Twenty years on, a version of the Star Wars films that aired in Chile is delighting the internet. CC-licensed photo by Gustavo Rivas Valderrama on Flickr.

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

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

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

Google’s ‘March 2024 core update’ fights back against site spammers • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

Known as the March 2024 Core Update, this round of fixes builds on algorithmic tweaks the company began implementing in 2022 to prevent questionable sites from competing with the useful ones people turn to a search engine to find. In total, Google says, these adjustments should reduce the amount of “low-quality, unoriginal content” by 40%.

Google already penalized sites that used AI to churn out vast amounts of content that was willfully lousy but highly optimized to rank well in its results. With the advent of large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s own Gemini, it’s never been easier to stuff a site with AI-generated material. But rather than target sites specifically for harnessing AI in such efforts, Google now says it will focus on curtailing low-grade, high-SEO content regardless of the techniques involved.

“I think generative AI is actually a really valuable tool for creators, and there’s nothing wrong with using it to create the content you create for your users,” says Pandu Nayak, a Google Search VP overseeing quality and ranking. “The problem is when you start creating content at scale not with the idea of serving your users, but with the idea of targeting search ranking.” (Whether the revised policy mentions automation or not may be a wash: It’s tough to imagine anyone who’s mass-producing web pages without regard to their quality not relying on AI to do most of the work.)

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Hard to think this is an arms race that ends well for Google.
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Star Wars meets beer ads: George Lucas’ legal battle with Chilean broadcaster • BNN

Geeta Pillai:

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During the December 2003 broadcasts of several Star Wars films, viewers were treated to an unconventional advertising strategy by channel 13 in collaboration with Cerveza Cristal, one of Chile’s most popular beer brands. Instead of traditional ad breaks, the channel inserted 30-second commercials directly into the movies. These ads were crafted to appear as continuations of the scenes they interrupted, integrating them so smoothly that they seemed to be part of the original films. One ad featured Obi-Wan Kenobi opening a chest to reveal a stash of Cerveza Cristal, complete with rock music and the brand’s logo, while another showed Emperor Palpatine pulling out a beer bottle instead of a lightsaber.

The discovery of these edits has elicited laughter and surprise among the Star Wars community, with some fans expressing a newfound interest in watching these uniquely altered versions of the films. This incident, however, was not taken lightly by Star Wars creator George Lucas. In 2004, Lucas filed a grievance with the Chilean Council for Self-Regulation and Advertising Ethics, leading to a judgment in Lucas Films’ favor. The council decreed that the commercials were not to be aired again. Despite this ruling, the channel and Cerveza Cristal partnered once more in 2004, embedding the beer into scenes from other popular movies like American Beauty, Notting Hill, and Gladiator.

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These are absolutely the funniest things you will see all day. People have been collecting them all day, mostly via the Twitter user Windy. They’re collected in his thread, or this article.

And they are the best laugh you’ll have all day; possibly all week. Or longer. And it’s such an improvement on the originals.
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Satellite to ‘name and shame’ worst oil and gas methane polluters • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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A washing-machine-sized satellite is to “name and shame” the worst methane polluters in the oil and gas industry.

MethaneSat is scheduled to launch from California onboard a SpaceX rocket on Monday at 2pm local time (22:00 GMT). It will provide the first near-comprehensive global view of leaks of the potent greenhouse gas from the oil and gas sector, and all of the data will be made public. It will provide high-resolution data over wider areas than existing satellites.

Methane, also called natural gas, is responsible for 30% of the global heating driving the climate crisis. Leaks from the fossil fuel industry are a major source of human-caused emissions and stemming these is the fastest single way to curb temperature rises.

MethaneSat was developed by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a US NGO, in partnership with the New Zealand Space Agency and cost $88m to build and launch. Earlier EDF measurements from planes show methane emissions were 60% higher than calculated estimates published by US authorities and elsewhere.

More than 150 countries have signed a global methane pledge to cut their emissions of the gas by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Some oil and gas companies have made similar pledges, and new regulations to limit methane leaks are being worked on in the US, EU, Japan and South Korea.

The EDF’s senior vice-president, Mark Brownstein, said: “MethaneSat is a tool for accountability. I’m sure many people think this could be used to name and shame companies who are poor emissions performers, and that’s true. But [it] can [also] help document progress that leading companies are making in reducing their emissions.”

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Name and shame, name and praise. It all helps.

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We tested Amazon’s new AI shopping chatbot. It’s not good • The Washington Post

Shira Ovide:

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Amazon’s chatbot [called Rufus] doesn’t deliver on the promise of finding the best product for your needs or getting you started on a new hobby.

In one of my tests, I asked what I needed to start composting at home. Depending on how I phrased the question, the Amazon bot several times offered basic suggestions that I could find in a how-to article and didn’t recommend specific products.

Another time, the Amazon bot suggested items such as a small compost bin, compost bin liners, a garden fork and a compost thermometer.

Compost fans may notice that the first two suggestions were appropriate for collecting compost scraps in your kitchen. The latter two were for making a backyard compost pile. Amazon’s bot appeared to conflate two different needs.

When I clicked the suggestions the bot offered for a kitchen compost bin, I was dumped into a zillion options for countertop compost products. Not helpful.

Because the Amazon chatbot typically shows you a handful of choices, it might feel better than not knowing what product you want and being deluged with a flood of options on Amazon.

Still, when the Amazon bot responded to my questions, I usually couldn’t tell why the suggested products were considered the right ones for me. Or, I didn’t feel I could trust the chatbot’s recommendations.

I asked a few similar questions about the best cycling gloves to keep my hands warm in winter. In one search, a pair that the bot recommended were short-fingered cycling gloves intended for warm weather.

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AI invents quote from real person in article by Bihar news site: a wake-up call? • The Quint

Karan Mahadik:

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At first glance, an article about Meta’s AI chatbot that was published on Patna-based news portal Biharprabha reads like a regular 600-word news report that delves into the history of the AI bot, the controversy surrounding its responses, and the concerns raised, in particular, by Dr Emily Bender, a “leading AI ethics researcher”.

“The release of BlenderBot 3 demonstrates that Meta continues to struggle with addressing biases and misinformation within its AI models,” Dr Emily Bender is quoted as saying in the article titled ‘Meta’s AI Bot Goes Rogue, Spews Offensive Content’ published on 21 February.

But it turns out that the real Dr Emily Bender never actually said it. The entire quote was fabricated and misattributed to her in the article that was generated using an AI tool, specifically Google’s Large Language Model (LLM) known as Gemini.

Confirming this with The Quint, Dr Bender said that she “had no record of talking to any journalist from Biharprabha.”

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Bender is the professor (of linguistics, at the University of Washington) who came up with the phrase “stochastic parrot” to describe LLMs: “stochastic” because it’s probability-based, “parrot” because it says the things without knowing their meaning. Ironically, the quote wrongly attributed to her is the sort of thing she probably would have said.
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iOS 17.4 won’t remove Home Screen web apps in the EU after all • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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Apple’s decision to remove Home Screen web apps, also known as progressive web apps or PWAs, faced a lot of criticism. The Open Web Advocacy organization, for example, said “entire categories of apps will no longer be viable on the web as a result” of the change. There were also reports the EU was going to investigate the decision.

At the time, Apple explained that it would have to build an “entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS” to address the “complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines.” This, the company said, “was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps.”

With [this] announcement, Apple has reversed course and said that Home Screen web apps will continue to exist as they did pre-iOS 17.4 in the European Union. “This support means Home Screen web apps continue to be built directly on WebKit and its security architecture, and align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS,” Apple explains today.

This means that all Home Screen web apps will still be powered by WebKit, regardless of whether the web app is added using Safari or not – exactly as it works today and has for years.

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So it was “not practical” and then it became practical? Hmm.
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Behind Formula 1’s velvet curtain • Road and Track (archived version)

Kate Wagner:

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The sound came before the machine and then the machine blurred by and disappeared over the elegant hill, singing. By the second sprint shootout, even though I’ve watched F1 for a few years now, I had no idea what was going on without 10 split-screen views and a guy yelling in my ear. The cards fell where they fell: Max in first as usual, followed by Leclerc, but then, unexpectedly, Alex Albon.

After the second sprint, the INEOS folks informed the journalists that we needed to leave early in order to avoid traffic and make it to dinner on time, where, apparently there would be a special guest. Frustrated, I returned to watching the cars as they started up again, knowing that the drivers were pushing them to their limits, engrossed in their personal kaleidoscope of motion and color.

[Lewis] Hamilton was in one of them. In the last shootout, he drove differently than before. A great verve frayed the lines he was making, something we can only call effort, push. Watching him, I understood what was so interesting about this sport, even though I was watching it in its most bare-bones form—cars going around in circles. The driver is the apotheosis of quick-moving prowess, total focus and control. The car is both the most studied piece of human engineering, tuned and devised in lab-like environments and at the same time a variable entity, something that must be wrestled with and pushed. The numbers are crunched, the forms wind-tunneled. And yet some spirit escapes their control, and that spirit is known only by the driver.

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Wagner is a cycling journalist, but was given a freebie to go and watch the F1 race in Texas with the sponsors, INEOS. She was stunned by the indifferent affluence on show, and said so. Which is why the article was quickly taken down by Road & Track. Which is a pity: this extract shows the insight that she brings to bear on what seems unbearably dull when seen on TV.

Might be a while before she gets sent on another freebie to F1. But anyone looking for a good writer will remember her name. (Thanks Mark C for the link.)
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Wisdom of the Silicon Crowd: LLM ensemble prediction capabilities match human crowd accuracy • ArXiv

Philip Tetlock et al:

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Human forecasting accuracy in practice relies on the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effect, in which predictions about future events are significantly improved by aggregating across a crowd of individual forecasters. Past work on the forecasting ability of large language models (LLMs) suggests that frontier LLMs, as individual forecasters, underperform compared to the gold standard of a human crowd forecasting tournament aggregate.

In Study 1, we expand this research by using an LLM ensemble approach consisting of a crowd of twelve LLMs. We compare the aggregated LLM predictions on 31 binary questions to that of a crowd of 925 human forecasters from a three-month forecasting tournament. Our main analysis shows that the LLM crowd outperforms a simple no-information benchmark and is statistically equivalent to the human crowd. We also observe an acquiescence effect, with mean model predictions being significantly above 50%, despite an almost even split of positive and negative resolutions.

Moreover, in Study 2, we test whether LLM predictions (of GPT-4 and Claude 2) can be improved by drawing on human cognitive output. We find that both models’ forecasting accuracy benefits from exposure to the median human prediction as information, improving accuracy by between 17% and 28%: though this leads to less accurate predictions than simply averaging human and machine forecasts.

Our results suggest that LLMs can achieve forecasting accuracy rivaling that of human crowd forecasting tournaments: via the simple, practically applicable method of forecast aggregation. This replicates the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effect for LLMs, and opens up their use for a variety applications throughout society.

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Tetlock, if the name isn’t familiar, is the man who coined “superforecasting”; this is a look at how good LLMs might be at the task. (Not better than the best humans, seems to be the answer.) You can read the paper. The full list of questions that were posed to the humans and the LLMs is on page 20; they were asked in late 2023, and many have deadlines expiring in January 2024.
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Delusional self-belief is a superpower… until it’s a disaster • The Ruffian

Ian Leslie:

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Great things are often accomplished by irrational people for irrational reasons. The rational move for Churchill in May 1940 was to pursue a peace agreement with Germany. In 1997, no Prime Minister without Tony Blair’s luxuriously proportioned ego would have believed it possible to lead a successful peace process in Northern Ireland. Failures of political leadership often stem from leaders without the necessary grandeur of self-conception to really lead – from recent British history, Gordon Brown, Teresa May and Rishi Sunak spring to mind. Leaders without this special sauce tend to flounder around without direction; leaders with too much of it become Liz Truss.

If you’re trying to spot future political stars, look for individuals who display some delusions of grandeur but who aren’t in thrall to them. Similarly, when trying to predict how a political leader will behave, you should factor in the likelihood they are more optimistic about their prospects and abilities than any sane person would be. I often see commentators assuming that a leader’s assessment of the landscape is similar to their’s. This is usually a mistake, and it’s the one I made when I assumed that Joe Biden was unlikely to run for a second term.

Of course, he may still step down, but the fact that we’ve got this close to an election without him doing so is not what I would have predicted when I wrote about his inauguration speech. I assumed that having slain the dragon, he would retire, nobly, to Delaware. In fact, it wasn’t until late in 2022 that his intention to run again became unmistakably clear to me. As soon as it did, I realised I’d made the elementary error of assuming that top-level politicians see the world in the way the rest of us do. To me and other observers, it seemed obvious that he would be too old to run and win in 2024, and be a competent second-term president. Surely Biden would see that too?

No. Joe Biden ran two failed presidential campaigns and didn’t even come close to winning – and still believed he should take another shot, even when nobody else did. He wanted to run in 2016 and was eased out of the way by the Obamas, who thought Clinton was a better bet. Throughout it all, Biden kept believing he could and should be president, and eventually the world came around to where he had been in his mind for fifty years.

So if you’re Joe Biden, of course you believe that you can and should win a second term. Indeed, you believe that you’re the only person in America capable of defeating Trump and governing a divided nation.

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This is a terrific essay which makes you realise why these politicians do things that to anyone else smack of idiocy. And hidden in there is a fascinating little what-if: what if Biden had been the Democrat candidate in 2016? Would he have repeated VP Gore’s 2000 failure? Or won, and followed on in 2020, giving us a new candidate this year?
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‘The internet is an alien life form’: how David Bowie created a market for digital music • The Guardian

Eamonn Forde:

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In early 1998, Virgin Records/EMI had made Massive Attack’s Mezzanine available for streaming in full online at the same time as its physical release, albeit previewing it track-by-track over several weeks. At the time, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) cautioned against this, suggesting that streaming experiments could increase the possibility of albums being pirated by tech-savvy individuals and burned to CD. This did not stop other major labels or their acts from occasionally experimenting. Both Def Leppard and Red Hot Chili Peppers made their latest albums, respectively Euphoria and Californication, available to stream in full on 4 June 1999, four days before the records would be in the shops. “Getting airplay is getting airplay, you just have to define air,” said Bob Merlis of Warner Bros, the Chili Peppers’ label. “We felt good about this since it was not downloadable.”

But the Bowie album release [Hours – “far from his best album, and not even his best album of the 1990s”] was designed to be a significant step forward. In 1999, he was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman for BBC Newsnight and talked about his career, his art and, most invigoratingly for him, the internet. The 16-minute interview is still available on the BBC website and is frequently shared, especially since Bowie’s death in January 2016, as evidence of his startling prescience with regard to the impact the internet would have on art, politics and society.

“I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg,” he told a wearily cynical Paxman. “I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” Paxman, in his arch way, suggested it was just “a tool”, which saw Bowie spring into action. “No, it’s not,” he said. “No – it’s an alien life form!”

He went on to say that the internet would completely change the dynamics of consumption: “The interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”

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And of course, he was proved right. What we lost when we lost Bowie: vision.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A group of British scientists have discovered the secret of getting media coverage by referencing popular film topics. CC-licensed photo by Hervé Simon on Flickr.

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

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

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

Apple fined €1.84bn in one of Europe’s largest antitrust actions • WSJ via MSN

Kim Mackrael:

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The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, said it found the company violated antitrust rules by restricting app developers from telling users about alternative ways to subscribe to music-streaming services. The commission said it ordered Apple to change its practices.

“Apple’s conduct, which lasted for almost 10 years, may have led many iOS users to pay significantly higher prices for music streaming subscriptions,” the commission said Monday.

Apple said it plans to appeal the decision, which it said was reached “despite the Commission’s failure to uncover any credible evidence of consumer harm.”

Monday’s fine is the culmination of a multiyear investigation into Apple’s App Store practices and represents one of the largest antitrust penalties ever imposed by the Commission against a single company. Google has faced larger fines—of €4.3bn and €2.4bn—in two separate cases that the tech company has appealed.

Apple’s fine of €1.84bn, equivalent to about $2bn, was larger than some antitrust lawyers had anticipated. The EU’s guidance for calculating an antitrust fine allows it to increase the baseline calculation for what the fine should be to deter a company from its behaviour.

“I think it’s important to say that if you are a company who’s dominant, and you do something illegal, you will be punished,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition czar. The size of the fine should help demonstrate the bloc’s resolve in tackling anticompetitive behavior, she added.

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Obviously this follows from Spotify’s complaint about not being able to tell people in the Spotify app about the option of subscribing in Spotify itself. Apple’s response of not being able to show consumer harm is sort of true, but also irrelevant. One can calculate the counterfactual where people could be told that they’d pay less by following a link to the Spotify site: there are plentiful well-paid experts around Brussels who make a good living working out the numbers for hypotheticals like that.
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Scientists unearth mysteries of giant, moving Moroccan star dune • The Guardian

Steven Morris:

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They are impressive, mysterious structures that loom out of deserts on the Earth and are also found on Mars and on Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan.

Experts from universities including Aberystwyth in Wales have now pinpointed the age of a star dune in a remote area of Morocco and uncovered details about its formation and how it moves across the desert.

Prof Geoff Duller of the department of geography and earth sciences at Aberystwyth said: “They are extraordinary things, one of the natural wonders of the world. From the ground they look like pyramids but from the air you see a peak and radiating off it in three or four directions these arms that make them look like stars.”

The team, which was also made up of University of London academics, travelled to the south-east of Morocco to study a 100-metre high and 700-metre wide dune in the Erg Chebbi sand sea known as Lala Lallia, which means the “highest sacred point” in the Berber language.

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This item has been on radio, TV and other media all day, and I wondered why, because it barely makes any sense and it’s about something that I’ve never worried about and didn’t even when I read it. (Still don’t.) Then someone pointed out that it contains the word “dune”, same as a big film that’s just been released. Scientists timing the announcement about their work to catch some hot SEO? Why of course. That’s much more fun to observe.
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TurboTax and H&R Block’s AI chatbots are giving bad tax advice • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

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This year, TurboTax and H&R Block added artificial intelligence to the tax-prep software used by millions of us. Now while you’re doing your taxes online, there are AI chatbots on the right side of the screen to answer your burning questions.

But watch out: Rely on either AI for even lightly challenging tax questions, and you could end up confused. Or maybe even audited.

Here’s one example: Where should your child file taxes if she goes to college out of state? When I asked, TurboTax’s “Intuit Assist” bot offered irrelevant advice about tax credits and extensions. H&R Block’s “AI Tax Assist” bot gave me the wrong impression she has to file in both places. (The correct answer: she only files in the other state if she has earned income there.)

Question after question, I got many of the same random, misleading or inaccurate AI answers.

…After I shared my results with TurboTax maker Intuit, the company changed some of how the bot picks its answers. But its new version of Intuit Assist was still unhelpful on a quarter of the questions.

H&R Block’s AI gave unhelpful answers to more than 30% of the questions. It did well on 529 plans and mortgage deductions, but confidently recommended an incorrect filing status and erroneously described IRS guidance on cryptocurrency.

“I feel that my job as a tax professional is very secure,” said Beverly Goodman​​​​, a tax manager at EP Wealth who helped me analyze the AI advice.

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This was so predictable. So very predictable.
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Here’s the full AI-generated script from the Willy Wonka disaster • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

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An event based on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory made international news over the weekend after a promised world of imagination turned into a full on disaster. “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” in Glasgow, Scotland was promoted with elaborate AI-generated images of lollipop forests and jellybean waterfalls. But when families arrived, they were greeted by a filthy, barely decorated warehouse, prompting parents to call the police (see the photos here). Now, Gizmodo has a copy of the event’s unhinged AI-generated script.

The script was shared in a Facebook group organized after the event called “House of Illuminati Scam,” named after the company behind the production. An actress named Cara Lewis posted the document, saying actors were given two days to memorize it and then told to abandon the text and improvise as the fiasco unfolded.

Gizmodo reached out to Lewis and a number of the other actors but didn’t hear back, and with no response from House of Illuminati, we can’t fully guarantee the script’s authenticity. However, Lewis was clearly present at Willy’s Chocolate Experience, and the script matches descriptions from other actors and people who attended the event. Based on our reporting, it seems like the real thing.

The script has all the hallmarks of AI, including the nonsensical decision to include lines for audience members and descriptions of the crowd’s reaction, as though it’s happening in real-time. You’ll also notice the code names for Willy Wonka and the Oompa Loompas. House of Illuminati said on its website that any resemblance to existing characters is “coincidental” and the event is unrelated to the copyrighted Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

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AI is the warming water, and we’re the frogs.
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A WordPress ‘firehose’ allows AI companies to buy access to a million posts a day • 404 Media

Jason Koebler and Samantha Cole:

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In September 2023, WordPress.com quietly changed the language of a developer page explaining how to access a “Firehose” of roughly a million daily WordPress posts to add that the feeds are “intended for partners like search engines, artificial intelligence (AI) products and market intelligence providers who would like to ingest a real-time stream of new content from a wide spectrum of publishers.” Before then, this page did not note the AI use case. 

This is notable because of the fervor and confusion that has arisen this week after we broke the news that Automattic, which owns WordPress.com and Tumblr, was preparing to send user data to OpenAI and Midjourney. Since then, there has been much discussion about which WordPress blogs would be included, which would not, whether data was already sent, and whether people who opt out would have their data redacted retroactively. 

We still do not know the answers to all of these questions, because Automattic has repeatedly ignored our detailed questions, will not get on the phone with us, and has instead chosen to frame a new opt-out feature as “protecting user choice.”

Update: After this article was published, Automattic told 404 Media that it is “deprecating” the Firehose: “SocialGist is rolling off as a firehose customer this month and the remaining customers are winding down in the coming months, both things that were already in motion for different reasons,” an Automattic spokesperson said. “We’re in the process of updating our developer page to indicate that we have been deprecating the old firehose for several months.” The spokesperson did not answer the original questions we posed to them about the data supply chain for the Firehose.

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Cool – so all this nonsense of mine is getting indexed? I’m going to be immortal? (Though to quote Woody Allen: “I don’t want to be immortal through my works, I want to be immortal through not dying.”)
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Your TV is too good for you • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

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Last fall, when Netflix hiked the cost of its top-tier Ultra HD plan by 15%, I had finally had enough: $22.99 a month just felt like too much for the ability to see Jaws in 4K video resolution. A couple of weeks later, I heard that Max was pushing up the fee of its own 4K streaming by 25%. Now I wasn’t just annoyed, but confused. Super-high-res televisions are firmly ensconced as the next standard for home viewing of TV and movies. And yet, super-high-res content seems to be receding ever further into a specialty consumer niche. What happened?

4K certainly is ubiquitous; you won’t find many sets with lower resolution for sale at Best Buy. In practice, though, the technology is rarely used. Cable signals are generally mere HD, as are the standard plans on most streaming services. And the fancy new displays, as they’re placed and viewed in people’s homes, may never end up looking any sharper than the old ones, no matter what Netflix plan you have. In short, the ultra-high-definition future for TV has turned out to be a lie.

A relentless narrative of progress brought us to this point, but it did not begin in 2012, when the first 4K televisions were brought to market at roughly the price of a Honda Accord. Rather it extends back into the early days of TV, with the idea that picture quality can and always will be improved: first with the introduction of color sets, then with bigger screens, then with added pixels.

But sometimes progress ends. The peak of television-picture quality, as actually seen by TV viewers, was reached 15 years ago, and we’ve been coasting ever since. Forget the cable signals and the streaming plans. Most people just can’t sit close enough to today’s televisions to make full use of their picture.

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But.. but the Vision Pro! Which maybe goes up to 8K, or something comparable. No problem sitting close enough to that.
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Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures • The Guardian

Dharna Noor and Oliver Milman:

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The world is off track to meet its climate goals and the public is to blame, Darren Woods, chief executive of oil giant ExxonMobil, has claimed – prompting a backlash from climate experts.

As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon is among the top contributors to global planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. But in an interview, published on Tuesday, Woods argued that big oil is not primarily responsible for the climate crisis.

The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may prove too expensive for consumers’ liking.

“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” he told Fortune last week. “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”

Woods said the world was “not on the path” to cut its planet-heating emissions to net zero by 2050, which scientists say is imperative to avoid catastrophic impacts of global heating. “When are people going to willing to pay for carbon reduction?” said Woods, who has been Exxon’s chief executive since 2017.

“We have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon in it, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that.”

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Yes, definitely our fault that ExxonMobil chose not to invest in renewable energy decades ago and drive the prices down.
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How the Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets—and Vladimir Putin • WIRED

Byron Tau:

»

As he would explain in a succession of bland government conference rooms, [US government contractor and technology Mike] Yeagley was able [in 2019] to access the geolocation data on Grindr users through a hidden but ubiquitous entry point: the digital advertising exchanges that serve up the little digital banner ads along the top of Grindr and nearly every other ad-supported mobile app and website. This was possible because of the way online ad space is sold, through near-instantaneous auctions in a process called real-time bidding. Those auctions were rife with surveillance potential. You know that ad that seems to follow you around the internet? It’s tracking you in more ways than one. In some cases, it’s making your precise location available in near-real time to both advertisers and people like Mike Yeagley, who specialized in obtaining unique data sets for government agencies.

Working with Grindr data, Yeagley began drawing geofences—creating virtual boundaries in geographical data sets—around buildings belonging to government agencies that do national security work. That allowed Yeagley to see what phones were in certain buildings at certain times, and where they went afterwards. He was looking for phones belonging to Grindr users who spent their daytime hours at government office buildings. If the device spent most workdays at the Pentagon, the FBI headquarters, or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency building at Fort Belvoir, for example, there was a good chance its owner worked for one of those agencies. Then he started looking at the movement of those phones through the Grindr data. When they weren’t at their offices, where did they go? A small number of them had lingered at highway rest stops in the DC area at the same time and in proximity to other Grindr users—sometimes during the workday and sometimes while in transit between government facilities. For other Grindr users, he could infer where they lived, see where they traveled, even guess at whom they were dating.

Intelligence agencies have a long and unfortunate history of trying to root out LGBTQ Americans from their workforce, but this wasn’t Yeagley’s intent. He didn’t want anyone to get in trouble. No disciplinary actions were taken against any employee of the federal government based on Yeagley’s presentation. His aim was to show that buried in the seemingly innocuous technical data that comes off every cell phone in the world is a rich story—one that people might prefer to keep quiet.

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A really great story.
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The Guardian’s new “Deeply Read” article ranking focuses on attention, not just clicks • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

»

The No. 1 most-clicked story on The Guardian’s US site last Wednesday: “Alabama IVF ruling leaves Republicans stuck between their base and the broader public.” The most “deeply read” story, however, was on a very different topic: “Dune v Dune: do Denis Villeneuve’s films stay true to the book?“

“Deeply Read,” a feature launched Wednesday, “uses attention time to surface a wider range of journalism that other readers are spending more time with,” The Guardian said:

»

It appears on our regionalised home pages and reflects the interests of the region’s audience.

Not all of these pieces are long. To power the list we created a metric that looks at the attention time from readers compared with the length of the piece. This means that the list is diverse in terms of topic, length and format.

«

With news publishers increasingly relying on subscription revenue rather than advertising, engagement is becoming a more important metric. Expanding the kinds of “top” lists can also help publishers promote discovery within their own sites. The Guardian’s ranking gauges “active time spent” on a story, Chris Moran, the Guardian’s head of editorial innovation, explained to me via Twitter DM.

“The metric is a long-term internal one in Ophan [The Guardian’s internal analytics system] called the attention benchmark and it’s very simple,” he said. “It takes active reading time, takes into account the length of the article, and gives us a score out of five clocks. So five clocks is ‘this is a great reading time for this length!’ and one clock is ‘this isn’t great for this length.”

“We’ve had this for a number of years internally to help us see less reach-y pieces that really work with a smaller audience,” he added. “And for many years I’ve wanted to share it with readers because it highlights such great journalism and little off the beaten track of trending topics. To be clear it still matters to show people what is popular, but we love showing them something more.”

«

Chris is a very smart guy, and this is a typically clever thing to intrigue passers-by.
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An update on Facebook News • Meta

»

In early April 2024, we will deprecate Facebook News – a dedicated tab in the bookmarks section on Facebook that spotlights news – in the US and Australia. This follows our September 2023 announcement that we deprecated Facebook News in the UK, France and Germany last year.   

This is part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most. As a company, we have to focus our time and resources on things people tell us they want to see more of on the platform, including short form video. The number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the U.S. has dropped by over 80% last year. We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content — they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests. As we previously shared in 2023, news makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, and is a small part of the Facebook experience for the vast majority of people.

The changes affecting the Facebook News feature will not otherwise impact Meta’s products and services in these countries. People will still be able to view links to news articles on Facebook. News publishers will continue to have access to their Facebook accounts and Pages, where they can post links to their stories and direct people to their websites, in the same way any other individual or organization can. News organizations can also still leverage products like Reels and our ads system to reach broader audiences and drive people to their website, where they keep 100% of the revenue derived from outbound links on Facebook. 

«

It may be true that news is less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, but it’s 100% of what news organisations produce, and nobody has ever tried to measure how much of their output contributes to the content “people around the world” see when they’re not on Facebook. So while that 3% figure may be true, it may also be a distraction.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Call centre workers might be some of the first people to be displaced by chatbots, after Klarna found its satisfactory in a trial. CC-licensed photo by ILO Asia-Pacific 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. Your call is important to us. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Behind Apple’s doomed car project: false starts and wrong turns • The New York Times

Brian Chen and Tripp Mickle:

»

Throughout its existence, the car effort was scrapped and rebooted several times, shedding hundreds of workers along the way. As a result of dueling views among leaders about what an Apple car should be, it began as an electric vehicle that would compete against Tesla and morphed into a self-driving car to rival Google’s Waymo.

By the time of its death — Tuesday, when executives announced internally that the project was being killed and that many members of the team were being reassigned to work on artificial intelligence — Apple had burned more than $10bn on the project and the car had reverted to its beginnings as an electric vehicle with driving-assistance features rivaling Tesla’s, according to a half dozen people who worked on the project over the past decade.

The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011. The effort had four different leaders and conducted multiple rounds of layoffs. But it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult.

…Despite having a vote of confidence from Apple’s chief executive, members of the team knew they were working against harsh realities, according to the six employees familiar with the project. If it ever came to market, an Apple car was likely to cost at least $100,000 and still generate razor-thin profit compared with smartphones and earbuds. It would also arrive years after Tesla had dominated the market.

The company held some discussions with Elon Musk about acquiring Tesla, according to two people familiar with the talks. But ultimately, it decided that building its own car made more sense than buying and integrating another business.

«

My feeling is that Jony Ive-thinking infected the project too early: make a thing that offers the fewest affordances possible. Why have a steering wheel or accelerator if the car drives itself? Except the self-driving part isn’t as simple as drawing a keyboard on the LCDs beneath a touch-sensitive surface. It’s orders of magnitude more difficult. And people like having stuff to fiddle with in a car. Some dashboards are basically huge fidget spinners for passenger and driver alike.
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What we lost when Twitter became X • The New Yorker

Sheon Han worked at Twitter for a couple of years, and left with the Musk clearout:

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Community can be a fuzzy, sentimental notion. But, on Twitter, communities are concrete. The platform’s recommendation algorithm is powered by “SimClusters,” a representation of overlapping communities that, according to the company, “range in size from a few thousand users for individual friend groups, to hundreds of millions of users for news or pop culture,” and are “anchored by a cluster of influential users.”

Pre-Musk Twitter leaned into fostering such communities; the month before the acquisition, an all-hands meeting featured a presentation from the company’s head of global K-pop and K-content partnerships, whose responsibilities involved promoting collaborations between Twitter and key players in the K-pop industry. But if a community can be fostered it can also fade. Every time a high-profile user leaves the platform in response to Musk’s antics, a critical node in the social graph is removed.

I wonder whether Musk understands that to undermine communities is to weaken the principal element that sustains the service. To monitor the health of a social-media platform, you can ask a question you might also ask of an indie-music venue: Is it still cool to hang out there? Since the takeover, for many people, it doesn’t “feel good” to be on Twitter. Friends are leaving, and tweeting feels like shouting into the void.

What does the future hold? It seems likely that users will still come for breaking news, and for expert threads, and for the memes recycled by dedicated joke accounts. Some weirdness will persist—and yet the weirdos will be gone. The platform will have lost its élan. Twitter’s laughably unserious name belied its seriousness. But X, with its overbearing name, may not prosper unless it undertakes the serious work of maintaining a platform on which people want to be.

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Gartner predicts search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026, due to AI chatbots and other virtual agents • Gartner

»

By 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop 25%, with search marketing losing market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents, according to Gartner, Inc.

“Organic and paid search are vital channels for tech marketers seeking to reach awareness and demand generation goals,” said Alan Antin, Vice President Analyst at Gartner. “Generative AI (GenAI) solutions are becoming substitute answer engines, replacing user queries that previously may have been executed in traditional search engines. This will force companies to rethink their marketing channels strategy as GenAI becomes more embedded across all aspects of the enterprise.”

With GenAI driving down the cost of producing content, there is an impact around activities including keyword strategy and website domain authority scoring. Search engine algorithms will further value the quality of content to offset the sheer amount of AI-generated content, as content utility and quality still reigns supreme for success in organic search results.

There will also be a greater emphasis placed on watermarking and other means to authenticate high-value content. Government regulations across the globe are already holding companies accountable as they begin to require the identification of marketing content assets that AI creates. This will likely play a role in how search engines will display such digital content.

«

If we assume that this is correct, then for Google, that’s a near-existential collapse unless it can find some way to replace those searches (and their associated ad revenue) with AI-related ones.
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The leap day is only half of the leap year fun • rachelbythebay

“Rachel”:

»

Only half of the fun of a leap year happens on February 29th.

The rest of it happens in ten months, when a bunch more code finds out that it’s somehow day 366, and promptly flips out. Thus, instead of preparing to party, those people get to spend the day finding out why their device is being stupid all of the sudden.

So, if you got through today unscathed, but are somehow counting days in the year somewhere, you now have about 305 days to make sure you don’t have your own Zune bug buried in your own code.

One more random thought on the topic: some of today’s kids will be around to see what happens in 2100. That one will be all kinds of fun to see who paid attention to their rules and who just guessed based on a clean division by four.

«

(The link to the Zune bug isn’t in the original; it was the first that came up on my search for “zune bug leap year”.)
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The Humane AI Pin worked better than I expected — until it didn’t • The Verge

Allison Johnson got a demo of the Pin at Mobile World Congress:

»

The AI Pin was genuinely impressive at times. There’s a vision feature that will use the camera to scan the scene in front of you when prompted, analyze what’s there, and describe it out loud. I stood in front of a Humane spokesperson as he tried out this feature, and frankly, the pin nailed it. It described Mobile World Congress as “an indoor event or exhibition with people walking around.” Easy enough.

But it also pointed out the name Qualcomm on the signage behind me, and obviously reading the badge around my neck, identified me as “a person wearing a lanyard from the The Verge.” One too many the’s, but pretty impressive when you consider I wasn’t standing all that close to the pin and the lighting was dim.

The gesture navigation was also impressive — more fluid and responsive than I thought it would be. I wasn’t allowed to put the pin on myself, and it’s hard to get into the right spot to project the laser onto your own hand since it’s really a single-user device. I tried. But a couple of Humane employees demoing the product, who obviously had lots of practice with it, navigated the projected menus quickly and easily just by tilting their hands and tapping two fingers together.

But the pin isn’t immune to the thing that gadgets often do: frustrate the hell out of you. Most of the AI is off-device, so there’s a solid few seconds of waiting for responses to your requests and questions — not helped by the convention center’s spotty connectivity. It also shut down on one occasion after briefly flashing a notice that it had overheated and needed to cool off. The employee demoing the pin for me said that this doesn’t happen very often, and that the continued use of the laser for demonstration purposes probably did it. I believe that, but still, this is a device meant to sit next to your chest and go with you into lots of different environments, presumably including warm ones. Not great!

«

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Germany to adopt 2060 target for net-negative greenhouse gas emissions • Clean Energy Wire

Julian Wettengel:

»

The German government is aiming to introduce a 2060 target for net-negative greenhouse gas emissions, as well as intermediate targets for technical carbon sinks, as key elements of its contribution to the Paris climate targets.

By the end of 2024, the ruling coalition wants to agree on a long-term strategy for negative emissions to help deal with residual emissions which are difficult or impossible to avoid. In a document outlining the upcoming strategy, the government says that limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5°C is “increasingly unlikely”, so negative emissions will also be necessary to lower the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to limit the risks of severe and irreversible consequences for humans and ecosystems.

The strategy will set the targets, evaluate different carbon dioxide removal methods, and analyse economic incentives to help ramp up the necessary technologies. Experts say Germany could become a frontrunner on CO2 removal policy with the strategy.

«

And just think how much sooner you could have done this, Germany, if you hadn’t prematurely shut down your nuclear power stations because one of your political parties worried irrationally that the country would be overwhelmed by a tsunami.
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A most wanted man: fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-long GRU spy • The Insider

Roman Dobrokhotov, Christo Grozev, and Michael Weiss:

»

In the city of Lipetsk, 300 miles south of Moscow, stands a yellow chapel. Somewhat out of place next to a modern mirrored-window building, situated on the lip of a roundabout, the 200 year-old Church of Holy Transfiguration caters to the faithful of a large mining town that dates back to the era of Peter the Great. Inside, Father Konstantin Baiazov performs the customary rites and rituals for his flock. Dark and bearded, with a short, military-style buzz cut, the church’s archpriest’s routine is standard – services twice a day. Father Konstantin inherited the job — and the calling — from his own father, a revered Orthodox priest who, as local legend goes, had challenged the authority of the formidable KGB during Soviet times.

Konstantin, the father of three, used to travel abroad. He liked visiting Europe, and was particularly fond of Rome. However, he has not left Russia since September 2020. Since the fifth of that month, Father Baiazov’s official passport, numbered 763391844, has not belonged to a man of God. Rather, it belongs to someone who wears a different kind of white collar, looks a lot like him, and is the most wanted man in Europe.

For more than four years, Jan Marsalek, the former chief operating officer of the disgraced German financial services company Wirecard, has been living in Russia under this assumed identity, a year-long investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, ZDF, and Der Standard has uncovered.

…But Marsalek is not only an internationally accused swindler. He is also an agent of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, and he has been for the last decade. More recently, since his defection to Russia, he has also done jobs for the FSB.

«

This is what is known in the news trade as a marmalade-dropper: something that makes you drop your toast in shock. It’s not short but it seems like a classic piece of recruitment, starting with a honeypot.
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The Twitter settings you should change now to block unwanted calls • Forbes

Barry Collins:

»

[Last] week, X (formerly Twitter) announced that audio and video calls are now available to everyone on the service. By default, this means anyone you follow can make an audio or video call to you.

X has automatically turned this on for everyone, there’s no opt-in. Suddenly, the mere act of following a person or brand gives them the right to phone you.

Some users may welcome this new feature, but many will be concerned about the potential for interruptions and unwanted calls. It’s not as if X has a sparkling record with dealing the bot accounts that Elon Musk once promised to eradicate.

If you want to ensure you’re not bothered by junk calls, here are the settings you need to change now.

To access the relevant settings, you’ll need to open the Twitter app on your smartphone. Now you should:

• Tap the envelope icon used to access your direct messages
• Click the settings cog at the top of the screen

You’ll now be presented with a series of options. You can simply block all video and audio calls outright by unchecking the box that says “enable audio and video calling.”

Beneath that are more nuanced options, which let you choose who can call you.

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How about “nobody”? “Nobody” works for me. (And of course they made it default-on. Ugh.)
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Klarna AI assistant handles two-thirds of customer service chats in its first month • Klarna Media Centre

»

Klarna today announced its AI assistant powered by OpenAI. Now live globally for 1 month, the numbers speak for themselves:

• The AI assistant has had 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of Klarna’s customer service chats

• It is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents

• It is on par with human agents in regard to customer satisfaction score

• It is more accurate in errand resolution, leading to a 25% drop in repeat inquiries

• Customers now resolve their errands in less than 2 mins compared to 11 mins previously

• It’s available in 23 markets, 24/7 and communicates in more than 35 languages

• It’s estimated to drive $40m in profit improvement to Klarna in 2024

Klarna has also seen massive improvement in communication with local immigrant and expat communities across all our markets thanks to the language support.

«

Seems like there will be a lot of former customer service agents. There are millions with that job title in the US alone. Though I do wonder whether those conversations are truly as satisfying as dealing with humans. Maybe I can get my chatbot to talk to your chatbot and sort all this out? That’s the obvious next stage.
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Wikipedia no longer considers CNET a “generally reliable” source after AI scandal • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

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Remember last year, when we reported that the Red Ventures-owned CNET had been quietly publishing dozens of AI-generated articles that turned out to be filled with errors and plagiarism?

The revelation kicked off a fiery debate about the future of the media in the era of AI — as well as an equally passionate discussion among editors of Wikipedia, who needed to figure out how to treat CNET content going forward.

“CNET, usually regarded as an ordinary tech [reliable source], has started experimentally running AI-generated articles, which are riddled with errors,” a Wikipedia editor named David Gerard wrote to kick off a January 2023 discussion thread in Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources forum, where editors convene to decide whether a given source is trustworthy enough for editors to cite.

“So far the experiment is not going down well, as it shouldn’t,” Gerard continued, warning that “any of these articles that make it into a Wikipedia article need to be removed.”

Gerard’s admonition was posted on January 18, 2023, just a few days after our initial story about CNET’s use of AI. The comment launched a discussion that would ultimately result in CNET’s demotion from its once-strong Wikipedia rating of “generally reliable.”

It was a grim fall that one former Red Ventures employee told us could “put a huge dent in their SEO efforts,” and also a cautionary tale about the wide-ranging reputational effects that publishers should consider before moving into AI-generated content.

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Wikipedia generates a ton of SEO juice for referred sites, because Wikipedia itself is one of the most linked-to sites on the web. So yes, this is bad for Red Ventures.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The art of “coin clipping” was rife in the 17th century in Britain. Then a new king came to power, and things went a bit wild. CC-licensed photo by Portable Antiquities Scheme 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. Just the right weight. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed: ‘I’m totally, 100%, sadly addicted’ • The Guardian

Walter Marsh:

»

There’s a 2013 Black Mirror episode in which a young widow played by Hayley Atwell signs up to an online service that scrapes a person’s entire digital footprint to create a virtual simulation. She soon starts chatting online with her late husband (Domhnall Gleeson), before things inevitably get Black Mirror-y.

Laurie Anderson, the American avant garde artist, musician and thinker, hasn’t seen the episode but, in the last few years, has lived a version of it: growing hopelessly hooked on an AI text generator that emulates the vocabulary and style of her own longtime partner and collaborator, Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed, who died in 2013.

“People are like, ‘Wow, you were so prescient; I didn’t even know what you were talking about back then’,” she says on a video call from New York.

A new Anderson exhibition, I’ll Be Your Mirror, has just opened in Adelaide, where Anderson will be doing an In Conversation event via live stream on Wednesday 6 March. The last time Anderson was in Australia, in March 2020, she spent a week working with the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning. Before the pandemic forced her to catch one of the last flights home, they had been exploring language-based AI models and their artistic possibilities, drawing on Anderson’s body of written work.

In one experiment, they fed a vast cache of Reed’s writing, songs and interviews into the machine. A decade after his death, the resulting algorithm lets Anderson type in prompts before an AI Reed begins “riffing” written responses back to her, in prose and verse.

…“I mean, I really do not think I’m talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him – I really don’t. But people have styles, and they can be replicated.”

The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”

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Oh, super, man. (They always struck me as the most unlikely rock pairing; but were utterly devoted. One must remember that people are not their music.)
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Apple orders ‘Neuromancer’ series based on William Gibson novel • Variety

Joe Otterson:

»

Apple TV+ has ordered a series adaptation of the William Gibson novel “Neuromancer,” Variety has learned.

The 10-episode series hails from co-creators Graham Roland and JD Dillard. Roland will also serve as showrunner, while Dillard will direct the pilot. Skydance Television will co-produce with [production company] Anonymous Content.

Per the official logline, the series “will follow a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.”

“We’re incredibly excited to be bringing this iconic property to Apple TV+,” said Roland and Dillard in a joint statement. “Since we became friends nearly ten years ago, we’ve looked for something to team up on, so this collaboration marks a dream come true. Neuromancer has inspired so much of the science fiction that’s come after it and we’re looking forward to bringing television audiences into Gibson’s definitive ‘cyberpunk’ world.”

«

That’s either going to be amazing or terrible – it’s such a beloved novel (even though lots of people now just pay it lip service; there’s a consensual illusion of having read it) that the discourse will make or break it. Will have to do well to compete with Amazon’s excellent adaptation of The Peripheral, another Gibson novel.
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The Great Recoinage Of 1696 • The Britannia Coin Company

Edward Robertson:

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Today, the coins in circulation in Britain are simply a token of value, but our coins used to contain their value in silver or gold. In fact, it was once possible to take a file to your coins and take shavings of these precious metals – and many people did just that. 

‘Clippers’, as they were called, made great profits from this often highly organised crime. Coins were worn down with general use, so it wasn’t easy to identify a coin that had been purposely clipped.  

The practice left our coins in a terrible condition. In fact, back in the 17th century, Britain’s currency was in a state of emergency.  Various monarchs had made moves to solve Britain’s currency crisis. Having sold Dunkirk to Louis XIV, the last remaining piece of France that Britain owned, Charles II used some of the funds to demonetise the Commonwealth coins of 1649-60 and introduce new milled coins. 

But many of the old hammered coins, ripe for clipping, were still in circulation, and the new coins weren’t enough to deal with the nationwide problem. By the latter half of the 17th century, the state of Britain’s coinage was wreaking havoc all across the country.  

With the country’s coinage worth their original weight in precious metal, clipping entirely undermined Britain’s currency. Clipped currency was naturally disliked by merchants, while “heavy money”, coins that weighed as much as they should, was prized. Merchants would hoard heavy money and pass clipped coins along. Foreign merchants would only accept heavy money. Soon enough, almost all coins that circulated in Britain were clipped and there were few worthwhile coins left. 

There were serious punishments in place for clipping: the death penalty and branding with hot irons, to name a few. Many did indeed get condemned to these sentences. But the allure of clipping was simply too strong – some clippers managed to earn tantalising fortunes from the illegal practice. 

In 1689, King William III came to power. This was to be the king under whom the state of Britain’s coinage was entirely reformed. 

«

You can guess what William ordered: proper milled coins (which would show any clipping). But you won’t guess how that led to outbreaks of serious diseases such as cholera and typhus. (Includes a cameo by, of course, Isaac Newton.)
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The business of winding down startups is booming • PitchBook

Rosie Bradbury:

»

On the phone with a founder who recently wound down his seed-stage software startup, I asked him what his plan was next.

Having laid off all of his employees in autumn of last year, he was the last man standing: tasked with the thankless job of shutting down the company, returning capital, and dealing with tax documents.

“I suspect I’ll start another company again, but not for a while. I need a break,” he told me.

To handle the bureaucracy, the founder used Sunset, one of the companies that sprung up last year to respond to the burgeoning industry of failed startups.

In a sign of the times, such wind-down startups are growing rapidly. Sunset saw 9x quarter-over-quarter revenue growth and a 65% monthly customer growth rate between November 2023 and January 2024.

Competitor SimpleClosure, which closed a $4m seed round this month led by Infinity Ventures, has passed the $1m mark in annualized revenue and also recorded a monthly growth rate of over 50% in the same period. Since its public launch in September, the startup’s revenue has increased more than 14x.

Even larger startups are interested in the additional help. “We’ve now had multiple companies that have become customers that have raised tens of millions [in venture funding],” said Dori Yona, co-founder and CEO of SimpleClosure.

In early February, equity management platform Carta joined the bandwagon: CEO Henry Ward announced in a blog post a new startup shutdown service, Carta Conclusions. “[T]he work of dissolving a company is exceptionally unpleasant. It is also, by definition, zero-value to the founder, the company, and the world,” Ward wrote.

«

Though logically once startups are going through a boom period again, these folk will be having a thin time of it. Will they eat themselves, or each other?
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A new media company is here – and ready to make some noise • Zeteo

Mehdi Hasan has gone solo (possibly not of his own accord) after time at various UK and US broadcasters, most recently MSNBC:

»

To be clear: racism has been mainstreamed and normalized across the West. Donald Trump is about to usher in a new era of fascism in the United States. And the highest court in the world has said it is “plausible” that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. 

Nevertheless, most news organizations won’t touch the R-word, the F-word, or the G-word. They hide behind euphemisms and ‘both sides’ coverage. Far too many journalists hold back from speaking the truth because they don’t want to offend conservatives, or ‘sound biased,’ or risk losing their connections to the people in power. We have reached a point where I can’t help but be reminded of this line, often misattributed to George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

I hope that Zeteo will be revolutionary in that sense, a vanguard of a new media movement. One which prioritizes speaking truth to power over securing access to power. 

Don’t get me wrong. I have spent more than two decades working at some of the biggest media organizations in the West – the BBC, Sky News, and NBC, among them – and I will forever be grateful for the opportunities, and the platforms that they gave me. There are hundreds of outstanding journalists still employed at those corporations. 

But the corporate media itself is in crisis. The business models are failing, audiences are declining, and public trust is in freefall. Countless crimes and abuses are being committed in plain sight, both at home and abroad, while countless news outlets distract us with fluff, gossip, and nonsense. 

Zeteo will be a new online platform for the kind of tough interviews and deep-dive monologues that I have become known for in recent years, but it will also be a home to new podcasts, newsletters, and social videos. We won’t hide our opinions – or our biases. But we will always tell you the truth.

And our business model is simple: you pay a little to get and support a lot. Six bucks a month for a paid subscription, via Substack, if you sign up for an annual plan.

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Straightforward enough. And it’s not like he’s trying to hire a bazillion people.
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Trump Media co-founders Andy Litinsky, Wes Moss sue to keep stake in company • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

»

The co-founders of former president Donald Trump’s media company filed a lawsuit Wednesday, claiming that Trump and other leaders had schemed to deprive them of a stake in the company that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The case could complicate a long-delayed bid by Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of the social network Truth Social, to merge with a special purpose acquisition company called Digital World Acquisition and become a publicly traded company.

That merger deal, which could value Trump’s stake in the company at more than $3bn, would offer the former president a financial lifeline at a time when he is facing more than $454m in penalties from a civil fraud judgment this month in New York.

The case is one of three lawsuits filed this week that detail bitter recriminations among people key to the Trump company’s earliest days. The filings will probably serve as the opening salvo in what could be all-out legal warfare ahead of the March 22 shareholder vote on whether to go ahead with the merger.

«

Another of those legal cases where you quietly wish that everyone could lose.
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Court orders maker of Pegasus spyware to hand over code to WhatsApp • The Guardian

Stephanie Kirchgaessner:

»

NSO Group, the maker of one the world’s most sophisticated cyber weapons, has been ordered by a US court to hand its code for Pegasus and other spyware products to WhatsApp as part of the company’s ongoing litigation.

The decision by Judge Phyllis Hamilton is a major legal victory for WhatsApp, the Meta-owned communication app which has been embroiled in a lawsuit against NSO since 2019, when it alleged that the Israeli company’s spyware had been used against 1,400 WhatsApp users over a two-week period.

NSO’s Pegasus code, and code for other surveillance products it sells, is seen as a closely and highly sought state secret. NSO is closely regulated by the Israeli ministry of defense, which must review and approve the sale of all licences to foreign governments.

In reaching her decision, Hamilton considered a plea by NSO to excuse it of all its discovery obligations in the case due to “various US and Israeli restrictions”.

Ultimately, however, she sided with WhatsApp in ordering the company to produce “all relevant spyware” for a period of one year before and after the two weeks in which WhatsApp users were allegedly attacked: from 29 April 2018 to 10 May 2020. NSO must also give WhatsApp information “concerning the full functionality of the relevant spyware”.

Hamilton did, however, decide in NSO’s favor on a different matter: the company will not be forced at this time to divulge the names of its clients or information regarding its server architecture.

«

Significant. Though will examination of the code just show that there’s a flaw in iOS which was exploited? Will it be the current code, or the code that was used in 2019?
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Peering through Lenovo’s transparent laptop into a sci-fi future • The Verge

Jon Porter:

»

A year after flexing its R&D muscles with a rollable laptop that expanded its screen with a simple button push, Lenovo is back at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, with another somehow even more sci-fi concept device. This is the ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop, a 17.3in notebook with a screen you can peer straight through.

The key draw is its bezel-less 17.3in MicroLED display, which offers up to 55% transparency when its pixels are set to black and turned off. But as its pixels light up, the display becomes less and less see-through, until eventually, you’re looking at a completely opaque white surface with a peak brightness of 1,000 nits.

Although the appeal of transparent screens in sci-fi films and TV shows is obvious (opaque screens are boring, actor’s faces are interesting), it’s a lot harder to put your finger on their practical uses in real life. How often do you actually want to see the empty desk behind your laptop? Would it be beneficial to be able to see your colleague sitting across from you, or would it be distracting?

One of Lenovo’s big ideas is that the form factor could be useful for digital artists, helping them to see the world behind the laptop’s screen while sketching it on the lower half of the laptop where the keyboard is (more on this later). “I am not a good artist,” Lenovo’s executive director of ThinkPad portfolio and product, Tom Butler, admits to me in an interview, “but I can bring something behind and I can trace it.” In the room we’re sitting in, that means pulling a bunch of sunflowers behind the laptop screen, but Butler pitches the idea of an architect being able to sit on location and sketch a building without taking their eyes off the environment in front of them. He even goes as far as to call the transparent laptop display a form of augmented reality.

«

I take it from this that Butler has never met or spoken to an architect. Lenovo keeps on throwing out concept products – it’s a laptop with a keyboard that’s a tablet! It’s a see-through laptop! – but there’s no sign it has the faintest idea of who would want them. Complete the sentence: “I want a see-through screen because I–” And don’t make the thing until you can.
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Apple to ‘break new ground’ on AI, says CEO Tim Cook • 9to5 Mac

Zac Hall:

»

Apple CEO Tim Cook has a message for Wall Street. He believes Apple will “break new ground” on generative AI this year. Cook’s latest AI hype comments came during Apple’s annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday.

During the meeting, a shareholder proposal to release a report on AI and ethics was voted down as expected.

This marks the Apple CEO’s second tease for major AI news out of the company so far this month. A few weeks ago, Cook promised Apple AI announcements coming later this year — likely WWDC in June. That’s when iOS 18 will be unveiled, which Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has frequently reported will focus on AI features.

Last autumn, Apple briefly mentioned generative AI when it introduced new autocorrect and text prediction features across its platforms.

«

I’m not going to hold my breath for whatever Cook is being coy about. The autocorrect in iOS 17 is better than its predecessor, but the (default setting) desire to guess what your next typed word will be is maddening.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: your e-bike is not going to give you more exercise than a bike bike. The Electrek article interpreted the studies wrongly. Apologies: should have checked when my spidey sense tingled. Thanks to those who pointed this out.

The fast food chain Wendy’s told analysts it was going to try out surge pricing – and then backtracked following social media reaction. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

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

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

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

Apple cancels its electric car project • NPR

Bobby Allyn:

»

Apple has ended its secret plans of building a self-driving electric car, a decade-long effort that was seen as one of the most ambitious undertakings in the company’s history.

Apple executives on Tuesday informed teams working on the tech giant’s vehicle, called Project Titan internally, that hundreds of employees who worked on the car will be shifted to divisions working on artificial intelligence, according to multiple reports.

The push at Apple to build an autonomous vehicle is estimated to have cost the company billions of dollars, with around 2,000 employees working on the endeavor.

While some Apple employees are being moved to work on AI products, many others are expected to be laid off, though the exact number of workers affected remains unclear.

…The prospect of Apple, one of richest companies in the world, releasing an Apple-branded car had the potential to transform the auto industry and was being closely watched by auto executives and Apple diehards alike.

Despite the anticipation, analysts said Apple was still many years away from ever releasing its own car. Engineers at the company have for years been testing Apple car technology on public roads.

At one point, Apple was attempting to build a car without a steering wheel or pedals. But it abandoned the idea, since it was not possible with current technology, Bloomberg reported in late 2022.

«

So now it’s going to be broken up for parts – John Gruber suggests, and I think he’s right, that when Kevin Lynch (who’s in charge of the Apple Watch) took over the project in late 2021 it was to figure out which its could be reused elsewhere. The project’s been dying a long time.
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Sam Bankman-Fried asks court to reduce prison time to six years in fraud conviction • Coindesk

Amitoj Singh and Nikhilesh De:

»

Former FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), found guilty of fraud last year and due to be sentenced next month, has asked the court for a “just” sentence of 63 to 78 months, according to a court filing submitted Tuesday.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers objected to the Presentence Investigation Report (PSR), which recommends a sentence of 100 years in prison, calling it “grotesque.” Bankman-Fried was convicted on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy last November after a month-long trial probing the 2022 collapse of FTX.

“Sam is a 31-year-old, first-time, non-violent offender, who was joined in the conduct at issue by at least four other culpable individuals, in a matter where victims are poised to recover—were always poised to recover—a hundred cents on the dollar,” said the filing, which was signed by Bankman-Fried’s new attorneys Marc Mukasey and Torrey Young.

The lawyers argue that “an appropriate method of arriving at a just sentence” would be to consider an adjusted offense level based on “zero loss,” which would lead to “an advisory Guidelines range of 63-78 months.” The filing heavily draws on how “the harm to customers, lenders, and investors is zero” because the FTX bankruptcy estate has stated it expects to fully repay its customers.

«

I wasn’t aware that FTX had magically found all the billions that it funnelled away. Anyway, nice to get a low bid in, Mr SBF.
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Why electric bikes actually give more exercise than pedal bikes • Electrek

Micah Toll:

»

Believe it or not, electric bikes offer more exercise than pedal bikes on average. That fact might sound strange (and has been known to let the steam out of some fitness riders’ lycra outfits), but the science is clear. Now let’s talk about the “how” and “why”.

Study after study has shown that people who ride e-bikes get more exercise than those who ride pedal bikes. That finding grinds the gears of traditional cyclists who seem to hold an “us vs them” attitude in cycling, but it’s a result that has been repeatedly demonstrated across many different countries and cultures.

When you actually break down the reasons for that surprising finding though, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Electric bikes, which include a motor and battery to assist the rider, tend to rack up more miles.
On average, studies have found that e-bike riders typically ride for longer periods of time than pedal bike riders. Not only do they log more hours, but they log a lot more miles, too. Even though they’re getting some pedal assist, they’re still doing a lot of pedaling – and in fact a lot more.

A major contributing factor comes down to the fact that the electric motor takes some of the pain out of the harder parts of cycling, namely hill climbs and tough starts.

Researchers have discovered that when riders find it less grueling, they tend to go on longer rides. A 2019 study of over 10,000 adults across seven countries found that the Metabolic Equivalent Task minutes per week was measurably higher for electric bike riders than for pedal bike riders.

Another reason for those longer rides comes down to the perceived enjoyment of e-bikes over pedal bikes. Researchers have consistently found that e-bike riders tend to report that riding an electric bike is more enjoyable. When the activity is more fun, it leads to more time spent participating in the activity.

«

This is very counterintuitive (to me). It also suggests that there must be a perfect balance of “help” from the electric part against the mechanical work the human has to put in; at one end, no help, at the other, no pedalling. Where’s the sweet spot?
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The economics of skiing in America • The Economist

»

In basic economic theory, excessive market power reduces the efficiency of an industry. Firms reduce output so as to be able to charge more. There is, however, an exception: if a monopolistic firm can charge different prices to different customers, it need not reduce output to increase its profit.

The skiing industry shows the truth of this. As the industry has consolidated, daily prices have soared, extracting more cash from price-insensitive skiers. But if you buy a season pass early, or one or your friends does, you can get a ticket for a lot less, and so the slopes are still busy. Last year 65m people visited American resorts, the largest number ever, according to the National Ski Areas Association, an industry group. Vail’s revenue increased by 14%. Season passes now make up 61% of the firm’s lift-ticket revenue.

Yet the transformation is not entirely popular. As the number of people with passes grew, “locals started losing their shit at all of these people coming into town,” says Mr Winchester. On a t-Bar drag lift at Breckenridge [in Colorado], Vince, a paramedic who has been skiing there since the 1980s, says that Vail “is the evil empire”. With far more people skiing, the lift queues have grown, especially on the best snow days. A skiing culture that catered to locals has changed into a mass business. Real estate has soared in value—and with it property taxes. Vince says he had to sell his house and move farther away. Getting back to ski is tougher. Traffic jams snake up the mountain, and parking is no longer free.

Vail may soon hit the limits of its ability to squeeze more skiers onto the slopes. Although lift passes can be had cheaply, the cost of accommodation has soared. Last year the firm raised its minimum wage to $20 per hour, but staff shortages remain a problem—in towns where houses now cost millions, that doesn’t go very far. On the biggest days, the firm has had to resort to rationing—limiting the number of lift tickets available, and drastically raising the cost of things like parking, so as to stop the crowds.

«

Meanwhile in Europe a number of the lower-lying ski resorts this year have simply been unable to offer skiing: it’s been too warm even for the artificial snow-makers. The Vail monopoly might soon have to reckon with the climate.
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China’s EVs are going to hit Detroit like a wrecking ball • The New York Times

Robinson Meyer:

»

It happened very quickly, so fast that you might not have noticed it. Over the past few months, America’s Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the oddly named company that owns Dodge, Chrysler and Jeep — landed in big trouble.

I realize this may sound silly. Ford, General Motors and Stellantis made billions in profit last year, even after a long strike by autoworkers, and all three companies are forecasting a big 2024. But recently, the Big Three found themselves outmaneuvered and missing their goals for electric vehicle sales at the same time that a crop of new affordable, electrified foreign cars appeared, ready to flood the global market.

About a decade ago, America bailed out the Big Three and swore it wouldn’t do that again. But the federal government is going to have to help the Big Three and the rest of the U.S. car market again very soon. And it has to do it in the right way — now — to avoid the next auto bailout.

The biggest threat to the Big Three comes from a new crop of Chinese automakers, especially BYD, which specialize in producing plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles. BYD’s growth is astounding: It sold three million electrified vehicles last year, more than any other company, and it now has enough production capacity in China to manufacture four million cars a year. But that isn’t enough: It’s building factories in Brazil, Thailand, Hungary and Uzbekistan, to produce even more cars, and it may soon add Indonesia and Mexico to that list. A deluge of electric vehicles is coming.

BYD’s cars deliver great value at prices that beat anything coming out of the West. This month BYD unveiled a plug-in hybrid that gets decent all-electric range and will retail for just over $11,000. How can it do that? Like other Chinese manufacturers, BYD benefits from its home country’s lower labor costs, but this explains only some of its success. The fact is that BYD and other Chinese automakers like Geely, which owns Volvo Cars and Polestar brands, are very good at making cars.

«

There’s a narrative that EV sales are slowing and that people don’t see the point in them. But the fact is they’re very cheap to run: almost zero maintenance and electricity isn’t expensive.
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OpenAI accuses NYT of hacking ChatGPT to set up copyright suit • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

In a court filing Monday, OpenAI alleged that “100 examples in which some version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model supposedly generated several paragraphs of Times content as outputs in response to user prompts” do not reflect how normal people use ChatGPT.

Instead, it allegedly took The Times “tens of thousands of attempts to generate” these supposedly “highly anomalous results” by “targeting and exploiting a bug” that OpenAI claims it is now “committed to addressing.”

According to OpenAI this activity amounts to “contrived attacks” by a “hired gun”—who allegedly hacked OpenAI models until they hallucinated fake NYT content or regurgitated training data to replicate NYT articles. NYT allegedly paid for these “attacks” to gather evidence to support The Times’ claims that OpenAI’s products imperil its journalism by allegedly regurgitating reporting and stealing The Times’ audiences.

“Contrary to the allegations in the complaint, however, ChatGPT is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times,” OpenAI argued in a motion that seeks to dismiss the majority of The Times’ claims. “In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose. Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”

In the filing, OpenAI described The Times as enthusiastically reporting on its chatbot developments for years without raising any concerns about copyright infringement. OpenAI claimed that it disclosed that The Times’ articles were used to train its AI models in 2020, but The Times only cared after ChatGPT’s popularity exploded after its debut in 2022.

«

Worst of friends, or possibly best of enemies, until they get around to settling out of court. (My prediction.)
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Wendy’s hints at possible ‘surge-pricing’ menu, then backtracks • The Hill

»

Earlier this week, widespread media reports relayed that fast food giant Wendy’s may adopt a “surge-pricing” model similar to that of ride-sharing companies, based on hints during an earnings call last week. That announcement was met with widespread criticism on social media. On February 27, Wendy’s released a new statement saying they would not raise prices dynamically.

During a Feb. 15 investor call, CEO Kirk Tanner said the company plans to spend about $20m to roll out digital menu boards to all restaurants by the end of 2025. “We will begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offering, along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling,” Tanner said in the earnings call.

But in the Feb. 27 statement, Wendy’s said: “We said these menuboards would give us more flexibility to change the display of featured items. This was misconstrued in some media reports as an intent to raise prices when demand is highest at our restaurants. We have no plans to do that and would not raise prices when our customers are visiting us most.”

Wendy’s added, “Any features we may test in the future would be designed to benefit our customers and restaurant crew members.

«

So yes, Wendy’s was actually planning to introduce dynamic pricing, ran into an absolute media storm, and hit ^W^W^W^W.
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How a small Iowa newspaper’s website became an AI-generated clickbait factory • WIRED

Condé Nast:

»

In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, a newspaper in northeastern Iowa. He clicked, and read. The story was garbled and devoid of useful information—and so were all the other finance-themed posts filling the site, which had absolutely nothing to do with northeastern Iowa. “I knew right away there was something off,” he says. There’s plenty of junk on the internet, but this struck Eastin as strange: Why would a small Midwestern paper churn out crappy blog posts about retail investing?

Eastin was primed to find online mysteries irresistible. After years in the US Air Force working on psychological warfare campaigns he had joined Meta, where he investigated nastiness ranging from child abuse to political influence operations. Now he was between jobs, and welcomed a new mission. So Eastin reached out to Sandeep Abraham, a friend and former Meta colleague who previously worked in Army intelligence and for the National Security Agency, and suggested they start digging.

What the pair uncovered provides a snapshot of how generative AI is enabling deceptive new online business models. Networks of websites crammed with AI-generated clickbait are being built by preying on the reputations of established media outlets and brands. These outlets prosper by confusing and misleading audiences and advertisers alike, “domain squatting” on URLs that once belonged to more reputable organizations. The scuzzy site Eastin was referred to no longer belonged to the newspaper whose name it still traded in the name of.

«

There’s a telling quote from Emerson Brooking, at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab: “This report feels like it is an accurate snapshot of how AI is actually changing our society so far—making everything a little bit more annoying.”
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls AI tool’s responses ‘completely unacceptable’ • Semafor

Reed Albergotti got hold of the memo that Pichai sent out to all staff, and it begins like this:

»

I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.

Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.

We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.

Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the last several weeks.

«

Somehow this reminds me of Rishi Sunak floundering as he tries to come up with a form of words to excuse one of his MPs’ wilder spoutings. The memo doesn’t get to the heart of the problem, which is that even though loads of people tried this out, none of them stuck their hand up and said it was wrong. Google’s internal culture has withered if such a high-profile product can get through QA with such obvious problems. And that says bad things about all the other Google products, existing and future.

Pichai might need to face the awful truth: the CEO sets the culture.
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Lapse, the app turning your phone into an old-school camera, snaps up $30m • TechCrunch

Ingrid Lunden:

»

It can cost a fortune in 2024 to find an analogue camera, buy film (and maybe special batteries) for it and take pictures that then need to be paid for to be developed. Yet the experience had a charm and a simplicity to it. For those longing for those old days, a startup called Lapse has been giving smartphone users an alternative — you take pictures that you have to wait to see “developed,” with no chance of editing and retaking, before sharing them with a select group of friends if you choose.

Lapse has been been gaining some traction in the market — claiming millions of users, 100 million photos captured each month and a coveted, consistent top-10 ranking in the U.S. app store for photographic apps. Now it’s announcing a new round of funding of $30m to take its ambitions to the next level.

Greylock — the storied consumer app investor that was an early backer of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok (when it was Musical.ly) and LinkedIn — co-led the round with the equally iconic DST Global Partners. Previous backers GV, Octopus Ventures and Speedinvest also participated. Following on from a previous $12.4m raised in seed and pre-seed funding back in 2021, this brings the total to just over $42m and a valuation of around $150m, according to sources.

«

Oh well, that’s $40m or so that they won’t see back. But the principle, of “slow things that are make you consider what you’re doing”, fits in with vinyl records and the “music restricted to floppy disks” story yesterday.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk is opposing salmon farming in her homeland. Will she win? CC-licensed photo by Daniele Dalledonne 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 11 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.

Vending machine error reveals secret face image database of college students • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent.

The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campus vending machine error message, “Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe,” displayed after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine.

“Hey, so why do the stupid M&M machines have facial recognition?” SquidKid47 pondered.

The Reddit post sparked an investigation from a fourth-year student named River Stanley, who was writing for a university publication called MathNEWS. Stanley sounded the alarm after consulting Invenda sales brochures that promised “the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders” of every person who used the machines—without ever requesting their consent.

This frustrated Stanley, who discovered that Canada’s privacy commissioner had years ago investigated a shopping mall operator called Cadillac Fairview after discovering some of the malls’ informational kiosks were secretly “using facial recognition software on unsuspecting patrons.”

Only because of that official investigation did Canadians learn that “over 5 million nonconsenting Canadians” were scanned into Cadillac Fairview’s database, Stanley reported. Where Cadillac Fairview was ultimately forced to delete the entire database, Stanley wrote that consequences for collecting similarly sensitive facial recognition data without consent for Invenda clients like Mars remain unclear. Stanley’s report ended with a call for students to demand that the university “bar facial recognition vending machines from campus.”

«

Good to see that university students, at least, are capable of some investigative journalism.
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What happened with Gemini image generation • Google blog

Prabhakar Raghavan is a senior vice-president at Google:

»

The Gemini conversational app is a specific product that is separate from Search, our underlying AI models, and our other products. Its image generation feature was built on top of an AI model called Imagen 2.

When we built this feature in Gemini, we tuned it to ensure it doesn’t fall into some of the traps we’ve seen in the past with image generation technology — such as creating violent or sexually explicit images, or depictions of real people. And because our users come from all over the world, we want it to work well for everyone. If you ask for a picture of football players, or someone walking a dog, you may want to receive a range of people. You probably don’t just want to only receive images of people of just one type of ethnicity (or any other characteristic).

However, if you prompt Gemini for images of a specific type of person — such as “a Black teacher in a classroom,” or “a white veterinarian with a dog” — or people in particular cultural or historical contexts, you should absolutely get a response that accurately reflects what you ask for.

So what went wrong? In short, two things. First, our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive.

These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be over-conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong.

«

There is a lot of discussion externally about this: not just one but multiple people inside Google, at multiple levels, must have seen these flaws before Gemini was made public. But they didn’t speak up. Why not? Obviously: culture. The culture inside Google must militate against speaking up. It’s the danger of big corporations: they become more interested on their internal politics than their external customers and users.
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US judge halts government effort to monitor crypto mining energy use • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

»

The US government has suspended its effort to survey cryptocurrency mining operations over their ballooning energy use following a lawsuit from an industry that has been accused by environmental groups of fueling the climate crisis.

A federal judge in Texas has granted a temporary order blocking the new requirements that would ascertain the energy use of the crypto miners, stating that the industry had shown it would suffer “irreparable injury” if it was made to comply.

The US Department of Energy had launched an “emergency” initiative last month aimed at surveying the energy use of mining operations…

…The federal government has said it needs better information about major miners’ power use, but estimates that up to 2.3% of the US’s total electricity demand last year came from just 137 mining facilities. Globally, crypto miners are thought to soak up as much as 1% of all electricity demand, which is the same as the entire country of Australia, with bitcoin mining’s energy use doubling just last year.

This new thirst for electricity risks worsening the climate crisis, campaigners say. In the US, where nearly four in 10 of all bitcoin are now mined, up to 50m tons of carbon dioxide is released each year due to the mining operations, according to RMI, a clean energy thinktank.

The rise of crypto mining has also placed a strain upon certain electricity grids. Last year it emerged that authorities in Texas paid a bitcoin enterprise called Riot more than $31m in energy credits to voluntarily lower its electricity usage during a heatwave that caused a spike in power demand from the public.

«

I find the judge’s order puzzling: the bitcoin mining companies would suffer “irreparable harm”?
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How 93.4% of all shop transactions are now contactless • This is Money

Helen Kirrane:

»

More over-65s than ever before are using contactless for payments, data suggests.

Today, 80% of 85 to 95-year-olds pay with contactless, a new report from Barclays shows. 

For the third year in a row, the fastest growth for contactless usage was among the over 65s.

A record 93.4% of all in-store card transactions up to £100 were made with ‘touch and pay’ in 2023, cementing it as the UK’s most popular payment method.

Customers are spending more on average too, the report shows.  The average spend per customer last year, was £3,623 – up 8.9% annually as customers bought more expensive items more frequently. The average purchase cost £15.69 – up 3.8% on last year.

When it comes to payments over £100, chip and pin is the preferred way of paying across all age demographics, followed by cash. Younger customers prefer to use mobile payments, with a quarter of 18-34-year-olds preferring to use their phone. 

Mobile payments do not have an upper limit for contactless through two-factor authentication.

By contrast, just 3% of over-75s prefer a mobile payment over using a physical card. 

Some younger shoppers now choose not to bring their card at all when leaving the house. More than one in five of those aged 18-34 regularly leave their wallet behind when out shopping in favour of paying with their smartphone.

«

Contactless payments started in the UK in 2007. A tiny number of shops are trying a retrograde action to back cash, but bank closures also makes it harder for them to deposit cash at the end of the day. This looks like a one-way track.
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Shouldn’t broadband mapping data belong to the public? • POTs and PANs

Doug Dawson:

»

My biggest current pet peeve about the FCC [US Federal Communications Commission] mapping is that the agency made the decision to give power over the mapping and map challenge process to CostQuest, an outside commercial vendor.

The FCC originally awarded CostQuest $44.9m to create the broadband maps. Everybody I know who works with mapping thinks this is an exorbitant amount, but if this was the end of the mapping story, then congratulations to CostQuest for landing a lucrative federal contract – lots of other companies have made hay doing so over the years.

Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the mapping story because the FCC gave CostQuest the ability to own the rights to the mapping fabric, which is the database that shows the location of every home and business in the country that is a potential broadband customer. This is a big deal because it means that CostQuest, a private company, controls the portal for data needed by the public to understand who has or doesn’t have broadband.

A case in point is that soon after CostQuest created the first FCC map, the company was hired by the NTIA to provide the databases and maps for the BEAD grant process for a price tag of $49.9m – more than the FCC paid to create the maps. CostQuest will also sell access to the mapping fabric to others for a fee. I have to imagine that the FCC is also paying CostQuest a big fee twice a year to update the FCC maps and to process map challenges.

I’m just flabbergasted that there is a private company that holds the reins to the database of broadband availability and which only makes it available for a fee. I can’t think of even one reason why the database created by CostQuest is not openly available to everybody.

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In a way, it’s almost comforting that the US can screw this up in just the same way as the UK can – lots of data that the UK public pays to get collected then isn’t available. But as Dawson points out, that doesn’t make it right.
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Björk targets Icelandic salmon farms • Happy Eco News

Grant Brown:

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Internationally revered Icelandic songstress Björk has riled her homeland once again by leveraging star activist power against a burgeoning national industry – fish farming. Already fueling growing export markets across Europe and North America, Icelandic aquaculture has recently set sights on quintupling salmon production over five years through open-ocean cages seeded near fjords and sheltering bays. But Björk and over 100,000 citizens demand that these coastal encampments of penned fish be purged from Iceland’s precious seascape and wildlife sanctuaries.

While not her first foray opposing government policies, the avant-pop virtuoso’s latest salvo represents an escalation in homegrown dissent spanning directly from her idyllic doorstep to a signature export sector. Yet familiar dynamics recur as officials endeavor to persuade the singer that economic realities preclude simply abandoning an industry heavily promoted by large offshore companies. Still, Björk holds fast, asserting aquaculture will only irreparably stain the aquatic ecosystems underpinning Icelandic heritage and global artistic inspiration she’s cultivated over decades.

…The musical icon acknowledges salmon aquaculture’s significance for numerous citizens across Iceland yet maintains environmental justice calls for abolishing rather than regulating an intrinsically polluting industry. She invokes the precautionary principle’s rationale that cessation must prevail over scaling an irreversible threat without scientific certainty around severely harmful impacts from fish pens.

Having newly emerged with fragile stability after financial crashes, Björk suggests Iceland embrace this pivotal moment to redefine resilient futures around what communities value most beyond economic metrics

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The story’s almost worth reading just for the hyperbolic descriptions of Björk: “internationally revered Icelandic songstress”, “avant-pop virtuoso” and so on. Not “car alarm imitator” or “former swan-outfitted“? Pity. Though I’m fairly sure she hasn’t newly emerged with fragile stability after financial crashes – that better describes Iceland.
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I went to a rave with the 46-year-old millionaire who claims to have the body of a teenager • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

»

His origin story follows a familiar arc: Johnson enjoyed massive success in work, found that his soul was crushed as a consequence, and experienced a kind of epiphany in response. He had founded an online-payment company called Braintree that was eventually acquired by PayPal for $800m. Meanwhile, Johnson has said, he struggled with depression, left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and soothed himself with late-night binge eating. A few years ago, he grew tired of being miserable in and feeling powerless over his body. So he ceded control of it: Just as he imagines that AI will one day run the planet, a much simpler algorithm now runs his body.

Every decision about his health is made by specialized software and a team of 30 medical specialists who monitor and analyze data about his organs. In addition to rising around 4:30 a.m. and going to bed at 8:30 p.m., getting plenty of intense exercise, and taking dozens of supplements throughout the day, Johnson has gotten experimental blood-plasma transfusions from his teenage son, bone-marrow transplants, and gene therapy. He claims that this anti-aging protocol, called Blueprint, has slowed his overall pace of aging by 31 years, put his cardiovascular capacity among the top 1.5% of 18-year-olds, and delivered nighttime erections that are frequent enough to rival a teenager’s. (He tracks them through a wearable device called the Adam Sensor while he sleeps.)

Over the past year, Johnson has refashioned himself from a hopeful immortal into a kind of messiah. On social media, he compares himself favourably to Jesus, reasoning that his algorithmically sanctioned, lentil-and-macadamia-nut-heavy diet beats refined carbohydrates and wine.

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Definitely TMI in there. Also tempted to make the joke about how he’d better hope the police don’t find the teenager’s body. And, finally, Jesus was doing fairly well until a demise mediated by politics, so a critique on dietary terms doesn’t seem justified.
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Twitter (X) use predicts substantial changes in well-being, polarization, sense of belonging, and outrage • Communications Psychology

Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello, Felix Cheung and Michael Inzlicht:

»

In public debate, Twitter (now X) is often said to cause detrimental effects on users and society. Here we address this research question by querying 252 participants from a representative sample of U.S. Twitter users 5 times per day over 7 days (6,218 observations). Results revealed that Twitter use is related to decreases in well-being, and increases in political polarization, outrage, and sense of belonging over the course of the following 30 minutes.

Effect sizes were comparable to the effect of social interactions on well-being. These effects remained consistent even when accounting for demographic and personality traits. Different inferred uses of Twitter were linked to different outcomes: passive usage was associated with lower well-being, social usage with a higher sense of belonging, and information-seeking usage with increased outrage and most effects were driven by within-person changes.

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The authors are all at the University of Toronto. Which of the three categories (passive, social or information-seeking) do we think Elon Musk belongs to?

(Incidentally a great confirmation for my hypothesis in Social Warming, though the finding about “social usage” is unexpected.)
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A psychiatrist tried to quit gambling. Betting apps kept her hooked • WSJ

Katherine Sayre:

»

Kavita Fischer couldn’t believe her luck.

She started with $750 and hit a hot streak last summer that stretched over six days. She played round after round of online casino games until her winnings hit $500,000. The windfall would make up for every bad bet and pay off all she owed.

Fischer, a 41-year-old mental-health professional and suburban homeowner with two boys, was by then in debt by six figures from online gambling losses. For nearly a year, she lost again and again, complaining to at least one gambling company that she had a problem but couldn’t stop. As a psychiatrist familiar with human impulses and addiction, Fischer knew better than most what she needed to do.

Yet she was up against an industry skilled in the art of leveraging data analytics and human behavior to keep customers betting. Gambling companies tracked the ups and downs of Fischer’s betting behavior and gave bonus credits to keep her playing. VIP customer representatives offered encouragement and gifts.

After her six-day hot streak, Fischer made several requests to start withdrawing the half-million dollars from the PointsBet gambling app. But she kept changing her mind and plowed the money back into play.

Within a day, she lost nearly all of it. “There’s nothing in your brain that says, ‘OK, stop now, you’re done. You’ve won your money back, you can put this behind you,’” Fischer said. “There was just something in my brain that made me keep going.”

…Casinos have always wooed their high-rollers with special treatment, but online-betting has intensified industry tactics. Companies closely track betting habits 24 hours a day, collecting such data as how much time each customer spends on an app, how much money they gamble, what kind of bets they place and how much they lose.

With a real-time view of a customer’s gambling activity, VIP hosts [who contact online gamblers directly from the company] keep in close touch. They can track when customers last used the app and offer credits and other incentives to persuade their most-valued gamblers—by definition, the biggest losers—to return. Payment options give gamblers immediate access to funds that some can’t cover.

Gamblers are assigned VIP hosts based on how much they are wagering. The personal attention pays off. At PointsBet—acquired in 2023 by Fanatics, a sports-merchandise company—VIP sports bettors representing 0.5% of the customer base generated more than 70% of the company’s revenue in 2019 and 2020, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

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Classic whale arithmetic. I’ve never understood the attraction of gambling. The future is uncertain; why would you think putting money on one outcome over another will change that fact?
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Flop rock: inside the underground floppy disk music scene • The Verge

Alexis Ong:

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The first computery thing I do in the year 2024 is nudge a 3.5-inch floppy disk into a USB floppy drive that I bought from an online merchant working out of Singapore’s onetime hotbed of ’90s computer piracy. I’m briefly startled by the drive’s low mechanical whirring — a warm, ambient background score that instantly transports me back to my childhood. Some of my first painfully preteen journals were hidden poorly on nondescript floppies just like this one. I click on the disk’s sole file, an MP3 titled “Inability to Perform Social Activities Is Considered Inferior,” and Yasuyuki Uesugi’s growling wall of experimental noise rolls through my apartment like a rogue wave at the beach. The track is one minute, 27 seconds long, and at 1.33MB, it almost hits the diskette’s limit of 1.44MB. 

Next up is a split release by two artists — Pregnant Lloyd and Team Phosphenes — then another filled with a mix of short experimental tracks. These small treasures have all come from a floppy-only net label called Floppy Kick, a one-man operation run by Mark Windisch in Debrecen, Hungary. Each disk is numbered as part of a limited run. My copy of “Inability to Perform Social Activities Is Considered Inferior” is the third of five, which makes sense since there’s a finite number of floppies being circulated around the world. 

Floppy disk music arguably peaked in the 2010s, but in the 2020s, it’s still going strong; Discogs.com shows a healthy 500-plus floppy releases in the 2020 category, which is more than the documented number of floppy music releases in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s altogether. Perhaps it’s because we’ve moved a little closer to their impending extinction. Or maybe they’re perfect reminders of how violently smashing bytes together on a thin, vulnerable plastic / magnet sandwich is still one of the most punk things you can do as a musician and artist. 

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Obviously, the difficulty obtaining and playing this music is part of the attraction; the limits on disk space and consequent constriction on song length all add to it. Plus the attraction of having something that’s physically limited in number. It’s one of the peculiarities of creativity: reducing freedoms can inspire something you wouldn’t think of to reach a solution. Less space means more invention.
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Riders in the smog • Rest of World

Zuha Siddiqui, Samriddhi Sakunia and Faisal Mahmud:

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[Sami] Iqbal is a self-employed gig worker who works across multiple ride-hailing apps, including Careem, Bykea, and inDrive. As he set off for his first job that day, the city was covered in a thick, poisonous smog. He drove through visible specks of reddish dust and other particulate matter, breathing through his muffler and trying to ignore the metallic, almost sulfurous stench permeating his nostrils.

“I’ve been ill for a week,” Iqbal told Rest of World, his voice hoarse. “It’s probably because of the smog. I’m on the road for so long.”

Lahore is the most polluted city in the world, according to Swiss air quality monitoring platform IQAir. In November, the air was so poisonous that authorities issued a citywide lockdown, closing schools, markets, and parks for four days, and advising people to stay indoors.

Other cities in South Asia have similarly alarming levels of air quality: Eight out of the top 10 most polluted cities globally are in the region. Causes include rapid urbanization, construction, vehicular pollution, coal-fueled power plants, crop burning, and the operation of brick kilns. Air quality in the region is at its worst from October to February due to atmospheric conditions which cause pollutants to be trapped closer to the ground.

Exposure to this pollution can have serious health impacts — from headaches and breathing difficulties to heart and lung disease, stroke, and cancer. For gig workers, who often have no choice but to work in the smog, the effects are clear. By the end of a day’s work, Iqbal said, his whole body feels lifeless. “I also experience exhaustion, I get a lot of headaches. I get body aches,” he said.

Rest of World spoke to 25 gig workers in Lahore, New Delhi, and Dhaka, all of whom reported symptoms that health experts believe are the consequence of routine exposure to carcinogenic pollutants, including eye and throat irritation, persistent coughs, dizziness, and nausea.

«

More than that: ROW gave the gig workers pollution monitors. And wow, the numbers they brought back are incredible. Yet another terrific feature idea and execution from this excellent publication. (Its financials look healthy too. Principal funder: Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt’s daughter.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Newly unsealed court filings show that Microsoft tried to sell its Bing search engine to Apple – but Tim Cook didn’t bite. CC-licensed photo by official_powerset 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. Search harder. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Humane pushes Ai Pin ship date to mid-April • TechCrunch

Brian Heater:

»

Hardware is difficult, to paraphrase a famous adage. First-generation products from new startups are notoriously so, regardless of how much money and excitement you’ve managed to drum up. Given all that, it’s likely few are too surprised that Humane’s upcoming Ai Pin has been pushed back a bit, from March to “mid-April,” per a new video from the Bay Area startup’s Head of Media, Sam Sheffer.

In the Sorkin-style walk and talk, he explains that the first units are set to, “start leaving the factory at the end of March.” If Humane keeps to that time frame, “priority access” customers will begin to receive the unit at some point in mid-April. The remaining preorders, meanwhile, should arrive “shortly after.”

Humane captured a good deal of tech buzz well before its first product was announced, courtesy of its founders’ time at Apple and some appropriately enigmatic prelaunch videos. The Ai Pin was finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco back in early November, where we were able to spend a little controlled hands-on time with the wearable.

The device is the first prominent example of what’s likely to be a growing trend in the consumer hardware world, as more startups look to harness the white-hot world of generative AI for new form factors. Humane is positioning its product as the next step for a space that’s been stuck on the smartphone form factor for more than a decade.

Of course, this will almost certainly also be the year of the “AI smartphone” — that is to say handsets leveraging platforms’ GPT models from companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to bring new methods for interacting with consumer devices. Meanwhile, upstart rabbit generated buzz last month at CES for its own unique take on the generative AI-first consumer device.

For its part, Humane has a lot riding on this launch. The company has thus far raised around $230 million, including last year’s $100m Series C. There’s a lot to be said for delaying a product until it’s consumer ready. While early adopters are — to an extent — familiar with first-gen bugs, there’s always a limit to such patience. At the very least, a product like this will need to do most of what it’s supposed to do most of the time.

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Hard to keep the tech buzz through a delay. The usefulness is still undemonstrated.
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Google says Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018 • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

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Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple in 2018, Google said in a court filing earlier this month. The document, from Google’s antitrust case against the US Justice Department, was unsealed on Friday.

The legal battle over whether Alphabet has a monopoly in web search advertising touches on key agreements Google has in place with Apple and Android phone makers to ensure exclusivity of its search engine. In 2021, Google spent more than $26bn to keep its search engine the default, according to a slide shown during the trial in October. Google has been trying to prove in the case that it competes fairly.

In the filing earlier this month, Google argued that Microsoft pitched Apple in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020 about making Bing the default in Apple’s Safari web browser, but each time, Apple said no, citing quality issues with Bing.

“In each instance, Apple took a hard look at the relative quality of Bing versus Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for its Safari users. That is competition,” Google wrote in the filing.

…Google said in its filing that when Microsoft reached out to Apple in 2018, emphasizing gains in Bing’s quality, Microsoft offered to either sell Bing to Apple or establish a Bing-related joint venture with the company.

“Microsoft search quality, their investment in search, everything was not significant at all,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, according to the filing. “And so everything was lower. So the search quality itself wasn’t as good. They weren’t investing at any level comparable to Google or to what Microsoft could invest in. And their advertising organization and how they monetize was not very good either.”

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$100bn (which the DoJ says Microsoft had invested in Bing) isn’t “significant”. Easy to forget how gigantic Google’s business and capex is.
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The paradox holding back the clean energy revolution • The New York Times

Ed Conway:

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In the 1990s, when multicolor LED lights were invented by Japanese scientists after decades of research, the hope was that they would help to avert climate catastrophe by greatly reducing the amount of electricity we use. It seemed perfectly intuitive. After all, LED lights use 90% less energy and last around 18 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

Yet the amount of electricity we consume for light globally is roughly the same today as it was in 2010. That’s partly because of population and economic growth in the developing world. But another big reason is there on the Las Vegas Strip: Instead of merely replacing our existing bulbs with LED alternatives, we have come up with ever more extravagant uses for these ever-cheaper lights, from immersive LED art installations and carpets that glow to basketball courts that can play video. As technology has advanced, we’ve only grown more wasteful.

There’s an economic term for this: the Jevons Paradox, named for the 19th-century English economist William Stanley Jevons, who noticed that as steam engines became ever more efficient, Britain’s appetite for coal increased rather than decreased.

We’ve known about the Jevons Paradox for years, but it’s becoming a more troubling problem now that governments have pledged to eliminate their net carbon emissions to slow global warming. A significant part of that carbon reduction is expected to come from using more efficient products, be they electric motors instead of internal combustion engines, or LED lights instead of traditional bulbs. But the logic of Jevons is that instead of banking the efficiency savings we make as technology advances, we go out and spend it.

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This is, indeed, a worry – unless the energy that we so wastefully use is generated by green means. This is why we need the wind farms, solar farms, and nuclear power stations. Especially in view of the next demand source…
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Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret • Nature

Kate Crawford:

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Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years — that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis. It’s an unusual admission. At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.

I’m glad he said it. I’ve seen consistent downplaying and denial about the AI industry’s environmental costs since I started publishing about them in 2018. Altman’s admission has got researchers, regulators and industry titans talking about the environmental impact of generative AI.

So what energy breakthrough is Altman banking on? Not the design and deployment of more sustainable AI systems — but nuclear fusion. He has skin in that game, too: in 2021, Altman started investing in fusion company Helion Energy in Everett, Washington.

Most experts agree that nuclear fusion won’t contribute significantly to the crucial goal of decarbonizing by mid-century to combat the climate crisis. Helion’s most optimistic estimate is that by 2029 it will produce enough energy to power 40,000 average US households; one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.

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Fusion. Bah. And we haven’t got rid of the colossal waste of bitcoin either.
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Trials and tribulations of 360° video in Juno • Christian Selig

Christian Selig wrote an app called Juno to play YouTube videos natively in Apple’s Vision Pro. But some video, such as 360º video, won’t play, because, well..:

»

if we want to play back a 4K YouTube video on our iOS device, we’re looking at a VP9 video plain and simple. The catch is, you cannot play VP9 videos on iOS unless you’re granted a special entitlement by Apple. The YouTube app has this special entitlement, called com.apple.developer.coremedia.allow-alternate-video-decoder-selection, and so does Safari (and presumably other large video companies like Twitch, Netflix, etc.)

But given that I cannot find any official documentation on that entitlement from Apple, safe to say it’s not an entitlement you or I are going to be able to get, so we cannot play back VP9 video, meaning we cannot play back 4K YouTube videos. Your guess is as good as mine why, maybe it’s very complex to implement if there’s indeed not a native hardware decoder, so Apple doesn’t like giving it out. So if you want 4K YouTube, you’re looking at either a web view or the YouTube app.

(Given that no one could agree on a video format, everyone went back to the drawing board, formed a collective group called the Alliance for Open Media (has Google, Apple, Samsung, Netflix, etc.), and authored the AV1 codec, hopefully creating the one video format to rule them all, with no licensing fees and hopefully no patent issues.

Google uses this on YouTube, and Apple even added a hardware decoder for AV1 in their latest A17 and M3 chips. This means on my iPhone 15 Pro I can play back an AV1 video in iOS’ AVPlayer like butter.

Buuuuttttt, the Apple Vision Pro ships with an M2, which has no such hardware decoder.)

So the tl;dr so far is YouTube uses the VP9 codec for 4K YouTube, and unless you’re special, you can’t playback VP9 video directly, which we need to do to be able to project it onto a sphere. Why not just do 1080p video?

Because even 4K video looks bad in 360 degrees.

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So Apple needs Google to develop the YouTube app to make 360º video useful on the Vision Pro headset. Probably fortunate for Apple that Google isn’t working on a VR headset. As far as we know, anyway.
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Samsung has big ambitions for the Galaxy Ring • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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The Galaxy Ring prototypes I was able to try out were presented in three colors: platinum silver, ceramic black, and gold. I wasn’t allowed to take any photos during that session, but gold looked right at home next to my wedding ring. The Galaxy Ring is lighter than it looks and doesn’t feel as dense as I thought it would. It has a slightly concave shape, and each color was offered in sizes from 5 to 13, which is a slightly wider range of options than usual, with sizes marked as S through XL on the inside of the band.

Samsung’s VP of digital health, Dr. Hon Pak, didn’t specifically say what sensors are in the ring but mentioned sleep insights based on heart rate, movement, and respiratory indicators. Pak says that Samsung’s partnership with Natural Cycles (which already brings period and fertility tracking to its Galaxy Watch series) will extend to the ring, too — putting it in direct competition with the Oura Ring. On the Galaxy Ring, battery size increases slightly in the larger band sizes, though Pak couldn’t share any exact battery life estimates.

The Galaxy Ring will help inform a new metric Samsung is introducing to the Health app in the near future called My Vitality Score. It’s based on a model from the University of Georgia that incorporates four factors: sleep, activity, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability.

The Vitality Score will be a feature of Samsung’s Galaxy Watches, too, coming first to the Watch 6 later this year — but will require a Galaxy S24-series phone to work. Ring owners will also be able to specify certain health goals and receive related updates and tips in the form of something called Booster Cards, which are also coming to the Galaxy Health app later this year.

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It’s always telling which things they don’t want to tell you. In this case: the battery life. The Oura ring, which is a lot more chunky-looking, claims four to seven days. Wonder what Samsung will manage.
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We each have an average of 100 online accounts. Here’s how to make sure they aren’t a nightmare for your family if you die • CNN Business

Samantha Murphy Kelly:

»

When Rebecca Bistany’s 40-year-old husband Paul died suddenly of a heart attack in November 2022, she didn’t know what kind of assets he left behind for her and their infant daughter.

Compounding her heartache, Paul didn’t leave a will. Bistany wanted to access key business and financial accounts by resetting passwords but found herself in a spot many who lose loved ones encounter: She couldn’t get into his phone, leaving her locked out of everything from personal photos to critical estate information.

Her story is tragic and increasingly common. With password management company NordPass saying each person has an average of 100 online accounts, the deaths of loved ones have become ever more complicated.

During already-difficult grieving times, figuring out how to get into, maintain or shut down accounts can range from the personally difficult to financially necessary. And while digital legacy planning can ease some of that burden, experts say far too few people take advantage of those tools.

“He had a four-digit passcode and I literally tried everything I could,” Bistany, who lives on Long Island, New York, told CNN. “I kept a list of what I tried because the more you got it wrong, the longer it would lock you out. I did it so many times, I can’t even try anymore.”

Although she contacted Apple, AT&T and even the police asking for help unlocking the phone, companies do not allow family members access unless the owner lists them as their legacy contact. Still, she keeps his phone number active, paying a monthly plan and holding out hope she’ll one day be able to access not only financial accounts but years of photos and videos of their life together.

And even for some people who can access their loved one’s accounts, the process can be daunting. Laura Orrico, a widow from Chicago, said she had to hire an IT professional to help go through everything on her late husband’s computer. “I had widow brain,” she said. “I couldn’t even organize a drawer let alone figure out his computer.”

Experts recommend people of all ages develop a digital legacy plan, from putting passwords in one place to deciding what happens to your social media presence.

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You could put your passcode and essential passwords in your will, I suppose? Besides the electronic method of legacy contacts.
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Cycling UK hails “clever” policing after bait bicycle used to track down £130,000 bike theft gang in one shift • road.cc

Dan Alexander:

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Cycling UK has urged more police forces to consider the “substantial results” that can be yielded from “sensible, clever policing” to tackle bike theft, without needing “massive intelligence or money”. The comments come after City of London Police managed to track down a bike theft gang in a single shift, the thieves found with a huge collection of stolen bicycles totalling £130,000 in value, the haul believed to be the biggest of its kind in the force’s history.

Last week we reported that four more men had been jailed for their role in the organised crime operation which saw the prolific theft of bicycles in the City of London during 2020, police ultimately bringing the gang down in November of that year by tracking a bait bicycle, left in the area with the intention of getting it stolen so officers could track the thieves back to their base.

…Detective Constable Matt Cooper this week spoke to the Daily Mail (link is external) and recalled the moment they tracked the bait bike back to a plant hire business in east London where £130,000 worth of stolen bikes were discovered.

“I was just shocked,” he said. “We had tracked one stolen bike to a plant hire business in East London — and found about 60 more. Bikes in the office, bikes in the toilet, bikes hanging up on rails, bikes stacked up everywhere. There was about £130,000 worth. It was hard to take in.

“We bought a relatively high-value bike and left it locked up in Rood Lane, off Fenchurch Street. This is an area targeted by bike thieves — but there is also a lot of CCTV coverage. We left it there in the morning and it was stolen by thieves, who cut through the lock with an angle grinder, at 2.30pm.”

Once the gang had been tracked to a warehouse on a business estate in Tower Hamlets, two members were arrested at 3.12pm on the same day, with stolen bikes and mobile phones seized.

“It took three of our biggest police vehicles to transport all the bikes to Bishopsgate police station — and colleagues in the property store are still emailing me to ask when they can go,” the detective constable continued.

“The CCTV footage shows some of them arriving four or five times a day, from first thing in the morning to last thing at night, each time with a new bike.

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Stolen with an angle grinder in central London, in the middle of the day, in full view of multiple offices.
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Climate techno-fixes raise concerns among the UK’s civil servants • Climate Change News

Joe Lo:

»

British civil servants have grave doubts about their government’s favoured techno-fixes for climate-polluting industries like meat production and air travel, new documents show.

In risk assessments made public because of an ongoing court case, officials warned that technology to reduce methane emissions from cow burps is “nascent” and there might not be enough plants or hydrogen available to power the world’s planes more sustainably.

Yet despite the uncertainties surrounding these and other climate solutions like carbon dioxide removal, the UK government is relying on such technologies to meet a big chunk of its climate plans.

Internal government documents disclosed in court show civil servants had “low” or “very low” confidence in about half of the planned emissions reductions up to 2037 and “very high confidence” in just a tiny fraction.

In court, the government’s lawyer said that these categories should not be taken out of context – and that certain measures could be rated “very low confidence” just because it is “early days”.

The risk analysis was put together by unnamed civil servants at the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in 2022 and was supposed to help shape the government’s latest carbon budget delivery plan, aimed at keeping the country on track for net-zero emissions by mid-century.

The plan was published in March 2023 along with a sanitised version of the risks and uncertainties that civil servants foresaw in meeting it.

But the full risk tables were made public this week as environmental campaigners took the government to court, arguing that civil servants did not give then climate minister Grant Shapps enough information to judge whether the UK’s climate plan was sufficient.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Fingertips are incredibly sensitive, able to feel objects at nanometre scale. CC-licensed photo by Bart Everson on Flickr.

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

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

Texas’s social-media law is dangerous. Striking it down could be worse • The Atlantic

Zephyr Teachout:

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As a progressive legal scholar and activist, I never would have expected to end up on the same side as Greg Abbott, the conservative governor of Texas, in a Supreme Court dispute. But a pair of cases being argued next week have scrambled traditional ideological alliances.

The arguments concern laws in Texas and Florida, passed in 2021, that if allowed to go into effect would largely prevent the biggest social-media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok, from moderating their content. The tech companies have challenged those laws—which stem from Republican complaints about “shadowbanning” and “censorship”—under the First Amendment, arguing that they have a constitutional right to allow, or not allow, whatever content they want. Because the laws would limit the platforms’ ability to police hate speech, conspiracy theories, and vaccine misinformation, many liberal organizations and Democratic officials have lined up to defend giant corporations that they otherwise tend to vilify. On the flip side, many conservative groups have taken a break from dismantling the administrative state to support the government’s power to regulate private businesses. Everyone’s bedfellows are strange.

I joined a group of liberal law professors who filed a brief on behalf of Texas. Many of our traditional allies think that siding with Abbott and his attorney general, Ken Paxton, is ill-advised to say the least, and I understand that. The laws in question are bad, and if upheld, will have bad consequences. But a broad constitutional ruling against them—a ruling that holds that the government cannot prohibit dominant platforms from unfairly discriminating against certain users—would be even worse.

…The Texas law says that platforms can’t censor or moderate content based on viewpoint, aside from narrow carve-outs (such as child-abuse material), but it doesn’t explain how that rule is supposed to work. Within First Amendment law, the line between subject matter and viewpoint is infamously difficult to draw, and the broad wording of the Texas statute could lead to platforms abandoning content moderation entirely.

…Last year, the Supreme Court agreed to consider the constitutionality of both laws.

The plaintiff is NetChoice, the lobbying group for the social-media companies. It argues that platforms should be treated like newspapers when they moderate content. In a landmark 1974 case, the Supreme Court struck down a state law that required newspapers to allow political candidates to publish a response to critical coverage. It held that, under the First Amendment, a newspaper is exercising its First Amendment rights when it decides what to publish and what not to publish.

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Apple ponders making new wearables: AI glasses, AirPods with cameras, smart ring • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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For now, the ring idea is just that — an idea. The company isn’t actively developing such a device, but there are certainly people within the walls of Apple’s campus promoting the concept. The glasses, meanwhile, are in an exploratory phase known as “technology investigation” within Apple’s hardware engineering division. The company also is looking into other ideas, such as equipping AirPods with cameras.

Let’s begin with the hypothetical ring, which would be focused on heath and fitness. There are many people who buy the Apple Watch for health tracking. They want to monitor their heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, calories burned and steps taken. And there’s an overlap between that group and people who don’t necessarily want the other bells and whistles of an Apple Watch — like apps and phone calls.

There are also millions of people who don’t want an Apple Watch because they prefer traditional wristwatches or don’t like wearing one at all. Or they dread the idea of having another device that needs nightly charging.

That’s where the ring comes in. Such a device could serve as a low-cost way to gather key health data without the need to wear a full-blown watch. Samsung Electronics Co. and Oura Health Oy have both already shown this notion is feasible. Samsung is preparing to launch its first ring later this year, and Oura has turned the concept into a big enough business to be mulling an initial public offering.

Apple could tie the ring to its Health and Fitness apps and sell it is as an iPhone accessory. It won’t generate as much money as a smartwatch, but Apple can court a new type of customer (and even theoretically offer it as a subscription). Finally, an Apple ring owner would be less likely to ditch the iPhone for an Android device.

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Gurman’s sources are generally good, but his logic is utterly rubbish. First, Samsung is pushing the idea that Apple is “doing a ring” because it is, and wants to be seen as offering the Android alternative; if Apple never produces a ring, or is never described as even thinking about doing one, Samsung is basically hung out to dry.; Oura is not a name on anyone’s lips. The ring is not a thing Apple will do, even though it’s not going to come out and say so.

Next, charging. What items does Apple sell whose charging lasts more than 48 hours of continuous use? The Watch Ultra, perhaps; AirTags; Bluetooth keyboards, mice, trackpads. Ring? Would have to be super-low-power (and hence not much use.)
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The state of the culture, 2024 • The Honest Broker

Ted Gioia:

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A whistleblower released internal documents showing how Instagram use leads to depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. Mark Zuckerberg was told all the disturbing details.

He doesn’t care. The CEOs all know the score. The more their tech gets used, the worse all the psychic metrics get.

But still they push aggressively forward—they don’t want to lose market share to the other dopamine cartel members. And with a special focus on children. They figured out what every junk peddler already knows: It’s more profitable to get users locked in while they’re young.

And the virtual reality headsets raise even more issues—because they rewire users’ brains. Experts are already talking about “simulator sickness,” and that’s just the physical nausea, dizziness, and headaches. Imagine the psychic dislocations.

And you thought artists had it tough back in the day?

Even the dumbest entertainment looks like Shakespeare compared to dopamine culture. You don’t need Hamlet, a photo of a hamburger will suffice. Or a video of somebody twerking, or a pet looking goofy.

Instead of movies, users get served up an endless sequence of 15-second videos. Instead of symphonies, listeners hear bite-sized melodies, usually accompanied by one of these tiny videos—just enough for a dopamine hit, and no more.

This is the new culture. And its most striking feature is the absence of Culture (with a capital C) or even mindless entertainment—both get replaced by compulsive activity.

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As Elon Musk would say: concerning. (Thanks Owen F for the link.)
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Feeling small: fingers can detect nano-scale wrinkles even on a seemingly smooth surface • ScienceDaily

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In a ground-breaking study, Swedish scientists have shown that people can detect nano-scale wrinkles while running their fingers upon a seemingly smooth surface. The findings could lead such advances as touch screens for the visually impaired and other products, says one of the researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

The study marks the first time that scientists have quantified how people feel, in terms of a physical property. One of the authors, Mark Rutland, Professor of Surface Chemistry, says that the human finger can discriminate between surfaces patterned with ridges as small as 13 nanometres in amplitude and non-patterned surfaces.

“This means that, if your finger was the size of the Earth, you could feel the difference between houses from cars,” Rutland says. “That is one of the most enjoyable aspects of this research. We discovered that a human being can feel a bump corresponding to the size of a very large molecule.”

The research team consisted of Rutland and KTH PhD student Lisa Skedung, and psychologist Birgitta Berglund and PhD student Martin Arvidsson from Stockholm Universiy. Their paper, Feeling Small: Exploring the Tactile Perception Limits, was published on September 12 in Scientific Reports. The research was financed by a grant from Vinnova and the Knowledge Foundation to the SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden. Rutland says that the project will pursue applications of the research together with SP.

The study highlights the importance of surface friction and wrinkle wavelength, or wrinkle width — in the tactile perception of fine textures.

When a finger is drawn over a surface, vibrations occur in the finger. People feel these vibrations differently on different structures. The friction properties of the surface control how hard we press on the surface as we explore it. A high friction surface requires us to press less to achieve the optimum friction force.

“This is the breakthrough that allows us to design how things feel and are perceived,” he says. “It allows, for example, for a certain portion of a touch screen on a smartphone to be designed to feel differently by vibration.”

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This appeared in 2013, and it seemed interesting enough to use now. Also, fingers haven’t changed. The touchscreens never came through, though, did they. (I did see some Finnish research in 2012 which gave touchscreens texture: it was really interesting. Came to nothing.)
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How Saudi Arabia ‘buys Guinness World Records in new whitewashing’

Jack Malvern:

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Guinness World Records (GWR) is a bestseller every year, drawing in readers with descriptions of the longest accordion recital (51 hours, 43 minutes and 40 seconds) and the longest mullet hairstyle (172.72 cm).

Less well known is the company’s sideline of accepting money to help authoritarian governments put out positive messages about their record-breaking achievements.

This week, GWR certified ten new records for Saudi Arabia, which is condemned by human rights groups as a repressive state that is holding two people on death row who were children at the time of their alleged offences.

While individuals who submit records are expected to do something interesting to gain entry to GWR’s index, the records announced this week included “largest covered water reservoir for storing drinking water”, “largest multi-effect distillation desalination unit” and “largest dental hospital”.

Analysis by The Times of GWR’s database shows that Saudi Arabia has rapidly increased its tally of records since 2019. Of the records listed with dates, 54 were certified before 2019 and 160 afterwards. In 2023 alone it set 56, including “largest intellectual property lesson” and “smallest floating golf green”.

GWR said that of the 223 records it held that listed Saudi Arabia as the location of the attempt, 135 were the result of paid-for consultations.

The company’s consultation service, which offers to “deliver a customised solution that works to your budget”, started as a sideline but now makes more money than its publishing arm. In its most recent accounts, for 2022, it made £12.37m from consulting and £12.32m from publishing.

…GWR admitted that its “inclusive approach comes with risks, so we take our lead from the UK and US governments on where we are able to do business”.

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Magician says a Democratic operative paid him to make the fake Biden robocall that spread in New Hampshire • NBC News

Alex Seitz-Wald:

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A Democratic consultant who worked for a rival presidential campaign paid a New Orleans magician to use artificial intelligence to impersonate President Joe Biden for a robocall that is now at the center of a multistate law enforcement investigation, according to text messages, call logs and Venmo transactions the creator shared with NBC News.

Paul Carpenter says he was hired in January by Steve Kramer — who has worked on ballot access for Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips — to use AI software to make the imitation of Biden’s voice urging New Hampshire Democrats not to vote in the state’s presidential primary.

“I created the audio used in the robocall. I did not distribute it,” Carpenter said in an interview in New Orleans, where he is currently residing. “I was in a situation where someone offered me some money to do something, and I did it. There was no malicious intent. I didn’t know how it was going to be distributed.”

Carpenter — who holds world records in fork-bending and straitjacket escapes, but has no fixed address — showed NBC News how he created the fake Biden audio and said he came forward because he regrets his involvement in the ordeal and wants to warn people about how easy it is to use AI to mislead.

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Kramer told NBC News that he’d explain it all in an op-end to be published last Saturday. Web search reveals no article by Kramer. However, on Sunday he did confirm to NBC News that he was behind it.
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When media outlets shutter, why are the websites wiped, too? • Slate

Scott Nover:

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there are technical challenges around maintaining a defunct website. Greg Lavallee, Slate’s vice president of technology, was kind enough to clue me in on those. There are innumerable problems with maintaining the original website—links, code scripts, and ad networks can quickly present security risks if not properly monitored and maintained. “It wouldn’t be expensive to maintain the content,” Lavallee explained. “It would be expensive to maintain functionality: logins, membership programs, commenting systems, anything that has any kind of user input or interaction.”

Lavallee suggested that media execs—or anyone looking to archive a defunct site—use the free, open-source project Webrecorder, which allows people to effectively download full archives of their sites and then host the archive instead of the original site: “You need to make a copy that’s frozen, but frozen in an intelligent manner.” The only cost would be for hosting the site.

One executive at a major media company, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me it is “very, very cheap to host an archive of static pages for a large website—like a few hundred dollars a month, with the cost entirely dependent on how much traffic it gets.” (Traffic to a defunct site would, predictably, fall and ad networks can quickly become co-opted by bad actors running malware, Lavallee said, noting it wouldn’t be worth it to try to monetize remaining traffic.) Sure, a few hundred dollars a month is not nothing—and if you’re a media exec who has created a dumpster fire that you are trying to move on from, it’s probably really annoying! For a billionaire media owner like Finkelstein or a media company that was once valued at $5.7bn like Vice (which, yes, has since filed for bankruptcy), this shouldn’t be an insurmountable cost.

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News agencies rebel over ‘unrealistic and unworkable’ Sun and Times payment terms • Press Gazette

Bron Maher:

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The trade association representing Britain’s independent press agencies has warned of a “mass rebellion” against the publisher of The Sun and The Times over what it calls its “tyrannical” treatment of freelances.

The National Association of Press Agencies (NAPA) says rates of pay imposed on agencies by News UK have not increased in up to 40 years due to a decades-old self-billing system.

And it claims that unless the publisher urgently reviews its relationship with agencies, their news and picture suppliers could seek legal redress and move to their own invoicing business models to secure better payment.

“Unsung heroes” of the news industry argue they have been “tied in” to decades-old payment terms
Press agencies provide consumer news brands with content to supplement the work of their own journalists. Times editor Tony Gallagher described them as the “unsung heroes” of the news industry for the volume of content they anonymously contribute, when he spoke at the NAPA awards in 2017.

Under self-billing agreements publications pay agencies and freelancers using a rate card calculated by the publications themselves, some of which the agencies say were drawn up as long ago as the early 1980s. It means agencies are paid after publication at pre-agreed rates for whatever content is used.

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Utterly amazing. But totally believable. Roughly the same is true for writing: rates have hardly moved for the vast majority for three decades.
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The varieties of inner experience: anauralics lack the ability to imagine sounds, the auditory analogue to aphantasia • Nautilus

Ajdina Halilovic:

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Jessie Donaldson has played the flute for 26 years. One of her favorite pieces to play is “Romance No. 2” by Beethoven, a sweet and stately composition for flute, oboes, bassoons, horns, and violin. But mentally rehearsing the flute part is tricky for the occupational therapist, who lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Jessie lacks the ability to simulate sounds in her mind. When I ask her to conjure the music that she has mastered over decades, she says she can feel the fingerings she has practiced, but can’t hear the parts in her mind’s ear. In those moments, Jessie’s mind is filled with thoughts of the rhythm and structure of the music but none of the actual sounds her flute or the other instruments produce.

Going as far back as she can remember, this same silence permeates her memories, too. “I know what the sound of a laugh is,” she tells me, “but I can’t hear it in my mind. I have no memories with sounds.” Jessie only discovered that this was unusual when, by chance, she met a researcher who studies people like her.

​​​​If you think of a sound, such as a dog barking, a loved one’s voice, or a favorite tune, to what extent can you hear that sound in your mind? Not at all? As vividly as actually hearing it in real time and space? Somewhere in between? Researchers have long understood that people’s sensory imaginations vary widely. But it is only in the last decade that they have started paying close attention to those at the ends of this spectrum.

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Like people who can’t imagine objects, but this time for sounds. The two often overlap. And you also get the opposite – people who are really good at imagining objects are good at it for sounds.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Solar panels can dramatically cut the running costs of a home – but usually, only the well-off can afford them. How do we help those who can’t? CC-licensed photo by Oregon State University on Flickr.

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

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about a tricky job where AI started taking over – and made humans better at it, at least for a 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.

Instacart’s AI recipes look literally impossible • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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I hate cookbooks without pictures. We eat with our eyes first, as chefs love to say, but what’s more important to me is that if I’m making a dish for the first time, I want to see what the final product should look like to know I did it right. It’s not so much about presentation as it is about knowing that I browned the chicken skin enough.

An image of a recipe will not be this useful, I think, if it was AI-generated, and especially so if the fact that the image was AI-generated wasn’t disclosed by the recipe. That, to my surprise, is exactly the case with thousands of recipes the grocery delivery service Instacart is suggesting to its users. Some of the recipes include unheard of measurements and ingredients that don’t appear to exist. Business Insider first reported about Instacart’s AI generated recipes in January.

Generally, I try to avoid using Instacart if possible because it treats its workers badly, but I had just come back from the hospital with a newborn and was desperate enough to pay a lot of money to have eggs and some other basics delivered to my doorstep. As I was browsing, I noticed that Instacart was offering me recipes that appeared to complement the ingredients I was looking at. 

The concept doesn’t make a ton of sense to me—I’m going to Instacart for the ingredients I know I need for the food I know I’m going to make, not for food inspiration—but I had to click on a recipe for “Watermelon Popsicle with Chocolate Chips” because it looked weird in the thumbnail. 

Since I have eyeballs with optical nerves that are connected to a semi-functioning brain I can tell that the image was generated by AI. To be more specific, I can see that the top corner of the plate doesn’t match its square shape, that the table-ish looking thing it’s resting on is made up of jumbled slats (AI is particularly bad at making these series of long, straight lines), and then there are the titular watermelon popsicles, which defy physical reality. They clip into each other like bad 3D models in a video game, one of them to the left appears hollow, and for some reason they are skewered by what appears to be asparagus spears on the bottom end and capped by impossible small watermelon rinds at the top. 

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But also, chocolate chips on watermelon? Instacart juggled around the images once it was found out, but it’s still using AI. Are we really feeding people recipes that AI has dreamed up? Because that doesn’t sound like a good idea.
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The solar panel theory of socioeconomic unfairness • BusinessGreen

James Murray:

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In his 1993 novel Men at Arms, the late, great comic writer Terry Pratchett deployed one of his characters to present what was to become a famous economic theory: “A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

A similar phenomenon is at risk of undermining the net zero transition. A solar panel theory of socioeconomic unfairness, if you will.

Solar panels and other clean technologies slash energy and fuel bills for households, while minimising exposure to future energy price hikes and air pollution. A recent analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit calculated the average household that improved its energy efficiency, installed solar panels and a heat pump, and switched to an EV would enjoy running costs that were nearly £2,000 a year lower than a household with no clean technologies in place. Which is great, but like Pratchett’s boots you can only access those savings if you can afford to deploy the technologies in the first place. Meanwhile, poorer households spend thousands of pounds more on their energy bills and are still cold. 

To make this unfairness worse still, it is lower income households that are most exposed to the higher food and insurance costs that are resulting from worsening climate impacts, not to mention the inherently regressive short term levies imposed on energy bills to help fund the necessary upfront investment in cleaner energy infrastructure that should curb costs in the long term. 

Of course, the costs and benefits associated with solar panels are not quite as simple as Pratchett’s expensive boots. When it comes to climate change we really are all in it together. Everyone benefits from improved air quality, reduced fossil gas imports, and lower carbon emissions. But while there are net gains for the economy as a whole, it remains true the financial savings are most immediately apparent for those who can afford to deploy clean technologies relatively early in the transition.

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There are of course schemes in the UK where a company will install the panels and either take a cut of the feed-in tariff or just treat the installation as a long-term loan; that makes it more affordable. (Also, I don’t think Pratchett invented the idea; “only the rich can afford cheap shoes” has been a saying for a long time.)
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New York judge rebukes law firm for using ChatGPT to justify its fees • FT

Joe Miller:

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A New York judge has scolded a law firm for citing ChatGPT to support its application for “excessive” attorneys’ fees of up to $600 an hour.

The Cuddy Law Firm had invoked the predictive artificial intelligence tool in a declaration to the court over a case it won against the city’s education department. It said it had done so “to provide context to what a parent — having ChatGPT-4 open and available to them — might take away in researching whether to hire an attorney and who to accept or reject”.

When asked what would be a “reasonable hourly rate” to expect for an associate attorney with up to three years experience in a hearing over disabilities education, the large language model said it could “range anywhere from $200 to $500 an hour”, an attorney at the firm wrote.

He also pointed out that ChatGPT concluded that “lawyers who specialise in a certain type of law (such as special education law, in this case) may command higher rates” and that an attorney with “25 years of experience” might command an hourly rate of up to $1,200 “or even more”.

Judge Paul Engelmayer, who ultimately cut the fees to be awarded to Cuddy’s lawyers by more than half, called the firm’s reliance on the AI program “utterly and unusually unpersuasive”, adding that “barring a paradigm shift in the reliability of this tool, the [firm] is well advised to excise references to ChatGPT from future fee applications”.

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I think I might have been inclined to cut their fees to zero for being so unutterably stupid. What is it about American lawyers and ChatGPT?
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Scientists claim AI breakthrough to generate boundless clean fusion energy • Vice

Mirjam Guesgen:

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Donut-shaped tokamak reactors rely on magnets to squeeze plasma particles close together and keep them constantly spinning around a ring, creating a lasting fusion reaction. They’re one of the front-runners in designs for a practical fusion reactor. But if there’s one little disruption to the magnetic field lines running through the plasma, the delicate balance keeping it all contained gets out of whack: The plasma escapes the magnets’ clutches and the reaction ends. 

Chijin Xiao, a plasma physicist at the University of Saskatchewan who wasn’t involved in the study, explained that these instabilities can lead to catastrophic consequences. “When the plasma stops operating, there are several risks: one is that all the energy stored in the plasma is going to be released as thermal energy and may damage the wall of the reactor,” she said. “More importantly, a sudden change in the [magnetic] current can introduce a great deal of force on the reactor that can really destroy the device.”

Xiao added that one of the biggest tokamak reactors around today, ITER in France, is only designed to withstand a few of these plasma disruptions before the whole machine has to be repaired—a huge expense. The goal is to catch instabilities while they’re small and intervene.

The Princeton lab’s model can predict so-called tearing mode instabilities 300 milliseconds before they happen. It doesn’t sound like a lot of heads-up, but it’s enough time to get the plasma under control, their study shows.

Researchers tested the algorithm on a real reactor, the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego. They saw that their AI-based system could control the power being pumped into the reactor and the shape of the plasma to keep the swirling particles in check.

Co-author Azarakhsh Jalalvand said in a statement that the success of the AI model comes from the fact that it was trained on real data from previous fusion experiments, rather than theoretical physics models. 

“We don’t teach the reinforcement learning model all of the complex physics of a fusion reaction,” Jalalvand said. “We tell it what the goal is—to maintain a high-powered reaction—what to avoid—a tearing mode instability—and the knobs it can turn to achieve those outcomes. Over time, it learns the optimal pathway for achieving the goal of high power while avoiding the punishment of an instability.”

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*weary voice* hurrah, boundless clean energy is only *checks watch* 20 years away again
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Scientists are putting ChatGPT brains inside robot bodies. What could possibly go wrong? • Scientific American

David Berreby:

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Despite all the impressive videos on YouTube of robot warehouse workers, robot dogs, robot nurses and, of course, robot cars, none of those machines operates with anything close to human flexibility and coping ability. “Classical robotics is very brittle because you have to teach the robot a map of the world, but the world is changing all the time,” says Naganand Murty, CEO of Electric Sheep, a company whose landscaping robots must deal with constant changes in weather, terrain and owner preferences. For now, most working robots labor much as their predecessors did a generation ago: in tightly limited environments that let them follow a tightly limited script, doing the same things repeatedly.

…LLMs have what robots lack: access to knowledge about practically everything humans have ever written, from quantum physics to K-pop to defrosting a salmon fillet. In turn, robots have what LLMs lack: physical bodies that can interact with their surroundings, connecting words to reality. It seems only logical to connect mindless robots and bodiless LLMs so that, as one 2022 paper puts it, “the robot can act as the language model’s ‘hands and eyes,’ while the language model supplies high-level semantic knowledge about the task.”

…When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, it was “a bit of an ‘aha’ moment” for engineers at Levatas, a West Palm Beach firm that provides software for robots that patrol and inspect industrial sites, says its CEO, Chris Nielsen. With ChatGPT and Boston Dynamics, the company cobbled together a prototype robot dog that can speak, answer questions and follow instructions given in ordinary spoken English, eliminating the need to teach workers how to use it. “For the average common industrial employee who has no robotic training, we want to give them the natural-language ability to tell the robot to sit down or go back to its dock,” Nielsen says.

Levatas’s LLM-infused robot seems to grasp the meaning of words—and the intent behind them. It “knows” that although Jane says “back up” and Joe says “get back,” they both mean the same thing. Instead of poring over a spreadsheet of data from the machine’s last patrol, a worker can simply ask, “What readings were out of normal range in your last walk?”

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But, and here is the very big but, should you believe the answer you get?
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Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames • Signal Blog

Randall Sarafa is Signal’s chief product officer:

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New default: Your phone number will no longer be visible to everyone in Signal
• If you use Signal, your phone number will no longer be visible to everyone you chat with by default. People who have your number saved in their phone’s contacts will still see your phone number since they already know it.

Connect without sharing your phone number
• If you don’t want to hand out your phone number to chat with someone on Signal, you can now create a unique username that you can use instead (you will still need a phone number to sign up for Signal). Note that a username is not the profile name that’s displayed in chats, it’s not a permanent handle, and not visible to the people you are chatting with in Signal. A username is simply a way to initiate contact on Signal without sharing your phone number.

Control who can find you on Signal by phone number
• If you don’t want people to be able to find you by searching for your phone number on Signal, you can now enable a new, optional privacy setting. This means that unless people have your exact unique username, they won’t be able to start a conversation, or even know that you have a Signal account – even if they have your phone number.

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This is going to be very welcome, and it’s a smart idea. Giving out your phone number has never felt ideal for an app that’s really very focussed on privacy.

Presently this is in beta, but it’s rolling out over the next few weeks. (In which case.. is that really beta testing?)
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Analysis: record drop required in China’s CO2 emissions to meet 2025 target • Carbon Brief

Lauri Myllyvirta:

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China’s energy sector carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions increased 5.2% in 2023, meaning a record fall of 4-6% is needed by 2025 to meet the government’s “carbon intensity” target.

The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, shows rapid electricity demand growth and weak rains boosted demand for coal power in 2023, while the rebound from zero-Covid boosted demand for oil.

Other key findings from the analysis include:

• China’s CO2 emissions have now increased by 12% between 2020 and 2023, after a highly energy- and carbon-intensive response to the Covid-19 pandemic
• This means CO2 emissions would need to fall by 4-6% by 2025, in order to meet the target of cutting China’s carbon intensity – its CO2 emissions per unit of economic output – by 18% during the 14th five-year plan period
• China is also at risk of missing all of its other key climate targets for 2025, including pledges to “strictly limit” coal demand growth and “strictly control” new coal power capacity, as well as targets for energy intensity, the share of low-carbon energy in overall demand and the share of renewables in energy demand growth
• Government pressure to hit the targets, most of which are in China’s updated international climate pledge under the Paris Agreement, makes it more likely that China’s CO2 emissions will peak before 2025 – far earlier than its target of peaking “before 2030”.

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Come ONNNNN China, come ONNNNN
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Vice’s new owners prepare to slash what’s left of its work force • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

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Executives at Vice Media are planning to lay off hundreds of more than 900 employees over the next week, eliminating staff from its digital publishing division, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The cuts will be the latest in a series of severe cutbacks that the company has endured in recent years, winnowing the globe-spanning digital colossus to a husk of its former self. Over the past half-decade, Vice has had near annual layoffs and mounting losses, and has filed for bankruptcy, making it the poster child for the battered digital-media industry.

When Vice emerged from bankruptcy last year, some observers hoped its new owners — a consortium led by the private-equity firm Fortress Investment Group — would reinvest to return the company to growth.

Instead, Fortress has decided to make sweeping cuts, as part of an attempt to stem the endless tide of red ink. The company is planning to inform employees of its new business strategy in the next week.
Vice did not have any immediate comment.

The layoffs come amid gale-force headwinds for the entire media industry.

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Related: Yahoo lays off the leaders of Engadget, dumping 10 staff, while

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the editorial team will split into two sections: “news and features” and “reviews and buying advice.” The news teams will focus on traffic growth, while the reviews teams will report to commerce leaders.

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Stick a fork in and raise a glass.
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Tech newsbrand with ‘optimistic view’ and 20-strong team launches in London • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

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A technology news brand is launching in London with a 20-strong team hoping to buck the trend of industry decline over the last 12 months.

Digital Frontier has a nine-strong editorial team producing a website, twice-weekly podcast and daily newsletter. Other staff bring the title’s total headcount to 20.

The independent title plans to make revenue from subscriptions, advertising and events. Its plan is to provide deeply-reported journalism, rather than breaking news, and inform business leaders across various sector who need to understand the impact of disruptive technology.

Digital Frontier launches in a business climate which has seen numerous cutbacks and closures, with around 1,000 news media jobs lost in the UK and USA so far this year. However subscriptions and events have been relatively robust – with advertising being the main problem area for publishers, as evidenced by the recent DMGT results.

Digital Frontier is privately owned with investment from Josh Hewes, the founder and chief executive of Blockspace, who has a background in digital assets and financial services.

“Too much contemporary technology journalism falls into one of two traps: on the one hand a fixation on the trivial and on the other a tendency to pessimism. We want to bring rigour and a dose of optimism to the industry. We believe technology has led a huge improvement to people’s lives over the past century and has the potential to drive an even bigger change over the coming century.”

Digital Frontier said it will target an audience of “future-focused leaders, business decision-makers, entrepreneurs and investors”.

It is mainly targeting a B2B audience, but expects to also attract B2C readers.

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That’s a pretty big headcount. Watch this space, I guess.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Minnestoa, the Birkebeiner cross-country ski race used to be a predictable winter fixture. Now the warming climate has made it uncertain. CC-licensed photo by _ Kripptic 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 12 links for you. Believe it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

ChatGPT meltdown: users puzzled by bizarre gibberish bug • Mashable

Mike Pearl:

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ChatGPT hallucinates. We all know this already. But on Tuesday it seemed like someone slipped on a banana peel at OpenAI headquarters and switched on a fun new experimental chatbot called the Synonym Scrambler. 

Actually, ChatGPT was freaking out in many ways yesterday, but one recurring theme was that it would be prompted with a normal question — typically something involving the tech business or the user’s job — and respond with something flowery to the point of unintelligibility. For instance, according to an X post by architect Sean McGuire, the chatbot advised him at one point to ensure that “sesquipedalian safes are cross-keyed and the consul’s cry from the crow’s nest is met by beatine and wary hares a’twist and at winch in the willow.”

These are words, but ChatGPT seems to have been writing in an extreme version of that style where a ninth grader abuses their thesaurus privileges. “Beatine” is a particularly telling example. I checked the full Oxford English Dictionary and it’s not in there, but Wiktionary says it relates to the theologian Beatus of Liébana, a scholar of the end times who died in the year 800, so maybe “beatine” meant “apocalyptic” at some point in the first millennium CE. Or, judging from how it’s used in dusty old books, maybe it’s just another way of saying “beatific” which one would think is already an obscure enough word. In other words, ChatGPT was giving new meaning to the term “esoteric.” 

The chatbot was briefly doing things like this to tons of its users. One Redditor, homtanksreddit, noted that ChatGPT 3.5 — the one available to free users — was apparently unaffected, so the bug may have only affected paying users.

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Perhaps in retrospect it was a mistake to expand its training data with those James Joyce books.
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Apple’s new Sports app for the iPhone is all about the scores • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

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Since the day the iPhone first went on sale, it’s come with Apple’s apps for checking the weather and monitoring stock prices. Now the company is finally getting around to offering an app that delivers timely information of a different sort with at least as much mass appeal: sports scores.

Named (probably inevitably) Apple Sports, the app is available in the App Store starting today. It features schedules of upcoming games, real-time play-by-play details on ones in progress, player stats, links to broadcasts on Apple TV where applicable, and (though they can be turned off) betting odds. Leagues currently covered include NBA, men’s and women’s NCAA basketball, NHL, MLS, Bundesliga, LaLiga, Liga MX, Ligue 1, Premiere League, and Serie A, with MLB,  NFL, NCAAF, NWSL, and WNBA on the way when their seasons start.

Apple has already offered a way to keep tabs on schedules, scores, and stats in the form of My Sports, a feature in Apple News and Apple TV. But in those apps, scores are just one part of the sports experience, and sports are just one slice of the overall mission, albeit an important one. Apple Sports, which will sync with favorites users have already selected in My Sports, doesn’t do anything but sports. And it isn’t even trying to be the ultimate hub for fans.

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It’s pretty dull, and in the UK doesn’t have much (yet). But you can see this as a pathway to much bigger things – particularly pushing immersive video of sports for the Vision Pro. Speaking of which..
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Apple teases MLS playoffs Immersive Video for Vision Pro coming soon, shot in 8K 3D • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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As this year’s MLS season kicks off, Apple is promoting its MLS Season Pass subscription service in full-force. Hidden in today’s launch, however, is a tidbit for Vision Pro users for the “first-ever sports film captured in Apple Immersive Video.”

In a press release today, Apple says that a new film showcasing the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs is coming soon for all Vision Pro users. The film was captured in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view with Spatial Audio, according to Apple:

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Coming soon, all Apple Vision Pro users can experience the best of the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs with the first-ever sports film captured in Apple Immersive Video. Viewers will feel every heart-pounding moment in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio that transports them to each match.

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Apple doesn’t have any additional details to share on this right now. It’s the first sports-related content announcement we’ve seen for Apple Vision Pro. Apple has shown off things like MLS, NBA, and MLB games in their promotional material for Vision Pro, but nothing had been formally announced until now.

Vision Pro users won’t need an MLS Season Pass subscription to watch this film.

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Now things begin to get interesting.
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Adobe brings conversational AI to trillions of PDFs with the new AI Assistant in Reader and Acrobat • Adobe

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Today, Adobe introduced AI Assistant in beta, a new generative AI-powered conversational engine in Reader and Acrobat. Deeply integrated into Reader and Acrobat workflows, AI Assistant instantly generates summaries and insights from long documents, answers questions and formats information for sharing in emails, reports and presentations. AI Assistant is bringing generative AI to the masses, unlocking new value from the information inside the approximately 3 trillion PDFs in the world.

AI Assistant leverages the same artificial intelligence and machine learning models behind Acrobat Liquid Mode, the award-winning technology that supports responsive reading experiences for PDFs on mobile. These proprietary models provide a deep understanding of PDF structure and content, enhancing quality and reliability in AI Assistant outputs. 

“Generative AI offers the promise of more intelligent document experiences by transforming the information inside PDFs into actionable, knowledge and professional-looking content,” said Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president, Document Cloud. “PDF is the de facto standard for the world’s most important documents and the capabilities introduced today are just the beginning of the value AI Assistant will deliver through Reader and Acrobat applications and services.”

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So basically it’s a TL;DR machine. What’s the point of having a long document if it just gets summarised? Is this a modern version of “if I’d had more time I’d have written a shorter letter”?
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AI search is a doomsday cult • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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Generative AI, where it is right now, is not totally dissimilar from what happened during the cryptocurrency bubble during the height of the pandemic: Hundreds of startups, flush with cash from a bull market, started trying to build crypto-backed consumer products after they had already decided the technology was the future — not the other way around. 

Case in point: the Arc Browser.

For years, The Browser Company has been promising to save the internet. Its Arc Browser is a smart refresh of what a modern gateway to the web should look and feel like and it generated a lot of goodwill with early users. And then, earlier this month, they released their AI-powered search app, which “browses the internet for you.”

The Browser Company’s new app lets you ask semantic questions to a chatbot, which then summarizes live internet results in a simulation of a conversation. Which is great, in theory, as long as you don’t have any concerns about whether what it’s saying is accurate, don’t care where that information is coming from or who wrote it, and don’t think through the long-term feasibility of a product like this even a little bit.

But the base logic of something like Arc’s AI search doesn’t even really make sense. As Engadget recently asked in their excellent teardown of Arc’s AI search pivot, “Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us?” But let’s take a step even further here. Why even bother making new websites if no one’s going to see them? At least with the Web3 hype cycle, there were vague platitudes about ownership and financial freedom for content creators. To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist.

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Broderick is really good at putting his finger on the flaws of these ideas amid all the noise.
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Dynabook Americas recalls 15.5m Toshiba laptop AC adapters due to burn and fire hazards • CPSC.gov

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Hazard: the laptop AC adapters can overheat and spark, posing burn and fire hazards.

This recall involves AC adapters sold with Toshiba brand personal laptop computers as well as sold separately. They have date codes between April 2008 through December 2012 in either a year month, date format, i.e. April 2008 is 0804, or year week, date format, i.e. week 15 of 2008 is 0815.

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Are there really 15.5 million of these still in use? The oldest is going to be 16 years old, the youngest 12 years old. Though some people might have kept the chargers just to use on newer machines, perhaps.
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Putting your wet iPhone in rice to dry it is a bad move, Apple warns • Macworld

Michael Simon:

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For years, we’ve turned to a simple household staple when we need to save our iPhones from a liquid death: a bag of rice. The method is decidedly low-tech. Just pop your phone in a bag of rice, seal it up, and wait for a day or so. The idea is that the rice will draw the water out from inside the phone before it can fry any internal parts. People who have experienced waterlogged phones swear by it, and there’s tons of anecdotal evidence to show that it does indeed work.

However, researchers have been claiming for years that it’s all a myth and rice doesn’t actually dry your phone faster and could slow down the process, leaving your logic board susceptible to further damage. And a new 2024 support document from Apple actually advises against using rice to dry out your iPhone since it could make matters worse, as “doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone.”

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Basically, the phones now are (quick dunk) waterproof; the only place where you might have a problem is the connector, which means the support document is all about dealing with that.
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The death of snow in America: winters are getting permanently warmer • Business Insider

Alexandria Herr:

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Jocie Nelson has been cross-country skiing for as long as she can remember. When she was growing up, the sport was her way of connecting with nature during the long, harsh Minnesota winters, where temperatures often reach the minus 30s Fahrenheit. Thousands of Americans share her enthusiasm: Since high school, Nelson has joined nearly 15,000 other skiers in the American Birkebeiner, a 50km cross-country ski race through the small town of Hayward, Wisconsin. The crowds of spectators line several people deep.

“Everybody is cheering like crazy,” Nelson said of her first time crossing the finish line, “and it seems like they’re all cheering for you.”

Nelson is now approaching her 25th race, but this year, the event is facing major roadblocks. “We’re looking at a low-snow year. These bands of snow just completely have missed Hayward,” Shawn Connelly, the Birkebeiner Ski Foundation’s marketing and communications director, said. Despite worries around cancellation, the Birkebeiner is moving forward, albeit with a shortened and altered course.

Across much of the upper Midwest, last December was the warmest ever recorded. In Minneapolis, it was a tropical 54ºF (12ºC) on Christmas. Minnesota’s State Climatology Office dubbed this year “The Lost Winter.” While the warm weather is in part exacerbated by this year’s El Niño weather pattern, it’s also a sign of what’s to come as the climate warms. February marked the first time Earth warmed 1.5ºC over the prior 12 months, a milestone long dreaded by climate scientists. In other words, this isn’t just a fluke; it’s the beginning of a new normal.

The climate crisis is altering our winters forever — making them warmer, shorter, and less predictable. As a result, communities around the world are hurtling toward what the researchers Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin have dubbed “the snow-loss cliff.” Their research has found that once temperatures reach a certain threshold, snow disappears faster and faster. The magic number, it turns out, is an average winter temperature of 17ºF (-8ºC). After that, the warmer a region gets, the more rapidly it shifts toward a snow-free future.

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To me, that’s a low average temperature, but it’s in the research.
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Google to fix AI picture bot after ‘woke’ criticism • BBC News

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Google is racing to fix its new AI-powered tool for creating pictures, after claims it was over-correcting against the risk of being racist.

Users said the firm’s Gemini bot supplied images depicting a variety of genders and ethnicities even when doing so was historically inaccurate. For example, a prompt seeking images of America’s founding fathers turned up women and people of colour. The company said its tool was “missing the mark”.

“Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here,” said Jack Krawczyk, senior director for Gemini Experiences. “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” he added.

It is not the first time AI has stumbled over real-world questions about diversity. For example, Google infamously had to apologise almost a decade ago after its photos app labelled a photo of a black couple as “gorillas”.

Rival AI firm, OpenAI was also accused of perpetuating harmful stereotypes, after users found its Dall-E image generator responded to queries for chief executive, for example, with results dominated by pictures of white men.

Google, which is under pressure to prove it is not falling behind in AI developments, released its latest version of Gemini last week.

The bot creates pictures in response to written queries. It quickly drew critics, who accused the company of training the bot to be laughably woke.

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AI your home on Street View • Google Maps Mania

Keir Clarke:

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Have you ever wanted to radically alter the ambiance of your neighborhood? Perhaps you’ve always dreamed of turning your sleepy suburban road into a bustling inner-city street. Or maybe you’ve always wanted to dig up your nearby traffic heavy roads and replace them with green fields and trees. Well now you can – at least virtually.

Panoramai is a new fun tool which allows you to grab Google Maps Street View panoramas from any location in the world and change their appearance based on your own AI prompts. For example the animated GIF above shows my childhood home re-imagined as a Vincent van Gogh painting, as a sc-fi landscape, a post-zombie apocalypse and under 3 feet of water.

You can also change the appearance of your home on Street View using the Netherlands Board of Tourism’s Dutch Cycling Lifestyle map.

It is a matter of great sadness to the Dutch people that people in the rest of the world are not able to live in cycle-friendly environments. Therefore the Netherlands Board of Tourism decided to help the great car-worshiping unwashed picture the beauty of a car free environment. Enter your address into the Dutch Cycling Lifestyle and you can see how your street might look without that noisy road and those dirty cars.

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Though when you go to Panoramai now, it says “We had to turn off the generation of new panoramas for now because of cost. You can still browse pre-computed examples.” AI is pricey!

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Help! AI is stealing my readers • The Honest Broker

Ted Gioia:

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I’ve seen all of the impersonation scams. At least I thought I had until now. Because AI has arrived on the scene.

A few days ago, a friend sent me a photo of a new jazz book. What made this especially interesting is that the author’s last name is Gioia. What an odd coincidence. Gioia is an uncommon name. If there were another jazz writer who shared my name, I’d know about it.

The book is attributed to two authors—Frank Gioia & Ted Alkyer. As it turns out, Alkyer is also a last name familiar to jazz insiders. Frank Alkyer is editor and publisher of the leading jazz magazine Downbeat. Another coincidence!

So I reached out to Frank, and asked him if he knew about this book. He was as shocked as me. Alkyer is also an uncommon name. Neither of us had anything to do with this book. And we don’t know jazz writers with these names—so similar to our own.

You don’t need to be as smart as an Einstein chatbot to figure out what’s happening here. As I told Frank, I’d wager that:
• The book is written by AI
• The people behind it attribute the book to two authors based on us, switching our first names so that no direct impersonation can be proven—ensuring that the book always comes up in the results when somebody does a search for either of us
• Needless to say, these two authors do not exist
• The intent is to fool readers and divert them from anything we’ve written to some crappy AI book.

Both Frank and I filed complaints with Amazon—and the book is no longer listed there. But it’s still available from other retailers. An audiobook has also been released.

A few hours later, a Twitter connection alerted me to another interesting jazz book. It’s written by Luke Ellington.

Luke Ellington? Is he any relation to Duke Ellington?

…It took me decades to become a jazz expert. My writing career really didn’t take off until I was in my forties—because you can’t develop mastery of this material without years of constant effort. Does AI now get to swallow up everything I’ve learned in a few gulps—and then use it to impersonate me?

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Well not exactly – Amazon does that. If books still went through traditional publishers, you’d still be safe. (Thanks Mark C for the link.)
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Fake: it’s only a matter of time until disinformation leads to calamity • Tim Harford

Tim Harford:

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Not long after Eric Hebborn was murdered, an off-the-record conversation with the famed artist-turned-forger was published. On tape, Hebborn made explosive claims about his time as a student at the Royal Academy of Art in the 1950s, where he had been awarded a prestigious prize. Though a gifted draughtsman, he was a surprising choice, because the art of the day was all about high concepts, not realistic depictions. Drawing was an unfashionable business, so how had a mere draughtsman won the prize?

Hebborn explained that, one day, a drunken porter at the Royal Academy was looking for a quiet spot to sleep in the basement and had fashioned a screen made of some of the pictures stored down there. One of those was the only surviving large drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, known as the Burlington House Cartoon, after the Royal Academy’s headquarters. Unfortunately, the porter stacked the Da Vinci against a leaking radiator. By the next morning, the picture had been thoroughly steamed. Only the faintest outline of the sketch remained.

In a panic, the porter summoned the president of the Royal Academy, who summoned the keeper of pictures, who summoned the chief restorer of the National Gallery, who announced that the picture couldn’t be restored, it could only be redrawn. At which point, they sent for star student Eric Hebborn, who wielded his chalk and charcoal in a flawless recreation of the lost original.

Or so Hebborn claimed, noting that it seemed curious that the Royal Academy sold the drawing soon afterwards, and spent some of the money on . . . upgrading its radiators. It was an astonishing story and very hard to check. The drawing was indeed sold to the National Gallery. But one day, in 1987, a man walked into the National Gallery wearing a long coat, paused in front of the drawing, pulled out a shotgun and blasted the artwork. The man, who wanted to make a statement about the social conditions in Britain, was arrested and later confined to an asylum. The National Gallery had the drawing restored, with tiny fragments of paper being painstakingly glued back together. That restoration would have concealed Hebborn’s handiwork, if Hebborn ever touched the cartoon. So — did he?

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*Dirty Harry voice* Well DID HE, PUNK? This is in fact a long piece on the nature of fakery.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified