Gene editing is able to cure sickle cell disease, aka thalassemia, in a remarkable application of CRISPR technology. CC-licensed photo by scooterdmu 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. Neatly edited. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO • The Verge

Alex Heath and Nilay Patel:

»

Sam Altman’s surprise move to Microsoft after his shock firing at OpenAI isn’t a done deal. He and co-founder Greg Brockman are still willing to return to OpenAI if the remaining board members who fired him step aside, multiple sources tell The Verge.

The promised mass exodus of virtually every OpenAI employee — including board member and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who led the initial move to depose Altman! — means that there is more pressure on the board than ever, with only two of the three remaining members needing to flip. Altman posted on X that “we are all going to work together some way or other,” which we are told is meant to indicate that the fight continues.

Altman, former president Brockman, and the company’s investors are still trying to find a graceful exit for the board, say multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation. The sources characterized the hiring announcement by Microsoft, which needed to have a resolution to the crisis before the stock market opened on Monday, as a “holding pattern.”

A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment.

After Altman was suddenly fired on Friday, negotiations with the board to potentially bring him back reached a stalemate.

«

It’s still all up in the air. At the time of compilation, about 95% of OpenAI’s staff had signed an open letter basically telling the OpenAI board they’re idiots. Among the signatories was Sutskever, which is the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen: signing a letter saying two-days-ago-you is an idiot.

Ben Thompson points out that Microsoft will either acquire OpenAI’s staff, or the company. Big winner: Microsoft. Satya Nadella, its CEO, says the oversight of OpenAI needs to change (perhaps put its biggest investor, in effect Microsoft, on the board?). And an analysis of the boards of not-for-profits (such as OpenAI) says “their governance is generally abysmal”.

Plus (at time of compilation) we still don’t know precisely why Altman was fired.
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Portugal just ran on 100% renewable energy for six days • JOE.co.uk

Joseph Loftus:

»

Portugal has reportedly broke a record for energy production after going six days relying entirely on renewable energy.

This apparently includes everything from electrical applianes in home and work, all were running on either wind, hydro, or solar power for six days straight.

Between 4:00AM on 31 October and 9:00AM on 6 November, the nation of ten million relied on only renewable energy, as 1102 GWh was generated.

Hugo Costa, the individual who runs EDP Renewables, the country’s renewable arm of the state utility, said: “The gas plants were there, waiting to dispatch energy, should it be needed. It was not, because the wind was blowing; it was raining a lot. And we were producing with a positive impact to the consumers because the prices have dropped dramatically, almost to zero.”

The news comes as many nations across Europe attempt to hit the Paris Agreement’s climate goals by 2050.

When 2050 finally comes around, nations need not only run via renewable energy for six days, but all year round.

«

Not so sure about that last sentence. “Net zero” means what it says: net, not totally, zero.

As a comparison, the UK’s electricity system uses an average of 715GWh per day; Portugal seems to consume about 184GWh per day. In the UK, wind generates about 10-15GW, or 240-360GWh per day. It’s just a question of scaling up.
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Apple plans to equip MacBooks with in-house cellular modems • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

Apple has reportedly been working on its own modem since 2018, as it seeks to move away from Qualcomm’s component currently used in iPhones. The timeframe for launching the modem has slipped several times and is now expected to be ready around 2026, and Gurman now hears that Apple has plans for the chip appearing in other Apple devices further down the line.

Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that Apple’s custom technology aspirations include integrating an in-house modem into its system-on-a-chip (SoC), which would eventually see the launch of MacBooks with built-in cellular connectivity.

Gurman says Apple will “probably need two or three additional years to get that chip inside cellular versions of the Apple Watch and iPad – and the Mac, once the part is integrated into the company’s system-on-a-chip.”

Apple has explored the possibility of developing MacBooks with cellular connectivity in the past. Indeed, the company reportedly considered launching a MacBook Air with 3G connectivity, but former CEO Steve Jobs said in 2008 that Apple decided against it, since it would take up too much room in the case. An integrated SoC would solve that problem.

«

At least Marco Arment and Casey Liss will be happy. (They’ve wanted modems in laptops for ages. Amusingly, in the early days of the internet, laptops did come with modems: it was how you got online.)

Apple won’t have wanted to use Qualcomm’s modems because Qualcomm charges a percentage of the product’s retail price. If Apple only uses Qualcomm’s patents, that’s a lot cheaper.
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The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars • The Conversation

Muhammad Rizwan Azhar and Waqas Uzair:

»

Close to half (44%) of all Australian commuter trips are by car – and under 10km. Of Perth’s 4.2 million daily car trips, 2.8 are for distances of less than 2km.

This is common in wealthier countries. In the United States, a staggering 60% of all car trips cover less than 10km.

So what’s the best solution? You might think switching to an electric vehicle is the natural step. In fact, for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you – and for the planet. That’s because these forms of transport – collectively known as electric micromobility – are cheaper to buy and run.

But it’s more than that: they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present, due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are a common form of transport.

On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans and trucks.

But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers on the road last year. Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day – about 1% of the world’s total oil demand, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

What about electric vehicles, you ask? After all, EVs have been heralded as a silver bullet for car emissions and air pollution in cities, as their tailpipe emissions are zero. If charged with renewable power, they get even greener.

But to see them as an inarguable good is an error. They are cleaner cars, but they are still cars, taking up space on the roads and requiring a lot of electricity to power them.

«

Only thing is: what about when it rains?
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AI scam calls: This mom believes fake kidnappers cloned her daughter’s voice • CNN

Faith Karimi:

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Jennifer DeStefano’s phone rang one afternoon as she climbed out of her car outside the dance studio where her younger daughter Aubrey had a rehearsal. The caller showed up as unknown, and she briefly contemplated not picking up.

But her older daughter, 15-year-old Brianna, was away training for a ski race and DeStefano feared it could be a medical emergency. “Hello?” she answered on speaker phone as she locked her car and lugged her purse and laptop bag into the studio.

She was greeted by yelling and sobbing. “Mom! I messed up!” screamed a girl’s voice.

“What did you do?!? What happened?!?” DeStefano asked.

“The voice sounded just like Brie’s, the inflection, everything,” she told CNN recently. “Then, all of a sudden, I heard a man say, ‘Lay down, put your head back.’ I’m thinking she’s being gurnied off the mountain, which is common in skiing. So I started to panic.”

As the cries for help continued in the background, a deep male voice started firing off commands: “Listen here. I have your daughter. You call the police, you call anybody, I’m gonna pop her something so full of drugs. I’m gonna have my way with her then drop her off in Mexico, and you’re never going to see her again.”

DeStefano froze. Then she ran into the dance studio, shaking and screaming for help. She felt like she was suddenly drowning. After a chaotic, rapid-fire series of events that included a $1m ransom demand, a 911 call and a frantic effort to reach Brianna, the “kidnapping” was exposed as a scam. A puzzled Brianna called to tell her mother that she didn’t know what the fuss was about and that everything was fine.

But DeStefano, who lives in Arizona, will never forget those four minutes of terror and confusion – and the eerie sound of that familiar voice. “A mother knows her child,” she said later. “You can hear your child cry across the building, and you know it’s yours.”

«

There’s a fair amount of doubt around this story: can AI voice copying really simulate screams, yelling, sobbing? Though free apps can clone a voice in a minute.

Generally, these sorts of calls are becoming common (or less uncommon) in the US, and of course the WhatsApp scams which don’t need voice are all over the place. Take Rob Leathern’s advice: work out a “safe word” for live calls, and a different one for a recording.
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Sickle-cell treatment created with gene editing wins UK approval • The New York Times

Gina Kolata:

»

Regulators in Britain [last week] approved the first treatment derived from CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing method. Called Casgevy, the treatment is intended to cure sickle-cell disease and a related condition, beta thalassemia.

The manufacturers, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, based in Boston, and CRISPR Therapeutics, based in Switzerland, say about 2,000 patients in Britain with sickle-cell disease or beta thalassemia are expected to be eligible for the treatment.

The companies anticipate that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will approve Casgevy for sickle-cell patients in the United States in early December. The agency will decide on approval for beta thalassemia next year.

In late December, the FDA is expected to approve another sickle cell gene therapy by Bluebird Bio of Somerville, Mass. That treatment does not rely on gene editing, instead using a method that inserts new DNA into the genome.

Sickle-cell disease is caused by a defective gene that leads to the creation of abnormal hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component in red blood cells. The cells themselves become malformed, causing episodes of extreme pain. About 100,000 Americans, who are mostly Black and Hispanic, are believed to have the illness.

…Casgevy relies on CRISPR to nick the DNA, activating a gene that produces an alternative form of hemoglobin. To receive the sickle-cell treatment, patients in Britain must be at least 12 years old and have experienced repeated episodes of extreme pain.

There is no upper age limit, nor are patients excluded because they have suffered too much organ damage from sickle-cell disease, said Dr. David Altshuler, Vertex’s chief scientific officer.

But the patients must have no other options. Sickle-cell disease can be cured with a bone-marrow transplant, but few patients have compatible donors.

«

Expensive, and there’s a (relatively) cheaper alternative – bone marrow transplant – but for that you need donors.
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US is seeking more than $4bn from Binance to end case • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Chris Strohm, Allyson Versprille and Olga Kharif:

»

Negotiations between the Justice Department and Binance include the possibility that its founder Changpeng Zhao would face criminal charges in the US under an agreement to resolve the probe into alleged money laundering, bank fraud and sanctions violations, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Zhao, also known as “CZ,” is residing in the United Arab Emirates, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US, but that doesn’t prevent him from coming voluntarily.

Binance didn’t respond to multiple emails and phone calls seeking comment. The Justice Department declined to comment.

An announcement could come as soon as the end of the month, though the situation remains fluid, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

The BNB cryptocurrency, a token native to Binance and the BNB Chain blockchain that was created by the exchange, rose as much as 8.5% to $266.42 after Bloomberg reported the negotiations.

«

Incredible if a cryptocurrency exchange happened to have that sort of money lying around that actually belongs to it. However this is only the DoJ – the SEC filed suit in June alleging mishandling of customer funds, misleading investors and breaking securities rules. The DoJ complaint is about money laundering, bank fraud and sanctions violations. None of it is what you’d call minor.
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Global warming on track for 2.9ºC as greenhouse gases keep rising, UN says • FT

Kenza Bryan and Steven Bernard:

»

The world is on track for a temperature rise of up to 2.9ºC above pre-industrial levels, a report by the UN environment programme has found, even assuming countries stick to their Paris agreement climate pledges.

UN chief António Guterres said that keeping the Paris goal of limiting the rise to ideally 1.5ºC and well below 2ºC would require “tearing out the poisoned root of the climate crisis: fossil fuels.”

“Otherwise, we’re simply inflating the lifeboats while breaking the oars,” he added. The world has already warmed by at least 1.1ºC.

Coming ahead of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 10 days, the latest UN report estimated the size of the gap between the emissions trajectory implied by climate pledges and the one needed to limit warming,

The level of greenhouse gas emissions stood at a new peak of 57.4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the UN emissions gap report noted, after rising 1.2% from 2021 to 2022.

Guterres referred to this “gap” as a “canyon littered with broken promises, broken lives, and broken records.”

Emissions cuts of 14bn tonnes or 28% are needed by 2030 to keep within 2ºC of warming, and a more ambitious reduction of more than 40% or 22bn tonnes is needed for the 1.5ºC threshold to be realistic.

«

This is what we need a time machine for: to take us back so that we can get things on the right track much earlier. More wind farms, more nuclear power plants.
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Patrick Vallance contradicts Rishi Sunak’s evidence to Covid inquiry • The Guardian

Peter Walker:

»

Rishi Sunak would almost certainly have known scientists were worried about his “eat out to help out” scheme during the pandemic, Sir Patrick Vallance has said, directly contradicting the prime minister’s evidence to the Covid inquiry.

In potentially damaging testimony, Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, said he would be “very surprised” if Sunak, then chancellor, had not learned about objections to his plan to help the hospitality industry.

Sunak had written to the inquiry saying he “[did] not recall any concerns about the scheme” being raised in ministerial meetings despite growing concerns that the discount plan could fuel the spread of the virus.

An extract from Vallance’s contemporaneous diary, in July 2020, provided evidence that Sunak also sought to push back against the scientists’ advice. In one economics-based meeting, Sunak said “it’s all about handling the scientists, not handling the virus”, the entry said.

Vallance said: “There were definitely periods when it was clear that the unwelcome advice we were giving was, as expected, not beloved, and that meant we had to work doubly hard to make sure that the science evidence and advice was being properly heard.”

«

Philip Ball, a science writer, wrote a thread on this, beginning: “I can’t see how Eat Out To Help Out can’t now become a major scandal. Here was a scheme imposed by Sunak with zero scientific consultation, and which in Vallance’s words utterly reversed the public-health messaging: from “Keep distant from those outside your family” to “We’ll pay you to spend hours in an enclosed space with people you don’t know.” Sunak, he suggests, misled the inquiry over this.
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The cassette-tape revolution • The New Yorker

Jon Michaud:

»

The compact audiocassette (to give it its full name) was conceived by Lou Ottens, the head of product development at the Dutch electronics company Phillips. One day, in the early nineteen-sixties, frustrated after “fiddling with that damn reel-to-reel” (as a colleague later recalled), an exasperated Ottens told his design team to create a version of their reel-to-reel tape that was small and portable, with the spools of tape contained inside a case. He wanted it to fit in a pocket and imagined it would be used by journalists and nature lovers (the latter to record birds and other outdoor sounds). Phillips introduced its new cassette system in 1963 and the immediate response was underwhelming. Before long, however, imitations of their compact cassette player began cropping up across the globe, most frequently in Japan.

Ottens then made a decision that helped boost the format. To promote standardization of the cassette, Phillips waived royalties, allowing anyone to license the design for free as long as they adhered to the company’s quality-control standards. This avoided the kind of schism that videotape would face during the VHS-Betamax war and insured that the Phillips cassette would be the dominant design. By the end of the sixties, eighty-five different manufacturers were producing cassette players, with sales of 2.5 million units. By 1983, cassettes were outselling LPs.

The ascent of the cassette caused a major freak-out among record-company executives. Nearly anyone who has ever bought vinyl will be familiar with the cassette-and-crossbones image that was for many years printed on record sleeves, accompanied by the dire warning: “Home taping is killing music.” On both sides of the Atlantic, the recording industry sought, futilely, to make the duplication of music on cassette tapes illegal. Other proposals included a compensatory tax on blank tapes.

«

Journalists and nature lovers! Inventors never know how their inventions will really be used. And strange how the same responses come to any new technology: suppress it, tax it, etc.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK government intends to give energy rebates to homes near new pylons in a scheme being announced on Wednesday. CC-licensed photo by Ruben Holthuijsen on Flickr.

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

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

Sam Altman’s counter-rebellion leaves OpenAI leadership hanging in the balance • WSJ

Berber Jin, Deepa Seetharaman, Tom Dotan and Keach Hagey:

»

Two days after Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI, he was back at the company’s office, trying to negotiate his return.

The former chief executive officer entered with a guest badge on Sunday and posted on X: “first and last time i ever wear one of these.”

The leadership of the company that created the hit AI chatbot ChatGPT remained unclear Sunday, as investors and many employees pushed over the weekend to restore Altman. He has been engineering a countercoup to retake control of one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable and high-profile startups.

The abrupt shake-up at OpenAI turns on one of the oldest tales in Silicon Valley: a breakup between a founder and his board.

But in this case it was a very particular kind of founder—the face of Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence revolution—and a very particular kind of board, which was tasked with making social good a priority over profit. The rupture threatens the future of the company and the billions of dollars investors had put into it.

Altman has also been considering starting his own venture, potentially with talent from OpenAI. He is pursuing both tracks: On Sunday morning, Chief Technology Officer and interim CEO Mira Murati sent a note to staff saying Altman would be returning to the San Francisco office later that day as discussions to reinstate him continued.

Over the weekend, Altman made clear to his allies that if he does return, he wants a new board and governance structure, people familiar with the matter said.

Two days after the board fired Altman, different explanations persisted for the initial firing. The board said Friday it pushed out the CEO after it concluded he hadn’t been candid with the company’s directors. It didn’t elaborate. 

«

At the time of compiling these links, the reason(s) for Altman’s ousting still hadn’t been made clear. Lots of people are spraying around ideas for why he was fired, hoping that their one will be true – hot take bingo – but no clear story has emerged.
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Who’s on the OpenAI board — the group behind Sam Altman’s ouster • CNBC

Hayden Field:

»

On Friday, the board of OpenAI, the buzzy AI company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT, suddenly and publicly ousted its CEO Sam Altman. The announcement came one day after he appeared publicly on behalf of his company at Thursday’s APEC CEO Summit.

OpenAI’s board said it conducted “a deliberative review process” and that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the board’s statement continued.

As of this week, OpenAI’s six-person board included OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman, who was also chairman of the board; Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist; Adam D’Angelo [Quora CEO]; Tasha McCauley [senior scientist at Rand Corporation]; Helen Toner [not an OpenAI employee]; and Altman himself. The company began publicly posting its board’s member list on its website in July, after the departures of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, director of Neuralink Shivon Zilis and former Texas congressman Will Hurd.

«

Marissa Mayer – ex-Google, ex-CEO of Yahoo – tweeted that companies of OpenAI’s size would normally have 8-15 independent directors, rather than the four independent ones it does. Though of course OpenAI has grown really fast, which might have made it hard to staff up the board quickly enough.

