Smart TVs have turned their makers from hardware specialists into advertising conduits. CC-licensed photo by Keith Williamson on Flickr.

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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. Not an advert. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How Google Search ranking works • Search Engine Land

Mario Fischer:

»

The structure of organic search results is now so complex – not least due to the use of machine learning – that even the Google employees who work on the ranking algorithms say they can no longer explain why a hit is at one or two. We do not know the weighting of the many signals and the exact interplay.

Nevertheless, it is important to familiarize yourself with the structure of the search engine to understand why well-optimized pages do not rank or, conversely, why seemingly short and non-optimized results sometimes appear at the top of the rankings. The most important aspect is that you need to broaden your view of what is really important.

All the information available clearly shows that. Anyone who is even marginally involved with ranking should incorporate these findings into their own mindset. You will see your websites from a completely different point of view and incorporate additional metrics into your analyses, planning and decisions.

To be honest, it is extremely difficult to draw a truly valid picture of the systems’ structure. The information on the web is quite different in its interpretation and sometimes differs in terms, although the same thing is meant. 

An example: The system responsible for building a SERP (search results page) that optimizes space use is called Tangram. In some Google documents, however, it is also referred to as Tetris, which is probably a reference to the well-known game.

Over weeks of detailed work, I have viewed, analyzed, structured, discarded and restructured almost 100 documents many times. 

This article is not intended to be exhaustive or strictly accurate. It represents my best effort (i.e., “to the best of my knowledge and belief”) and a bit of Inspector Columbo’s investigative spirit. The result is what you see here.

«

This is not brief. But also, you’ll end up a bit stunned by how much goes into a search ranking.
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Sonos considers relaunching its old app • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Sonos has explored the possibility of rereleasing its previous mobile app for Android and iOS — a clear sign of what an ordeal the company’s hurried redesign has become. The Verge can report that there have been discussions high up within Sonos about bringing back the prior version of the app, known as S2, as the company continues toiling away at improving the performance and addressing bugs with the overhauled design that rolled out in May to a flood of negative feedback. (The new Sonos app currently has a 1.3-star review average on Google Play.)

Letting customers fall back to the older software could ease their frustrations and reduce at least some of the pressure on Sonos to rectify every issue with the new app.

«

There is a lesson here. Sonos did a complete ground-up rewrite and changed the UI. So, interestingly, did Marco Arment of his very popular Overcast podcast app. “My business is on fire,” Arment declared a couple of weeks after the release: people hated the new UI and they hated the fact that elements they used all the time had been moved to somewhere illogical.

Arment wailed that moving those elements back was going to spoil his lovely UI redesign. But! He was prepared to do it, because the customer is right. Arment is a one-man band, and while he isn’t going back to the old app, it’s a lot easier for him to get approval to change things.

Sonos burnt its bridges and it’s hard to turn the supertanker around (so to speak). Meanwhile, it’s just let 100 people – about 6% of its workforce – go. Hardware is hard.
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UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch among missing in Sicily yacht sinking • The Guardian

Jamie Grierson and Lorenzo Tondo:

»

The British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is missing after a superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm.

The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-metre sailboat, was carrying 22 people and anchored just off shore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by a tornado in the early hours, the Italian coastguard said in a statement.

One man, understood to be the vessel’s chef, was confirmed dead and six others, including Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, remained unaccounted for on Monday evening. The coastguard said the missing had British, American and Canadian nationalities.

Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old girl who was saved by her mother.

A spokesperson for Lynch declined to comment. A spokesperson for the UK Foreign Office said: “We are providing consular support to a number of British nationals and their families following an incident in Sicily, and are in contact with the local authorities.”

Lynch co-founded Autonomy, a software firm that became one of the shining lights of the UK tech scene, in the mid-90s. Once described as Britain’s Bill Gates, Lynch spent much of the last decade in court defending his name against allegations of fraud related to the sale of Autonomy to the US tech company Hewlett-Packard for $11bn.

The 59-year-old was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June, after he had spent more than a year living in effect under house arrest. Upon his acquittal, he told reporters: “I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.”

«

This has all the beats of a Greek tragedy. But as real life.
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OpenAI’s new voice mode let me talk with my phone, not to it • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

»

I’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode for the last week, and it’s the most convincing taste I’ve had of an AI-powered future yet. This week, my phone laughed at jokes, made them back to me, asked me how my day was, and told me it’s having “a great time.” I was talking with my iPhone, not using it with my hands.

OpenAI’s newest feature, currently in a limited alpha test, doesn’t make ChatGPT any smarter than it was before. Instead, Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) makes it friendlier and more natural to talk with. It creates a new interface for using AI and your devices that feels fresh and exciting, and that’s exactly what scares me about it. The product was kinda glitchy, and the whole idea totally creeps me out, but I was surprised by how much I genuinely enjoyed using it.

Taking a step back, I think AVM fits into OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s broader vision, alongside agents, of changing the way humans interact with computers, with AI models front and center.

…On Wednesday, I tested the most tremendous upside for this advanced technology I could think of: I asked ChatGPT to order Taco Bell the way Obama would.

“Uh, let me be clear — I’d like a Crunchwrap Supreme, maybe a few tacos for good measure,” said ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode. “How do you think he’d handle the drive-thru?” said ChatGPT, then laughing at its own joke.

«

This is my unimpressed face. I know everyone’s saying this is the next step for smartphones, but seriously, I’m fine with a device that can interpret commands. Maybe it’ll be like TARS in Interstellar, where you can fine-tune the humour level.
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Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.

How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?

Success in the TV industry used to mean selling as many TV sets as possible. But with smart TVs becoming mainstream and hardware margins falling, OEMs have sought new ways to make money. TV OS providers can access a more frequent revenue source at higher margins, which has led to a viewing experience loaded with ads. They can be served from the moment you pick up your remote, which may feature streaming service ads in the form of physical buttons.

Some TV brands already prioritize data collection and the ability to sell ads, and most are trying to boost their appeal to advertisers. Smart TV OSes have become the cash cow of the TV business, with providers generating revenue by licensing the software and through revenue sharing of in-app purchases and subscriptions.

A huge part of TV OS revenue comes from selling ads, including on the OS’s home screen and screensaver and through free, ad-supported streaming television channels. GroupM, the world’s largest media investment company, reported that smart TV ad revenue grew 20% from 2023 to 2024 and will grow another 20% to reach $46bn next year. In September 2023, Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at analyst Omdia, reported that “each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”

«

Hardware is hard; advertising seems to be eating the world, or at least all its available attention. This isn’t really what we wanted when we got smart TVs, but the connectedness means that the makers refuse to let go of their device. So we see smart TVs showing advertising and car manufacturers holding back capabilities such as heated seats unless you pay them a subscription.
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Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales • The Verge

Kylie Robison:

»

Shortly after Humane released its $699 AI Pin in April, the returns started flowing in.

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

At launch, the AI Pin was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews. Our own David Pierce said it “just doesn’t work,” and Marques Brownlee called it “the worst product” he’s ever reviewed. Now, Humane is attempting to stabilize its operations and maintain confidence among staff and potential acquirers. The New York Times reported in June that HP is considering purchasing the company, and The Information reported last week that Humane is negotiating with its current investors to raise debt, which could later be converted into equity.

Humane’s AI Pin and accessories have brought in just over $9m in lifetime sales, according to the internal data seen by The Verge. But around 1,000 purchases were cancelled before shipping, and more than $1m worth of product has been returned.

«

Remarkable that there are that many people still finding them worthwhile. Or maybe they dropped them down the back of the sofa and forgot about them?

Anyway: it’s dead, Jim. Hardware is so, so difficult.
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Bots on Twitter/X run wild amid global elections • Rest of World

Russell Brandom:

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As Rwanda prepared for its national election on July 15, something strange was happening on X. Hundreds of accounts appeared to be operating in unison, posting identical or oddly similar messages in support of incumbent president Paul Kagame. A team of researchers at Clemson University started tracking the seemingly automated network and discovered more than 460 accounts involved, sharing what appeared to be AI-generated messages.

“The campaign, which exhibits several markers of coordinated inauthentic behavior, seems to be trying to affect discourse about the performance of the Kagame regime,” the researchers wrote in a paper tracing the network.

It was the kind of revelation that would normally send moderators scrambling, particularly in the weeks before a national election. But when the group reported their findings to X, nothing happened. Flagged accounts remained up, and the network continued to post. 

It was a stunning result, given the sensitivity of the country’s election and how easy it would have been to stop the network in its tracks. “It’s obvious,” researcher Morgan Wack, who led the Clemson project, told Rest of World. “If you’re paying attention at all, it’s very clear you could take down several of these accounts. There’s just no effort to take down any of this.”

Wack’s experience is part of a larger shift in moderation on X, which has opened the door to influence operations around the world. In the two years since Elon Musk took ownership of the company, its trust and safety team has been decimated — and the result has been a steady drip of networks like the one uncovered in Rwanda. Simply finding the networks is harder than ever, as researchers must do without API access and face growing legal risks after their work is published.

«

Musk utterly doesn’t care. He’s got no interest in anything outside the US, and even there he only cares about his stupid little obsessions.

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Sam Altman’s Worldcoin is battling with governments over your eyes • WSJ

Angus Berwick:

»

Sam Altman wants to save us from the AI-dominated world he is building. The trouble is, governments aren’t buying his plan, which involves an attempt to scan the eyeballs of every person on Earth and pay them with his own cryptocurrency.

Altman’s OpenAI is creating models that may end up outsmarting humans. His Worldcoin initiative says it is addressing a key risk that could follow: we won’t be able to tell people and robots apart.

But Worldcoin has come under assault by authorities over its mission. It has been raided in Hong Kong, blocked in Spain, fined in Argentina and criminally investigated in Kenya. A ruling looms on whether it can keep operating in the European Union.

More than a dozen jurisdictions have either suspended Worldcoin’s operations or looked into its data processing. Among their concerns: How does the Cayman Islands-registered Worldcoin Foundation handle user data, train its algorithms and avoid scanning children?

…Worldcoin verifies “humanness” by scanning irises using a basketball-sized chrome device called the Orb. Worldcoin says irises, which are complex and relatively unchanging in adults, can better distinguish humans than fingerprints or faces.

Users receive immutable codes held in an online “World ID” passport, to use on other platforms to prove they are human, plus payouts in Worldcoin’s WLD cryptocurrency.

Worldcoin launched last year and says it has verified more than six million people across almost 40 countries. Based on recent trading prices, the total pool of WLD is theoretically worth some $15bn.

The project says its technology is completely private: Orbs delete all images after verification, and iris codes contain no personal information—unless users permit Worldcoin to train its algorithms with their scans. Encrypted servers hold the anonymised codes and images. 

«

It’s not scanned a lot of people, to be honest. But also: if the worry is that superhuman AI will pose as humans, why wouldn’t the superhuman AI just hack into the servers? It makes no sense. (Thanks Karsten for the link.)
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US wind and solar on track to overtake coal this year • Microgrid Media

Jonas Muthoni:

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For the first time in history, wind and solar energy have generated more electricity than coal in the United States through July. This shift marks a significant milestone as these renewable resources continue their upward trajectory in the power generation sector.

According to federal data, the combined output of wind and solar was 393 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly ahead of coal’s 388 TWh. This development is particularly notable as it does not include other renewable sources like hydropower, which have also seen substantial usage in past comparisons.

Factors influencing the shift:
• Increase in solar output: solar facilities saw a 36% increase in production over the previous year, reaching 118 TWh.
• Steady growth in wind energy: wind energy production also increased by 8%, totaling 275 TWh.
• Decline of coal: The decline in coal is attributed to the closure of numerous coal plants and an overall decrease in its economic viability.

«

And yet I do come across people who insist that wind and solar are no use and that we should be piling in to the North Sea for its oil and gas reserves rather than onshore wind or solar. Hard to argue with “logic” like that.
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When will climate change turn life in the US upside down? • Yale Climate Connections

Jeff Masters is a former meteorologist:

»

In the US, the most likely major economic disruption from climate change over the next few years might well be a collapse of the housing market in flood-prone and wildfire-prone states. Billion-dollar weather disasters — which cause about 76% of all weather-related damages — have steadily increased in number and expense in recent years and would be even worse were it not for improved weather forecasts and better building codes. The recent increase in weather-disaster losses has brought on an insurance crisis — especially in Florida, Louisiana, California, and Texas — which threatens one of the bedrocks of the U.S. economy, the housing and real estate market.

In California, the insurer of last resort, the FAIR plan, had only about $250m in cash on hand as of March 2024.

“One major fire near Lake Arrowhead, where the Plan holds $8 billion in policies, would plunge the whole scheme into insolvency,” observed Harvard’s Susan Crawford, author of “Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm.”

It is widely acknowledged that higher weather disaster losses result primarily from an increase in exposure: more people with more stuff moving into vulnerable places, including those at risk of floods. Martin Bertogg, Swiss Re’s head of catastrophic peril, said in a 2022 AP interview that two-thirds, perhaps more, of the recent rise in weather-related disaster losses is the result of more people and things in harm’s way.

But this balance will likely shift in the coming decades. Increased exposure will continue to drive increased weather disaster losses, but the fractional contribution of climate change to disaster losses — at least for wildfire, hurricane, and flood disasters — is likely to increase rapidly, making the insurance crisis accelerate.

«

Long essay, but interesting. He thinks there’s another 15 years or so before things go haywire.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Good news (perhaps): VAR decisions in Premier League will this season be aided by an array of iPhones all around the ground. CC-licensed photo by Footy.com Images 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. Welcome back, hope it was good for you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google threatened tech influencers unless they ‘preferred’ the Pixel • The Verge

Victoria Song:

»

The Verge has independently confirmed screenshots of the clause in this year’s Team Pixel agreement for the new Pixel phones, which various influencers began posting on X and Threads last night. The agreement tells participants they’re “expected to feature the Google Pixel device in place of any competitor mobile devices.” It also notes that “if it appears other brands are being preferred over the Pixel, we will need to cease the relationship between the brand and the creator.” The link to the form appears to have since been shut down.

The Verge obtained a link to the survey, but it appears to have since been shut down. Screenshot: The Verge
When asked, Google communications manager Kayla Geier told The Verge that “#TeamPixel is a distinct program, separate from our press and creator reviews programs. The goal of #TeamPixel is to get Pixel devices into the hands of content creators, not press and tech reviewers. We missed the mark with this new language that appeared in the #TeamPixel form yesterday, and it has been removed.”

Those terms certainly caused confusion online, with some assuming such terms apply to all product reviewers. However, that isn’t the case. Google’s official Pixel review program for publications like The Verge requires no such stipulations. (And, to be clear, The Verge would never accept such terms, in accordance with our ethics policy.)

So then, what is Team Pixel, exactly? Officially, it’s a program handled by PR agency 1000heads that seeds early units to influencers and superfans to drum up interest as brand ambassadors. While Google partners with 1000heads, it doesn’t directly run the program, and there are distinct differences from the traditional reviews program. For example, journalists and influencers in the official reviews program often get briefed and given products under embargo before or during an event. Team Pixel participants get the devices shortly after launch but before the public — all in exchange for some coverage on social media. For smaller creators, this can be a big leg up in terms of access.

“I joined the program over five years ago because it was a great way to get a phone and either relatively early or on time, which, in the review world, is big,” says creator Adam Matlock, who reviews tech on his TechOdyssey YouTube channel.

«

Which goes to show how much one should trust influencers, I suppose. (Never saw this reviewing Apple products, and as with The Verge, would have ignored it. That’s different from an embargo on when the review can be published, though.) I bet all the folk at Humane (struggling with mountains of returns) are realising they missed a trick.
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Delay of gratification and adult outcomes: the “Marshmallow Test” does not reliably predict adult functioning • Wiley Online Library

Jessica Sperber, Deborah Lowe Vandell, Greg Duncan, Tyler Watts:

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This study extends the analytic approach conducted by Watts et al. (2018) to examine the long-term predictive validity of delay of gratification. Participants (n = 702; 83% White, 46% male) completed the Marshmallow Test at 54 months (1995–1996) and survey measures at age 26 (2017–2018). Using a preregistered analysis, Marshmallow Test performance was not strongly predictive of adult achievement, health, or behavior.

Although modest bivariate associations were detected with educational attainment (r = .17) and body mass index (r = −.17), almost all regression-adjusted coefficients were nonsignificant. No clear pattern of moderation was detected between delay of gratification and either socioeconomic status or sex. Results indicate that Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.

«

You have no idea how long I’ve waited for the Marshmallow Test to be shown to be hooey. (Yes, that’s a joke.) Unusual, of course, for a negative result to be published in this way, but it’s an important one.
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I, for one, will mourn Twitter • New Statesman

Jonn Elledge:

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The argument against Twitter is becoming overwhelming. The social media network, to which I still refuse to refer using Elon Musk’s embarrassing rebrand “X”, has always had its dark side. It has been described, by its most loyal users, as “the hellsite” for literally years. It’s been a transmission mechanism for nasty far-right politics to reach the political mainstream before, too, playing no small part in the unlikely transformation of a failed real-estate mogul and reality-TV star into the once and perhaps future president of the United States.

But since Elon Musk acquired it, possibly by accident, back in 2022, the voices of racist, misogynistic or homophobic trolls have become louder and more prominent. Moderation policies have been weakened; banned accounts belonging to the likes of Andrew Tate or Alex Jones reinstated. Misinformation abounds, and the loss of reputable advertisers has made noticeably less reputable ones more visible.

Even that era now looks like a lost golden age compared to these last few weeks. Musk has tweeted about “two-tier Keir” – a reference to a right-wing conspiracy theory that the reason violent anti-immigration rioters have been policed more harshly than protesters supporting left-wing causes is the politics, not the violence. He’s agreed with Nigel Farage that the Prime Minister is the “biggest threat to free speech we’ve seen in our history”. He’s even used his platform to predict civil war in the UK. If Twitter was a new social media network, the News Agents’ Lewis Goodall has argued, we’d treat it like Truth Social or Gab – an outpost of the alt right – not the world’s “public square”. If your politics aren’t on the nasty right, the case for leaving is increasingly unarguable.

«

On Twitter, I don’t follow Musk, and have zero interest in what he has to say; but it’s clear there’s a huge number of people who do, and do. It’s also clear that his decision to let people who pay to be there be amplified (and be paid for that) has a seriously bad effect on behaviours and outcomes.

Threads, however, is really boring. BlueSky I find more interesting.
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Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries • SPARC

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MIT has long tried to avoid vendor lock-in through big deal contracts and, in 2019, maintained individual title-by-title subscriptions to approximately 675 Elsevier titles. In 2020, they took the significant step of canceling the full Elsevier journals contract – all 675 titles – leaving users with immediate access to only pre-2020 backfile content. Since the cancellation, MIT Libraries estimates annual savings at more than 80% of its original spend. This move saves MIT approximately $2m each year, and the Libraries provide alternative means of access that fulfils most article requests in minutes. 

After laying the groundwork with faculty and university administrators, the transition has been relatively seamless with minimal push back from researchers. Most faculty have been supportive of the Libraries in taking a principled stand in line with MIT values and are finding alternative means of  access to needed research without an Elsevier subscription. Four years out, the faculty who continue to be most challenged by lack of immediate access are in the life sciences.

The experience has highlighted the extraordinary difference between what MIT had been paying (with pricing based on historic spend) to subscribe to Elsevier journal content and what it actually costs the Libraries to provide users with read access to what they need. On the publishing side, MIT’s analysis demonstrates that there were no financial economies of scale offered by Elseiver’s read and publish proposal. While local institutional context varies, MIT librarians believe others could likely benefit from a similar move. They are interested in collaborating with others to make collective investments in open publishing using their savings.

«

We might be moving towards a new model of scientific publishing: preprints on Arxiv, discussion on blogs and Arxiv, revision and publication in a jointly-funded open publication journal.
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‘It made me cry’: photos taken 15 years apart show melting Swiss glaciers • The Guardian

Ajit Niranjan:

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A tourist has posted “staggering” photos of himself and his wife at the same spot in the Swiss Alps almost exactly 15 years apart, in a pair of photos that highlight the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers.

Duncan Porter, a software developer from Bristol, posted photos that were taken in the same spot at the Rhône glacier in August 2009 and August 2024. The white ice that filled the background has shrunk to reveal grey rock. A once-small pool at the bottom, out of sight in the original, has turned into a vast green lake.

“Not gonna lie, it made me cry,” Porter said in a viral post on social media platform X on Sunday night.

Porter and his wife had taken the original photo from a viewpoint by a “Wes Anderson-style” hotel that has since shut, and hung it up in their kitchen. Eager to return to the mountains and let their teenage daughters Maisie and Emily see the glacier, they took a camper van trip across Europe and set out to recreate the picture.

“But obviously the circumstance of this photo was drastically different,” said Porter. Helen Porter, a nurse, added: “I thought it was really unbelievable.”

The carbon pollution released by burning fossil fuels and destroying nature has heated the planet 1.3C since preindustrial times. In Europe, which has warmed twice as fast as the global average, hotter summers have forced people in mountainous regions to see slow-moving glaciers melt before their eyes.

Switzerland has lost one-third of its glacier volume since 2000, according to official statistics, and 10% has disappeared in the last two years alone.

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The photographs really are striking.
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The English Premier League will ditch its hated VAR offside tech for a fleet of iPhones • WIRED

Ben Dowsett:

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When you watch this year’s English Premier League soccer games, there’s a high chance you may get mad at some of the offside calls. However, unlike past seasons, your anger won’t be because the call, or the lack thereof, was obviously lousy. That’s because the League’s new offside-detection system is apparently able to spot a player’s position on the field, and call them offside, with more accuracy than ever—and it’s all powered by iPhones.

The League’s rollout of this new semiautomated offside tech later in the 2024–25 season won’t just provide long-awaited placation for players and fans frustrated by years of problems with previous video-assistant referee (VAR) systems, from extensive delays and human process errors to concerns about the precision of in-game calls due to limitations of the existing technology.

Genius Sports and subsidiary Second Spectrum, known for years of optical tracking and data-based work in NBA basketball, will be debuting this smartphone-based system known internally as “Dragon.”

The system utilizes dozens of iPhones, using the cameras to capture high-frame-rate video from multiple angles. Dragon’s custom machine intelligence software supposedly allows the smartphones to effectively communicate and work together to process all the visual data collected by the multiple cameras.

What’s more, in addition to its use in soccer games, it could also serve as a driver of new motion-capture and artificial-intelligence models across many other sports. WIRED obtained exclusive access to Dragon’s development and imminent deployment in the EPL.

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The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, but it can’t be worse than the previous VAR. Can it?
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Online sports betting hurts consumers • Slow Boring

Ben Krauss and Milan Singh:

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In 30 states, as well as DC and Puerto Rico, everyone over the age of 21 is effectively walking around with a mini sports casino in their pocket. 

We’ve both written pieces warning that the widespread and mostly unregulated push towards legal mobile sports gambling could have dangerous consequences. At the time, we knew that total sports wagers had grown to well over a hundred billion dollars annually and states with legalized mobile sports gambling had seen a corresponding rise in calls to addiction hotlines. We also knew that previous forms of legal gambling (state lotteries) had disproportionately hurt the financial well-being of poor Americans, and that the extra tax revenue from legalized gambling likely wasn’t worth the cost of addiction. But we lacked data that proved mobile sports gambling led to widespread financial hardship in the states that legalized it. 

Now, we have it. 

This past month, two research teams released papers showing how legalized mobile sports gambling negatively impacts bettors’ financial health. While most gamblers wager responsibly, a concerning minority do not. Large samples of individual financial data show that legalized sports gambling decreases credit scores, increases debt loads, and substitutes positive investment activities. These effects are particularly prevalent among low-income men.

Legislators in states with legalized sports betting — and those considering it — need to take these harms seriously, and reconsider if the mobile sports betting boom is truly worth the tax dollars it provides.

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Harms credit scores, leads to more personal bankruptcies, more credit card delinquencies.. but I bet the tax dollars are thought worth it. Also there’s the difficulty of preventing people doing illicit betting given they have a casino in their pocket and neither Google nor Apple will block it.
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Fusion power might be 30 years away but we will reap its benefits well before • The Guardian

Stuart Clark, in a roundup piece about various ways in which fusion power might – might – be able to provide useful technologies for other applications:

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At present, the biggest spin-out project for Focused Energy is a contract with the German government to build the first laser-driven neutron source for examining nuclear waste containers.

Having shut down its last remaining nuclear power plants in 2023, Germany must now deal with the waste, which has been piling up for decades. Focused Energy’s imaging system will determine the contents of the barrels, and what condition the waste is in, so that they can be safely and finally stored.

Across the Atlantic, Shine is planning to take this one step further. Instead of using neutrons to image the waste, if the neutron beam can be made more intense, it can transform the waste into less harmful substances. For example, traditional nuclear reactors split uranium-235 or plutonium-239 to produce energy. The waste product is iodine-129, with a half-life of more than 15m years. However, if it could be bombarded with a high-intensity neutron beam, it would be transformed into iodine-128, which has a half-life of just 25 minutes.

“You can be rid of this 10 million-year problem in a day,” says Piefer.

«

At this point you, like me, are saying “Wow! This is a solution that we’re crying out for.” (Though I’m not confident that iodine is the only waste product.) Now read on:

»

It turns out that the kind of neutrons necessary to do this will be made in abundance in many fusion power plants. So the reactors of the future will not only solve the world’s energy problems, but can be harnessed to help clean up the dirty legacy of the first nuclear reactors.

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Oh, so we first have to build the impossible machine, and then we can perform a bit of magic to solve our current challenges. (Thanks Steve for the link.)
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Why I finally quit Spotify • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

Through Spotify, I can browse many decades of published music more or less instantly; I can freely sample the work of new musicians. Yet it has become aggravatingly difficult to find what I want to listen to. The uppermost menu now offers three options, each given equal real estate—Music, Podcasts, and Audiobooks—and the Music tab is filled with rows of playlists, autoplay “radio” stations, and algorithmically generated mixes. The only option for browsing full albums is a small item in the lesser Library column, to the right of yet more buttons for Playlists and Podcasts. With the upgrade, it became clearer than ever what the app has been pushing me to do: listen to what it suggests, not choose music on my own. In 2012, Spotify launched its slogan, “Music for everyone.” Now it may as well be “Be grateful for whatever music we give you.”

I’m hardly alone in my souring on Spotify. When I posted about my annoyance with the interface on X, I heard from dozens of other unhappy users. “It’s harder just to enjoy music,” Kyle Austin, a marketing executive in Boston who responded to the post, told me. He’s noticed that the home-page interface emphasizes only what you’ve played recently; if you don’t want to continue listening to the same playlist or set of albums, you have to scroll past rows of recommendations or click out of the Home window. Diving deep into a particular artist’s discography—say, in Austin’s case, that of the prolific singer-songwriter Zach Bryan—requires scrolling through “Popular” tracks, “Artist Picks,” and “Popular Releases.” “It’s teaching you to not do that,” Austin said. Michael Toohey, an accountant in Chicago, told me that on Spotify “the entire concept of an album feels more like a hindrance than anything.”

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Chayka’s argument is that Spotify is now not interested in helping you find the music you want; much more the content it wants to push at you. Of course, you’re wondering what alternatives there would be..
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The introduction since 2011 in the UK of a charge for plastic shopping bags has cut the number washed up on beaches by 80%. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll 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, but there’s no post at the Social Warming Substack: I went to see Nadine Shah at a gig instead. But there are lots of articles there!

The Overspill is going on a two-week break. It’s August, and nothing happens (trust me!). Enjoy whatever the weather does. Back on Monday 19th, if spared.

Mike Lynch: I only got justice because I’m rich • BBC News

Tom Gerken & Tom Singleton:

»

The British businessman Mike Lynch, who this June was acquitted in the US of a multi-billion pound fraud, has said he believes he was only able to clear his name because of his huge wealth.

Mr Lynch, 59, was facing two decades in jail if had been convicted of the 17 charges he faced, relating to the sale of his tech company, Autonomy, to US firm Hewlett-Packard.

He told the the PM programme, on BBC Radio 4, that though convinced of his innocence throughout, he was only able to prove it in a US court because he was rich enough to pay the enormous legal fees involved.

“You shouldn’t need to have funds to protect yourself as a British citizen”, he said. “The reason I’m sitting here, let’s be honest, is not only because I was innocent… but because I had enough money not to be swept away by a process that’s set up to sweep you away.”

He said most people, even they sold all their assets, would run out of funds in a matter of months, a situation that he said “has to change.”

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Lynch was charged in 2018 by the US, eventually extradited in 2022, and then acquitted this year. The imbalance in the extradition treaty between the US and UK has been a longrunning source of resentment – try getting a US citizen to face the music in the UK – and probably needs revision. But who’s going to tell the US?
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Antarctic temperatures rise 10ºC above average in near record heatwave • The Guardian

Damien Gayle and Dharna Noor:

»

Ground temperatures across great swathes of the ice sheets of Antarctica have soared an average of 10ºC above normal over the past month, in what has been described as a near record heatwave.

While temperatures remain below zero on the polar land mass, which is shrouded in darkness at this time of year, the depths of southern hemisphere winter, temperatures have reportedly reached 28ºC above expectations on some days.

The globe has experienced 12 months of record warmth, with temperatures consistently exceeding the 1.5ºC rise above preindustrial levels that has been touted as the limit to avoiding the worst of climate breakdown.

Michael Dukes, the director of forecasting at MetDesk, said that while individual daily high temperatures were surprising, far more significant was the average rise over the month.

Climate scientists’ models have long predicted that the most significant effects of anthropogenic climate change would be on polar regions, “and this is a great example of that”, he said.

“Usually you can’t just look at one month for a climate trend but it is right in line with what models predict,” Dukes added. “In Antarctica generally that kind of warming in the winter and continuing in to summer months can lead to collapsing of the ice sheets.”

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Perhaps the rising oceans will get us before the bird flu (later!).
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Microsoft and Reddit are fighting about why Bing’s crawler is blocked on Reddit • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Microsoft and Reddit are offering conflicting explanations for why Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is currently blocked from crawling Reddit and offering links from the site in its search results. 

Reddit, which now demands payment from anyone crawling the site and using its data to train AI products, claims that Bing’s crawler is being used to power AI products. Microsoft claims it has made it easy for any site to block its crawler that’s used for AI products, while still allowing a crawler that is only used for search results, and that Reddit’s decision to block Bing is “impacting competition” in the search engine space. 

The conflicting reasonings behind the block are further proof that the massive, indiscriminate scraping of the internet to create AI training data in a way that violates long-respected norms about how to access information on the web are eroding trust, making the internet less open, and causing tech companies to beef about this issue in public.

The beef between Microsoft and Reddit came to light after I published a story revealing that Reddit is currently blocking every crawler from every search engine except Google, which earlier this year agreed to pay Reddit $60m a year to scrap the site for its generative AI products. Reddit told me last week that this $60m deal “is not at all related” to it blocking other search engines. At the same time, as Reddit explains on its site and as it explained to me, any search engine that wants to crawl Reddit for search results must guarantee that it will not use Reddit data to power any AI products. 

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I’ve read through the story, and it really seems like Microsoft and Reddit have completely conflicting explanations of this. I thought the Google deal was about getting “fresh” results, but it seems not. So is Google getting to feed its AI systems? That’s the big question.
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AI’s future in grave danger from Nvidia’s chokehold on chips, groups warn • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has joined progressive groups—including Demand Progress, Open Markets Institute, and the Tech Oversight Project—pressuring the US Department of Justice to investigate Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market due to alleged antitrust concerns, Reuters reported.

In a letter to the DOJ’s chief antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, groups demanding more Big Tech oversight raised alarms that Nvidia’s top rivals apparently “are struggling to gain traction” because “Nvidia’s near-absolute dominance of the market is difficult to counter” and “funders are wary of backing its rivals.”

Nvidia is currently “the world’s most valuable public company,” their letter said, worth more than $3 trillion after taking near-total control of the high-performance AI chip market. Particularly “astonishing,” the letter said, was Nvidia’s dominance in the market for GPU accelerator chips, which are at the heart of today’s leading AI. Groups urged Kanter to probe Nvidia’s business practices to ensure that rivals aren’t permanently blocked from competing.

According to the advocacy groups that strongly oppose Big Tech monopolies, Nvidia “now holds an 80% overall global market share in GPU chips and a 98% share in the data center market.” This “puts it in a position to crowd out competitors and set global pricing and the terms of trade,” the letter warned.

Earlier this year, inside sources reported that the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission reached a deal where the DOJ would probe Nvidia’s alleged anti-competitive behavior in the booming AI industry, and the FTC would probe OpenAI and Microsoft. But there has been no official Nvidia probe announced, prompting progressive groups to push harder for the DOJ to recognize what they view as a “dire danger to the open market” that “well deserves DOJ scrutiny.”

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The argument is that Nvidia “sells chips, networking, and programming software as a package”, which ties companies to them, and blocks customers doing business with rivals. The latter is surely an antitrust error, and the former seems ripe for examination.
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Intel to cut jobs, suspend dividend in cost-saving push • WSJ

Asa Fitch:

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Intel plans to lay off thousands of employees this year and pause dividend payments in the fourth quarter as part of a broad cost-saving drive more than three years into Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger’s turnaround effort.

Gelsinger laid out the plan to reduce costs by more than $10bn next year as the chip maker reported second-quarter sales of $12.8bn, down 1% and below analysts’ forecasts in a FactSet survey. Reaching that cost-reduction goal will require cutting jobs and lowering capital expenditures, among other moves, the company said.

The company’s stock fell more than 14% in after-hours trading.

Intel has struggled to gain a foothold in the market for artificial-intelligence chips that have driven the sales and valuations of Nvidia and some other rival chip makers. The heavy spending on those AI-focused chips to build out big data centers also has cut into demand for the non-AI processors for data centers that have long been central to Intel’s business.

“Clearly market conditions, some were good and some not so good, and you have to adjust the financial envelope appropriately,” Gelsinger said in an interview. “The AI surge was much more acute than I expected, and you have to adjust to those things.”

Intel will lay off about 15,000 people, most of them by the end of this year, Gelsinger said in the interview. The company reported about 116,500 employees in its core business at the end of June.

Intel reported a loss of $1.6bn for the second quarter, compared with a $1.5bn profit a year earlier. It said it expected sales of roughly $13bn in the third quarter, below analyst forecasts.

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Intel is in deep trouble. The “AI surge” is Nvidia, and GPUs, where Intel isn’t strong; but that’s where the data centre spending is going. The only way back is through ARM chips, surely, but that means competing with TSMC.
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What’s genuinely weird about the online right • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

»

Last week, I struck up a conversation with the guy cutting my hair, who was a Frenchman living in London. When I told him that my job was writing about politics, he gave a passable impression of being interested.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Did I hear something about Donald Trump getting shot?”

I stared back at him with the awestruck bafflement of a soon-to-be-dead missionary contemplating the Sentinelese: How wondrous to meet someone so untouched by modern life! But, of course, by poring over swing-state polls, consuming coconut memes, and developing strong opinions about Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, I have become the weird one. Most Americans follow political news sporadically and sketchily. About 73 million people watched at least some of the first debate between Trump and Joe Biden in 2020, but a month before the 2016 election, 40% of Americans could not name the vice-presidential candidate from either party. They simply allocated no space in their brain for the existence of Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate—and in retrospect, who could say that was the wrong decision?

One of the dangers of following politics too closely is that you assume too much knowledge, and interest, among regular voters. You overinterpret every event—this speech will definitely move the race!—and you assume that niche opinions are widely held. You end up talking with your peers rather than the public. You become, to use the word of the moment, weird.

…Also, when trying to rebut the charge that you and your allies are weird, you should not—as the right-wing influencer Dave Rubin recently did—circulate a supercut of people calling you weird and claim that the allegation is being spread by “NPCs.” If you know what NPCs are, you are very weird.

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Typically enjoyable article. I confess to being weird, on this metric.
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Delta CEO blames Microsoft and CrowdStrike for a $500m outage • The Verge

Richard Lawler:

»

Asked about a continuing relationship with Microsoft after the crash, [Delta Air Lines CEO Ed] Bastian said he regards it as “probably the most fragile platform” and asked the question, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” He placed some blame on the valuations of big tech companies, which lately have been lifted by generative AI hype, saying, “…they’re building the future, and they have to make sure they fortify the current.”

Apparently, the only thing offered to Delta so far from the two companies was free consulting advice, so it seems their IT department wasn’t on the list for one of CrowdStrike’s $10 UberEats cards. CNBC previously reported Delta has hired attorney David Boies to seek damages.

Delta isn’t alone — CrowdStrike shareholders filed a proposed class action lawsuit this week, reports Reuters. The suit cites CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz’s comments on a March 5th call that its software was “validated, tested, and certified.” The shareholders now regard those claims as false and misleading since CrowdStrike wasn’t performing the same level of testing on Rapid Response Content updates as it does on other updates, and its Content Validator checks didn’t catch the bug that caused the global IT crash.

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If Delta switches over to Apple.. I’ll be very, very surprised.
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I’ve been driving an EV for a year. I have only one regret • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

My electric vehicle and I are about to celebrate our first anniversary. Please send a 150-kilowatt cake and your finest bottle of car wax.

Yes, last summer I tested five EVs under $60,000. I ended up leasing a Ford Mustang Mach-E, and have continued documenting my ad-EV-ntures.

While you hear a lot about electric vehicles these days—They aren’t selling! They’re dragging down profits! They’re destroying our country!—life has been pretty great for my EV and me. 

Like any couple in the honeymoon phase, we often stare longingly at each other, wondering what all the worry is about. Range anxiety? Not a thing—definitely not when it’s warm out. Missing the rumble of an internal combustion engine? Nope. Regrets about skipping the Tesla? Not since March, when I was able to start charging at Tesla stations.

“Have any of these people driven these vehicles before they say they love them or hate them?” Ford chief executive Jim Farley told me in a recent interview. “Here I am, this petrol person who just loves getting in his electric truck.”

Farley would say that. He’s got some EVs to sell. I don’t. I’m also not pushing personal politics or macroeconomic theories. I’m just a tech fan, here to tell you there’s a lot to love about these battery-powered, cutting-edge cars. 

There are also some things to not love.

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• Public charging isn’t really a thing; people charge at home
• Not needing maintenance is great
• The software matters
• Winter is bad
• Leasing is good.

There you go.
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Number of plastic bags found on UK beaches down 80% since charge introduced • The Guardian

Karen McVeigh:

»

The number of plastic bags washed up on UK beaches has fallen by 80% over a decade, since a mandatory fee was imposed on shoppers who opt to pick up single-use carrier bags at the checkout.

According to the Marine Conservation Society’s (MCS) annual litter survey, volunteers found an average of one plastic bag every 100 metres of coastline surveyed last year, compared to an average of five carrier bags every 100 metres in 2014.

The charity, which has monitored beach litter for the past three decades, said the drop was undoubtedly due to the introduction of mandatory charges, which can range from 5p to 25p, for single-use plastic bags.

Lizzie Price, Beachwatch programme manager at MCS, said: “It is brilliant to see policies on single-use plastics such as carrier bags working.”

Large retailers in Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and England have been required to charge for single-use plastic bags by laws introduced in 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2015, respectively. The charge was increased from 5p to 10p in 2021 for England and Scotland and is 25p in Northern Ireland. Wales, where the minimum charge remains 5p, has said it will ban the bags altogether by 2026.

Price urged the devolved UK governments to push forward with their policies to charge for, ban or reduce more single-use items, and take action such as speeding up the proposed deposit scheme for plastic bottles, cans and glass. All four UK nations have been working together to try to agree a joint approach to the scheme, which has now been delayed until 2027.

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Putting a non-trivial price on something makes people hold on to it! Astonishing finding which will surely get economists buzzing.
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Bird flu cases among farm workers may be going undetected, study suggests • NPR Health News

Amy Maxmen:

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A new study lends weight to fears that more livestock workers have gotten the bird flu than has been reported.

“I am very confident there are more people being infected than we know about,” said Gregory Gray, the infectious disease researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch who led the study, posted online Wednesday and under review to be published in a leading infectious disease journal. “Largely, that’s because our surveillance has been so poor.”

As bird flu cases go underreported, health officials risk being slow to notice if the virus were to become more contagious. A large surge of infections outside of farmworker communities would trigger the government’s flu surveillance system, but by then it might be too late to contain.

“We need to figure out what we can do to stop this thing,” Gray said. “It is not just going away.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bases decisions on its surveillance. For example, the agency has bird flu vaccines on hand but has decided against offering them to farmworkers, citing a low number of cases.

But testing for bird flu among farmworkers remains rare, which is why Gray’s research stands out as the first to look for signs of prior, undiagnosed infections in people who had been exposed to sick dairy cattle – and who had become ill and recovered.

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Not happy with this “not going away”. Watching brief. Just a watching brief.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The EU regulation that requires the tops to be attached to plastic bottles affects the UK, because why wouldn’t it, logically? CC-licensed photo by an.difal 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 won’t be a post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack – I’m going to a gig. Free signup.

A selection of 8 links for you. Undetachable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A first look at Apple Intelligence and its (slightly) smarter Siri • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

»

A splash screen reintroduces you to the virtual assistant once you enable Apple Intelligence, an early version of which is now available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in a developer beta. You’ll know Siri is listening when the edges of the screen glow, making it pretty obvious that something different is going on.

The big Siri AI update is still months away. This version comes with meaningful improvements to language understanding, but future updates will add features like awareness of what’s on your screen and the ability to take action on your behalf. Meanwhile, the rest of the Apple Intelligence feature set previewed in this update feels like a party waiting for the guest of honor.

That said, Siri’s improvements in this update are useful. Tapping the bottom of the screen twice will bring up a new way to interact with the assistant: through text. It’s also much better at parsing natural language, waiting more patiently through hesitations and “um”s as I stumble through questions. It also understands when I’m asking a follow-up question.

New Siri understands context in follow-up questions, like this one after I asked for the weather in Olympia.
Outside of Siri, it’s kind of an Easter egg hunt finding bits of Apple Intelligence sprinkled throughout the OS. They’re in the mail app, with a summarize button at the top of each email now. And anywhere you can type and highlight text, you’ll find a new option called “writing tools” with AI proofreading, writing suggestions, and summaries.

…In iOS 18, voice recordings finally come with automatic transcriptions, which is not an Apple Intelligence feature since it also works on my iPhone 13 Mini. But Apple Intelligence will let you turn a recording transcript into a summary or a checklist. This is helpful if you want to just free-associate while recording a memo and list a bunch of things you need to pack for an upcoming trip; Apple Intelligence turns it into a list that actually makes sense.

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So the real interesting stuff is still some way off. And quite a lot of the things people think are impressive are there already.
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The climate is changing so fast that we haven’t seen how bad extreme weather could get • The Conversation

Hayley Fowler, Simon Lee and Paul Davies:

»

Typically, meteorologists and climate scientists use a 30-year period to represent the climate, which is updated every ten years. The most recent climate period is 1991-2020. The difference between each successive 30-year climate period serves as a very literal record of climate change.

This way of thinking about the climate falls short when the climate itself is rapidly changing. Global average temperatures have increased at around 0.2°C per decade over the past 30 years, meaning that the global climate of 1991 was around 0.6°C cooler than that in 2020 (when accounting for other year-to-year fluctuations), and even more so than the present day.

If the climate is a range of possible weather events, then this rapid change has two implications. First, it means that part of the distribution of weather events comprising a 30-year climate period occurred in a very different background global climate: for example, northerly winds in the 1990s were much colder than those in the 2020s in north-west Europe, thanks to the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the global average. Statistics from three decades ago no longer represent what is possible in the present day.

Second, the rapidly changing climate means we have not necessarily experienced the extremes that modern-day atmospheric and oceanic warmth can produce. In a stable climate, scientists would have multiple decades for the atmosphere to get into its various configurations and drive extreme events, such as heatwaves, floods or droughts. We could then use these observations to build up an understanding of what the climate is capable of. But in our rapidly changing climate, we effectively have only a few years – not enough to experience everything the climate has to offer.

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(The authors are academics in climate change, meteorology and atmospheric science.)
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Xbox console sales continue to crater with massive 42% revenue drop • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

Microsoft’s revenue from Xbox console sales was down a whopping 42% on a year-over-year basis for the quarter ending in June, the company announced in its latest earnings report.

The massive drop continues a long, pronounced slide for sales of Microsoft’s gaming hardware—the Xbox line has now shown year-over-year declines in hardware sales revenue in six of the last seven calendar quarters (and seven of the last nine). And Microsoft CFO Amy Hood told investors in a follow-up call (as reported by GamesIndustry.biz) to expect hardware sales to decline yet again in the coming fiscal quarter, which ends in September.

The 42% drop for quarterly hardware revenue—by far the largest such drop since the introduction of the Xbox Series X/S in 2020—follows an 11% year-over-year decline in the second calendar quarter of 2023.

Microsoft no longer shares raw console shipment numbers like its competitors, so we don’t know how many Xbox consoles are selling on an absolute basis. But industry analyst Daniel Ahmad estimates that Microsoft sold less than 900,000 Xbox units for the quarter ending in March, compared to 4.5 million PS5 units shipped in the same period.

Overall, the reported revenue numbers suggest that sales of the Xbox Series X/S line peaked sometime in 2022, during the console’s second full year on store shelves. That’s extremely rare for a market where sales for successful console hardware usually see a peak in the fourth or fifth year on the market before a slow decline in the run-up to a successor.

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There’s an article putting this in context, but even so: consoles long ago peaked.
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A hill to die on • Jonty’s Jottings

Jonty Bloom:

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Who would have thought that plastic bottle tops were a perfect illustration of Brexit and also a hill to die on for the Brexiteers?

As you may have noticed plastic bottle tops now stay attached to the bottle, to prevent billions of the little beggars getting loose and polluting the world. This is apparently, and this is news to me, the result of an EU directive. A wise move to try to reduce pollution across the EU you might think, but it also applies in the UK, or to be precise, it doesn’t.

Because we have left the EU the directive does not affect us, (a classic case of regulatory divergence by inertia, which I have mentioned before). But any British manufacturer of plastic bottle who wants to sell in the EU has to follow the EU rules.

As British industry, Remain and anyone with an ounce of common sense has been pointing out for years now, no company is going to run two production lines – one that meets EU standards, and a British one that meets lower UK standards. They will run the one with higher standards and sell them in the UK and the rest of Europe.

Hey presto! The Brexit fools have discovered that these new bottle tops have been “imposed” on the UK by the EU, we are not free or sovereign, EU regulations still apply, we are still in the dead clutch of Brussels, chained to a corpse and so on, all in a constant whining voice. .

Well, welcome to the real world, fools!

These bottle tops are not imposed on us, we are not subject to EU directives, but we will now use them because it is common sense. There is little or no advantage in setting UK only standards, there is no economic boost from so doing, only considerable cost. The EU is a regulatory superpower, we are not. Real life economics trumps sad fantasies. You had better get to like it.

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Not surprising, but obvious enough really.
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Japan’s rice stocks drop to lowest level in decades amid tourist boom and poor crop yields • The Guardian

Timothy Hornyak and AFP:

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Japan’s rice stockpile has fallen to the lowest level this century, with a tourism boom part of the cause, government officials say.

Private-sector inventories of rice fell to 1.56m tons in June, down 20% from a year earlier and the lowest since 1999, when comparable data was first gathered, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. It attributed the decrease to the high temperatures that hit crops in 2023 as well as demand from inbound visitors. Last year Japan recorded its hottest September since records began 125 years ago.

“The chief reasons behind the record-low inventory is a decline in production last year due to high temperatures combined with water shortages, and the relative cheapness of rice prices compared to prices of other crops such as wheat,” farm ministry official Hiroshi Itakura told Agence France-Presse. “The increase in demand by foreign tourists has also contributed,” Itakura said, and added that “we are not in a situation of facing shortages of rice”.

The trading price for rice has hit a 30-year high, wholesalers are running low on stock and some supermarkets have decided to further raise prices and limit purchases, according to Japanese news reports. The situation is expected to continue until September, when rice from this year’s harvest will become available.

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Water shortages and high temperatures? Not the.. climate then?
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Websites are blocking the wrong AI scrapers (because AI companies keep making new ones) • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

Hundreds of websites trying to block the AI company Anthropic from scraping their content are blocking the wrong bots, seemingly because they are copy/pasting outdated instructions to their robots.txt files, and because companies are constantly launching new AI crawler bots with different names that will only be blocked if website owners update their robots.txt. 

In particular, these sites are blocking two bots no longer used by the company, while unknowingly leaving Anthropic’s real (and new) scraper bot unblocked. 

This is an example of “how much of a mess the robots.txt landscape is right now,” the anonymous operator of Dark Visitors told 404 Media. Dark Visitors is a website that tracks the constantly-shifting landscape of web crawlers and scrapers—many of them operated by AI companies—and which helps website owners regularly update their robots.txt files to prevent specific types of scraping. The site has seen a huge increase in popularity as more people try to block AI from scraping their work.

“The ecosystem of agents is changing quickly, so it’s basically impossible for website owners to manually keep up. For example, Apple (Applebot-Extended) and Meta (Meta-ExternalAgent) just added new ones last month and last week, respectively,” they added.

Dark Visitors tracks hundreds of web crawlers and scrapers, attempts to explain what each scraper does, and lets website owners constantly update their site’s robots.txt file, which is a set of instructions that tells bots if they have permission to crawl a site. We have seen time and time again that AI companies will often find surreptitious ways of crawling sites that they aren’t supposed to, or, in some cases, they simply ignore robots.txt.

…After this story was originally published, an Anthropic spokesperson told 404 Media that CLAUDEBOT will respect block requests for its older two crawlers. “The ‘ANTHROPIC-AI’ and ‘CLAUDE-WEB’ user agents are no longer in use,” the spokesperson said. “We have configured ClaudeBot, our centralized user agent, to respect any existing robots.txt directives that were previously set for these deprecated user agents. This attempts to respect website owners’ preferences, even if they haven’t updated their robots.txt files.”

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The preachers behind Kenya’s online-only churches • Rest of World

Vincent Owino:

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Standing behind a podium in a first-floor apartment in Nairobi’s Embakasi estate, Kenyan preacher Jeffter Wekesa speaks into a wireless microphone. His gaze alternates between a Samsung phone recording from a tripod to his left and a webcam on another stand before him. It’s past midnight, and the city’s near-constant pandemonium has given way to a mortal stillness.

Wekesa, 31, stands five-foot-four with a clean-shaven head and is dressed in a sleek, cream-and-maroon Ankara suit. He has the air of a man at ease before a congregation of thousands. But he’s alone in his living room, facing a coffee table and empty couch. The webcam is broadcasting his nightly sermon live on Facebook, the Samsung live on TikTok, and another phone live on a messaging app called Imo. In total, close to 500 people are following along. “Some of us, if it were not for God, we would have been defeated [a] long time ago,” he tells them.

Behind him, a 75in flatscreen TV displays a photo of a lion, while two speakers play soft gospel instrumentals that blend into the stentorian sound of his voice. The room is illuminated by a pair of LED tube lights, creating a sense of a tranquil, sunlit afternoon. “There was a day, child of God, I was a nobody,” he intones. “It is important to remember that — if it were not for God — at some point you would have fallen. At some point, child of God, you would’ve ended up to be a nobody.” 

The comment sections of his livestreams buzz with activity as followers type “Amen!”

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Well, why shouldn’t a church be online? The community is the thing.
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Delta CEO says CrowdStrike tech outage cost it $500m • WSJ

Alison Sider:

»

Delta Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian said the carrier took a $500m hit from the CrowdStrike technology outage that hurt its operations.

With more than 5,000 flight cancellations over several days, Delta faced deeper disruption and took days longer than rivals to get back on track after the outage knocked key systems offline. The US Department of Transportation is investigating how the airline handled the disruption and its customer response.

Delta has hired prominent litigator David Boies, chairman of the firm Boies Schiller Flexner, and notified CrowdStrike and Microsoft to prepare for litigation, according to letters reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Bastian said in a CNBC interview Wednesday from Paris that the airline has no choice but to seek to recover its losses.

“Between not just the loss of revenue, but the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels. We did everything we could to take care of our customers over that time,” he said.

CrowdStrike said in a statement: “We are aware of the reporting, but have no knowledge of a lawsuit and have no further comment.” Microsoft didn’t comment.

«

Not sure that Microsoft deserves any of the blame here, but of course that won’t stop David Boies, who has a long history of suing Microsoft: he was a lead prosecutor for the DOJ antitrust trial in the 1990s.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Judging gymnastics has now become a job where AI can help. CC-licensed photo by Jeffrey Hyde 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. Tumbling. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The AI search war has begun • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

»

existing AI products are absolutely filled with media that publishers have received no compensation for. ([Perplexity’s chief business officer Dmitry] Shevelenko told me that Perplexity will not stop citing publishers outside its revenue-sharing deal [announced on Tuesday with Time, Fortune and some other publishers], nor will it show any preference for its paid partners moving forward.) AI companies don’t seem to value human words, human photos, and human videos as works of craft or products of labour; instead they treat the content as strip mines of information.

“People don’t come to Perplexity to consume journalism; they come to Perplexity to consume facts,” Shevelenko told me in an interview before today’s announcement. “Journalists’ content is rich in facts, verified knowledge, and that is the utility function it plays to an AI answer engine.” To Shevelenko, that means Perplexity and journalists are not in direct competition—the former answers questions; the latter breaks news or provides compelling prose and ideas. But even he conceded that AI search will send less traffic to media websites than traditional search engines have, because users have less reason to click on any links—the bot is providing the answer.

The growing number of AI-media deals, then, are a shakedown. Sure, Shevelenko told me that Perplexity thinks revenue-sharing is the right thing to do. But AI is scraping publishers’ content whether they want it to or not: Media companies can be chumps or get paid. Still, the nature of these deals also suggests that publishers may have more power than it seems. Perplexity and OpenAI, for instance, are offering fairly different incentives to media partners—meaning the tech start-ups are themselves competing to win over publishers.

All of these products have made basic mistakes, such as incorrectly citing sources and fabricating information. Having a searchbot ground itself in human-made “verified knowledge” might help alleviate these issues, especially for recent events the AI model wasn’t trained on. Publishers also have at least some ability to limit AI search engines’ ability to read their websites. They can also refuse to sign or renegotiate deals, or even sue AI companies for copyright infringement, as The New York Times has done. AI firms seem to have their own ways around media companies’ barricades, but that is an ongoing arms race without a clear winner.

«

This all seems like bad ideas all over the place.
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Why we might never know the truth about ultra-processed foods • BBC News

Philippa Roxby:

»

UPFs are defined by how many industrial processes they have been through and the number of ingredients – often unpronounceable – on their packaging. Most are high in fat, sugar or salt; many you’d call fast food.

…a recent meeting of the American Society for Nutrition in Chicago was presented with an observational study of more than 500,000 people in the US. It found that those who ate the most UPFs had a roughly 10% greater chance of dying early, even accounting for their body-mass index and overall quality of diet.

In recent years, lots of other observational studies have shown a similar link – but that’s not the same as proving that how food is processed causes health problems, or pinning down which aspect of those processes might be to blame.

So how could we get to the truth about ultra-processed food?

The kind of study needed to prove definitively that UPFs cause health problems would be extremely complex, suggests Dr Nerys Astbury, a senior researcher in diet and obesity at Oxford University.
It would need to compare a large number of people on two diets – one high in UPFs and one low in UPFs, but matched exactly for calorie and macronutrient content. This would be fiendishly difficult to actually do.

Participants would need to be kept under lock and key so their food intake could be tightly managed. The study would also need to enrol people with similar diets as a starting point. It would be extremely challenging logistically.

And to counter the possibility that people who eat fewer UPFs might just have healthier lifestyles such as through taking more exercise or getting more sleep, the participants of the groups would need to have very similar habits.

“It would be expensive research, but you could see changes from the diets relatively quickly,” Dr Astbury says.

Funding for this type of research could also be hard to come by. There might be accusations of conflicts of interest, since researchers motivated to run these kind of trials may have an idea of what they want the conclusions to be before they started.

«

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An unexpected twist lights up the secrets of turbulence • Quanta Magazine

David Freedman:

»

It’s time to feed the blob. Seething and voracious, it absorbs eight dinner-plate-size helpings every few seconds.

The blob is a cloud of turbulence in a large water tank in the lab of the University of Chicago physicist William Irvine. Unlike every other instance of turbulence that has ever been observed on Earth, Irvine’s blob isn’t a messy patch in a flowing stream of liquid, gas or plasma, or up against a wall. Rather, the blob is self-contained, a roiling, lumpy sphere that leaves the water around it mostly still. To create it and sustain it, Irvine and his graduate student Takumi Matsuzawa must repeatedly shoot “vortex loops” — essentially the water version of smoke rings — at it, eight loops at a time. “We’re building turbulence ring by ring,” said Matsuzawa.

Irvine and Matsuzawa tightly control the loops that are the blob’s building blocks and study the resulting confined turbulence up close and at length. The blob could yield insights into turbulence that physicists have been chasing for two centuries — in a quest that led Richard Feynman to call turbulence the most important unsolved problem in classical physics. (Quantum turbulence has become an important problem too.) Untangling turbulence might also prove extraordinarily impactful, given that it plays a huge role in stars, aviation, nuclear fusion, weather, changes in the Earth’s core, wind turbines and even human health — arterial flow can become dangerously turbulent.

If the blob does yield big advances in turbulence, it will add to the growing string of surprising and influential breakthroughs that Irvine and his students have produced in the physics of what might loosely be called spinning stuff — systems composed of whirling objects, fluids and even fields.

«

Fascinating piece about a really important, yet very poorly understood field of physics: fusion reactors (yes I know) are very sensitive to fluctuations in the circulating plasma, and that’s all turbulence.
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Playing Pokémon by ear • Game File

Stephen Totilo:

»

After Ross Minor was blinded in 2006, he still wanted to play Pokémon.

He was a kid. Eight years old. And he found a way. 

“I listened to all my friends playing the game, and I would hear the soundtrack and be like, ‘Oh, I remember that. That song plays when you’re in this town.’ So I learned that each town has a different song.

“Then I learned that each Pokémon has a different cry… All the attacks make different sounds. 

“The cherry on top was that, when you run into a wall, it plays this boom-boom sound. So, through that alone, I was able to memorize all the games and form this mental map—and beat the games completely by myself without sighted assistance.”

Minor played 2007’s Pokémon Diamond and Pearl that way, then 2011’s Black and White, and then more as each year’s new Pokémon game came out.

For over a decade, his strategy worked. But 2019’s Pokémon Sword and Shield added navigation in three dimensions, and Minor struggled to draft a mental map. He needed assistance from sighted players.

Then came 2022’s Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. Those, Minor told me, “are just completely inaccessible.”

This is what happens, Minor explained, when a video game’s accessibility for players with disabilities is accidental or unintentional.

Players like him can get left behind. 

«

Amazing triumph over the odds – and then Nintendo pulls the rug from under him.
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The gymnastics world braces for an AI future • The Verge

Dvora Meyers:

»

When Simone Biles saluted the judges and stepped onto the mat to vault at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp, Belgium, it seemed like every camera in the packed arena was trained on her. People in the audience pulled their smartphones to record. The photographers zoomed in from their media perches. One TV camera tracked her run on a high-speed dolly, all the way down the runway, as she hurdled into a roundoff onto the springboard. The spider cam, swinging above, caught the upward trajectory of her body as she turned towards the table and blocked up and off, twisting one and a half times before landing on the blue mat and raising her arms above her head. The apex of human athleticism and kinesthetic beauty had been captured.

But there were other cameras that few other people watching in the arena were thinking about as they took in Biles’ prowess on the event: the four placed in each corner of the mat where the vault was situated. These cameras also caught the occasion but not with the purpose of transmitting it to the rest of the world. These were set up by the Japanese technology giant Fujitsu, which, since 2017, has been collaborating with the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) to create an AI gymnastics judging system. 

In its early days, the system used lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to create 3D composites of gymnasts in action. These days, it uses an even more sophisticated system, drawing from four to eight strategically placed hi-def cameras to capture the movement of the athletes, make 3D models, and identify whether the elements they are performing fall into the parameters established by the judging bodies inside the federation. 

But the computer system doesn’t make judgments itself. Instead, it is deployed when there is an inquiry from the gymnast or coaches or a dispute within the judging panel itself. The Judging Support System (JSS) can be consulted to calculate the difficulty score of an athlete’s exercise — a second opinion, rather than an initial prognosis. Currently, it is mostly used for edge cases.

«

Neat article: the judges’ task has always seemed incredibly difficult in gymnastics. (Imagine being a fencing judge before the electronic hit systems; even with those you still get human evaluation of some rounds.)
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The future of science publishing • C&EN

Dalmeet Singh Chawla:

»

In 2015, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest charitable research foundations in the world, introduced a new publication policy that promised to pay publication charges for papers its grantees write as long as the content of the final version of the study was freely available to read somewhere online.

The policy stated that the foundation “would pay reasonable fees required by a publisher to effect publication on these terms.” In 2021, the foundation narrowed that support, clarifying that going forward it would pay only for research published in fully open-access journals, which make all their papers freely available to read.

In March, the Gates Foundation surprised many by backtracking on these policies. It announced that starting Jan. 1, 2025, it would no longer cover publishing costs. The decision is causing anxiety among researchers and publishing experts, who wonder how the open-access model can be maintained if funders don’t foot the publishing bill.

The open-access movement started in the 1990s in a bid to make taxpayer- funded research freely available. Before then, subscription journals were the norm. Researchers typically had access to these journals through their institutional libraries, though cash-strapped universities in emerging-market countries often couldn’t afford the subscriptions. Some publishers introduced waivers for certain universities and libraries in such nations.

…the foundation notes that open access in its current form has resulted in “some unsavory publishing practices,” including unchecked pricing from journals and publishers, questionable peer review, and paper mills—people or organizations that produce fake or subpar papers and sell authorship slots on them.

…The Gates Foundation is now suggesting that authors post online preprints of their author-accepted manuscripts—near-final versions of studies accepted by journals for publication before they are typeset or copyedited—and then publish in whichever journals they like.

«

The latter seems the better model, but still assumes that someone will do the peer review (a necessary step). We still haven’t found the ideal model for science publishing.
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New study confirms mammal-to-mammal avian flu • EurekAlert!

»

A new Cornell University study provides evidence that a spillover of avian influenza from birds to dairy cattle across several US states has now led to mammal-to-mammal transmission – between cows and from cows to cats and a raccoon.

“This is one of the first times that we are seeing evidence of efficient and sustained mammalian-to-mammalian transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1,” said Diego Diel, associate professor of virology and director of the Virology Laboratory at the Animal Health Diagnostic Center in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Diel is co-corresponding author of the study, “Spillover of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Virus to Dairy Cattle” published in Nature.

Whole genome sequencing of the virus did not reveal any mutations in the virus that would lead to enhanced transmissibility of H5N1 in humans, although the data clearly shows mammal-to-mammal transmission, which is concerning as the virus may adapt in mammals, Diel said.

So far, 11 human cases have been reported in the US, with the first dating back to April 2022, each with mild symptoms: four were linked to cattle farms and seven have been linked to poultry farms, including an outbreak of four cases reported in the last few weeks in Colorado. These recent patients fell ill with the same strain identified in the study as circulating in dairy cows, leading the researchers to suspect that the virus likely originated from dairy farms in the same county.

While the virus does have the ability to infect and replicate in people, the efficiency of those infections is low. “The concern is that potential mutations could arise that could lead adaptation to mammals, spillover into humans and potential efficient transmission in humans in the future,” Diel said.

«

*bites nails* Just a watching brief, nothing more.
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Hacker shows how to get free laundry for life • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Michael Orlitzky was not having a good day with his laundry. First CSC Serviceworks, a laundry management company, replaced all of the machines in his building with new coin-op or app-powered ones. The card reading machines had been an issue for years because the cards would stop working and the recharge machine would steal dollar bills, Orlitzky said. Now he had another enemy with its own quirks to get used to. Plus, CSC had replaced the machines about a week ahead of schedule, meaning that any cash on his or others’ laundry cards was now worthless and unusable.

Then, one of the new machines ate his quarters. The first machine was stuck on the cold setting, and he had to pay another $2 and move all of his belongings to another machine. He called CSC customer service and was on hold for an hour. CSC eventually told him to get a refund through the company’s website, which in turn insisted he install CSC’s app to proceed.

“That was the day I decided laundry would be free,” Orlitzky told 404 Media in an email.

Orlitzky then discovered multiple bypasses to CSC machines that allow him to wash his clothes for free. Since then, he’s been pretty quiet about the whole thing. Orlitzky published a brief write-up of his escapades on his personal website last year, but hasn’t shared it on social media. Some people in his building know his secret, but that’s about it.

That is, until now, with Orlitzky due to speak at the DEF CON hacker conference in August about how he found infinite money cheats for CSC laundry machines. The talk is called “Laundering Money.”

«

Upside: free laundry. Downside: in the launderette.
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CrowdStrike outage could cost cyber insurers $1.5bn • Data Breach Today

Mathew Schwartz:

»

The global IT outage triggered by a faulty CrowdStrike software update on July 19 could lead to cyber insurers paying out up to $1.5bn in compensation.

That’s the conclusion of cyber risk analytics platform CyberCube, which in a report said the insurer losses range from $400m to $1.5bn. Those figures represent 3% to 10% of the $15bn in global cyber premiums held today.

The final insurance payout total will need time to emerge. “Determining final losses for the industry is likely to be a lengthy process because cyber insurance policy language is not standardized,” Moody’s Reports said in a Monday report. “It will take time for insurers to determine which customers suffered losses from the outage, and whether those losses are covered.”

Most claims will center on losses due to “business interruption, which is a primary contributor to losses from cyber incidents,” it said. “Because these losses were not caused by a cyberattack, claims will be made under ‘systems failure’ coverage, which is becoming standard coverage within cyber insurance policies.” But, not all systems-failure coverage will apply to this incident, it said, since some policies exclude nonmalicious events or have to reach a certain threshold of losses before being triggered.

The outage resembled a supply chain attack, since it took out multiple users of the same technology all at once – including airlines, doctors’ practices, hospitals, banks, stock exchanges and more.

Cyber insurance experts said the timing of the outage will also help mitigate the quantity of claims insurers are likely to see. At the moment CrowdStrike sent its update gone wrong, “more Asia-Pacific systems were online than European and US systems, but Europe and the US have a greater share of cyber insurance coverage than does the Asia-Pacific region,” Moody’s Reports said.

«

I like the idea that there exists a site called “Data Breach Today”. Turns out that there’s more than enough content to fill it, daily.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new type of influencer has come to prominence: women undergoing IVF. CC-licensed photo by ZEISS Microscopy 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 probably won’t be a post this week at the Social Warming Substack: I’m going to some gigs.

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

The rise of the IVF influencers • Forbes

Alexandra S. Levine:

»

In November, as [Caitlyn O’Neil] posted daily videos giving herself at-home hormone shots to stimulate egg growth, her TikTok following nearly doubled. It surged again as she broadcast her egg retrieval—donning a hospital gown and hairnet, with an IV in her arm and a fistful of crackers post-anesthesia. When they harvested 13 eggs, four of which were successfully fertilized and became embryos, she posted a video of the final step of the process, panning an ultrasound screen that showed just where in her uterus the doctor would implant them.

“I’m officially one day past transfer, and I am considered PUPO… Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise!” she said in a November 28 post liked more than 20,000 times.

When a December blood test confirmed that, she again shared the news on TikTok.

But by the end of the month, she’d lost another pregnancy.

“There is no heartbeat and no more growth,” she told her TikTok audience, which by then numbered 150,000. “Today we are broken. Today we are crushed. Today we are grieving. This is miscarriage. This is infertility. But we will try again. We are not giving up.”

In the new year, after chronicling another attempt with their two remaining embryos, O’Neil and her husband failed to get pregnant. Without the funds to give IVF another go, she told followers they were figuring out how to raise the money needed to continue. The post went viral, and small donations, mostly $1 to $5, began pouring into the Venmo, PayPal and GoFundMe listed in O’Neil’s TikTok bio. Within a day, strangers on TikTok had covered all $20,000 for another cycle, O’Neil told Forbes. “It was the most surreal experience,” she said. “Because of social media and sharing our story, we were able to go on to do a second round.”

She gained even more traction on TikTok as she shared their subsequent journey—more than doubling the size of her following again, she said. Then, later that fall, she began landing lucrative brand deals for products ranging “from a vacuum to prenatals.” When their second round of IVF was unsuccessful, those paid partnerships—a $40,000 collab with a water bottle brand, for example—enabled them to pay for a third and fourth.

«

You might think: how awful, to exploit oneself in this way. To which the very powerful riposte is: would it be OK if she wrote a book about it which was a bestseller? If not, why not – after all, people have been writing books about their life experiences for years. This is just a different format.
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The world just saw the four hottest days in recorded history – The Washington Post

Sarah Kaplan:

»

As global temperatures spiked to their highest levels in recorded history on Monday, ambulances were screaming through the streets of Tokyo, carrying scores of people who had collapsed amid an unrelenting heat wave. A monster typhoon was emerging from the scorching waters of the Pacific Ocean, which were several degrees warmer than normal. Thousands of vacationers fled the idyllic mountain town of Jasper, Canada ahead of a fast-moving wall of wildfire flames.

By the end of the week — which saw the four hottest days ever observed by scientists — dozens had been killed in the raging floodwaters and massive mudslides triggered by Typhoon Gaemi. Half of Jasper was reduced to ash. And about 3.6 billion people around the planet had endured temperatures that would have been exceedingly rare in a world without burning fossil fuels and other human activities, according to an analysis by scientists at the group Climate Central.

These extraordinary global temperatures marked the culmination of an unprecedented global hot streak that has stunned even researchers who spent their whole careers studying climate change.

Since last July, Earth’s average temperature has consistently exceeded 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) above preindustrial levels — a short-term breach of a threshold that scientists say cannot be crossed if the world hopes to avoid the worst consequences of planetary warming.

This “taste” of a 1.5º world showed how the natural systems that humans depend on could buckle amid soaring temperatures, said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Forests showed less ability to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Sea ice around Antarctica dwindled to near record lows. Coral bleaching became so extreme scientists had to change their scale for measuring it.

Even as scientists forecast an end to the current record-breaking stretch, they warn it may prove difficult for parts of the planet to recover from the heat of the past year.

«

The Republicans and huge parts of the right wing, think this is nothing to think about, that it’s all fake, it isn’t happening. How one can deny reality like this is puzzling, to say the least; how one can not worry about the consequences of being wrong is really shocking.
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Apple in talks to bring ads to Apple TV+ • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

Apple has apparently been in discussions with the UK’s Broadcaster’s Audience Research Board (BARB) to explore the necessary data collection techniques for monitoring advertising results. Currently, BARB provides viewing statistics for major UK networks including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky, as well as Apple TV + programming. These new discussions suggest that Apple is preparing to implement an ad-supported tier on its streaming service, similar to moves made by competitors such as Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video.

While BARB already monitors viewing time for Apple TV + content, additional techniques are required to track advertising metrics accurately. This data is vital for advertisers to assess the reach and impact of their campaigns on the platform. In addition to the UK, Apple has also reportedly held similar discussions with ratings organizations in the United States.

Apple has already included limited advertising in its live sports events, such as last year’s Major League Soccer coverage, where ads were incorporated even for Season Pass holders. It is also notable that in March Apple hired Joseph Cady, a former advertising executive from NBCUniversal, to bolster its video advertising team.

Competitors like Netflix and Disney+ have successfully launched lower-cost, ad-supported tiers, which have helped them attract additional subscribers and increase revenue.

«

So is Apple really trying to attract additional subscribers who aren’t willing to pay the £9/month? Or just to have a lower-price tier? It’s already the cheapest subscription after Discovery+. Also, the streaming wars are turning every streaming company into the same thing that people thought they were getting away from: an excess of ads. (It will have to change the legend at the top of the Apple TV+ page saying “New Apple Originals every month – always ad-free”.)
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The AI non-economy: a rant • The Coded Message

Jimmy Hartzell:

»

who doesn’t want a confident confabulator incapable of critical thinking? A bullshit artist designed to do what many of us learned to do in high school and college, and write pages of content that sounded “educated” without actually paying attention to the actual ideas, or even understanding them at all?

I mean, I don’t want one. But clearly society does, otherwise why did we educate so many people in exactly that? If we have so many bullshit jobs it makes sense that someone would create a bullshit factory to automate them. Although, as the book Bullshit Jobs also points out, the point of the bullshit jobs is rarely what the job description nominally claims. Sometimes, the point is just to show off having employees, which AI can’t really do.

Not that it’s completely without valid use cases. I’ve even used AI, as a language practice buddy. I wouldn’t trust it with anything real, and it sometimes makes up grammar mistakes when I ask it to correct my grammar, but I don’t find it useless.

But I also don’t find it worth paying anything for personally, let alone an amount consistent with the billions of dollars spent building these models, and that soon will be spent building future models. And that’s the cost that doesn’t take into account the environmental damage, the stealing from writers and artists, and the damage from the hallucinations.

Here’s hoping this recent Atlantic article is the beginning of a trend where people realizes that when you spend more than the Manhattan project or the Apollo project, you need to have results comparable to nuclear weapons and energy, or landing people on the moon. And even then, it probably still doesn’t pay off as a private investment.

At some point, like the Bitcoin bubble, the real estate bubble, and the Dot Com bubble of the 90s, the AI bubble will break.

«

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Wind and solar to surpass 40% of China’s power capacity by year-end • South China Morning Post

Yujie Xue:

»

Wind and solar are expected to account for more than 40% of China’s total installed power generation capacity by the end of the year, after exceeding coal-fired capacity for the first time in the first half, according to the country’s power trade association.

China is expected to add about 300 gigawatts (GW) of solar and wind power capacity to the grid this year, a touch higher than the 293GW a year earlier, the China Electricity Council (CEC) said in a report.

This could boost the cumulative grid-connected wind and solar power generation capacity in China to 1,350GW by the year-end, accounting for more than 40% of the 3,300GW total installed capacity from all energy sources, according to CEC.

The continuing momentum in solar and wind power installation could also drive the overall installed capacity of non-fossil fuel energy sources, which include nuclear and hydropower, to 1,900GW by the end of 2024, or 57.5% of the overall energy mix, versus 53.9% in 2023, the report said.

China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and power consumer, is working towards having 80% of its total energy mix from non-fossil fuel sources by 2060, when it aims to become carbon neutral.

«

Huge ambition – which of course China will reach because its rulers have decided that it must.
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French fiber optic cables cut in latest Olympics sabotage • Axios

Ivana Saric:

»

Fiber optic cables in several regions of France were cut overnight in what appears to be a coordinated act of sabotage, French service providers said Monday.

This is the second attack on French infrastructure in a matter of days, underscoring the security threats around the Paris Olympic Games. “A new major sabotage of long distance cables took place last night in France around 2:15 a.m.,” Nicolas Guillaume, CEO of internet service provider Netalis, wrote on X Monday.

A number of major French telecommunications providers — including SFR, Bouygues and Free — were impacted by the attack.

Six French regions — Bouches-du-Rhône, Aude, Oise, Hérault, Meuse and Drôme — were affected by the outages, Le Monde reported. Orange, the telecom provider for the Paris Games, was not affected in the attack, per Le Monde.

“I condemn in the strongest terms these cowardly and irresponsible acts,” Secretary of State for Digital Affairs Marina Ferrari wrote on X Monday. Ferrari confirmed the attack damaged fiber optic lines, as well as telephone and mobile phone lines, in several departments.

«

Quite the series of attacks. What’s next – electricity? Water? Sewerage? I guess the French security services will be thinking of all of those. And only have the entire country to cover.
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People are overdosing on off-brand weight-loss drugs, FDA warns • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

In an alert Friday, the FDA warned that people are overdosing on off-brand injections of semaglutide, which are dispensed from compounding pharmacies in a variety of concentrations, labeled with various units of measurement, administered with improperly sized syringes, and prescribed with bad dosage math. The errors are leading some patients to take up to 20 times the amount of intended semaglutide, the FDA reports.

Though the agency doesn’t offer a tally of overdose cases that have been reported, it suggests it has received multiple reports of people sickened by dosing errors, with some requiring hospitalizations. Semaglutide overdoses cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, fainting, headache, migraine, dehydration, acute pancreatitis, and gallstones, the agency reports.

In typical situations, compounding pharmacies provide personalized formulations of FDA-approved drugs, for instance, if a patient is allergic to a specific ingredient, requires a special dosage, or needs a liquid version of a drug instead of a pill form. But, when commercially available drugs are in short supply—as semaglutide drugs currently are—then compound pharmacies can legally step in to make their own versions if certain conditions are met. However, these imitations are not FDA-approved and, as such, don’t come with the same safety, quality, and effectiveness assurances as approved drugs.

In the warning Friday, the FDA said that some patients received confusing instructions from compounding pharmacies, which indicated they inject themselves with a certain number of “units” of semaglutide—the volume of which may vary depending on the concentration—rather than milligrams or milliliters. In other instances, patients received U-100 (1-milliliter) syringes to administer 0.05-milliliter doses of the drug, or five units. The relatively large syringe size compared with the dose led some patients to administer 50 units instead of five.

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Update on the Sonos app from Patrick [Spence, CEO] • Sonos Blog

Patrick Spence is the CEO:

»

We know that too many of you have experienced significant problems with our new app which rolled out on May 7, and I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you. There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down, and I assure you that fixing the app for all of our customers and partners has been and continues to be our number one priority.

We developed the new app to create a better experience, with the ability to drive more innovation in the future, and with the knowledge that it would get better over time. However, since launch we have found a number of issues. Fixing these issues has delayed our prior plan to quickly incorporate missing features and functionality.

Since May 7, we have released new software updates approximately every two weeks, each making significant and meaningful improvements, adding features and fixing bugs. Please see the release notes for Sonos software updates for detailed information on what has been released to date.

While these software updates have enabled the majority of our customers to have a robust experience using the Sonos app, there is more work to be done.

</blockquote

This is going to make a really interesting business study one day. It’s obvious to anyone who uses the new app in comparison with the old one that the new version is slower (because of changes made to the back end) and more puzzling (the UI has changed) without some necessary features (alarms weren’t in the original update). So why did nobody speak up? Where was the beta testing? The feedback? Spence should be worried that nobody brought the bad news up to him: it speaks to a flawed internal culture. What other bad news isn’t reaching him?
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Samsung’s foldables aren’t quite flying off the shelves this year • Android Police

Sanuj Bhatia:

»

While the Samsung Galaxy Ring may have already sold out in the US, Samsung seems to be facing struggles with its new Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6, particularly in its home market of South Korea. According to a new report, Samsung is experiencing a drop in pre-orders for both foldable devices compared to last year’s models.

The Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6 were available for pre-order in multiple markets, including South Korea, but it seems Samsung has received fewer pre-orders for the new foldables compared to the Z Fold 5 and Z Flip 5. According to a report from The Korea Herald (via GSMArena), Samsung received only 910,000 pre-orders for the new foldables in South Korea. This is nearly a 10% decline from last year when Samsung received a record 1.02 million pre-orders.

Despite the low sales numbers, not all is bad for Samsung. The report notes that Samsung has made strides with younger consumers. It states that buyers in their 20s and 30s, which is Samsung’s “target audience,” accounted for nearly 50% of the pre-orders. This is an increase from 43% last year.

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Hmm.. (nearly) 50% of 0.91m is 455,000. By contrast 43% of 1.02m is 440,000. So they’ve got 15,000 extra preorders from people under 40.

Foldables still aren’t a thing.
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Removing the music makes the ‘Firestarter’ video even creepier • The Verge

Rich McCormick:

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The Prodigy’s video for seminal ’90s dance hit Firestarter was always unsettling. But remove the music, replace the siren-like samples, and strip away the cycling bass loop, and you’re left with something even weirder. By turns hilarious and somehow creepier than the original video, Mario Wienerroither’s “Musicless Musicvideo” scores Keith Flint’s restless underground jittering with the sound of shuffling, sneezing, and unexpected subway trains.

Wienerroither has also produced musicless videos for Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Queen’s I Want To Break Free, but the most popular take on the concept so far has been YouTube user Moto2h’s 2012 version of Gangnam Style.

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This is just over ten years old, but I’d never seen it before. And yet it’s indeed peculiar, and faintly unsettling. (The sound effects are added, but clever for all that.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

While Sonos’s hardware remains popular, the rewrite of its app is universally unpopular. What was changed, and why? CC-licensed photo by The Unwinder 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.

OpenAI just released SearchGPT. It’s already error prone • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

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On Thursday afternoon, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a prototype AI tool that can search the web and answer questions, fittingly called SearchGPT. The launch is designed to hint at how AI will transform the ways in which people navigate the internet—except that, before users have had a chance to test the new program, it already appears error prone.

In a prerecorded demonstration video accompanying the announcement, a mock user types music festivals in boone north carolina in august into the SearchGPT interface. The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, the first being An Appalachian Summer Festival, which according to the tool is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started on June 29 and will have its final concert on July 27. Instead, July 29–August 16 are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed. (I confirmed these dates with the festival’s box office.)

Other results to the festival query that appear in the demo—a short video of about 30 seconds—seem to be correct. (The chatbot does list one festival that takes place in Asheville, which is a two-hour drive away from Boone.) Kayla Wood, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me, “This is an initial prototype, and we’ll keep improving it.”

…The demo is reminiscent of any other number of AI self-owns that have happened in recent years. Within days of OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, which kicked off the generative-AI boom in November 2022, the chatbot spewed sexist and racist bile. In February of 2023, Google Bard, the search giant’s answer to ChatGPT, made an error in its debut that caused the company’s shares to plummet by as much as 9% that day. More than a year later, when Google rolled out AI-generated answers to the search bar, the model told people that eating rocks is healthy and that Barack Obama is Muslim.

Herein lies one of the biggest problems with tech companies’ prophecies about an AI change: Chatbots are supposed to revolutionize first the internet and then the physical world. For now they can’t properly copy-paste from a music festival’s website.

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This machine exposes privacy violations • WIRED

Brian Merchant:

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When you search for where to get an abortion, is sensitive data being tracked and collected? Unfortunately, very possibly so. Is an addiction treatment page or trans porn site exposing your IP address? Quite likely. Countless websites (truly countless—the scope, as we shall see, is nearly incomprehensible) are shipping private data about your web activity directly to the tech giants’ doorsteps. Thanks in part to the efforts of privacy researchers like Libert, we know this already, have known we’re being tracked for years—yet we lack knowledge of the specifics, and we lack agency, so this sea of privacy violations becomes another Bad Thing that happens on an internet teeming with them.

A lot of this leaking data is not just potentially embarrassing, or perhaps harmful to career prospects if it were to be made public, but outright illegal. Over the past half-decade, the European Union, a number of US states, and other governments around the world have enacted laws that restrict what kind of data websites can collect, or require a company to receive consent from a user before it does so. Every day, tech companies may violate those laws when, say, search engines and medical websites trample HIPAA by allowing search logs of users’ ailments to be tracked, documented, and sometimes monetized by companies like Google, or running roughshod over consent rules by turning a blind eye to advertising cookies embedded in publishers’ websites.

This, [Tim] Libert says, is why he developed webXray, a crude prototype of which he’s demoing for me right now. It’s a search engine for rooting out specific privacy violations anywhere on the web. By searching for a specific term or website, you can use webXray to see which sites are tracking you, and where all that data goes. Its mission, he says, is simple; “I want to give privacy enforcers equal technology as privacy violators.” To level the playing field.

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The webXray page is interesting – example searches include “pages on the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] website that expose visitor IP addresses to Google”. Very focused on Google. Now do it for Facebook/Meta.
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Hiker lost on US mountain ignored calls from rescuers because he didn’t recognise the number • The Guardian

Samantha Lock, in 2021:

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The hiker was reported missing around 8pm on 18 October after failing to return to where he was staying, Lake county search and rescue said.

Repeated attempts to contact the man through calls, texts and voicemail messages went ignored, according to a statement released by the agency.

Five rescue team members were deployed at around 10pm to search “high probability areas” on from Mount Elbert but returned around 3am the following morning after failing to locate the missing hiker on the 4401 metre-high (14,440ft) peak.

A second team set out at 7am the next day to search areas where hikers “typically lose the trail” only to discover the man had returned to his place of lodging about 9:30am.

The hiker told authorities he had lost his way around nightfall and “bounced around on to different trails trying to locate the proper trailhead” before finally reaching his car the next morning, about 24 hours after setting out on the hike.

Lake county search and rescue said the man reported having “no idea” anyone was out looking for him.

“One notable take-away is that the subject ignored repeated phone calls from us because they didn’t recognise the number,” the agency added.

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One would imagine things have only got worse in the three years since.
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Automakers sold driver data for pennies, senators say • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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If you drive a car made by General Motors (GM) and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker.

This practice, disclosed in a letter sent by Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts to the Federal Trade Commission on Friday, is yet another way in which automakers are tracking drivers, often without their knowledge.

Previous reporting in The New York Times, which the letter cited, revealed how automakers including GM, Honda and Hyundai collected information about drivers’ behaviour, such as how often they slammed on the brakes, accelerated rapidly and exceeded the speed limit. It was then sold to the insurance industry, which used it to help gauge individual drivers’ riskiness.

…One of the surprising findings of an investigation by Mr. Wyden’s office was just how little the automakers made from selling driving data. According to the letter, Verisk paid Honda $25,920 over four years for information about 97,000 cars, or 26 cents per car. Hyundai was paid just over $1m, or 61 cents per car, over six years.

GM would not reveal how much it had been paid, Mr. Wyden’s office said. People familiar with GM’s program previously told The Times that driving behavior data had been shared from more than eight million cars, with the company making an amount in the low millions of dollars from the sale. G.M. also previously shared data with LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

“Companies should not be selling Americans’ data without their consent, period,” the letter from Senators Wyden and Markey stated. “But it is particularly insulting for automakers that are selling cars for tens of thousands of dollars to then squeeze out a few additional pennies of profit with consumers’ private data.”

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I tried Apple Vision Pro and it made me rethink everything • Macworld

David Price:

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I was surprised by how complex the fitting process is, and how tricky it can be to get set up with the optimal Light Seal and headband; a facial scan is supposed to help with this, but my first seal had to be sent back and replaced. Then simply tightening the straps up just the right amount so the weight is distributed comfortably across your forehead and cheeks is more challenging than you might expect, and took some time and various checks before everything was arranged exactly right. This might seem like a complaint, but I was impressed by the commitment and patience shown to make sure the product was at its very best for the demo.

Because it really was worth the wait. Using Vision Pro is an odd experience but an utterly immersive one, thanks to the carefully calibrated fit and exceptionally high-quality hardware. There were several moments in the demo where I gasped, or laughed, or looked around excitedly like a tourist, simply because the headset does such a good job of making you feel like you’re inside its media. The spatial home movies of strangers could have felt artificial (anyone who’s seen the troubling 1995 thriller Strange Days will know roughly what I mean), but the effect is so compelling that it made me think about my own memories and what it would be like to relive them in this format. It was oddly poignant.

…Apple’s patient assistant had to metaphorically hold my hand, since I suspect the interface would have been baffling without assistance. Moving over the years from iPod to iPhone, from iPad to Apple Watch, has always felt like a natural and intuitive evolution, but the Vision Pro is completely new.

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Like me, Price thinks that sports and similar passive content are going to be the real winners here. That, though, depends on Apple actually getting on and capturing some content.
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Steve Jobs knew the moment the future had arrived. It’s calling again • WIRED

Steven Levy:

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Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no other place to set it down. It is 1983, and he’s about to ask designers for their help in improving the look of the coming wave of personal computers. But first he will tell them that those computers will shatter the lives they have led to date.

“How many of you are 36 years … older than 36?” he asks. That’s how old the computer is, he says. But even the younger people in the room, including himself, are sort of “precomputer,” members of the television generation. A distinct new generation, he says, is emerging: “In their lifetimes, the computer will be the predominant medium of communication.”

Quite a statement at the time, considering that very few of the audience, according to Jobs’ impromptu polling, owns a personal computer or has even seen one. Jobs tells the designers that they not only will soon use one, but it will be indispensable, and deeply woven into the fabric of their lives.

The video of this speech is the centerpiece of an online exhibit called The Objects of Our Life, presented by the Steve Jobs Archive, the ambitious history project devoted to telling the story of Apple’s fabled cofounder. When the exhibit went live earlier this month—after the discovery of a long-forgotten VHS tape in Jobs’ personal collection—I found it not only a compelling reminder of the late CEO, but pertinent to our own time, when another new technology is arriving with equal promise and peril.

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That “another new technology” being, in Levy’s view, AI. And that’s probably true, in a sense. But it’s hard to say that Jobs can offer us much more guidance than Douglas Adams’s quote about technologies.
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No, Southwest Airlines is not still using Windows 3.1 • OSnews

Thom Holwerda:

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A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem because they were still using windows 3.1. It’s a great story that fits the current zeitgeist about technology and its role in society, underlining that what is claimed to be technological progress is nothing but trouble, and that it’s better to stick with the old. At the same time, anybody who dislikes Southwest Airlines can point and laugh at the bumbling idiots working there for still using Windows 3.1. It’s like a perfect storm of technology news click and ragebait.

Too bad the whole story is nonsense.

…Let’s start with the actual source of the claim that Southwest Airlines was unaffected by CrowdStrike because they’re still using Windows 3.11 for large parts of their primary systems. This claim is easily traced back to its origin – a tweet by someone called Artem Russakovskii, stating that “the reason Southwest is not affected is because they still run on Windows 3.1”. This tweet formed the basis for virtually all of the stories, but it contains no sources, no links, no background information, nothing. It was literally just this one line.

It turned out be a troll tweet.

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But but but! While Holwerda is very happy to discredit everyone who believed this and didn’t check it (OK, guilty), he doesn’t go the extra step and answer the question: fine, so it’s not Windows 3.1. So which OS is it based around? We don’t know. Turns out the reason it wasn’t affected is.. Southwest Airlines doesn’t use Crowdstrike. (Thanks Seth F for the link.)
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New Zealand “deeply shocked” after Canada drone-spied on its Olympic practices—twice • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

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On July 22, the New Zealand women’s football (soccer) team was training in Saint-Étienne, France, for its upcoming Olympics matchup against Canada when team officials noticed a drone hovering near the practice pitch. Suspecting skullduggery, the New Zealand squad called the local police, and gendarmes located and then detained the nearby drone operator. He turned out to be one Joseph Lombardi, an “unaccredited analyst with Canada Soccer”—and he was apparently spying on the New Zealand practice and relaying information to a Canadian assistant coach.

On July 23, the New Zealand Olympic Committee put out a statement saying it was “deeply shocked and disappointed by this incident, which occurred just three days before the sides are due to face each other in their opening game of Paris 2024.” It also complained to the official International Olympic Committee integrity unit.

Early today, July 24, the Canadian side issued its own statement saying that it “stands for fair-play and we are shocked and disappointed. We offer our heartfelt apologies to New Zealand Football, to all the players affected, and to the New Zealand Olympic Committee.”

Later in the day, a follow-up Canadian statement revealed that this was actually the second drone-spying incident; the New Zealand side had also been watched by drone at its July 19 practice.

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As a result, Canada has been docked six points, which might mean it won’t make it out of the group stage to defend its gold medal. But would it have been worse if they’d been peeking through a gap in the fence? Does using a drone make the offence worse?
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What happened to the Sonos app? A technical analysis • LinkedIn

Andy Pennell:

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Sonos have been mostly in denial as to how bad things are, with the app release officially described as “courageous” – well, pissing off a sizable chunk of your existing user base could be called that, I guess. An immediate revert to the old version would have been my suggestion.

Also thanks to the device discovery problems, not only are existing users frustrated with the app not working, but new users who get their shiny Sonos device out of the box and then can’t get the app to work are just going to put it back in the box and return it.

The new app shipped with a lot of features missing from the old app (never a good idea), but over the last two months some of those features have returned in various updates. However Queue management is still AWOL, and that was a key Sonos feature. (It’s also a UX challenge, handling a list of over 30,000 items that can change at any time in a performant way).

While device discovery remains a crapshoot for many, the app store scores are likely to stay in the 1.0 range that they have fallen to in the last two months.

…As many have discovered, the Sonos speakers themselves are still working fine, despite the contrary impression the new mobile apps may give. You can verify this by using the official Desktop apps (which are feature-frozen), or third party software like SonoPhone (for iOS ) or my own Phonos Universal (for Windows/Xbox ). All of these apps use the UPnP APIs, which still work great, for the moment anyway. However, Sonos have stated that they want to deprecate their desktop apps at some unspecific point in the future. If they do, they can then remove UPnP support from the speakers, killing the entire third-party ecosystem built around their products. That would be “courageous” indeed.

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A great writeup of why the Sonos app has suddenly got absolutely terrible: they threw away both the front end and the back end for the rewrite.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The modern version of the Apollo moon missions, called Artemis, is wildly expensive – and might kill the crew on reentry. Why is it going ahead? 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.

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

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

OpenAI training and inference costs could reach $7bn for 2024, AI startup set to lose $5bn – report • DCD

Sebastian Moss:

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OpenAI is set to spend billions of dollars on training and inference this year, and may be forced to raise more money to cover growing losses.

The Information reports that, as of March, the company was set to spend nearly $4bn this year on using Microsoft’s servers to run inference workloads for ChatGPT.

A person familiar with the matter told the publication that OpenAI has the equivalent of 350,000 servers containing Nvidia A100 chips for inference, with around 290,000 of those servers used for ChatGPT. The hardware is being run at near full capacity.

Training ChatGPT as well as new models could cost as much as $3bn this year, according to financial documents seen by the publication. The company has ramped up the training of new AI faster than it had originally planned.

For both inference and training, OpenAI gets heavily discounted rates from Microsoft Azure. Microsoft has charged OpenAI about $1.30 per A100 server per hour, way below normal rates.

The company now employs about 1,500 people, which could cost $1.5bn as it continues to grow, The Information estimates – OpenAI had originally projected workforce costs of $500m for 2023 while doubling headcount to around 800 by the end of that year.

The company is bringing in about $2bn annually from ChatGPT, and could be set to bring in nearly $1bn from charging access to LLMs.

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The Information’s numbers might be off a little, but they’d have to be a long way off for this not to be in the ballpark. A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking serious money.

Unanswered question: how does OpenAI ramp up its income and reduce its costs?
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AOC’s deepfake AI porn bill unanimously passes the Senate • Rolling Stone

Lorena O’Neil:

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The Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan bill to provide recourse to victims of porn deepfakes — or sexually-explicit, non-consensual images created with artificial intelligence. 

The legislation, called the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act — passed in Congress’ upper chamber on Tuesday.  The legislation has been led by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in the House.

The legislation would amend the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to allow people to sue those who produce, distribute, or receive the deepfake pornography, if they “knew or recklessly disregarded” the fact that the victim did not consent to those images.

“Current laws don’t apply to deepfakes, leaving women and girls who suffer from this image-based sexual abuse without a legal remedy,” Durbin posted on X after the bill’s passage. “It’s time to give victims their day in court and the tools they need to fight back. I urge my House colleagues to pass this bill expediently.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) praised the bill’s passage, commending Durbing for his work. “This isn’t just some fringe issue that happens to only a few people — it’s a widespread problem,” said Schumer.

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This is interesting, and impressive – AOC getting absolutely everyone in the Senate to pass a bill? Sure, it has plenty of hurdles to jump in the lower House, but the mark of a good politician is being able to get legislation passed. On that measure, she’s extraordinary, succeeding where (as the story points out) others have failed.
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Israel tried to frustrate US lawsuit over Pegasus spyware, leak suggests • The Guardian

Harry Davies and Stephanie Kirchgaessner:

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The Israeli government took extraordinary measures to frustrate a high-stakes US lawsuit that threatened to reveal closely guarded secrets about one of the world’s most notorious hacking tools, leaked files suggest.

Israeli officials seized documents about Pegasus spyware from its manufacturer, NSO Group, in an effort to prevent the company from being able to comply with demands made by WhatsApp in a US court to hand over information about the invasive technology.

Documents suggest the seizures were part of an unusual legal manoeuvre created by Israel to block the disclosure of information about Pegasus, which the government believed would cause “serious diplomatic and security damage” to the country.

Pegasus allows NSO clients to infect smartphones with hidden software that can extract messages and photos, record calls and secretly activate microphones. NSO’s clients have included both authoritarian regimes and democratic countries and the technology has been linked to human rights abuses around the world.

Since late 2019, NSO has been battling a lawsuit in the US brought by WhatsApp, which has alleged the Israeli company used a vulnerability in the messaging service to target more than 1,400 of its users in 20 countries over a two-week period. NSO has denied the allegations.

The removal of files and computers from NSO’s offices in July 2020 – until now hidden from the public by a strict gag order issued by an Israeli court – casts new light on the close ties between Israel and NSO and the overlapping interests of the privately owned surveillance company and the country’s security establishment.

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Hard not to think that the Israeli government finds the existence of NSO Group, and Pegasus in particular, very useful for its own purposes.
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The lunacy of Artemis • Idle Words

Maciej Cieglewski:

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If you believe NASA, late in 2026 Americans will walk on the moon again. That proposed mission is called Artemis 3, and its lunar segment looks a lot like Apollo 17 without the space car. Two astronauts will land on the moon, collect rocks, take selfies, and about a week after landing rejoin their orbiting colleagues to go back to Earth.

But where Apollo 17 launched on a single rocket and cost $3.3bn (in 2023 dollars), the first Artemis landing involves a dozen or two heavy rocket launches and costs so much that NASA refuses to give a figure (one veteran of NASA budgeting estimates it at $7-10bn). The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, and yet the mission’s scientific return—a small box of rocks—is less than what came home on Apollo 17. And the whole plan hinges on technologies that haven’t been invented yet becoming reliable and practical within the next eighteen months.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to wonder what’s going on here. If we can put a man on the moon, then why can’t we just go do it again? The moon hasn’t changed since the 1960’s, while every technology we used to get there has seen staggering advances. It took NASA eight years to go from nothing to a moon landing at the dawn of the Space Age. But today, 20 years and $93bn after the space agency announced our return to the moon, the goal seems as far out of reach as ever.

Articles about Artemis often give the program’s tangled backstory. But I want to talk about Artemis as a technical design, because there’s just so much to drink in. While NASA is no stranger to complex mission architectures, Artemis goes beyond complex to the just plain incoherent. None of the puzzle pieces seem to come from the same box. Half the program requires breakthrough technologies that make the other half unnecessary. The rocket and spacecraft NASA spent two decades building can’t even reach the moon. And for reasons no one understands, there’s a new space station in the mix.

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That’s not the worst of it: the heat shield has a flawed thermal model and might simply kill the crew on reentry.
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Wexton makes history as first member to use AI voice on House floor • CNN via MSN

Danya Gainor and Haley Talbot:

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Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton of Virginia made history Thursday as the first lawmaker to use an artificial intelligence-generated model of her voice to speak for her on the House floor.

“My battle with progressive supranuclear palsy, or PSP, has robbed me of my ability to use my full voice and move around in the ways that I used to, rather than striding confidently onto the House floor to vote,” Wexton said on the floor through the AI model.

Wexton had announced in September that she will not seek reelection, citing her health challenges, which she said she anticipates will worsen.

“I rely on a walker to get around and in all likelihood before my term ends, I will appear on the House floor for votes in a wheelchair,” she said Thursday.

Wexton is the first member to use an augmentative and alternative communication device on the House floor.

When she first heard the AI rendition of her voice, Wexton called it “music to my ears.”

“It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and I cried tears of joy,” she said.

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A very scary disease; a good use for AI voice recreation.
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How music lost its value • Fast Company

Joe Berkowitz:

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A new documentary from Paramount+, How Music Got Free, tells the inside story of how albums shed their exoskeletons and became something more ethereal and less profitable. Produced by LeBron James and Eminem, who rode the tail end of the CD boom to stratospheric heights, the film explores the music industry’s spectacular implosion about two seconds later. But while it traces the overarching business story in forensic detail, How Music Got Free doesn’t quite capture what it felt like to be a music fan living through this extraordinary moment as it unfolded.

Well before Steve Jobs promised to put a thousand songs in our pockets — and well, well before a thousand songs seemed like a relative pittance next to the infinite expanse of a Spotify account — the peak of musical mobility was a book of CDs. It was the only way to bring along a curated sample of your entire library of albums wherever you went. In the early days of the pandemic, I found an old book of CDs I’d collected during the era that How Music Got Free spans: half of them bought, half burned. Revisiting it in 2020 revealed all we’ve lost since it was my main source for music—and may explain why some older music formats are making a comeback.

…Deep inside my old book of CDs lay the first burned one I ever acquired. A friend had copied for me the new (and ultimately final) studio album from Rage Against the Machine, 1999’s Battle of Los Angeles, in exchange for burning one of mine for himself. Listening in 2020, I felt all over again the palpable excitement of getting a brand-new album for free from a band I’d adored. It had felt like getting away with something on a deeper level than Columbia House — because it was.

That excitement had been short-lived, though. I never had the album art for Battle of Los Angeles. Not even the usual CD-face art adorning all its neighbors in the CD book. The band’s name and album title were instead scrawled in my squiggly teenage handwriting. In place of the vibe its cover was meant to conjure, I had information; instead of enjoyment, I had ingestion; in place of the connection forged by trading money for art, I had the fading flash of attainment.

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Smear campaigns and false narratives: how the crypto lobby seeks to influence US politics • Amy Castor

Jake Donoghue:

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Earlier this month, crypto skeptic Molly White launched a website – followthecrypto.org – providing real-time data of crypto election campaign financing. It shows that, to date, the cryptocurrency sector has raised more than $187m for the ironically named “Fairshake” super PAC and its affiliates. 

These committees have wasted no time putting these funds to use, with their notable outgoings including a successful $10m smear campaign against progressive Democrat Katie Porter to keep her out of the Senate. 

Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange, is the biggest contributor to Fairshake’s war chest, with $46.5m in donations. They’re also leading the lobbying charge on another front: In 2023, the industry behemoth hired market research firm Morning Consult to find out how many Americans own cryptocurrencies. As soon as the results came in, [crypto market] Coinbase sprang into action, launching a major campaign to “mobilize 52 million crypto owners into an army of one million advocates for change.” 

This spurious and misleading figure – which equates to 20% of the nation’s entire adult population – is at stark variance with data from the US Federal Reserve. Specifically, the Fed’s Economic Well-Being of US Households survey. 

Published in May, the Fed’s report not only showed the percentage of US crypto holders to be far lower than that cited by Coinbase – 7% of the population, nearly two-thirds less than Morning Consult’s findings – but also that the number of holders is actually in decline, having fallen by 5% from 2021.

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As much as anything, this goes to show that crypto advocates are desperate to make people think there are more of them than there are. But also that a few of them have a ridiculous amount of money.
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From online drug lord to crypto entrepreneur, Blake Benthall is back in business • The New York Times

Ryan Mac and Kashmir Hill:

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At a cryptocurrency convention in Austin in May, Blake Emerson Benthall hustled for investor money alongside scores of other entrepreneurs. But none of them, it is safe to say, could pitch their experience as the leader of a multimillion-dollar criminal drug enterprise.

In the convention’s “Deal Flow Zone,” Mr. Benthall, 5-foot-4, cleanshaven and wearing a gray tee with his start-up’s logo, turned his laptop around at a lunch table and began giving his spiel to a bespectacled potential investor.

“I’m a lifelong entrepreneur,” Mr. Benthall said as he clicked through a presentation that detailed how he had run Silk Road 2.0, the second iteration of the infamous online bazaar where 1.7 million anonymous customers signed up and used Bitcoin to buy methamphetamine, heroin and other illegal substances. He recounted his eventual arrest by the F.B.I. and the years he spent in the punitive employ of the federal government.

Now, with his sentence served and probation ended, Mr. Benthall, 36, is promoting a new business: a two-year-old start-up, Fathom(x), which aims to provide businesses and government agencies with software to track digital currency transactions and ensure legal compliance.

Mr. Benthall knows it’s rich for an ex-con to school companies about compliance. But in an industry crawling with hucksters and overnight experts, Mr. Benthall says his criminal experience can help unmask fraud before it leads to another scam like FTX, the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange whose founder is in prison.

«

“Trust me, I’ve been dishonest” is quite the pitch.
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Ulez expansion led to significant drop in air pollutants in London, report finds • The Guardian

Gwyn Topham:

»

Levels of harmful air pollutants have dropped significantly since the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) was enlarged to cover Greater London last year, according to a report from city hall.

Analysis covering the first six months since the Ulez expansion found that total emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from cars across London were 13% lower than projected had the scheme remained confined to inner London, while NOx from vans was 7% lower.

Levels of particulate pollution in the form of PM2.5 exhaust emissions from cars in outer London are an estimated 22% lower than without the expansion. The total change was equivalent to removing 200,000 cars from the road for one year, the report said.

London’s air quality was continuing to improve at a faster rate than the rest of England, with the capital’s pollution rapidly approaching levels seen across the country, it found.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, extended Ulez from the inner London boroughs across the whole of London in August 2023. The move was bitterly opposed by many in outer London with a number of Conservative-led councils taking legal action.

The most polluting cars must normally pay a £12.50 charge each day they are driven in the capital. Only a minority of cars on the road are affected, with most petrol cars under 19 years old and diesel cars under nine years old exempt.

The proportion of non-compliant vehicles entering the expanded Ulez halved to less than 4% in February, compared with more than 8% detected on London’s roads last June. About 90,000 fewer non-compliant vehicles were detected daily on average each day in the zone.

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The full report (with spreadsheet) is on the London government page. Vehicle pollution has halved over the past 10 years.
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“Brat” explained by a veteran journalist who has to accept whatever assignment we give him • I Might Be Wrong

Jacob Fuzetti, who “wrote an award-winning biography of Lech Walesa and whose dispatches from Afghanistan are considered the definitive account of that war, and who now works for a man who thinks that it’s hilarious to photoshop fake breasts onto ET”, under the instruction, so to speak, of Jeff Maurer:

»

This week, Benjamin Netanyahu toured the U.S., a software failure threw the global economy into chaos, and a singer called Kamala Harris “brat”. I begged my editor to assign me to one of the first two stories, but he assigned me to the “brat” story. So, I will attempt to elucidate the meaning of “brat”, place that meaning into context, and to do all that without collapsing into utter despair over the state of journalism and also my life.

“Brat” — pronounced like the word meaning “unruly child”, and not like the German sausage — is a word repurposed by a British “popular music” star known as Charli [sic] XCX. Despite the masculine first name, Ms. XCX is female, and her honorific is pronounced “ex, see, ex” — the letters do not connote Roman numerals. Last month, Ms. XCX released a record album entitled “Brat”, and The Guardian reports that “brat” also refers to “a lifestyle inspired by noughties excess.” The meaning of that phrase could not be determined as of press time.

I feel compelled to report that I consider the information in the preceding paragraph undersourced. My primary source is my grand-nephew Stewie, who was kind enough to talk to me on the phone even though he was “tripping balls on edibles”.

«

I mean, this is how a lot of the coverage read.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Golf fans were able to follow last week’s open via a detailed VR system with every detail of holes such as Royal Troon’s “Postage Stamp”. CC-licensed photo by easylocum 2.0 on Flickr.

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

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

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

AI models fed AI-generated data quickly spew nonsense • Nature

Elizabeth Gibney:

»

Training artificial intelligence (AI) models on AI-generated text quickly leads to the models churning out nonsense, a study has found. This cannibalistic phenomenon, termed model collapse, could halt the improvement of large language models (LLMs) as they run out of human-derived training data and as increasing amounts of AI-generated text pervade the Internet.

“The message is we have to be very careful about what ends up in our training data,” says co-author Zakhar Shumaylov, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK. Otherwise “things will always, provably, go wrong,” he says.” The team used a mathematical analysis to show that the problem of model collapse is likely to be universal, affecting all sizes of language model that use uncurated data, as well as simple image generators and other types of AI.

The researchers began by using an LLM to create Wikipedia-like entries, then trained new iterations of the model on text produced by its predecessor. As the AI-generated information — known as synthetic data — polluted the training set, the model’s outputs became gibberish. The ninth iteration of the model completed a Wikipedia-style article about English church towers with a treatise on the many colours of jackrabbit tails (see ‘AI gibberish’).

More subtly, the study, published in Nature1 on 24 July, showed that even before complete collapse, learning from AI-derived texts caused models to forget the information mentioned least frequently in their data sets as their outputs became more homogeneous.

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There’s a neat illustration of this, in visual terms, on the story.
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CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people who say they received the gift card, as well as a source who also received one.

On Tuesday, a source told TechCrunch that they received an email from CrowdStrike offering them the gift card because the company recognizes “the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused.” 

“And for that, we send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience,” the email read, according to a screenshot shared by the source. The same email was also posted on X by someone else. “To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!”

The email was sent from a CrowdStrike email address in the name of Daniel Bernard, the company’s chief business officer, according to a screenshot of the email seen by TechCrunch. According to one post on X, in the United Kingdom the voucher was worth £7.75, or roughly $10 at today’s exchange rate.

On Wednesday, some of the people who posted about the gift card said that when they went to redeem the offer, they got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled. When TechCrunch checked the voucher, the Uber Eats page provided an error message that said the gift card “has been canceled by the issuing party and is no longer valid.”

CrowdStrike spokesperson Kevin Benacci confirmed to TechCrunch that the company sent the gift cards.

“We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates,” Benacci said in an email.

«

When it rains, it pours. Though this is more like a shower after a hurricane.
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Microsoft’s China-based AI staff face relocation decision deadline • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

»

Alan, a young engineer at Microsoft, has been living a comfortable life in Beijing working for the tech giant on cloud computing. He earns six times the average income in the city, allowing him to dine out frequently and take taxis whenever he wants. 

But Microsoft is now asking Alan to start a new life across the Pacific. For the past two months, he’s been weighing up a request made to hundreds of Chinese employees who work on artificial intelligence and cloud computing to consider relocating to places including Canada, Australia, or Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Alan, who spoke under a pseudonym, received an offer to go to Vancouver, but he just couldn’t make up his mind. “No matter how comfortable Chinese people could be in Vancouver, it wouldn’t be as comfortable as Beijing,” he told Rest of World. 

…the kind of US-China tech collaboration Microsoft once pioneered might be facing an end. The Biden administration has blocked China from accessing chips used to develop AI technologies, proposed restrictions on tech investments in China, and threatened bans on Chinese-owned platforms like TikTok. In Washington, Microsoft’s presence in China is increasingly viewed as a national security threat.

…“Emigration is not that appealing to many Microsoft people in China,” a Beijing-based employee told Rest of World, after declining an offer to relocate to Vancouver. “If you deduct taxes, every place except Seattle may come with a pay cut compared to Beijing. The living quality would really suffer.”

While Microsoft says it makes about 1.5% of its global sales revenue in China, research contributions from its Chinese engineers are far more valuable to the company, Jean-Marc Blanchard, executive director of California-based think tank Wong MNC Center, told Rest of World.

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The ways people hear about big news these days: “into a million pieces,” says source • Nieman Journalism Lab

Joshua Benton:

»

Here’s an obviously incomplete list of some of the ways that Americans and others around the world heard the news [that Joe Biden was stepping aside].

A lifeguard on the loudspeaker at a D.C. pool
Live TV playing at the gym
A Twitter account that tracks whether or not Liza Minnelli has yet outlived a particular person or thing
A friend’s text with a link to The Guardian
Top-of-the-hour headlines on a public radio station
An “old-school message board”
Horny copypasta
Phone call from college-aged son while during housework
A New York Times push alert
A push alert at Whataburger
A text from someone sitting nearby at a Nationals game
The chat in a Twitch stream of a live crossword competition
In a discipleship class at church
In a bar-exam-prep Discord channel
From the happy screams of 100-plus women at a mass outdoor workout
Push alerts while taping a Dungeons & Dragons podcast
BBC push alert during a Dungeons & Dragons game
From the radio announcers at a Yankees game
From the radio announcers at a Mets game
An American Girl doll-themed Instagram meme account
From a Try Guy at a farmer’s market
“In a text from my husband…from across the room…because he didn’t want to say it out loud because we were at my conservative dad’s house for a family birthday party.”
A news alert on a patient’s Apple Watch mid-exam
A Discord notification: “It’s Kamencing”
The Twitter account of a Minecraft server
An Alexa notification
An email alert from The New York Times
“For the first time ever, Apple News push alert actually broke news to me”
A push alert in an ice cave
A spouse asking a smart speaker: “hey Google, who’s going to replace Joe Biden?”
“On a queer camping trip on the yuba river, a friend got an update text from her girlfriend that their pepper plant had new peppers on it…and also Joe Biden pulled out”
Overheard in an hour-long lobster-roll line in Maine
A text: “YOOOOOO”
Watching MSNBC
“From a reality TV Instagram account posting how the current Big Brother candidates won’t know that Biden dropped out of the race til October.”
“FB alert from a fellow journalist while sitting at a dog agility trial waiting to run my corgi”
Overheard at an art gallery
Wall Street Journal push notification while grocery shopping at Publix
Slack

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The data, networking and GenAI driving The British Open golf championship • Computer Weekly

Bryan Glick:

»

Typically, the temporary village set up to cater to the quarter of a million fans and the world’s broadcasters and media requires on-site links into the fibre backbone using standard Cat5 cabling that’s installed for the event and thrown away afterwards.

To replace this, NTT Data trialled the use of a private 5G “network in a box” at Troon, focused around the hospitality area. This required the short-term purchase of radio spectrum from telecoms regulator Ofcom – a requirement for any private 5G installation in the UK. But it meant that connectivity within its 2km range was available to any device with a suitable nanoSIM card, offering 400Mbps bandwidth.

The next generation of the networking equipment will offer eSIM capabilities, which means that fans visiting the Open could simply scan a QR code to activate eSim software to connect to the private 5G. That’s important to The R&A because they want to maximise fans’ engagement with the event – and the more they use the digital offerings available, the better.

For example, for the 150th Open in 2022, The R&A and NTT Data launched Shot View, a precise virtual representation of each course, which allows fans to track every shot played by the competing golfers using a digital twin that represents the actual trajectory of every shot, in as close to real-time as can be achieved.

Every one of The Open courses has been mapped using drones and Lidar scanning to capture every bump, bunker and slope to 2cm accuracy. During the championship, computer vision cameras set up at every hole track golf balls across the green, while 60 people around the course use GPS trackers to record the location on the fairway where every ball comes to rest.

All of that data is fed into a virtual reality (VR) environment running on Unreal Engine, one of the most popular gaming engines, to plot every movement of the ball. As players tee up at each hole, fans can use Shot View to see exactly how they played the hole on previous days, as well as keep up with what’s happening around the whole course.

«

Amazing – didn’t even know there was this app. It’s an amazing effort. And also, hello, Apple, can you see the possibilities of a VR environment following a golf tournament?
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The political economic determinants of nuclear power: evidence from Chernobyl • NBER

Alexey Makarin, Nancy Qian and Shaoda Wang:

»

The rapid growth in the number of nuclear power plants (NPP) declined dramatically after Chernobyl [in April 1986], especially in countries with democratic governments which had the highest number of NPPs at the time. To understand the mechanisms driving such change, we examine two case studies in detail: the United States and the United Kingdom.

In the US, we document that: (a) after the Chernobyl accident, campaign contributions to House and Senate races from fossil fuel special interest groups became strongly associated with negative votes on nuclear-related bills, and such donations increased significantly; and (b) newspapers with more fossil fuel advertisements published more anti-nuclear articles after Chernobyl, while we do not observe significant changes in advertisement spending by the fossil fuel industry.

In the UK, MPs sponsored by mining unions were much more likely to give anti-nuclear speeches in parliament after Chernobyl. We examine air pollution as a downstream outcome of reduced nuclear investment. We estimate that the decline in NPP caused by Chernobyl led to the loss of approximately 141 million expected life years in the US, 33 million in the UK and 318 million globally.

…Nuclear energy competes with and threatens the fossil fuel industry. This paper asks a simple question: did fossil-fuel special interests leverage the 1986 Chernobyl reactor meltdown and the public fear that it triggered to influence government policy against nuclear investment in the democracies with the most NPPs at the time?

«

It’s an academic study, but full of rigour for that reason. And concludes that fossil fuel interests did jump on the opportunity to diss nuclear post-Chernobyl (and then Fukushima in 2011).

Such a butterfly wing. Chernobyl’s chief wanted to run the safety test near the end of the month. But it couldn’t run the low-power test during the day because grid power was needed for factories meeting quotas. Which meant the test was run it at night with inexperienced operators, with the reactor in a state where the test itself was certain to fail – and by trying to make it happen, ran into an incredible edge case of the RBMK reactor design that could cause an explosion.

And nuclear power everywhere was stymied.
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Inrupt debuts data wallet as digital wallet use grows • Pymnts

»

Enterprise software firm Inrupt has introduced a digital wallet designed to hold user data.

Businesses and governments, the company wrote on its blog Tuesday (July 23), can use the technology to give customers and citizens a place to store their data.

“Over 60% of the world’s population is expected to use digital wallets regularly by 2026, and over half of consumers report interest in using them for a broader range of purposes,” the company said. “But the existing market has focused largely on financial transactions and is dominated by a handful of Big Tech vendors.”

The Data Wallet, Inrupt said, differs from alternatives by accepting a range of different data, and makes it easy for users to consent to access to their data. The company argued that the Data Wallet creates opportunities for organizations as the web pivots toward a “user-centric approach” to sharing, using and managing personal data.

“Browsers shaped the Web 1.0 era, and Web 2.0 was all about apps. But Web 3.0 is all about empowered individuals and personal data,” said Sir Tim Berners-Lee, co-founder of Inrupt and esteemed computer scientist.

(Berners-Lee is widely credited for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the building blocks that allowed the internet to scale.)

“The Data Wallet becomes a fundamental tool for users,” he added. “By making this key piece of technology available, Inrupt is ensuring that the opportunities and benefits of secure personal Data Wallets are open for everyone.”

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Yes, you were wondering what TBL had got up to. Look, it’s pretty hard to follow inventing the web and opening the 2012 Olympics.
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Google’s plan to get rid of cookies crumbles • Inc.com

Kit Eaton:

»

Google’s 2020 plan sounded simple. Cookies really work: they’re why you keep seeing ads for say, Stanley cups, after you click on a single ad for one online. [Why keep showing you an ad for something you already clicked an ad for? – Overspill Ed.] But by accruing extensive info on users’ browsing habits, cookies seemed more and more like a privacy nightmare, especially when comparing Google to rivals. Apple, in particular, shapes its brand identity around always placing customer privacy front and center.

At the time of its initial announcement, Google said cookies would go inside two years and be replaced by newer “privacy-preserving and open-standard” systems. The intended result? A “healthy ad-supported web” would exist, just as it did when third-party cookies were supported on Chrome, but with stronger privacy protections in place. The new tracking tech–which was always short on detail–would still allow targeted ads, but in a way that wouldn’t store as much user data.

The new “Privacy Sandbox” system sounded like a great thing for end users, who would enjoy increased privacy while using Chrome. But it also was potentially very bad news for digital advertisers because it could undo the effectiveness of targeting ads–simply because users’ interests, likes and habits weren’t being tracked as closely. 

The outcry from advertisers was the main reason Google subsequently failed to turn off cookies for four years after its initial promise, and why the company has changed its mind completely.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google’s U-turn was actually forced by “digital advertising companies and regulators.” There were numerous objections to the plan to end cookies and replace them with newer Google tech that worked in the company’s Privacy Sandbox. When Google began a trial switching off a tiny fraction of Chrome users’ cookies in January this year, research by Adobe found that 75% of marketers were shunning a raft of alternative ad-tracking systems, and were still relying on traditional cookies.

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So, in short, inertia, and leverage. Not even Google can – or wants to – stand up to the might of the digital advertising lobby.
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There are no good options left with bird flu • The Atlantic

Yasmin Tayag:

»

Of all the news about bird flu, this month has brought some of the most concerning yet. Six people working on a chicken farm in Colorado have tested positive for the virus—the biggest human outbreak detected in the U.S. The country’s tally is now up to 11 since 2022, but that’s almost certainly a significant undercount considering the lack of routine testing.

Since the current strain of bird flu, known as “highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1,” began spreading around the world in late 2021, it has become something like a “super virus” in its spread among animals, Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, told me. Wild birds have been decimated, as have poultry farms: The virus has been detected in more than 100 million birds in 48 states. H5N1 has been around for longer than 25 years, but only recently has it regularly jumped to mammals, infecting cats, sea lions, and bears. In March, it was detected for the first time in American cattle and, since then, has already spread to 163 herds in 13 states.

All of that would be worrying enough without reports of people also falling sick. Everyone who has tested positive in the U.S. has worked closely with farm animals, but each additional case makes the prospect of another human pandemic feel more real. “That’s absolutely the worst-case scenario,” Webby said. It’s a possibility, although not the likeliest one. For now, the virus seems poised to continue its current trajectory: circulating among wild birds, wreaking havoc on poultry farms, and spreading among cattle herds. That outcome wouldn’t be as catastrophic as a pandemic. But it’s still not one to look forward to.

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*sighs* Just a watching brief, honest.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

“Hey, Alexa, is it true that you’ve cost Amazon billions of pounds with no profit to show for it?” In fact: yes. CC-licensed photo by ajay_suresh 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 (probably) at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Smart or not smart? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Inside the 78 minutes that took down millions of Windows machines • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

At 12:09AM ET on July 19th, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released a faulty update to the Falcon security software it sells to help companies prevent malware, ransomware, and any other cyber threats from taking down their machines. It’s widely used by businesses for important Windows systems, which is why the impact of the bad update was so immediate and felt so broadly.

CrowdStrike’s update was supposed to be like any other silent update, automatically providing the very latest protections for its customers in a tiny file (just 40KB) that’s distributed over the web. CrowdStrike issues these regularly without incident, and they’re fairly common for security software. But this one was different. It exposed a massive flaw in the company’s cybersecurity product, a catastrophe that was only ever one bad update away — and one that could have been easily avoided.

…Kernel access makes it possible for the driver to create a memory corruption problem, which is what happened on Friday morning. “Where the crash was occurring was at an instruction where it was trying to access some memory that wasn’t valid,” Wardle says. “If you’re running in the kernel and you try to access invalid memory, it’s going to cause a fault and that’s going to cause the system to crash.”

CrowdStrike spotted the issues quickly, but the damage was already done. The company issued a fix 78 minutes after the original update went out. IT admins tried rebooting machines over and over and managed to get some back online if the network grabbed the update before CrowdStrike’s driver killed the server or PC, but for many support workers, the fix has involved manually visiting the affected machines and deleting CrowdStrike’s faulty content update.

While investigations into the CrowdStrike incident continue, the leading theory is that there was likely a bug in the driver that had been lying dormant for some time. It might not have been validating the data it was reading from the content update files properly, but that was never an issue until Friday’s problematic content update.

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Lock down the kernel? Third-party companies complain. Don’t lock it down? Voila. A good point made by John Gruber: this might have only affected 1% of PCs, but it affected a lot more than 1% of people in the relevant countries.
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Alexa is in millions of households—and Amazon is losing billions • WSJ

Dana Mattioli:

»

When Amazon launched the Echo smart home devices with its Alexa voice assistant in 2014, it pulled a page from shaving giant Gillette’s classic playbook: sell the razors for a pittance in the hope of making heaps of money on purchases of the refill blades.

A decade later, the payoff for Echo hasn’t arrived. While hundreds of millions of customers have Alexa-enabled devices, the idea that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on Amazon by talking to the iconic voice assistant on the underpriced speakers didn’t take off.

Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” said a former senior employee. 

As a result, Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars on its devices business, which includes Echos and other products such as Kindles, Fire TV Sticks and video doorbells, according to internal documents and people familiar with the business.  

Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon had more than $25bn in losses from its devices business, according to the documents. The losses for the years before and after that period couldn’t be determined.

It is a high-stakes miscalculation the tech giant made under founder Jeff Bezos that current CEO Jassy, who took the helm in 2021, is now trying to change. As part of a plan to reverse losses, Amazon is launching a paid tier of Alexa as soon as this month, a move even some engineers working on the project worry won’t work, according to people familiar with those efforts.

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Hinges on a Bezos metric called “downstream impact” (DSI), dreamt up by economists, measuring how much time people spend inside Amazon’s ecosystem once they buy a product or service. Smart speakers: not much DSI.
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OpenAI wants NYT to hand over journalistic notes in landmark case • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

The New York Times has described an attempt by OpenAI to see its journalists’ confidential notes as “harassment and retaliation” for its decision to sue the tech company.

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has asked a New York judge to force the NYT to hand over “underlying reporter’s notes, interview memos, records of materials cited, or other ‘files’” to prove its work can be classed as original works of authorship under US copyright law.

The New York Times said in response: “Permitting OpenAI to investigate The Times’s privileged newsgathering process would have serious negative and far-reaching consequences.

“It would entail the disclosure of The Times’s confidential reporters’ files on investigative reporting into highly sensitive matters, including those related to the defendants themselves.”

The NYT filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December after months of negotiations on a deal fell short, arguing the use of its content for the training of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT was “free-riding” on its own investment in journalism.

…“The Times can only assert infringement over those portions of the works that are (a) original to the author, and (b) owned or exclusively licensed to the Times,” OpenAI said.

In other words, according to OpenAI, the NYT should not be allowed to bring its case in relation to any of its reporting in which it “copied another’s work” or used “elements in the public domain”.

«

Not sure which is the braver gambit, but going to be fun to watch it play out. OpenAI is basically saying that the NYT’s journalists are just stenographers assembling bits and pieces from here and there, and that that’s what OpenAI does too. (Not correct in either case.)
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The VR winter continues • Benedict Evans

»

It can feel a little odd to write about anything other than generative AI these days, but I sometimes remind people that all the things that we were talking about in October 2022 are still there. E-commerce is still growing (it’s now 40% of non-food retail in the UK!), Amazon has a $50bn ad business, peak TV is over, and Meta is still investing in VR and AR – at last $50bn so far.

There’s nothing new to say about this: Meta has a device at roughly the right price that isn’t good enough yet, and Apple has a device with a much better spec, at least on some measures, that isn’t cheap enough or light enough yet (I wrote about that here). And meanwhile, we don’t have product-market fit.

Some VR apps do well, but the platform at a whole is small, and not really growing either. Meta probably sold 1m of the Quest 3 (seen in the spike in Q4 2023, but compare with this data from Deloitte for the UK – the installed base is basically flat and only 20% of people who own one use it every day. That’s a 2% DAU [daily active user] penetration.

As I’ve written a few times before, it’s obvious that the devices will get better, lighter and cheaper, but much less obvious whether that’s enough. How many people will care?

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And that is the critical question. Over the past 30 years, VR has come around again and again, and each time the market has rebuffed it.
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Apple tries to rein in Hollywood spending after years of losses • Bloomberg

Lucas Shaw:

»

After spending more than $20bn to produce original TV shows and movies that not a lot of people watch, Apple is starting to refine its strategy in Hollywood.

Based on interviews with more than a dozen people, including former employees, current employees and business partners, Apple services boss Eddy Cue has been having regular meetings with studio chiefs Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht to go over budgets, pushing them to exert more control over spending on projects. Van Amburg and Erlicht have told some of their top creative partners that they want to change their reputation as the biggest spender in town, according to these people.

Apple doesn’t buy the most projects in Hollywood — that is still Netflix. But it splurges on individual titles. The studio spent more than $500m combined on movies from directors Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Matthew Vaughn, and upward of $250m on the World War II miniseries Masters of the Air, one of more than a dozen new series released this year.

Those pictures were all disappointments at the box office, and only Killers of the Flower Moon registered in Nielsen’s rankings of the most-popular streaming titles. Masters of the Air delivered a smaller US audience than House of Ninjas, a Netflix show in Japanese, according to Nielsen. Even so, it’s the only new Apple show this year to appear in Nielsen’s rankings.

Apple is spending billions of dollars a year on original programming that has received strong reviews and many awards nominations. But its streaming service is attracting just 0.2% of TV viewing in the US. Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.

“Subscriber growth has been weak, with the platform’s original content a fraction of what rivals offer,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Geetha Ranganathan and Kevin Near wrote in a recent note.

Apple has largely escaped scrutiny from the press and Wall Street. The company discloses no data about its spending or the financial performance of its Hollywood operation. Investors are more focused on iPhone sales.

Yet as studios and streaming services across Hollywood cut back after years of record spending and record losses, Apple is also looking to make its streaming business more sustainable.

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I’d suggest not wasting it on the big feature films, and keeping with the good small series. But 0.2% of US TV viewing? That’s an incredible way to burn money. It makes Americas Cup racing look like a sensible economy.
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China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week • ABC News

James Purtill:

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While Australia debates the merits of going nuclear and frustration grows over the slower-than-needed rollout of solar and wind power, China is going all in on renewables.

New figures show the pace of its clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week.

A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early.

It’s installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight.

By comparison, experts have said the Coalition’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants would add fewer than 10GW of generation capacity to the grid sometime after 2035.

Energy experts are looking to China, the world’s largest emitter, once seen as a climate villain, for lessons on how to go green, fast.

“We’ve seen America under President Biden throw a trillion dollars on the table [for clean energy],” CEF director Tim Buckley said. “China’s response to that has been to double down and go twice as fast.”

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Australia is presently having complete conniptions about nuclear power, which it wants to include as a “renewable”, except it isn’t, and will take longer to install than any renewable. Meanwhile China gets on and just does it. Speaking of which…
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China has created the first ever meltdown-proof nuclear reactor • IFLScience

Russell Moul:

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One new(ish) kind of reactor design, known as a pebble-bed reactor (PBR), may have solutions to the issues inherent in older designs. These reactors are “passively” safe, whereby they can shut down on their own if there is any issue with the cooling system.  

Unlike other reactors that rely on highly energy-dense fuel rods, PBRs use smaller, low-energy-density fuel “pebbles” in greater numbers. Although they contain less uranium than traditional fuel rods, there are more of them. They are also surrounded by graphite, which is used to moderate the amount of neutron activity in the core. This helps slow down nuclear reactions, resulting in less heat.

As such, lower energy density means excess heat can be spread out across the pebbles and can be more easily transferred away.

This may sound good, but until recently the only PBR reactors in existence were prototypes in Germany and China. However, China has now constructed a full-scale Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor Pebble-Bed Module (HTR-PM) in Shandong, which became commercially operational in December 2023 and is equipped with these systems.

In order to test them, engineers turned off both modules of HTR-PM at a time when they were operating at full power.

“To confirm the presence of inherent safe reactors on a commercial scale, two natural cooling tests were performed on the #1 reactor module on August 13, 2023 and the #2 reactor module on September 1, 2023,” the researchers write. “During the entirety of the tests, the reactor modules were naturally cooled down without emergency core cooling systems or any cooling system driven by power.”

The results, which have just been published, show that HTR-PM cooled itself, reaching a stable temperature within 35 hours of its power being cut. 

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Not great, not terrible. (Chernobyl joke.)
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𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘆Pod

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What goes around, comes around! Rediscover the delight of tactile scrolling with tinyPod’s physical scroll wheel. And yes, it actually scrolls.

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A brilliant idea (and a pretty neat web page for it). What if you.. took your Apple Watch and put it into a hand-sized iPod case? Obviously you’d need a mobile-connected Watch for this to be perfect, but it’s a nice idea which will surely and deservedly sell a few thousand.
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Your Body’s Updated Terms of Service • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Chas Gillespie:

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We are writing to inform you that Your Body (“you,” “yourself,” “your aging body”) has updated its terms of service, which apply to the use of all your Parts and Areas. These terms will apply only to Your Once-Useful Body and may differ from Other People’s Bodies, Which Are Still Normal.

We encourage you to review the updated Terms before you attempt any dangerous activity, such as playing with your dog or walking uphill. Our other legal policies are available in our Depressing Policy Center.

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Depressingly true, and of course there’s no way not to accept them. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified