The question of who owns specific parts of the Moon if they’re commercially valuable has never been raised. Soon it might be. CC-licensed photo by marcus agrippa on Flickr.

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

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

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

Automakers are sharing consumers’ driving behavior with insurance companies • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

»

In recent years, insurance companies have offered incentives to people who install dongles in their cars or download smartphone apps that monitor their driving, including how much they drive, how fast they take corners, how hard they hit the brakes and whether they speed. But “drivers are historically reluctant to participate in these programs,” as Ford Motor put it in a patent application that describes what is happening instead: Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry.

Sometimes this is happening with a driver’s awareness and consent. Car companies have established relationships with insurance companies, so that if drivers want to sign up for what’s called usage-based insurance — where rates are set based on monitoring of their driving habits — it’s easy to collect that data wirelessly from their cars.

But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened. Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people’s driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis.

Automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say they have drivers’ permission to do so. But the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read.

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America’s nonexistent privacy laws are being quietly exploited by data brokers in every possible avenue? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you. And of course all those details are used by the insurance companies to push premiums up.
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Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out • The Atlantic

Derek Thompson:

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In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert Putnam recognized that America’s social metabolism was slowing down. In the book Bowling Alone, he gathered reams of statistical evidence to prove that America’s penchant for starting and joining associations appeared to be in free fall. Book clubs and bowling leagues were going bust.

If Putnam felt the first raindrops of an antisocial revolution in America, the downpour is fully here, and we’re all getting washed away in the flood. From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30%. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35%. For teenagers, it was more than 45%. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 reduced their weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week. In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in US history when people have spent more time on their own.

And so what? one might reasonably ask. Aloneness is not loneliness. Not only that, one might point out, the texture of aloneness has changed. Solitude is less solitary than ever. With all the calling, texting, emailing, work chatting, DMing, and posting, we are producing unprecedented terabytes of interpersonal communication. If Americans were happy—about themselves, about their friends, about their country—then whining about parties of one would feel silly.

But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year. The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted. Americans have been so depressed about the state of the nation for so many consecutive years that by 2023, NBC pollsters said, “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”

«

Lots of strange data, including the stuff about pets (Americans spend more time with them on average than humans. Then again, pets don’t argue or want to change the channel.)
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Who owns the Moon? The race for lunar real estate is an impending ethical nightmare • Inverse

Kiona Smith:

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Along with private missions like the recent Intuitive Machines’ lander IM-1, several countries’ space agencies all have their eyes on the same real estate around the Moon’s south pole, where water ice may lie waiting in permanently shadowed craters. Until recently, debates about what should and shouldn’t happen on the Moon have been abstract. Only one country’s space agency had ever sent humans to the Moon, and they didn’t stay long. That’s on the brink of changing. The next decade may see the once-pristine lunar landscape dotted with bases and riddled with mines, all jostling for space (and bandwidth) with telescopes and other scientific exploration. But is the lunar environment worth preserving, for science or in its own right, and who gets to decide?

A recent (failed) mission to land cremated human remains on the Moon raised a high-profile example of the kind of ethical issues space ethicists say we should be considering. Astrobotic’s Peregrine One lander was scheduled to deliver the cremated remains of Gene Roddenberry and several members of the original Star Trek cast, and others to the Moon.

The Navajo Nation formally protested the mission’s launch; in Navajo beliefs, the Moon is a sacred object, and placing human remains there would be a desecration. In the end, a fuel leak forced the mission to return to Earth, where it ended in a fiery plunge into the upper atmosphere, but it drew attention to a larger debate about who gets to decide — for everyone — how we as a species relate to the Moon now.

“Every culture on Earth has conceptions about the Moon,” Santa Clara University space ethicist Brian Green tells Inverse. “There are lots of groups on Earth who have thoughts on how the Moon should be treated. This is why we need to have a larger conversation.”

Part of the unfolding discussion centers on what, if anything, we should try to protect on the Moon. Several groups here on Earth, such as For All Moonkind, have spent years arguing that the first crewed lunar landing sites are an important part of human history and should be preserved, but at the moment there’s no law or treaty preventing someone from erasing the rover tracks or astronauts’ footprints.

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It’s very expensive to go to the Moon, so any valuable resources such as water will be even more valued. So this is likely to be ugly and solved through force majeure.
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Colorado ranchers sentenced after tampering with rain gauges to increase crop subsidies • CBS Colorado

Logan Smith:

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Two southeastern Colorado ranch owners were recently sentenced to pay $6.6m to resolve federal charges that they damaged or altered rain gauges in an effort to get paid for worsening drought conditions. 

By preventing the rain gauges from accurately measuring precipitation, the men aimed to increase the amount of money they could receive from the federal government, according to court documents. 

Patrick Esch, 72, and Ed Dean Jagers, 62, both of Springfield, received short prison sentences – Esch two months and Jagers six. They also were ordered to pay a combined $3.1m in restitution – the estimated amount of fraudulently inflated funds they received from the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. As well, they agreed to pay a combined $3.5m to settle the allegations.

The cases against Esch and Jager included civil allegations and criminal charges accusing the men of making false statements and defrauding the federal government, in addition to the physical tampering of the rain gauges.  

“Hardworking farmers and ranchers depend on USDA crop insurance programs, and we will not allow these programs to be abused,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado Cole Finegan stated in a press release.  “This case also shows the full measure of justice that can be achieved when our office uses both civil and criminal tools to protect vital government programs.”

…The group allegedly damaged rain gauges located in Springfield, Ordway, La Junta, Walsh, and Ellicott, Colorado, and others in Syracuse, Coolidge, and Elkhart, Kansas. Wires were cut, funnels to rain collectors were filled with silicone, holes drilled or punched in collectors, parts of collectors were disassembled, and objects such as cake pans or pie tins were placed over the gauges during rainstorms. The incidents occurred between July 2016 and June 2017.

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As the saying goes – once you start to make the measurement of something that can be manipulated important, it ceases to be a useful measurement.
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Kate Middleton’s photo editing controversy is an omen of what’s to come • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

»

It’s not clear what tools the princess used to edit the photo — a tool like Facetune might be able to remove blemishes or toggle the brightness of the photo, but it won’t create a phantom sleeve beneath Charlotte’s elbow. Some retouching tools, like Photoshop’s content-aware fill or a clone brush, might use elements of the photo to create something that wasn’t originally there. But those aren’t the kinds of photo editing tools that people use when they’re trying to make themselves look Instagram-ready — it’s what you use when you’re trying to edit out a random guy in the background of your beach photo.

Even British celebrities like Piers Morgan have weighed in, raising the question of why the Royal Family won’t quash the conspiracy theories by just releasing the unedited photo.

As AI-powered image generation becomes mainstream, we’re losing our grip on reality. In a time when any image can be fake, how can we know what’s actually real? There are some tell-tale signs, like if someone has an abnormal number of fingers, or if someone is wearing an earring on one ear but not the other (though that could also be a style choice — you know it when you see it). But as AI gets better and more widespread, these methods of detection aren’t as reliable. A recent study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate revealed that deepfake images about elections have been rising by 130% per month on average on X (Twitter). Though speculation about a missing princess isn’t going to sway an election, this incident shows that people are finding it more and more challenging to distinguish between fact and fiction.

«

But.. the photo is fiction, in a sense. We don’t know what it was like before the edits. (Not very much different, I’m sure: Kate and the three children. But perhaps not all laughing with eyes open at exactly the same time.) I’m sure Morgan knows there isn’t just one photo, but multiple: he knows what a contact sheet is.