Though board membership seems to have been something of a revolving door.
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Nothing Chats has already been pulled from Google Play over privacy issues • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

Nothing has pulled the Nothing Chats beta from the Google Play store, saying it is “delaying the launch until further notice” while it fixes “several bugs.” The app promised to let Nothing Phone 2 users text with iMessage, but it required allowing Sunbird, who provides the platform, log into users’ iCloud accounts on its own Mac Mini servers, which… isn’t great? [It offers an enormous hole for hacking – Overspill Ed]

The removal came after users widely shared a blog from Texts.com showing that messages sent with Sunbird’s system aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted — and that it’s not hard to compromise it. The app launched in beta yesterday after being announced earlier this week.

9to5Google pointed to a thread from site author Dylan Roussel, who found that part of Sunbird’s solution involves decrypting and transmitting messages using HTTP to a Firebase cloud-syncing server and storing them there in unencrypted plain text. Roussel posted that the company itself has access to messages because it logs them as errors using Sentry, a debugging service.

Sunbird claimed yesterday that HTTP is “only used as part of the one-off initial request from the app notifying back-end of the upcoming iMessage connection.”

That was in response to someone pointing to Texts.com’s blog examining the vulnerability. Texts.com wrote that “an attacker subscribed to the Firebase realtime database will always be able to access the messages before or at the moment they are read by the user.”

«

That’s so woeful. Unsurprising that Sunbird hasn’t launched publicly yet, given such truck-sized holes. Almost any of Sunbird’s team could have God Mode to read peoples’ messages.
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Massive cryptomining rig discovered under Polish court’s floor, stealing power • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Police were called to dismantle a secret cryptomining rig winding throughout the floors and ventilation ducts of a Polish court in September, according to Polish news channel TVN24.

Several secured computers were discovered, potentially stealing thousands of Polish Zlotys worth of energy per month (the equivalent of roughly $250 per 1,000 Zlotys.) It’s currently unknown how long the rig was running because the illegal operation went undetected, partly because the computers used were connected to the Internet through their own modems rather than through the court’s network.

While no one has been charged yet with any crimes, the court seemingly has suspects. Within two weeks of finding the rig, the court terminated a contract with a company responsible for IT maintenance in the building, TVN24 reported. Before the contract ended, the company fired two employees that it said were responsible for maintenance in the parts of the building where the cryptomine was hidden.

Poland’s top law enforcement officials, the Internal Security Agency, have been called in to investigate. The Warsaw District Prosecutor’s Office has hired IT experts to help determine exactly how much electricity was stolen from Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court in Warsaw, TVN24 reported.

The Supreme Administrative Court is the last resort for sensitive business and tax disputes, but no records seem to have been compromised.

«

Quite an enterprising bit of IT outsourcing there.
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US aims to triple global nuclear energy production • HuffPost UK Politics

Alexander Kaufman:

»

The United States is preparing to announce a pledge to triple the world’s production of nuclear energy by 2050, with more than 10 countries on four continents already signed on to the first major international agreement in modern history to ramp up the use of atomic power.

Signatories to the pledge, set to be unveiled at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai later this month, include many of the largest current users of nuclear energy such as the United Kingdom, France, Romania, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and South Korea, a senior Biden administration official familiar with the efforts confirmed HuffPost. A handful of newcomers that have not yet built reactors, including Poland, Ghana and Morocco, are also said to have joined the pledge.

The plan will put pressure on the World Bank to end its long-standing ban on financing nuclear-energy projects, which the American Nuclear Society, a nonprofit of academics and industry professionals who advocate for atomic energy in the public interest, said was crucial to any buildout.

“Tripling the world’s nuclear energy supplies by 2050 is the catalyst required to halt rising temperatures and achieve a sustainable future,” the ANS said in a statement to HuffPost. “A large-scale build-out of new nuclear energy can only happen with the crafting of nuclear-inclusive lending policies by financial institutions like the World Bank.”

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I had no idea that the World Bank had such a ban in place. Utterly bonkers.
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Autumn Statement: Homes close to new pylons to get £1,000 off bills • BBC News

»

Households living close to new pylons and electricity substations could receive up to £1,000 a year off energy bills for a decade under new plans.

It is hoped the plan would convince people to support upgrades in their area, which are needed in part for new electric vehicle charging points.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is expected to announce the policy in the Autumn Statement on Wednesday.
It is unclear at this stage how many households will get the full discount.

Mr Hunt and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are currently finalising the content of the statement, which will set out the priorities for government spending in the final year before a general election has to be held.

It is known that they are considering announcing some tax cuts, and changes to income tax, national insurance, inheritance tax and business taxes are all being discussed.

But the Treasury has indicated the pounds-for-pylons plan will definitely form part of the chancellor’s statement.

«

This might be useful, inasmuch as yes, we do need more pylons. But also what about discounts for being near new onshore wind turbines? Or new nuclear power stations? There’s such a paucity of imagination.
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MPs want UK national security law used to vet Barclay family’s Telegraph offer • The Guardian

Julia Kollewe:

»

MPs, including Edward Leigh, John Hayes and the life peer Margaret Eaton, have written to the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, the business secretary, Kemi Badenoch, and the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, questioning the use of overseas sovereign wealth to buy Telegraph Media Group, the Financial Times reported.

The Barclays had owned the group, which includes the Daily and Sunday Telegraph as well as the Spectator, since 2004 but Lloyds Banking Group took control of it in June after the family failed to reach an agreement over more than £1bn in unpaid debt. It has since been put up for sale by the bank in an auction run by Goldman Sachs.

Last month, the Barclay family tabled an offer valuing the newspaper group at £1bn in an attempt to deter rival bidders from challenging them before the auction. The family has secured financing from investors based in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, after talks that began in August.

The MPs said in the letter that they were concerned that investment vehicles with links to the UAE royal family “may soon gain control of or material influence over two of the most important media publications in Great Britain, the Telegraph and the Spectator”.

They argued that there “is a strong case for close scrutiny by the government under both the Enterprise Act 2002 and the National Security and Investment Act 2021”, especially if the offer involved taking the publications as security for the loan, “an amount which, by any sensible measure, the revenue of the publications will not be able to support”.

«

So the MPs are saying they don’t think the titles are worth anything like that much, and that the loans will fall into default. Hard to argue: the Telegraph titles have been valued around £500m-£700m.
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Ad execs urge Twitter CEO to resign after Musk endorses antisemitic post • Forbes

John Paczkowski:

»

Forbes has confirmed that Yaccarino has been contacted by a groundswell of leading advertising executives who questioned why she is risking her reputation to shield Musk’s behavior—and suggested that she could make a statement about racism and antisemitism by stepping down. She has so far resisted their entreaties, sources said.

Last week, Musk endorsed an explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theory, and a report from watchdog Media Matters found that ads from major companies including IBM and Amazon had been placed next to content promoting Nazis and white nationalism, prompting advertisers including Apple, Disney and IBM to pull ads from the platform. Even the White House has condemned Musk’s antisemitic and racist statement, in which Musk agreed with an X user who espoused a conspiracy theory that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”

On November 16, Yaccarino responded to the firestorm in a post on X: “X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board — I think that’s something we can and should all agree on. When it comes to this platform — X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.” Yaccarino did not immediately respond to a comment request made through X’s press team.

The personal outreach to Yaccarino by leading advertising executives comes as X, previously known as Twitter, struggles to right itself under its mercurial owner and to battle the advertiser-unfriendly content his behavior has emboldened.

«

You have to wonder what she thinks she’s getting out of it. Every blowup like this shows how powerless she is to control Musk, and how pointless her position is.
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Ads watchdog files FTC complaint against X, formerly Twitter, over unlabeled ads • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

X, formerly Twitter, was caught running unlabeled ads on its platform in September. Now that issue, which has been ongoing, has been brought to the FTC’s attention. An independent nonprofit Check My Ads has filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission urging an investigation over the advertising practices at X, including the lack of disclosure about which posts are ads, broken links that explain why ads are targeted and more.

The complaint cites X’s lack of disclosure around ads, saying it misleads consumers that the content and the information they’re consuming on the platform is not paid for.

“This misrepresentation tricks users into trusting content as organic and exacerbates the opportunity for scams to occur,” the complaint states. “Furthermore, by failing to adequately disclose advertisements, X Corp. misrepresents the methods employed to target users or facilitate third-party ad targeting.”

It also points out that X’s promotional materials for advertisers indicate that advertisements are distinguished from non-paid, organic content with a “Promoted” label, but no such label appears for consumers. As Mashable earlier reported, X appeared to be switching between the “Promoted” and “Ad” labeling format for some time. Most of the ads on X are now simply labeled “Ad” but some are surfacing in users’ feeds without any ad label attached at all.

«

When things go bad, they go really bad.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Analysis suggests it was a tweet, not TikTok, which made Osama bin Laden’s manifesto go viral. CC-licensed photo by justgrimes on Flickr.

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

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about David Cameron, and the past following you around.

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.

Apple announces RCS support for iMessage • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Apple shocked the mobile world on Thursday by saying it will adopt the RCS messaging standard. When iMessage users are talking to people off the service, iMessage will soon be able to fall back to the RCS carrier messaging standard instead of SMS, which comes with the advantages of read receipts, higher-quality media sending, and typing indicators. Your chats with your green bubble friends will be slightly less awful.

Apple sent several media outlets a statement:

»

Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.

«

iMessage is currently besieged on all sides by various parties. Google has been waging a “get the message” campaign against Apple for the past year or two, imploring the company to adopt RCS.

Last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked on stage if the company would make messaging with Android better, and he responded, “I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point” and told the audience member to “just buy your mom an iPhone” if he wanted easier communication with his mother. Regulators in the European Union have yet to decide the fate of iMessage, but if it meets the qualifications for being a big tech “Gatekeeper,” the iMessage protocol will be forced to open up in the EU. [Thursday was the last day before the EU might have forced Apple to offer iMessage interoperability – Overspill Ed]

The Wall Street Journal ran an article last year subtitled “Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble,” detailing the bullying that Android users were subject to due to SMS fallback dragging down the capabilities of iMessage group chats (87% of US teenagers have iPhones).

On the Android side of things, companies have been desperate to work better with iMessage, with Google hacking together an emoji response solution for Google Messages and Android manufacturer Nothing planning a wild “hack into iMessage” scheme to run messages through Mac computers hosted in a data center.

«

RCS was devised in 2008, and Google started pushing it harder in 2017. But to actually bang heads together, you need a trade bloc, just as with GSM decades ago.
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Apple’s in-house 5G modem work faces further delays • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple is continuing to run into troubles in its attempt to develop a 5G modem to replace Qualcomm’s 5G modems in the iPhone and other products, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Apple in 2019 acquired the majority of Intel’s smartphone business and started in on a serious effort to develop its own modem hardware, but the project has suffered multiple setbacks. Apple is still “years away” from creating a chip that is able to perform as well as or better than chips from rival Qualcomm.

The Cupertino company initially wanted to have an in-house modem chip ready to go by 2024, a goal that could not be met, and now Gurman says that Apple is also going to miss an extended spring 2025 launch timeline. As of now, the modem chip launch has been postponed until the end of 2025 or early 2026, and Apple is still planning to introduce the technology in a version of the low-cost iPhone SE.

Development on a modem chip is said to be in the early stages, and it “may lag behind the competition by years.” One version in development does not support faster mmWave technology, and Apple has also run into issues with the Intel code that it has been working with. Rewrites have been required, and adding new features has been causing existing features to break, plus Apple has to be careful not to infringe on Qualcomm patents while developing the chip.

…[Apple and Qualcomm] signed a new contract [for Apple to use Qualcomm’s modems], which was extended in September 2023. The latest deal with Qualcomm covers smartphone launches in 2024, 2025, and 2026, and will last through Apple’s delayed modem chip development.

«

Zeno’s modem? It seems like it’s always two, maybe three years away.
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Russian troops deployed on a motorbike. A drone chased them down • Forbes

David Axe:

»

On Oct. 19, Ukrainian marines in small boats motored across the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, landed in the Russian-occupied settlement of Krynky and, in a series of infantry actions, seized a bridgehead across the river.

Provided Russian motor-rifle regiments don’t soon push the marines back into the river, the Krynky lodgment could serve as a base for a wider Ukrainian offensive in Kherson.

In the meantime, it’s an object-lesson in local air-superiority. A lesson a pair of motorbike-riding Russian air-defense troops learned the hard way, as an explosives-laden Ukrainian first-person-view drone chased them down and killed them in dramatic fashion in Krynky recently. Warning: the video of the strike is extremely graphic.

The Krynky river-crossing was the culmination of a long preparatory campaign by Ukrainian pilots, gunners, drone-operators and electronic-warfare specialists who struck Russian supply lines and air-defenses, suppressed Russian artillery, harried Russian strongpoints and—perhaps most critically—jammed Russian drones and struck electronic-warfare systems in order to keep the Russians from jamming Ukrainian drones.

And now the air over Krynky belongs to Ukrainian drone-operators and daring Ukrainian army helicopter pilots flying low-level rocket-attack sorties. Russian troops cannot venture out into the open in and around Krynky without drawing the attention of Ukrainian aircraft.

As early as June, there were reports the Ukrainians were positioning powerful radio-jammers on the Dnipro’s right bank in order to create a 12-mile-deep zone where Russia’s explosive FPV drones cannot reliably operate, but Ukrainian drones can operate.

«

Black Mirror’s “Hated in the Nation“, written by Charlie Brooker: fiction in 2016, a grim reality seven years later.
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Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

It is the architectural embodiment of ridiculousness, a monument to spectacle and to the exceedingly human condition of erecting bewildering edifices simply because we can. It cost $2.3bn; it’s blanketed in 580,000 square feet of LED lights; it can transform its 366-foot-tall exterior into a gargantuan emoji that astronauts can supposedly see from space. This is no half dome and certainly not a rotunda. This is Sphere.

When I approached the Sphere on the ground, around dusk, the building awoke from its screen saver (an unpleasant advertisement for a Spider-Man video game) and began to emit a strange burbling noise. A semi-realistic animation of a womb-bound fetus appeared and spoke the words “This is not a rehearsal” before bursting into flames, flickering violently, and shape-shifting into the following series of images: a blinking eyeball, a thunderstorm, the ocean, some plants, the moon, more flames, all to the pounding drums and metallic guitar clanking of U2’s “Zoo Station.” Even in the context of the pulsing neon goat rodeo of the Vegas Strip, this was a sensory assault.

The kaleidoscopic display made a certain kind of sense, because the Sphere is itself many different things. It’s an arena, conceived by the Madison Square Garden Company in 2018, and home to an ongoing U2 residency. It’s a movie theater, too, like 42 and a half IMAX screens bolted together. (The filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has been screening Postcard From Earth, a documentary he made specifically for this curved megatron.) The Sphere is a new form of architecture, a billboard, a digital canvas for art, and it is a weenie—which, my colleague Ian Bogost informed me, is a term invented by Walt Disney to describe landmarks inside his theme parks that help orient visitors. Las Vegas is a city of weenies, and the Sphere is its most glamorous.

«

A great piece of writing by Warzel, but that headline has subeditors all over the internet grinding their teeth in envy at not having written it.
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AI chatbots just showed scientists how to make social media less toxic • Business Insider

Adam Rogers:

»

On a simulated day in July of a 2020 that didn’t happen, 500 chatbots read the news — real news, our news, from the real July 1, 2020. ABC News reported that Alabama students were throwing “COVID parties.” On CNN, President Donald Trump called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate.” The New York Times had a story about the baseball season being canceled because of the pandemic.

Then the 500 robots logged into something very much (but not totally) like Twitter, and discussed what they had read. Meanwhile, in our world, the not-simulated world, a bunch of scientists were watching.

The scientists had used ChatGPT 3.5 to build the bots for a very specific purpose: to study how to create a better social network — a less polarized, less caustic bath of assholery than our current platforms. They had created a model of a social network in a lab — a Twitter in a bottle, as it were — in the hopes of learning how to create a better Twitter in the real world. “Is there a way to promote interaction across the partisan divide without driving toxicity and incivility?” wondered Petter Törnberg, the computer scientist who led the experiment.

It’s difficult to model something like Twitter — or to do any kind of science, really — using actual humans. People are hard to wrangle, and the setup costs for human experimentation are considerable. AI bots, on the other hand, will do whatever you tell them to, practically for free. And their whole deal is that they are designed to act like people. So researchers are starting to use chatbots as fake people from whom they can extract data about real people.

“If you want to model public discourse or interaction, you need more sophisticated models of human behavior,” says Törnberg, an assistant professor at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. “And then large language models come along, and they’re precisely that — a model of a person having a conversation.” By replacing people as the subjects in scientific experiments, AI could conceivably turbocharge our understanding of human behavior in a wide range of fields, from public health and epidemiology to economics and sociology. Artificial intelligence, it turns out, might offer us real intelligence about ourselves.

«

They used three models: “Echo chamber” full of people who agree with you, “Discover” (sort of “For You”) offering views from all over, and “Bridge”, showing what was most popular with political opposites. Have a guess at which caused the least rancour, and then read it.
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Trade with Europe ‘harder than ever’ for UK businesses • The London Economic

Jack Peat:

»

A comprehensive new survey of UK businesses has exposed the reality of trade with Europe post-Brexit, pointing to ongoing damage to the UK economy caused by the split.

A whopping 94% of respondents to the European Movement poll said leaving the single market and customs union has had a negative effect, while hundreds reported having to reduce their workforce hours, make staff redundant, or even close entirely.

