like her have figured out how to build a career off someone else’s impulse buys.

She demonstrates how she might record a video showing off a pair of white mesh kitten heels: attach a phone to a tripod and angle the camera toward a corner in her home office where there is nothing in the background, just a blank wall and part of a chair. The shoes pop against the nothingness, new and clean and buyable. To show off an outfit, Sheil drags a full-length mirror in front of her and snaps into a pose; she is — quite literally — a pro. 

The only item in her home not from Amazon is an all-white canvas poster handmade by Sheil that hangs above her work desk. In big block letters, it reads, “I AM SO LUCKY.” Perched beneath this mantra, Sheil plugs away at her computer searching for Amazon products that fit her colorless world. 

But all of this — the videos, the big house, her earnings — could come crashing down: Sheil is currently embroiled in a court case centered on the very content that is her livelihood, a Texas lawsuit in which she is being sued for damages that could reach into the millions.

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The allegations, made by another influencer, are that Sheil has essentially copied the other one (the laundry list is like Single White Female, which they both are). The fact they used to know each other when in Austin, Texas may be material. And how it’s heading to court, in a case alleging copyright infringement. High stakes for both.
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