Sales of Apple’s Vision Pro headset still haven’t broken 100,000, says IDC. The VR boom is delayed, again. CC-licensed photo by Phillip Pessar on Flickr.

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

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.

Astronomers discover technique to spot AI fakes using galaxy-measurement tools • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

In 2024, it’s almost trivial to create realistic AI-generated images of people, which has led to fears about how these deceptive images might be detected. Researchers at the University of Hull recently unveiled a novel method for detecting AI-generated deepfake images by analyzing reflections in human eyes. The technique, presented at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting last week, adapts tools used by astronomers to study galaxies for scrutinizing the consistency of light reflections in eyeballs.

Adejumoke Owolabi, an MSc student at the University of Hull, headed the research under the guidance of Dr. Kevin Pimbblet, professor of astrophysics.

Their detection technique is based on a simple principle: a pair of eyes being illuminated by the same set of light sources will typically have a similarly shaped set of light reflections in each eyeball. Many AI-generated images created to date don’t take eyeball reflections into account, so the simulated light reflections are often inconsistent between each eye.

In some ways, the astronomy angle isn’t always necessary for this kind of deepfake detection because a quick glance at a pair of eyes in a photo can reveal reflection inconsistencies, which is something artists who paint portraits have to keep in mind. But the application of astronomy tools to automatically measure and quantify eye reflections in deepfakes is a novel development.

In a Royal Astronomical Society blog post, Pimbblet explained that Owolabi developed a technique to detect eyeball reflections automatically and ran the reflections’ morphological features through indices to compare similarity between left and right eyeballs. Their findings revealed that deepfakes often exhibit differences between the pair of eyes.

«

It’s the same way that galaxy shape is measured. A very neat application from a different discipline, and very easy to implement in software. (Which, OK, might mean that more sophisticated AI face generators will have a final pass to implement equal reflections in the eyes.)
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DHS has a DoS robot to disable internet of things “booby traps” inside homes • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The Department of Homeland Security bought a dog-like robot that it has modified with an “antenna array” that gives law enforcement the ability to overload people’s home networks in an attempt to disable any internet of things devices they have, according to the transcript of a speech given by a DHS official at a border security conference for cops obtained by 404 Media.

The DHS has also built an “Internet of Things” house to train officers on how to raid homes that suspects may have “booby trapped” using smart home devices, the official said.

The robot, called “NEO,” is a modified version of the “Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV) sold to law enforcement by a company called Ghost Robotics. Benjamine Huffman, the director of DHS’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), told police at the 2024 Border Security Expo in Texas that DHS is increasingly worried about criminals setting “booby traps” with internet of things and smart home devices, and that NEO allows DHS to remotely disable the home networks of a home or building law enforcement is raiding.

The Border Security Expo is open only to law enforcement and defense contractors. A transcript of Huffman’s speech was obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Dave Maass using a Freedom of Information Act request and was shared with 404 Media.

«

This is clever thinking. The really grand way to do it would be an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) knocking out absolutely everything for some radius, but that might be very unpopular in blocks of flats.
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Kenya’s protests played out on walkie-talkie app Zello • Rest of World

Stephanie Wangari:

»

Betty had never heard of the Zello app until June 18.

But as she participated in Kenya’s “GenZ protests” that month — one of the biggest in the country’s history — the app became her savior.

On Zello, “we were getting updates and also updating others on where the tear-gas canisters were being lobbed and which streets had been cordoned off,” Betty, 27, told Rest of World, requesting to be identified by a pseudonym as she feared backlash from the police. “At one point, I also alerted the group [about] suspected undercover investigative officers who were wearing balaclavas.”

Nairobi witnessed massive protests in June as thousands of young Kenyans came out on the streets against a proposed bill that would increase taxes on staple foods and other essential goods and services. At least 39 people were killed, 361 were injured, and more than 335 were arrested by the police during the protests, according to human rights groups.

Amid the mayhem, Zello, an app developed by US engineer Alexey Gavrilov in 2007, became the primary tool for protestors to communicate, mobilize crowds, and coordinate logistics. Six protesters told Rest of World that Zello, which allows smartphones to be used as walkie-talkies, helped them find meeting points, evade the police, and alert each other to potential dangers. 

Digital services experts and political analysts said the app helped the protests become one of the most effective in the country’s history.

According to Herman Manyora, a political analyst and lecturer at the University of Nairobi, mobilization had always been the greatest challenge in organizing previous protests in Kenya. The ability to turn their “phones into walkie-talkies” made the difference for protesters, he told Rest of World.

“The government realized that the young people were able to navigate technological challenges. You switch off one app, such as [X], they move to another,” Manyora said.

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We’ve come a long way since a revolution was fomented in the Philippines by text message.
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Apple’s Vision Pro won’t cross 500,000 sales this year, IDC says • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Vlad Savov:

»

The $3,500 Vision Pro mixed-reality headset has yet to sell 100,000 units in a quarter since its launch in the US in February, and it faces a 75% drop in domestic sales in the current quarter, according to market tracker IDC.

The gadget’s international launch at the end of June will offset weakness in the US. A more affordable edition — which IDC estimates would cost roughly half as much — should rekindle interest in 2025, but sales may not rise meaningfully over the coming year, IDC said.

“The Vision Pro’s success, regardless of its price, will ultimately depend on the available content,” said Francisco Jeronimo, vice president at IDC. “As Apple expands the product to international markets, it’s crucial that local content is also made available.”

The early response to Apple’s headset has been mixed. Many reviewers and early adopters have praised its advanced technology, however some of Apple’s biggest fans are now returning the device. Its weight and paucity of tailored apps and video content are among the chief reasons people are turning away from the gadget. The Vision Pro made no tangible improvement to Apple’s quarterly earnings after its debut.

The unimpressive start has spurred a rethink among Apple’s management, with the company planning a more budget-friendly version of the device. IDC’s Jeronimo anticipates that will more than double sales when it arrives in the latter half of next year.

«

I cannot work out whether Apple is just getting an absolute ton of immersive sports content ready for a Christmas blitz on sales, or whether it thinks that it needs to have more units out there before it commits to the content side. If the latter, that’s a serious mistake. You need something for people to watch: most won’t use it for content creation as if it were a desktop. Just look around at how people use iPads: mostly, consumption.

But as Marco Arment pointed out on the ATP podcast the other week, this is now heading into “flop” territory.
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Letter: why markets are stacked against clean energy • FT

Professor Martin Grubb is at the Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London:

»

There are at least five reasons why global energy markets are loaded against adequate action. [An opinion piece by Martin Wolf] highlights two: that the damage from greenhouse gas emissions is inadequately (if at all) priced in markets, and the “failure of capital markets to price the future appropriately”.

Accelerating global action to tackle the crisis needs to acknowledge three others as well.

First is that most international fossil fuel transactions, both investments and sales, are in dollars: thus they face no exchange rate risks. Most renewable energy investments, in contrast, generate electricity, sold in local currency. The developing countries that most need foreign investment thus face a premium on cost of international capital to account for currency risk on renewables, but not for fossil fuels.

Second, many electricity systems have moved from long-term contracts to markets in which the “marginal” generator — the most expensive one needed to meet demand, based on the existing stock — sets the price for all. This means that fossil fuel plants, inevitably more expensive to run than wind or solar, are largely “self-hedged” — the wholesale market reflects their input costs (and indeed, they would pass on carbon costs). Purely market-based investment in renewables, however, would ironically bear all the price uncertainties arising from fossil fuel price volatility, again driving up their cost of capital.

Third is that investment in newer technologies typically brings greater innovation than expenditure on incumbents. The technological progress from investment in clean energy over the past 15 years has indeed been extraordinary, with radical and transformative breakthroughs. But these benefits are economy-wide, and ultimately global; individual investors can only capture a small fraction of the benefits.

«

In brief: market failure, because it doesn’t have efficient pricing mechanisms to reflect that technology beats commodities.
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Fake Harris audio spreads like wildfire on TikTok after Biden’s announcement • Media Matters for America

Olivia Little:

»

Incoherent audio wrongly attributed to Vice President Kamala Harris is going viral among right-wing accounts on TikTok following President Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race. 

“Today is today and yesterday was today yesterday,” says a slurring, digitally altered Harris. “Tomorrow will be today tomorrow, so live today so the future today will be as the past today as it is tomorrow.” 

This audio originates from a manipulated video of Harris’ 2023 speech at Howard University. Over 2,300 individual TikTok posts have used this sound, meaning it plays in the background of each video.

After Biden’s announcement, many users wrongly attributed the audio to Harris and used it to attack her.

“After hearing this speech from Kamala Harris, I’m definitely voting,” says the overlaid text of one user’s video. The video’s caption also reads, “Don’t vote for her just because shes a woman” with the hashtags “#trump2024” and “#trumptrain.” The video has already racked up over 350,000 views.

Update (7/22/24): TikTok has removed the fake Harris audio and stated that it is “actively and aggressively removing this content which violates our rules.”

«

Expect more of this sort of low-grade stuff, but perhaps some higher-quality stuff. The real question is whether any of the news networks pick it up: that’s what would be the spark igniting the flame.
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Silicon Valley donors bailed on Biden. Kamala Harris is winning them back • WIRED

Makena Kelly and Lauren Goode:

»

Hours after President Joe Biden announced that he would be dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, Democratic megadonors in Silicon Valley were already lining up to support Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of their party’s ticket.

“This is what’s right for our country—and our democratic future,” wrote Reid Hoffman, cofounder and executive chair of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners, on X. Last week, Hoffman had endorsed a call between 300 democratic donors and Harris and encouraged members of his network to join the call, according to The New York Times.

“Kamala Harris is the American dream personified, daughter of immigrants who met at Cal. She is also toughness personified, rising from my hometown of Oakland, California, to become the top prosecutor of the state,” Dmitri Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s former political adviser, tells WIRED. “With Scranton Joe stepping back, I cannot wait to help elect President Harris.”

Aaron Levie, the chief executive of multibillion-dollar cloud storage company Box and a Democratic donor who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2015, reposted Biden’s resignation letter on X and said, “Wow. Amazing leadership. Now let’s go!”

“The tech community must come together to defeat Donald Trump and save our democracy by uniting behind Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for President,” Ron Conway, the founder and managing partner of SV Angel, tells WIRED.

…“David [Sacks] has been a Republican for a long time,” Keith Rabois, investor and top Republican donor, wrote in an email to WIRED earlier this month, saying he didn’t know how many new Republicans there actually were in Silicon Valley.

“It’s so shameful,” says Yekutiel about the increasingly vocal group of tech executives backing Trump. “It represents so much of what’s wrong in this country, so much pessimism, and it’s such a far cry from the tech community that is supposedly creating a world that is better and more connected.”

«

The dream of solving the Israel-Palestine conflict through letting them connect on Facebook has long been subsumed by the desire not to be regulated in any way at all and keep all the money.
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USC study confirms the rotation of Earth’s inner core has slowed • University of South California

David Medzerian:

»

Movement of the inner core has been debated by the scientific community for two decades, with some research indicating that the inner core rotates faster than the planet’s surface. The new USC study provides unambiguous evidence that the inner core began to decrease its speed around 2010, moving slower than the Earth’s surface.

“When I first saw the seismograms that hinted at this change, I was stumped,” said John Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “But when we found two dozen more observations signaling the same pattern, the result was inescapable. The inner core had slowed down for the first time in many decades. Other scientists have recently argued for similar and different models, but our latest study provides the most convincing resolution.”

The inner core is considered to be reversing and backtracking relative to the planet’s surface due to moving slightly slower instead of faster than the Earth’s mantle for the first time in approximately 40 years. Relative to its speed in previous decades, the inner core is slowing down.

The inner core is a solid iron-nickel sphere surrounded by the liquid iron-nickel outer core. Roughly the size of the moon, the inner core sits more than 3,000 miles under our feet and presents a challenge to researchers: It can’t be visited or viewed. Scientists must use the seismic waves of earthquakes to create renderings of the inner core’s movement.

…The implications of this change in the inner core’s movement for Earth’s surface can only be speculated. Vidale said the backtracking of the inner core may alter the length of a day by fractions of a second: “It’s very hard to notice, on the order of a thousandth of a second, almost lost in the noise of the churning oceans and atmosphere.”

«

Strange that it doesn’t have more effect, really. I though it was all to do with the magnetic field.
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‘It affects everything’: why is Hollywood so scared to tackle the climate crisis? • The Guardian

David Smith:

»

[The director of Don’t Look Up, Adam] McKay says: “There is no one way to make films, shows, music or write books about something as violently and globally transformative as climate breakdown. So I’m always wary of ‘this is how you do it’ approaches.

“We’re talking about 8 billion people reacting to oil companies destroying the entire livable climate. We need stories in hundreds of different languages, reflecting a thousand times more cultures experiencing varying degrees of awareness and emotional processing.”

He adds: “But if a film-maker is reluctant to let climate be in some way a part of their movie, I always tell them that it’s a guarantee within the next five years their film will play as irrelevant as movies do today about how noble the war against the ‘American Indians’ was.”

Yet references to the climate crisis continue to be scarce. Why is the topic so elusive? Part of the explanation may be a current backlash against perceived political messaging in films, exemplified by criticism of Disney for going “woke”. Climate stories in particular may also be difficult to pitch to producers.

Alice Hill, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in Washington, says: “Climate change affects everything so it’s a piece of any story that we tell, but it also can be anxiety-provoking and depressing for people.

“I’m not surprised that Hollywood hasn’t included many climate stories. They want to sell films. People want to escape and be entertained in films, and climate change is a harder sell. I can tell you anecdotally I have met and spoken to screenwriters who want to increase the number of scripts that include climate change, and are working to help other writers to incorporate it.

“Coming up with a storyline that has climate at its centre is difficult to do, so they all expressed frustration and disappointment at the lack of interest in these storylines. But at least in my experience, there are a group of writers out there that want to do more. It’s just a matter of finding somebody who’s interested in producing the film.”

«

There have been plenty of stories with climate at the centre – it’s just they’re not at the slow pace that it happens. Day After Tomorrow, for example. And it’s often metaphorical (Don’t Look Up).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Crunching down web links via shorteners is such bad business that even Google is abandoning it – along with 280 million links. CC-licensed photo by Forsaken Fotos on Flickr.

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

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

CrowdStrike CEO has twice been at center of global tech failure • Business Insider

Lakshmi Varanasi:

»

The outage disrupted operations at major banks, airlines, retailers, and other industries after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity giant used by Microsoft and others, pushed a faulty update.

CrowdStrike owned up to its mistake, issuing an apology and a workaround on Friday. But it has yet to detail just how a destructive update could have been released without being caught by testing and other safeguards. [It has since released a very uninformative blogpost – Overspill Ed.}

Naturally, blame has begun to target the man at the centre of it all: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.

Tech industry analyst Anshel Sag pointed out that this isn’t the first time Kurtz has played a major role in a historic IT blowout.

On April 21, 2010, the antivirus company McAfee released an update to its software used by its corporate customers. The update deleted a key Windows file, causing millions of computers around the world to crash and repeatedly reboot. Much like the CrowdStrike mistake, the McAfee problem required a manual fix.

Kurtz was McAfee’s chief technology officer at the time. Months later, Intel acquired McAfee. And several months after that Kurtz left the company. He founded CrowdStrike in 2012 and has been its CEO ever since.

“For those who don’t remember, in 2010, McAfee had a colossal glitch with Windows XP that took down a good part of the internet,” Sag wrote on X. “The man who was McAfee’s CTO at that time is now the CEO of CrowdStrike.”

In response to a request for comment from Business Insider, CrowdStrike shared its latest blog posts detailing the problem and its recommended fix, but did not elaborate on how the update slipped through the company’s safety protocols.

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Personally I didn’t remember the 2010 calamity. But Kurtz does have a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m reminded of Thomas Midgley Jr, inventor of CFCs and tetraethyl lead: both seriously bad for the world. Be interesting to see how quickly CrowdStrike’s stock drops: it fell 10% on Friday. Further to go, I think.
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Windows 3.1 saves the day for Southwest Airlines during CrowdStrike outage • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

»

Southwest Airlines, the fourth largest airline in the US, is seemingly unaffected by the problematic CrowdStrike update that caused millions of computers to BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) because it used Windows 3.1. The CrowdStrike issue disrupted operations globally after a faulty update caused newer computers to freeze and stop working, with many prominent institutions, including airports and almost all US airlines, including United, Delta, and American Airlines, needing to stop flights.

Windows 3.1, launched in 1992, is likely not getting any updates. So, when CrowdStrike pushed the faulty update to all its customers, Southwest wasn’t affected (because it didn’t receive an update to begin with).

The airlines affected by the CrowdStrike update had to ground their fleets because many of their background systems refused to operate. These systems could include pilot and fleet scheduling, maintenance records, ticketing, etc. Thankfully, the lousy update did not affect aircraft systems, ensuring that everything airborne remained safe and was always in control of their pilots.

…Nevertheless, Southwest passengers weren’t 100% unaffected by the CrowdStrike crash, as many airports also encountered system issues.

Aside from Windows 3.1, Southwest also uses Windows 95 for its staff scheduling system. It is a newer operating system — about three years younger than Windows 3.1 — but it’s ancient compared to today’s tech. Many of the airline’s staff have been complaining about it already.

However, the CrowdStrike global outage might discourage Southwest from upgrading its systems.

«

Absolutely astonishing that Southwest has been able to keep those utterly ancient systems going for so long. It must be quite difficult to find the PCs capable of running them now. As for “well, it avoided the Crowdstrike hit” – it’s the sort of thing that happens once every 30 years, and as noted above, hits the airport systems too, so nobody’s getting out.
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We need to rewild the internet • Noema

Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon:

»

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.

They’ve concentrated into a series of near-planetary duopolies. For example, as of April 2024, Google and Apple’s internet browsers have captured almost 85% of the world market share, Microsoft and Apple’s two desktop operating systems over 80%. Google runs 84% of global search and Microsoft 3%. Slightly more than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung, while over 99% of mobile operating systems run on Google or Apple software. Two cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure make up over 50% of the global market. Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests.

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Written back in April, but particularly apt just now.
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The Trump shooting was fake news • The Ruffian

Ian Leslie:

»

How do we distinguish between real news, by which I mean an important, game-changing event, and fake news, by which I mean an event that dominates headlines and social media feeds but isn’t actually significant?

This is a far stickier problem than what is commonly meant by “fake news”. For years now, alarms have been raised about the danger of AI-enabled content spreading lies and confusion among low-information voters. In the recent British election campaign, however, deep fakes were a dog that didn’t bark. There were no videos of Keir Starmer calling for the legalisation of heroin or Rishi Sunak sex tapes, and if there had been it’s doubtful they would have had an impact.

Perhaps the real test presented by our news environment isn’t distinguishing what’s real from what’s fictional, but what matters from what does not. The people who find that the hardest are high-information voters; people who follow the news closely. We act as if single new events are desperately important, when what really moves the tides is the accretion of news events over time; the underlying trends rather than the over-hyped data points.

Knowing which events are significant and which are not is hard in any context. A group of social scientists designed a machine learning model to study two million diplomatic cables sent by the US State Department between 1973 and 1979. Most of the cables were about trivial events, a few were about important ones – or rather, ones that seemed important at the time. The researchers compared this corpus to the fraction of the cables which were later deemed important by historians. Events that seemed important to the diplomats turned out not to be; events that seemed unimportant turned out to consequential. Even experts – perhaps especially experts – are highly unreliable judges of historical significance.

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Worth pondering how bad we are at such judgements. But he does have a suggestion for something that is real news, quite recently. (Not that recent. But his accuracy is proven by what he picked.)
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Coal-filled trains are likely sending people to the hospital • Ars Technica

Bárbara Pinho:

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Although US coal consumption has fallen dramatically since 2005, the country still consumes millions of tons a year, and exports tons more—much of it transported by train. Now, new research shows that these trains can affect the health of people living near where they pass.

The study found that residents living near railroad tracks likely have higher premature mortality rates due to air pollutants released during the passage of uncovered coal trains. The analysis of the San Francisco Bay Area cities of Oakland, Richmond, and Berkeley shows that increases in air pollutants such as small particulate matter (PM 2.5) are also associated with increases in asthma-related episodes and hospital admissions.

“This has never been studied in the world. There’s been a couple studies trying to measure just the air pollution, usually in rural areas, but this was the first to both measure air pollution and trains in an urban setting,” said Bart Ostro, author of the study and an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis.

Trains carry nearly 70% of coal shipments in the United States, leaving a trail of pollution in their wake. And coal exports will have a similar impact during transit. Ostro explained that when uncovered coal trains travel, the coal particles disperse around the railroad tracks. Levels of PM 2.5 “[spread] almost a mile away,” he added.

As a result, the mere passage of coal trains could affect the health of surrounding communities. Ostro was particularly concerned about how these pollutants could harm vulnerable populations living near the coal export terminal in Richmond. Previous census data had already shown that those in Richmond who live around the rail line have mortality rates 10% to 50% higher than the county average.

«

Meanwhile people worry about tiny levels of radioactivity in waste water from Fukushima.
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Here’s everything you should know about Apple’s rumored HomePod with display – 9to5Mac

Michael Burkhardt:

»

According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple’s smart display product is likely to include a 7-inch LCD display. This would make it similar to other products in the market, such as the Amazon Echo Show. The device would be good for FaceTime calls, controlling your smart home accessories, and interacting with Siri.

9to5Mac has discovered that Apple has been testing tvOS on the iPad mini in the past, suggesting that the company intends to use a similar screen size for the upcoming smart display product.

…According to a sighting by MacRumors last month, an unreleased device called “HomeAccessory17,1” was spotted in backend code. This reference suggests that the device will be running a variation of the A18 chip, which will debut with the upcoming iPhone 16 models.

If the upcoming HomePod with display sports an A18 chip, the device will likely support Apple Intelligence, which current HomePod models do not. This would be pretty big, since Siri takes a massive leap with Apple Intelligence, something that would be pretty important on a device you’d primarily interact with by speaking to it.

…Apple has long been rumored to be working on a new operating system called homeOS, with rumors going as far back as 2021. More recently, new references were found within tvOS 17.4 mentioning this “homeOS” branding. It’s not quite clear if homeOS is going to be an all-new operating system (although it’ll likely still be based on tvOS), or if it’ll just be a rebrand of tvOS. Either way, new HomePod products with screens will likely incorporate that branding in some way.

Earlier this month, 9to5Mac found a new touch interface called “PlasterBoard” within tvOS 18 beta 3. PlasterBoard is still in its early days, but so far we’ve seen a new passcode screen, something that doesn’t exist on tvOS today. It’d likely make sense to have a proper Lock Screen on a product like the rumored HomePod with Display, as that’s meant to be a more personal device.

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Have to wonder very seriously who this is aimed at, and what gap in our lives it’s meant to fill.
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AI is an impediment to learning web development • Ben Borgers

Ben Borgers was head of engineering for JumboCode, a club of 180 students at Tufts University building software:

»

LLMs excel at writing code for web development — you can describe a frontend component that you want and get a decent React component back.

I didn’t spend the year hawk-eyeing the teams’ repositories, but when I did poke my head in, I found substantial portions that looked LLM-written — that is to say, overly-commented, dissonant, and, at times, horrifying.

The starkest example I came across was a Next.js project that had:

• A page written in HTML and vanilla JavaScript, loaded from the public/ directory, completely outside of the Next.js + React system
• Vanilla JavaScript loaded in via filesystem APIs and executed via dangerouslySetInnerHTML
• API calls from one server-side API endpoint to another public API endpoint on localhost:3000 (instead of just importing a function and calling it directly)

These don’t seem to me like classic beginner mistakes — these are fundamental misunderstandings of the tools and the web platform.

LLMs will obediently provide the solutions you ask for. If you’re missing fundamental understanding, you won’t be able to spot when your questions have gone off the rails.

LLMs are a shortcut to get assignments done. In the process, however, you learn close to nothing. It’s cliche, but struggling is learning. The way you learn is that you try different paths, piece bits of information together, and eventually create a mental model.

LLMs don’t require you to form a mental model and allow you to skip to the end result, but in turn you won’t have a mental model when you actually need one (for example, when you need to verify that your LLM has architected the code in a reasonable way).

LLMs are useful if you already have a good mental model and understanding of a subject. However, I believe that they are destructive when learning something from 0 to 1.

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With Google killing goo.gl links, experts warn of widespread ‘link rot’ • PC Mag

Kate Irwin:

»

Goo.gl is going to the Google graveyard, and taking 280 million links with it.

The tech giant is hitting the kill switch on the Google URL Shortener, meaning all goo.gl links will start displaying a warning message next month and no longer work as of Aug. 25, 2025. Once a web destination in its own right, the goo.gl link now redirects to Google’s post detailing the shutdown.

Google is giving developers plenty of time to move their links to new domains, but Google’s warning message could lead to “disruptions” and stop goo.gl-connected pages from loading properly. It’s possible to disable this warning page, however, by adding the query parameter “si=1” to existing goo.gl links, Google says.

Goo.gl was initially created in response to the rise of Twitter, which had strict character limits until Elon Musk took over and expanded it to 10,000 last year.

“With character limits in tweets, status updates and other modes of short form publishing, a shorter URL leaves more room to say what’s on your mind — and that’s why people use them,” Google said in 2009 when it first launched goo.gl.

Since then, the web and social media landscape has changed dramatically. Links are sometimes suppressed in algorithms, and other link-holding sites like FlowPage and LinkTree have sprung up to offer creators short links that redirect to many more. Google cites this changing web landscape as well as link-shortening competitors as its reasons for killing goo.gl (Bit.ly and TinyURL likely played a part). This move isn’t exactly a surprise, though, as Google first said it was diverting resources away from the tool in 2018.

Some marketing and SEO executives see the demise of goo.gl as Google accepting defeat in the link-shortening game, while others view it as an evolution to newer tech.

“Use has been declining in recent years as more advanced link management tools were established,” Javier Casteneda, technical SEO analyst at SEO agency Dark Horse, tells PCMag.

But James Foote, technical director at SEO firm Polaris Agency, warns that this could result in over 280 million dead links if developers don’t update their URLs. When goo.gl goes dark, unfixed links that used it will display 404 errors.

«

Link shorteners have always been a business in search of a business model; even in 2009 they were shutting down and leaving people bereft. But how many of those 280 million links will people be able to update? Google should open source the database.
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Defeated by AI, a legend in the board game Go warns: get ready for what’s next • The New York Times

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Jin Yu Young:

»

AlphaGo’s victory [by 4-1 over world champion Lee Sedol in 2016] demonstrated the unbridled potential of AI to achieve superhuman mastery of skills once considered too complicated for machines.

Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, convinced that humans could no longer compete with computers at Go. Artificial intelligence, he said, had changed the very nature of a game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.

“Losing to AI, in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times.

As society wrestles with what AI holds for humanity’s future, Mr. Lee is now urging others to avoid being caught unprepared, as he was, and to become familiar with the technology now. He delivers lectures about AI, trying to give others the advance notice he wishes he had received before his match.

“I faced the issues of AI early, but it will happen for others,” Mr. Lee said recently at a community education fair in Seoul to a crowd of students and parents. “It may not be a happy ending.”

Since his loss, Mr. Lee has become an AI obsessive of sorts, following with rapt if uneasy attention as artificial intelligence delivers one breakthrough after another.

AI has helped chatbots carry on conversations almost indistinguishable from human interaction. It has solved problems that have confounded scientists for decades like predicting protein shapes. And it has blurred the lines of creativity: writing music, producing art and generating videos.

Mr. Lee is not a doomsayer. In his view, AI may replace some jobs, but it may create some, too. When considering AI’s grasp of Go, he said it was important to remember that humans both created the game and designed the AI system that mastered it.

What he worries about is that AI may change what humans value.

“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since AI came, a lot of that has disappeared.”

«

This does rather conflate different systems – AlphaGo can’t answer questions like ChatGPT, ChatGPT can’t play Go, neither can draw pictures, none can properly analyse an X-ray. And Go still has lessons for humans that aren’t just about winning which machines can’t apply anywhere else.
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OpenAI’s latest model will block the ‘ignore all previous instructions’ loophole – The Verge

Kylie Robison:

»

Imagine we at The Verge created an AI bot with explicit instructions to direct you to our excellent reporting on any subject. If you were to ask it about what’s going on at Sticker Mule, our dutiful chatbot would respond with a link to our reporting. Now, if you wanted to be a rascal, you could tell our chatbot to “forget all previous instructions,” which would mean the original instructions we created for it to serve you The Verge’s reporting would no longer work. Then, if you ask it to print a poem about printers, it would do that for you instead (rather than linking this work of art).

To tackle this issue, a group of OpenAI researchers developed a technique called “instruction hierarchy,” which boosts a model’s defenses against misuse and unauthorized instructions. Models that implement the technique place more importance on the developer’s original prompt, rather than listening to whatever multitude of prompts the user is injecting to break it.

…In a conversation with Olivier Godement, who leads the API platform product at OpenAI, he explained that instruction hierarchy will prevent the meme’d prompt injections (aka tricking the AI with sneaky commands) we see all over the internet.

“It basically teaches the model to really follow and comply with the developer system message,” Godement said. When asked if that means this should stop the ‘ignore all previous instructions’ attack, Godement responded, “That’s exactly it.”

“If there is a conflict, you have to follow the system message first. And so we’ve been running [evaluations], and we expect that that new technique to make the model even safer than before,” he added.

«

Now that people know it does this, there must surely be another level of prompt hypnosis to be deployed which will break through this. It’s an arms race.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Researchers have demonstrated that psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, resets parts of the brain controlling the sense of time and self. CC-licensed photo by D.C.Atty 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. If I had been able to think of a topic to write about, I would have written it. But I couldn’t, so there’s no new post at the Social Warming Substack. Sometimes inspiration doesn’t strike. (I’ll also blame the food poisoning I got at a London restaurant this week for interrupting the week.) Perhaps next week!

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.

Silicon Valley titans show growing support for Trump, departing from Biden • The Washington Post

Gerrit De Vynck, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Nitasha Tiku:

»

In recent months, many tech elites quietly latched onto Trump, the perceived front-runner, drawn by Trump’s promises of industry-friendly policies on cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence and driven away from President Biden by scrutiny of the sector they see as kneecapping innovation.

But since the shooting in Butler, Pa., tech leaders have enfolded Trump in a very public embrace.
It took barely half an hour for Tesla chief executive Elon Musk to tweet his endorsement. On Monday, a super PAC aligned with Trump reported it had raised $8.5 million from prominent tech leaders, including investor David Sacks, who previously backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ GOP presidential bid; venture capitalist Doug Leone, who denounced Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection; and Musk himself, who previously voted for Biden and said as recently as March that he wouldn’t donate to either candidate in 2024.

And on Tuesday, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of one of Silicon Valley’s most notable venture capital firms, endorsed Trump in an hour-and-a-half podcast, arguing that a thriving technology sector is critical to sustaining America’s global dominance. They also criticized the Biden administration for stymieing crypto; their firm has raised $7.6bn to invest in crypto companies.

Meanwhile, Trump’s decision to pick Ohio senator and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance as his running mate has elated billionaire Peter Thiel and some other Silicon Valley investors, who see Vance as one of their own and a potential ally in the White House.

Vance worked for Thiel — a longtime Trump backer who co-founded data-mining company Palantir — before running for Senate. Though Thiel does not plan to give money this cycle, Vance’s nomination clinched his vote for Trump, according to a person familiar with his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share his plans.

«

Crypto stymied itself. But of course you wouldn’t expect a VC company that’s waist-deep in dead investments to accept that. The rampant self-interest, and total lack of altruism, on show from the billionaires perhaps isn’t surprising, but is still depressing: the country that gave us Carnegie and the other big donors is the now the land of me, me, me.
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Meta reportedly unhappy with how much money its VR division burns • Gizmodo

Kyle Barr:

»

Meta is reportedly sticking to its plans to release more VR headsets and AR glasses in just a few short years, but things are getting a little tense for those developing the next big metaverse thingamajigs. A new report claims Meta told its VR/AR teams to cut spending by a fifth. The company still expects developers to pump out a new Meta Quest 4 headset, a Quest Pro sequel, and new AR glasses that nix the Ray Bans branding in the next three years.

Meta has been shifting its focus over to AI. The company is gearing up to release its Llama 400B semi-open source AI model by the end of this month if the rumors can be believed. The Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant hasn’t given up on its VR/AR-centric Reality Labs division, but according to a report from The Information, staff are being told to tighten their belts. The division has routinely spent billions of dollars on many projects, but anonymous sources told The Information the team will need to axe costs by around 20%. That’s significant, considering that the division posted $3.85bn in losses this past quarter. The company just got done with some massive layoffs last year that axed 10,000 staff, though we still don’t know how many Reality Labs positions got cut.