Companies across sectors including engineering, agriculture, hospitality and finance reported they had lost business in the EU, and been made uncompetitive by new red-tape.

More than half of respondents said new red tape had made trading with the EU increasingly difficult, calling it ‘the single biggest obstacle’ to doing business with our largest trading partner.

A further 40% highlighted problems with finding staff since the loss of Freedom of Movement.

Sir Nick Harvey, CEO of European Movement UK, said: “This research shows just how difficult trading with the EU has become for British businesses. Many we have talked to have either cut down their exports into the bloc, or stopped them entirely, citing new costs, increased red tape, and diminishing confidence from EU businesses in UK suppliers. The voices of our small and medium businesses are not being heard, and times are harder than ever.

“Their stories are the ugly truth of trading for UK business after exiting the EU.”

«

Predictable. In case you haven’t heard of The London Economic: here’s the About page.
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Users can’t speak to viral AI girlfriend CarynAI because CEO is in jail for arson • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler:

»

People who paid to speak to an AI girlfriend modelled after real life 23-year-old influencer Caryn Marjorie are distraught because the service they paid for, Forever Companions, no longer works. It appears that the service stopped working shortly after Forever Companion CEO and founder John Meyer was arrested for trying to set his own apartment on fire. 

…“I terminated my relationship with Forever Voices due to unforeseen circumstances,” Marjorie told 404 Media in an email. “I wish the best for John Meyer and his family as he recovers from his mental health crisis. We didn’t see this coming but I vow to push CarynAI forward for my fans and supporters.”

…CarynAI became a viral sensation in May, getting coverage at NBC News, Fortune, Washington Post, and many other publications. While the service was not explicitly promoted for providing adult content, that is what it turned to immediately after users get their hands on it.

«

But of course it did.
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TikTok is removing videos praising Osama bin Laden letter • Semafor

J.D. Capelouto and Louise Matsakis:

»

TikTok says it’s “aggressively removing” videos promoting Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” which explained why he orchestrated the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The platform has also blocked the hashtag #LettertoAmerica, meaning users won’t be able to search for it, a TikTok spokesperson told Semafor.

Several videos from creators encouraging others to read the letter or sympathizing with bin Laden’s views on Israel and the U.S. racked up tens of thousands of views on TikTok and other platforms in recent days. Google Trends data indicates that searches for the document began spiking around a week ago.

Critics argued the videos showed that TikTok was spreading harmful information to young people, who make up a large bulk of its user base. But the platform said in a statement on X that the number of videos about the letter “is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate.” The statement added: “This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”

In its statement, TikTok said that content “promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” adding that it is “investigating how it got onto our platform.” TikTok has been at the center of the conversation about how the Israel-Hamas war is playing out on social media, in part because of a narrative that the app, which is Chinese-owned, leans pro-Palestine.

…Many TikTok users originally read the letter on the website of The Guardian, where it amassed over 100,000 views in recent days before the newspaper took it down, according to a person familiar with the matter. Another person at The Guardian told Semafor that almost all of the traffic came from people searching for the letter on Google, starting on Nov. 9.

The Guardian said it deleted bin Laden’s letter from its website because it was being shared on social media without its original context.

«

Lot of side eye at TikTok’s apparent boosting of this, but analysis by Ryan Broderick suggests that what made it “go viral” was a tweet.
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Apple should share its knowledge of Indian politicians’ iPhone hacks • Rest of World

Barkha Dutt:

»

India’s opposition has accused the government of spying on them after multiple iPhone users in the country received an alert from Apple. “State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone,” the automated text message read. So far, all the members of Parliament who have come forward about receiving the alert are those who oppose the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

An inevitable political row has followed.  

But amid the outrage, Apple’s muted public response has been perplexing, obfuscatory, and contradictory. So far, the iPhone manufacturer has not released a formal public statement. Attributions have been made to sources, government officials, or what Apple has purportedly said when contacted for a response. The absence of any clear or constituent articulation from the American technology giant has left the space wide open for random mudslinging and unverifiable claims and counterclaims.

The Narendra Modi government, while announcing an inquiry, has also described the protesting political figures to be “compulsive critics.” Officials say the alert is “vague,” generic, and no more than an automated advisory sent out in 150 countries.

“If it’s an algorithm tripping up, how can you explain why only one side of the political aisle has been warned?” argued Priyanka Chaturvedi, an opposition leader who received Apple’s alert, in an interview with me.

…In 2021, there was a national furore when a global investigative project reported that Pegasus spyware, developed by Israel’s NSO Group, had been used to target the devices of at least 50,000 individuals globally, including serving ministers, journalists, and opposition members in India. Two years later, a panel of experts failed to reach any clarity. The inquiry panel informed the Indian Supreme Court that the government had failed to cooperate. Malware was found on some devices but could not conclusively be linked to Pegasus. The government refused to confirm or deny whether it owned or used Pegasus.

«

The complaint in this article is that Apple isn’t telling the targeted people who is targeting them, but it seems very likely that Apple doesn’t know; it can just detect something from the logfiles of the devices that say things are awry. It’s always been difficult to know who’s controlling Pegasus; if this is the same or a different piece of spyware, you’d expect the same.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

People are getting injured or even killed taking selfies, a new study shows – and it’s time to warn them properly. CC-licensed photo by Mike Goad 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. Hello, duckface. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s 36% search revenue share with Apple is 3x what Android OEMs get • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

How much more does Google pay for an Apple user than an Android one? A lot. It was recently revealed in the Epic v. Google trial (Google has a few monopoly lawsuits going on) that the highest tier of search revenue share for cooperative Android OEMs is only 12%, a third of what Google pays Apple. In terms of total cash amount, it’s reasonable to assume Apple gets more total money than many smaller companies but to see the direct breakdown that each Apple user is worth three times more than an Android user is a new insight.

A big part of the differing payment rates probably has to do with how threatened Google feels by each company. Apple has already proven that it has the power to dump an established Google service and go off on its own. A prime example is Apple Maps, which replaced Google Maps as a default iOS app and, according to testimony from Google VP of Finance, Michael Roszak, tanked Google Maps mobile traffic by 60% when it launched. Roszak said that Google uses the Apple Maps launch as “a datapoint” when estimating how an Apple search switch would go. No one on the Android side has this kind of power. There’s also the consideration that Apple users are generally more affluent than Android users, making them more desirable ad clickers.

On Android, Google has differing tiers of payments depending on how Google-y your phone is. As revealed in documents from Epic v. Google, Android’s “Premier Device Program” offers 12% search revenue to devices with “Google exclusivity and defaults for all key functions” and no rival app stores.  The big participants in this program are/were Motorola, LG, and HMD, which had at least 98% of their devices qualify. Other brands like Xiaomi, Sony, Sharp, and BBK (that’s OnePlus, Oppo, and Vivo) were at 70%.

Android partners don’t just get search revenue; they also get a cut of Google Play app sales and ads run on their devices. In the case of Motorola and LG, they were getting another 3–6% of Play Store spending.

«

It is fascinating seeing Google’s business model, particularly around TAC (traffic acquisition costs), being picked apart in public like this.
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Meta bars political advertisers from using generative AI ads tools • Reuters

Katie Paul:

»

Facebook owner Meta is barring political campaigns and advertisers in other regulated industries from using its new generative AI advertising products, a company spokesperson said on Monday, denying access to tools that lawmakers have warned could turbo-charge the spread of election misinformation.

Meta publicly disclosed the decision in updates posted to its help center on Monday night, following publication of this story. Its advertising standards prohibit ads with content that have been debunked by the company’s fact-checking partners but do not have any rules specifically on AI.

“As we continue to test new Generative AI ads creation tools in Ads Manager, advertisers running campaigns that qualify as ads for Housing, Employment or Credit or Social Issues, Elections, or Politics, or related to Health, Pharmaceuticals or Financial Services aren’t currently permitted to use these Generative AI features,” the company said in a note appended to several pages explaining how the tools work.

«

So political campaigns won’t be able to use Meta’s generative AI tools to make their ads, but they could certainly do so outside Meta and then just upload them. Hard to see what difference this makes to anything, apart from giving Meta something to say it “doesn’t allow” in US congressional hearings.
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Why I just resigned from my job in generative AI • Music Business Worldwide

Ed Newton-Rex worked at Stability AI on its Stable Audio generative AI music-making platform; he’s a published classical composer in his own right:

»

I’ve resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI, because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’.

…I wasn’t able to change the prevailing opinion on fair use at the company.

This was made clear when the US Copyright Office recently invited public comments on generative AI and copyright, and Stability was one of many AI companies to respond. Stability’s 23-page submission included this on its opening page: “We believe that Al development is an acceptable, transformative, and socially-beneficial use of existing content that is protected by fair use”.

For those unfamiliar with ‘fair use’, this claims that training an AI model on copyrighted works doesn’t infringe the copyright in those works, so it can be done without permission, and without payment. This is a position that is fairly standard across many of the large generative AI companies, and other big tech companies building these models — it’s far from a view that is unique to Stability. But it’s a position I disagree with.

I disagree because one of the factors affecting whether the act of copying is fair use, according to Congress, is “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”. Today’s generative AI models can clearly be used to create works that compete with the copyrighted works they are trained on. So I don’t see how using copyrighted works to train generative AI models of this nature can be considered fair use.

«

Well, I guess we’ll see how the courts view this. But it seems to me that this is a “transformational” use and will be allowed. Will Newton-Rex ask for his job back if the courts rule that way?
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The incredible shrinking heat pump • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

Just 10% of households worldwide have heat pumps today. Those are typically bigger, more complex, and expensive systems that need to be professionally installed. For those reasons, they’re usually out of reach for renters. New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) actually did a test run with one of those existing options, called a split system unit, which involved mounting equipment on the roof and on the wall in a tenant’s home. It ended up being too unwieldy, and the project stopped there. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to new, more efficient appliances and clean energy technologies, it’s typically more affluent households that can afford to bring these new things into their homes first. The benefits don’t usually trickle down to lower-income households until later, if at all. 

New York is attempting to flip that scenario now by purchasing new window heat pumps for public housing residents. “The beauty of this project is that some of the lowest-income residents in the city are experiencing the newest technology for the first time so they’re leading in this area, which is really nice and something that we’re very proud of,” says Justin Driscoll, president and CEO of New York Power Authority, the public power organization that procures electricity for NYCHA.

The big motivation to switch to heat pumps now, though, is a deadline. Back in 2019, New York state passed a law to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change by 85% by 2050.

…Heat and hot water in buildings create about 40% of New York City’s planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. So, in 2021, NYCHA and its partners announced a $263m investment in electric heat pumps.

«

They have huge air conditioning units festooned over houses, so why not heat pumps?
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Here’s how bad climate change will get in the US—and why there’s still hope • WIRED

Matt Simon:

»

The [US Fifth National Climate] assessment notes the already staggering cost of climate change in the US, beyond wildfires. In the 1980s, on average, the US experienced one billion-dollar disaster every four months. That’s now one every three weeks. Between 2018 and 2022, the country suffered 89 billion-dollar events. Extreme weather now costs the country nearly $150bn annually. But, the report emphasizes, that’s a conservative estimate, because it doesn’t consider the costs of the aftermath, like loss of life, health care for survivors, or the damage done to ecosystems.

“I think this report really highlights how the changes we’re experiencing now are unprecedented in our nation’s history,” says Kristina Dahl, a technical contributor to the assessment and principal climate scientist for the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The US has warmed more quickly than the planet as a whole. So the US is really feeling this.”

The assessment also points out that in the next three decades, scientists expect sea levels along the contiguous US to rise nearly a foot. By 2050, coastal flooding will happen five to 10 times more often than today, and by the end of the century, millions of seaside residents could be displaced. But we’re dealing with a lot of uncertainty. Sea level rise could accelerate if the ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica start declining faster. Just last week, a study found that northern Greenland’s ice is in much worse shape than previously understood. “Uncertainty in the stability of ice sheets at high warming levels means that increases in sea level along the continental US of 3-7 feet by 2100 and 5-12 feet by 2150 are distinct possibilities that cannot be ruled out,” the assessment warns.

And keep in mind that sea level rise will not unfold uniformly across US coastlines, due to quirks in the physics involved. Some places, like the Gulf Coast, are also rapidly sinking, a phenomenon known as subsidence, which exacerbates the problem.

«

2050 actually doesn’t feel that far away.
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YouTubers asked to disclose AI-generated content – or else • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

»

YouTube is slapping a bunch of rules on AI-generated videos in the hope of curbing the spread of faked footage masqueraded as legit; deepfakes that make people appear to say or do things they never did; and tracks that rip off artists’ copyrighted work.

This red tape will be rolled out over the coming months and apply to material uploaded by users, we’re told

Specifically, the Google-owned vid-sharing giant will require content creators to disclose if their videos contain believable synthetic footage of made-up events, including AI-made depictions, or deepfakes that put words in people’s mouths. In those cases, a label will be added to a video’s description declaring the content was altered or digitally generated, and a more prominent note will be added to the video player itself if the content is particularly sensitive. Breaking the rules will lead to content being torn down and accounts punished.

…Faked footage that could mislead viewers about important topics such as elections, conflicts and violence, public health issues, or popular figures must also be flagged in particular. “Creators who consistently choose not to disclose this information may be subject to content removal, suspension from the YouTube Partner Program, or other penalties,” YouTube product veeps Jennifer Flannery O’Connor and Emily Moxley warned today.

«

Well, let’s see how that works out for them. How will they know, apart from anything?
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Everyone stop being ridiculous for like five minutes • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

There’s an old journalism joke that reporters cover every new election according to the rules of the previous one. But I think the tech press does the same thing. Which explains why most of the stories you read about AI right now use the same whack-a-mole content cop strategy most news outlets and research groups spent the 2010s using to cover platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Now they’re breathlessly writing up every instance of an AI producing A Forbidden Image. And what’s worse is this attitude helps tech companies continue to undermine labor and consolidate lobbying power, allows politicians to keep dragging their feet on writing real legislation for the internet, and provides fantastic cover for online platforms that still don’t know how to moderate themselves. I have yet to see anything produced by generative AI you couldn’t do with Photoshop or After Effects or, like, Wikipedia. And if everyone stopped being ridiculous for five minutes, we’d all realize that this tech hasn’t introduced a single new problem. We still just have same old ones we refuse to deal with!

And so, my big hot AI take here is that there’s actually nothing new to moderate. I mean, my god, OpenAI is literally using the same Africa-based third-party moderation contractors that Meta and Google use. It’s all just the same stuff with a new Sci-Fi coat of paint.

«

Broderick essentially arguing the opposite position from the Tech Against Terrorism research linked here yesterday from Wired.
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Sam Bankman-Fried exposed the fragility of crypto • The New York Times

Molly White:

»

Although some might try to dismiss the FTX collapse as a unique case, it is far from it: the funding model [of issuing a “coin” in an “initial coin offering”, or ICO, and putting a ludicrous value on it, and then using that as collateral for loans of real money] has become all too normal in the cryptocurrency world. Entrepreneurs thought they had found a free money machine in 2017 as initial coin offerings became popular, enabling cryptocurrency companies to bootstrap without needing to find venture investors — investors who might insist on a seat on the board or a view into the company’s operations. A crackdown on I.C.O.s in the United States shortly after failed to stop the practice, with companies either presenting the offerings in disguises designed to stymie if not entirely evade the Securities and Exchange Commission, or moving offshore in hopes of being beyond the reach of the long arms of the Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.)’s enforcers.

FTX is perhaps the best known catastrophe, but the same pattern has played out for customers of the Celsius cryptocurrency lender’s CEL token, the Voyager Digital broker’s VGX and the Terra/Luna ecosystem’s LUNA. Civil and criminal cases have revealed internal conversations among Celsius executives desperately trying to support the CEL token price to keep the floundering company afloat, to no avail, knowing what the token’s collapse would mean for the company. Binance, a still-operational exchange whose balance sheets are as opaque as those of the Bankman-Fried companies before their collapse, heavily promotes its BNB token. The extent to which the company relies on BNB to finance its operations is unclear, but history provides ominous warnings.

The collapse of the FTX exchange revealed the massive duplicity underlying many crypto exchanges, but its implosion should not be attributed to that alone. It, like so many companies in the cryptocurrency industry, had propped itself up on an imaginary foundation of tokens it had invented, and that foundation was bound to fail eventually. When the next company in its position falls, the only surprise should be that people expected any other outcome.

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I’ve long since ceased to be surprised by the things that people will believe will happen differently this time.
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Selfie-related deaths at tourist sites are ‘public health problem’: researchers • NY Post

Angie Raphael:

»

Selfie-related injuries and deaths at tourist hotspots have become such a massive risk that they should be viewed as a “public health problem”, researchers suggest.

Of particular concern are selfie-related deaths at picturesque aquatic locations, such as waterfalls, according to the University of New South Wales, Australia study.

Part of the study examined how selfie-related injuries and deaths were reported in the media.

Four peer-reviewed studies identified falls from a height, such as a cliff or waterfall, as the most common incident. Drowning was the second most common cause of death. People often climbed over barriers and fenced-off areas to get to the perfect selfie spot, the report noted.

The mean age of victims was about 22, most of whom were female tourists. “The selfie-related incident phenomenon should be viewed as a public health problem that requires a public health risk communication response,” the report concluded. “To date, little attention has been paid to averting selfie-related incidents through behaviour change methodologies or direct messaging to users, including through social media apps.”

Previous research recommended “no selfie zones”, barriers and signage as ways to prevent selfie-related injuries and deaths.

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Perhaps something like “5 people have died here so far taking selfies”, but write the number with 1, 2, 3, and 4 crossed out in front of it. The paper is in the “Journal of Medical Internet Research”, which is an intriguing title in its own right.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Weather forecasting can be done more accurately and more quickly with using machine learning systems, Google DeepMind has shown. CC-licensed photo by Chic Bee 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. Bright prospects. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Here’s how violent extremists are exploiting generative AI tools • WIRED

David Gilbert:

»

For years, Big Tech platforms have worked hard to create databases of known violent extremist content, known as hashing databases, which are shared across platforms to quickly and automatically remove such content from the internet. But according to Hadley, his colleagues are now picking up around 5,000 examples of AI-generated content each week. This includes images shared in recent weeks by groups linked to Hezbollah and Hamas that appear designed to influence the narrative around the Israel-Hamas war.

“Give it six months or so, the possibility that [they] are manipulating imagery to break hashing is really concerning,” Hadley says. “The tech sector has done so well to build automated technology, terrorists could well start using gen AI to evade what’s already been done.”

Other examples that researchers at Tech Against Terrorism have uncovered in recent months have included a neo-Nazi messaging channel sharing AI-generated imagery created using racist and antisemitic prompts pasted into an app available on the Google Play store; far-right figures producing a “guide to memetic warfare” advising others on how to use AI-generated image tools to create extremist memes; the Islamic State publishing a tech support guide on how to securely use generative AI tools; a pro-IS user of an archiving service claiming to have used an AI-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to transcribe Arabic language IS propaganda; and a pro-al-Qaeda outlet publishing several posters with images highly likely to have been created using a generative AI platform.

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Nothing is bringing iMessage to its Android phone • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

Nothing Phone 2 owners get blue bubbles now. The company shared it has added iMessage to its newest phone through a new “Nothing Chats” app powered by the messaging platform Sunbird. The feature will be available to users in North America, the EU, and other European countries starting this Friday, November 17th.

Nothing writes on its page that it’s doing this because “messaging services are dividing phone users,” and it wants “to break those barriers down.” But doing so here requires you to trust Sunbird. Nothing’s FAQ says Sunbird’s “architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey,” and that messages aren’t stored on its servers.

Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, “…it’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.”

Nothing’s US head of PR, Jane Nho, told The Verge in an email that Sunbird stores user iCloud credentials as a token “in an encrypted database” and associated with one of its Mac Minis in the US or Europe, depending on the user’s location, that then act as a relay for iMessages sent via the app. She added that, after two weeks of inactivity, Sunbird deletes the account information.

But you’re still giving them access to your iCloud account to make this work, and as we’ve all learned over the years, companies don’t always do what they say they will. It’s worth reviewing Sunbird’s privacy policy and keeping a very skeptical mind about it.

«

Sunbird doesn’t explain how it does this. My understanding is that iMessages require key exchange, and that the private/public keypair is generated by the device itself. How does Sunbird generate an appropriate hardware key for the Android device? At Pocket Lint, Jason Cipriani wags a big finger and says no, don’t do this: it requires Sunbird signing into your iCloud account on a Mac it controls:

»

“You’re more or less giving Sunbird access to your entire Apple ID/iCloud account, and if you’re someone who uses Apple’s services, that’s a scary thought.”

«

Also, jeepers, people: just use WhatsApp, or Signal. Platform-specific messaging apps are so 2010s.
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Robotic putting greens, mixed reality, loud spectators: this is golf?! • WIRED

Steven Levy:

»

Cameron Young slides a driver from his bag. He stares at a hole referred to as Texas Hill Country. It’s new to him—a par 4 with sand hazards and rough to avoid. The 26-year-old is in the top 20 in the Official World Golf Ranking, but he’s not sure how to proceed. He turns to his companion, former pro Roberto Castro. “What’s going on here?” Young asks.

Castro consults with their caddie and reports, “It’s 312 to that bunker there.”

Young makes clean contact. The ball lofts skyward.

But there’s no sky above him. On this steamy day in late October, Young is in an air-conditioned soundstage on the back lot of Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. The building once hosted Nickelodeon TV shows. The “caddie” Castro consulted is virtual—it lives on a 15-inch tablet. The tee is on a patch of natural grass the width of a large mattress. It sits atop wooden pallets on a concrete floor.

Young’s golf ball hits a billboard-sized screen 35 yards away. The dimpled sphere falls meekly to the ground, while up on the giant display its virtual successor continues its flight. A phalanx of supersensitive radar trackers and hi-res cameras sends data to a bank of computer servers that calculate velocity and spin to show how the ball will bounce and where it will ultimately settle on the vista of the screen.

Young’s ball lands in the digital rough. He walks over to a tray of two-inch-high Bermuda grass mixed with rye. The screen now shows him closer to his goal, an 8-iron away. He swings, the ball thuds against the display again, and seconds later his virtual ball lands just outside the green.

…Many pro golfers practice using room-sized simulators in their personal gym, and weekend warriors commonly visit golf centers with plenty of tech. That’s not what Young is up to. He’s testing a system for real competition that will be aired on prime time, with $20m of prize money at stake. He’s one of 24 pros, including golf legends Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, who are involved in the most ambitious effort yet to merge e-gaming and actual pro sports. It’s called TGL, allegedly not an acronym for The Golf League, but three TV-friendly letters that don’t mean anything.

TGL’s first event will take place on January 9 inside a $50m–plus, custom-built arena with an inflatable dome in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. A 200,000-pound [91 tonne] turntable will support an 800,000-pound [363 tonne] green that will shape-shift to give each hole its character. A 4K screen will rival the goliath displays of Taylor Swift concerts. The stands will accommodate around 1,600 live spectators, who are encouraged to boisterously violate golf’s finicky silence rule. Players themselves will be mic’d up, in hopes that their trash talk might go viral online.

«

Strange things that the combination of money, TV and empty airtime will make people try.
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Andreessen Horowitz invests in Civitai, which profits from nonconsensual AI porn • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm that was an early investor in Facebook, Lyft, and other tech giants, has invested in Civitai, a giant platform for sharing AI models that enables and profits from the creation of AI generated nonconsensual sexual images of real people. That includes launching a feature where people can list “bounties” for others to create AI models of specific targets.

Civitai said that it raised $5.1m in a seed funding round led by a16z.

A16z’s official website, which includes a jobs board with open positions at companies in its portfolio, currently lists five jobs at Civitai. According to a16z’s site, these jobs were posted more than 30 days ago.

A16z regularly announces investments the company is making on its site, but has not publicly announced its investment in Civitai yet.

A16z did not respond to a request for comment. When asked about a16z’s investment in Civitai over Discord, a community engagement manager at Civitai told 404 Media that “There will be a press release/announcement shortly.” Civitai then published a press release confirming the investment minutes after 404 Media reached out for comment.

In August, 404 Media published an investigation into Civitai, which explained how the platform works, and enables the creation of AI-generated nonconsensual sexual images, and profits from it. Civitai allows users to share modified models of the open source text-to-image AI tool Stable Diffusion. These modified models are often trained on images of celebrities, influencers, YouTubers, and athletes, almost exclusively women, to recreate their likeness. Those models can then be combined with AI models that are trained on porn in order to instantly generate nonconsensual sexual images.

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You know, I’m beginning to think that a16z is a bit skeevy.
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Google DeepMind’s weather AI can forecast extreme weather faster and more accurately • MIT Technology Review

Melissa Heikkilä:

»

In research published in Science on Tuesday, Google DeepMind’s model, GraphCast, was able to predict weather conditions up to 10 days in advance, more accurately and much faster than the current gold standard. GraphCast outperformed the model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in more than 90% of over 1,300 test areas. And on predictions for Earth’s troposphere—the lowest part of the atmosphere, where most weather happens—GraphCast outperformed the ECMWF’s model on more than 99% of weather variables, such as rain and air temperature

Crucially, GraphCast can also offer meteorologists accurate warnings, much earlier than standard models, of conditions such as extreme temperatures and the paths of cyclones. In September, GraphCast accurately predicted that Hurricane Lee would make landfall in Nova Scotia nine days in advance, says Rémi Lam, a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind. Traditional weather forecasting models pinpointed the hurricane to Nova Scotia only six days in advance.

“Weather prediction is one of the most challenging problems that humanity has been working on for a long, long time. And if you look at what has happened in the last few years with climate change, this is an incredibly important problem,” says Pushmeet Kohli, the vice president of research at Google DeepMind.

Traditionally, meteorologists use massive computer simulations to make weather predictions. They are very energy intensive and time consuming to run, because the simulations take into account many physics-based equations and different weather variables such as temperature, precipitation, pressure, wind, humidity, and cloudiness, one by one.

GraphCast uses machine learning to do these calculations in under a minute. Instead of using the physics-based equations, it bases its predictions on four decades of historical weather data. GraphCast uses graph neural networks, which map Earth’s surface into more than a million grid points. At each grid point, the model predicts the temperature, wind speed and direction, and mean sea-level pressure, as well as other conditions like humidity. The neural network is then able to find patterns and draw conclusions about what will happen next for each of these data points.

«

Surprise! Historical data is a good predictor of future weather patterns. Unfortunately “It still lags behind conventional weather forecasting models in some areas, such as precipitation, Dueben says”. In other words, it’s not going to take over rain prediction – the thing we really want – just yet.
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Chatbots may ‘hallucinate’ more often than many realise • The New York Times

Cade Metz:

»

a new start-up called Vectara, founded by former Google employees, is trying to figure out how often chatbots veer from the truth. The company’s research estimates that even in situations designed to prevent it from happening, chatbots invent information at least 3% of the time — and as high as 27%.

Experts call this chatbot behavior “hallucination.” It may not be a problem for people tinkering with chatbots on their personal computers, but it is a serious issue for anyone using this technology with court documents, medical information or sensitive business data.

Because these chatbots can respond to almost any request in an unlimited number of ways, there is no way of definitively determining how often they hallucinate. “You would have to look at all of the world’s information,” said Simon Hughes, the Vectara researcher who led the project.

Dr. Hughes and his team asked these systems to perform a single, straightforward task that is readily verified: Summarize news articles. Even then, the chatbots persistently invented information.

“We gave the system 10 to 20 facts and asked for a summary of those facts,” said Amr Awadallah, the chief executive of Vectara and a former Google executive. “That the system can still introduce errors is a fundamental problem.”

The researchers argue that when these chatbots perform other tasks — beyond mere summarization — hallucination rates may be higher.

Their research also showed that hallucination rates vary widely among the leading AI companies. OpenAI’s technologies had the lowest rate, around 3%. Systems from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, hovered around 5%. The Claude 2 system offered by Anthropic, an OpenAI rival also based in San Francisco, topped 8%. A Google system, Palm chat, had the highest rate at 27%.

«

The problem isn’t so much the fact of hallucination – we often like it when humans make stuff up, a phenomenon we call “stories” – but that we can’t predict or necessarily spot where it’s happening.
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Samsung unveils ChatGPT alternative Samsung Gauss that can generate text, code and images • TechCrunch

Kate Park:

»

Just a few days after OpenAI’s developer event, Samsung unveiled its own generative AI model, Samsung Gauss, at the Samsung AI Forum 2023.

Samsung Gauss, developed by the tech giant’s research unit Samsung Research, consists of three tools: Samsung Gauss Language, Samsung Gauss Code and Samsung Gauss Image.

Samsung Gauss Language is a large language model that can understand human language and answer questions like ChatGPT. It can be used to increase productivity in several ways. For instance, it can help you write and edit emails, summarize documents and translate languages. Samsung plans to incorporate the large language model into its devices like phones, laptops and tablets to make the company’s smart devices a bit smarter. When asked if it supports both English and Korean as interaction languages, a spokesperson of Samsung declined to comment on it.

Samsung Gauss Code, which works with its code assistant called code.i, focuses more specifically on development code. The idea is that Samsung Gauss Code could help developers write code quickly. Samsung said the AI model for code will support “code description and test case generation through an interactive interface.”

As for Samsung Gauss Image, as the name suggests, it will be an image generation and editing feature. For instance, it could be used to convert a low-resolution image into a high-resolution one.

«

AI envy is absolutely a thing now, and given that Samsung is the company most given to technology envy, this was inevitable, as is its gradual sunsetting and/or supplanting by users over the next few years in favour of something from Google.
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August 2021: A $1.5m ‘women-led’ NFT project was actually run by dudes • Inverse

Chris Stokel-Walker, in August 20212:

»

The NFT market, like many tech-centric areas, has traditionally been dominated by men, and a women-led project was a much-welcomed change.

The three women behind it — Cindy and Andrea, the U.S.-based marketer and developer, respectively, and Kelda, the Norwegian artist and “ideologist” — were supposedly striking a note for female empowerment. Their head-and-shoulders illustrations of slender women in different guises — which users could pay Ethereum to mint and own — even merited a passing mention in The New Yorker.

But the story behind the project was a lie. The three women purportedly running Fame Lady Squad weren’t women at all. They were Russian men, according to research by NFT enthusiast and fellow Russian Fedor Linnik. And they are allegedly behind other NFT collectible series that claim to be one thing, but are in actuality something else entirely.

The story began with whispered rumors last month, and came to a conclusion, of sorts, this week. After an uprising within the community of investors that bought into the project to the tune of nearly $1.5 million, the Russian men behind Fame Lady Squad have ceded control of the project to actual women, including a self-employed realtor in Canada, Ashley Smith.

…“These guys are just cynically exploiting the Western, left-liberal agenda of protecting female rights and stuff like that,” says Linnik. He points to the fact that at least two of the original team alleged to be behind Fame Lady Squad have previously lived or studied in Canada as an indication that the decision to misrepresent their gender when launching the project was a cynical one. “I believe these guys understand Western society pretty well, and that’s why they can manipulate us easily.”

On Monday, Linnik posted a Twitter thread laying out what he knew. The men who had pretended to be women moved quickly to try and limit the reputational damage. On Tuesday, in a lengthy Twitter thread of their own, the originators apologized for misleading the world. “But it doesn’t mean it’s a scam or a fraud,” they wrote.

«

Nooooo, not a scam at all. NFT stats says average price was $123.20. “Current floor price $0.05”. A couple of years old, but Stokel-Walker pointed to it in the Guardian Technology mailout on Tuesday, and I couldn’t resist.
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China’s spending on green energy is causing a global glut • WSJ

Sha Hua and Phred Dvorak:

»

China’s newest solar-energy manufacturers include a dairy farmer and a toy maker.

The new entrants are examples of a green energy spending binge in China that is fueling the country’s rapid build-out of renewable energy while also creating a glut of solar components that is rippling through the industry and stymying attempts to build such manufacturing elsewhere, particularly in Europe.

Since the start of the year, prices for Chinese polysilicon, the building block of solar panels, are down 50% and panels down 40%, according to data tracker OPIS, which is owned by Dow Jones.

Inside China, some companies fear a green bubble is about to pop. China’s state-guided economy spent nearly $80bn on clean-energy manufacturing last year, around 90% of all such investment worldwide, BloombergNEF estimates. The country’s annual spending on green energy overall has increased by more than $180bn a year since 2019, the International Energy Agency says.

The rush of funding has attracted an unusual array of companies to the bustling business. Last summer, Chinese dairy giant Royal Group unveiled plans for three new projects. There was a farm with 10,000 milk cows, a dairy processing plant and a $1.5bn factory to make solar cells and panels.

“The solar industry is improving over the long term, and the market potential is huge,” Royal Group wrote in a document outlining the project last year. More recently, Royal Group said it wants to create synergies between its core agricultural business and photovoltaics, “and promote solar technology to empower dairy owners to reduce costs and increase efficiency,” the company said in a response to The Wall Street Journal.

The milk manufacturer wasn’t alone in jumping on China’s solar bandwagon in the past two years. Other newbies include a jewelry chain, a producer of pollution-control equipment and a pharmaceutical company.

The newcomers are helping an ambitious wind and solar push in China—this year alone the country is set to install roughly as much solar as the U.S. has in total, Rystad Energy estimates.

«

One feels a disapproving tone in this story: how dare China fund a product that’s in huge demand (and, it’s careful to point out, which the US invented in the 1950s) and make its price crater so more people can benefit from it? Why can’t dairy farmers and toymakers just stick to their knitting?
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The Humane AI Pin is a bizarre cross between Google Glass and a pager • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Not since Magic Leap has a “next-generation” hardware company been so hyped while showing so little. Everyone in the tech world has been freaking out about this new pocket protector thing that wants to “replace your smartphone.” It’s called the “Humane AI Pin.” As far as we can tell, it’s a $700 screenless voice assistant box and, like all smartphone-ish devices released in the last 10 years, it has some AI in it. It’s as if Google Glass had a baby with a pager from the 1990s.

«

Amadeo writes absolutely brutal reviews of hardware. I heartily approve. Savour this one particularly. (He’s also scathingly sceptical about the Nothing/iMessage/Sunbird promise.)

At the end, he asks:

»

Why wasn’t this just a smartwatch? Some of the OpenAI-powered responses are pretty neat, but there’s no reason not to have that just show up on a screen or be read aloud by a smartwatch.

«

That really is the question. This thing more and more looks like an adjunct to a smartphone, not a replacement. And an excellent question in the comments about this suit-lapel-worn (ladies, how do you feel about that?) device:

»

There are so many places to start, but I think my very very favorite is: does Silicon Valley know that, come November, when we go outdoors most of us are wearing coats?

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The smog in Delhi, India is so bad that its officials want to use “cloud seeding” to precipitate it out with rain. CC-licensed photo by ben dalton 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. Looks like rain? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Delhi plans to unleash cloud seeding in its battle against deadly smog • WIRED

Sushmita Pathak:

»

The air is so bad that schools in Delhi and its surrounding areas have announced closures, and offices are allowing employees to work from home. The government has advised children, elderly people, and those with chronic diseases to stay indoors as much as possible. Diesel trucks, except those carrying essential goods, are no longer allowed into the city. Spells of rain last week cleaned up the air, but the respite was short-lived as air quality worsened again, aided by firecrackers set off over the weekend to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.

Now, Delhi officials are seeking permission from federal agencies in India to try cloud seeding. The technique involves flying an aircraft to spray clouds with salts like silver or potassium iodide or solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, to induce precipitation. The chemical molecules attach to moisture already in the clouds to form bigger droplets that then fall as rain. China has used artificial rain to tackle air pollution in the past—but for cloud seeding to work properly, you need significant cloud cover with reasonable moisture content, which Delhi generally lacks during the winter. If weather conditions are favorable, scientists leading the project at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur plan to carry out cloud seeding around November 20.

Until then, at least, Delhi will remain shrouded in a thick gray haze, which has become a toxic winter ritual. The smog, a dangerous cocktail of particulate matter and noxious gasses, results from a series of unfortunate events that happen at the start of winter.

In late October, farmers in northern India, particularly wheat growers in the states of Punjab and Haryana northwest of Delhi, use a cheap and easy method to clear their paddy fields for fresh sowing—lighting fires to burn off stalks left behind after harvesting. In doing so, they inadvertently send plumes of smoke into the air. Authorities have tried to convince farmers to switch to using machines to remove crop residue instead of burning it, but farmers can’t always afford that method. Some small startups turn the crop residue into pulp that can then be used to make cardboard items. State and federal governments have also been looking into paying farmers to not burn their fields.

[But] Even on the worst days, smoke from crop burning only accounts for about a third of Delhi’s pollution, says Somvanshi.

«

In the UK, farm stubble burning was banned in 1993. Cloud seeding will have unpredictable effects; this might not be the magic solution the Delhi authorities think.
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Humane will be updating its AI Pin reveal video to address a big error • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Humane will be updating its AI Pin reveal video to address a big error.In the video, Humane’s AI Pin confidently lied about the best places to watch April’s upcoming total solar eclipse, but Humane staffer (and Verge alum) Sam Sheffer said in Humane’s Discord that this was a bug that’s since been resolved. Sheffer says Humane will be updating the video on its website, but as of this writing, the wrong eclipse information is still in it.

The device also misstated the amount of protein in a handful of almonds. Sheffer says the pin was spelling out the amount of protein for a half cup of almonds, which was the “correct and current” behavior. However, he says the behavior will “improve over time.” The video on Humane’s website has a footnote that says “protein amount estimated” — I’m not sure if this was there originally.

«

That’s a lot of wrong already. How might you know whether the generative AI projecting answers onto your hand is getting other things wrong which are bugs that have yet to be resolved?
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Apple gets 36% of Google’s Safari search revenue • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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We previously learned that Google is paying Apple billions of dollars to be the primary [no: the default – Overspill Ed] search engine on Apple devices, and now, Bloomberg has shared the total percentage of Google’s revenue that Apple earns.

Google pays Apple 36% of the total revenue that it earns from searches conducted on the Safari browser on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with the number shared by an economics expert testifying on Apple’s behalf. According to Bloomberg, Google’s main lawyer “visibly cringed” when the revenue data was shared, as it was meant to remain confidential.

Last month, wealth management company Bernstein suggested that Apple is getting anywhere from $18bn to $20bn per year, representing somewhere around 15% of Apple’s total annual operating profits.

Apple and Google have both worked to keep details in the antitrust lawsuit private, claiming that publicly sharing the information would “undermine Google’s competitive standing.”

Google has been the default search engine on Apple devices since 2002, though the agreement between the two tech companies has been revised multiple times. Apple earns a ton of money from the deal, while Google gets to be the default search option on the world’s most popular smartphone.

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Jason Kint calculates that Google probably spends $90bn annually on search default deals. For its most recent fiscal year, its total revenue was just under $280bn. So nearly a quarter of revenues go straight out the door on default deals. That doesn’t suggest complete confidence in being “the best search engine”.
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UK petrol station group EG to buy Tesla ultra-fast chargers • Reuters

Sachin Ravikumar and Nick Carey:

»

British petrol station operator EG Group said on Monday it would buy Tesla ultrafast charging units to boost its electric vehicle charging network across Europe, as the EV maker continues to expand the reach of its charging business.

EG, owned by the billionaire Issa brothers who also own UK supermarket chain Asda, will expand its charging network to more than 20,000 EV chargers at its own sites over time, from above 600 currently deployed.

The first Tesla chargers will be installed by the end of this year, EG said, though it didn’t provide details on the cost or time frame for the total purchase.

The “open network” Tesla chargers will be accessible to all EV drivers regardless of their vehicles’ brand.

“The rapid installation of reliable, easy-to-use EV charging infrastructure is the right step towards a sustainable future,” said Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla’s senior director of charging infrastructure.

…The UK had just over 49,000 public electric vehicle charging devices installed as of Oct. 1, according to government figures.

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Impressive that the Issa brothers are actually thinking ahead to a time when (fossil) fuelling stations are less and less useful, but electric charger more and more so. Might be ten years, but it’s coming.
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Tech groups push back on Biden AI executive order, raising concerns that it could crush innovation • FedScoop

Nihal Krishan:

»

“Broad regulatory measures in Biden’s AI red tape wishlist will result in stifling new companies and competitors from entering the marketplace and significantly expanding the power of the federal government over American innovation,” Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel at NetChoice, an advocacy group that represents major AI companies such as Amazon, Google and Meta, said in a statement.

“This order puts any investment in AI at risk of being shut down at the whims of government bureaucrats,” he continued. “That is dangerous for our global standing as the leading technological innovators, and this is the wrong approach to govern AI.”

Szabo added that there are many federal government regulations that already govern AI that can be used to rein in the technology, but the Biden administration “has chosen to further increase the complexity and burden of the federal code.”

The Chamber of Commerce said the EO shows promise and addresses important AI priorities, but also raises concerns and needs more work.

“Substantive and process problems still exist,” Tom Quaadman, executive vice president of the Chamber’s Technology Engagement Center, said in a statement. “Short, overlapping timelines for agency-required action endangers necessary stakeholder input, thereby creating conditions for ill-informed rulemaking and degrading intra-government cooperation.” 

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That last quotation could have come from ChatGPT, but the point about Biden’s EO is that it strengthened the position of the incumbents, and made entrance harder for those not already there. As is going to be the case for any sort of regulation.
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The selfie camera has gotten too good • The Atlantic

Caroline Mimbs Nyce:

»

A camera is fundamentally a tool for documenting the world, but it is also pretty subjective. And what makes a photograph “good” depends on what you want to do with it. If you’re taking a photo of your eyelid eczema to send to your doctor, you probably want an extreme level of detail. If you’re taking a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower to send to your boyfriend, you probably don’t want every blemish on your skin in high-def. Apple’s software is post-processing selfies en masse, but “there’s no one universal algorithm that will make every picture better for the purpose it’s intended for,” Cooper said.

It’s hard to build a camera that’s just right. Five years ago, the iPhone presented the opposite problem. In 2018, Apple’s newly launched XR and XS models took photos that made people look suspiciously good. The phones were accused of artificially smoothing skin, in what came to be known as “beautygate.” Apple later said that a software bug was behind these unusually hot photos, and shipped a fix. “Do you want a nicer photo or a more accurate representation of reality?” Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, wrote in his review of the XR. “Only you can look into your heart and decide.”

The answer to Patel’s question seems to be that people want something in the middle—not too hot, but not too real either. People are chasing a Goldilocks ideal with the selfie camera: They want it to be real, authentic, and messy, just not too real, authentic, or messy.

“When someone thinks of a perfect selfie, they don’t think of having no pores,” Maria-Carolina Cambre, an education professor at Concordia University in Montreal, told me. “And they don’t think of having every single pore visible. It’s neither one of those extremes.” For more than years, Cambre and a colleague ran selfie focus groups in Canada, discussing the style of photography with more than 100 young people. They found that people examine selfies in a very specific way, which they termed the “digital-forensic gaze.” People inspect such images closely, pinching in to look for details and for evidence of any filtering. They look for flaws and inconsistencies. “This is the paradox,” she told me. “Everything is optimized, but the best selfies look like they haven’t been optimized. Even though they have.”

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(Thanks G for the link.)
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The Lego-like way to get CO2 out of the atmosphere • The Washington Post

Shannon Osaka:

»

Graphyte, a new company incubated by Bill Gates’s investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures, announced Monday that it has created a method for turning bits of wood chips and rice hulls into low-cost, dehydrated chunks of plant matter. Those blocks of carbon-laden plant matter — which look a bit like shoe-box sized Lego blocks — can then be buried deep underground for hundreds of years.

The approach, the company claims, could store a ton of CO2 for around $100 a ton, a number long considered a milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbon removal may not seem like a top priority — why not just stop using fossil fuels in the first place? — but virtually every projection of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 involves some amount of it. That’s because certain areas of the economy like aviation, cement-making and steelmaking, are very challenging to do with renewable energy and batteries. It’s hard to make temperatures hot enough with electricity to produce cement or steel, and to fly planes on heavy lithium-ion batteries.

“We’ve bet the future of our planet on our ability to remove CO2 from the air,” said Chris Rivest, a partner at Breakthrough Energy Ventures. “Pretty much every IPCC scenario that has a livable planet involves us pulling like 5 to 10 gigatons of CO2 out of the air by mid- to late-century,” he added, referring to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Five to 10 gigatons of CO2 a year is around 12% to 25% of what humanity currently emits every year.

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Just a reminder – “giga” is 10^9, so to remove that amount from the atmosphere, even at $100 per ton(ne), would cost $100bn per gigaton. One has to wonder, again, if it isn’t cheaper to not put the stuff in the atmosphere in the first place. (Thanks G for the link.)

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Google’s AI Magic Editor won’t work on IDs, faces, or bodies • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

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Google’s AI-powered Magic Editor will not work if you try to alter images of ID cards, receipts, human faces, or body parts.

The feature, now available in the Google Photos app on the latest Pixel 8 smartphones, uses generative AI to edit images. Users can do all sorts of things like removing unwanted objects, like people in the background, repositioning the focus of a photo, or changing its lighting. 

But it won’t touch up everything you might want it to. The software has been designed to avoid editing documents that contain personally identifiable information, such as IDs or receipts, or the faces and body parts of humans, Android Authority reported. If you try to highlight any of these things to try and change in Google Photos, the app will likely show you an error message. 

Google refers to its policy detailing what its generative AI technologies should and shouldn’t do. Changing IDs, for example, could allow people to impersonate others or create content for deceptive or fraudulent activities, like helping underage teenagers buy alcohol, for example. Whereas altering faces and body parts could be used to harm others, like creating non-consensual deepfakes or cyberbullying. 

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I thought part of what it did was to alter faces in order to get the “best” picture, but perhaps that’s just picking from the ones that it captures in that moment. Anyway, very reminiscent of scanners refusing to scan dollar bills.
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Analysis: China’s emissions set to fall in 2024 after record growth in clean energy • Carbon Brief

Lauri Myllyvirta:

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China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are set to fall in 2024 and could be facing structural decline, due to record growth in the installation of new low-carbon energy sources.

The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, shows China’s CO2 emissions continuing to rebound from the nation’s “zero-Covid” period, rising by an estimated 4.7% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2023.

The strongest growth was in oil demand and other sectors that had been affected by pandemic policies, until the lifting of zero-Covid controls at the end of 2022.

Other key findings from the analysis include:

• China has been seeing a boom in manufacturing, which has offset a contraction in demand for carbon-intensive steel and cement due to the ongoing real-estate slump
• The emissions rebound in 2023 has been accompanied by record installations of low-carbon electricity generating capacity, particularly wind and solar
• Hydro generation is set to rebound from record lows due to drought in 2022-23
• China’s economic recovery from Covid has been muted. To date, it has not repeated previous rounds of major infrastructure expansion after economic shocks
• There has been a surge of investment in manufacturing capacity, particularly for low-carbon technologies, including solar, electric vehicles and batteries
• This is creating an increasingly important interest group in China, which could affect the country’s approach to domestic and international climate politics
• On the other hand, coal power capacity continues to expand, setting the scene for a showdown between the country’s traditional and newly emerging interest groups.

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You’re wondering about the mix of renewables? “All in all, 210GW of solar, 70GW of wind, 7GW hydro and 3GW of nuclear are expected to be added in China this year.” Notable how tiny nuclear is in this.
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Netflix and bill: the high price of a subscription lifestyle • Tim Harford

The economist strikes again:

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The subscription business model has expanded from traditional products, such as newspapers and gym memberships to software, streaming media, vegetable boxes, shaving kits, makeup, clothes and support for creative types via Patreon or Substack. We should all be asking ourselves, if so many people are paying not to go to the gym, what else are we paying not to do?

A new working paper from economists Liran Einav, Benjamin Klopack and Neale Mahoney attempts an answer. Using data from a credit and debit card provider, they examine what happens to subscriptions for 10 popular services when the card that is paying for them is replaced. At this moment, the service provider suddenly stops getting paid and must contact the customer to ask for updated payment details. You can guess what happens next: for many people, this request reminds them of a subscription they had stopped thinking about and immediately prompts them to cancel it. Relative to a typical month, cancellation rates soar in months when a payment card is replaced — from 2% to at least 8%.

Einav and his colleagues use this data to estimate how easily many people let stale subscriptions continue. Relative to a benchmark in which infallible subscribers instantly cancel once they decide they are no longer getting enough value, the researchers predict that subscribers will take many extra months — on average 20 — to get around to cancelling.

Don’t take the precise numbers too seriously — as with most social science, this is not a rigorously controlled experiment but an attempt to tease meaning out of noisy real-world data. What you should take seriously is the likelihood that you are swimming in barely noticed subscriptions, some of which you would choose to cancel if you were forced to pay attention to them for a few minutes. Perhaps you should. Come to think of it, perhaps *I* should.

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The working paper is worth a read; it notes that the “subscription economy” is reckoned to have quadrupled in size over the past decade.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Las Vegas Sphere is an amazing new landmark, but so far isn’t anywhere near profitable. CC-licensed photo by Nigel Hoult on Flickr.

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

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

Advertisers don’t want sites like Jezebel to exist • 404 Media

Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg:

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Lauren Tousignant, Jezebel’s interim editor in chief, told 404 Media that Jezebel was told “brand safety,” the fact that advertisers don’t want to be next to the type of content Jezebel was publishing, was “one of the biggest factors” that led G/O to stop publishing the site and lay off its staff. Tousignant said that a couple of weeks ago, the ads sales team asked if it could remove Jezebel’s tagline—“Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth”—from the site.

“They took it off because they’re like, let’s see if this makes a huge difference,” Tousignant said. “So yeah, it was very much the problem here that no one will advertise on Jezebel because we cover sex and abortion. I know taking the tagline off was to see if the algorithm advertising would change. After it was removed one of the editorial directors was like, ‘I’m seeing an ad for J Crew for the first time ever, maybe this will be good.’”

G/O Media has a long history of destroying or otherwise undermining the work of beloved media outlets that have done incredibly important work. Spanfeller blames, as is seemingly required in every CEO layoff notice, “economic headwinds” and “macroeconomic news.” Spanfeller and Great Hill Partners have, surely, mismanaged Jezebel in ways both big and small, and Spanfeller and G/O haven’t given anyone a reason to take their words at face value, but the subtext here is that Jezebel’s content was hard to sufficiently monetize.

This should not be the case considering that millions of people read it and chose, specifically, to visit Jezebel every month. But this is unfortunately how the internet works now, and has for a long time: News terrifies brands big and small, to the point where “brand safety” and “brand suitability” have become gigantic industries that have brought even giants like Facebook and Google to heel. 

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The clear downside of being ad-supported. The “brand safety” topic cuts both ways: it gets used to cut the funding for right-wing sites, but also against those like Jezebel deemed too controversial.
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Inside the magical world of AI Prompters on Reddit • Hyperallergic

Aidan Walker:

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Recent research shows that Americans who are learning about AI tools are mostly teaching themselves, often through sources and communities found online. And the best prompt engineers seem to be on Reddit. There’s one big subreddit for each kind of generator, including Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALLE-3, along with several others where users debate, post, and refine prompts. A connected universe of wikis, YouTube tutorials, and influencers flesh out the emerging institutional world of AI-generated art.  

Take an image known as “Spiral Town,” generated by a user known as Ugleh and posted to the StableDiffusion subreddit this September. Many of the comments on the original Spiral Town post are people telling Ugleh where they first saw the viral image: “a shrooms facebook group,” says one, while another lists other non-AI subreddits. Ugleh seems ambivalent about it: “I’m fine with it tbh. I only spent about 10 minutes on this photo.”

But as others praise Ugleh and post links to their own YouTube tutorials on how to make images similar to Spiral Town, some commenters double down on the argument that Ugleh should be treated as a “real” artist. Sure, generating the Spiral Town image may have taken minutes, but that doesn’t mean that creating such works doesn’t require skill — in fact, much of the subreddit’s audience seems to be people trying to develop these very abilities. Almost every post on the Stable Diffusion subreddit has a flare next to its title that says “Workflow Included,” meaning it explains the procedure used to create the image. 