People love a mystery, in truth. Especially when those who know the answer to the mystery won’t talk. (Kate editing the pictures? Yeah, suuuuure.)
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Analysis: UK emissions in 2023 fell to lowest level since 1879 • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

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The UK’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by 5.7% in 2023 to their lowest level since 1879, according to new Carbon Brief analysis.

The last time UK emissions were this low, Queen Victoria was on the throne, Benjamin Disraeli was prime minister, Mosley Street in Newcastle became the first road in the world with electric lighting and 59 people died in the Tay Bridge disaster in Dundee.

Carbon Brief’s analysis, based on preliminary government energy data, shows emissions fell to just 383m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2023. This is the first time they have dropped below 400MtCO2e since Victorian times.

Other key findings from the analysis include:
• The UK’s emissions are now 53% below 1990 levels, while GDP has grown by 82%
• The drop in emissions in 2023 was largely due to an 11% fall in gas demand. This was due to higher electricity imports after the French nuclear fleet recovered, above-average temperatures and weak underlying demand driven by high prices
• Gas demand would have fallen even faster, but for a 15% fall in UK nuclear output
• Coal use fell by 23% in 2023 to its lowest level since the 1730s, as all but one of the UK’s remaining coal-fired power stations closed down
• Transport was the single-largest sector in terms of emissions, followed by buildings industry, agriculture and electricity generation. The electricity sector likely dropped below agriculture for the first time.

While the 23MtCO2e reduction in 2023 was faster than the 14MtCO2e per year average needed to reach net-zero by 2050, it was mostly unrelated to deliberate climate action. The UK will need to address emissions from buildings, transport, industry and agriculture to reach its 2050 target.

«

So we need more nuclear power stations, and higher gas prices? Not sure the latter would be desirable on a societal basis, even if it gets us nearer net zero.
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$500K sand dune designed to protect coastal homes washes away in just three days • Daily Beast

Dan Ladden-Hall:

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In a drastic attempt to protect their beachfront homes, residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, invested $500,000 in a sand dune to defend against encroaching tides. After being completed last week, the barrier made from 14,000 tons of sand lasted just 72 hours before it was completely washed away, according to WCVB.

“We got hit with three storms—two in January, one now—at the highest astronomical tides possible,” Rick Rigoli, who oversaw the dune project, told the station. Ron Guilmette, whose tennis court was destroyed in previous storms along the beach, added that he now doesn’t know how much his property is worth or if he will stay in the area. He calls the situation on Salisbury Beach “catastrophic.” “I don’t know what the solution is,” Guilmette said. Beachfront homes in the area started being damaged by strong winds and high tides after a winter storm in December 2022 removed previous protective dunes, according to WBTS-CD.

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As so often when the US is hit by climate change, this feels like a sowing/reaping thing.
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Deadspin sold by G/O Media, editorial staff to be laid off • Axios

Sara Fischer:

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G/O Media, formerly Gizmodo Media Group, has sold sports blogging site Deadspin to European firm Lineup Publishing, a new digital media rollup company, CEO Jim Spanfeller announced in a note to staff Monday.

The firm, which was acquired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners in 2019, has been slowly offloading sites as pressure mounts from investors to make a return on its investment.

In the memo, Spanfeller said none of Deadspin’s existing staff will move over with the site as part of the deal and the new owners will “instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand.”

Impacted staffers were notified Monday that they were being let go from G/O Media, marking the third round of cuts at the firm in less than a year.

Spanfeller said Lineup Publishing approached him about the sale and that the company was not “actively shopping Deadspin.”

“The rationale behind the decision to sell included a variety of important factors that include the buyer’s editorial plans for the brand, tough competition in the sports journalism sector, and a valuation that reflected a sizable premium from our original purchase price for the site,” Spanfeller wrote in the memo.

«

In the aforementioned memo, Spanfeller refers to the site on first mention as “Deadpin”, which maybe is a bit on the nose. Apparently the staff were given 30 minutes’ notice before they were locked out of their company laptops. What nobody’s saying: how many staff that actually is.
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Who sends traffic on the web and how much? New research from Datos & SparkToro • SparkToro

Rand Fishkin:

»

Close to twi-thirds (63.41%) of all US web traffic referrals from the top 170 sites initiated on Google.com. The second-largest individual, traffic-referring domain is technically YouTube.com, but whereas Google.com hosts Google Docs, Gmail, Google Meet, and others, Microsoft splits these among a wide range of domains in the top 100 (Bing.com, Office.com, Live.com, Office365.com, Sharepoint.com, MicrosoftOnline.com, and Microsoft.com).

And for the curious, the 170th largest traffic-referrer (Pinimg.com) sent 0.003197%, suggesting that even if the next thousand sites (#171-1,171) all sent similar amounts of traffic to the web, their combined referral traffic is smaller than Facebook or YouTube.

I reasoned it was only fair to group these and compare apples to apples. Taken together, these Microsoft-owned sites are responsible for a combined 7.21% of referrals.

«

It’s an absorbing read with lots of slicing and dicing, but the message that comes through overall: when it comes to traffic on the web, the only one that really matters is Google.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Academy Awards on Monday night were a triumph for… semaglutide, the weight control drug. CC-licensed photo by Thank You (24 Millions ) views 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple reverses ban on Fortnite-maker in EU, a sign of softening approach to crackdown • WSJ

Aaron Tilley:

»

Apple has reversed course on its decision to prevent Fortnite-maker Epic Games from building its own app store in Europe, softening what appeared to be a hard line stance as it faces an array of regulations.

The tech giant earlier banned Epic’s developer account in Sweden after Chief Executive Tim Sweeney sharply criticized Apple’s response to new EU regulations that took effect this week. Sweeney accused Apple of retaliating and the company drew a public rebuke from an EU official.

Sweeney said in a post on X that Apple’s reversal was a big win “for the freedom of developers worldwide to speak up” and further suggested that Europe’s new law, called the Digital Markets Act, had its first major victory in securing Apple’s compliance.

The back-and-forth between the two companies, which have been sparring for years over Apple’s control over third-party software on its devices, comes as European regulators are evaluating how the iPhone-maker has opened up its App Store in response to the new law.

“Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our DMA policies,” said an Apple spokeswoman. “As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple Developer Program.”

Apple has stridently defended its App Store and software ecosystem in the face of a barrage of criticism from developers such as Sweeney. The Justice Department is expected to file an antitrust lawsuit in the coming weeks accusing Apple of monopolistic practices related to its interactions with outside companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

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This isn’t “a softening approach” at all. As Ben Thompson pointed out on the Dithering podcast, Apple faces this equation: the EU can impose a fine of 10% of worldwide revenue. Meanwhile, the EU is only 7% of Apple’s worldwide revenue. (Seems low, but OK.) Pissing off the EU is therefore a terrible idea, and Apple rapidly came to realise this when the EU made angry noises over the revocation of Epic’s Swedish developer account.

But notice how Apple’s dictatorial approach is now getting it into increasingly hot water. Worked OK when it just applied to hardware and some software. Gets a lot more problematic once you’re offering services and app stores and so on to significant chunks of the world. Can Apple change its culture to give developers more flexibility? (The saying is that Apple’s priorities are: 1) Apple 2) its users 3) third-party developers 5000000000000000000) everyone else. Pushing developers up the stack won’t come easy.)
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How Ozempic ate awards season • The Ankler

Allen Salkin:

»

Forget Chanel, Dior or Prada: this year, the most prominent designers on the red carpet are Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, whose injectable weight-loss drugs are the new couture. As awards season peaks this weekend with the 96th Academy Awards, those in every cranny of the celebrity-industrial complex, from restaurateurs to marketing mavens, have found themselves dealing with profound changes wrought on entertainment industry bodies and minds by this new kid in town. In the old days — five years ago (and five decades ago) — you’d get someone into rehab or to Two Bunch Palms to dry out and get in shape for a big role or a red carpet. Now a star can quickly lose up to 15 pounds (or more) in plain sight.

Only a handful of celebrities — Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk and Tracy Morgan are the most prominent — have publicly acknowledged using this new class of drugs, known as semaglutides, GLP-1s or by their brand names Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. A few other famous people, such as Amy Schumer, Chelsea Handler and Sharon Osbourne, have admitted to using these drugs in the past, and an even smaller subset is using them for their original purpose of helping type 2 diabetics (Anthony Anderson). Indeed, a whole separate cottage industry has popped up of people denying or condemning the use of them.

Julia Fox told Entertainment Tonight, “People are saying that I’m taking Ozempic. I’m not, and I never have. I would never do that. There are diabetics that need it.” Jessica Simpson denied to Bustle that her weight loss was injection based, saying “Oh Lord . . . it is not.” Most judgy of all was Vanderpump Rules’ Lala Kent, who may be thin in the old-fashioned way, possibly so hungry that she recently bit the hand that feeds her. “Stop taking it for weight loss,” she told People. “Enough already. I think that Hollywood is all sorts of f—ed up.” 

So in honor of the Oscars, let’s look at the impact on restaurants, plastic surgeons, trainers and makeup artists around town of a drug turning Hollywood into wannabe Barbies and Kens.

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Salkin goes on to talk to a fair number of people. Restaurants are feeling it. But of course it would be LA where these drugs get most used.
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Death threats and disinformation: what it’s like being viciously targeted by conspiracy theory activists • British Vogue

Marianna Spring:

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I try to protect my friends and family as much as I can. Both from the hate itself, but also from worrying about my safety. I don’t ever publicly share their names, because they could be fresh meat for the trolls. My family love my reporting almost as much as I love doing it. But I don’t want them to pay any price for it.

I’m far from any frontline, unlike my extraordinary colleagues at the BBC, many of whom have put themselves at risk to report what’s happening on the ground from war zones all across the world. That includes operating in autocracies, where they’re at risk of persecution for attempting to tell the truth. I’m not subjected to racist hate, or other forms of discrimination.

Still, it seems sinister when a young female investigative reporter working in a democracy is specifically targeted with abuse at her office. If you care about protecting freedom of expression – as many of those embedded in these conspiracy theory movements claim to – why would you condone or refuse to condemn that?

We seem to have accepted online hate as part of the fabric of our society – that it’s something to be expected now social media exists. As a consequence, the onus falls on the individuals to call out and battle these trolls. The trolls as a collective, though, are more than random people expressing their anger in an unacceptable way online. Trolling is a tool used to silence and intimidate. If we do not highlight the issue of violent rhetoric and abuse online, those who can do something about it are let off the hook.

You’re probably thinking: why not just pack it in, Marianna? After all, it’d be easier. The answer? Well, then they win. All of this shows how investigating the harm caused by what’s unfolding on social media, giving a voice to those who’ve been targeted, and holding those responsible to account is more important than ever. I am grateful to everyone who allows me to investigate their stories. The more I experience the very thing they’re living through, the more I want to tell their stories – without fear.

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Sounds like she’s experiencing the outcomes of s_c__l w_rm_ng doesn’t it.
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Energy transitions: the decline of whale oil and the rise of petroleum • JKempEnergy.com

John Kemp:

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Before Edwin Drake drilled his first successful well in Pennsylvania in 1859, however, spermaceti was already becoming increasingly scarce and prices were climbing sharply as a result of overfishing, escalating costs and crew shortages. Sperm oil imports into the United States (the amount declared to customs on landing) had halved to 2.6 million gallons in 1858 down from 5.3 million gallons in 1843. The landed price of sperm oil had doubled to $1.21 per gallon from 63 cents.

Spermaceti availability was declining primarily because of overfishing, which forced whaling ships further offshore and on longer voyages, and even then they increasingly came back with less than a full load. The industry’s cost base was also rising as ships were fitted out to higher and more modern standards.

Once the California gold rush was underway, crewing became a major problem. Sailors would contract for a lengthy voyage from the U.S. east coast to go whaling in the Pacific, collect their sign on bonus, enjoy free passage to the Pacific, then jump ship when they reached California to try their luck in the gold fields, delaying voyages and requiring costly extra hires.

Spermaceti as a source of illumination was already in trouble before Drake’s well. It could never have satisfied the growing demand for lighting. The sudden competition from a plentiful source of cheap lighting in the form of petroleum-derived kerosene accelerated the industry’s decline. By the late 1870s the whale fishery had become a shadow of its former self.

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There must be an alternative history to be written about a world where people didn’t figure out how to use oil, or where for some reason it wasn’t accessible (at the bottom of the ocean?). Would there be whale farming? What would we have done?
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‘Unexploded bombs’: call for action after 11 deaths in UK due to e-bike fires • The Guardian

Jon Ungoed-Thomas:

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Eleven people were killed in fires caused by e-bikes in the UK last year and now ministers face calls for urgent action over the sale of dangerous products.

E-bike fires can be particularly deadly because they can rapidly ignite in a fireball, and because the bikes are routinely left to charge overnight in hallways, they can block what may be the only exit. Campaigners compare the most dangerous products to “unexploded bombs”.

New figures produced by the Office for Product and Safety Standards (OPSS), drawn from data from UK fire and rescue services, reveal what is believed to be the highest number of deaths recorded from e-bike fires in the UK last year.

Yvonne Fovargue, a Labour MP and chair of the all party parliamentary group on online and home electrical safety, said: “These e-bikes can reach a phenomenally high temperature in seconds. They are so dangerous. It is almost like having an unexploded bomb in your house.”

MPs and safety groups are calling for third-party certification to ensure e-bikes, e-scooters and their batteries are approved by an independent body before being available for sale. This is already the case for other high-risk products such as fireworks.

Fire safety officers say consumers should buy from a reputable retailer and warn e-bikes fitted with conversion kits or fitted with batteries bought online may pose a greater risk.

An inquest heard last month how Sofia Duarte, 21, died on New Year’s Day 2023 after a fire broke out in the hallway of a property she was staying in at Bermondsey, south-east London. The fire is believed to have been caused by an unbranded battery pack fitted to a converted bike.

Other residents escaped by jumping out of windows, but Duarte, unaware of the ferocity of the fire, tried to leave by the staircase. She died of burns and smoke inhalation.

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The Rossminster affair: how Led Zeppelin tried to use a Shakespearean theatre charity to avoid paying tax • Led Zeppelin News

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Led Zeppelin’s record sales skyrocketed during the 1970s, leaving the band with a difficult problem to solve by 1978: How could the members of the band receive £3.668m in royalty payments without giving a significant portion of the money to British tax authorities?

The band’s tax advisers had an inventive solution: The members of Led Zeppelin would hand control of their companies to a Shakespearean theatre charity based in a former church in London that was run by an actor known for playing mysterious foreign villains. That would enable the band’s royalties to be classed as profits received by the charity, keeping it out of the reach of the tax authorities.

In 1978, the members of Led Zeppelin and their manager Peter Grant sold their businesses to the charity in the hope of solving their tax problem. But the transaction, despite its inventiveness, failed to solve Led Zeppelin’s financial woes and saw the band caught up in one of the UK’s most infamous corporate scandals.

[Led Zep’s accountants] Rossminsters knew that any income or capital gains generated by [actor George] Murcell’s theatre charity were completely exempt from taxes in the UK.

Furthermore, a business could choose to pay its profits as a dividend to a parent company. This meant that a business generating profits could essentially hand up that money to its owner and avoid paying tax itself.

Another quirk of British tax law meant that if the parent company of that business was a charity like St George’s Elizabethan Theatre, those profits were passed on not as a dividend but instead as a donation. This meant that the business didn’t need to plan to pay corporation tax on the profits.

Rossminster managed to combine the theatre’s charity status with these facets of UK law to develop a scheme that meant any businesses owned by the charity could essentially move their profits through the corporate structure without paying any taxes on it.

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And you thought it was about music. Then again, the top marginal personal tax rate was 83% (and 98% on investment income). That was down from when the Beatles wrote “Taxman“: “it’s one for you, 19 for me” – referring to the 95% top personal tax rate. (There are SO many stories of those giant bands and their tax avoidance frolics.)
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OpenAI GPT sorts resume names with racial bias, test shows • Bloomberg

Leon Yin, Davey Alba and Leonardo Nicoletti :

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In the race to embrace artificial intelligence, some businesses are using a new crop of generative AI products that can help screen and rank candidates for jobs — and some think these tools can even evaluate candidates more fairly than humans. But a Bloomberg analysis found that the best-known generative AI tool systematically produces biases that disadvantage groups based on their names.

OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot that can churn out passable song lyrics and school essays, also sells the AI technology behind it to businesses that want to use it for specific tasks, including in HR and recruiting. (The company says it prohibits GPT from being used to make an automated hiring decision.) Becker, who has tested some of these AI-powered hiring tools, said that she’s skeptical of their accuracy. OpenAI’s underlying AI model, which is developed using a vast number of articles, books, online comments and social media posts, can also mirror and amplify the biases in that data.

In order to understand the implications of companies using generative AI tools to assist with hiring, Bloomberg News spoke to 33 AI researchers, recruiters, computer scientists and employment lawyers. Bloomberg also carried out an experiment inspired by landmark studies that used fictitious names and resumes to measure algorithmic bias and hiring discrimination. Borrowing methods from these studies, reporters used voter and census data to derive names that are demographically distinct — meaning they are associated with Americans of a particular race or ethnicity at least 90% of the time — and randomly assigned them to equally-qualified resumes.

When asked to rank those resumes 1,000 times, GPT 3.5 — the most broadly-used version of the model — favored names from some demographics more often than others, to an extent that would fail benchmarks used to assess job discrimination against protected groups. While this test is a simplified version of a typical HR workflow, it isolated names as a source of bias in GPT that could affect hiring decisions. The interviews and experiment show that using generative AI for recruiting and hiring poses a serious risk for automated discrimination at scale.

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Rishi Sunak’s report finds low-traffic neighbourhoods work and are popular • The Guardian

Peter Walker:

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An official study of low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) ordered by Rishi Sunak amid efforts to stop them being built has instead concluded they are generally popular and effective and the report was initially buried, the Guardian has learned.

The long-delayed review by Department for Transport (DfT) officials was commissioned by the prime minister last July, as Sunak sought to capitalise on controversy about the schemes by promising drivers he was “on their side”.

Downing Street had hoped that the study would bolster their arguments against LTNs, which are mainly installed by Labour-run councils, but it largely points the other way.

The report, which applies only to England as transport is devolved, had been scheduled for publication in January. However, after its findings emerged, government advisers asked that it be permanently shelved, the Guardian was told.

One government source disputed this, saying the report would be published soon, and it was “categorically not the case” that it had been suppressed.

A copy of the report seen by the Guardian said that polling carried out inside four sample LTNs for the DfT found that overall, twice as many local people supported them as opposed them.

A review of evidence of their effectiveness said that although formal studies were limited, they did not support the contention of opponents that LTNs simply displaced traffic to other streets rather than easing overall congestion.

“The available evidence from the UK indicates that LTNs are effective in achieving outcomes of reducing traffic volumes within their zones while adverse impacts on boundary roads appear to be limited,” it read.

«

This administration has never been hot on evidence-based policy, and this is just more, well, evidence of that.
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Here’s how much shorter the US ski season might be in 25 years • SKI

Samantha Berman:

»

A new report detailing climate change’s effect on the ski industry takes a look at both the past and future. The study, which was published in the trade publication Current Issues in Tourism, examines global warming’s effect on different aspects of the ski industry, including season length, average winter temperatures in different US regions, and projected economic losses if climate issues go unchecked.

One of the most unique aspects of the report is that it presents an alternate reality of what our ski seasons would have looked like over the last 20 years without any climate-change impacts. Using data from ski resorts gathered between 1960-1979, before the effects of global warming started to impact our winters, the researchers concluded that our ski seasons would have been extended by 5.5 to 7.1 days. Those days equaled around $252m in lost revenue
.
Using similar extrapolated data, the researchers also projected how our future ski seasons will be impacted by global warming. Instead of only gloom and doom, however, they offer a glimpse of what it might look like if we successfully lower our fossil fuel emissions—as well as if we don’t.

We’ll give you the bad news first. If we continue on our current trajectory, our seasons risk losing up to 60 days in the high-emissions scenario. That’s two months. And if we do manage to reduce our carbon emissions, we’ll only lose an estimated 14 to 33 days. Those estimates take into account not only reduced snowfall, but also higher temperatures that will make it more difficult or impossible to make snow.

It’s not a great scenario, but it’s also not surprising given the way global warming has left its mark in every corner of the globe. Yet despite evidence of climate change touching our everyday lives, we can’t seem to move the needle.

«

Despite the SUV being the best-selling car in the US, and vehicle emissions being a major source of greenhouse gases, you can’t seem to move the needle? Surprising.
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NYTimes files copyright takedown against hundreds of Wordle clones • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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The New York Times has filed a series of copyright takedown requests against Wordle clones and variations in which it asserts not just ownership over the Wordle name but over the broad concepts and mechanics of the word game, which includes its “5×6 grid” and “green tiles to indicate correct guesses.”

The Times filed at least three DMCA takedown requests with coders who have made clones of Wordle on GitHub. These include two in January and, crucially, a new DMCA filed this week against Chase Wackerfuss, the coder of a repository called “Reactle,” which cloned Wordle in React JS (JavaScript). (The full takedown is embedded at the bottom of this article.)

The most recent takedown request is critical because it not only goes after Reactle but anyone who has forked Reactle to create a different spinoff game; an archive of the Reactle code repository shows that it was forked 1,900 times to create a diverse set of games and spinoffs. These include Wordle clones in dozens of languages, crossword versions of Wordle, emoji and bird versions of world, poker and AI spinoffs, etc. 

«

So the NYT thinks it has the One True Wordle? You could agree that the 5×6 grid and the use of green tiles for correct letters does mark it out. But not that much more. (What about lower-case letters?)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Researchers at the University of Surrey have found that higher pressure makes people use less water in showers. CC-licensed photo by Dean McCoy 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. Don’t read in the shower. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How hackers dox doctors to order mountains of Oxycodone and Adderall • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

404 Media has uncovered a wide-spanning scheme in which criminals break into various panels used by doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and even wholesale narcotics providers, and then leverage that access to order controlled substances like oxycodone. Some of the hackers then appear to sell these substances for profit online. Because the hackers are using legitimate ordering tools designed for industry professionals, when a prescription request lands at a pharmacy, it can look as legitimate as any other.

In some cases hackers are phishing doctors for certain pieces of information, such as their unique DEA-assigned number, to then create drug ordering accounts in their name. The hackers are also making use of powerful bots that allow them to dox nearly anyone in America for as little as $15. Some of these bots use credit header data, which is information a person provides, such as their physical address, to the big three credit bureaus who then sell access to third-parties. I’ve previously shown how these bots are connected to violent criminals. Now, they’re being used as part of the underground drug trade, with hackers able to dox a specific doctor within a target ZIP code in around 15 minutes, one fraudster said.

The news presents not just a series of individual breaches at multiple companies in the pharmaceutical industry, but a more fundamental undermining of the trust in a digital prescription system that itself was created as a response to pill mills, doctor shopping, and other systemic abuses during the opioid crisis.

…One person on Telegram, who used the handle “Escripted,” explained how they steal doctor’s personal and professional information and then sign-up to electronic prescription portals. Instead of a tear-off from a notepad that a doctor signs and hands to a patient, electronic prescriptions are digitally sent by the doctor to a fulfilling pharmacy. The idea is that they are much harder to counterfeit, with a digital signature being more robust than simply copying a doctor’s handwritten one.

«

Another banger from 404 Media. (Clearly, rootling about in Telegram is a reliable way to find story leads.)

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TikTok campaign against ban backfires • Semafor

»

A House committee unanimously advanced legislation that would force ByteDance to divest the social media app TikTok, despite congressional offices being bombarded with calls from TikTokers who were urged by the platform to call their representatives to protest the bill.

“Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO,” a pop-up message on the app said, imploring users to “stop a TikTok shutdown.”

Aides from multiple congressional offices told Semafor that they were getting flooded with calls pushing back on the legislation Thursday. Some offices reported getting as many as 50 phone calls. One office received a message from a caller threatening suicide if the app was taken down, a Politico reporter posted on X.

But later Thursday afternoon, the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously advanced the legislation in a 50-0 vote. The bipartisan House bill introduced Tuesday would force ByteDance to sell off TikTok or face it being banned in the United States, over national security concerns associated with Chinese ownership of the app, which TikTok says is used by 170 million Americans. House majority leader Steve Scalise said the bill would come to the floor next week.

“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement. “The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression. This will damage millions of businesses, deny artists an audience, and destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country.”

The bill was proposed by Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the top lawmakers on the House select committee on China, and quickly received support from the White House and Speaker Mike Johnson.

“Here you have an example of an adversary-controlled application lying to the American people, and interfering with the legislative process in Congress,” Gallagher said in response to the calls. “In a weird way it almost proves the point that we’ve been making here.”

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Beyond the water flow rate: water pressure and smart timers impact shower efficiency • OSF Preprints

Ian Walker, Pablo Pereira-Doel and James Daly at the University of Surrey :

»

England is projected to face a water supply shortfall of 4 billion litres daily by 2050, mostly due to population growth and increasing climate-driven droughts and flooding. The Environment Act 2021 mandates significant water usage reductions, targeting a decrease for households from the current 144 litres per person/day to 110, and a 15% reduction for businesses.

Enhancing water efficiency in showers is crucial, given their high water consumption, energy use and associated carbon emissions. Water consumption in 290 showers was covertly monitored for 39 weeks, capturing 86,421 showering events. Increased water pressure was strongly associated with reduced water use – an effect that can be amplified even further by installing smart timers to inform users of their shower duration.

«

Walker, who is professor of environmental psychology (pause a moment to consider what that implies), wrote a thread about this research which has all sorts of fascinating details – such as that there are people who take showers lasting an hour or more. (Mean 6.7 minutes, median 5.7 minutes, 50% lie between 3.3 and 8.8 minutes. Time yourself next time!)

But the idea that making the shower stronger reduces water use is initially counterintuitive. Except: you know that a really high-pressure shower is pretty brutal, and doesn’t encourage lingering. (Thanks Adewale A for the link.)
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The Iditarod is embroiled in a controversy over moose guts • Outside Online

Frederick Dreier:

»

What’s the weirdest rule in endurance sports? A few come to mind.

• Regulations governing the New York City Marathon explicitly forbid runners from pooping on the pavement at the starting line
• Article 7.01-G of the Ironman Triathlon rulebook prohibits nakedness in transition areas
• And don’t get me started on the wackadoo bylaws enforced by pro cycling’s governing body, the Union Cycliste International, which govern the minutiae of oh so many aspects of bike racing, from the height of an athlete’s socks to the size and shape of his or her ugly helmet.

But in all my time covering professional outdoor competitions, I’ve never come across anything like Rule 34 in the regulations governing Alaska’s Iditarod, the Tour de France of dogsledding. The law, titled “Killing of Game Animals,” is below:

»

In the event that an edible big game animal, i.e., moose, caribou, buffalo, is killed in defense of life or property, the musher must gut the animal and report the incident to a race official at the next checkpoint. Following teams must help gut the animal when possible. No teams may pass until the animal has been gutted and the musher killing the animal has proceeded. Any other animal killed in defense of life or property must be reported to a race official, but need not be gutted. 

«

Yes, the Iditarod requires you to disembowel the big mammals that you kill along the way. Not only that—officials will scrutinize the efficacy of your job gutting the animal in question.

At the moment, there’s a brewing controversy about the Iditarod’s Rule 34 – specifically, whether or not a star athlete gutted a moose the right way.

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AI likely to increase energy use and accelerate climate misinformation – report • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

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Claims that artificial intelligence will help solve the climate crisis are misguided, with the technology instead likely cause rising energy use and turbocharge the spread of climate disinformation, a coalition of environmental groups has warned.

Advances in AI have been touted by big tech companies and the United Nations as a way to help ameliorate global heating, via tools that help track deforestation, identify pollution leaks and track extreme weather events. AI is already being used to predict droughts in Africa and to measure changes to melting icebergs.

Google, which has developed its own AI program called Bard (recently rebranded to Gemini) and has an AI project to make traffic lights more efficient, has been at the forefront of promoting emissions reductions through AI adoption, releasing a report last year that found AI could cut global emissions by as much as 10%, equivalent to the entire carbon pollution put out by the European Union by 2030. “AI has a really major role in addressing climate change,” said Kate Brandt, Google’s chief sustainability officer, said in December, describing the technology at an “inflection point” in making major progress in environmental goals.

However, a new report by green groups has cast doubt over whether the AI revolution will have a positive impact upon the climate crisis, warning that the technology will spur growing energy use from data centers and the proliferation of falsehoods about climate science.

“We seem to be hearing all the time that AI can save the planet, but we shouldn’t be believing this hype,” said Michael Khoo, climate disinformation program director at Friends of the Earth, which is part of the Climate Action against Disinformation coalition that put out the report.

“It’s not like AI is ridding us of the internal combustion engine. People will be outraged to see how much more energy is being consumed by AI in the coming years, as well as how it will flood the zone with disinformation about climate change.”

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There’s so much handwaving about AI saving energy down the years. It was going to be deployed in 2017 by the electricity grid in the UK to optimise things. Did anything come of that?
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Ozempic is in fact a brain drug • The Atlantic

Sarah Zhang:

»

When scientists first created the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, they told a tidy story about how the medications would work: The gut releases a hormone called GLP-1 that signals you’re full, so a drug that mimics GLP-1 could do the exact same thing, helping people eat less and lose weight.

The rest, as they say, is history. The GLP-1 revolution birthed begat semaglutide, which became Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, which became Mounjaro and Zepbound—blockbuster drugs that are rapidly changing the face of obesity medicine. The drugs work as intended: as powerful modulators of appetite. But at the same time that they have become massive successes, the original science that underpinned their development has fallen apart. The fact that they worked was “serendipity,” Randy Seeley, an obesity researcher at the University of Michigan, told me. (Seeley has also consulted for and received research funding from companies that make GLP-1 drugs.)

Now scientists are beginning to understand why. In recent years, studies have shown that GLP-1 from the gut breaks down quickly and has little effect on our appetites. But the hormone and its receptors are naturally present in many parts of the brain too. These brain receptors are likely the reason the GLP-1 drugs can curb the desire to eat—but also, anecdotally, curb other desires as well. The weight-loss drugs are ultimately drugs for the brain.

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Fascinating. (Subediting note: “birth” is not a transitive verb; it’s a noun. “Created” works, and “begat” as substituted by me above if you want to sprinkle a little light Biblical feel.)
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How Google blew up its open culture and compromised its product • Big Technology

David Kiferbaum:

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In my seven years at Google, one of the most shocking moments came after I questioned our fixation with the word “guys.”

It was 2017, and Google had been facing gender pay gap allegations when I attended an unconscious bias training. Rather than directly discuss the issue, the instructors were obsessed with word choice, focusing on replacing “guys.”

“You should be aware that the term ‘guys’ is gendered and could be alienating for some Googlers, so instead you should be referring to groups of people you work with as ‘team’ or ‘folks’,” one session leader said.

When I challenged the instructor, raising skepticism that this language change would address the real issue, I got shouted down.

“How dare you!” a colleague said from the other side of the room. Other participants, and the instructor, began to scold me. I nearly got shouted out of the session.

Google used to be a place to ask questions. “You must make it safe to ask the tough questions and to tell the truth at all times, even when the truth hurts,” wrote Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg in their 2014 book How Google Works. “When you learn of something going off the rails, and the news is delivered in a timely, forthright fashion, this means — in its own, screwed-up way — that the process is working.” 

Inside Google today, the process is not working. Previously accessible Google executives have disappeared, once acceptable questions can’t be asked, and a dispassionate arrogance has taken hold. Unsurprisingly, the company’s deficient culture is showing up in the product, most vividly in its recent Gemini debacle. As a user and shareholder, I’m concerned.

…Lacking the forums for public questioning — and feeling their precarious job security — Google employees no longer feel fully able to speak up within the company.

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Very much what we suspected, but interesting to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
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IDC forecasts global PC shipments to grow 2.0% in 2024, led by the arrival of AI PCs and the start of a commercial refresh cycle • IDC

»

As the global economy nears recovery, so will the PC market with global shipments forecast to reach 265.4 million units in 2024, up 2.0% from the prior year according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. While vendors focused on clearing inventory in 2023, IDC expects 2024 to be an expansion year with the introduction of AI PCs, which will ultimately drive the market forward to 292.2m units in 2028 and a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.4% over the 2024–2028 forecast period.

Growth is expected to slowly ramp up over the year along with the availability of AI PCs, which will coincide with the beginning of a commercial refresh cycle in 2025. “Commercial buyers, both enterprise and educational, are on the cusp of a refresh cycle that begins later this year and reaches its peak in 2025,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile and Consumer Device Trackers. “Many of these buyers are expected to be among the first in terms of AI PC adoption. The presence of on-device AI capabilities is not likely to lead to an increase in the PC installed base, but it will certainly lead to a growth in average selling prices.”

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Have to love IDC forecasting this to four significant figures: 292.2 million, not 292. To be honest, though, I wouldn’t put that much weight on this. Wayyy back in 2012 I looked at how IDC’s forecasts for PC sales had changed in the light of tablets. The forecast for 2016’s sales: over 500m. Actual sales in 2016: 270m. This stuff is not very good guesswork.
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Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users consent to new terms • TechCrunch

Devin Coldewey:

»

Roku users around the country turned on their TVs this week to find an unpleasant surprise: The company required them to consent to new dispute resolution terms in order to access their device. The devices are unusable until the user agrees.

Users (at least, this user) received an email the day before saying that “we have made changes to our Dispute Resolution Terms, which describe how you can resolve disputes with Roku. We encourage you to read the updated Dispute Resolution Terms. By continuing to use our products or services, you are agreeing to these updated terms.”

The terms, of course, include a forced arbitration agreement that prevents the user from suing or taking part in lawsuits against Roku. It’s common these days as a way of limiting liability, and users often have little or no recourse. They only find out later, when the company does something heinous and consequences are negligible. Tech companies love this one dirty trick to save millions! (Full disclosure, our parent company requires arbitration as part of its dispute resolution policy as well.)

But what is actually new on perusal of the terms is a whole “Informal Dispute Resolution” section. This requires anyone with legal complaints to take them to Roku lawyers first, who will conduct a “Meet-and-Confer” call and then “make a fair, fact-based offer of resolution” that will no doubt be generous and thoughtful. So they’ve added a pre-arbitration arbiter to further distance legal threats from materializing. The change was actually made last fall (though no notification appears to have been sent out) but only came into effect recently, and now, some weeks later, users are being informed by this questionable method.

I try to opt out of these when I can, and after reading the terms (to which, of course, by “continuing to use” my TV, I had already agreed), I found that you could only do so by mailing a written notice to their lawyers — something I fully intended to do today. Actually, since arbitration was apparently already required, this update provides an opportunity to opt out of something I didn’t know I was already subject to.

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Of course disconnecting your Roku TV from the internet will mean that you can’t look at any content through the Roku part.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Airlines in the US are becoming a lot more restrictive about what people can claim is “carry-on baggage”. CC-licensed photo by Bradley Gordon 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. They fit perfectly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Airlines are coming for your carry-on bags • WSJ

Dawn Gilbertson:

»

Fanny packs. Cross-body bags. Shopping bags. Pillows and blankets. The Southwest Airlines gate agent rattled off so many items that counted toward the two carry-on bag limit on my flight to Baltimore, I thought it might be a playful jab at Spirit and Frontier and their rigid carry-on policing to collect more fees.

But this was no joke. Southwest quietly began cracking down on carry-on bags on Feb. 22, ahead of the spring and summer travel rush, advising gate agents of the changes in a memo. This crackdown isn’t about bag size. It is about how many bags you have.

Southwest isn’t alone in putting passengers’ personal items in its crosshairs as a way to save precious bin space and speed up boarding. Delta and United agents have also recently asked me to stuff my small Lululemon bag in my backpack. One American Airlines frequent flier told me he watched gate agents in Sacramento, Calif., and Dallas list a litany of items that count as a personal item on weekend flights to Nashville, Tenn., last month.

Carting all your stuff to the gate can save you time and often saves money, especially with some airlines’ new, higher checked-baggage fees. Delta joined the club on Tuesday, announcing prices of $35 for your first bag and $45 for your second.

But testing airlines’ carry-on limits is now more likely to backfire, and lose you precious time as airlines make you consolidate items or check a bag at the gate. Few things sum up the industry’s carry-on challenges like Southwest’s latest move. The nation’s largest domestic carrier by passengers should have the fewest issues given its generous two-free-checked-bag policy. (Unlike checked bags, the government doesn’t track carry-on bag volume and airlines don’t disclose it.)

Southwest declined to discuss its carry-on changes beyond a statement saying the change “provides for a consistent customer experience and helps to align with other airlines’ policies.” A memo to employees about the changes singles out cross-body purses of any size and pillows and blankets, but employees are free to ad lib, spokesman Chris Perry says. Representatives for Delta, United and American pointed to their carry-on policies when asked for comment.

Tymali Gore, a traveling hospice nurse, couldn’t believe it when she heard a gate agent announce new rules about pillows, blankets and a host of other items counting as a personal item late last month. “It was the first time I’d ever heard anything like that,” she says. 

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Then again, some people pretty much bring a steamer trunk and try to wedge it into the overhead lockers, then give up and vainly attempt to stuff it under the seat in front. The mind boggles.
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Inside the world of TikTok spammers and the AI tools that enable them • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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We have recently been getting bombarded with Instagram Reels of influencers explaining how they make five figures a month by using AI to create tons of viral TikTok pages using stolen celebrity clips juxtaposed next to Minecraft gameplay footage. This strategy, the influencers say, allows them to passively make $10,000 a month by flooding social media platforms with stolen and low-effort clips while working from private helicopters, the beach, the ski slope, a park, etc.

What I found was a complex ecosystem of content parasitism, with thousands of people using a variety of AI tools to make low-quality spammy videos that recycle Reddit AMAs, weird “Would You Rather” games, AI-narrated “scary ocean” clips, ChatGPT-generated fun facts, slideshows of tweets, clips lifted from celebrities, YouTubers, and podcasts.

To help these people fill the internet with nonsense, there is an entire industry of creators, influencers, hustlers, and software developers selling them templates, stock clips, TikTok account creation services, cash out services, low-wage video editors in the developing world, AI voiceover and editing tools, and different “strategies” or “metas” to go viral enough to earn money from YouTube’s AdSense or from TikTok’s Creativity Program Beta, a monetization program that pays for “high-quality, longer TikTok videos” but which AI content influencers say can be easily gamed with low-effort content.

One of the kings of this world is Musa Mustafa, who got his start editing clips for the streamer Sneako but now seemingly makes most of his money from a Discord channel called “Media Metas,” which has 80,000 members and has a locked, premium section that costs $40 per month and is full of strategies and software people can supposedly use to go viral and make thousands of dollars a month. Whop, the platform he uses to sell access to the Discord, claims he is now making more than a million dollars a year through their platform.

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Probably knock a couple of zeroes off that, but it’s slightly depressing that it’s an option at all.
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European Electricity Review 2024 • Ember

Sara Brown and Dave Jones:

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The EU accelerated its shift away from fossil fuels in 2023, with record falls in coal, gas and emissions. Fossil fuels dropped by a record 19% to their lowest ever level at less than one third of the EU’s electricity generation. Renewables rose to a record 44% share, surpassing 40% for the first time. Wind and solar continued to be the drivers of this renewables growth, producing a record 27% of EU electricity in 2023 and achieving their largest ever annual capacity additions. Furthermore, wind generation reached a major milestone, surpassing gas for the first time.

Clean generation reached more than two-thirds of EU electricity, double fossil’s share, as hydro rebounded and nuclear partially recovered from last year’s lows alongside the increase in wind and solar. 

Coal was already in long-term decline, and that trend resumed in 2023. The temporary slowdown in coal plant closures during the energy crisis did not prevent a huge fall in coal generation this year, with a wave of plant closures imminent in 2024. Gas generation fell for the fourth consecutive year, and as coal nears phase-out in many countries, gas will be next to enter terminal decline.

In addition to clean growth, falling electricity demand also contributed to the drop in fossil fuel generation. Demand fell by 3.4% (-94 TWh) in 2023 compared to 2022, and was 6.4% (-186 TWh) lower than 2021 levels when the energy crisis began. This trajectory is unlikely to continue. With increased electrification, this rate of demand fall is not expected to be repeated in the coming years. To reduce fossil fuels at the speed required to hit EU climate goals, renewables will need to keep pace as demand increases. 

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That fall in electricity demand is peculiar: Ember puts it down to “a drop in industrial electricity consumption, mild weather and energy savings and efficiency” – principally in the energy-intensive industries of chemicals/petrochemicals, iron/steel, and paper/pulp, where manufacturing may have been reined in as gas prices soared.
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Vendor offering citations for purchase is latest bad actor in scholarly publishing • Science

Katie Langin:

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In 2023, a new Google Scholar profile appeared online featuring a researcher no one had ever heard of. Within a few months, the scientist, an expert in fake news, was listed by the scholarly database as their field’s 36th most cited researcher. They had an h-index of 19—meaning they’d published 19 academic articles that had been cited at least 19 times each. It was an impressive burst onto the academic publishing scene.

But none of it was legitimate. The researcher and their institution were fictional, created by researchers at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi who were probing shady publishing practices. The publications were written by ChatGPT. And the citation numbers were bogus: some came from the author excessively citing their own “work,” while 50 others had been purchased for $300 from a vendor offering a “citations booster service.”

“The capacity to purchase citations in bulk is a new and worrying development,” says Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney who has studied problematic publications in the biomedical literature. In academia, a researcher’s h-index and the number of citations they’ve garnered are often used for hiring and promotion decisions. And the fabricated profile, which was part of a study posted as a preprint on arXiv, shows “extreme” tactics that can be employed to manipulate them, adds Byrne, who was not involved in the work. (The researchers declined to name the vendor to avoid giving them more business.)

The study got started when Yasir Zaki, a computer scientist at NYU Abu Dhabi, and his colleagues noticed troubling patterns among real researchers. After combing through the Google Scholar profiles of more than 1.6 million scientists and looking at authors with at least 10 publications and 200 citations, the team identified 1016 scientists who had experienced a 10-fold increase in citations over a single year. “You know something is off when a scientist experiences a sudden and massive spike in their citations,” Zaki says.

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Arguably this sort of thing would have been harder to spot in the days before Google Scholar – though there maybe wouldn’t have been the same incentive to do it.
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Apple car’s crash: design details, Tim Cook’s indecision, failed Tesla deal • Bloomberg (archived)

Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett:

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According to a longtime Apple executive who worked on the car, it was widely seen within the company as an ill-conceived product that needed to be put out of its misery. “The big arc was poor leadership that let the program linger, while everyone else in Apple was cringing,” they say. Asked what went wrong with the effort, a senior manager involved in the vehicle’s interior design replied: “What went right?”

…It was Steve Jobs who first floated the idea of a car at Apple. In the late 2000s, in a typically grand pronouncement, the company’s co-founder and CEO declared internally that Apple should have dominant technologies in all of the spaces in which people spent time: at home, at work and on the go. For many Americans, being in transit means being on the road, sometimes for hours a day. “We talked about what would be this generation’s new Volkswagen Beetle,” recalls Tony Fadell, who led mobile device engineering under Jobs. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with American car companies on the brink of failure, the Apple chief executive even floated the idea of acquiring General Motors Co. for pennies on the dollar.

That scheme was quickly abandoned, in part because Apple decided it would be a bad look and in part because of the need to focus on the iPhone. But in 2014, seeking a new multi-hundred-billion-dollar revenue stream, Cook began to focus again on cars. Apple executives weighing whether to enter the market joked with one another that they’d rather take on Detroit than a fellow tech giant: “Would you rather compete against Samsung or General Motors?” The profit margins in cars were far lower than in consumer electronics, but Apple was coming off a stretch during which it had reshaped not only the music industry but the mobile phone market.

To its supporters, the idea of getting into automobiles had the potential to be, as one Apple executive puts it, “one more example of Apple entering a market very late and vanquishing it.” While the initial prototypes operated like traditional cars, these supporters eventually pursued more radical redesigns, invoking a transportation technology experience they said would “give people time back.” The ultimate plan was a living room on wheels where people who no longer needed to drive their cars could work or entertain themselves with Apple screens and services instead.

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Absorbing read; more is going to come out about this. Lots of wrong choices and indecision.
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Decoder guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future • The Verge

Hank Green, not of The Verge, interviewed Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, about how The Verge is still here:

»

HG: let’s start with you being the person who runs the last website on earth. Because you say things all the time and then you don’t explain them, which I love, but now I’ve got you. And so you have to explain to me why The Verge is “the last website on earth.”

NP: That’s a little bit of a joke. It’s 50% a joke. I’m aware that there are other websites. What I specifically mean is we were founded in a boom time of websites. We were founded in 2011. We started talking about the site in 2010. We remain part of a venture-backed digital media startup. There were a lot of those back then. We had a lot of competition in 2011, meaningful — like we were scared of them — competition.

ReadWriteWeb existed, and we tried to beat them every day. TechCrunch was a very different kind of publication back then. We tried to beat them all the time, and I really respect the people I competed against. I came up at Engadget competing ferociously against the people at Gizmodo, and we became first rivals and then really good friends out of that competition. Some of those sites still exist. Some of them are still doing great work. Some of them still have great people. But that moment when there was a ferocious rush of energy and money and attention into websites has obviously faded.

We’re not making those the same way we used to anymore, and I look at my peer group and so many of them are gone. To me, it’s that. It’s all the things: the people and the properties that I used to wake up in fear of, many of them are radically different than they used to be. And we’re still here. And that feels strange to me.

HG: It feels strange. You won, and it’s like, “Oh, I don’t actually…” It turns out that when you’re put into the arena and you’re the last man standing, there’s just a lot of carnage around, which isn’t that much of a triumph. It feels like it hurts a little bit. It’s weird to be us, our age, and hear that the word website feels almost anachronistic. It feels of another era.

The way I think about it is that I don’t have anyone else’s algorithm to think about, and that is really important to me. But then I look at all of the most important creators and the most influential members of the new media, and what they are is so successful that they have transcended algorithms on other people’s platforms.

«

The whole podcast is available to listen to (for free); there’s also the transcript. The Verge has indeed managed something remarkable in surviving and succeeding in its current form for so long.
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Google hit with €2.1bn lawsuit from more than 30 European media companies • POLITICO

Pieter Haeck:

»

A group of 32 European media organizations have filed a lawsuit against Google, seeking damages of about €2.1bn.

The lawsuit touches on the US tech giant’s digital advertising practices, with the media groups claiming that they “incurred losses due to a less competitive market,” according to a statement shared by law firms Geradin Partners and Stek, which represent the organizations.

“Without Google’s abuse of its dominant position, the media companies would have received significantly higher revenues from advertising and paid lower fees for ad tech services,” the statement added.

Among the media groups are some of Europe’s leading news companies, including Axel Springer (owner of POLITICO), Norway-based Schibsted, and Benelux groups such as DPG Media and Mediahuis. The coalition claims to cover 17 European countries.

The lawsuit was filed in a Dutch court.

In June last year, the European Commission sent antitrust charges to Google over its advertising business.

“Our preliminary concern is that Google may have used its market position to favour its own intermediation services,” Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager said at the time.
“Not only did this possibly harm Google’s competitors but also publishers’ interests, while also increasing advertisers’ costs.”

The European Union’s competition watchdog has been probing Google’s online display advertising business since 2021. It’s previously probed the company’s shopping search service, its mobile phone software and advertising contracts, levying more than €8bn in fines.

«

(I’m involved with a similar lawsuit against Google in the UK; the process is ongoing.)
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Amazon just bought a 100% nuclear-powered data center • Electrek

Michelle Lewis:

»

One of the US’s largest nuclear power plants will directly power cloud service provider Amazon Web Services’ new data centre.

Power provider Talen Energy sold its data center campus, Cumulus Data Assets, to Amazon Web Services for $650m. Amazon will develop an up to 960-megawatt (MW) data center at the Salem Township site in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

The 1,200-acre campus is directly powered by an adjacent 2.5 gigawatt (GW) nuclear power station also owned by Talen Energy.

The 1,075-acre Susquehanna Steam Electric Station is the sixth-largest nuclear power plant in the US. It’s been online since 1983 and produces 63m kWh per day. The plant has two General Electric boiling water reactors within a Mark II containment building that are licensed through 2042 and 2044.

According to Talen Energy’s investor presentation, it will supply fixed-price nuclear power to Amazon’s new data center as it’s built. Amazon has minimum contractual power commitments that ramp up in 120 MW increments over several years. The cloud service giant has a one-time option to cap commitments at 480 MW and two 10-year extension options tied to nuclear license renewals.

«

Not sure how I feel about this: OK, so the centre is going to be nuclear-powered: hooray. But isn’t that energy that could be used to power homes or other businesses? The tradeoff implied here is tricky.
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Meta & LG confirm “next-gen XR device” partnership • UploadVR

David Heaney:

»

LG just officially announced an XR “strategic collaboration” with Meta.

Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg met with LG CEO William Cho and the president of LG’s Home Entertainment division Park Hyoung-sei at LG’s headquarters in Seoul to finalize the details of the partnership. The meeting apparently included Zuckerberg demoing Quest 3 to Cho.

This is Zuckerberg’s first publicly-known trip to South Korea since 2014, when he visited Samsung to finalize the Gear VR smartphone-holder headset partnership.

William Cho, Mark Zuckerberg, and Park Hyoung-sei earlier today at LG headquarters in Seoul.
LG confirmed the talks included discussing “business strategies and considerations for next-gen XR device development”, giving the following statement:

»

“LG envisions that by bringing together Meta’s platform with its own content/service capabilities from its TV business, a distinctive ecosystem can be forged in the XR domain, which is one of the company’s new business areas.

Moreover, the fusion of Meta’s diverse core technological elements with LG’s cutting-edge product and quality capabilities promises significant synergies in next-gen XR device development.”

«

«

One rather suspects that Zuck would have preferred to be visiting Samsung again, rather than smartphone-loser LG. But Samsung likely has its eyes on Google (whose blandishments Meta just rejected to cooperate on VR).
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AI models make stuff up. How can hallucinations be controlled? • The Economist

»

Researchers at Google DeepMind found that telling an LLM to “take a deep breath and work on this problem step-by-step” reduced hallucinations and improved problem solving, especially of maths problems. One theory for why this works is that AI models learn patterns. By breaking a problem down into smaller ones, it is more likely that the model will be able to recognise and apply the right one. But, says Edoardo Ponti at the University of Edinburgh, such prompt engineering amounts to treating a symptom, rather than curing the disease.

Perhaps, then, the problem is that accuracy is too much to ask of llms alone. Instead, they should be part of a larger system—an engine, rather than the whole car. One solution is retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which splits the job of the ai model into two parts: retrieval and generation. Once a prompt is received, a retriever model bustles around an external source of information, like a newspaper archive, to extract relevant contextual information. This is fed to the generator model alongside the original prompt, prefaced with instructions not to rely on prior knowledge. The generator then acts like a normal LLM and answers. This reduces hallucinations by letting the LLM play to its strengths—summarising and paraphrasing rather than researching. Other external tools, from calculators to search engines, can also be bolted onto an LLM in this way, effectively building it a support system to enhance those skills it lacks.

Even with the best algorithmic and architectural antipsychotics available, however, LLMs still hallucinate. One leaderboard, run by Vectara, an American software company, tracks how often such errors arise. Its data shows that GPT-4 still hallucinates in 3% of its summaries, Claude 2 in 8.5% and Gemini Pro in 4.8%.

«

The RAG approach sounds like the adversarial system used for generating images such as thispersondoesnotexist, where one neural network generates and the other tries to find fault with it, feeding back between the two until the latter is satisfied.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.)

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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.

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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.

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

A selection of 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:

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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.”

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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