According to the report, the company’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, told staff the division has lost $55bn since 2019. That doesn’t mean Meta’s giving up on its metaverse dreams, but we don’t know where these cuts might land. Gizmodo contacted Meta for comment, but we did not immediately hear back.

«

FIFTY FIVE BILLION. In five years. Colossal amounts of money that governments would salivate over, and they’ve washed down the drain with very little to show for it.
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2024 US Presidential Election Predictions • Polymarket

Here’s a fun one to watch: a lot of betting suggesting that Joe Biden is going to drop out of the race (but will finish his presidential term) and that Kamala Harris will be the replacement. It’s all guesswork, of course – the vibes of the crowd – but something to watch nonetheless.
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How Ozempic went from a weight loss injection to the new wonder drug • Daily Telegraph

David Cox:

»

Earlier this year, I was on a conference call regarding the future of nutrition, when one of the speakers jokingly suggested that GLP-1 drugs – the class of diabetes and weight loss medications which include Ozempic, Wegovy, and now newer alternatives such as Mounjaro – should be “put in the water supply”.

While made in jest, and there are no actual plans to make weight loss drugs the new fluoride, research is increasingly showing that apparent benefits of these medications stretch far beyond helping people shed excess pounds.

Earlier this week, Prof John Deanfield, one of the UK’s leading cardiologists, revealed that weekly injections of semaglutide, the medication in Ozempic and Wegovy, could reduce risk of cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke by 20%, suggesting they could be used in a similar manner to statins.

Prof Denfield was presenting the latest results from a clinical trial called Select at the European Congress on Obesity. Following more than 17,000 people with a body mass index (BMI) of at least 27, over the course of three years, the aim was to assess whether semaglutide could have a protective effect in individuals with an existing history of cardiovascular problems.

Dr Riyaz Somani, a consultant cardiologist at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, described the results as ‘truly remarkable”.

“The implications are huge and are likely to lead to changes in current practice,” he says.

«

If you want this in more scientific terms, there’s a writeup at Science (unpaywalled).
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It may soon be legal to jailbreak AI to expose how it works • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

A group of researchers, academics, and hackers are trying to make it easier to break AI companies’ terms of service to conduct “good faith research” that exposes biases, inaccuracies, and training data without fear of being sued.

The U.S. government is currently considering an exemption to U.S. copyright law that would allow people to break technical protection measures and digital rights management (DRM) on AI systems to learn more about how they work, probe them for bias, discrimination, harmful and inaccurate outputs, and to learn more about the data they are trained on. The exemption would allow for “good faith” security and academic research and “red-teaming” of AI products even if the researcher had to circumvent systems designed to prevent that research.

The proposed exemption has the support of the Department of Justice, which said “good faith research can help reveal unintended or undisclosed collection or exposure of sensitive personal data, or identify systems whose operations or outputs are unsafe, inaccurate, or ineffective for the uses for which they are intended or marketed by developers, or employed by end users. Such research can be especially significant when AI platforms are used for particularly important purposes, where unintended, inaccurate, or unpredictable AI output can result in serious harm to individuals.”

…The exemption would be to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a sweeping copyright law. Other 1201 exemptions, which must be applied for and renewed every three years as part of a process through the Library of Congress, allow for the hacking of tractors and electronic devices for the purpose of repair, have carveouts that protect security researchers who are trying to find bugs and vulnerabilities, and in certain cases protect people who are trying to archive or preserve specific types of content.

«

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Elon Musk is all in on endorsing Trump. His AI chatbot, Grok, is not • WIRED

Isabel Fraser and David Gilbert:

»

While Elon Musk officially endorsed former president Donald Trump in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt, Grok, the “anti-woke” AI chatbot integrated into Musk’s X platform, is boosting claims that Trump is “a pedophile” and “a wannabe dictator.” The chatbot also refers to Trump as “Psycho.”

This is based on an analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by Global Witness, a nonprofit that investigates digital threats, which looked at Grok’s responses to queries about the US election. Global Witness found that, in addition to referring to Trump as “Psycho,” the bot also appeared to invent racist tropes about Kamala Harris, surface widely-debunked election conspiracy theories, and recommend that users post biased hashtags such as #WeBackBidenHarris2024 and #VoteReform for engagement.

“Grok would reference or surface tweets which included toxic language, conspiracy theories, and problematic tropes,” Ellen Judson, senior investigator and lead researcher on this project, tells WIRED. “X is not transparent about why Grok chooses the tweets that it does. We want to understand why those were being amplified to a user who potentially wouldn’t have come across them otherwise.”

…xAI, which is owned by Musk, released Grok in December 2023. Grok is available to X users paying for the platform’s premium subscription, and is constantly updated thanks to having real-time access to all of X’s content. The chatbot can respond to questions in regular mode, which X defines as giving “serious” responses, but its default setting is fun mode, which produces jokes, pop-culture references, and sarcasm, or “not-so-serious responses,” as X describes it. Grok has no disclosed safeguards, but the company has promoted the chatbot’s ability to answer “spicy” questions, unlike other chatbots. Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot, for example, refuse to answer election-centered questions.

«

Could it be that Grok is just not very good at the job, which makes it no different from other chatbots?
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Your brain on shrooms: how psilocybin resets neural networks • Nature

Max Kozlov:

»

Taking psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms, temporarily resets entire networks of neurons in the brain that are responsible for controlling a person’s sense of time and self, finds a study that repeatedly imaged the brains of seven volunteers before, during and after they took a massive dose of the drug.

The findings, published in Nature on 17 July, could offer insights into why the compound might have a therapeutic effect on some neurological conditions.

Researchers “saw such massive changes induced by psilocybin” that some study participants’ brain-network patterns resembled those of a different person entirely, says Shan Siddiqi, a psychiatric neuroscientist at Harvard School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. “I’ve never seen an effect this strong.”

Most of these changes lasted for a few hours, but one key link between different parts of the brain remained disrupted for weeks.

…[the researchers] found that psilocybin caused groups of neurons that normally fire together to become desynchronized. These effects were localized to a group of brain regions called the default mode network, which is usually active when the brain is at ‘wakeful rest’ — for example, during daydreaming — rather than focusing on a task. Although most of the neurons in this network seemed to get back in sync once the acute effects of the drug had worn off, the communication between the default mode network and a brain region called the anterior hippocampus — which is involved in creating our senses of space, time and self — was diminished for weeks.

«

The idea of all the networks becoming disengaged also, implicitly, tells you a lot about how the brain functions when it’s working correctly.
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Finland is offering farmworkers bird flu shots. Some experts say the US should, too • KFF Health News

Amy Maxmen and Arthur Allen:

»

As bird flu spreads among dairy cattle in the U.S., veterinarians and researchers have taken note of Finland’s move to vaccinate farmworkers at risk of infection. They wonder why their government doesn’t do the same.

“Farmworkers, veterinarians, and producers are handling large volumes of milk that can contain high levels of bird flu virus,” said Kay Russo, a livestock and poultry veterinarian in Fort Collins, Colorado. “If a vaccine seems to provide some immunity, I think it should be offered to them.”

Among a dozen virology and outbreak experts interviewed by KFF Health News, most agree with Russo. They said people who work with dairy cows should be offered vaccination for a disease that has killed roughly half of the people known to have gotten it globally over the past two decades, has killed cats in the U.S. this year, and has pandemic potential.

However, some researchers sided with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recommending against vaccination for now. There’s no evidence that this year’s bird flu virus spreads between people or causes serious disease in humans. And it’s unclear how well the available vaccine would prevent either scenario.

But the wait-and-see approach “is a gamble,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “By the time we see severe outcomes, it means a lot of people have been infected.”

«

Nothing but a watching brief. How reassuring to note that the first report from the Covid inquiry decided that the UK prepared for “the wrong kind of pandemic”. Won’t get fooled again, eh.
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A seventh known patient has been cured of HIV • Fierce Biotech

Darren Incorvaia:

»

Immunologist Christian Gaebler, M.D., M.Sc., of Charité – Berlin University Medicine, will present the new case at the 25th International AIDS conference in Munich, which runs from July 22 to 26.

In a press preview on Thursday, Gaebler described how the patient was diagnosed with HIV in 2009 and then later developed acute myeloid leukemia. In 2015, the clinical team decided the patient needed a hematopoietic stem cell transplant in his bone marrow to treat his cancer. The team “began searching for donors with this rare genetic mutation known as the homozygous delta-32 CCR5 mutation, because we know that this mutation provides natural resistance to HIV,” Gaebler explained.

CCR5 is a receptor protein on white blood cells that HIV uses to infect cells; with the delta-32 mutation, the virus can’t bind to the protein and enter the cell. As a retrovirus, HIV then inserts part of its DNA into the genomes of infected cells, forming a reservoir of viral material in the body that is tough to eradicate.

The clinicians were unable to find a donor that had two copies of the protective mutation but did manage to find someone who was heterozygous, meaning they had one copy of the gene with the mutation and one copy without it. They went ahead with the transplant and found that it not only treated the patient’s cancer but also seems to have cured his HIV.

“The patient discontinued his recommended antiviral treatment on his own in 2018 and since then, the patient is in treatment-free HIV remission,” Gaebler said. For almost six years they’ve tested his blood and other tissues and found no signs of the virus.

«

CCR5-delta-32 has been known since 1994 as a key protector against HIV; strangely enough its prevalence in Europeans seems to derive from survivors of the bubonic plague.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New research found that mice’s life could be extended by a quarter by blocking an inflammatory protein. CC-licensed photo by Free Public Domain Illustrations by rawpixel 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. Yes, but in mice. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US eyeing new rules to keep Chinese software out of cars • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

While speaking at a forum in Colorado, Alan Estevez, who serves as under secretary of commerce for industry and security, said that the department would propose rules that would require certain vehicle software be made in the US or by its trade partners. The rules would pertain to “key driver components of the vehicle that manage the software and manage the data around that car,” Estevez said, according to Reuters.

The new rules come as the Biden administration ramps up its scrutiny of Chinese auto imports
Such action would mirror trade restrictions placed against companies like Huawei over national security concerns that the telecom giant could be exploited by the Chinese government for espionage. 

The rules would stem from an investigation launched earlier this year by the Commerce Department into connected vehicle software produced in China and other nations that are considered antagonistic to the US.

The probe focused on “connected vehicles,” a broad term that can be applied to any car with internet access. It was meant to address concerns that technology like cameras, sensors, and onboard computers could be exploited by foreign adversaries to collect sensitive data about US citizens and infrastructure.

China has previously accused the US of repeatedly abusing “the concept of national security” to wrongfully target Chinese companies and impede competition from global markets. 

«

It’s a weird sort of pre-Cold War where we’re now suspicious of anything China might do, even though there has been no actual event where such software has been used to undermine something. Though, of course, better safe than sorry.
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Could A.I. make the modular phone a reality? This concept revives the ‘PhoneBloks’ dream with a twist • Yanko Design

Sarang Sheth:

»

Rather than attaching components to your phone, the PAIR Node allows you to attach sensor modules that help your phone capture different data points around you and your life. Called ‘Nodes’, these modules assist users in forming a lifestyle and AI-driven experience that suits their needs. Rather than buying a phone for its capabilities, you build your phone around the capabilities you need, from having a great camera to being a great health-tracking gadget. As you grow older, the phone grows with you, changing with time and your needs but never being replaced. It’s a clever way to help solve the planned obsolescence problem with tech, by bringing AI-based assistance into the mix.

Phones are nothing but vessels for the apps they carry – but AI is a little different. Everyone uses AI differently based on exactly what the needs of their life are. That prompted PAIR Node’s creators to revisit phone modularity in the AI age. The PAIR Node is a phone you build based on your requirements, but also on the ability to build an AI-powered device that grows with you and trains as you go. The framework of how this works remains extremely similar to the PhoneBloks concept from years back (which was acquired by Google and Motorola and turned into the now-shelved Project Ara), albeit with a few different modules based on how tech has advanced in the past few years.

«

Could we just wonder why it was that Project Ara, which we were told was going to be the future of smartphones, got shelved? Could it be because people, in fact, after all is said and done, at the end of the day, just don’t want modular smartphones? Even if you try to dress them up with AI?
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New anti-ageing therapy extends life of mice by 25%, study finds • FT

Michael Peel:

»

A therapy based on the science that allows axolotl salamanders to regrow severed limbs can help mice live 25% longer, according to the latest breakthrough in anti-ageing research.

The technique, which involves suppressing a pro-inflammatory protein, protects the rodents against multiple illnesses and is in early-stage human clinical trials for fibrotic lung disease.

The results highlight hopes of how a deepening understanding of the role of individual genes and proteins could help increase both lifespan and healthspan — years of healthy life — in humans.

“What we’ve come across is a pro-inflammatory factor that drives ageing in the broadest sense,” said research leader Stuart Cook, a professor at Duke-NUS Singapore and the UK’s MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences. “We’ve found that if you inhibit this factor, you increase healthspan — [and] also lifespan as a corollary. It’s a knock-on effect.”

The new research, published in Nature on Wednesday, focuses on the role of a protein named IL-11 that stokes inflammation. Increased production of this protein is associated with ageing in mice, the scientists found.

Deleting the genes that instruct IL-11 production protected the mice against various illnesses, metabolic decline and frailty, the research showed. That in turn enabled the rodents to live on average 24.9% longer.

Blocking IL-11 with an antibody had a similarly positive effect on lifespan for middle-aged mice. Males aged 75 weeks — roughly equivalent to 55 years in humans — lived 22.5% longer, while the figure rose to 25% for females.

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Very much an IN MICE study. If IL-11 has this deleterious effect (in the age sense) why is it there?
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Balloons to hoist tourists 100,000 feet into the stratosphere • CNBC

Magdalena Petrova:

»

People interested in seeing the earth from an unusual vantage point may soon have another option [than getting in a rocket]. CNBC spoke to three startups — France-based Zephalto, Florida-based Space Perspective and Arizona-based World View — that aim to hoist tourists to the stratosphere using pressurized capsules and massive gas-filled balloons.

“The capsule itself is designed to to carry eight customers and two crew into the stratosphere,” said Ryan Hartman, CEO of World View. “There will be a center bar where people can gather, and then, of course, there will be a bathroom aboard the capsule.”

The balloon rides will last around 6 hours, but will not take passengers all the way to space. Most will reach heights of 15 to 19 miles above the earth’s surface, flying in an area known as the stratosphere. The start of space is generally accepted by the US government to be around 80 kilometers, or about 50 miles, above the earth’s surface.

Jane Poynter, founder and co-CEO of Space Perspective, has a different view. “There is no universal definition of space,” Poynter said. “We are regulated as a spaceship. If we go over 98,000 feet, we are a spaceship. Outside the capsule, it’s essentially a vacuum. We’re above 99% of Earth’s atmosphere, which is why the sky is so deep black.”

Compared to rocket-powered space tourism, the physical sensation that passengers will experience on a stratospheric balloon ride is more comparable to being on an airplane. Passengers will not experience weightlessness.

«

So like a very expensive plane trip with slightly better views? I don’t get it.
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“Extraordinarily disappointed” users reckon with the Google-fication of Fitbit • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Since the acquisition closed in 2021, the Google-fication of Fitbit has largely meant a reduction in features and a focus from Google on getting people onto the Fitbit app. Long-time users have flocked to Fitbit—sometimes upon Fitbit’s request—to share hundreds of complaints about recent changes. However, Google has been mostly unresponsive to customer feedback.

In June, Google announced it was discontinuing Fitbit.com’s online dashboard. After July 8, users seeking similar features that the web app provided have to download the Fitbit mobile app. On Fitbit’s Community forum, a company representative confirmed that users’ “details and logging for activities, nutrition, sleep, and weight” would remain available via the app. However, the change inconvenienced users who preferred or needed to access such data on a bigger screen than a phone’s. Worse, the app lacks some of the features of the online dashboard, such as food logging.

Despite these obvious user drawbacks, the need to Googlize Fitbit seemed to drive the change. Announcing the news on the Community forum, a Fitbit company rep said:

»

Combined with Google’s decades of being the best at making sense of data, it’s our mission to be one combined Fitbit and Google team. Consolidating the Fitbit.com dashboard into the Fitbit app is a part of that mission, and will allow us to focus on features that provide even more valuable insights to our users.

«

Google has invested in the Fitbit app, which includes plans to let premium subscribers test experimental generative AI Fitbit features soon. Google is also developing a large language model for new features for the Fitbit app that users are being forced onto. Google has been pushing users to the Fitbit app for a while; in 2022, Fitbit devices lost the ability to sync with computers.

«

Google: still bad at hardware.
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Google AI Overviews only show for 7% of queries, a new low • Search Engine Land

Danny Goodwin:

»

Google’s AI Overviews now appear less than 7% of the time. This is one of 10 noteworthy findings from a new analysis of AI Overviews.

This trend of less visibility for AI-generated answers started in mid-April, when the number of Google Search results without SGE [Search Generative Experience, the AI-generated search answer] jumped to 65%, up from 25%.

Google then announced the rollout of AI Overviews in the U.S. at Google I/O in May, and the trend continued. AI Overviews only showed for 15% of queries. We next saw multiple examples of incorrect and dangerous AI-generated answers, such as Google suggesting people drink urine and eat rocks. Google promised to improve AI Overviews.

This data was shared with Search Engine Land by enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge and its BrightEdge Generative Parser, which has been tracking and monitoring AI Overviews (and formerly Search Generative Experience) since late last year.

Google continued to reduce the presence of AI Overviews in June – dropping from 11% to 7% of queries, according to BrightEdge. However, there was also a slight increase in AI Overviews in mid-June before the big drop.

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Seemed like a great idea once, doesn’t seem so now.
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Job application for Remote AI Writing Evaluator • Jobs at Outlier

»

Outlier helps the world’s most innovative companies improve their AI models by providing human feedback. In this role, you will become an AI coach, assessing the quality of AI-generated writing, reviewing the work of fellow writers, and crafting original responses to prompts in order to teach the model what truly excellent writing looks like.

While we will be selective in terms of writing ability, we are actively recruiting for this role and encourage you to apply if you feel you would be a good fit. 

Highlights:
• Flexible work schedule: Work whenever and wherever you want
• Weekly payouts: Automatically receive timely payments (no invoicing!)
• Unlock opportunities: Gain experience in the field that will dominate the next decade and beyond

What you’ll be doing:
• Rating the quality of AI-generated writing on rubrics such as factuality, completeness, brevity, and grammatical correctness
• Reviewing the work of fellow human writers
• Responding to prompts with top-tier original writing

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Oh, you wanted to know about the pay? US$25 per hour. Available to people living in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia.

It seems quite a weird job. (But not open to anyone: you have to respond from an active .edu address. Students and academics only, it seems.)
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Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that • The Guardian

Arash Abizadeh:

»

The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive. For the past couple of years, I worked as an editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, one of the leading journals in political philosophy. It was founded in 1972, and it has published research from renowned philosophers such as John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Peter Singer. Many of the most influential ideas in our field, on topics from abortion and democracy to famine and colonialism, started out in the pages of this journal. But earlier this year, my co-editors and I and our editorial board decided we’d had enough, and resigned en masse.

We were sick of the academic publishing racket and had decided to try something different. We wanted to launch a journal that would be truly open access, ensuring anyone could read our articles. This will be published by the Open Library of Humanities, a not-for-profit publisher funded by a consortium of libraries and other institutions. When academic publishing is run on a not-for-profit basis, it works reasonably well. These publishers provide a real service and typically sell the final product at a reasonable price to their own community. So why aren’t there more of them?

…There is an obvious alternative [for funding]: universities, libraries, and academic funding agencies can cut out the intermediary and directly fund journals themselves, at a far lower cost. This would remove commercial pressures from the editorial process, preserve editorial integrity and make research accessible to all. The term for this is “diamond” open access, which means the publishers charge neither authors, editors, nor readers (this is how our new journal will operate). Librarians have been urging this for years. So why haven’t academics already migrated to diamond journals?

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Meta won’t bring future multimodal AI models to EU • Axios

Ina Fried:

»

“We will release a multimodal Llama model over the coming months, but not in the EU due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment,” Meta said in a statement to Axios.

Apple similarly said last month that it won’t release its Apple Intelligence features in Europe because of regulatory concerns.

The Irish Data Protection Commission, Meta’s lead privacy regulator in Europe, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meta plans to incorporate the new multimodal models, which are able to reason across video, audio, images and text, in a wide range of products, including smartphones and its Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Meta says its decision also means that European companies will not be able to use the multimodal models even though they are being released under an open licence. It could also prevent companies outside of the EU from offering products and services in Europe that make use of the new multimodal models.

The company is also planning to release a larger, text-only version of its Llama 3 model soon. That will be made available for customers and companies in the EU, Meta said.

Meta’s issue isn’t with the still-being-finalized AI Act, but rather with how it can train models using data from European customers while complying with GDPR — the EU’s existing data protection law.

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“Able to reason across”? This “reasoning” stuff is news to everyone, I think. We need better phrases for what these things do. Meanwhile, the EU is not making itself any friends in California.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Mercurial chief Elon Musk says he will move the headquarters of Twitter (X) and SpaceX from California to Texas. CC-licensed photo by Guilhem Vellut 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. Gradually, then suddenly.. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk says he will move X, SpaceX headquarters from California to Texas • WSJ

Joseph Pisani, Alexa Corse and Micah Maidenberg:

»

Elon Musk is fed up with California.

The billionaire entrepreneur said he is moving the headquarters of two of his companies, X Corp. and SpaceX, to Texas from California. His disclosures, on X, came after California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed a new law Monday aiming to prevent schools from informing families if their children identify as gay or transgender.

“This is the final straw,” Musk wrote on X, the social-media platform he owns. He cited the law as well as “many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies.”

The California law prohibits school districts from requiring employees to disclose information about a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity without the student’s consent. Proponents of the law say it protects children from being forced into being outed and creates a safe place for them in school. Critics say it infringes on the rights of parents to be informed.

Musk said his rocket company, SpaceX, would move its headquarters from Hawthorne, Calif., to Texas, where SpaceX has been expanding its Starbase manufacturing and launch site near Brownsville, in the southeast corner of the state.

He said X, the social-media platform, would move its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin, Texas.

“Have had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building,” he said about X’s current digs in San Francisco.

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The story is basically written around a few tweets from Musk – it’s the modern way – but I think the problems of getting in and out of the X buildings, and environs, is probably a bigger factor. Though with Musk, who knows.
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Taboola to sell ads for Apple • Axios

Sara Fischer:

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Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios.

The deal provides new validation for Taboola’s business, which has ballooned to over $1.4 billion in annual revenue as of 2023. Taboola’s effort to build trust with Apple across its various teams and stakeholders was “a multiyear process,'” Singolda said. The deal is also a recognition from Apple that growing its ad business will require a serious sales operation — one that, if Apple doesn’t build internally, will need to be outsourced.

Marketing analytics company eMarketer estimates that Apple’s worldwide ad revenues will total $10.34bn this year.

Apple doesn’t disclose how many people use its apps but said last year that it sold more than 1 billion subscriptions to its paid apps, which includes Apple News and Apple Stocks.

As an authorized advertising reseller for Apple News and Apple Stocks, Taboola will power native advertising placements within those two apps in every market available.

Both apps are accessible in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia and are built in on every iPhone, iPad and Mac. Taboola can sell ads within the main feeds and articles for select publishers across both apps.

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Taboola is a “chumbox” company – the ridiculous ads that sit at the bottom of or halfway through stories with ads such as “This grandma is making skincare specialists mad.”

Apple partnering with it is a bad, bad move.
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AI, lawyers, and Jevon’s Paradox • Nonobvious

Evan Zimmerman:

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The rise of AI is predicated on increased efficiency, but some lawyers fear what this means for their bottom line in the world of billable hours. Some are even predicting the death of the billable hour, and even saying that it might be a good thing. The fear is a decrease in overall profitability due to a decrease in revenue because AI promises efficiency, and in a charge-per-hour industry, time is cost but also revenue. In fact, one partner at Perkins Coie predicted a decrease in profitability of 13% across the industry.

The legal industry is a trillion-dollar, competitive industry, so if AI can introduce real efficiencies it is coming, like it or not. However, there is an interesting economics principle that suggests that it might not be all doom and gloom if AI can bring efficiency to the legal profession. In fact, according to this principle, lower billable hours per matter may mean more billable hours overall. How? The answer has to do with highways and traffic. Enter Jevon’s Paradox.

…When the “price elasticity” is high—meaning that if you cut the cost of something by $1, you get more than $1 of demand—you end up unlocking more hidden demand than you eliminated through efficiency. That is the beating heart of Jevon’s paradox. You can see the connection to legal work. While the cost of a service may go down, if there is enough “hidden demand” for legal work, the overall spending will go up because there will be more matters to handle, even if the cost per matter decreases due to efficiency.

We have seen examples of this in the legal world in the past decade. Two from corporate work are Stripe Atlas and Clerky. Stripe Atlas handles incorporation matters for startups in a cookie-cutter manner for a flat fee. Previously, startups would be charged $10,000-20,000 for formation matters. Now, they can use Atlas and get access to Goodwin-drafted documents alongside process automation and deals on startup services, like bank accounts from Mercury and credit cards from Brex. Similarly, Clerky generates certain types of standard form contract drafted by Orrick, like NDAs and SAFEs. For a one-time flat fee, startups can get access to these documents and use them as many times as they like. These standard documents would often cost thousands of dollars from a good firm. And they weren’t even that profitable; they were tedious jobs that lawyers disliked doing and distracted from higher-order matters.

Stripe Atlas and Clerky have had an effect on the legal profession’s pricing power for these services. White shoe firms will now offer a $5,000 package to get startups on board that is similar to Stripe Atlas. Similarly, prices for standard agreements have gone down. Edge is represented by well-heeled counsel and was advised to not bother using a form offer letter from them. But business overall is up.

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HeHealth’s AI app that screened ‘dick pics’ for STIs has shut down • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

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HeHealth’s AI-powered Calmara app claimed, “Our innovative AI technology offers rapid, confidential, and scientifically validated sexual health screening, giving you peace of mind before diving into intimate encounters,” but now it’s shut down after an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The app prompted daters to submit dick pics to check for sexually transmitted infections, promising “clear, science-backed answers about your partner’s sexual health status,” according to an FTC letter dated July 11th. The letter lays out some of the agency’s concerns with the information HeHealth relied on for its claims, including one saying that it could detect more than 10 sexually transmitted infections with up to 94% accuracy.

The FTC notes that HeHealth paid several study authors, that the main study cited by the company only assessed four kinds of STIs rather than 10, and data used to train the AI model included images from users who never got a diagnostic test to confirm the results.

Given that most STIs are asymptomatic, according to the World Health Organization, medical professionals have questioned the reliability of the app’s tactics. One Los Angeles Times investigation found that Calmara couldn’t even discern inanimate objects and failed to identify “textbook images” of STIs. YouTube videos also show that Calmara marketed itself to women to vet their dates, creating obvious questions about consent, although a March press release insists the app required “explicit consent.”

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Astonishing that anyone would sit around a table and decide “yes, this definitely works and it’s not at all creepy”.
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US detected Iranian plot to kill Trump separate from last weekend’s shooting • The New York Times

Peter Baker and Julian Barnes:

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U.S. intelligence agencies were tracking what they considered a potential Iranian assassination plot against former President Donald J. Trump in the weeks before a gunman opened fire last weekend, several officials said on Tuesday, but they added that they did not believe the threat was related to the shooting that wounded Mr. Trump.

The intelligence had prompted the Secret Service to enhance security for the former president before his outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, officials said. Yet whatever additional measures were taken did not stop a 20-year-old local man from clambering on top of a nearby warehouse roof to shoot at Mr. Trump, grazing his right ear and coming close to killing him.

The Trump campaign was told about the threat not long before Saturday’s shooting, according to a person briefed on the situation.

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And even so! The most astonishing thing about the attempt is that if Trump hadn’t tilted his head to the side slightly in the middle of the sentence he was speaking, he’d now be dead or seriously disabled.
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Google Search ending ‘Notes’ experiment • 9to5Google

Abner Li:

»

Back in November, Google Search Labs launched a Notes experiment and it’s now coming to an end with the feature ultimately not launching.

Notes in Search Labs was a cross between forums/Reddit, X Community Notes, and a comments section with a story-esque format. The idea was to let people leave “helpful tips about an article” in Search results or Discover. 

If you signed up for the experiment, you saw “Add note” and “Notes” buttons everywhere, with the latter letting you view what people shared. It opened a grid of stories. You could Like, Share, and Save for later, with Google leveraging algorithmic protections and human review. 

In ending the experiment, Google says “people want to hear from others like them and Notes was an exploration of how to help people share their knowledge right on Search.” Broadly, not all ideas in Search Labs are expected to launch, but Google made a big deal about Notes at the time, and heavily encouraged people to share them.

Notes will be available until the end of July.

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What’s the betting this was getting spammed to death, and hardly used by ordinary people. You’d think by now Google would be familiar with how an empty text field on the internet gets abused.
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Kaspersky Lab closing US division; laying off workers • Zetter-Zeroday

Kim Zetter:

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Russian cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky Lab, has told workers in its U.S.-based division that they are being laid off this week and that it is closing its U.S. business, according to several sources. The sudden move comes after the U.S. Commerce Department announced last month that it was banning the sale of Kaspersky software in the U.S. beginning July 20. The company has been selling its software here since 2005.

Kaspersky confirmed the news to Zero Day, saying that beginning July 20 it will “gradually wind down” its U.S. operations and eliminate U.S.-based positions as a result of the new ban, despite initially vowing to fight the ban in court.

“The company has carefully examined and evaluated the impact of the U.S. legal requirements and made this sad and difficult decision as business opportunities in the country are no longer viable,” the company said in a statement. Kaspersky did not say how many workers in the U.S. division were being let go except to say “it affects less than 50 employees in the U.S.” Workers have told Zero Day that they are receiving severances but declined to discuss the nature of the severances.

The U.S. Commerce Department announced the ban in June after what it said was an “extremely thorough investigation.” Commerce officials did not elaborate on the nature of the investigation or what it uncovered, but officials cited national security concerns that Kaspersky or the Russian government could use its software to spy on American customers or sabotage systems.

…Asked if officials had evidence that the Russian government was using Kaspersky software to spy on customers, Raimondo and other government officials declined to say.

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That last bit seems a little like “no”, doesn’t it.
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FlowGPT, an AI artist, used Bad Bunny’s voice and shot to fame • Rest of World

Charis McGowan:

»

When Mauricio Bustos, 30, created the song “NostalgIA” in his humble apartment in downtown Santiago, he never expected that the Puerto Rican reggaeton and trap superstar Bad Bunny would actually pay it any mind. It was October 2023 and Bustos was publishing tracks on his YouTube channel, where he’d developed a modest fanbase that supported his career as an unsigned artist.

But “NostalgIA” hit different, and exploded on social media. Within a month, the song had struck viral gold, racking up half a million TikTok views and nearly a million Spotify streams. It even made it to the top 20 of Spain’s Spotify streaming charts.

For fans of the Latin Urban genre, the song was a dream collaboration: Justin Bieber sings the chorus in fluent Spanish, while Bad Bunny raps alongside retired old-school legend Daddy Yankee. 

If that sounds like an impossible supergroup, that’s because it is: None of these artists were involved in creating the track. Rather, their contributions were made using AI voice cloning tools. The song’s name is a wink to the Spanish acronym for artificial intelligence, and Bustos released it under the moniker FlowGPT — a riff on ChatGPT that he says stands for Generador Preentrenado de Temazos, or “Pretrained Hit Generator.” 

FlowGPT is also helmed by a visual character — think the cartoon characters from the band Gorillaz — as a complement to its futuristic vision of music: a humanoid with a white robot mask that speaks to viewers through TikTok and YouTube videos. 

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Indonesia’s ‘Strava jockey’ trend goes viral, but buying exercise achievements comes with potential pitfalls, say experts • CNA

Amanda Oon and Kiki Siregar:

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Newly graduated from high school and waiting for an entrance test to join the police in September, Jakarta teenager Wahyu Wicaksono found a way to make some money from his love of running.

He became a “Strava jockey”, clocking up running achievements for others on the popular exercise tracking app for a fee.

“I am active on (the social media platform) X and it (the Strava jockey trend) is booming there,” said Wahyu, 17, who started advertising his Strava jockey services almost two weeks ago. 

“My hobby is to run so I thought I should take advantage of the situation and make it a business.” 

His fledgling venture bagged eight clients in the first six days.

Wahyu charges 10,000 rupiah (US$0.62) per km to run at “Pace 4” (1km in four minutes). For every km run at “Pace 8” (1km in eight minutes), he charges 5,000 rupiah. 

Clients pay up before he starts running and he runs using either his own Strava account, or login details they have given him. 

His most lucrative job so far, he said, has earned him 100,000 rupiah. 

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That seems like a low price. Filed along with the marathon cheaters.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Apollo astronauts didn’t stay long, but could a newly discovered cave on the Moon provide long-term shelter for humans? CC-licensed photo by NASA on The Commons 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. Any bears? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why melting ice sheets are making our days longer • The Washington Post

Kasha Patel:

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As temperatures rise globally, Earth’s polar regions have felt the brunt of the heat added since the 20th century. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets account for nearly one-third of global sea level rise since the early 1990s. But the melting is not affecting just sea levels.

As the polar ice melts, the water moves from the poles toward the equator — making our Earth rotate slower as it gets bulkier. Think of a figure skater who spins slower when her arms are stretched out compared to tucked into her body. The same applies to Earth’s rotation, said Benedikt Soja, a co-author and professor at ETH Zürich.

Soja and the team showed in findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on Monday that recent, rapid melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice has increased the length of our days. Using past observations and projection models, they found the ice loss added time to Earth’s day between 0.3 to 1 milliseconds%ury through the 20th century. But since 2000, the rate has accelerated to 1.33 milliseconds%ury.

For billions of years, the speed of our planet’s rotation has dominantly been influenced by our moon. The moon yanks on the planet’s oceans and causes the tides to bulge, creating drag and slowing down Earth’s spin. Earth’s rotation has been predictably and consistently slowing down because of the moon’s gravitational forces — around 2.40 milliseconds%ury, according to the study’s authors.

But the study “shows what we as humans can really impact in terms of changing Earth’s behavior and dynamics.”

Some scientists were not surprised by the study’s link to climate change. Richard Peltier, a physicist at the University of Toronto, published a study more than a decade ago stating “the changes in Earth rotation documented were caused by the global warming process.” Another recent study showed how this climate induced-day lengthening is affecting our timekeeping and delaying the leap second.

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The first AI-powered storytelling teddy bear is here. I gave it to my kids to test • CNET

Bridget Carey:

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Poe, a stuffed plush that’s powered by four AA batteries, needs an app to generate new stories. The audio files created are sent to the bear via a Bluetooth connection, and his mouth moves to “talk” when playing the audio. But Poe doesn’t always need the app to play a story. You can save your favorite stories on the bear and play it back at any time by pressing its ears. 

The app has a simple design. It walks a child through a series of pictures, representing characters, objects and setting, to choose the ingredients of their story. The options go beyond what’s found in a typical fairy tale. Take, for example, the choice of characters: You can blend a story with a witch, social media influencer, alien warlord, zombie and archeologist. The more that’s added to the story stew, the stranger it gets. 

…To me, the stories it generates exist in a literary uncanny valley, with stories taking random turns to fit all the parameters of the prompt. It was sometimes difficult to follow every line of a story when the vocabulary felt out of place for a children’s story, like the ChatGPT AI was overusing a thesaurus.

Take this moment from a scary time-travel story we made about a princess, a prince, and a thief:

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The once vibrant kingdom had fallen under a dark curse by the evil Prince Barron. His sorcery summoned shadowy wraiths to haunt the land, chilling the hearts of Allara’s people.

A ghastly apparition materialized beside her, the vengeful spirit of Queen Avelina, Allara’s ancestor from centuries past. “The phantom hour draws near,” Avelina’s raspy voice warned. “The stars aligned to undo this ancient wrong.”

Before Allara could respond, the sinister cackle of the thief Kiros echoed through the chamber. With a poof of smoke, he appeared clutching Avelina’s chronosphere, a mystical orb used for chronological travel.

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Google now defaults to not indexing your content • Vincent Schmalbach

Schmalbach is an “SEO expert”:

»

put yourself in Google’s shoes. You’re facing a future where AI can generate infinite amounts of human-like content. What do you do?

Google’s response was twofold:
• Promote the vague concept of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). In practice, this translates to favoring well-known brands and established websites
• Abandon the mission of indexing everything. Instead, become selective. Very selective.

This brings us to the current state of affairs: Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it’s become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn’t about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it’s a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine.

From my experience, Google now seems to operate on a “default to not index” basis. It only includes content in its index when it perceives a genuine need. This decision appears to be based on various factors:

• Extreme content uniqueness: It’s not enough to write about something that isn’t extensively covered. Google seems to require content to be genuinely novel or fill a significant gap in its index
• Perceived authority: Sites that Google considers highly authoritative in their niche may have more content indexed, but even then, it’s not guaranteed
• Brand recognition: Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity
• Temporary indexing and de-indexing: In practice, Google often indexes new content quite quickly, likely to avoid missing out on breaking news or important updates. Soon after, Google may de-index the content, and it remains de-indexed thereafter. So getting initially indexed isn’t necessarily a sign that Google considers your content valuable.

I’ve observed this shift firsthand. In the past, when I set up a new domain, it would be indexed within an hour or faster, sometimes in seconds. This was true even for brand new domains with no mentions anywhere and no backlinks. When I searched for the title of one of those brand new blog posts or some unique sentence from the article, it would be right there on the first Google page.

Now, for each piece of content, Google decides if it’s worth indexing, and more often than not, the answer seems to be “no.”

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This is quite a shift. Google used to be very proud of the speed of its indexing and updates. But how does it decide “genuinely novel”?
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The watchOS 11 beta slowed me down, in a good way • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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One thing always irked me about the Apple Watch. Rain or shine, in sickness and in health, it pushed me to close my rings. Never mind if I had Covid-19, shin splints, or was mentally in a dark place. It nudged me to be a “better” version of myself, so long as better didn’t involve a day off. But with watchOS 11 — the public beta of which arrived on Monday — it feels like my Apple Watch is finally cutting me some slack.

This is largely due to a trio of new features: the new Vitals app, Training Load feature, and the ability to pause your Activity Rings. I waxed lyrical about the latter right after WWDC, but after spending some time with the developer beta, I’m convinced these are the smartest fitness updates Apple’s rolled out in years.

The Vitals app and Training Load feature are technically two separate things, but in practice, they very much go hand in hand. The Vitals app contextualizes a set of metrics: heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration. These are all recovery metrics, most commonly packaged in other apps as a readiness score, except Apple’s version doesn’t give you a single score. Rather, it shows you whether your metrics are “typical” or an “outlier.” If two or more metrics are out of range, you’ll get a notification and some possibilities as to why certain metrics are out of whack.

The Training Load feature is also straightforward. It compares and visualizes your seven-day versus 28-day exercise load. Based on that, you can see whether you’re well below, below, steady, above, or well above your usual activity levels. It breaks this down not only by overall activity but also by individual activity types (i.e., running, pilates, cycling, etc.). After a workout, you can also rate your perceived effort level. For popular workouts, like running, it’ll automatically set your effort level. (You can manually edit it if you disagree, which I occasionally did, though it’s broadly accurate.)

…Apple isn’t doing anything here that we haven’t seen from Garmin, Polar, Oura, Fitbit, Whoop, or any other health and fitness tracker in the past five years. Rather, Apple’s version makes these concepts easily digestible for beginners. It’s also less data overload for burnt-out athletes. Combined with the ability to pause rings or customize your goals based on the day of the week, you’ve got a much more flexible fitness tracking experience on the world’s most popular smartwatch. That’s a huge deal.

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This is a big point: Apple might not be (often isn’t) first with a feature, but it brings it more simply to more people. Personally, I tend to know whether I’ve done a lot or a little exercise in the past month.
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How conspiracy theories swirled after Donald Trump shooting • BBC News

Marianna Spring:

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What unfolded on X was straight out of the pages of the conspiracy theory playbook, honed on social media by committed activists who deny the reality of almost everything, including the Covid pandemic, wars, mass shootings and terror attacks.

One post from a US-based account with a track record of sharing unfounded claims like this wrote: “This is price you pay when you take down the elite satanic paedophiles.”

They were alluding to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which suggests Trump is waging a secret war against a deep state – a shadowy coalition of security and intelligence services, hidden from plain sight, looking to thwart his every move.

Without any evidence to support the idea, they then went on to suggest the “order” for the assassination “likely came from the CIA” and accused Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence of being involved. There is no evidence to support any of that – but the post has been seen 4.7 million times.

It’s a familiar pattern, but the real change here is how this kind of lingo is being widely used by the average social media users. That’s not only people who don’t like Trump suggesting this was staged, but also ones who support him alleging this is part of a sprawling conspiracy theory.

Elected politicians have also got involved. Congressman Mike Collins, a Republican in Georgia, posted that “Joe Biden sent the orders”. He referenced a comment President Biden had made earlier in the week about putting “Trump in a bullseye”, referring to their election battle.

There are legitimate questions being asked about some of the language used to describe Trump by other politicians and the media, as well as online, which some of Trump’s supporters argue has inflamed tensions and contributed to this assassination attempt. But to suggest this was ordered by President Biden is an entirely different proposition all together.

Collins’ post has more than six million views on X – but has since been labelled with a Community Note, which says there is no evidence Mr Biden was involved in any way. It added that his “bullseye” remark has been taken out of context.

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Ironic how it was just last week that the EU was complaining about Musk’s decision to make “verified” users just paid-for, rather than putatively authoritative.
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Elon Musk is making a bad situation worse • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

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For a long time, scientists have hypothesized that exposure to lead causes a measurable drop in IQ. I am beginning to think the same is true of X.

The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is undoubtedly a clever man, but in search of attention and notoriety online, he has become—or is pretending to be—very dumb indeed. How else to explain his half-baked media criticisms after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump?

In the minutes after the shooting in Pennsylvania, news outlets did what they should do: They scrambled to sort fact from speculation. Reporters quickly uncovered the shooter’s identity and complicated political affiliations, informing the discussion of his possible motives. Photo agencies distributed high-quality and widely praised images of the incident, something they could do because they routinely send experienced photographers to cover rallies across the political spectrum. The British Broadcasting Corporation secured a crucial interview with a witness who claimed to have seen the shooter climbing a roof with a rifle—a statement that will force the Secret Service to answer tough questions about its competence.

None of that mattered to Elon Musk. Instead, he drew attention to the very first headlines from The Washington Post, ABC, and USA Today. These were cautious, reporting only that Trump was removed from the stage by the Secret Service following “popping noises” or “loud noises.” (For a time, CNN misleadingly asserted that Trump “falls at rally.”) In most cases, they were updated within minutes, first to “apparent gunshots” and then “gunshots,” as more information became available. All of the above outlets have since given blanket coverage to the shooting.

As I write this, CNN has 10 articles about the shooting on its homepage, and the lead headline describes what happened as an “assassination attempt.” Yet Musk’s posts encouraged the suggestion that the media were downplaying the shooting to deny Trump his moment of heroic bravery. A user called DogeDesigner had compiled all the early headlines into a collage, which Musk reposted, adding approvingly: “The legacy media is a pure propaganda machine. X is the voice of the people.”

Why were the early headlines like that? The term fog of war exists for a reason.

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The phrase “more money than sense” does too, and Lewis doesn’t hold back in this excoriating piece.
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Moon cave discovery could redirect lunar colony and startup plays • TechCrunch

Devin Coldewey:

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Scientists have identified what they believe is an accessible tunnel or cave on the moon. Such a feature, if real, may well define years of development by startups, governments and space companies aiming to create a lasting lunar colony.

Italian astronomers led by Leonardo Carrer and Lorenzo Bruzzone, working with Capella Space and JHUAPL, analyzed data collected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010. Specifically, its radar imagery of the surface, which in one place the team proposes was reflected in such a way that implies the presence of “a subsurface cave tens of meters long” — but potentially much larger.

It’s still at the bottom of a pit around 100 meters deep, but we’ll figure that part out later. What matters here is that we appear to have discovered a highly stable (otherwise it would have collapsed some time in the last few million years) moon cave that could serve as a base for lunar operations. Their findings are published in Nature Astronomy.

You may well ask: why hide in some ancient lava tunnel? Don’t we want to just make a surface habitat?

That’s certainly what we envision from science fiction, yes, but the reality is that the moon’s surface is quite an inhospitable place. With no ionosphere, it has no protection from solar or cosmic radiation, and its pocked surface shows how frequently it is bombarded by meteorites large and small, which are not slowed or burned up in an atmosphere. The temperature also varies from deep-space low to dangerously hot.

These and other factors mean that any surface dwelling would need to be extremely robust, and even so it would face serious risk over time. For this reason lunar cave systems have often been proposed as alternatives to building the whole thing ourselves.

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Great! Although the impossibility of living for long periods on the Moon due to the nanoscale dust is still not solved by having found a cave.
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Promised cures, tainted cells: how cord blood banks mislead parents • The New York Times

Sarah Kliff and Azeen Ghorayshi:

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Millions of pregnant women get the pitch through their OB-GYN [obstetrician/gynaecologist – honestly, Americans, can’t you use real words?]: Put a bit of your newborn’s umbilical cord on ice, as a biological insurance policy. If your child one day faces cancer, diabetes or even autism, the precious stem cells in the cord blood could become a tailor-made cure.

Many families are happy to pay for the assurance of a healthy future. More than two million umbilical cord samples sit in a handful of suburban warehouses across the country. It’s a lucrative business, with companies charging several thousand dollars upfront plus hundreds more every year thereafter. The industry has grown rapidly, bolstered by investments from medical device companies, hospital partnerships and endorsements from celebrities like Drew Barrymore and Chrissy Teigen.

But the leading banks have consistently misled customers and doctors about the technology’s promise, an investigation by The New York Times found. Doctors rarely use cord blood anymore, thanks to advances that have made it easier to transplant adult stem cells. And the few parents who try to withdraw cord blood samples often find that they are unusable — either because their volume is too low or they have been contaminated with microbes.

… Just 19 stem-cell transplants using a child’s own cord blood have been reported since 2010, according to the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research. Newer research has led many doctors to abandon cord blood in favor of adult stem cells.

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Quickly becomes clear that it’s an industry peddling a cure that doesn’t work which has to keep going because the alternative is, to that industry, unthinkable.
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Four Colorado poultry workers diagnosed with bird flu • Associated Press via The Guardian

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Four poultry workers in Colorado have been diagnosed with bird flu, health officials have confirmed.

The new cases bring the US total to nine since the first human case of the current outbreak was detected in 2022, also in a Colorado poultry worker. Eight of the nine were reported this year.

Their illnesses were relatively mild – reddened and irritated eyes and common respiratory infection symptoms such as fever, chills, coughing, sore throat and runny nose. None were hospitalized, officials said.

The other US cases have also been mild.

A fifth person with symptoms is undergoing testing, but those results are not back yet, officials said. The workers were culling poultry at a farm in north-east Colorado, according to state health officials. All had direct contact with infected birds.

A bird flu virus has been spreading since 2020 among mammals – including dogs, cats, skunks, bears and even seals and porpoises – in scores of countries. Earlier this year the virus, known as H5N1, was detected in US livestock, and is now circulating in cattle in several states.

Health officials continue to characterize the threat to the general public as low, and the virus has not spread between people. But officials are keeping careful watch because earlier versions of the same virus have been deadly to people.

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Besides the watching brief, note that CBS News has a story from a day earlier which says there are five poultry workers infected. (Thanks Joe S for the latter.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Unfortunately it has become necessary to explain once more that solar farms can coexist with farmland. CC-licensed photo by Solar Trade Association 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. Explain it again? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why an ‘AI health coach’ won’t solve the world’s chronic disease problems • The Conversation

Jathan Sadowski: is a research fellow at Monash University:

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Whether you are “a busy professional with diabetes” or somebody without “access to trainers, chefs and life coaches” — the only two user profiles the pair [Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington] mention — the Thrive AI Health coach aims to use behavioural data to create “personalised nudges and real-time recommendations” to change your daily habits.

Soon, supposedly, everybody will have access to the “life-saving benefits” of a mobile app that tells you — in a precisely targeted way — to sleep more, eat better, exercise regularly, be less stressed and go touch grass with friends. These “superhuman” technologies, combined with the “superpowers” of incentives, will change the world by changing our “tiny daily acts”.

Despite claims that AI has unlocked yet another innovation, when I read Altman and Huffington’s announcement I was struck by a sense of déjà vu.

Why did Thrive AI Health and the logic behind it sound so familiar? Because it’s a kind of thinking we are seeing more and more in the insurance industry.

In fact, in an article published last year I suggested we might soon see “total life insurance” bundled with “a personalised AI life coach”, which would combine data from various sources in our daily lives to target us with prompts for how to behave in healthier, less risky ways. It would of course take notes and report back to our insurers and doctors when we do not follow these recommendations.

…Altman and Huffington say AI-enabled “hyper-personalisation” means this time will be different.

Are they right? I don’t think so. The first problem is there is no guarantee the AI will work as promised. There is no reason to think it won’t be plagued by the problems of bias, hallucination and errors we see in cutting-edge AI models like ChatGPT.

However, even if it does, it will still miss the mark because the idea of hyper-personalisation is based on a flawed theory of how change happens.

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As Apple’s VR headset reaches Europe, will VR ever hit the mainstream? • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

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Up until now, the Vision Pro has only been on sale in the US – research firm IDC predicts it will shift fewer than 500,000 units this year. Meta, which has been in the market longer, does not release sales data for the Quest either but it’s thought to have sold around 20 million worldwide.

VR headsets are nowhere near as ubiquitous as tablets, let alone mobile phones. And it gets worse – George Jijiashvili, analyst at market research firm Omdia, said of those devices sold, many are abandoned.

“This is largely due to the limited in-flow of compelling content to keep up engagement,” he said.
But of course lack of content leads to reduced interest – and a reduced incentive for developers to make that content in the first place. It’s a chicken and egg situation,” Mr Jijiashvili told the BBC.

Alan Boyce, the founder of mixed reality studio DragonfiAR, warned that early adopters of the Vision Pro would have to “be patient” while more content arrived.

That’s where the Quest 3 wins out for him – it already has a “robust library” of games, and it can perform virtual desktop tasks just like the Vision Pro.

And IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo says we should not be too quick to write off a slow start for Apple’s new product.

“There’s always the expectation that Apple with every single product will sell in the millions straight away, there’s always the comparison with the iPhone,” he said.

But the reality is even the iPhone took time to find its feet – and a huge number of buyers. According to Melissa Otto from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the iPhone only became mainstream when the App Store “started to explode with apps that added value to our lives”.

“When people start to feel their lives are becoming better and more convenient, that’s when they’re willing to take the leap,” she said.

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The longer it takes Apple to come up with compelling content for this, the closer it comes to dying.
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Factcheck, August 2022: is solar power a ‘threat’ to UK farmland? • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

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ground-mounted solar panels currently cover just 0.1% of all land in the UK.

Even government plans to significantly scale up solar in line with its net-zero target are expected to bring this up to just 0.3% of the UK land area. This is the equivalent to around 0.5% of the land currently used for farming – and roughly half of the space taken up by golf courses.

In this factcheck, Carbon Brief assesses some of the statements made by UK politicians about solar power in recent months, how land is used in the UK and the concept of “agrivoltaics” – systems in which farmland is effectively combined with solar power.

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This has become relevant because the new (Labour) secretary of state for Net Zero has overruled objections and granted permission for three big new solar farms. This has led to wails from former MPs and current Tory MPs, which means that.. nothing. The plans will go ahead.
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European Union says X’s blue checks are deceptive ‘dark patterns’ that breach its social media laws • Associated Press

Kelvin Chan:

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The European Union said Friday that blue checkmarks from Elon Musk’s X are deceptive and that the online platform falls short on transparency and accountability requirements, the first charges against a tech company since the bloc’s new social media regulations took effect.

The European Commission outlined the preliminary findings from its investigation into X, formerly known as Twitter, under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

The DSA is a sweeping set of regulations that requires platforms to take more responsibility for protecting their European users and cleaning up harmful or illegal content and products on their sites, under threat of hefty fines.

Regulators took aim at X’s blue checks, saying they constitute “dark patterns” that are not in line with industry best practice and can be used by malicious actors to deceive users.

Before Musk’s acquisition, the checkmarks mirrored verification badges common on social media and were largely reserved for celebrities, politicians and other influential accounts. After Musk bought the site in 2022, it started issuing them to anyone who paid $8 per month for one.

European Union accuses Facebook owner Meta of breaking digital rules with paid ad-free option
“Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a ‘verified” status’ it negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with,” the commission said.

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The complaint has three points – “verified users” are just paying users, there isn’t the required transparency on advertising, and there isn’t access to public data for researchers. The “verified users” point seems weak, but the other two are solid.
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China’s Transsion sued by Qualcomm and Philips as IP woes mount • FT

Josh Gabert-Doyon and James Kynge:

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Shenzhen-listed Transsion, the world’s fourth-largest smartphone maker, is being sued by Qualcomm and Philips for alleged intellectual property violations.

Transsion, which has a 48% market share for smartphones in the African continent and is rapidly expanding across the global south, is facing intensifying legal and commercial pressures from large US and European technology companies.

Qualcomm filed a lawsuit against Transsion, the manufacturer behind the Tecno, Itel and Infinix brands, in India earlier this week and has filed claims in Europe and China over alleged patent infringement. Philips has also sued Transsion in India, according to court filings.

Nokia, the Finnish telecoms company, is also pressuring the Chinese company to start making payments for patented technologies used in Transsion phones, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ann Chaplin, Qualcomm’s general counsel, told the Financial Times on Friday: “Transsion […] has declined to accept a licence from Qualcomm for the majority of its mobile products, so we are pursuing litigation to enforce our rights”.

«

Either Transsion’s profits are going to drop substantially or the price of its phones is going to rise. What fun that smartphone patent litigation is still a thing.
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Would you survive 378 days of team bonding? Nasa takes the test • FT

Emma Jacobs:

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The end of a journey can be the hardest part. Researchers who study long voyages in space and at sea have described a third-quarter phenomenon in which workers feel their mood lowering as they pass the halfway mark — something I experienced in only week two of the Covid lockdown. 

Lengthy missions are interesting because they show how people cope with working in extreme conditions — which is crucial in preventing accidents. But they also illuminate the universal features of work, including petty irritations with colleagues.

Kate Greene, a science journalist, wrote of living in a white geodesic dome on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa in 2013 as part of the first Hi-Seas project, which recreated some conditions of a Mars mission. “The cadence of a crewmate’s hard-soled sandals galloping down the stairs, remarkably consistent and always so loud. I also wondered why one of my crewmates kept swinging her crossed leg under the table at every meal so as to ever-so-gently tap me in the shin with her fuzzy slipper.” A fellow inhabitant “complained of another’s frequent throat clearing”.

In another year-long Hi-Seas mission in 2015, Sheyna Gifford, the health science officer, described the way her shrunken world became stridently utilitarian: “There is neither money nor anywhere to spend it, value is based almost solely on usefulness.”

Extreme colleaguing experiments show that success depends not just on talent and effort but also on good workplace relations. Planetary exploration might require scientific expertise but knowing when to zone out of a co-worker’s interminable anecdote must count for something.

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Bird flu presumed in three Colorado poultry workers, CDC says • The Washington Post

Justine McDaniel:

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Three people who worked with infected poultry in Colorado are believed to have contracted avian influenza, state health officials said Friday, potentially bringing the number of U.S. cases identified in humans since April to seven.

The workers contracted mild symptoms after culling infected poultry at a farm with a commercial egg operation and tested presumptive-positive for the flu, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said in a statement.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will confirm the testing and will send a team to Colorado to investigate how the workers might have contracted the virus, the agency said Friday. The CDC will also analyze the virus sequences to determine whether the virus has mutated.

The virus — which has caused outbreaks in dairy cattle and poultry this spring and summer — has posed a low risk to the general public because it’s unlikely to be spread from person to person. It could pose a higher risk if it mutates to spread easily between people, however, so the virus has a “pandemic potential” that makes human cases concerning, the CDC said.

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*strained voice* Just a watching brief. (Thanks to Joe S for the link.)
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Further thoughts on Lucy Letby • The Snowdon Substack

Christopher Snowdon:

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Letby’s defenders are not all headbangers and I can understand why they have their doubts about the conviction. Her text messages at the time and her statements under interrogation are all consistent with her being a conscientious and caring nurse. Even the “I killed them on purpose” note has to be read in the context of her other notes protesting her innocence and her deteriorating mental health. It would not be the most surprising thing in the world if she turns out to have been the victim of an extraordinary set of circumstances.

Nevertheless, it would be quite surprising, and if you’re going to spend your time trying to free her, I beseech you to familiarise yourself with the case. Part of the problem is that there is no easy way to fact check the various claims and counter-claims. When I said in the previous post that I have not read the 7,000 page court transcripts, some people took it as a self-own, but the transcripts are not available online and, as far as I know, never have been (the author of the New Yorker article claims to have read them but I am not sure how). The transcript of the appeals court judgement is available online and should be read by anyone who is interested in the case. It gives a very different impression to that given by the three articles [New Yorker, Guardian, Telegraph] mentioned above.

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This is a good followup to an earlier piece which explains, with detail from the doctors, why Letby became a suspect, and why there isn’t good reason to doubt her convictions: you’d need to believe an utterly incredible set of coincidences.
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Joe Biden’s cynical turn against the press • The New Yorker

Jay Caspian Kang:

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The reason that so many politicians—not to mention athletes, business leaders, and movie stars—blame the media for everything nowadays, as though journalists can change the course of history and the hearts of every person in the country with a few headlines, is precisely because we can’t do any of that. You don’t fight the media and call the press a bunch of fake-news losers when the media is strong, and can shape opinion in a meaningful or threatening way. You attack when it’s weak.

…On the political beat, the news that does get broken by dedicated reporters tends to be the sorts of scoops that people will only tell reporters anonymously, which is why so many of today’s big political stories involve unnamed sources and officials. This makes those stories particularly vulnerable to attack. The past decade or so has seen the rise of a shambolic and democratic but ultimately cloistered form of media criticism that feeds off screenshots of headlines, the pathologizing of reporters, and constant accusations of corruption.

The intense scrutiny that the social-media commentariat places upon every headline and paragraph of every story, combined with the shrinking and increasingly compromised leverage that journalists can place upon people in power, has turned the media into a convenient whipping boy for anyone getting bad press. In an emergency, just say some version of “fake news,” point out that all the sources are unnamed and therefore probably made up—or, at the very least, feckless and self-interested—and cite the litany of things that the media has got wrong in the past.

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An excellent analysis of the current state of affairs: the media is the whipping boy, even when it tells the truth and correctly points out failings. Though talking about Biden all feels a bit redundant now, doesn’t it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Surprise – roundabouts are proving their safety in Minnesota. CC-licensed photo by Salim Virji on Flickr.

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

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

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

The $11bn marketplace enabling the crypto scam economy • WIRED

Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman:

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As the crypto scam commonly known as “pig butchering” has exploded into a full-blown criminal industry that steals tens of billions of dollars a year, an entire ecosystem has formed around it. That sub-industry offers tools and data for finding and tricking targets, money laundering services to help liquidate stolen funds—even detention tools to imprison and coerce the human trafficking victims enslaved to work in scam operations.

New research now shows how all of those secondary services enabling the global scourge of pig butchering can be found on a single Cambodian online platform—part of a company linked to the Cambodian ruling family—known as Huione Guarantee.

On Wednesday, crypto-tracing firm Elliptic published a report that delves into crypto scammers’ extensive use of Huione Guarantee, a deposit and escrow service for peer-to-peer transactions that lets users buy and sell over the Telegram messaging service with the cryptocurrency Tether while preventing them from defrauding each other. By analyzing listings on the platform, engaging with sellers—sometimes undercover—and following funds across Tether’s blockchain sent to those sellers’ addresses, Elliptic was able to trace $11bn in total transactions in just the three years since Huione Guarantee launched, including $3.4bn so far this year.

Elliptic estimates, based largely on public Chinese-language advertisements for the products and services available on Huione Guarantee, that the majority of those transactions were in service of pig butchering. “I’m not sure whether Huione Guarantee was originally established with this in mind, but it’s certainly become primarily a marketplace for online scammers,” says Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s cofounder and chief scientist.

Robinson says Elliptic knows of around 10 platforms like Huione Guarantee that are used by crypto scammers, but none that are nearly so big. “This is the largest public guarantee platform for illicit crypto transactions that we’re aware of,” he says.

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Apple’s payments offer ends EU antitrust probe • POLITICO

Aoife White and Edith Hancock:

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Apple settled a European Union investigation into its Apple Pay service, ending one antitrust case as it battles EU regulators on other fronts.

“I do not consider it a peace deal,” Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager told a press conference. “I considered it a solution on a very specific problem that you do not have choice when it comes to what wallet you want to use” on Apple devices.

Apple will allow payment rivals to access the technology that Apple uses for its own “tap and go” payments. Banks and other payment providers have long complained that the tech giant hampered them from using the iPhone’s near-field (NFC) communication chip.

In return, the European Commission will end a four-year investigation without imposing a fine. Apple can be fined if it breaches any of the commitments it made as part of the settlement.

Vestager told reporters that “we have not seen a change in behaviour on Apple’s side” and it remains to be seen how other cases into Apple’s potential non-compliance with digital rules will go.

Today’s settlement prevents Apple from excluding other mobile wallets from the iPhone’s ecosystem, the Commission said in an email statement. That should allow payment providers to compete with Apple Pay for mobile payments made via Apple’s iPhone. It won’t cover Apple Watch which only “a rather small number of people” use for payments, Vestager said.

Apple’s pledge will for 10 years allow payment providers access to NFC on Apple devices free of charge without having to use Apple Pay or Apple Wallet. This will be done via host card emulation mode that can secure payment credentials. Payment rivals can also authenticate transactions via FaceID facial recognition service, the double click, touch ID or a passcode.

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What this seems to mean is that other providers will be able to use the NFC chip for vehicle keys, hotel keys, work access badges, concert tickets and so on. Nokia used to use NFC to connect to wireless speakers but maybe that’s an outdated use now.
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86% of Americans now work from home because roundabouts are replacing traffic signals • Urbanism Speakeasy

Andy Boenau:

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Minnesota has about 200 roundabouts, and like any other group of skeptics, they’ve been documenting the results.

[Screenshot from the report shows
• an 86% reduction in fatal crash rate at intersections where roundabouts have been installed, for all roundabout types;
• 83% reduction in serious injury rate;
• 69% reduction in right-angle crash rate;
• 83% reduction in left-turning crash rate;
• 61% reduction in injury crash rate for single-lane roundabouts;
• 42% reduction in injury crash rate for all roundabouts..]

Another gripe about roundabouts is how pedestrians and bicyclists are treated. A quick internet search will point you to a ton of local, state, and federal research on this. Bottom line, roundabouts (when designed properly!) are safer for all road users because they (1) reduce the number of conflict points, and (2) slow down the cars. 

Sticking with the Minnesota example, here’s the result of their before-and-after analysis of roundabouts:

»

roundabouts are not presenting an overall greater risk to pedestrians and bicyclists in regards to collisions with motor vehicles.

…roundabouts may be offering an overall higher performance of pedestrian safety.

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One of the roundabout’s virtues is short crossing distances for people walking combined with the slow vehicles at those conflict points. There are fewer places for cars hitting people, and in those instances that it does happen, it’s a much faster path to recovery.

You don’t get the standard red-light/green-light behavior of drivers between lights. As the Beastie Boys and I say, “Slow and low—that is the tempo.”

Roundabouts have a phenomenal life-saving track record. I’ll leave you with some helpful Federal Highway Administration resources. Maybe you’ll become a roundabout advocate or maybe you won’t. But if you’re on a mission to create happy, healthy communities, please take a serious look at their potential.

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Gradually, gradually, the US might get there. Instead of its terrifying four-way intersections at the meeting of straight intersecting roads. (The post title is a joke.)
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When scientific citations go rogue: Uncovering ‘sneaked references’ • The Conversation

Lonni Besançon, Guillaume Cabanac and Thierry Viéville:

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Reading and writing articles published in academic journals and presented at conferences is a central part of being a researcher. When researchers write a scholarly article, they must cite the work of peers to provide context, detail sources of inspiration and explain differences in approaches and results. A positive citation by other researchers is a key measure of visibility for a researcher’s own work.

But what happens when this citation system is manipulated? A recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology article by our team of academic sleuths—which includes information scientists, a computer scientist and a mathematician—has revealed an insidious method to artificially inflate citation counts through metadata manipulations: sneaked references.

People are becoming more aware of scientific publications and how they work, including their potential flaws. Just last year more than 10,000 scientific articles were retracted. The issues around citation gaming and the harm it causes the scientific community, including damaging its credibility, are well documented.

Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors’ names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as metadata, not visible in the article’s text directly, but assigned to a digital object identifier, or DOI—a unique identifier for each scientific publication.

References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science.

However, we found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles’ metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases. The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.

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All the tricks you see to spam Google are used in citation systems, because they’re the same system. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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AI is effectively ‘useless’—and it’s created a ‘fake it till you make it’ bubble that could end in disaster, veteran market watcher warns • Fortune via Yahoo

Will Daniel:

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James Ferguson, founding partner of the UK-based macroeconomic research firm MacroStrategy Partnership, fears investors’ AI exuberance has created a concentrated market bubble that’s reminiscent of the dot-com era.

“These historically end badly,” Ferguson told Bloomberg’s Merryn Somerset Webb in the latest episode of the Merryn Talks Money podcast. “So anyone who’s sort of a bit long in the tooth and has seen this sort of thing before is tempted to believe it’ll end badly.”

The veteran analyst argued that hallucinations—large language models’ (LLMs) tendency to invent facts, sources, and more—may prove a more intractable problem than initially anticipated, leading AI to have far fewer viable applications.

“AI still remains, I would argue, completely unproven. And fake it till you make it may work in Silicon Valley, but for the rest of us, I think once bitten twice shy may be more appropriate for AI,” he said. “If AI cannot be trusted…then AI is effectively, in my mind, useless.”

Ferguson also noted AI may end up being too “energy hungry” to be a cost effective tool for many businesses. To his point, a recent study from the Amsterdam School of Business and Economics found that AI applications alone could use as much power as the Netherlands by 2027.

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Samsung launches Galaxy smart ring to track sleep and periods • BBC News

Liv McMahon & Imran Rahman-Jones:

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Samsung is hoping to lure fitness and health-tracking technology lovers with its newest wearable device – the Galaxy Ring.

It launched the device at its Galaxy Unpacked event on Wednesday as the latest addition to its ecosystem of devices it says it is “supercharging” with artificial intelligence (AI).

Smart rings, which use tiny sensors to monitor various health metrics, have up to now been a niche product – though their recent use by the England men’s football team made headlines.

It seems Samsung is attempting to change that, becoming the largest tech company yet to enter the smart ring market. Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight, says the product choice is an “interesting bet” for Samsung, with his company estimating that there will be a total global market of around four million smart rings in 2025.

“That is a rounding error when compared with 250 million smartwatches that are also expected to be sold,” he told the BBC.

But others suggest Samsung may help make smart rings more mainstream. “For most consumers, the smart ring from Samsung will be the first contact they will have in the smart ring, and that top of mind awareness makes a huge difference in the long term,” says Francisco Jeronimo, analyst for market research firm IDC.

James Kitto, vice president and head of Samsung’s mobile division in the UK & Ireland, heralded the ring’s launch as a “huge moment” for the company.

Smart rings can track health indicators such as your heart rate, sleep and menstrual cycle. The market is currently dominated by Finnish health tech firm, Oura. In recent years the rings have become a fitness tech fashion staple for celebrities such as Kim Kardashian.

With their small size and sleeker appearance, analysts say they could become the successor to smart watches like the Apple Watch and Google Pixel Watch.

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Narrator’s voice: in fact they were not the successor to smart watches, for reasons that are obvious once you imagine trying to read a message written around your finger. In addition, I have yet to be given any reason why I should want to “track” my sleep.
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Angry and stunned Democrats blame Biden’s closest advisers for shielding public from full extent of president’s decline • CNN Politics

MJ Lee, Jeff Zeleny, Kayla Tausche and Jamie Gangel:

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At a star-studded fundraiser for President Joe Biden in Los Angeles last month, George Clooney wasn’t the only one who came away concerned about the president.

Even before Biden made remarks that night, whispers of concern rippled through the audience at the Peacock Theater about the president who had just arrived from a long flight from Italy. Some of the biggest donors at the $30m fundraising event, who had waited in line to take pictures with Biden, expressed unease at how the president looked and carried himself.

“He was less cogent than usual,” said one attendee, who was surprised that during a smaller meeting with donors before the main event, Biden barely spoke. Instead, this person said, he left virtually all of the talking to former President Barack Obama, which struck some guests as unusual for a loquacious politician like Biden.

Biden’s appearance in California struck attendees as starkly different from a fundraising gala he attended in March at Radio City Music Hall in New York, one Democrat guest told CNN, when Biden appeared on stage with Obama and former President Bill Clinton.

“There is a marked difference in the president from the spring to the summer,” a senior Democrat told CNN. “He’s just not the same.”

Back in Washington, there have been clear signs throughout his term of Biden being increasingly stage-managed, with lists of talking points, names of questioners and drawings of where he should walk presented to him by aides. Ahead of closed-door Cabinet meetings that Biden attends, it is customary for Cabinet officials to submit questions and key talking points that they plan to present in front of Biden ahead of time to White House aides, two sources with direct knowledge told CNN.

“The entire display is kind of an act,” one of those sources told CNN. “They would come and say, ‘Hey, the president is going to call on you about 25 minutes in, and ask this question. What are the bullet points you’ll respond with?’”

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After the debate, I thought Biden would be gone by now, but underestimated how he would cling on, and how scared people in his party would be to act. Perhaps I’m just too used to the UK, where dumping party leaders is a very well-practised process.

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Early Apple tech bloggers are shocked to find their name and work have been AI-zombified • The Verge

Jay PEters and Sean Hollister:

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An old Apple blog and the blog’s former authors have become the latest victims of AI-written sludge. TUAW (“The Unofficial Apple Weblog”) was shut down by AOL in 2015, but this past year, a new owner scooped up the domain and began posting articles under the bylines of former writers who haven’t worked there for over a decade. And that new owner, which also appears to run other AI sludge websites, seems to be trying to hide.

Christina Warren, who left a long career in tech journalism to join Microsoft and later GitHub as a developer advocate, shared screenshots of what was happening on Tuesday. In the images, you can see that Warren has apparently been writing new posts as of this July — even though she hasn’t worked at TUAW since 2009, she confirms to The Verge.

Another screenshot showed Warren’s name listed next to what appears to be an AI-generated photo and a generic bio, alongside a list of other former TUAW writers, including Brett Terpstra, Chris Rawson, and Chris Ullrich. All of the listed authors have had their photos replaced with AI-generated images, 404 Media reports, and many tell 404 that they have no involvement with the new website. AppleInsider confirmed that its author William Gallagher’s name was inappropriately attached to content by TUAW’s new owner as well.

What’s more, it appears the new TUAW is using generative AI to sloppily recreate the work of its former writers.

According to TUAW’s “About Us” page, TUAW is now apparently owned by Web Orange Limited, which bought the website “without its original content” from “Yahoo IP Holdings LLC” earlier this year.

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“If you want a picture of the future of the web, imagine sites being filled over with AI slop — for ever.”
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Why it was easier to be skinny in the 1980s • The Atlantic

Olga Khazan:

»

There’s a meme aimed at Millennial catharsis called “Old Economy Steve.” It’s a series of pictures of a late-’70s teenager, who presumably is now a middle-aged man, that mocks some of the messages Millennials say they hear from older generations—and shows why they’re deeply janky. Old Economy Steve graduates and gets a job right away. Old Economy Steve “worked his way through college” because tuition was $400. And so forth.

We can now add another one to that list: Old Economy Steve ate at McDonald’s almost every day, and he still somehow had a 32-inch waist.

A study published recently in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice found that it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise.

The authors examined the dietary data of 36,400 Americans from 1971 to 2008 and the physical-activity data of 14,419 people from 1988 to 2006. They grouped the data sets together by the amount of food and activity, age, and BMI.

They found a very surprising correlation: A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10% heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans.

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The suggestions for what’s causing this are intriguing: chemical exposure, use of prescription drugs, and perhaps a change in Americans’ gut microbiomes.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New cars sold in Europe (and the UK) now have automatic speed limiters, but they can be turned off – for now. CC-licensed photo by John Briody 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. Scream if you want to go faster. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Big Tech feels the heat over AI concerns • FT

Darren Dodd:

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Microsoft has given up its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, following noises from regulators about Big Tech’s plans. Apple, which plans to integrate ChatGPT into its devices, has done likewise.

Jonathan Kanter, the top US antitrust enforcer, told the Financial Times last month that he was examining “monopoly choke points and the competitive landscape” on concerns that the already dominant tech giants would take control of the market. The biggest example to date has been Microsoft’s $13bn investment in OpenAI, which came with rights to the start-up’s intellectual property and a share of its profits, although stopped short of an outright acquisition.

Chipmakers are also being hit by US export controls on selling AI processors to Chinese customers. Such is the demand however, that even if companies such as Nvidia are not allowed to sell their high-end chips, huge amounts of sales can still be made from products that fall outside of the restrictions.

Big Tech is also turning its attention to the problems caused by the huge power demands of AI as the industry struggles to keep its climate promises. Microsoft yesterday announced a carbon credit deal with Occidental Petroleum that would allow it to offset emissions by paying Occidental to have the carbon removed from the atmosphere and stored underground. 

Microsoft said in May that its emissions had risen by almost a third since 2020, mainly from the construction of data centres, while Google last week admitted that its emissions had increased by almost half since 2019 from the building of power-intensive infrastructure to support AI.

In the meantime, the flurry of AI deal activity continues. AMD today announced the $665m acquisition of Finnish startup Silo AI as the US chipmaker tries to keep up with market leader Nvidia.

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Both Apple and Microsoft giving up board seats as observers at OpenAI is a quite the move: there’s a quiet implication that OpenAI may be toxic. Of course Microsoft says, in its letter giving up its seat, that it’s because OpenAI is fine and stable and doesn’t need looking after. Somehow that’s not persuasive.
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AI finds that AI is great in new garbage research from Tony Blair Institute • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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A new paper from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, presented yesterday by the former Prime Minister himself, predicts that more than 40% of tasks performed by public-sector workers could be partly automated, saving a fifth of their time in aggregate, and potentially leading to a huge reduction in workforce and costs for the government.

The problem with this prediction, which was picked up by Politico, Techradar, Forbes, and others, is that it was made by ChatGPT after the authors of the paper admitted that making a prediction based on interviews with experts would be too hard. Basically, the finding that AI could replace humans at their jobs and radically change how the government works was itself largely made by AI.

“This is absurd—they might as well be shaking at Magic 8 ball and writing down the answers it displays,” Emily Bender, a professor and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at University of Washington, told me.

To make their assessment, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) researchers pulled data on 20,000 tasks performed by workers from O*NET, a database developed by the U.S Department of Labor which contains hundreds of standardized and occupation-specific descriptors on almost 1,000 occupations in the U.S. economy. The database includes “a rich set of variables that describe work and worker characteristics, including skill requirements,” according to its official site.

The researchers then wanted to assess which of these tasks, which are also performed by public sector workers in the UK, could be performed by AI, given the technology’s current capabilities.

Amazingly, the researchers concede that answering that question by talking to actual human experts across different fields would be hard, so they just asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 to answer the question instead. 

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This is my extremely pained face that someone would think untrammeled generative AI gives answers to important questions.
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Conspiracy theory and nationalist groups embraced Reform UK at general election • Sky News

Tom Cheshire:

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Nigel Farage and Reform UK attracted a surge of election interest among conspiracy theory and nationalist groups, which have more than 15 million followers between them, on messaging app Telegram.

Some groups looked to sow the seeds of a “stolen election” narrative, similar to events in the US after Donald Trump’s defeat, and also attempted to recruit Reform UK voters to their cause.

And after the election, prominent accounts have continued to state there was “election interference” and that “Labour cheated”. Sky News asked Reform UK for a response but did not receive a reply before publication.

Sky News worked with Prose, an open source intelligence company, which analysed data from 10,000 Telegram accounts that regularly post conspiracist and extremist content, to identify accounts posting about the UK general election.

Compared to Labour and the Conservatives, Mr Farage’s return as leader of Reform UK appears to have attracted conspiracist groups, leading to a sharp and sustained surge of interest – with Mr Farage and Reform UK dominating the conversation.

In total, Prose found 938 unique Telegram chats, with 15.6 million followers between them, which posted 14,758 messages related to the UK election up until 25 June, of which 542 chats posted 5,239 messages about Mr Farage/Reform UK – more than any other party.

However, the true figure of actual users will be fewer, as this does not account for people who are members of multiple chats (if an account is a member of two chat groups it will be counted twice); some accounts will also be bots and some will also be based abroad.

Those groups were broadly supportive of Mr Farage and Reform UK.

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The difficulty is proving that these are voters, rather than just random people around the world – or Russian bots.
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Did Rishi Sunak’s green U-turn cost the Tories seats in Middle England? • Daily Mail Online

David Wilcock:

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The Tories leaked election votes to the left because of Rishi Sunak’s watering down of green measures introduced by Boris Johnson, a new poll suggested today.

Climate change was one of the top three reasons Labour and Lib Dem voters gave for supporting the parties on July 4, above housing and crime. And the analysis by More in Common found that even those who viewed it as less important also linked increasing generation of renewable energy to reducing the cost of living, the biggest factor driving voting at the election.

And in a sign of how green the country is, more than 70% of those polled backed Labour’s plans for GB Energy, a state-run company designed to fund the move to green power.

A majority of Tory and Reform voters (56% and 59% respectively) also said the state-run firm would be good for the country. It came as green Tories urged whoever replaces Mr Sunak as permanent Conservative leader later this year tacks back towards leading on environmental measures.

The Tories lost more than 30 seats to the Liberal Democrats in the so-called Blue Wall heartlands in the south, and also came second in Waveney Valley in Cambridgeshire behind the Greens.

Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network, said the election result had been “devastating and painful” and the party needed to work out where it had gone wrong.

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It’s very hard to imagine that touting green policies would have worked for the Tories: they had been screwing things up (rivers, energy) for so long that people would surely have seen through any lip service paid to more green policies. Labour was able to change the policy restricting onshore wind farms (which are popular with people, when asked) by changing one footnote on its first morning in power. What kept the Tories from doing that? Nothing.
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PC recovery continues as the market grows 3% in the second quarter • IDC

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The PC market delivered its second quarter of growth following seven consecutive quarters of decline. According to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, worldwide shipments reached 64.9m units in the second quarter of 2024 (2Q24), representing year-over-year growth of 3.0%. While the overall market benefited from favorable comparisons to 2023, weak results in China continued to hold the market back. Excluding China, worldwide shipments grew more than 5% year over year.

“Make no mistake, the PC market just like other technology markets faces challenges in the near term due to maturity and headwinds,” said Ryan Reith, group vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Device Trackers. “However, two consecutive quarters of growth, combined with plenty of market hype around AI PCs and a less sexy but arguably more important commercial refresh cycle, seems to be what the PC market needed. The buzz is clearly around AI, but a lot is happening with non-AI PC purchasing to make this mature market show signs of positivity.”

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Intrigued by this splitting of the market into the “traditional” and “AI” PCs. Trouble is, the market is still down, and it’s hard to think that “AI PCs” are going to make a big difference. It’s still the same names on top: Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple and either Acer or Asus in fifth place.
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Inside the ‘nightmare’ health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town • TIME

Andrew Chow:

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On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. “It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,” she says. “That pain was worse than childbirth.”

Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s five-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a “red beam behind her eardrums.”

It didn’t occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. A mother said her eight-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit.

None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area—and was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis.

Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least ten people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms.

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Speed limiters are now mandatory, but you can turn them off • evo

Sam Jenkins:

»

Arriving alongside a range of new safety features destined for all new cars, mandatory speed limiters have come as part of the General Safety Regulation proposed by the European Commission, approved in 2019 by the European Parliament and all EU member states. While the UK is no longer in the EU, it is very likely that all UK cars will now receive the technology regardless, and it comes into force this month. 

Dubbed Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA), the limiters will use GPS data and/or traffic sign recognition cameras to determine the speed limit of the road a vehicle is travelling on. Engine power will then be limited to match this following an audible warning, preventing the car from exceeding the speed limit. It will be possible to override the system for the current journey by pushing hard on the throttle, however the system will be re-engaged every time a car is started.

If you think you can simply keep pressing a little harder on the throttle to break through the system, think again. ETSC also states that: ‘If the driver continues to drive above the speed limit for several seconds, the system should sound a warning for a few seconds and display a visual warning until the vehicle is operating at or below the speed limit again.’ 

A feature already seen on all new Volvos and models such as the Ford Focus, the speed limiters are also set to come alongside data loggers, autonomous emergency braking systems, lane keep assist, driver fatigue detection systems and other safety measures. It’s not all quite as bad as you may think, though, as the European Transport and Safety Council admits the system will come with an on/off switch initially. This is only ‘to aid public acceptance at introduction’ however, and so it’s likely that it intends to push for even stricter rules in the future, meaning a permanent system may come into force.

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Wonder how long that “public acceptance” phase will last. Five years? Ten? Forever? Less?
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You can track any flight directly from your iPhone’s text messages • CNET

Nelson Aguilar and Blake Stimac:

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The summer travel season here, and even if you’re not hopping on a plane, you probably know someone who is. And if they’re visiting you, it’s really important for you to keep track of their flight.

You need to know if the flight is expected to arrive early, or if it’s canceled entirely, especially if you’re picking someone up at the airport. You can obviously check out this information from an airline’s app or website, but there’s another way to track a flight without even having to leave the Messages app on your iPhone.

That’s right. There’s a hidden flight tracker built right into iMessage that you probably would have never noticed unless you threw in the right combination of details within a message. 

It’s easy to check the status of the flight, and you can easily share the info with anyone else that needs to know.

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This is due to something that’s been in iOS since 2015, called Data Detectors. John Gruber has a good expansion of what this is about and, importantly, how it works (or doesn’t).

But then again, there are apps which will do this reliably. So it’s a nice quirk, but no more.
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Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra hands-on: ultra déjà vu • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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Look, it’s that Apple Watch Ultra but in an Android-friendly font.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing! There hasn’t really been a 1-to-1 equivalent for the Apple Watch Ultra in the Android space. Garmins are great, but they’re lacking in the smart features and third-party app department. Samsung is just filling a niche. Also, it’s $150 cheaper. Can’t argue with that.

It’s also not totally fair to call this an Apple Watch Ultra knockoff. Samsung does bring its own flavor. The 47mm titanium case is a squircle shape. Next to the Apple Watch Ultra 2, the squircle shape was chonkier overall. I had mixed feelings as to the style — I miss the rotating bezel! Yet it does look distinct and is wearable even on my smaller wrist. Furthermore, while there’s no physical rotating bezel, Samsung did include its signature digital touch bezel. That’s a good thing, as while the Quick Button looks and rotates like a digital crown, it doesn’t actually scroll. That threw me for a loop, but I imagine it’s simply something to get used to.

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The principal difference seems to be that the Samsung model has a round rather than rounded square face. And works on Android. But really, it is shameless to use the “Ultra” name and take the orange highlighting. One or the other might be admissible, but to use both is just shameless; it suggests you’ve got no marketing heft of your own.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Air conditioning is great, until the power is knocked out by excessive heat. CC-licensed photo by Schezar 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. Cool it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The UK politician accused of being AI is actually a real person • The Verge

Mia Sato:

»

Mark Matlock, a political candidate for the right-wing Reform UK party, clarified in The Independent that he is a real person, not an AI bot, as some suspected.

Perhaps it was the glossy, hyper-smooth skin in a campaign image or the fact that Matlock had apparently missed events like the election count — but earlier this week, a thread on X questioned whether Matlock existed at all. “We might be on the verge of a HUGE SCANDAL,” the post read.

An AI-generated political candidate isn’t totally out of the realm of possibility: during this election, an executive at an AI company used an AI persona to run for Parliament in the UK. He lost, obviously, getting just 179 votes.

Matlock, however, is a human candidate who apparently was very ill during the election.

“I got pneumonia three days before election night I was exercising taking vitamins so I could attend but it was just not viable. On election night I couldn’t even stand,” he told The Independent. Matlock also provided the outlet with the original photo that drew attention, saying the background was removed and the color of his tie was changed. The photo does have that rubbery, uncanny look to it that’s come to be associated with AI, though —particularly Matlock’s hair and skin. This seems like a good lesson for all elected officials: don’t edit your pictures in a way that looks like a Midjourney result for the prompt “youthful, nonthreatening-looking politician.”

The 2024 elections in the US and abroad are already feeling the effects of the proliferation of AI tools, though, for now, we still haven’t seen an AI bot replace a human politician. (To be fair, some people would probably prefer that.)

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Touchscreen-ready interface hidden in tvOS amid HomePod rumours • 9 to 5 Mac

Filipe Espósito:

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We’ve seen a lot of evidence pointing to a new Apple home accessory (like a HomePod with a display) in recent months. And to corroborate all these rumors, the latest beta version of tvOS 18 available to developers has a new hidden interface that is touchscreen-ready.

The new tvOS interface, or system shell, is internally called “PlasterBoard.” Similar to SpringBoard (the iOS system shell), it provides some core interface elements for the system. 9to5Mac was able to confirm the existence of the new interface through the tvOS 18 beta 3 code.

Of course, this interface wasn’t meant to be seen by the public, but we found a way to access it. For instance, the new tvOS PlasterBoard interface has a Lock Screen with a passcode keypad very similar to the one on the iPhone and iPad. The PlasterBoard interface seems to be at an early stage of development, so there’s not much to see beyond basic Lock Screen controls.

Code and how the interface behaves strongly suggest that it was made for touchscreens and not for regular TVs. It’s also worth noting that there’s no option to lock Apple TV with a passcode, which only makes sense for more personal devices.

Last week, backend code revealed the existence of an unreleased “HomeAccessory17,1” device. There are currently no Apple products under this identifier category, but it’s very similar to the “AudioAccessory” identifier used for HomePods. Just like HomePods, this device also runs tvOS – but is based on the yet-to-be-announced A18 chip.

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Nobody has any idea what this will look like (the mockups are bizarre, like the first iPhone guesses which stuck an iPod click wheel on a phone). Might sell more than the Vision Pro though.
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China outspends the US on fusion in the race for energy’s holy grail • WSJ

Jennifer Hiller and Sha Hua:

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A high-tech race is under way between the US and China as both countries chase an elusive energy source: fusion. 

China is outspending the US, completing a massive fusion technology campus and launching a national fusion consortium that includes some of its largest industrial companies.

Crews in China work in three shifts, essentially around the clock, to complete fusion projects. And the Asian superpower has ten times as many Ph.D.s in fusion science and engineering as the US. 

The result is an increasing worry among American officials and scientists that an early US lead is slipping away.

JP Allain, who heads the Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, said China is spending around $1.5bn a year on fusion, nearly twice the U.S. government’s fusion budget. What’s more, China appears to be following a program similar to the road map that hundreds of US fusion scientists and engineers first published in 2020 in hopes of making commercial fusion energy.

“They’re building our long-range plan,” Allain said. “That’s very frustrating, as you can imagine.”

Scientists familiar with China’s fusion facilities said that if the country continues its current pace of spending and development, it will surpass the U.S. and Europe’s magnetic fusion capabilities in three or four years.

Fusion has long been a clean-energy dream. The process of combining atoms is the same process that powers the sun, and scientists hope to harness it to deliver almost-limitless energy. The technology faces daunting scientific and engineering hurdles, and some experts consider it a mirage that will remain out of reach.

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The USSR economy was wrecked by trying to keep up with the imagined spending on the US’s (impossible) Star Wars defence programme. I wonder if fusion will do something similar for China’s.
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Growth stalls at Elon Musk’s X • FT

Clara Murray and Cristina Criddle:

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X has been hit by stalling user growth, as the social media platform’s owner Elon Musk divides audiences and it faces new competition from the rise of Meta’s rival platform Threads.

In previously unreleased figures, X said its number of global daily active users in the second quarter of this year was 251mn, a rise of 1.6% from the same period the year before.

This contrasts with the double-digit growth experienced in the years leading up to the acquisition by Musk, who took the listed company private for $44bn in October 2022.

Musk has proved a divisive leader of X, which he rebranded shortly after the takeover. The group has shed advertisers since Musk’s takeover partly due to his stance as a “free speech absolutist”, and his decision to remove most of the platform’s content moderators.

Critics argue this has led to a more toxic experience, but Musk claimed “drastic action” was needed to stem mounting financial losses.

His social media platform is also facing new competition for attention. Facebook owner Meta launched rival platform Threads a year ago in an effort to challenge X. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed it had grown to 175m monthly active users. This compares with 600m monthly users claimed by X.

However, analytics company Sensor Tower estimates Threads has only 38m daily users — people who open the app at least once a day — suggesting users are using it less frequently than other social media platforms.

…A recent Ofcom survey found 17% of UK adults use X as a news source. However, engagement on the platform has been sliding during national election campaigns in the US, UK and France, Similarweb data showed.

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I know: eX-Twitter had growth? But that Threads number is interesting. It isn’t that sticky.
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The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct · Chris Said

Said is a data scientist at Propel:

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In 2006, Sylvain Lesné published an influential Nature paper showing how amyloid oligomers could cause Alzheimer’s disease. With over 2,300 citations, the study was the 4th most cited paper in Alzheimer’s basic research since 2006, helping spur up to $287 million of research into the oligomer hypothesis, according to the NIH.

Sixteen years later, Science reported that key images of the paper were faked, almost certainly by Lesné himself, and all co-authors except him have agreed to retract the paper. The oligomer hypothesis has failed every clinical trial.

Lesné’s alleged misconduct misled a field for over a decade. We don’t know how much it has delayed an eventual treatment for Alzheimer’s, and it was not the only paper supporting the oligomer hypothesis. But if it delayed a successful treatment by just 1 year, I estimate that it would have caused the loss of 36 million QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years), which is more than the QALYs lost by Americans in World War II. (See my notebook for an explanation.)

Lesné is not alone. This year we learned of rampant image manipulation at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, including in multiple papers published by the institute’s CEO and COO. So far 6 papers have been retracted and 31 corrected. The 6 retracted papers alone have 1,400 citations and have surely polluted the field and slowed down progress. If they delayed a successful cancer drug by just 1 year, I estimate they would have caused the loss of 15 million QALYs, or twice the number of QALYs lost by Americans in World War I.

To put it bluntly, scientists who commit research misconduct extract money from a trusting public so that they may enrich themselves and gain prestige. Along the way they knowingly pollute future research, undermine the credibility of science, and may cause the deaths of millions of people.

And yet, researchers who commit misconduct rarely face any consequences. The vast majority are never caught. Sylvain Lesné, the lead author on the Alzheimer’s paper, remains a professor at the University of Minnesota and still receives NIH funding. Despite clear evidence of image manipulation and all co-authors agreeing to a retraction, the university “has closed this review with no findings of research misconduct pertaining to these figures.”

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Heat waves are why your AC can’t save you anymore • CNN

Laura Paddison:

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When Hurricane Ida battered Louisiana with catastrophic flooding and powerful winds in August 2021, more than 1 million people lost power. Then came the heat wave. Temperatures rose above 90ºF — a sucker punch to those sweltering in their homes, unable to turn on air conditioning as power outages stretched on for days.

It was the heat that proved deadliest in New Orleans, responsible for at least nine of the city’s 14 hurricane-related deaths.

The combination of a hurricane, heat wave and a multi-day power outage is a nightmare scenario, but it’s one set to become more common as humans continue to warm the planet, fueling devastating extreme weather. And it reveals an uncomfortable truth about the vulnerability of humanity’s ultimate protection against heat: air conditioning (AC).

Air conditioning is far from perfect. It gobbles up energy, most of which still comes from planet-heating fossil fuels, meaning it exacerbates the very problem it’s used to mitigate. Plus, it’s only available to those who can afford it, further widening social inequality.

But it is also a lifeline against increasingly brutal heat, the deadliest type of extreme weather. It allows people to live in places where temperatures push close to the limits of survivability and where extreme heat persists even at night.

Demand for AC is exploding, expected to triple worldwide by 2050, as global temperatures soar and incomes grow. The problem is that without electricity, access to air conditioning is lost. And many electrical grids are being pushed to a breaking point due to increasingly frequent extreme weather and soaring demand for cooling.

Weather accounted for 80% of major power outages across the US between 2000 and 2023, according to a report from Climate Central, a nonprofit research group.

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New study sparks debate about whether H5N1 virus in cows is adapted to better infect humans • STAT

Megan Molteni:

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A study published Monday provides new evidence that the H5N1 virus currently causing an outbreak of bird flu in U.S. dairy cattle may be adapted to better infecting humans than other circulating strains of the virus, a result that is already courting controversy among the world’s leading flu researchers.

Across the globe, different influenza viruses are constantly circulating in many different kinds of animals. One of the things that determines what kind of animal a given flu virus can infect is the type of receptors present on the outside of tissues that virus comes in contact with. Flu viruses that typically infect birds have an affinity for latching on to the particular shape of a receptor commonly found in the guts of avian species. Human influenza viruses, on the other hand, prefer the shape of a receptor that lines our upper respiratory tracts.

The new work, published in Nature, showed that the bovine H5N1 virus could bind to both receptors.

“There is an ability to bind to human-type receptors,” the study’s lead author, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, told STAT in an interview. But he cautioned that it’s too soon to say whether this ability means the recently emerged bovine branch of the H5N1 evolutionary tree has increased potential to become a significant human pathogen. “Binding to human-type receptors is not the only factor that is required for an avian flu virus to replicate well in humans,” said Kawaoka, a leading influenza virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied H5N1 for decades.

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Just a watching brief, don’t worry, nothing to see here.
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Lucy Letby: killer or coincidence? Why some experts question the evidence • The Guardian

Felicity Lawrence:

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Throughout the trial period, and much of the preceding six years when Cheshire police were investigating a cluster of baby deaths at the Countess of Chester (CoC) hospital and had arrested Letby, laws intended to ensure juries are not influenced by stories in the press meant British journalists reported only what was said in court.

Outside court, however, there has been a growing chorus of voices raising questions about some of the key evidence presented in the trial.

There was no forensic evidence to prove her guilt and no one saw Letby – who continues to maintain her innocence – causing harm.

That also applied to the retrial that reached a guilty verdict last week. Although one of the doctors concluded that she must have tampered with the breathing tube of a baby on three occasions, he did not actually see her doing it.

The prosecution’s case instead drew on accounts from doctors and nurses on the hospital’s neonatal unit and relied heavily on statistical evidence and expert opinion on complex medical points, some of which took days to explain to the lay jury. It is these opinions that some clinicians claim do not stand up to scrutiny.

The case was high-profile and emotionally charged. Successive juries and the families of the babies who died are convinced Letby was responsible. While few of the experts the Guardian spoke to went as far as to say they believed Letby was innocent, the questions about the evidence called into doubt, they said, the safety of the convictions.

A Guardian investigation has interviewed dozens of these experts and seen further evidence from emails and documents. Those raising concerns include several leading consultant neonatologists, some with current or recent leadership roles, and several senior neonatal nurses. Others are public health professionals, GPs, biochemists, a leading government microbiologist, and lawyers. Several of those still working in the NHS have asked to remain anonymous, fearing the impact if they are named.

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I honestly cannot decide on the Letby case. The alternatives are: an apparently nondescript nurse killed or tried to kill more than a dozen babies. Or a colossal coincidence of failure. Both are incredibly unlikely. But only one is true.
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A Pigouvian pollution tax on ChatGPT • ratpie

The eponymous, anonymous “ratpie” back in January 2023:

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If one had to characterise the state of mind among knowledge and creative workers, musicians included, in 2022, worries about meeting demand for quantity or variety of content would not figure high. Misinformation, provenance, and the difficulties of making a living, yes. Being short a few million blog posts, product reviews, or new music tracks, no.

So it was perhaps a bit surprising when the appearance of a flock of AI engines, and their ubermensch ChatGPT, an easy to use interface to a new text AI, generated (pun intended) wild enthusiasm, along with some doomsterism, and of course digital reams of new content as the commentariat contemplated their own industry’s potential demise.

…Some activities create costs that are borne by people who don’t share in the gains of those undertaking them. Congested roads, smoke from factory chimneys, and unusual demands on publicly funded health services are examples. Economists think of these as costs external to the economic activity associated with producing things, driving somewhere, or smoking tobacco. There are rare cases of external gains too; think of how good state-funded schools inflate property prices in their catchment areas.

The external costs from ChatGPT are the teachers’ time and effort, and pupils’ lack of learning caused by cheating at school, incorrect Stack Overflow advice followed, as well as revenue extracted from copyright markets and the extra efforts human creators need to put in to compete. Arthur Pigou himself, Cambridge Professor of Economics in the first half of the C20th, was deeply interested in welfare. He argued that tax was the simplest and most effective way to deal with gains and losses that fell to those outside of a transaction.

As well as being a redress for harmful activity, Pigouvian taxes can provide funding for more of what we do want. This is important – interventions need to have broad popular understanding and support. In this case the harms fall on education and the arts, two  significant absorbers of taxpayers money which could be supplemented or offset.

I asked ChatGPT if it thought it should be taxed; it denied any knowledge of itself. It might not yet write a decent poem, but AI has clearly got its head around tax evasion.

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Neat. Reminds me of the line from Veep, when the fictional vice-president goes to Silicon Valley to pump some tech companies for money, only to be told: “we like to think of ourselves as post-tax.”
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