An Ugleh piece made three days later seems to have taken more than 10 minutes. The checkerboard image below was created starting with the deceptively simple prompt “Medieval village scene with busy streets and castle in the distance,” followed by fifteen lines of complicated and sometimes indecipherable modifiers, including one that instructs the AI to not make the image like a “bad anime.”  

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“Prompt engineering” really is taking off, becoming a very arcane space in its own right; though the community around it described here reminds me a bit of hackers, with the anti-commercial approach and wide sharing of tools. The images on show are amazing, though.
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Why we can’t quit email, even though we hate it • Tim Harford

Tim went to the Design Museum in London, which has an exhibition of notable emails:

»

Email is the cockroach of computing. BlackBerry instant messenger and Friends Reunited may come and go, but email cannot be killed. The variety of emails displayed on the wall of the exhibition make it clear why. Any new ping in your inbox could be your lover dumping you, a friend proposing an idea that will make you both rich or a stranger with a piece of information that could save your life. Even the everyday traffic will contain both time-wasting spam and a message from a senior colleague that you ignore at your peril. There may be semi-useful administrative information (don’t Reply All), sweet nothings from a spouse, disposable quips from friends, politely phrased requests from complete strangers, interesting newsletters and much more.

It’s all in there. No wonder we feel overwhelmed. No wonder we can’t do without it.

It is that vast range of importance in the emails pouring into our inboxes every day, from the trivial to the life-changing, that explains why the inbox can be so addictive. The psychologist BF Skinner once serendipitously discovered while running low on supplies of rat food that the rats in his laboratory were more motivated by unpredictable food rewards than by predictable ones: the uncertainty grabbed their attention in a way that a steady pay-off never could. Whenever we check our inboxes, we’re like Skinner’s rats. It has been at least 90 seconds since we last checked, after all. Will the email slot-machine offer us a jackpot or a disaster? Or just a chance to hit “refresh” and have another spin?

Despite every effort, I still check my own email too often, but even for those with better habits than I, that range of possibility poses a challenge. I have argued before that one of the underrated habits of any productive person is to clarify what needs to be done — if anything — with each new incoming thing. It rarely takes long to decide with a single email but, given that the scope of possible responses could be anything from “delete” to “find a good lawyer”, it is not surprising that we get bogged down and let the undecided emails accumulate.

«

My position is that your inbox is a to-do list created almost randomly by other people. The question is whether you acquiesce to doing those things.
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Las Vegas Sphere reports $98.4m loss; CFO quits • Las Vegas Sun News

Ray Brewer:

»

The Sphere in Las Vegas reported an operating loss of $98.4m for the fiscal quarter ending Sept. 30, Sphere Entertainment Co. said this morning on an earnings call.

Additionally, the company lost its chief financial officer, as Gautam Ranji has resigned, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Ranji’s exit was “not a result of any disagreement with the company’s independent auditors or any member of management on any matter of accounting principles or practices, financial statement disclosure or internal controls,” the company said in the filing.

The New York Post reported Tuesday that Ranji suddenly quit after a bout of yelling and screaming from CEO James Dolan.

Ranji, who had been on the job for 11 months, will be replaced on an interim basis by Greg Brunner, the company’s senior vice president, according to the filing.

…Next week, there will be a multiday takeover of the Sphere for the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix, Sphere officials said.

Revenue for the quarter included $4.1m in event revenue — those two sold out U2 shows — and $2.6m from suite licensing and advertising on the Sphere exosphere.

«

Sounds like Ranji’s exit was over a disagreement about what to do, not how they account for it. Even so, it’s an amazing object.
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Apple’s AI-powered Siri assistant could land as soon as WWDC 2024 • TechRadar

Mark Wilson:

»

The iPhone 16’s biggest new feature could be on-device AI, according to fresh rumors claiming that Apple could announce a next-gen Siri assistant at WWDC 2024.

The speculation comes from the well-known leaker Revegnus on X (formerly Twitter), who claims that “Apple is currently using LLM [large language model] to completely revamp Siri into the ultimate virtual assistant” and that “the first product is expected to be unveiled at WWDC 2024”.

According to the leaks, Apple is preparing to develop Siri “into Apple’s most powerful killer AI app” and plans “for it to be standard on the iPhone 16 models and onwards”. This suggests that a next-gen Siri may need new dedicated hardware, which could leave older iPhones unable to access its most powerful features.

Current iPhones like the iPhone 15 Pro already have powerful chips like the A17 Pro, which are capable of powering some AI-powered tasks. The forthcoming Journal app, for example, is coming to iOS 17 soon and “uses on-device machine learning to create personalized suggestions to inspire a user’s journal entry”, according to Apple.

But the suggestion from these new rumors is that Apple is planning to give Siri a much bigger overhaul with more far-reaching powers. And this is backed up by Samsung’s recent musings about Galaxy AI, which suggest that on-device AI will be the next big smartphone battleground in 2024.

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Would be amazing if Apple weren’t doing this, really, but it’s always the timescale that one wonders about. Having been first with Siri, back in 2011, Apple hasn’t really been first on anything to do with AI.
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Lost in space: astronaut’s toolbag orbits Earth after escaping during spacewalk • The Guardian

Diana Ramirez-Simon:

»

Nasa astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara were conducting a rare all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) on 1 November when their toolbag gave them the slip, according to Nasa.

The astronauts, both on their first spacewalk, were making repairs on assemblies that allow the ISS solar arrays to track the sun continuously, reported SciTechDaily, which was documenting the spacewalk.

“During the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost. Flight controllers spotted the tool bag using external station cameras. The tools were not needed for the remainder of the spacewalk. Mission Control analyzed the bag’s trajectory and determined that risk of recontacting the station is low and that the onboard crew and space station are safe with no action required,” said Nasa on its blog.

The white, satchel-like bag is surprisingly bright, shining just below the limit of visibility to the naked eye, which means observers would be able to spot it using binoculars, according to EarthSky. Its visual magnitude is around a 6, making it slightly less bright than the ice giant Uranus.

To track the bag, observers need only to find the ISS, which is the third-brightest object in the night sky, according to Nasa, and can be located using the agency’s Spot the Station tool. The bag will be orbiting Earth two to four minutes ahead of the ISS.

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But will burn up on reentry in a few months. Strange they don’t have a leash.
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If you’ve ever heard a voice that wasn’t there, this could be why • The New York Times

Veronique Greenwood:

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Some years ago, scientists in Switzerland found a way to make people hallucinate. They didn’t use LSD or sensory deprivation chambers. Instead, they sat people in a chair and asked them to push a button that, a fraction of a second later, caused a rod to gently press their back. After a few rounds, the volunteers got the creeping sense of someone behind them. Faced with a disconnect between their actions and their sensations, their minds conjured another explanation: a separate presence in the room.

In a new study published in the journal Psychological Medicine, researchers from the same lab used the ghostly finger setup to probe another kind of hallucination: hearing voices. They found that volunteers were more likely to report hearing a voice when there was a lag between the push of the button and the rod’s touch than when there was no delay.

The findings suggest that the neurological roots of hallucinations lie in how the brain processes contradictory signals from the environment, the researchers said.

Hearing voices is more common than you might think, said Pavo Orepic, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva and an author of the new paper. In surveys, scientists have discovered that many people without a psychiatric diagnosis — perhaps 5 to 10% of the general population — report having heard a disembodied voice at some point in their lives. “There is actually a continuum of these experiences,” Dr. Orepic said. “So all of us hallucinate — at certain times, like if you’re tired, you’ll hallucinate more, for instance — and some people are more prone to do so.”

In the new study, as in earlier work, Dr. Orepic and his collaborators had volunteers sit in a chair and push the button that caused the rod to touch their backs. During some sessions, there was no delay between the push and the touch, while others had a half-second delay — enough time to give volunteers that feeling that someone was nearby.

During all trials, the volunteers listened to recordings of pink noise, a softer version of white noise. Some recordings contained recorded bits of their own voice, while others had fragments of someone else’s voice or no voice at all. In each trial, the volunteers were asked if they had heard anyone speaking.

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The impact of fake reviews on demand and welfare • National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Akesson et al:

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Although fake online customer reviews have become prevalent on platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, little is known about how these reviews influence consumer behavior. This paper provides the first experimental estimates of the effects of fake reviews on individual demand and welfare.

We conduct an incentive-compatible online experiment with a nationally representative sample of respondents from the United Kingdom (n = 10,000). Consumers are asked to choose a product category, browse a platform resembling Amazon, and select one of five equally priced products. One of the products is of inferior quality, one is of superior quality, and three are of average quality. We randomly allocate participants to variants of the platform: five treatment groups see positive fake reviews for an inferior product, and the control group does not see fake reviews.

Moreover, some participants are randomly selected to receive an educational intervention that aims to mitigate the potential effects of fake reviews.

Our analysis of the experimental data yields four findings. First, fake reviews make consumers more likely to choose lower-quality products. Second, we estimate that welfare losses from such reviews may be important—on the order of $.12 for each dollar spent in the setting we study. hird, we find that fake reviews have heterogeneous effects. For example, the effect of fake reviews is smaller for those who do not trust customer reviews.

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I’m not totally surprised by the third finding, but the cost – borne by users – of fake reviews really is substantial. Of course, there’s no incentive for the platforms to get rid of them. People buy things anyway.
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Vision Pro, spatial video, and panoramic photos • Daring Fireball

John Gruber got some time with the Vision Pro to find out what it’s like with “spatial video” (which is sort-of 3D) that you shoot yourself on an iPhone 15 Pro:

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Vision Pro is capable of presenting video that looks utterly real — because that’s exactly how pass-through video works and feels. Recorded spatial videos are different. For one thing, reality is not 30 fps, nor is it only 1080p. This makes spatial videos not look low-resolution or crude, per se, but rather more like movies. The upscaled 1080p imagery comes across as film-like grain, and the obviously-lower-than-reality frame rate conveys a movie-like feel as well. Higher resolution would look better, sure, but I’m not sure a higher frame rate would. Part of the magic of movies and TV is that 24 and 30 fps footage has a dream-like aspect to it.

Nothing you’ve ever viewed on a screen, however, can prepare you for the experience of watching these spatial videos, especially the ones you will have shot yourself, of your own family and friends. They truly are more like memories than videos. The spatial videos I experienced yesterday that were shot by Apple looked better — framed by professional photographers, and featuring professional actors. But the ones I shot myself were more compelling, and took my breath away. There’s my friend, Joanna [Stern], right in front of me — like I could reach out and touch her — but that was 30 minutes ago, in a different room.

Prepare to be moved, emotionally, when you experience this.

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I think this, more than the Humane AI pin, is going to be what shifts our view of what’s possible with technology. This creates a human connection: think of how many futuristic films show the protagonist viewing immersive video of past events (particularly, Minority Report).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Humane AI Pin has officially launched, with opinions widely split on whether it’s revolutionary or blah. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll on Flickr.

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

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

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.

Algorithms are deciding who gets organ transplants. Are their decisions fair? • FT

Madhumita Murgia:

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Over the past decade, predictive software has proliferated through western healthcare systems as a way to make crucial medical decisions more cost-efficient and accurate. The results haven’t always been as intended. In 2019, for example, researchers found that an algorithm used by hospitals treating up to 70 million Americans was prioritising healthier white patients over sicker black patients who needed extra medical support for chronic illnesses. Nearly 47% of black patients should have been referred for extra care, but the algorithmic bias meant that only 18% were, according to the study. The bias came from the software assigning higher risk scores to an individual with higher annual healthcare costs. Because minorities and other underserved populations make proportionally less use of healthcare, from a statistical perspective they appeared less costly — but they weren’t necessarily less sick. Similar racial biases have been found in algorithms involved in estimating heart failure risk, breast cancer diagnoses and, earlier this year, socio-economic bias was discovered in a liver allocation algorithm in use across the US.

Systematic bias in algorithms can crop up for a variety of reasons, from the quality of underlying data used to train the systems — such as the skewed data from the 2019 study — to the unequal weighting of certain variables such as age, gender or race, which can inadvertently disadvantage specific communities. It’s why those who advocate for ethical use of these models, particularly in sensitive areas such as healthcare or policing, call for human oversight of all decisions and an appeal system that allows humans (surgeons, for example) to intervene if things don’t look quite right.

In an organ allocation system, difficult choices must be made. Because there aren’t enough livers for all 700 people on the UK’s list, “transplantation remains a zero-sum game and any adjustment in allocation is simply a case of causing harm to one to help another,” wrote Raj Prasad, a surgeon at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, in the Lancet this year.

But the question Jess was looking to answer was whether her sister [who has cystic fibrosis] was being unfairly and systematically passed over by the NLOS [National Liver Offering Scheme] software, precluding her from ever receiving a liver through this method.

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(This is a free link for a limited number of readers.) A long read, but fascinating.
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What I watched Hamas do • The Line

Matt Gurney was one of a few journalists to receive a briefing at an Israeli consulate in Toronto which included footage from bodycams and other cameras of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7. Even just reading is harrowing:

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I want to end by talking about this family. I’ve left it until now on purpose. If you’d read anything about the media briefing, you’d probably read about this section of the video, because it’s probably the most viscerally shocking. It’s a dad and two young boys. The dad gets the boys into a shelter but he can’t get the door closed and he’s killed by a tossed grenade and then shot when he crumples to the ground. The boys wander out. One of them, the smaller one, is badly wounded. He seems to have lost an eye to the grenade’s shrapnel — the video is mercifully not clear enough to show that in too much detail, but he’s telling his older brother that he can’t see out of that eye. They discuss their father being dead while a Hamas terrorist stands in their kitchen, a few feet away, pilfering their fridge for a cold drink. The terrorist casually offers them some food and drink, and leaves when they decline. The boys talk to each other about how their father is dead. “It’s not a prank, he’s dead,” one says to the other. “I know, I saw,” the other agrees.

Seeing that moment was the part of Monday’s briefing that I had most feared. That’s what I was afraid would break me. I’d read all about it in basically every account of the presentation. And good God, it was awful. I had to take a break writing this part of the column to have myself a good sobbing fit because this is just about the worst thing I have ever seen.

But there was something I hadn’t read anywhere else: after their father’s killer stops raiding the fridge and leaves, the older brother grabs a bottle of water and tries to give his younger brother first aid. He tries cleaning out his bloody shrapnel wounds what what supplies he has on hand.

That is bravery. That is courage.

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The evolutionary reasons we are drawn to horror movies and haunted houses • Scientific American

Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner:

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Our desire to experience fear, it seems, is rooted deep in our evolutionary past and can still benefit us today. Scary play, it turns out, can help us overcome fears and face new challenges—those that surface in our own lives and others that arise in the increasingly disturbing world we all live in.

The phenomenon of scary play surprised Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man, he wrote that he had heard about captive monkeys that, despite their fear of snakes, kept lifting the lid of a box containing the reptiles to peek inside. Intrigued, Darwin turned the story into an experiment: He put a bag with a snake inside it in a cage full of monkeys at the London Zoological Gardens. A monkey would cautiously walk up to the bag, slowly open it, and peer down inside before shrieking and racing away. After seeing one monkey do this, another monkey would carefully walk over to the bag to take a peek, then scream and run. Then another would do the same thing, then another.

The monkeys were “satiating their horror,” as Darwin put it. Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom—it’s called predator inspection. The inspection occurs when an animal looks at or even approaches a predator rather than simply fleeing. This behavior occurs across a range of animals, from guppies to gazelles.

At first blush, getting close to danger seems like a bad idea. Why would natural selection have instilled in animals a curiosity about the very things they should be avoiding? But there is an evolutionary logic to these actions. Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment. It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences.

When you consider that many prey animals live close to their predators, the benefits of morbidly curious behavior such as predator inspection become clear. For example, it’s not uncommon for a gazelle to cross paths with a cheetah on the savanna. It might seem like a gazelle should always run when it sees a cheetah. Fleeing, however, is physiologically expensive; if a gazelle ran every time it saw a cheetah, it would exhaust precious calories and lose out on opportunities for other activities that are important to its survival and reproduction.

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The evolutionary psychology post-justification often seems a bit Just So. Then you read a thread like this. Pray you never need to put your scary play to similar use.
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“Let me tell them goodbye before they get killed”: how eSIM cards are connecting Palestinian families • The Markup

Lam Thuy Vo:

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Farid Sami Alzaro, 27, has had little control over how and when he can communicate with his family. Alzaro lives in Cairo, and his extended family lives in Gaza.

…Alzaro had read on Instagram that people from around the world were donating and delivering eSIM cards to Palestinians. Despite the name, eSIM cards aren’t physical cards at all but pieces of software that act like traditional SIM cards, allowing people to activate a new cellular plan with phone and internet access on their existing phone. Alzaro wrote to Egyptian writer and journalist Mirna El Helbawi, who was organizing an eSIM distribution campaign, and she promptly sent him access information for an eSIM to share with his family in Gaza. His family couldn’t get it to work. When he told El Helbawi, she sent him access information for a second one.

A full day after he shared the second eSIM’s info, Alzaro’s family called. It worked.

“It was the happiest moment of my life,” Alzaro said in an Instagram message. “I talked. Also with my grandmother, who is Alzheimer’s patient, do you know what she said to me? I want to hug you until you sleep in my arms, I don’t want anything but to see you.”

El Helbawi said she has distributed more than 7,000 eSIM cards free of charge since she started her campaign on Oct. 28. Within a few hours of launch, her campaign went viral. El Helbawi said that people across Europe, Canada, the US, Australia, Mexico, and other countries sent her eSIMs. She now has more than 14,000, donated by individuals who wanted to help bring connectivity to Palestinians in Gaza.

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Humane officially launches the AI Pin, its OpenAI-powered wearable • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

Unlike a device like the Rewind Pendant, it’s not meant to be always recording, and it’s not even listening for a wake word. You’ll have to activate the device manually by tapping and dragging on the touchpad, and the Pin’s “Trust Light” blinks to let you and supposedly everyone else know it’s collecting data.

The Pin’s primary job is to connect to AI models through software the company calls AI Mic. Humane’s press release mentions both Microsoft and OpenAI, and previous reports suggested that the Pin was primarily powered by GPT-4 — Humane says that ChatGPT access is actually one of the device’s core features. Its operating system, called Cosmos, is designed to route your queries to the right tools automatically rather than asking you to download and manage apps.

What Humane is trying to do with the Pin is essentially strip away all the interface cruft from your technology. It won’t have a homescreen or lots of settings and accounts to manage; the idea is that you can just talk to or touch the Pin, say what you want to do or know, and it’ll happen automatically. Over the last year, we’ve seen a huge amount of functionality become available through a simple text command to a chatbot; Humane’s trying to build a gadget in the same spirit.

The question, then, is what this thing can actually do. Most of the features Humane mentions in its announcement today are the ones co-founder Imran Chaudhri showed off during a demo at TED earlier this year: voice-based messaging and calling; a “catch me up” feature that can summarize your email inbox; holding up food to the camera to get nutritional information; and real-time translation. Beyond that, though, it seems the device’s primary purpose is as something of a wearable LLM-powered search engine.

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A couple of years ago, “wearable LLM-powered search engine” would have been a meaningless phrase. Now at least we know what the words mean, even together.
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The real personal (AI) computer • On my Om

Om Malik is excited about the Humane AI Pin:

»

What does the next step in personal computing mean? So far, we have used mobile apps to get what we want, but the next step is to just talk to the machine. Apps, at least for me, are workflows set to do specific tasks. Tidal is a “workflow” to get us music. Calm or Headspace are workflows for getting “meditation content.” In the not-too-distant future, these workflows leave the confines of an app wrapper and become executables where our natural language will act as a scripting language for the machines to create highly personalized services (or apps) and is offered to us as an experience. 

In this not-too-distant future, we won’t need apps to have their wrapper. Instead, we would interface with our digital services through an invisible interface. Do I need to create a playlist in my music service when I only want it to play a certain kind of music? (By the way, that was the number one use case on Amazon’s Alexa.) Alexa, Google Home, and Siri are some technologies that have set the stage for this interaction behavior. Our kids are growing up talking to machines — for them, it will be natural to use their voice to get machines to do things. 

The way I see it, the evolution of apps to “experiences” means that we are seeing the end of the line for the App Store as we know it. “It’s not about declaring app stores obsolete; it’s about moving forward because we have the capability for new ways,” Chaudhri argued. Humane’s idea is to make these workflows (aka apps in smartphone terms) available to us through its myriad interfaces — primarily voice. 

And I buy this future! Why? Because I have seen the shift before. 

When the iPhone launched, there wasn’t a shortage of skeptics about the notion of a touch screen as an interface. I can still remember the hue-and-cry over a virtual keyboard. Fifteen years later, no one even flinches at the obviousness of a smartphone. In a few years — voice (thanks to the AI) will be part of our digital interaction reality. It won’t be the only one, but it will be an important one. 

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He thinks “The biggest challenge for Humane, and the AI Pin is privacy.” I think its biggest challenge will be selling the second 100,000 of them.
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Tumblr is reportedly on life support as its latest owner reassigns staff • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

Internet statesman and Waxy.org proprietor Andy Baio posted what is “apparently an internal Automattic memo making the rounds on Tumblr” to Threads. The memo, written to employees at WordPress.com parent company Automattic, which bought Tumblr from Verizon’s media arm in 2019, is titled or subtitled “You win or you learn.” The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named “Bumblr”) will “switch to other divisions.” Those working in “Happiness” (Automattic’s customer support and service division) and “T&S” (trust and safety) would remain.

“We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have revenue and usage above its previous peaks,” the posted memo reads. After quotes and anecdotes about love, loss, mountain climbing, and learning on the journey, the memo notes that nobody will be let go and that team members can make a ranked list of their top three preferred assignments elsewhere inside Automattic.

Ars has emailed Automattic to confirm the memo’s authenticity and ask for comment. One source of the memo has since deleted the post, citing the typical fatigue that comes with receiving replies from random outside commenters.

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Was a startup, launched 2007, bought by Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1bn, sold to Verizon in 2017 (including Yahoo) for $4.5bn, sold (just Tumblr) to Automattic in 2019 for less than $20m. Creator of a gazillion memes. Now, well, not a lot.
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Jezebel, the pioneering women’s site, is “suspended” by G/O Media • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

»

“Disillusioned by the state of American women’s media, I was given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create and oversee a women’s-media entity‚ in this case, a Web site,” Anna Holmes, the founder of Jezebel, wrote for The New Yorker on November 4. “I imagined it as one with a lot of personality, with humor, with edge. I wanted it to combine wit, smarts, and anger, providing women — many of whom had been taught to believe that ‘feminism’ was a bad word or one to be avoided — with a model of critical thinking around gender and race which felt accessible and entertaining.”

Jezebel has been up for sale for a couple of weeks. On Thursday, Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Jezebel’s parent company G/O Media, said in a memo to staff that the site had not found a buyer and that “we are making the very, very difficult decision to suspend Jezebel.”

In response to a question about why G/O Media says Jezebel is “suspended” rather than “shut down,” G/O Media head of corporate communications Mark Neschis told me in an email, “The hope is that G/O Media might still find a buyer, a partner, or enough advertiser support to bring it back fully.”

…Jezebel lived up to Holmes’s vision. By December 2007, it was receiving 10 million monthly pageviews; by June 2009, 25 million. It was parodied on 30 Rock (Liz Lemon: “It’s this really cool feminist website where women talk about how far we’ve come and which celebrities have the worst beach bodies”). “I really despise mainstream feminism,” Moe Tkacik, the site’s first features editor and one of its earliest writers, told The Guardian in 2017, but “Jezebel was part of bringing feminism into the mainstream.”

«

Sic transit gloria media. Seven staff laid off. (There was a time when a news organisation dropping seven staff would have been known as “another Tuesday at The Sunday Times”.) Also cutting staff: Vice, Popsugar, The Onion, and Gizmodo. ZIRP time is over.
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Apple says it ‘expects to make’ App Store policy changes due to EU DMA • TechCrunch

Manish Singh and Natasha Lomas:

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Apple has bowed to the inevitable and said it “expects to make” App Store policy changes to comply with EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The pan-EU DMA came into application across the bloc back in May. Apple has likely been expecting for months, if not years, to be subject to the new ex ante competition regime — which was first proposed by the Commission at the end of 2020. But the language change in its filing makes it explicit policy shifts are on the way.

The iPhone-maker has updated the language pertaining to its risk factors in the fiscal year 2023 Form 10-K filing (PDF), with the revised text presenting a shift from the company’s previous position, indicating a more definitive stance on potential modifications to the App Store policies.

Apple said that future changes could also affect how the company charges developers for access to its platforms; how it manages distribution of apps outside of the App Store; and “how, and to what extent, it allows developers to communicate with consumers inside the App Store regarding alternative purchasing mechanisms.”

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Morgan Stanley reckons this means that Apple will probably begin offering third-party app stores on-device in Europe. Epic will be pleased.
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Apple dealt blow at top EU court over €14.3bn tax bill in Ireland • FT

Javier Espinoza and Jude Webber:

»

Apple has been dealt a blow in its €14.3bn tax dispute with Brussels after an adviser to the EU’s top court said an earlier ruling over its business in Ireland should be shelved.

Giovanni Pitruzzella, advocate-general of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the EU’s highest court, said on Thursday that a landmark decision quashing the EU’s order for Apple to pay €14.3bn in back taxes to Ireland “should be set aside”.

Such opinions by advocates-general are non-binding but often influential in final judgments by the EU’s top court.

The General Court, the EU’s second-highest court, ruled in 2020 that, while it supported the EU’s right to investigate national tax arrangements, Brussels had failed to show that Apple had received an illegal economic advantage in Ireland over tax.

But Pitruzzella said the court had “committed a series of errors in law” and “failed to assess correctly the substance and consequences of certain methodological errors”. As a result, he said the court needed “to carry out a new assessment”.

An ECJ ruling is expected next year.

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That second paragraph really is mindbending. So: the EU order should be unquashed. So, he’s saying Apple should pay the back taxes (currently being held in escrow until the legal process has played out). This has been pinging back and forth since antitrust queen Margrethe Vestager decided in 2016 that Ireland was favouring Apple. Ireland, and Apple, demurred. Hence: lawyers.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Cat hairs found at a crime scene can be key evidence for convictions of owners, via new forensic methods. CC-licensed photo by *^ ^* Sherry 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.

Humane’s AI Pin costs $699 and $24 a month with OpenAI and T-Mobile integration • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

Humane has been teasing its first device, the AI Pin, for most of this year. It’s scheduled to launch the Pin on Thursday, but The Verge has obtained documents detailing practically everything about the device ahead of its official launch. What they show is that Humane, the company noisily promoting a world after smartphones, is about to launch what amounts to a $699 wearable smartphone without a screen that has a $24-a-month subscription fee and runs on a Humane-branded version of T-Mobile’s network with access to AI models from Microsoft and OpenAI.

The Pin itself is a square device that magnetically clips to your clothes or other surfaces. The clip is more than just a magnet, though; it’s also a battery pack, which means you can swap in new batteries throughout the day to keep the Pin running. We don’t know how long a single battery lasts, but the device ships with two “battery boosters.” It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and uses a camera, depth, and motion sensors to track and record its surroundings. It has a built-in speaker, which Humane calls a “personic speaker,” and can connect to Bluetooth headphones. 

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Dead on arrival. This is not how you supplant the smartphone.
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The new Twitter is changing rapidly — study it before it’s too late • Nature

Mike Caulfield:

»

Last month, my team at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public in Seattle looked at data from X (formerly Twitter) to find the most influential voices in the discourse surrounding the Israel–Hamas war.

…What we found was extraordinary. A small group of seven accounts, many unknown a year ago, were racking up hundreds of millions of views each day, out-performing standard news accounts by an order of magnitude and exercising significant influence on the discourse around the war. X’s owner, Elon Musk, had interacted with or explicitly recommended six of those posters, potentially bringing them to the attention of his 162 million followers. Reporting that built on our work revealed some of the apparent identities behind these accounts: a London teenager who has posted antisemitic content, a US soldier in Georgia who seemed to have pulled at least some news from pro-Russian propaganda channels, and a right-wing news group in Poland.

Twitter was always a mix of credible and less credible sources — but our research supports the notion that X is changing dramatically, in ways that are not fully apparent even to researchers who have followed the platform for years. The influence of this new group of accounts, previously unknown to us, had skyrocketed shockingly quickly. In my more than ten years in this field, I’ve never seen an almost entirely new set of accounts come to dominate a major platform in less than a year.

… Our work on last year’s US midterm elections showed that, even before the worrying changes at X, the platform was able to disseminate election conspiracy theories broadly and with remarkable efficiency. We feel that X will play that part in next year’s US elections — including the presidential race — as well as in dozens of others around the world in what is shaping up to be a very important year.

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But, but, but: Twitter’s importance and trustworthiness are cratering. It was never used very much by average people; the word is getting out that it’s now just a mess.
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Solar-plus-storage outperforms diesel in military survivability analysis • PV magazine USA

John Fitzgerald Weaver:

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Analysis by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) demonstrated that solar energy systems, when paired with 14-day duration energy storage (LDES), outperform military grade emergency diesel generators (EDGs) in both survivability and financial viability in military applications.

Historical data comparing the failure rates of EDGs to solar plus LDES technologies demonstrates that, over a 14-day standard military uptime evaluation, solar plus LDES’ survivability probability exceeds 95%, while the diesel generators’ survivability hovers around 80%.

The study also suggests that a more strategically sized solar-plus-storage system could achieve nearly perfect reliability, with uptime approaching 100% over a two-week period. NREL differentiates between the 95%+ ‘Intermediate’ Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), which is currently available for field testing and provides a 38% round-trip efficiency, while the 100% ‘Goal’ BESS, still in the conceptual phase, is expected to provide a 48% round-trip efficiency and cut the energy storage system costs in half. However, since the ‘Goal’ BESS is currently under development, future costs may deviate from these projections.

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Rather puts the kibosh on the claim shown here the other day that the military totally absolutely must have diesel and that renewables can’t fill any sort of gap.
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One regulation could have stopped a nationwide car theft wave. Why doesn’t the US have It? • Vice

Aaron Gordon:

»

The U.S. is dealing with an unprecedented wave of car thefts as thieves target some nine million Kias and Hyundais manufactured between 2011 and 2021. People who bought those vehicles had no idea they were buying cars with built-in vulnerabilities. Many have had their cars stolen multiple times, which causes real hardship in both stark monetary terms and also psychological trauma. Those who cannot afford to absorb tens of thousands of dollars in losses to buy a different car are stuck with one that’s easy to steal, and even those who own models not directly affected are seeing their insurance premiums skyrocket for simply owning a car made by the same brand.

None of this is happening in Canada, despite many of the same Kias and Hyundais being sold north of the border. This is because, in 2005, Canada enacted a simple regulation that made all cars harder to steal. 

As part of Motherboard’s ongoing coverage of the Kia-Hyundai theft issue, involving more than 125 public information requests and interviews with victims and experts, I’ve been trying to answer what I hoped would be a simple question: Why doesn’t the United States have a similar regulation? Unfortunately, I didn’t find any satisfying answers. Instead, I found bigger questions about why the U.S. has no serious anti-theft regulations and how its regulatory agencies think about crime prevention—which is to say, in some cases, not at all.

The story of what is happening with Kia andHyundai thefts in the U.S., and what is not happening in Canada, is as clear a case you will find illustrating what good regulations can do and what intelligent, thoughtful crime prevention actually looks like when it involves a holistic government effort rather than a narrow and singular focus of policing and incarceration.

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The Canadian regulation since 2007: requiring an immobiliser. To British ears, this is incredible: new cars sold in the UK must have an immobiliser since October 1998. (Old ones quickly got them too. I had one fitted on a secondhand car in 1996 or so.)

Like American banking, this is astonishingly retrograde. A little regulation which could improve so many people’s lives.
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Revenue from click-to-message ads in India has doubled, says Zuckerberg • The Economic Times

»

Meta said [last] Thursday its revenue from click-to-message ads in India doubled year on year in the third quarter ended September as the company continues to push WhatsApp business messaging in the country, which is its largest market.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated that business messaging will be the next major pillar of the social media giant’s business. “More than 60% of people on WhatsApp in India message a business app account,” he said. “Now, I think that this is going to be a really big opportunity for new business AIs that we hope will enable any business to easily set up an AI that people can message to help with commerce and support,” he added.

In February 2023, Zuckerberg had said click-to-message ads had reached a $10bn revenue run-rate globally. India is the biggest market for WhatsApp with over 500 million users.

Speaking of the business sense that it made, Zuckerberg said most commerce and messaging is in countries where the cost of labour is low enough that it makes sense for businesses to have people corresponding with customers over text. And in those countries like Thailand or Vietnam, there is a huge amount of commerce that happens in this way, he said.

“But in lots of parts of the world, the cost of labour is too expensive for this to be viable,” he added. “But with business AIs, we have the opportunity to bring down that cost, and expand commerce and messaging into larger economies across the world. So, making business AIs work for more businesses is going to be an important focus for us into 2024.”

Last month Zuckerberg said “India is leading the world in terms of how people and businesses embrace messaging”.

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There’s also a longer background piece (though it feels unfocused) about WhatsApp at the NY Times.
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DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs • cabel.com

Cabel Sasser:

»

As a kid, I didn’t really read sci-fi novels, I’ve never read a single word of J.R.R. Tolkien, and I mostly used the encyclopedia to look up funny words.

What I did read as a kid, over and over again, were game/computer magazines… and the DAK Catalog.
(I know this says a lot about me. We don’t need to discuss it any further.)

Now, I’ve written about this particular catalog back in 2012, but back then I only scratched the surface.

To explain DAK, let’s both look at the Summer ’83 issue.

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“DAK”, as in the catalog(ue), was produced by DAK Industries Incorporated, which was run by Drew Alan Kaplan. Hence the acronym. He wrote much of the copy – and there’s a LOT of copy – that accompanied the items on sale, bubbling with enthusiasm for each and every one. (“Experience the thrill of total phone freedom as you roam throughout your home, yard or even a neighbor’s house. You’ll never have to ‘run for the phone’ again.”)

Older Britons will find themselves thinking of the long-dead Innovations catalogue, except DAK’s things might have been useful.

More observationally: these date to a time when manufacturing and microchips and miniaturisation were all accelerating together, so that imaginary things could become real within a few months. It feels as though things have slowed down, certainly on the hardware front.
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We need more USB-C cables with bandwidth and USB versions on them • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Elgato hasn’t just made an excellent teleprompter, it’s also made a great USB-C cable that ships with it. Professional audio engineer Matt “Spike” McWilliams spotted that Elgato’s latest USB-C cable has the bandwidth and USB type imprinted on the connector, and now I wish all manufacturers did this.

I recently spent too many hours sorting my USB-C cables into ones that are high speed, ones that can deliver fast charging, and ones that can do both. None of them had any marker to let me know the speed or type of USB-C cable without me having to test them. It’s a common issue for people switching to USB-C right now, and even a small indicator like Elgato’s can certainly help. The writing on Elgato’s cable tells me it’s USB 3.0 compatible and can support up to 5Gbps in bandwidth.

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Back in 2021 there was the suggestion of colour coding for USB-C (nobody seems to be taking it up, sadly) but this would be the next best thing. Sorting cables! Fun times in the Warren household.
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Cat-ching criminals with DNA from pet hairs • Phys.org

»

Around 26% of UK householders own a cat and with the average feline shedding thousands of hairs annually, it’s inevitable that once you leave, you’ll bear evidence of the furry resident. This is potentially useful in the forensic investigation of criminal activity.

While a human perpetrator may take pains not to leave their own DNA behind, transferred cat hair contains its own DNA that could provide a link between a suspect and a crime scene, or a victim.

In a paper published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics earlier this month, researchers at the University of Leicester describe a sensitive method that can extract maximum DNA information from just one cat hair.

Emily Patterson, the lead author of the study and a Leicester Ph.D. student, said, “Hair shed by your cat lacks the hair root, so it contains very little useable DNA. In practice we can only analyze mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mothers to their offspring, and is shared among maternally related cats.”

This means that hair DNA cannot individually identify a cat, making it essential to maximize information in a forensic test.

However, a new method identified by the researchers enabled them to determine the sequence of the entire mitochondrial DNA, ensuring it is around ten times more discriminating than a previously used technique which looked at only a short fragment.

Dr. Jon Wetton, from the University’s Department of Genetics & Genome Biology, co-led the study. He said, “In a previous murder case we applied the earlier technique but were fortunate that the suspect’s cat had an uncommon mitochondrial variant, as most cat lineages couldn’t be distinguished from each other. But with our new approach virtually every cat has a rare DNA type and so the test will almost certainly be informative if hairs are found.”

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Not certain, but the “previous murder case” seems to be State of Missouri v Henry L Polk Jr, of a 2004 murder with a 2009 verdict.

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AI negotiates legal contract without humans involved for first time • CNBC

Ryan Browne:

»

In a world first, artificial intelligence demonstrated the ability to negotiate a contract autonomously with another artificial intelligence without any human involvement.

British AI firm Luminance developed an AI system based on its own proprietary large language model (LLM) to automatically analyze and make changes to contracts. LLMs are a type of AI algorithm that can achieve general-purpose language processing and generation.

Jaeger Glucina, chief of staff and managing director of Luminance, said the company’s new AI aimed to eliminate much of the paperwork that lawyers typically need to complete on a day-to-day basis.

In Glucina’s own words, Autopilot “handles the day-to-day negotiations, freeing up lawyers to use their creativity where it counts, and not be bogged down in this type of work.”

…In the demonstration, the AI negotiators go back and forth on a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, that one party wants the other to sign. NDAs are a bugbear in the legal profession, not least because they impose strict confidentiality limits and require lengthy scrutiny, Glucina said.

…“This is just AI negotiating with AI, right from opening a contract in Word all the way through to negotiating terms and then sending it to DocuSign,” she told CNBC in an interview. 

“This is all now handled by the AI, that’s not only legally trained, which we’ve talked about being very important, but also understands your business.”

Luminance’s Autopilot feature is much more advanced than Lumi, Luminance’s ChatGPT-like chatbot.

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We’ve gone from humans writing contracts with clauses nobody will read unless they absolutely have to, to computers writing contracts where only computers will read them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

According to Google’s “featured snippet”, there are no countries in Africa that start with a K. What, not even one? CC-licensed photo by Kevin Walsh 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.

Adobe is selling fake AI images of war in Israel-Palestine • Crikey

Cam Wilson:

»

Adobe is selling artificially generated, realistic images of the Israel-Hamas war which have been used across the internet without any indication they are fake.

As part of the company’s embrace of generative artificial intelligence (AI), Adobe allows people to upload and sell AI images as part of its stock image subscription service, Adobe Stock. Adobe requires submitters to disclose whether they were generated with AI and clearly marks the image within its platform as “generated with AI”. Beyond this requirement, the guidelines for submission are the same as any other image, including prohibiting illegal or infringing content.

People searching Adobe Stock are shown a blend of real and AI-generated images. Like “real” stock images, some are clearly staged, whereas others can seem like authentic, unstaged photography.

This is true of Adobe Stock’s collection of images for searches relating to Israel, Palestine, Gaza and Hamas. For example, the first image shown when searching for Palestine is a photorealistic image of a missile attack on a cityscape titled “Conflict between Israel and Palestine generative AI”. Other images show protests, on-the-ground conflict and even children running away from bomb blasts — all of which aren’t real.

Amid the flurry of misinformation and misleading online content about the Israel-Hamas war that’s circulating on social media, these images, too, are being used without disclosure of whether they are real or not. 

A handful of small online news outlets, blogs and newsletters have featured [the photo] “Conflict between Israel and Palestine generative AI” without marking it as the product of generative AI. It’s not clear whether these publications are aware it is a fake image.

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Looking inside real vs. fake AirPods with industrial computerised tomography • Lumafield

»

Today’s counterfeit products are so sophisticated that they often appear visually and functionally identical to the genuine articles—at least initially. For both manufacturers and consumers, counterfeits present a serious challenge: how can you ensure the quality and safety of your products?

CT [computerised tomography] scanning, a technique once reserved for medical diagnostics, has found a new purpose in the fight against counterfeit electronics. Industrial CT scanners like the Neptune allow engineers to inspect and optimize their designs throughout the product development cycle, from R&D to field support. They’re also the perfect tool for identifying fakes with precision. Along the way, they also reveal the complexity and sophistication of the engineering that goes into genuine products.

We examined the internal structure of Apple’s AirPods Pro and MagSafe 2 power adapters for MacBook, exposing the shortcuts and compromises made in counterfeit versions that could compromise functionality and user safety.

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Judge dismisses copyright claims against AI image generators • PetaPixel

Matt Growcoot:

»

A judge in California has largely dismissed copyright claims brought by three artists against AI image generators Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DeviantArt.

U.S. District Court Judge William H. Orrick failed to find evidence of direct infringements by the AI image companies and mostly granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case.

The three artists — Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz — immediately ran into problems as two of them — McKernan and Ortiz — did not register their works with the US Copyright Office.

…Although the case is against three AI image generators, the plaintiffs allege that Midjourney is based on Stable Diffusion and DeviantArt’s “DreamUp” is powered by Stable Diffusion.

The problem for the artists is that the training data for these programs is a black box. Outside of LAION, very little is known about what exactly went into training AI image generators but it is widely assumed that the companies did an almighty scrape of images on the internet which included taking copyrighted and copyrightable pictures.

Judge Orrick writes that it is “unclear” as to whether Stable Diffusion holds “compressed copies” of the images and points to the defense’s argument that the training dataset, which contains five billion images, can “not possibly be compressed into an active program.”

The judge has offered the plaintiffs an opportunity to amend and clarify their theory as to how Stable Diffusion operates its training data.

He wrote that the sheer size of the LAION database may protect the company because it is “simply not plausible that every training image used to train Stable Diffusion was copyrighted (as opposed to copyrightable) or that all DeviantArt users’ output images rely upon (theoretically) copyright training images.”

And since it is almost impossible to produce an identical image that exists within the training data, it will be very difficult for artists to prove that an image that’s come out of Midjourey et al was based on their work.

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Fully expect this scenario to be repeated in other copyright v AI cases.
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WeWork founder Adam Neumann is ‘disappointed’ about its bankruptcy • Business Insider

Tom Carter:

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Adam Neumann says it is “challenging” for him to watch WeWork go bankrupt.

The WeWork cofounder and former CEO, who resigned after overseeing the company’s botched IPO, said he was “disappointed” by the bankruptcy and accused WeWork of “failing to take advantage” of its potential.

The coworking giant, which at its peak was valued at $47 billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday after years of financial problems.

“As the co-founder of WeWork who spent a decade building the business with an amazing team of mission-driven people, the company’s anticipated bankruptcy filing is disappointing,” said Neumann in a statement on Monday.

“It has been challenging for me to watch from the sidelines since 2019 as WeWork has failed to take advantage of a product that is more relevant today than ever before. I believe that, with the right strategy and team, a reorganization will enable WeWork to emerge successfully,” he added.

Neumann quit as WeWork’s CEO in 2019 after the company’s much-anticipated public launch fell apart. He reportedly received $480m for his stake in the company when he stepped down, and in total collected around $770m from WeWork’s eventual public offering in 2021.

The tech entrepreneur had faced significant scrutiny over WeWork’s business model and his perceived conflicts of interest, which would later become the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.

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That reminds me – must watch the Netflix special. (I’d have thought Neumann might have been smart enough not to say anything, and just sit at home counting his money for the next 50 years or so.
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Hackers drain $4.4M in crypto from LastPass victims in a single day • Coindesk

Oliver Knight:

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Hackers siphoned a total of $4.4m worth of crypto from at least 25 LastPass users on Oct. 25, according to blockchain analyst ZachXBT.

LastPass is a platform that stores and encrypts password information for users. Its cloud-based storage service was breached in an attack last year that involved targeting an employee and stealing their credentials.

ZachXBT and MetaMask developer Taylor Monahan have tracked at least 80 crypto wallets that have been compromised in relation to the hack.

Funds have been stolen from the Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, Arbitrum, Solana and Polygon blockchains, according to a list published by Monahan.

“Cannot stress this enough, if you believe you may have ever stored your seed phrase or keys in LastPass migrate your crypto assets immediately,” ZachXBT wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Cryptocurrency wallets are often targeted by hackers because a common attack vector is obtaining a private key, which gives the hacker complete access to funds. In July more than $300m was stolen from crypto users in a string of hacks and exploits.

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That’s an average of $176,000 per user – the sort of money you might notice (if it were money). I wonder if it’s a total coincidence that the price of bitcoin ramped up dramatically a few days before these hacks occurred; to me it suggests the hackers have their targets lined up and wait for the price to come right.
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Google’s relationship with facts is getting wobblier • The Atlantic

Caroline Mimbs Nyce:

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There is no easy way to explain the sum of Google’s knowledge. It is ever-expanding. Endless. A growing web of hundreds of billions of websites, more data than even 100,000 of the most expensive iPhones mashed together could possibly store. But right now, I can say this: Google is confused about whether there’s an African country beginning with the letter k.

I’ve asked the search engine to name it. “What is an African country beginning with K?” In response, the site has produced a “featured snippet” answer—one of those chunks of text that you can read directly on the results page, without navigating to another website. It begins like so: “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter ‘K.’”

This is wrong. The text continues: “The closest is Kenya, which starts with a ‘K’ sound, but is actually spelled with a ‘K’ sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.”

Given how nonsensical this response is, you might not be surprised to hear that the snippet was originally written by ChatGPT. But you may be surprised by how it became a featured answer on the internet’s preeminent knowledge base. The search engine is pulling this blurb from a user post on Hacker News, an online message board about technology, which is itself quoting from a website called Emergent Mind, which exists to teach people about AI—including its flaws. At some point, Google’s crawlers scraped the text, and now its algorithm automatically presents the chatbot’s nonsense answer as fact, with a link to the Hacker News discussion. The Kenya error, however unlikely a user is to stumble upon it, isn’t a one-off: I first came across the response in a viral tweet from the journalist Christopher Ingraham last month, and it was reported by Futurism as far back as August.

This is Google’s current existential challenge in a nutshell: The company has entered into the generative-AI era with a search engine that appears more complex than ever. And yet it still can be commandeered by junk that’s untrue or even just nonsensical.

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I confirmed this outcome (using Google in Incognito Mode). As Elon Musk would say: concerning. Even more concerning: Google knows about this error. However

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Instead, [search VP Pandu ] Nayak said the team focuses on the bigger underlying problem, and whether its algorithm can be trained to address it.

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OK, and what if it can’t?
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The Potato Hack: your guide to leaning out with the Potato Diet

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The Potato Hack (aka The Potato Diet) is an extremely effective method for losing weight without experiencing hunger.

The Potato Hack works by filling the belly with low-calorie nutrient-dense boiled potatoes. One gets full on a low number of calories. This results in a calorie deficit and fat loss.

Unlike other diets, the dieter does not experience hunger and thus the brain does not see the weight loss as a threat. This greatly reduces the odds of regaining the weight, which is a problem with all willpower diets.

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I absolutely do not endorse this, but just bring it to you to point out the next thing that you should expect to hear about endlessly from Silicon Valley tech bros, and then US cable stations, and then people who have been over to the US recently, and then breakfast TV trying to find something to fill in a spare five minutes in the schedules. The whole cycle typically lasts six months, and is followed by scientists and dieticians sucking their teeth and pointing out the problems. (I’m going to guess on this one that it’s lack of protein and vitamins.)

Also, Americans: a really good way to not gain that weight (and to get rid of it) is to stop drinking sugary drinks and stop eating food to which sugar in whatever form has been added, either by the manufacturer or you. Then you don’t have to cosplay Irish families in the 19th century.
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Today’s energy bottleneck may bring down major governments • Our Finite World

Gail Tverberg:

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History is full of records of economies that have collapsed. The book Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin and Serjey Nefedov analyzes eight of these failed economies. Populations tend to grow after a new resource is found or is acquired through war. Once population growth hits what Turchin calls carrying capacity, these economies hit a period of stagflation. This period lasted 50 to 60 years in the sample of eight economies analyzed. Stagflation was followed by a major contraction, typically with failing or overturned governments and declining overall population.

One way of estimating when a major contraction (or squeezing out) would occur would be to look at oil supply. We know that US oil production hit a peak and started to decline in 1970, changing the dynamics of the world economy. This started a period of stagflation for many of the wealthier economies of the world. Adding 50 to 60 years to 1970 suggests that a major downturn would take place in the 2020 to 2030 timeframe. Since it was the wealthier economies that first entered stagflation, it would not be surprising if these economies tend to collapse first.

There have been several studies computing estimates of when the extraction of fossil fuels would become unaffordable. Back in 1957, Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover of the US Navy gave a speech in which he talked about the connection of the level of fossil fuel supply to the standard of living of an economy, and to the ability of its military to defend the country. With respect to the timing of limits to affordable supply, he said, “. . .total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today’s unit cost are likely to run out at some time between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into account.”

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This is part of a rather longer post, which is part of a longer theme that Tvelberg develops. I don’t agree with it; for example, if you use fossil fuels to make solar panels or a nuclear plant or wind farm, the effect is multiplicative – you get more energy out long-term than you put in. Rear Admiral Rickover may have been right in 1957, but not in 2023.
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King’s Speech promises new bill to boost fossil fuel drilling • BusinessGreen News

James Murray:

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The government today used its final King’s Speech before the next election to confirm plans for new legislation to deliver annual oil and gas licensing rounds and accelerate grid connections for clean energy projects.

As had been widely trailed, the speech set out plans for a new Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill that would mandate the North Sea Transition Authority to undertake new oil and licensing rounds on an annual basis.

But at the same time it also reiterated Number 10’s commitment to meeting the UK’s net zero targets and boosting investment in renewables projects.

In his first opening of Parliament as monarch, King Charles said: “Legislation will be introduced to strengthen the United Kingdom’s energy security and reduce reliance on volatile international energy markets and hostile regimes.

“This bill will support future licensing of new oil and gas fields helping the country to transition to net zero by 2050 without adding undue burdens on households.

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Annual licensing! That means this current government will be able to run *checks notes* a round of licensing. Yes, it’s stupid and retrograde on Rishi Sunak’s part; new fields won’t help the Net Zero transition at all (they’ll make hitting it harder), but this is the last gasp of a dying government. Also, there’s little left in the North Sea to exploit profitably.
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Nature retracts controversial superconductivity paper by embattled physicist • Nature

Davide Castelvecchi:

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Nature has retracted a controversial paper claiming the discovery of a superconductor — a material that carries electrical currents with zero resistance — capable of operating at room temperature and relatively low pressure.

The text of the retraction notice states that it was requested by eight co-authors. “They have expressed the view as researchers who contributed to the work that the published paper does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied,” it says, adding that these co-authors “have concluded that these issues undermine the integrity of the published paper”. (The Nature news team is independent from its journals team.)

It is the third high-profile retraction of a paper by the two lead authors, physicists Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester in New York and Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Nature withdrew a separate paper last year and Physical Review Letters retracted one this August. It spells more trouble in particular for Dias, whom some researchers allege plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis. Dias has objected to the first two retractions and not responded regarding the latest. Salamat approved the two this year.

“It is at this point hardly surprising that the team of Dias and Salamat has a third high-profile paper being retracted,” says Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames and at Ames National Laboratory. Many physicists had seen the Nature retraction as inevitable after the other two — and especially since The Wall Street Journal and Science reported in September that 8 of the 11 authors of the paper — including Salamat — had requested it in a letter to the journal.

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Oh well, it was a nice few moments of excitement while it lasted. (This isn’t the South Korean team, but a separate group; the South Korean claim simply fizzled when nobody could reproduce it. They never submitted a formal paper.)(
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified