Claiming to be carbon-neutral is easy – but proving it is a lot harder, as a new report challenges Apple to do. CC-licensed photo by Mountain/\Ash on Flickr.

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

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

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

How Google alters search queries to get at your wallet [note: subsequently retracted] • WIRED

Megan Gray:

»

I was attending the [DOJ-Google antitrust] trial out of long-standing professional interest. I had previously battled Google’s legal team while at the Federal Trade Commission, and I advocated around the world for search engine competition as an executive for DuckDuckGo. I’m all too familiar with Google’s secret games and word play. With the trial practically in my backyard, I couldn’t stay away from the drama.

This onscreen Google slide had to do with a “semantic matching” overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results.

…Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.

«

Wired has now taken this article down. Google says the piece has “serious inaccuracies“. Google also shared the slide referred to. It certainly makes the case even stronger for the trial being much, much more open..
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New report casts doubt on Apple’s first ‘carbon neutral’ products • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

Apple needs to disclose more information about its suppliers to back up claims about its first carbon-neutral products, says a new report by an environmental organisation that had previously given the company high marks.

Apple has backtracked when it comes to transparency about its supply chain emissions, the new report says. That makes it difficult to see how Apple is able to market its products as carbon neutral, meaning the company didn’t produce more carbon dioxide emissions than it could capture or offset while making the device.

“We believe there is a need for full disclosure and explanation of how Apple achieves carbon neutrality of its products, given the increase in carbon emissions from some of its suppliers,” the report says. The report was published by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), a nonprofit environmental research organization based in Beijing that was founded by former investigative journalist Ma Jun.

Apple released its latest Apple Watch models last month and said that “select” combinations of cases and bands make them carbon neutral. To reach carbon neutrality, Apple says it cut down emissions from materials, electricity, and transportation — with the help of suppliers who use clean energy. Any remaining pollution was then offset through nature-based projects like restoring forests so that they could capture more CO2.

…Apple stopped requiring that its suppliers publicly disclose data on their greenhouse gas emissions this year, according to the report. And based on data IPE was able to gather in the past, the math isn’t quite adding up…

«

Tricky thing, claiming carbon neutrality.
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OVO to offer heat pumps at lower cost than gas boilers • BusinessGreen News

Michael Holder:

»

OVO Energy is offering to halve running costs for heat pumps in order to make them cheaper than operating a conventional gas boiler, as fierce competition among energy suppliers to offer consumers more affordable low carbon heating options continues to intensify.

The energy supplier today announced its new Heat Pump Plus, promising to provide the cheapest rate for low carbon heating on the market and making it £500 a year cheaper to heat the average home compared to a gas boiler, while also slashing domestic greenhouse gas emissions.

By offering a separate rate of 15p per kilowatt hour for electricity specifically used to power heat pumps, alongside the standard rate for the rest of a home’s electricity usage, OVO said it hoped the new tariff would encourage more households to swap out their gas boiler for an electric-powered alternative.

Moreover, OVO said it was partnering with installer Heat Geek to deliver heat pump installations at an upfront cost of just £500 for one of the appliances when including the government’s £7,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last month announced the grant available through the Boiler Upgrade Scheme would increase by 50% to £7,500.

…The government has set a goal for 600,000 heat pumps to be installed in the UK each year by 2028, but experts have repeatedly warned that without urgent action, more funding and ambitious policy support, the target is likely to be missed.

«

Don’t know how they would know which electricity is used specifically for the heat pumps, unless they run at exactly the same rate all the time so that there’s a base load.
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How Michael Lewis got snowed by Sam Bankman-Fried • Los Angeles Times

Michael Hiltzik is a business columnist at the LA Times:

»

Journalism schools will be able to use “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” Michael Lewis’ new book about the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and the fall of its boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, as a textbook on the imperative need to approach a subject with a healthy helping of skepticism.

To make a long story short, in this book Lewis doesn’t exercise any.

The result is what amounts to a defense brief for Bankman-Fried for his fraud trial in New York federal court, which [opened] Tuesday — coinciding, as it happens, with the publication date of Lewis’ book.

Fortunately, readers interested in the story of the cryptocurrency scam and Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall can turn to a much more convincing (and more entertaining) book. That’s “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall,” by Zeke Faux, a financial investigative reporter for Bloomberg.

Faux demonstrates his incisive grasp of the story with the very first words of his prologue: “‘I’m not going to lie,’ Sam Bankman-Fried told me,” he writes. “That was a lie.”

Lewis, by contrast, opens his book with an anecdote about a long hike he took with Bankman-Fried in the hills above Berkeley in which he listened to his subject spin wild yarns about all the money he was making in crypto, “all of which, I should say here, turned out to be true.”

Well, no. Not really.

«

It is so interesting how Lewis couldn’t see that crypto was an utter scam. There’s also a fascinating long read in The Guardian, in which Samanth Subramanian takes plenty of time to talk to Lewis, and does challenge him about SBF:

»

Lewis’s habit of falling in love with his characters is so ingrained that he really doesn’t judge them. In Going Infinite, that can make him seem credulous – and that’s even before we know if Bankman-Fried has committed any crimes.

Lewis was keen to investigate this response of mine. He thought Bankman-Fried hadn’t lied to him at all – or at least, that he’d only lied by omission, not commission.

«

But do read it all.

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Meta plans to charge $14 a month for ad-free Instagram or Facebook • WSJ

Sam Schechner:

»

Would people pay nearly $14 a month to use Instagram on their phones without ads? How about nearly $17 a month for Instagram plus Facebook—but on desktop?

That is what Meta Platforms wants to charge Europeans for monthly subscriptions if they don’t agree to let the company use their digital activity to target ads, according to a proposal the social-media giant has made in recent weeks to regulators.

The proposal is a gambit by Meta to navigate European Union rules that threaten to restrict its ability to show users personalized ads without first seeking user consent—jeopardizing its main source of revenue.

Meta officials detailed the plan in meetings in September with its privacy regulators in Ireland and digital-competition regulators in Brussels. The plan has been shared with other EU privacy regulators for their input, too.

Meta has told regulators it hopes to roll out the plan—which it calls SNA, or subscription no ads—in coming months for European users. It would give users the choice between continuing to access Instagram and Facebook free with personalized ads, or paying for versions of the services without any ads, people familiar with the proposal said.

«

Hard nope for both proposals from me. I’m pretty confident I don’t consume $14 per month worth of ads on Instagram. But I don’t see that that obligates me to agree to be tracked. Plus, would people find VPNs for a little less and appear to be in the US?
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Social media traffic to top news sites craters • Axios

Sara Fischer:

»

Traffic referrals to the top global news sites from Meta’s Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, has collapsed over the past year, according to data from Similarweb.

Website business models that depended on clicks from social media are now broken.

Regulatory pressure and free speech concerns have pushed tech giants to abandon efforts to elevate quality information, leaving the public more susceptible to misinformation ahead of the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, news companies are scrambling to find business solutions while simultaneously fighting to protect their work in the AI era.

While the news industry has known this day would come, many are still unprepared. A slower ad market and less reliable traffic contributed to a record number of media job cuts this year. Efforts to reach voters with trusted information are becoming more difficult as tech platforms lean into viral trends, instead of quality news.

«

According to the data, Facebook referrals have fallen from nearly 120m per month in August 2020 to 21.4m in August 2023; for Twitter, from a peak of nearly 80m in January 2021 to 22.6m in August 2023. Collectively, now less than referrals from either back in August 2020. (Of course, that was the midst of an election.)
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How common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children • The Economist

Natasha Loder:

»

It was a sunny day in September 2007 when Garrett Pohlman, then seven years old, came home from school. Crying, he warned his mother that radiation was coming out of the house’s electrical sockets. If they went outside, he said, birds would peck them to death. These pronouncements were accompanied by odd facial movements. The boy would stick his tongue out and jerk his arms and legs. The day before, Garrett had been a normal boy. Both the paranoia and the tics had come out of the blue, but they proved to be the start of a horrifying mental decline.

In the end, Garrett was lucky. A hospital scan three months later revealed a bacterial sinus infection. A course of antibiotics cured the infection and brought about a striking improvement in his psychiatric symptoms. Garrett had been suffering from pandas, which stands for Paediatric Autoimmune-Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus.

Many other children are not so fortunate; some have suffered long-term damage. In plain English, Garrett’s unsettling behaviour was the result of an immune system gone haywire following an infection with group A Streptococcus, a common bacterium. (A similar illness, triggered by other infections, goes by the acronym pans, for Paediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome.)

«

The role of bacteria and viruses in psychiatric illness is largely unknown, but we’re starting to understand them as having key roles in illnesses that had previously been thought idiopathic. Loder writes about PANDAS at greater length on her Substack.
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Book review: ‘Extremely Online,’ by Taylor Lorenz • The New York Times

Clay Shirky:

»

[The six-second video app] Vine’s rapid success and sudden implosion encapsulate most of the book’s themes: the creators who understand a new platform better than its inventors do; the competing interests of talent, agents, advertisers, audience and owners; the particular hostility directed at successful women online. Vine closed in 2017, in part because of poor relations with its star creators; as Lorenz dryly notes, “The company’s only problem was itself.” Vine’s demise fueled rather than dampened the fervor for short-term video and autobiographical content, sending experienced creators to other platforms, especially TikTok.

Lorenz has a beat reporter’s eye for detail, which can occasionally be overwhelming. Explaining the rise of online gossip sites and “Dramageddon,” a falling-out among a friend group of YouTube-famous makeup artists, she introduces six gossip sites and 13 creators in four pages. (To be fair, “Dramageddon” was also exhausting to witness firsthand.)

But “Extremely Online” aims to tell a sociological story, not a psychological one, and in its breadth it demonstrates a new cultural logic emerging out of 21st-century media chaos.

«

As much as anything, it’s nice to see Clay Shirky writing again. He used to be one of the most influential voices on the web, about 15 years ago; then got a promotion at NYU and effectively vanished.
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Official stop and search figures published with ‘dodgy’ warning • BBC News

Daniel Wainwright is a data journalist at BBC Verify:

»

The Home Office has released one of its most politically sensitive datasets with a note attached describing some of the figures as “dodgy”.

The note, spotted by BBC Verify, was on a Home Office spreadsheet about the number of people arrested after being stopped and searched by police. It said: “Reason for arrest data is dodgy so maybe we shouldn’t publish it.” The note was removed after we contacted the Home Office.

The data was about the number of people stopped and searched in England and Wales under Section 60. This means that police do not need to have reasonable suspicion to carry out a search. The orders give the police powers to stop people within a designated area, such as the Notting Hill Carnival.

The arrests were broken down into those “for offensive weapons” or those “for other reasons”. Attached to the offensive weapons column was the note from an “author” asking whether the figures should be published.

…Dr Simon Harding, director of the National Centre for Gang Research, says different forces have different ways and procedures for recording their data. “There is data coming in from 43 different constabularies and there are varying levels of quality,” he said. “These things ought to be ironed out before they get to the Home Office.”

We showed the note to Habib Kadiri, director of StopWatch, a campaign group which focuses on police stop and search and the “overpolicing of marginalised communities”. He said: “The comment in question is indicative of a long history of questionable recording practices by police forces.”

«

Now you start to understand why the government is so keep to publish data as PDFs.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Coal use in Britain peaked in 1956. Since then it’s fallen to a level not seen since 1757. CC-licensed photo by rauter25 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Anil Kapoor wins battle against AI, supports Hollywood strikes • Variety

Naman Ramachandran:

»

Top Indian actor Anil Kapoor has won a landmark judgement against artificial intelligence (AI).

The “Slumdog Millionaire” star had filed a suit in the Delhi High Court through his lawyer Ameet Naik for protection of his personality rights including his name, image, likeness, voice and other attributes of his personality against any misuse including on digital media. The suit provided various instances of misuse of his attributes. The court, after a detailed hearing, granted an order on Wednesday acknowledging his personality rights and restraining all offenders from misusing his personality attributes without his permission in any manner.

“I’m very happy with this court order, which has come in my favor, and I think it’s very progressive and great for not only me but for other actors also,” Kapoor told Variety. “Because of the way technology and the AI technology, which is which is evolving every day [and] which can completely take advantage of and be misused commercially, as well as where my image, voice, morphing, GIFs and deep fakes are concerned, I can straight away, if that happens, send a court order and injunction and they have to pull it down.”

«

Simples! Well, good luck with that, Mr Kapoor. I’m sure conquering the internet with legal letters will be a pushover now. In fact, Tom Hanks would like a word…
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Tom Hanks warns fans about ‘AI version of me’ promoting dental plan • Variety

Michaela Zee:

»

Tom Hanks is not informing fans to get their teeth cleaned.

The Oscar-winning actor shared a computer-generated image of himself on Instagram Saturday, warning his followers about a promotional video for a dental plan circulating online.

“BEWARE!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it,” Hanks wrote over the photo of his AI counterpart.

Hanks has previously discussed the rise of artificial intelligence and deepfake technology in the creative industries, saying on an episode of “The Adam Buxton Podcast” that it’s now possible for him to continue acting after his death.

“Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deep fake technology. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on,” Hanks said. “Outside the understanding of AI and deepfake, there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone. And it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality. That’s certainly an artistic challenge but it’s also a legal one.”

«

We imagine that AI is going to bring us a brand new frontier, marvellous new insights, an inspired depth of knowledge. Instead it’s used for hokey porn and to push crypto and dental plans.
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Why Kagi is the best Google alternative I’ve tried yet • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

I’ve become a total convert to the Kagi search engine. I wrote a big story about Neeva and search a few months ago, and a bunch of people were like, “Try Kagi! It’s awesome!” It is, in fact, awesome. Here’s what I like about it:

• It’s customisable. Kagi looks a lot like Google and generally feels very similar to use. But unlike Google, Kagi lets you block sites you don’t like and promote sites you do like. You can also create “lenses” to only search certain sites or domains — Kagi has a bunch built in, too, like a “Small Web” lens that favors blogs, forums, and other parts of the web that tend to get blotted out by the giants
• No ads. The catch with Kagi is you have to pay for it. You get a few searches a month for free, but $10 buys you unlimited access. That’s a lot of money for a search engine! But the pages are so much cleaner and less confusing that I was surprised how quickly I paid up
• It’s great for videos and podcasts. Podcast search is, like, impossible. But I’ve had surprisingly good luck Kagi-ing topics I’m interested in and finding related podcast episodes, and the engine does a similarly good job of scouring YouTube for interesting stuff
• Its AI is handy but not in the way. For a lot of queries, Kagi puts a little “Quick Answer” button at the top — click it, and you get a brief AI-generated answer, with cited sources you can click on. That’s exactly the amount of AI I’m looking for in most of my searches
• The mobile browser is great. Kagi’s mobile app is a browser called Orion, and it’s as no-frills a mobile browser as you’ll find. But that’s cool by me! It’s fast and easy to use. You can also supposedly download Kagi as a Safari extension on iOS, but I haven’t managed to make that work. (On Android, you can just switch to Kagi as your default search engine because Android is much better at this.)
• It seems… good? I’ve tried basically all the search engines, and I usually end up back on Google because Google has better results. (Or at least the results I’m expecting and looking for.) With Kagi, I’ve found myself going back to Google less than usual. I don’t know if that’ll hold up forever, but I’m impressed so far.

«

I wondered why I hadn’t used Kagi, then came to the bit about needing to pay. Even if you don’t sign up, you can see some example results (here’s “best headphones” (and here’s the comparison for DuckDuckGo).
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Passport database ‘will be used to catch shoplifters and burglars’ • The Times

Matt Dathan:

»

Britain’s passport database of 45 million people will be used to help catch shoplifters, burglars, car and bike thieves under plans to tackle crime.

Video of suspected crime from CCTV, doorbell and dashcam technology would be compared against facial images from a range of government databases to find a match under the plans.

The immigration and asylum biometrics system would also be available in order to search for foreign nationals who are not on the passports database.

Chris Philp, the crime and policing minister, said he is planning to integrate data from the police national database (PND), HM Passport Office and other national databases in order to enable police to find a match with the “click of one button”. He said he is aiming to have the amalgamated system up and running within two years and predicted it would be a gamechanger for catching thieves. He also called on members of the public to make citizen’s arrests in supermarkets if they see shoplifters.

Currently, police forces only run facial recognition software through the PND but that only holds information on people who have been arrested.

While they currently have access to the passport database, police forces are not using it to find criminals as it sits on a completely separate IT system.

Philp said in the short term he wants police forces to start running footage of crime scenes through the separate passport system while the new combined database is created.

«

Easy to predict that this is going to be challenged in the courts by every NGO imaginable.
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The art of aphantasia: how ‘mind blind’ artists create without being able to visualise • The Conversation

Matthew MacKisack:

»

Glen Keane, the Oscar-winning artist behind such Disney classics as The Little Mermaid (1989), was once described by Ed Catmull the former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Studios as “one of the best animators in the history of hand-drawn animation”. But when he sat down to design Ariel, or indeed the beast from Beauty and the Beast (1991), Keane’s mind was a blank. He had no preconception of what he would draw.

This is because he has aphantasia, a recently-identified variation of human experience affecting 2-5% of the population, in which a person is unable to generate mental imagery. Perhaps surprisingly, Keane is not alone in being a visual artist who cannot visualise.

When aphantasia was named and publicised, a number of creative practitioners – artists, designers and architects – contacted the researchers to say that they too had no “mind’s eye”. Intrigued by the seemingly counter-intuitive notion, we gathered a group of these people together and curated an exhibition of their work.

How is it, then, that a person like Keane can draw a picture of Ariel without a mental picture to guide him?

«

I wasn’t aware of aphantasia (how wonderful that a Disney illustrator should have it, given that Disney’s first film was called Fantasia), but it is fascinating to consider. One person told me they can’t read fiction because they can’t imagine the voices of the characters; nor can they imagine a conversation they’d have between themselves and someone else. The link to the article about aphantasia really is worth your time.
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June 2021: The mRNA vaccine revolution is just beginning • WIRED UK

Stephen Buranyi in June 2021:

»

The scope of mRNA vaccines always went beyond any one disease. Like moving from a vacuum tube to a microchip, the technology promises to perform the same task as traditional vaccines, but exponentially faster, and for a fraction of the cost. “You can have an idea in the morning, and a vaccine prototype by evening. The speed is amazing,” says Daniel Anderson, an mRNA therapy researcher at MIT. Before the pandemic, charities including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) hoped to turn mRNA on deadly diseases that the pharmaceutical industry has largely ignored, such as dengue or Lassa fever, while industry saw a chance to speed up the quest for long-held scientific dreams: an improved flu shot, or the first effective HIV vaccine.

Amesh Adalja, an expert on emerging diseases at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in Maryland, says mRNA could “make all these applications we were hoping for, pushing for, become part of everyday life.”

“When they write the history of vaccines, this will probably be a turning point,” he adds.

While the world remains focused on the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, the race for the next generation of mRNA vaccines – targeted at a variety of other diseases – is already exploding. Moderna and BioNTech each have nine candidates in development or early clinical trials.

There are at least six mRNA vaccines against flu in the pipeline, and a similar number against HIV. Nipah, Zika, herpes, dengue, hepatitis and malaria have all been announced. The field sometimes resembles the early stage of a gold rush, as pharma giants snap up promising researchers for huge contracts – Sanofi recently paid $425m (£307m) to partner with a small American mRNA biotech called Translate Bio, while GSK paid $294m (£212m) to work with Germany’s CureVac.

«

On Monday the Nobel for Physiology and Medicine went to the people who figured out how to tweak mRNA to make vaccines. There are now two candidate vaccines for malaria. The speed with which this has gone from theory to practice to product is about 30 years. Still impressive.
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Warning: BMW wireless charging may break iPhone 15’s Apple Pay chip • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

If you have an iPhone 15 and drive a BMW, it might be best to avoid charging the device with the vehicle’s wireless charging pad for now.

Over the past week, some BMW owners have complained that their iPhone 15’s NFC chip no longer works after charging the device with their vehicle’s wireless charging pad, according to comments shared on the MacRumors Forums and X, formerly known as Twitter. Affected customers say the iPhone goes into a data recovery mode with a white screen, and the NFC chip is no longer functional after the device reboots.

In an iPhone, the NFC chip powers features like Apple Pay and digital car keys. Affected users receive a “Could Not Set Up Apple Pay” error message in the Wallet app, and there does not appear to be a way to fix the problem. Some customers say Apple replaced their iPhone after confirming the NFC chip failed, but the replacement iPhone is then vulnerable to the same issue, so there is currently no permanent solution.

«

Yikes. And it only seems to be the new iPhones. Which is odd. Side note: I got a new iPhone 15 Pro, and it wouldn’t charge or (I thought) send/receive data via the USB-C port. Took it to the Apple Store, where it did plug in to a laptop and take a firmware update. Voila: port works for charging and data. Not sure what the solution for BMWs is, though.
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Rivian’s quest to build the ultimate electric truck burns through billions • WSJ

Sean McLain:

»

Rivian Automotive set out to build the ultimate electric vehicle for American consumers—a pickup truck with sports-car handling and a dizzying array of features. 

Engineers gave the truck a beefy underlying metal frame for higher crash-test ratings and one of the most complicated suspension systems on the market for a smoother ride on- and off-road. It can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in 3 seconds. Rivian added pop-out flashlights stored away in the doors and a portable Bluetooth speaker.

All that comes at a cost. Rivian vehicles sell for over $80,000 on average. Yet they’re so expensive to build that in the second quarter the company lost $33,000 on every one it sold. That’s roughly the starting price of a base model Ford F-150.

When Rivian launched onto the electric-vehicle scene, industry watchers expected it to beat rivals to market and become the “Tesla of trucks.” Investors piled into its splashy market debut in 2021, when it raised nearly $12 billion in cash and became the U.S.’s largest IPO in years. For a short while, Rivian was worth more than Ford Motor and General Motors.

In two years, Rivian has blown through half of its $18 billion cash pile, in part because it struggled to master the nuts and bolts of manufacturing. While production is now growing and losses have narrowed, Rivian still loses money on its vehicle sales. In an industry known for narrow margins and tough competition, Rivian pays too much for parts and produces too few vehicles to cover its costs. 

«

So you’re suggesting that Tesla’s ability to make a profit is actually impressive? Also, Rivian is aiming to produce about 52,000 vehicles annually. Tesla was doing more than that back in 2016.
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‘Big Short’ author Michael Lewis says Sam Bankman-Fried came to him for advice on ideas — like buying Twitter with Elon Musk • Business Insider via Yahoo News

Kai Xiang Teo:

»

Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of crypto exchange FTX, used “The Big Short” author Michael Lewis  as a sounding board for ideas — including one about acquiring Twitter.

That’s according to Lewis, who was speaking to CBS’ “60 Minutes” about his upcoming book on cryptocurrency exchange cofounder, “Going Infinite.”

Lewis told CBS that Bankman-Fried came to him for advice on a variety of ideas. When asked for details, Lewis said, “For just, like, decisions he was making. Should I join Elon Musk in buying Twitter? You know? Should we do this? Should we do that?”

“Mostly, my answers were no, no, and no. And he would look at me and say, ‘You’re a boring grownup.'” Lewis added.

For context, Bankman-Fried’s interest in acquiring Twitter with Musk appears to have gone past the ideation stage. Text exchanges from March last year revealed that philosopher Will MacAskill — an advisor to Bankman-Fried — relayed his interest to Elon Musk and tried to set up a meeting between the two. The text messages were part of the discovery process in Musk’s court battle with Twitter.

In April last year, Musk’s former partner Grimes texted Musk that Bankman-Fried would be willing to contribute up to $5bn to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

«

Only one of Lewis and SBF is facing jail time, of course. I’m a little puzzled that Lewis, who for decades has looked razor-sharp in spotting the bad guys and scammers, seems to have been taken in by SBF.

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Analysis: UK emissions fall 3.4% in 2022 as coal use drops to lowest level since 1757 • Carbon Brief

Simon Evans:

»

The UK’s coal demand fell by another 15% in 2022 to just 6.2m tonnes. This is the lowest level since 1757, according to Carbon Brief analysis of historical data.

That year in the UK, George II was king, William Cavendish was prime minister and the industrial revolution had not yet begun. A year earlier, Wolgang Amadeus Mozart had been born in Austria.

In the years that followed, UK coal use climbed rapidly as industrialisation took off. Annual demand for the fuel rocketed to 60Mt by 1850 and peaked at 221Mt in 1956.

This is shown in the chart [in the article], which combines data covering 1853 onwards from the UK government with estimates for earlier years published by historian Paul Warde.

(The UK’s historical coal use is the main reason it remains the eighth-largest contributor to current warming. Its contribution is particularly notable given its modest population.)

…Last year, there had been fears of a coal “comeback” or a “return to coal” in the face of the global energy crisis. In the event, use of the fuel to generate electricity fell by 15% in 2022.

Electricity system operator National Grid had paid an estimated £386m to keep old coal plants open and stocked with coal, in case electricity supplies were tight. But the plants never ran.

«

The graph shows use peaking in 1956, at 221m tonnes. Lots of fascinating data in the article.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists have discovered bacteria that will eat plastic – but how will we control them? CC-licensed photo by Ivan Radic on Flickr.

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

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

Did you miss the Social Warming Substack post last Friday? It’s about Twitter v Threads, and how one will catch the other.

Watch Linda Yaccarino’s wild interview at the Code Conference • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

»

On Wednesday evening, X CEO Linda Yaccarino appeared onstage at the Code Conference with frustration and protest. “I think many people in this room were not fully prepared for me to still come out on the stage,” she told interviewer Julia Boorstin, senior media and tech correspondent at CNBC.

Yaccarino sounded rattled. She’d found out earlier in the day that Kara Swisher, a Code Conference co-founder, had booked a surprise guest to appear an hour before her: Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety. He has been an outspoken critic of the direction Elon Musk has taken the site.

In his interview with Swisher, Roth recounted how Musk put him personally in danger. Musk suggested on Twitter that Roth had advocated for sexualizing children — a completely unfounded claim — which led to death threats and his address being posted online. “I had to sell my house. I had to move,” Roth said. He encouraged Yaccarino to think about how Musk could turn on her, too, and said the site was bleeding users and advertisers.

These criticisms are nothing new, but Yaccarino was visibly bothered by having to appear shortly after a well-known critic of her company. “I’d be happy to respond,” Yaccarino said. “I think I’ve been given about 45 minutes [of notice].” The conference’s 300-some-seat ballroom was packed for her appearance; I caught Swisher reclining on a couch in the back before things kicked off, waiting to see the results of her surprise play out.

Throughout the interview, Yaccarino repeated that she’s only been on the job at X for 12 weeks, as if to say there’s only so much she could have done by now. But in that time, she’s managed to do one thing consistently: dismiss concerns about X, whether it’s the platform’s disinvestment in moderation or Musk’s chaotic leadership.

Her dismissive stance was very much on display Wednesday night.

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And how. I wasn’t impressed by the interviewing (In Britain, we’ve got a different view of what “tough questions” involves, and keeping an interviewee on track), but Yaccarino comes across as befuddled, incoherent, out of touch. She’ll fit in perfectly. Related: How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson, pointing out how credulous Isaacson is.
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The AI fight in Hollywood is probably coming to other industries • Associated Press

Jake Coyle:

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In the coming weeks, WGA [Writers Guild of America, who write screenplays] members will vote on whether to ratify a tentative agreement, which requires studios and production companies to disclose to writers if any material given to them has been generated by AI partially or in full. AI cannot be a credited writer. AI cannot write or rewrite “literary material.” AI-generated writing cannot be source material.

“AI-generated material can’t be used to undermine a writer’s credit or separated rights,” the proposed contract reads.

Many experts see the screenwriters’ deal as a forerunner for labour battles to come. “I hope it will be a model for a lot of other content-creation industries,” said Tom Davenport, a professor of information technology at Babson College and author of “ All-in on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence.” “It pretty much ensures that if you’re going to use AI, it’s going to be humans working alongside AI. That, to me, has always been the best way to use any form of AI.”

The tentative agreement between the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the studios, doesn’t prohibit all uses of artificial intelligence. Both sides have acknowledged it can be a worthwhile tool in many aspects of filmmaking, including script writing.

The deal states that writers can use AI if the company consents. But a company cannot require a writer to use AI software.

Language over AI became a sticking point in the writers’ negotiations, which dragged on in part due to the challenges of bargaining on such a fast-evolving technology.

When the writers strike began May 2, it was just five months after OpenAI released ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that can write essays, have sophisticated conversations and craft stories from a handful of prompts. Studios said it was it too early to tackle AI in these negotiations and preferred to wait until 2026.

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So, contrary to some earlier reports, the WGA hasn’t completely fought off AI; it just won’t have to share a credit with it.
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Thousands of Derby City Council callers struggling to get help from new AI helpers • Derbyshire Live

Nigel Slater:

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Thousands of callers to Derby City Council have been struggling to get the help they need when being dealt with by the council’s new AI (Artificial Intelligence) digital helpers, according to new figures. And a leading councillor has said a “ring back” option to help solve the problem cannot be put on the cards because it would be too expensive for the local authority to pay for.

New figures have been published showing that within a single week – starting from Monday, September 11 – more than 3,700 callers to the council could not get the answer they required by AI assistants Darcie and Ali or had to be transferred to a human for support. More than 1,500 of these calls ended up as abandoned.

The figures come just months after the council implemented new AI-led phone system technology. Since April, visitors to Derby City Council’s website and those who call the council’s main phone line can seek help from AI “helpers”. Darcie helps with council services and Ali is available to help Derby Homes customers/tenants with housing enquiries.

A human being is on standby if the AI helpers cannot assist callers directly. This form of AI was aimed to improve customer services and make them accessible 24/7, while at the same time delivering cash savings for the authority.

…In July, council bosses said its new AI digital assistants Darcie and Ali had been a huge success. A presentation revealed the use of AI technology since April had already met a savings target of £200,000 within the council’s budget plan. At the time the council said the AI helpers answered more than 100,000 questions from the public via its main phone line.

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So maybe not really that much of a saving or improvement? It’s hard to tell.

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The art of Wikiracing • Slate

Stephen Harrison:

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The final round required navigating from the Wikipedia article on “Stroopwafel” to the page about “Jimmy Wales,” Wikipedia’s co-founder—a tough leap for even the most seasoned Wikiracers. As the challenge appeared on their screens, the contestants leaned into their laptops and tried to quickly strategize their path across the internet encyclopedia. Whoever made it to “Jimmy Wales” from “Stroopwafel” with the fewest clicks would be crowned champion.

Wikiracing has long been viewed as a quirky, low-stakes pastime for friendly nerds—a world away from the high-pressure environment of competitive Scrabble or speedcubing. But while those other “geek sports” have already established their own versions of a Super Bowl, Wikiracing has traditionally remained confined to college dorm rooms and high school computer labs.

Not anymore. Wikiracing was a featured event at this year’s Wikimania, the global conference for dedicated Wikipedia editors, which took place this past August in Singapore. “People took Wikimania 2023’s Wikiracing very seriously, and the level of competition was incredibly high,” said Zack McCune, director of brand at the Wikimedia Foundation. “We had F1 Grand Prix energy in the room.”

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Take any totally innocent activity such as clicking links: people will find a way to turn it into a competition, ideally for money.
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End of the line for barcodes as new square QR code shapes up in shops • The Sunday Times

Louise Eccles:

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The barcode is so integral to daily life that it is scanned ten billion times a day, more times than Google’s search engine is used.

But the familiar black lines are likely to be replaced by the QR code at main supermarkets within five years, according to GS1, the not-for-profit regulator behind most of the world’s barcodes.

A dual-purpose QR code is being developed that can be scanned at the checkout, but also by shoppers on their smartphones, if they want to learn more about the ingredients, potential allergens, expiry date, product recalls, and how to recycle it.

Sarah Atkins, membership director at GS1, said: “This is as significant — if not more significant — than when we first introduced the barcode. The potential for the transformation in the way we shop is massive.”

With increasing labelling demands on retailers, such as making clear what allergens a product contains, shoppers now need 20-20 vision to decipher the tiny but crucial writing on the backs of packets.

In the future, shoppers will be able to scan a jar of sauce and be taken to a screen with a series of icons that can tell them detailed information about every ingredient, including the farm the meat is from, nutritional information and the carbon footprint.

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A UPC-A barcode is 12 digits (including a checkdigit), so 100 billion possible values. A QR code can hold 3kb of data: 7,089 numbers or 4,269 alphanumeric characters.

Related: Apple uses microscopic QR codes on its screens to track manufacturing. Also: five common QR code scams.
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Apple says software bug and certain apps causing iPhone overheating • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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Apple has identified the causes of an overheating problem with its latest iPhone series, including a software bug and using certain apps.

The tech company said it would issue an update to fix the bug in its iOS 17 software and was working with developers whose apps had overloaded its handsets. Apple took action after users of its iPhone Pro and iPhone Pro Max products had complained that they had become too hot during use, reaching temperatures of more than 43C (110F) in some cases.

“We have identified a few conditions which can cause iPhone to run warmer than expected,” said Apple in a statement.

The company said on Saturday that it was working on an update to the iOS17 system that powers the iPhone 15 lineup to prevent the devices from becoming uncomfortably hot and was working with apps that were running in ways “causing them to overload the system”.

Apple added that there might also be issues during initial use of the phone. “The device may feel warmer during the first few days after setting up or restoring the device because of increased background activity,” the company said.

Instagram, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, modified its app last week to prevent it from heating up the device on the latest iPhone operating system.

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So this is Heatgate. Apparently with the new phones there’s also Lipgate (a barely discernible height difference between the screen and case) and Casegate (people don’t like the “Fine Woven” synthetic cases). Fairly routine year for iPhone introductions.
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‘We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world • The Guardian

Stephen Buranyi:

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Before the publication of [professor Kohei] Oda’s paper in 2016, no one knew that bacteria capable of digesting plastic existed. Now, we have one solidly documented case. Given that we have discovered only a tiny fraction of microbial life, a far better candidate might be out there. In engineering terms, we may currently be trying to squeeze elite racing performance out of a Toyota Yaris engine, when somewhere, yet to be discovered, there is the bacterial equivalent of a Ferrari. “This is something we constantly struggle with,” says Beckham. “Do we go back to the well to search and see if nature has the solution? Or do we take the small footholds we have to the lab and work on them now?”

This question has led to a boom in what is known as bioprospecting. Like panning for gold in a river, bioprospectors travel the world looking to discover interesting and potentially lucrative microbes. In 2019, a team at Gwangju National University in South Korea took a construction drilling rig to the municipal dump outside town, and drilled 15 metres under the trash trenches to reveal decades-old plastic garbage. In it, Prof Soo-Jin Yeom and her students found a variety of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that appeared to be able to survive using polyethylene bags as food. Yeom’s team is now studying which enzymes the bacterium might be using, and whether it is really able to metabolise the plastic.

In vast mangrove swamps on the coastlines of Vietnam and Thailand, Simon Cragg, a microbiologist from the University of Portsmouth, is hunting for other potential PET-eating microbes. “The plastic-degrading enzymes we’ve already seen are quite similar to natural enzymes that degrade the coatings of plant leaves,” he told me. “Mangroves have a similar waterproof coating in their roots, and the swamps, sadly, also contain a shocking amount of plastic tangled up in them.” His hope is that bacteria capable of degrading the mangrove roots will be able to make the jump to plastic.

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Though our concern is that it’ll go out of control. Tricky balance.
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Disney+ to begin cracking down on password sharing in Canada in November • Mobile Syrup

Bradly Shankar:

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Disney will begin cracking down on password sharing in Canada as of November 1st, 2023.

In an email sent to the service’s Canadian subscribers on Tuesday evening, the company outlined updates to its Subscriber Agreement.

While Disney begins the email by saying new terms have been put forth to coincide with the November 1st launch of its ad-supported membership, it also notes that it is now “implementing restrictions on account sharing.” While Disney’s previous terms also stated that users can’t share their accounts, it never enforced this.

…Interestingly, Disney opens this account sharing section by mentioning “unless otherwise permitted by your Service Tier.” Netflix, the first streamer to crack down on free password sharing, allows those subscribed to its higher tiers to pay an additional $7.99/month to add on ‘Extra Members,’ people outside of their household who can access your account. Therefore, it remains to be seen whether Disney intends to permit those subscribed to certain Disney+ memberships (“Service Tiers”) to do something similar.

It’s worth noting that Disney CEO Bob Iger had confirmed in August that the company would indeed crack down on password sharing, but he indicated this would likely take place next year.

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First they came for the Brazilian Netflix password sharers.. anyway, as before, totally predictable: at the margin, this will increase the number of subscribers. Everything is being tightened up.
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The age of AI is a time for antitrust • Fast Company

Luther Lowe:

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Allowing Google to hardwire its AI technology into its search engine is also a massive risk to the open web. When you search for a business, learn about a new topic, or shop for a product, Google plans to give you the answer it thinks you want—without clear or conspicuous attribution.

That has enormous implications. By remixing copied answers from various parts of the internet un-cited, Google is killing the original function of its search engine: to refer users to other websites. Anyone who puts their own content on the web should be alarmed by the “plagiarism engine” that Google wants to impose on us. And that’s putting aside the genuine concern that the answers are sometimes objectively wrong.

Publishers face a Hobson’s Choice when it comes to “opting out” of services like Bard: Until recently, in order to remove your data from Bard, you had to entirely remove yourself from the index that powers Google’s search engine. If a website opts out, does its historical data Bard has presumably already trained on get purged? Could opting out of Bard hurt a website’s ranking in Google? Google doesn’t say.

Google’s rollout of Bard is the latest chapter of a well-worn Big Tech playbook. Big companies use their incumbent power to kill competition in developing technologies, thereby depriving consumers of choice and undermining innovation in the economy. But that’s Big Tech’s business model. Amazon has a well-documented track record of selling knock-off versions of its best-selling products—undercutting the small businesses that sell on its platform. And Google has been accused of distorting its search results to favor its own “Shopping” service. The poor track record by the largest players to give themselves preferential treatment as a way to extend their dominance is not good news for AI startups hoping to offer fresh services that make us all less dependent on today’s tech giants.

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Lowe is not a totally impartial observer on this: he was, until Friday, working for Yelp, which has repeatedly accused Google of abusing its search monopoly by grabbing data from Yelp. But, that being said, you still have to find coherent arguments against his.
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The Raspberry Pi 5 is finally here • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Powering the brain of the Raspberry Pi 5 is a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor that runs at 2.4GHz, allowing for two to three times the performance boost when compared to the four-year-old Raspberry Pi 4. The device also comes with an 800MHz VideoCore VII graphics chip that the Raspberry Pi Foundation says offers a “substantial uplift” in graphics performance.

I got to try out the device for myself. While I didn’t have time to do much tinkering with it, I found that it boots up pretty quickly, while also loading webpages fast when compared to my older Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. It does get pretty hot, but luckily, Raspberry Pi sent over an active cooling component that I could mount directly on the board.

Additionally, the Raspberry Pi 5 features a component made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for the first time: the southbridge, also known as a part of the chipset that helps the device communicate with peripherals. With the RP1 southbridge, the Raspberry Pi Foundation says the microcomputer “delivers a step change in peripheral performance and functionality,” enabling faster transfer speeds to external UAS drives and other peripherals.

It also opens up two four-lane 1.5Gbps MIPI transceivers that let you connect up to two cameras or displays. There’s also a new single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface for the first time, offering support for “high-bandwidth peripherals.”

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Up to the fifth generation and I still can’t think of anything I’d want to do with one. Also: “powering the brain of the Raspberry Pi is a 64-bit…”? It’s either powering, or it’s the brain. Oh, and it gets hot, does it? Fancy.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Women runners are setting new records at longer distances, with the marathon the latest to go. What’s behind their newfound success? (It’s not drugs.) CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer on Flickr.

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

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

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

What will replace smartphones? Experts reveal the unsettling reality • Inverse

Marc Saltzman:

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The near future is even more impressive. Humane’s AI Pin, for example, is a small device you can attach to your shirt or jacket, and it works as a nonphysical smartphone by projecting calls, messages, and info from apps onto a surface (like your hand). As covered by Inverse, this “clothing-based wearable” houses a microphone for hearing your requests, speakers for relaying info (like a smart speaker), and cameras to scan surroundings (in one demo, a chocolate bar is held up to the device and the AI reads its contents and caloric information).

Powered by artificial intelligence, this screenless solution will also have location data and contextual awareness, so you can ask it to tell you the weather or give you directions to walk to the closest Dunkin’ Donuts.

That’s Humane’s grand vision to make everyone more present with reality again, according to the company. “For the human-technology relationship to actually evolve beyond screens, we need something radically different,” said Imran Chaudhri, Humane’s chairman and president, during a TED Talk introducing the “screenless, seamless, sensing” wearable device.

The AI Pin hasn’t launched yet, and nobody outside of the company has used it, so it’s impossible to say whether the wearable is a smartphone replacement or not. It is the most hyped phone alternative, though, simply because Humane’s ranks consist of so many ex-Apple veterans who designed iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and Macs.

Similarly, Alexa-powered glasses called Echo Frames can be activated with its wake word and serve as a personal assistant on the go — but they also require a nearby smartphone to do the heavy lifting, via a Bluetooth connection.

…“I don’t think it’ll be a one-size-fits-all scenario but likely a combination of ambient computing, where things around us and a combination of wearables and other devices around us, with or without screens, as well as putting something on our face,” says [Creative Strategies president, Carolina] Milanesi, with a laugh.

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I don’t think Humane will get any takeup. Ambient computing, sure (already here); smart glasses, surely. When is a different question.
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India’s weather influencers are faster than official channels • Rest of World

Raksha Kumar:

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One reason for the weather influencers’ success is their hyperlocal approach. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) publishes its weather predictions for entire districts, across a radius of hundreds of kilometres, while people are seeking “data that is zoomed in,” Kirthiga Murugesan, a crop-weather modelling enthusiast and a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, told Rest of World.

Umashankar Das is a scientist at the IMD’s branch in the eastern city of Bhubaneswar. He told Rest of World the state does not have the manpower or resources to do the kind of localized work that weather influencers do, contributing to their popularity among the public. “If IMD gives out data that contradicts the predictions of the local weather predictor, they tend to believe the local person,” Das said.

Murugesan is testing a weather model that collects data every four kilometers in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. She shares it with local farmers on a WhatsApp group daily and alerts them to changes in the weather patterns. “If a farmer puts fertilizer in his crop and it rains, it is a waste of his money,” said Murugesan, whose father is a sugarcane and rice farmer in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur district.

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“Weather influencers” (not people who influence the weather, but who other people think are worth listening to) are a thing now.
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Computer science is no longer the safe major • The Atlantic

Kelli María Korducki:

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computer-science degrees, and certainly not English, have long been sold to college students as among the safest paths toward 21st-century job security. Coding jobs are plentiful across industries, and the pay is good—even after the tech layoffs of the past year. The average starting salary for someone with a computer-science degree is significantly higher than that of a mid-career English graduate, according to the Federal Reserve; at Google, an entry-level software engineer reportedly makes $184,000, and that doesn’t include the free meals, massages, and other perks.

Perhaps nothing has defined higher education over the past two decades more than the rise of computer science and STEM. Since 2016, enrollment in undergraduate computer-science programs has increased nearly 49 percent. Meanwhile, humanities enrollments across the United States have withered at a clip—in some cases, shrinking entire departments to nonexistence.

But that was before the age of generative AI. ChatGPT and other chatbots can do more than compose full essays in an instant; they can also write lines of code in any number of programming languages. You can’t just type make me a video game into ChatGPT and get something that’s playable on the other end, but many programmers have now developed rudimentary smartphone apps coded by AI. In the ultimate irony, software engineers helped create AI, and now they are the American workers who think it will have the biggest impact on their livelihoods, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. So much for learning to code.

ChatGPT cannot yet write a better essay than a human author can, nor can it code better than a garden-variety developer, but something has changed even in the 10 months since its introduction.

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The question isn’t “will AI take over programming?” (it won’t) but “will average pay rates go down, and if so, how far?”
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Facebook let Indian pressure, and its profits, stop removal of violent content • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn and Gerry Shih:

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Nearly three years ago, Facebook’s propaganda hunters uncovered a vast social media influence operation that used hundreds of fake accounts to praise the Indian army’s crackdown in the restive border region of Kashmir and accuse Kashmiri journalists of separatism and sedition.

What they found next was explosive: the network was operated by the Indian army’s Chinar Corps, a storied unit garrisoned in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, the heart of Indian Kashmir and one of the most militarized regions in the world.

But when the US-based supervisor of Facebook’s Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) unit told colleagues in India that the unit wanted to delete the network’s pages, executives in the New Delhi office pushed back. They warned against antagonizing the government of a sovereign nation over actions in territory it controls. They said they needed to consult local lawyers. They worried they could be imprisoned for treason.

Those objections staved off action for a full year while the Indian army unit continued to spread disinformation that put Kashmiri journalists in danger. The deadlock was resolved only when top Facebook executives intervened and ordered the fake accounts deleted.

“It was open-and-shut” that the Chinar Corps had violated Facebook’s rules against using fictional personas to surreptitiously promote a narrative, said an employee who worked on the Kashmir project. “That was the moment that almost broke CIB and almost made a bunch of us quit.”

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On the plus side, the execs in the US did the right thing: some years of getting it wrong have finally sunk in. But clearly, people in-country are still scared of ramifications.
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Why Linda Yaccarino took on the wildest job in Silicon Valley • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

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Musk, according to multiple former and current staffers, runs X from his iPhone. To break through, do not send him attachments or documents or spreadsheets. Put everything inside the body of the email. Find a way to make a simple graph fit inside the text box. Take screenshots and embed them. This is what survivors at X have learnt.

For many of the self-selecting group who signed up to the mandatory pledge to adhere to his “hardcore” working culture, going the distance at X has essentially meant adjusting to the working practices of one man. For Yaccarino, the calculation will be a similar one. “The smart thing for her to do is let Elon be Elon and work with it,” says a person with knowledge of their working relationship. “That’s the trade off of getting the CEO role she’s always wanted.”

Early on, Musk brought in a team of executives and staffers from elsewhere in his business empire, including Tesla and The Boring Company, to help steady the ship. Formally, they were dubbed the “transition team”. Informally, they were known as the “goons”, according to ex-staffers. Holdovers found Musk has no tolerance for people who make nonsensical statements in order to sound smart. If you do not know something, admit it, they were told by longtime Musk employees. (Then, tell him you will get back to him on the matter in a reasonable number of hours.) They discovered he cares about working with people who are directly responsible for tasks. (Middle managers were among the first laid off when Musk took the reins.)

Unwavering loyalty is a given. Musk is intensely paranoid about the risk of “saboteurs”, disenchanted employees who might deliberately harm the company. Suril Kantaria, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who headed finance as part of the transition team, reporting directly to Musk, says the billionaire has a “unique ability” to “create extreme urgency” that gets his team focused. “Wartime at any company is hard, but under Elon it’s next-level intense.”

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It’s a long piece principally about Yaccarino, but with little bits like this. She seems surprised, Murphy says, that anyone would ask about what it’s like to work with Musk. Kinda sorta related: “NFL issues statement in response to placement of its ads on white nationalist Twitter/X pages“.
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X can’t get story straight on election disinformation team • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

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It’s only been a day since rumours began swirling that X, formerly Twitter, had disabled features allowing users to report election misinformation, and the confusion hasn’t been cleared up by duelling statements from platform owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino.

Responding to researcher claims that X had eliminated the ability to report posts for election misinformation – or disinformation of any kind, based on this reporter’s look at the current post reporting options on X – Musk said yesterday that he had axed the entire team.

“Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone,” Musk posted on X. His statement goes beyond claims from unnamed Twitter insiders who told The Information that half the election integrity team, including its chief, had been chopped.

X CEO Yaccarino had an entirely different take when speaking at Vox’s Code Conference yesterday. Asked why X had cut the team, Yaccarino said it hadn’t. “It’s an issue we take very seriously,” Yaccarino reportedly said.

“And contrary to the comments that were made, there is a robust and growing team at X that is wrapping their arms around election integrity,” she added. Note that Yaccarino didn’t indicate whether it’s the same team that exists now.

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It’s just bonkers. I wouldn’t trust Yaccarino to have any idea, though I suspect the final clause is right: the election integrity team has been axed, and the task dumped on someone else’s desk.
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‘When I saw her time, I pinched myself!’ – why women’s running records are being smashed • The Guardian

Kate Carter:

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Manufacturers have thrown money at their R&D departments to catch up. The latest salvo was fired on Sunday when [Tigist] Assefa set her [women’s marathon world] record while wearing a pair of Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1s, Adidas’s lightest shoe yet, a limited number of which were available through a special draw this week at £400. They last just one marathon.

Environmental implications aside, for the running purist, the existence of supershoes has devalued the pursuit of records. While technology may always advance, they say, such is this step-change that it renders new times entirely meaningless.

But shoes are not the only new tech. There is also wave light technology – small flashing lights placed into the side of athletics tracks that can be set to a specific pace. It means that athletes gunning for a track record know they are on target, lap after grinding lap. Some complain that human pacers are better, others that any pacing at all is “against the spirit of the sport”.

“Technology across so many sports gets better as time passes,” says a former top British marathon runner, Richard Nerurkar. “And that’s what happened in athletics. We just have to accept that, and celebrate the achievements of these athletes, who are now able to run even faster because of technology.”

But to put performances (and times) purely down to shoes is to do athletes a disservice. You can’t just put on these shoes and become a world-beater. Elite runners train hard, month after month, year after year to reach new heights. And in fact, height may be the relevant word when it comes to east African dominance of the sport: most Ethiopians and Kenyans live and train at high altitude, where the lack of oxygen in the air forces the body to increase its red blood cell count. It means that when they return to sea level, they usually find performance is improved for a short period. That’s why elite athletes from around the world go to high-altitude training camps when preparing for big races.

But why are so many women’s records being broken now?

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The answer seems to be: more participation, especially by younger runners, attracted by the growing prizemoney. But technology is certainly playing a part too.
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Solar and wind farms can easily power the UK by 2050, scientists say • The Times

Adam Vaughan:

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Wind and solar power could comfortably supply all the UK’s energy needs by the middle of the century, according to a University of Oxford team.

The researchers calculated that the two renewable technologies could power the nation even after making a conservative estimate that accounted for the amount of land and sea available, energy storage needs, economics and a high future demand for energy.

The analysis found that the UK has enough wind and solar resources to generate 2,896 terawatt hours a year by 2050, or almost ten times today’s electricity needs.

The vast majority, 73%, would come from offshore wind farms, followed by utility-scale solar in fields at 19%. The Solar Energy Industries Association defines a solar project as utility-scale if it generates greater than 1 megawatt of solar energy.

Onshore wind farms, which the government this month promised to unblock in England by changing planning barriers, would supply about 7%.

Solar on rooftops would provide less than 1%, because it was assumed the technology would be largely confined to the south of Britain and only for south-facing rooftops.

The paper by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment said wind and solar had been underestimated in Great Britain, and “predominant narratives that renewables are too expensive or impractical are wildly out of date”.

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Speaking of which…

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True cost of Net Zero for every household in Britain revealed amid PM’s green slowdown • The Sun

Ryan Sabey:

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Households face a net zero bill of £6,070 every year until 2050 despite Rishi Sunak’s green slowdown, it was claimed last night.

A study reveals the price tag could be more than triple official estimates and hit £4.5 trillion — 12 times the cost of Covid.

Report author Ewen Stewart says the public is “left in the dark” over the true cost which could plunge the UK into a financial meltdown.

The economist warned: “The UK’s approach is legally enforcing with little regard to the wider economic and societal impacts.”

The report by the Civitas think tank claims that the independent Climate Change Committee has vastly under- estimated costings.

It says the realistic cost of power generation, which includes doubling electricity output, will be £883bn plus £639bn in financing costs.

«

This is included as an example of how absolute nonsense can get written up. The report’s author made a stunning mistake: he took the cost of installing a single wind turbine (around £1.3m per megawatt) and then three lines later said that was the cost per HOUR of the electricity it generates. Given that a turbine will have a lifespan of about 20 years, and there are 8,760 hours in a year, you can imagine that this overestimates the cost of wind by A LOT.

Yet I can’t find any news articles rebutting the Civitas report. Perhaps nobody thought it worth bothering with. But it got mentions in The Sun (widely read) and The Times (read, arguably, by decision makers). If junk like this poisons the discourse, we have a problem. Even worse: Stewart was warned by Simon Evans, an energy and environment journalist, that he had it wrong before publication. Evans’s Twitter thread on the whole farrago is worth reading. (Available here on a single page without requiring Twitter login.)

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UK go-ahead for North Sea oil and gas field angers environmental groups • The Guardian

Mark Sweney and Matthew Taylor:

»

Simon Francis, the coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said: “Hidden in the small print of the deal is that this project can only go ahead thanks to a massive tax break the government is giving to international oil and gas giant Equinor.

“Households struggling with their energy bills will be shocked that the new energy secretary has chosen to hand a multibillion-pound tax break to this Norwegian firm … Figures show that more North Sea production will only give us an extra year of domestic gas, which will be charged to struggling households at global market prices.”

Claire Coutinho, the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, said the UK needed to “be pragmatic”, with oil and gas forecast to still be needed for a quarter of the country’s energy needs in 2050.

“We will not play politics with our energy security,” she posted on X. “The choice we face is this: do we shut down our own oil and gas leaving us reliant on foreign regimes? Do we lose 200,000 jobs across the UK? Do we import fuel with much higher carbon footprints instead? And lose billions in tax revenue?

“We are a world leader at reducing carbon emissions but as much as we will be ambitious, we must be pragmatic.”

«

Francis’s comment about the tax break refers to a story from April about the project:

»

Equinor, the state-owned Norwegian company behind Rosebank, could receive an estimated £3.75bn of tax breaks and tax-funded incentives towards the estimated £4.1bn cost of the development, owing to loopholes in the government’s windfall tax on North Sea fossil fuels, according to estimates from the campaign group Uplift. About 80% of the fossil fuels produced by Rosebank are likely to be exploited, and the development could turn into a net loss of £100m to the UK taxpayer. [Emphasis added – Overspill Ed.]

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Cuba, getting an iPhone or other Apple product repaired is quite the challenge. But there are those who rise to it. CC-licensed photo by Pedro Szekely on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Eh, it’ll wipe off. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon faces antitrust lawsuit from FTC, US states • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski, Will Oremus and Trisha Thadani:

»

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Amazon on Tuesday alleging that the company abused its powers to squeeze merchants and thwart rivals — resulting in higher prices and lower-quality goods for the tens of millions of American households who regularly shop at the company’s online superstore.

Merchants who rely on Amazon to stay in business are forced to pay a range of fees that trickle down to consumers, the FTC argues in the suit. “Pay-to-play advertisements” clog its store and “[degrade] the services” it provides customers, the regulators allege.

The long-awaited lawsuit, filed in Western District of Washington court, marks a historic political test of one of the world’s most influential companies — as well as the regulators who have promised for years to rein in its allegedly monopolistic practices.

FTC Chair Lina Khan’s meteoric rise to the helm of the antitrust enforcement agency has been closely tied to the e-commerce company. She gained national attention while still a law school student for a paper titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” arguing the e-commerce giant evades scrutiny because of the relatively narrow way the courts have interpreted antitrust law. Her paper has been at the center of a broader political movement that argues monopoly law should be more creatively and aggressively enforced, extending beyond the prices consumers pay.

«

There’s 172 pages of the lawsuit. (Enjoy!) Ben Thompson has an analysis (free to read) of the lawsuit, which to me boils down to “it’s going to be hard to prove antitrust via monopoly on this”.
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An old master? No, it’s an image AI just knocked up … and it can’t be copyrighted • The Guardian

Edward Helmore:

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The use of AI in art is facing a setback after a ruling that an award-winning image could not be copyrighted because it was not made sufficiently by humans.

The decision, delivered by the US copyright office review board, found that Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial, an AI-generated image that won first place at the 2022 Colorado state fair annual art competition, was not eligible because copyright protection “excludes works produced by non-humans”.

Artist Jason Allen claimed his use of the online AI-platform Midjourney allowed him to claim authorship of the image because he “entered a series of prompts, adjusted the scene, selected portions to focus on, and dictated the tone of the image”. But the board ruled that “if all of a work’s ‘traditional elements of authorship’ were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship, and the Office will not register it”.

Allen told the Pueblo Chieftain local newspaper that he “wanted to make a statement using artificial intelligence artwork. I feel like I accomplished that, and I’m not going to apologise for it.”

The decision comes as writers, actors, musicians and photographers claim AI is threatening their jobs, and follows a similar ruling last month in a US federal court that an image created by an AI computer system owned by Stephen Thaler could not be copyrighted because human beings are an “essential part of a valid copyright claim”.

US courts are now routinely referring to human authorship requirements under copyright law, noting, in a case called Urantia Found. v. Kristen Maaherra that “it is not creations of divine beings that the copyright laws were intended to protect.”

«

How fascinating that AI systems are, in the eyes of the court, “divine beings”. For those worried about AI taking over the world, that might be enough to put the fear of.. gods into them.
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Microsoft is going nuclear to power its AI ambitions • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

Data centres already use a hell of a lot of electricity, which could thwart the company’s climate goals unless it can find clean sources of energy. Energy-hungry AI makes that an even bigger challenge for the company to overcome. AI dominated Microsoft’s Surface event last week.

Nuclear energy doesn’t create greenhouse gas emissions. Even so, it could also open up a whole new can of worms when it comes to handling radioactive waste and building up a uranium supply chain. The role nuclear energy ought to play in combatting climate change is still hotly debated, but Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, has long been a big fan of the technology.

Based on the new job listing, it looks like Microsoft is betting on advanced nuclear reactors to be the answer. The job posting says it’s hiring someone to “lead project initiatives for all aspects of nuclear energy infrastructure for global growth.”

Microsoft is specifically looking for someone who can roll out a plan for small modular reactors (SMR). All the hype around nuclear these days is around these next-generation reactors. Unlike their older, much larger predecessors, these modular reactors are supposed to be easier and cheaper to build. For comparison, the last large nuclear reactor to be built in the US finally came on line this summer roughly $17bn over budget after seven years of delays.

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Would be nice if Microsoft were to prove SMRs’ feasibility.
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The first foldable PC era is unfolding • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Lenovo launched the first foldable laptop in 2020, but the first real era of foldable PCs is only starting to unfold now. Today, LG became the latest OEM to announce a foldable-screen laptop, right after HP announced its first attempt, the Spectre Foldable PC, earlier this month.

LG only announced the Gram Fold in South Korea thus far. LG didn’t immediately respond when I asked if it has plans to release the machine in the US.

A Google translation of LG’s Korean announcement said the laptop is 9.4-mm (0.37in) thick when unfolded and used like a 17in tablet. Alternatively, the OLED PC can be folded in half to use like an approximately 12.2in laptop. In the latter form, a virtual keyboard can appear on the bottom screen, and you can dock a Bluetooth keyboard to the bottom screen or pair a keyboard with the system wirelessly. The screen has 1920×2560 pixels for a pixel density of 188.2 pixels per inch.

One draw of foldable PCs is supposed to be portability. The Gram Fold weighs 2.76lb (1.25kg), which is even lighter than LG’s latest Gram clamshell laptop (2.9lb, 1.32kg).

LG said the Gram Fold will release on October 4 for 4.99m won (about $3,726).

«

I really don’t get the point. The screen being foldable is.. no different from a standard laptop, surely. The product and in-use shots in the picture don’t change my opinion. Foldables, both in phones and in laptops, seem a distraction: done because they can be, not because they’re more useful.
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Hydrogen cars are dead as projects are scrapped and refueling prices go through the roof • autoevolution

Cristian Agatie:

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Although battery-electric vehicles have proved they are the best to replace ICE vehicles, many people still expect a miracle fuel to save the combustion engine. For many, this miracle fuel is hydrogen, a gas that promises to burn with zero carbon emissions. Hydrogen is also the most abundant element on Earth, so it looked like the perfect solution for decarbonization. Well, things didn’t pan out the way hydrogen proponents have imagined.

Hydrogen vehicles are still an exotic appearance due to their sky-high prices, whereas hydrogen proved a nightmare to produce, transport, and store. This is why hydrogen refueling stations are confined to small areas, like California in the US, and clean fuel prices are too high to make sense economically. Still, this didn’t prevent car companies like Toyota from pouring billions into hydrogen vehicle development. Today, most hydrogen FCEV vehicles in California are Toyota Mirai, which is owed chiefly to Toyota heavily subsidizing the hydrogen refueling costs.

Shell, the biggest oil company in the world and one significant supplier of hydrogen fuel for both heavy-duty and passenger vehicles, started a year ago to close its car-focused hydrogen filling stations across the globe. The move culminated in August when Shell announced closing all its car-focused filling stations in California while only keeping three heavy-duty stations. These stations were located in San Francisco (two), Sacramento, Berkeley, and Citrus Heights.

Shell went a step further and scrapped plans to build 48 new hydrogen filling stations in California for which it had been awarded a $41m grant. No money has changed hands yet, and the oil giant formally rejected the funding in July, citing “political and economic uncertainty.” At this stage, Shell has no plans to build and operate additional light-duty vehicle fueling stations in California. Considering that Shell closed all its hydrogen stations in the UK last year, we can safely assume the trend is here to stay.

«

Won’t be long before plans to replace natural gas with hydrogen are scrapped too. Been tried, doesn’t work. The oil companies like it because they can crack oil to make hydrogen. It’s a bad idea.
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Cuba’s underground Apple technicians are thriving • Rest of World

Lidia Hernández-Tapia:

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Even though prohibition limiting the exportation, re-exportation, sale, and supply of Apple products to Cuba was eased in 2015, getting a hold of, operating, and maintaining them can still be a challenge. This is in part because basic replacement parts are difficult to import, since they cannot be purchased directly from Apple. It’s not just hardware, either: Downloading apps or software updates is tricky because Cuban IP addresses are blocked. And setting up a new Apple ID with two-factor verification requires a phone number from outside Cuba.

García Padrón is part of an exclusive circle of Apple enthusiasts who are defying Cuba’s constraints to create profitable repair businesses. In little more than a decade, these Cuban Apple technicians have evolved from casual tinkerers to a small yet thriving community of celebrity repairers, respected by locals and foreigners alike.

The absence of official Apple stores and product resellers in Cuba has fostered a community-driven ecosystem that relies on unofficial suppliers and a transnational network of individuals who can travel abroad to buy hardware replacement parts. Technicians told Rest of World there are only a handful of Apple repair shops in Cuba, mostly clustered in Havana; it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact number as there are no official statistics.

Orlando Gutiérrez is one Cuban trailblazer who opened Meca Móvil, his own iPhone repair shop in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood. Finding an Android repairperson, he told Rest of World, is easy enough. “You might even find a few on a single block,” he said. “But a Mac technician is the holy grail.”

«

Fabulous story. ROW really is excellent at finding novel angles on what could otherwise be tired stories.
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BT begins big switchover ahead of analog phone sunset • The Register

Dan Robinson:

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BT has revealed details on its UK-wide rollout schedule as it switches over from analog phone lines to a digital voice service to hit the deadline of retiring the analog service by the end of 2025.

The former state-owned telecoms giant, which still operates the bulk of Britain’s telco infrastructure, has previously flagged up plans to switch from the old analog phone lines to internet-based voice calls operating over a fiber network.

BT said that pilots of the switchover in Salisbury (Wiltshire) and Mildenhall (Suffolk) were successful, and it is now beginning the next phase in the rollout of its new home phone service, “Digital Voice,” on a region-by-region basis.

This kicked off with the East Midlands in July, then Yorkshire and the Humber region in August and Northern Ireland in September. The future schedule will cover London and the North West of England this autumn, followed by the South East, West Midlands, East Anglia and Wales in spring 2024. Scotland, the North East and South West of England will be switched during the summer of 2024.

…While many people these days use mobile phones rather than a landline for calls, there have been concerns voiced about those who still rely on one, such as more elderly citizens or those with a healthcare pendant that can be used to call for help in an emergency. In the latter case, a power cut could mean the phone service is unavailable.

BT said it won’t be “proactively switching” – an amazing piece of terminology – anyone with a healthcare pendant, those who only use a landline or have no mobile signal, or customers that have disclosed additional needs, where the company is aware of this situation.

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I bet this will be the source of a fair bit of NIMBYism when it happens. I wonder if it will be an election issue at all.
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The plot of all objects in the universe • Kottke

Jason Kottke:

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You just have to admire a chart that casually purports to show every single thing in the Universe in one simple 2D plot. The chart in question is from a piece in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Physics with the understated title of “All objects and some questions“.

»

In Fig. 2, we plot all the composite objects in the Universe: protons, atoms, life forms, asteroids, moons, planets, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, giant voids, and the Universe itself. Humans are represented by a mass of 70 kg and a radius of 50 cm (we assume sphericity), while whales are represented by a mass of 10^5 kg and a radius of 7 m.

«

The “sub-Planckian unknown” and “forbidden by gravity” sections of the chart makes the “quantum uncertainty” section seem downright normal — the paper collectively calls these “unphysical regions”. Lovely turns of phrase all.

But what does it all mean? My physics is too rusty to say, but I thought one of the authors’ conjectures was particularly intriguing: “Our plot of all objects also seems to suggest that the Universe is a black hole.” Huh, cool.

«

The paper is indeed interesting, but it’s the plot (shown at the Kottke post or the paper) which is most fascinating: there are spaces of “quantum uncertainty” which intersects with “forbidden by gravity” (the latter where something can’t be so small and also have more than a certain mass; black holes lie at its boundary). Essentially it’s a physics paper saying “here be dragons” – well, instantons.
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Cory Doctorow: Silicon Valley is now a world of ‘lumbering behemoths’ • Fast Company

Wilfred Chan interviews Cory Doctorow, whose new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation has just come out:

»

Fast Company: You were once more of a techno-optimist. But you argue in your new book that decades of trying to turn Big Tech into “better tech” have been a failure, and it’s time to cut the tech companies down to size. Was there a turning point when you realized the industry needed systemic change? 

Cory Doctorow: It was more of a process than a turning point. 

There used to be a time when the tech sector could be described as a bunch of “fast companies,” right? They would use the interoperability that’s latent in all digital technology and they would specifically target whatever pain points the incumbent had introduced. If incumbents were making money by showing you ads, they made an ad blocker. If incumbents were making money by charging gigantic margins on hard drives, they made cheaper hard drives.

Over time, we went from an internet where tech companies more or less had their users’ backs, to an internet where tech companies are colluding to take as big a bite as possible out of those users. We do not have fast companies anymore; we have lumbering behemoths. If you’ve started a fast company, it’s probably just a fake startup that you’re hoping to get acqui-hired by one of the big giants, which is something that used to be illegal.

As these companies grew more concentrated, they were able to collude and convince courts and regulators and lawmakers that it was time to get rid of the kind of interoperability, the reverse engineering that had been a feature of technology since the very beginning, and move into a new era in which no one was allowed to do anything to a tech platform that their shareholders wouldn’t appreciate. And that the government should step in to use the state’s courts to punish anyone who disagrees. That’s how we got to the world that we’re in today.

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In a nutshell.
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San Francisco techies are living in small pods for $700/month • SF Standard

Joshua Bote:

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The average rent for a one-bedroom San Francisco apartment is $3,040 a month, according to Zillow. Staying in a $700-per-month pod, therefore, is a way to live in San Francisco on the cheap, [Chicago native Christian] Lewis said, without being locked into a pricey yearlong lease. It’s also, he contends, better than an Airbnb—Lewis says he booked “a dump” of a short-term rental on the platform and found it uninhabitable. (He also would rather not live in a shared apartment with roommates.)

The Mint Plaza pod space evokes a co-op, or a much, much more cramped version of those micro-apartments that have popped up throughout the Bay Area. Comparisons to the Hong Kong-style “coffin homes” are not entirely inaccurate. But in Lewis’ words, it’s a form of “minimalist living” for young, unattached people coming in and out of San Francisco. And Wi-Fi and utilities are included.

“For $700, you have workspaces and an office and a place to sleep, so that’s pretty great,” he said. “It’s downtown.”

Back to the pods: They’re each 4 feet high, 3½ feet wide, and long enough to fit a twin-size mattress. It’s comfortable enough for Lewis, who is 5 foot 9. (Lewis jokes that I should report that he’s an inch taller so that he can boast about it on the dating apps. I do not oblige.)

Lewis advises that I take my sneakers off before he takes me to observe the sleeping pods.

You don’t want to disturb anyone who could be asleep, he explains, as we inch toward the stacks of pods on Thursday afternoon. Each is sheathed with a black curtain as the main mode of privacy. There are about 20 of them, stacked in twos like bunks.

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Similar things in Tokyo, I think, though without the potential upside of getting into an AI startup in SF.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, went extinct decades ago – but now their RNA has been sequenced, in a first. CC-licensed photo by State Library of New South Wales 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak • OpenAI

»

We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT. They offer a new, more intuitive type of interface by allowing you to have a voice conversation or show ChatGPT what you’re talking about.

Voice and image give you more ways to use ChatGPT in your life. Snap a picture of a landmark while traveling and have a live conversation about what’s interesting about it. When you’re home, snap pictures of your fridge and pantry to figure out what’s for dinner (and ask follow up questions for a step by step recipe). After dinner, help your child with a math problem by taking a photo, circling the problem set, and having it share hints with both of you.

We’re rolling out voice and images in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise users over the next two weeks. Voice is coming on iOS and Android (opt-in in your settings) and images will be available on all platforms.

You can now use voice to engage in a back-and-forth conversation with your assistant. Speak with it on the go, request a bedtime story for your family, or settle a dinner table debate.

…The new voice technology—capable of crafting realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech—opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications. However, these capabilities also present new risks, such as the potential for malicious actors to impersonate public figures or commit fraud.

This is why we are using this technology to power a specific use case—voice chat. Voice chat was created with voice actors we have directly worked with. We’re also collaborating in a similar way with others.

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Faintly concerning. Also I wouldn’t trust ChatGPT to settle a dinner table debate. It would just be an invitation to lower ourselves deeper into the ocean of misinformation.
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Erotica, Atwood, and ‘For Dummies’: the books behind Meta’s generative AI • The Atlantic

Alex Reisner:

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Books play a crucial role in the training of generative-AI systems. Their long, thematically consistent paragraphs provide information about how to construct long, thematically consistent paragraphs—something that’s essential to creating the illusion of intelligence. Consequently, tech companies use huge data sets of books, typically without permission, purchase, or licensing. (Lawyers for Meta argued in a recent court filing that neither outputs from the company’s generative AI nor the model itself are “substantially similar” to existing books.)

In its training process, a generative-AI system essentially builds a giant map of English words—the distance between two words correlates with how often they appear near each other in the training text. The final system, known as a large language model, will produce more plausible responses for subjects that appear more often in its training text. (For further details on this process, you can read about transformer architecture, the innovation that precipitated the boom in large language models such as LLaMA and ChatGPT.) A system trained primarily on the Western canon, for example, will produce poor answers to questions about Eastern literature. This is just one reason it’s important to understand the training data used by these models, and why it’s troubling that there is generally so little transparency.

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You can find out whether a book you wrote (🙋‍♂️) or someone you know wrote is in the database. It’s hungry for fiction and non-fiction. The point about long paragraphs being useful for creating the illusion of intelligence is very apt.
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Meta pays £149m to break London office lease • Financial Times

Joshua Oliver and Cristina Criddle:

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Meta has paid £149m to break its lease on a major London development near Regent’s Park as hybrid working prompts big tech groups to pull back on office space.

British Land, which owns the building at 1 Triton Square, on Tuesday flagged a short-term hit to earnings as it will now have to find a new tenant for the eight-storey building in a challenging London office market.

“It is a staggering amount of money. In my 20 years, I can’t think of a tenant paying [so much] to give back space they don’t occupy,” said Matthew Saperia, analyst at Peel Hunt.

The news is the latest sign of Big Tech’s determination to reduce costs by cutting office space as more staff work from home. The contraction has hit cities such as San Francisco that rely heavily on tech companies. Office tenants and European markets including Dublin and London have not been spared.

Colm Lauder, real estate analyst at Goodbody, estimated Meta was now proposing to sublet or surrender close to 1m sq ft of office space in Europe, mostly in London and Dublin.

…Meta never moved into 1 Triton Square but let the space in 2021 following a major refurbishment. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has embarked on dramatic cuts to the company of tens of thousands of staff, he has also committed to shrinking its office space, with hybrid workers asked to share desks.

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Macron launches ‘ecological plan’ to end France’s use of fossil fuels by 2030 • The Guardian

Kim Willsher:

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Emmanuel Macron has unveiled a national “ecological plan” to reduce France’s greenhouse gas emissions by 55% and end the use of fossil fuels by 2030.

Speaking after a special ministerial council at the Elysée, the French president said an extra €10bn (£8.7bn) would be put towards the 50-point programme, which he described as “ecology à la Française”.

The plan was aimed at addressing the climate crisis while ensuring that France remained competitive in agriculture and industry, said Macron.

It was essential, he said, that “France reduces our dependence on so-called fossil fuels, coal, petrol and gas, which we don’t produce any more but on which we depend”. The aim, he added, was to reduce this dependence from 60% to 40% by 2030.

“The priority that we have set is that by January 2027 we will have totally ended the use of coal for our electricity production,” he said.

Other measures in the plan include the acceleration of electric car production, with brakes on gas boilers, though the president stopped short of a total ban. It also includes new projects for offshore windfarms, the opening of several electric battery factories in northern France, a map to establish where natural resources can be found in France, including hydrogen gas and essential elements for lithium batteries, and €700m state investment in the regional train network.

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Quite the contrast with Snooze Button” Sunak, who thinks pausing something doesn’t mean it will take any longer to do.
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Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year • BBC News

Lora Jones:

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Amazon is set to introduce adverts to its Prime Video streaming service in 2024 as it seeks to put more cash into creating TV shows and films.

UK Prime customers, along with those in the US, Germany and Canada, will see ads early next year unless they subscribe for an “ad-free” option at an additional cost. In a statement, Amazon said Prime Video still offered “very compelling value”. It follows similar moves by rivals including Disney+ and Netflix.

Amazon said that the ads would be introduced across France, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Australia later in 2024. It will roll out the “ad-free” subscription tier for an extra $2.99 (£2.44) per month for Prime subscribers in the United States. Pricing for other countries will be announced at a later date, Amazon said.

At the moment, a Prime subscription, which includes free one-day delivery on goods as well as access to its streaming service, costs £8.99 per month, or £95 a year, in the UK.

“To continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time, starting in 2024, Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements in the UK,” Amazon said.

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Feels like a bait-and-switch, doesn’t it. The BBC TV licence, which provides access to multiple ad-free TV channels and also to a big news website and multiple radio channels (though the latter two don’t require a licence) feels like comparatively good value at £159 annually, fixed for some time.
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In-depth Q&A: Can ‘carbon offsets’ help to tackle climate change? • Carbon Brief

Josh Gabbatiss, Daisy Dunne, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Orla Dwyer, Molly Lempriere, Yanine Quiroz, Ayesha Tandon, Dr Giuliana Viglione, Joe Goodman, Tom Pearson, and Tom Prater:

»

According to Carbon Brief analysis of data from the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, just 3% of offsets on the four largest voluntary offset registries involve removing CO2 – all from tree-planting projects.

Many available offsets have been labelled “junk” or “hot air” because they result from carbon-market design flaws and do not represent real emissions reductions.
The ideas and experiments with carbon offsets and trading trace back at least half a century, as outlined in the timeline of the 60-year history of carbon offsets.

Over the years, offset projects have been dogged by allegations of land conflicts, human rights abuses, hampering conservation and furthering coal use and pollution.

They have been decried as a “false solution” by activists. Negotiations over new carbon markets under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement have seen a sustained outcry for not delivering mitigation at scale, threatening Indigenous rights and “carbon colonialism”.

Meanwhile, companies claiming carbon neutrality using voluntary offsets have been increasingly called out and restrained from making “greenwashing” claims. (See: Why is there a risk of greenwashing with carbon offsets?)

The central problem of carbon offsetting is summarised by Robert Mendelsohn, a forest policy and economics professor at Yale School of the Environment. Reflecting on the achievements of carbon offsets, he tells Carbon Brief: “They have not changed behaviour and so they have not led to any reduction of carbon in the atmosphere…They have achieved zero mitigation.”

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There’s a whole week-long look at the reality of carbon offsets. Worth a bookmark.
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Google antitrust trial spills details on deals with Apple, Samsung • WSJ

Miles Kruppa:

»

Apple began licensing Google’s search engine for the 2003 release of its Safari web browser. Google in 2005 offered Apple a portion of advertising revenue if it made the search engine the default choice on desktop computers.

Two years later, Apple asked Google for an amendment to the contract that would allow it to present users with several options for the default search engine, according to an email presented by the Justice Department. Apple approached Yahoo about participating in the setup.

In response, Google told Apple: “No default—no revenue share,” according to an internal email chain that included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin. Apple dropped the idea and hasn’t raised it again, said DOJ lead trial attorney Kenneth Dintzer.

A Google spokesman pointed to a previous statement saying the company competes for default placement so that users can easily access its services, and Apple has said it picks Google because it is the best search engine. Apple declined to comment.

…In 2021, Google analyzed the potential hit if Apple switched to another default search-engine provider, according to an internal email presented in court, calling it a “Code Red” scenario.

Google also tussled with Samsung about changes the smartphone company had made to its mobile web browser. The design tweaks made it easier for users to switch default search engines, according to testimony from Antonio Rangel, a behavioral economics professor called by the DOJ.

Google protested, telling Samsung it had violated their agreement, and the phone maker rolled back the change, Rangel said. Samsung didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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Of course, the level of Google’s concern about Apple defecting is easy to evaluate: it’s measured in the billions of dollars that it pays Apple every year to be the Safari default.
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The world’s biggest crypto firm is melting down • WSJ via MSN

Patricia Kowsmann, Caitlin Ostroff and Angus Berwick:

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After FTX crashed, the world of crypto seemed to belong to the largest exchange, Binance. Less than a year later, Binance is the one in distress.

Under threat of enforcement actions by US agencies, Binance’s empire is quaking. Over the past three months, more than a dozen senior executives have left, and the exchange has laid off at least 1,500 employees this year to cut costs and prepare for a decline in business. And while Binance still looms large in crypto, its dominance is dwindling. 

Binance now handles about half of all trades where cryptocurrencies are directly bought and sold, down from about 70% at the start of the year, according to data provider Kaiko.

What happens to Binance will have immense implications for the crypto industry because the exchange is so big. Industry players and watchers say other exchanges would fill the void if Binance were to collapse. But in the short term, liquidity in the market could evaporate, driving the price of tokens sharply down.

One institutional trader told The Wall Street Journal that his company has conducted fire drills to withdraw its assets from Binance quickly in the event of a meltdown. 

Yi He, Binance’s co-founder and chief marketing officer, vowed to overcome the troubles in a message to Binance staff last month.

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I’d have thought that the biggest firm in crypto was Tether, which basically keeps the whole shenanigans afloat. The problem for all these crypto firms will be the extent to which they’re wrapped up with extremely shady, prone-to-violence people when everything starts going south.
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Tasmanian tiger RNA is first to be recovered from an extinct animal • Nature

Miryan Naddaf:

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For the first time, researchers have sequenced RNA from an extinct animal species — the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus).

Using muscle and skin samples from a 132-year-old museum specimen, scientists isolated millions of RNA sequences. This genetic material provides information about the animal’s genes and the proteins that were made in its cells and tissues. The findings, published in Genome Research1, offer hope that RNA locked up in the world’s museum collections could provide new insights into long-dead species.

Being able to look at RNA in particular “opens up a whole new potential source of information”, says Oliver Smith, a geneticist at the medical-diagnostics company Micropathology in Coventry, UK. “As opposed to looking at what a genome is, we can look at what the genome does.”

…Obtaining RNA from historical samples is challenging because unlike DNA — which is highly stable and has been extracted from extinct species that lived more than one million years ago — RNA rapidly breaks down into smaller fragments. “Outside of living cells, it’s believed to be degraded or destroyed in minutes,” says study co-author Marc Friedländer, a geneticist at Stockholm University.

The team developed a protocol specifically for extracting ancient RNA from tissue samples, adapting standard methods that are used on fresher samples. Nevertheless, “it was surprising that we found these authentic RNA sequences in this mummified Tasmanian tiger”, says Friedländer.

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The really important update on the iPhone 15 Pro is just above its volume buttons. 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.

A selection of 9 links for you. Lights, camera, sorted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The end of privacy is a Taylor Swift fan TikTok account armed with facial recognition tech • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

A viral TikTok account is doxing ordinary and otherwise anonymous people on the internet using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology, creating content and growing a following by taking advantage of a fundamental new truth: privacy is now essentially dead in public spaces.

The 90,000 follower-strong account typically picks targets who appeared in other viral videos, or people suggested to the account in the comments. Many of the account’s videos show the process: screenshotting the video of the target, cropping images of the face, running those photos through facial recognition software, and then revealing the person’s full name, social media profile, and sometimes employer to millions of people who have liked the videos. There’s an entire branch of content on TikTok in which creators show off their OSINT doxing skills—OSINT being open source intelligence, or information that is openly available online. But the vast majority of them do it with the explicit consent of the target. This account is doing the same, without the consent of the people they choose to dox. As a bizarre aside, the account appears to be run by a Taylor Swift fan, with many of the doxing videos including Swift’s music, and including videos of people at the Eras Tour.

404 Media is not naming the account because TikTok has decided to not remove it from the platform. TikTok told me the account does not violate its policies; one social media policy expert I spoke to said TikTok should reevaluate that position.

«

Related: I reviewed Kashmir Hill’s new book about Clearview AI, which also solved this challenge a few years ago and began selling it to US police departments – really cheaply.

It seems the cat is very much out of the bag on facial recognition for the masses.
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The Action Button is the most significant new iPhone feature in years • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

»

Apple showcased the Action Button in its announcement of the iPhone 15 Pro, and it was highlighted in many reviews that followed (including our own). But it wasn’t until users got their hands on the iPhone 15 Pro late last week that the Action Button’s potential was fully realised.

By default, the button acts as a direct replacement for the old mute switch: you use it to change the ringer settings on your phone. In the iPhone’s Settings app, you can change it to do a handful of other things, like turning on the flashlight, launching the camera, or toggling Do Not Disturb. But the real power of the Action Button is unlocked when you pair it with Apple’s programmable Shortcuts app. From there, you can do just about anything you might imagine on your phone in a quicker, more convenient way.

The Settings app will suggest some simple shortcuts to bind to the Action Button, but things get a lot more interesting when you tap into custom shortcuts. You can program the Action Button to display a menu of other shortcuts that you can then run from a tap on the screen. You can make it do different things depending on your location, time of day, or even device orientation. The limit is really your imagination — and your tolerance for programming in the Shortcuts app, which can be frustrating and tedious. (Fortunately, I have some tips for this below.)

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Initially seems, as he says, like a very minimal thing: oh, a button that you can program. But it opens up a huge range of possibilities, and shows how we really are carrying around little computers. Yes, Samsung has had a programmable side button for a while, but it doesn’t have the power of Shortcuts to expand what it can do: it opens the camera, or an app, or its Bixby assistant.
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The bizarre cottage industry of YouTube obituary pirates • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

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People who lose somebody, whether it’s a dearly cherished family member or a long-lost acquaintance, must now navigate a slimy cottage industry of profiteers trying to hijack their attention. Instead of finding important funeral details or where to write a remembrance or send flowers, they are confronted by a flood of low-budget videos crudely summarizing the death notices of the person they’ve lost.

Obituary pirating, where people scrape and republish obituaries from funeral homes and websites like Legacy.com, has been an ethically dubious business for years. Piracy websites are often skilled enough at search engine optimization to rise to the top of search results, and they use the resulting traffic to charge a premium for digital ads that appear next to text lifted wholesale from funeral homes, local newspapers, and other authorized obituary publishers. Occasionally, these pirate sites go a step further, manipulating bereaved people into buying sympathy gifts like candles or flowers and pocketing the money.

The flood of YouTube obituary videos is a janky update on this practice. Some of these channels upload dozens of death notice summaries every hour, abandoning any pretense of looking like an official source of information in an effort to churn out as many videos as they can.

Although text-based obituary pirating has been a scourge on the industry for years, these videos are a more recent phenomenon. “This is a new one for me,” says Jessica Koth, director of public relations for the National Funeral Directors Association. “These videos are not sanctioned or authorized by the funeral home or family of the person who died. I would imagine they would be quite upsetting to the families involved.”

«

There’s essentially nothing that isn’t seen as somehow monetisable through ads on YouTube.
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The Musk algorithm • Hey.com

David Heinemeier Hansson:

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The part of the business book [as he views the Musk biography] I’ve enjoyed the most is the countless illustrations of how Musk applies his “algorithm”. A methodology for shipping everything from electric cars to Mars rockets to flamethrowers to humanoid robots. Quoted in full:

1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.

…You can absolutely learn from people you wouldn’t want to be. Extracting wisdom from Musk’s success does not oblige you to become his disciple or his mirror.

«

Reasonable point, but there’s a lot of competition to apply that algorithm, and so it’s the ones who take it to the absolute beyond-reasonable-total-jerk who take the prize. Though plenty do the same and don’t take the prize.
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Nissan to go all-electric by 2030 despite petrol ban delay • BBC News

Simon Jack:

»

Nissan will accelerate plans towards electrification by committing that all vehicles sold in Europe will be electric by 2030.

The announcement comes despite the UK postponing its 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. Nissan’s boss said the firm’s move was “the right thing to do”.

Car trade body the SMMT has voiced concerns that the postponement of the ban would see consumers delay the switch to electric vehicles.

Nissan will also introduce new battery technology by the end of the decade that it said will reduce both the charging time and cost of electric vehicles (EVs).

“Nissan will make the switch to full electric by 2030 in Europe. We believe it is the right thing to do for our business, our customers and for the planet,” said Nissan’s chief executive Makoto Uchida. In an interview with the BBC, Mr Uchida said the company was aiming to bring down the cost of electric vehicles for customers, so that they were no more expensive than petrol and diesel cars.

“It may take a bit of time, but we are looking at the next few years,” he said.

«

Nissan is aiming for price parity with ICEs by 2030. What’s significant about this story is that Nissan chose the BBC’s Business Editor to tell it to: essentially, a rebuff to Rishi Sunak putting back the deadline last week, and encouraging the EU to move it forward.

Nissan is also probably a bit peeved with the UK government: it has an EV battery manufacturing plant in the UK, and is putting £1bn (plus £100m from, um, the UK government) into expanding its carmaking facility.
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Guidance on AI detection, and why we’re disabling Turnitin’s AI detector • Vanderbilt University

»

In April of this year, Turnitin released an update to their product that reviewed submitted papers and presented their determination of how much of a paper was written by AI. As we outlined at that time, many people had important concerns and questions about this new tool, namely how the product exactly works and how reliable the results would be. After several months of using and testing this tool, meeting with Turnitin and other AI leaders, and talking to other universities who also have access, Vanderbilt has decided to disable Turnitin’s AI detection tool for the foreseeable future. This decision was not made lightly and was made in pursuit of the best interests of our students and faculty. 

When Turnitin launched its AI-detection tool, there were many concerns that we had. This feature was enabled for Turnitin customers with less than 24-hour advance notice, no option at the time to disable the feature, and, most importantly, no insight into how it works. At the time of launch, Turnitin claimed that its detection tool had a 1% false positive rate (Chechitelli, 2023). To put that into context, Vanderbilt submitted 75,000 papers to Turnitin in 2022. If this AI detection tool was available then, around 750 student papers could have been incorrectly labeled as having some of it written by AI.

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That’s a pretty bad false positive rate in terms of sheer numbers. Nice of them to let students know. (Turnitin is still used to test against alleged plagiarism on other work by students.)
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Covid helped China secure the DNA of millions, spurring arms race fears • Washington Post

Joby Warrick and Cate Brown:

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The Fire-Eye [portable lab developed by China] excelled not only at cracking the genetic code for viruses, but also for humans, with machines that can decipher genetic instructions contained within the cells of every person on Earth, according to its Chinese inventors. [I think that means “sequence human genomes” – Overspill Ed.] In late 2021, with the pandemic still raging, Serbian officials announced they were working with a Chinese company to convert the lab into a permanent facility with plans to harvest and curate the entire genomes, or genetics blueprints, of Serbian citizens.

Serbia’s scientists were thrilled, and the country’s prime minister, Ana Brnabic, praised China for giving the Balkan country the “most advanced institute for precision medicine and genetics in the region.” Yet now, China’s Fire-Eye labs — scores of which were donated or sold to foreign countries during the pandemic — are attracting the attention of Western intelligence agencies amid growing unease about China’s intentions. Some analysts perceive China’s largesse as part of a global attempt to tap into new sources of highly valuable human DNA data in countries around the world.

That collection effort, underway for more than a decade, has included the acquisition of U.S. genetics companies as well as sophisticated hacking operations, U.S. and Western intelligence officials say. But more recently, it received an unexpected boost from the coronavirus pandemic, which created opportunities for Chinese companies and institutes to distribute gene-sequencing machines and build partnerships for genetic research in places where Beijing previously had little or no access, the officials said.

«

Hard to tell how much this is paranoia and how much is justified. It’s a deeply researched story, though again: how much is joining dots that are just dots?
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AlphaFold touted as next big thing for drug discovery — but is it? • Nature

Carrie Arnold:

»

Last month, the biotechnology firm Recursion, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, announced that it had calculated how 36 billion potential drug compounds could bind to more than 15,000 human proteins whose structures were predicted by AlphaFold. To pull off the massive computation, Recursion used its own AI tool, MatchMaker, that ‘matched’ binding pockets on the predicted structures with suitably shaped small molecules, or ligands, from a database called Enamine Real Space.

“Lots of people have predicted how molecules would bind with proteins,” says Chris Gibson, Recursion’s co-founder and chief executive, “but this many predictions is pretty unprecedented”.

But not everyone is as bullish about AlphaFold revolutionizing drug discovery — at least, not yet. In a paper published in eLife the day before Recursion’s announcement, a team of scientists at Stanford University in California showed that AlphaFold’s prowess at predicting protein structures doesn’t yet translate into solid leads for ligand binding.

“Models like AlphaFold are really good with [protein] structures, but we need to put some thought into how we’re going to use them for drug discovery,” says Masha Karelina, a biophysicist at Stanford and co-author of the paper.

Others who spoke to Nature agree that this type of effort offers impressive amounts of data, but they aren’t yet sure about its quality. Biotech announcements such as the one from Recursion aren’t typically accompanied by validation data — confirmation from laboratory experiments that a model has accurately predicted binding.

«

(Ligand: “an ion or molecule with a functional group that binds to a central metal atom to form a coordination complex”.)
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3 iOS 0-days, a cellular network compromise, and HTTP used to infect an iPhone • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Apple has patched a potent chain of iOS zero-days that were used to infect the iPhone of an Egyptian presidential candidate with sophisticated spyware developed by a commercial exploit seller, Google and researchers from Citizen Lab said Friday.

The previously unknown vulnerabilities, which Apple patched on Thursday, were exploited in clickless attacks, meaning they didn’t require a target to take any steps other than to visit a website that used the HTTP protocol rather than the safer HTTPS alternative. A packet inspection device sitting on a cellular network in Egypt kept an eye out for connections from the phone of the targeted candidate and, when spotted, redirected it to a site that delivered the exploit chain, according to Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School.

Citizen Lab said the attack was made possible by participation from the Egyptian government, spyware known as Predator sold by a company known as Cytrox, and hardware sold by Egypt-based Sandvine. The campaign targeted Ahmed Eltantawy, a former member of the Egyptian Parliament who announced he was running for president in March. Citizen Lab said the recent attacks were at least the third time Eltantawy’s iPhone has been attacked. One of them, in 2021, was successful and also installed Predator.

“The use of mercenary spyware to target a senior member of a country’s democratic opposition after they had announced their intention to run for president is a clear interference in free and fair elections and violates the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and privacy,” Citizen Lab researchers Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton, Daniel Roethlisberger, Bahr Abdul Razzak, Siena Anstis, and Ron Deibert wrote in a 4,200-word report. “It also directly contradicts how mercenary spyware firms publicly justify their sales.”

«

Amazing how this thing we’re assured by the vendors doesn’t happen keeps happening.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Could genetically engineered bacteria make tooth decay (and brushing?) a thing of the past? CC-licensed photo by makelessnoise 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.

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About — Lantern Bioworks

»

Lantern Bioworks is a biotech startup dedicated to developing effective oral probiotics as a means of preventing dental caries. By harnessing the power of beneficial bacteria, we believe that it is possible to fully eradicate cavities worldwide.

«

This is pretty mindblowing, as prospects go: it says a strain of Streptococcus mutans (S.mutans) – which lives around the teeth and converts sugar into acid which then eats into tooth enamel and causes cavities – has been created by genetic engineering which instead produces ethanol.

And this was back in 1985. Clinical trials in the 2000s led to no ill effects – the company claims. The idea isn’t new: it’s been written about multiple times (here in 2016, here in 2002 – with the latter describing trying it out himself and a medical colleague, but that “wives and children” were not then infected by it 14 years later.

The problem is, this doesn’t have a valid patent: it ran out. Plus there’s the question of whether the bacteria might colonise other parts of the body. Plus we’d be ever so slightly intoxicated all the time.

Well, maybe it’s not all bad. (Thanks Adewale for the link.)
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The workers at the frontlines of the AI revolution • Rest of World

Andrew Deck:

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Since the blockbuster launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, future-of-work pontificators, AI ethicists, and Silicon Valley developers have been fiercely debating how generative AI will impact the way we work. Some six months later, one global labor force is at the frontline of the generative AI revolution: offshore outsourced workers.

These include workers hired per commission or on a contractual basis, such as freelance copywriters, artists, and software developers, as well as more formal offshore workforces like customer service agents. As generative AI tools present a new model for cost cutting, pressure is quickly mounting for these outsourced workers to adapt or risk losing work.

Rest of World spoke to outsourced workers across different industries and regions, including call center operators in Manila, programmers in Lahore, and designers in Cairo. Many said they are already seeing generative AI change the demand for their work and the stability of their income. But while some brace for layoffs or diminishing commissions, others have embraced generative AI tools in an effort to keep ahead of the curve. If generative AI represents a tectonic shift in the way we work, offshore outsourced workers are at the fault lines.

«

Typically clever choice of topic, and amazing in revealing how far ChatGPT use has spread: Lagos, Guadalajara, the Philippines, Shenzhen.
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The invisible problem • Scott Jenson

Jenson works at Google:

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Whenever I explain my research at Google into mobile text editing, I’m usually met with blank stares or a slightly hostile “Everyone can edit text on their phones, right? What’s the problem?”

Text editing on mobile isn’t ok. It’s actually much worse than you think, an invisible problem no one appreciates. I wrote this post so you can understand why it’s so important. But as it’s a rather nuanced issue, I may lose you. To help, I’ve sprinkled lots of headers throughout so if you get bored, just skip ahead.

TL;DR: Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors.

It’s less of a problem if you only do short bursts of text in social media or messaging apps. But doing anything more complicated like an email gets tedious. However, in my user study on text editing, I was surprised to find that everyone had significant problems and rather severe workarounds for editing text.

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The appalling thing about reading this is that it makes you realise how bad things are. Even worse, Jenson has the (or a) solution – but doesn’t think anyone would take it up.
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Pixel 8 camera features “leak” with manual controls and face-changing AI • 9to5 Google

Ben Schoon:

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The focus of Google’s Pixel phones has always been on the camera, and it seems there’s a lot of new stuff coming with the Pixel 8 series, as a new leaked ad reveals manual camera controls, new features, and a whole bunch of AI in the pipeline.

A leaked video posted to 91Mobiles by the reliable leaker Kamila Wojciechowska offers a pretty detailed breakdown of all of the new camera features coming to Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, including some returning favorites like Night Sight, Astrophotography, and Super Res Zoom.

What’s new this year, though, is actually quite a bit.

That starts with “Video Boost,” which Google says will use AI to create a “smoother view” as well as bringing Night Sight’s effects to video, as we had previously reported was coming. The video also gives us a first look at “Audio Eraser” – another feature that popped up previously – with a quick example of removing city noise from the background of a video of a cello player.

Perhaps the most wild use of AI in the video, though, is a Google Photos feature on Pixel 8 where the app will literally be able to change people’s faces in a shot to create the shot you want – the Michael Scott treatment, if you will. There’s no explanation on how this works, but it seems like it uses multiple, similar shots to create one final product. Again, it looks absolutely wild.

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Google certainly doesn’t like surprising people; it’s been giving out the details of the upcoming Pixels for weeks. Now there’s video showing the face-replacement AI (turning that frown upside down!), and we can now definitely say that you’ll no longer even be able to trust photos taken straight off a camera.
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Rishi Sunak scraps home energy efficiency taskforce • BBC News

Ione Wells:

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A taskforce to speed up home insulation and boiler upgrades has been disbanded, the BBC can reveal.

The group – which included the chair of the National Infrastructure Commission Sir John Armitt and other leading experts – was only launched in March. But it appears to be a casualty of Rishi Sunak’s decision to scrap energy efficiency regulations for landlords in an overhaul of green policies.

Members were informed in a letter, seen by the BBC, that it was being wound up. Energy efficiency minister Lord Callanan told the group its work would be “streamlined” into ongoing government activity.

A spokesperson for the Energy Security and Net Zero department said: “We would like to thank the Energy Efficiency Taskforce for its work in supporting our ambition to reduce total UK energy demand by 15% from 2021 levels by 2030.

“We have invested £6.6bn in energy efficiency upgrades this Parliament and will continue to support families in making their homes more efficient, helping them to cut bills while also achieving net zero in a pragmatic, proportionate and realistic way.”

But former Conservative MP Laura Sandys, who sat on the taskforce, said she was “disappointed” by the decision to disband it and “confused” about the government’s intentions on the cost of living. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, she said energy efficiency must be the “first priority to reduce citizens’ costs” and “improve energy security”.

«

Just incredible. Data in 2020 found 12m homes in the UK with a “D” or worse rating, out of nearly 24m “occupied residential dwellings”. The £37bn spent on subsidising energy bills last year could have been better targeted at improving the worst homes.
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Spotify code suggests HiFi tier is coming with lossless audio for $20 / month • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Spotify’s long-awaited HiFi tier could finally be getting closer to launch. Code within the Spotify app reveals new details about the “Supremium” tier, which could feature 24-bit lossless audio, the ability to create playlists with AI, and more, as spotted by u/Hypixely on Reddit.

Spotify first announced the more expensive HiFi tier in February 2021, but the feature has been stuck in limbo since then. The last we heard about the tier was in June of this year when a Bloomberg report found Spotify had rebranded the HiFi tier as “Supremium.” The Redditor’s findings corroborate this claim, as they say Spotify now refers to the audio as lossless with “no lag and delays.”

Additionally, the Redditor found that the Supremium tier could feature 30 hours of audiobook listening each month, along with the ability to sort your library by mood, activity, and genre.

The app’s code also mentions advanced mixing tools, allowing you to customize the order of playlists by beats per minute, enable smooth transitions between songs, and filter songs in a playlist by mood or genre. There’s even a “soundcheck” feature that lets you “learn more about your

«

The audiobooks might be attractive to some people, but the price hike – compared to the $11/month it presently costs (expect $ to translate directly to £ and €) – is pretty substantial for lossless audio, which makes a difference basically nobody can hear without the world’s most expensive studio speakers.
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OpenAI and ChatGPT Lawsuit List • Originality.AI

Jonathan Gilham:

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We looked at all lawsuits occurring against OpenAI and listed them below. In addition to the relevant detail we had a lawyer provide some commentary. This list will remain updated as an easy-to-reference location for any lawsuits against OpenAI ordered by date (oldest to newest).

«

Currently standing at five. I wonder if OpenAI has a sign in its HQ with “– DAYS SINCE A LAWSUIT WAS FILED AGAINST US”.
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Warning: update your iPhone 15 to iOS 17.0.2 before transferring data from another iPhone • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

If you are unboxing an iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, or iPhone 15 Pro Max today, make sure to update the device to iOS 17.0.2 before transferring data to the device from another iPhone, or else you might encounter issues.

iOS 17.0.2 is only available for the iPhone 15 lineup. Apple says the update fixes an issue that may prevent transferring data directly from another iPhone during the device setup process, so installing it is very important. The update should appear during the setup process, or it can be installed via the Settings app under General → Software Update if you proceeded to set up the device as new and transfer data later.

If you already attempted to transfer data from another iPhone before updating to iOS 17.0.2, and your iPhone 15 is now stuck showing an Apple logo, Apple has shared a new support document with steps on how to restore the iPhone:

1. Connect your new iPhone to a computer with a cable
2. Press and quickly release the volume up button. Press and quickly release the volume down button. Then, press and hold the side button
3. Continue to hold while the Apple logo appears and don’t let go until an image of a computer and cable appears
4. On your computer, locate your new iPhone in the Finder or in iTunes
5. Choose Restore when you see the option to Restore or Update.

«

Happily I missed the delivery of my new iPhone last week so didn’t get caught by this. Somewhat embarrassing for Apple, though.
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Craptacular is more like it • Daring Fireball

John Gruber did a detailed takedown of the WSJ article that I linked to last week:

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We can’t know that Qualcomm is behind this, but we do know that Qualcomm threw shade at Apple’s modem efforts with a press release about a renewed deal between the companies the day before the iPhone announcement event. How better to follow that up than a new story painting a picture of technical ineptitude and managerial chaos inside Apple’s modem team, set to appear the day before the iPhones 15 hit customers’ hands? This narrative especially suits Qualcomm if they’re concerned about their own engineering talent defecting.

«

I’m slightly annoyed at myself for not having picked up the inconsistencies in the WSJ story that Gruber points out. There are plenty, mostly around timing and lead times and sources. Evidently, Apple hasn’t managed to make its own modem – yet. But is everything a shambles? Anyhow, this story will not make the already frosty relationship between Apple and Qualcomm any warmer. It may even spur Apple’s team on.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Would you be astonished to hear that NFTs are worthless now? Did you think they were worthful before? CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch on Flickr.

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

Inside Apple’s spectacular failure to build a key part for its new iPhones • WSJ

Aaron Tilley and Yang Jie:

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Apple had planned to have its modem chip ready to use in the new iPhone models. But tests late last year found the chip was too slow and prone to overheating. Its circuit board was so big it would take up half an iPhone, making it unusable.

…[Apple chip chief Johny] Srouji flew to Munich to greet Apple’s newly acquired Intel wireless employees in December 2019. He told a gathering that the modem-chip project would be a game changer for Apple, the next step in the company’s evolution, said people who watched the meeting. He said the chip would distinguish Apple devices, as Apple’s processors had done.

As Apple filled the project’s ranks with Intel engineers and others hired from Qualcomm, company executives set a goal to have the modem chip ready for fall 2023. It soon became apparent to many of the wireless experts on the project that meeting the goal was impossible.

Apple found that employing the brute force of thousands of engineers, a strategy successful for designing the computer brain of its smartphones and laptops, wasn’t enough to quickly produce a superior modem chip.

Modem chips are trickier to make than processing chips because they must work seamlessly with 5G wireless networks, as well as the 2G, 3G and 4G networks used in countries around the world, each with its own technological quirks. Apple microprocessors run software programs designed solely for its iPhones and laptops. 

Apple executives who didn’t have experience with wireless chips set tight timelines that weren’t realistic, former project engineers said. Teams had to build prototype versions of the chips and certify they would work with the many wireless carriers worldwide, a time-consuming job.

Executives better understood the challenge after Apple tested its prototypes late last year. The results weren’t good, according to people familiar with the tests. The chips were essentially three years behind Qualcomm’s best modem chip. Using them threatened to make iPhone wireless speeds slower than its competitors.

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(The link should be free to read.)
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Nearly 500 brands exited smartphone market during 2017-2023 • Counterpoint Research

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At its peak in 2017, the global smartphone market saw more than 700 brands fiercely competing and contributing to the total annual sales of over 1.5 billion units. Fast forward to 2023 and the number of active brands (that have recorded sell-through volumes) is down by a third to almost 250, according to Counterpoint’s Global Handset Model Sales Tracker, which has been tracking sales of these brands across more than 70 key countries.

A maturing user base, improving device quality, longer replacement cycles and a growing refurbished secondary market, along with economic headwinds, supply-chain bottlenecks, major technological transitions such as 4G to 5G, and the growing scale and concentration of power in a handful of brands, have gradually whittled down the number of active brands and their volumes over the years.

It has become difficult to remain profitable and feasible in this maturing marketplace. For example, major local smartphone brands, known as “local kings”, like Micromax, Intex and Karbonn in India; InnJoo and Xtouch in the Middle East and Africa; Meizu, Meitu, Gionee and Coolpad in China; Kyocera and NEC in Japan; and LG in South Korea, have exited over the last five years.

Strikingly, the decline in the number of active brands is almost entirely coming from local brands. The number of global brands has remained consistent at over 30. Most local brands operate in regions that have fragmented markets across wide geographies, like Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Middle East and Africa. Such brands focus on customers looking for affordable devices.

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Combination of the pandemic, followed by component shortages, followed by the “macroeconomic climate”. Surely overdue, but still dramatic – and shows that the smartphone is well into its maturity.
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Why TikTok is banned in some African countries • Rest of World

Damilare Dosunmu:

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TikTok is getting caught in political and moral disputes across several African nations.

In August, Senegal and Somalia banned the app, with calls to do the same in Kenya and Uganda. While local governments and petitioners have cited security risks and morality as reasons to take action against TikTok, lawyers and activists told Rest of World via text and social media messages that the Chinese app is falling prey to politically motivated decisions.

“It seems it’s a political decision shrouded in a morality cloak,” said Mohamed Mubarak, a Somali policy analyst. “The government is unhappy about the political parody of the president and [prime minister] and is using ‘human rights’ as a justification.” In its official announcement of the ban on August 20, the Somali government said its decision was based on the damage the app had caused to the country’s social morals and cultural values.

In an emailed statement to Rest of World, TikTok said it’s engaging with local governments and key stakeholders to arrive at a resolution that ensures it continues operations in Africa. “At TikTok, we have over 40,000 talented safety professionals dedicated to keeping TikTok safe,” the email read. “TikTok is for users aged 13 and above. One of our most important commitments is supporting the safety and well-being of teens, and we recognise this work is never finished.”

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DuckDuckGo CEO says it takes ‘too many steps’ to switch from Google • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Todd Shields:

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Founded in 2008, DuckDuckGo currently has about a 2.5% share of the market for search in the US, said CEO Gabriel Weinberg, and conducts about 100 million searches a day globally. In comparison, Google conducts several billion searches daily.

Weinberg said about 30% to 40% of DuckDuckGo’s users have a “strong preference” for privacy and that most of the company’s users switch over from Google.” The company considers Google to be “far and away” its biggest competitor.

“Switching is way harder than it needs to be,” Chief Executive Officer Gabriel Weinberg said in federal court on Thursday. “There’s just too many steps.”

Weinberg testified Thursday in the government’s antitrust trial against Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc. The Department of Justice claims Google pays more than $10 billion a year to tech rivals, smartphone makers and wireless providers to be the preselected option, or default, on PCs and mobile phones.

By illegally maintaining this monopoly, the government alleges, Google has kept rival search engines such as Microsoft Corp.’s Bing and DuckDuckGo from gaining the scale needed to compete. Google says it has won its market share, which the government has pegged at almost 90%, because it has the best search engine.

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I’ve met Weinberg a couple of times – he’s a nice guy, making a useful search engine (I’ve used DDG for more than a decade). He says it takes 15 or more clicks to change the default search on Android; it should be one. Google said it’s four on iOS.
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Searching for a breakup • Medium

Scott Galloway:

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what was the last innovative Google product? Restructuring the brand’s architecture under Alphabet? Earnings growth has, mostly, been a function of finding new ways to extract profits from its monopoly: Google search results have become a billboard for Google-sponsored results interspersed with content harvested from other sites and links to Google’s own services.

In 2020, The Markup found that Google-associated results (ads for or links to the company’s other services) constituted over 60% of the first screen of an average Google search result. And in 1 of 5 searches, the entire first screen is Google results. This is the meat of its business: search ads generate 57% of the company’s revenue.

Despite turning search results into a carousel of ads and Google services, Google has racked up 90% market share in search queries — 95% on mobile. How? As Microsoft once did, it leverages its control over the most popular mobile operating system (Android) and spends unprecedented sums on deals assuring it is the default search engine on computers and phones — more than $10bn per year. Google says it’s the leader because it has the best product, but if that’s so … why pay $10bn a year to be the default?

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It’s slightly post-hoc to say “it leverages its control over the most popular mobile operating system” – Android’s success wasn’t a foregone conclusion in 2010, for example, when Nokia and Windows Phone were still alive. (Though, strategically, Eric Schmidt – on Apple’s board – had tied up the search deal on the first iPhone.)

But the final question – if you’re so great, why do you have to pay people so much to tell you that you’re great? – is the important one, and is coming under the spotlight in the US antitrust trial.
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March 2023: a gadget recession • Inside Orchard

Neil Cybart, on his site for observations about the wider tech market, writing back in March (before the Vision Pro was unveiled, but was suspected):

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While economic and competitive pressures are genuine, there is another factor unfolding in the gadget space that can’t be ignored. Beginning at the tail end of the pandemic, various tech YouTubers began to speak up about a marked slowdown in views and engagement. Things felt off in the tech vertical, and the pandemic didn’t seem to fully explain the situation.

In retrospect, the changes may be the byproduct of something akin to a settling out process in the gadget space. We aren’t quite ready to jump into the face wearables era. Apple is expected to unveil their move into the space in a few months with a launch later in the year. Meanwhile, the smartphone and tablet space has been unfolding along ecosystem grounds. The iPhone business has been a replacement business for years with the majority of sales going to existing iPhone users upgrading their device.

Taking a step back to look at broader industry trends, a gadget recession likely won’t be met with a wave of M&A. Instead, it is far more likely management teams will reassess their commitment to hardware in the first place. News of Microsoft and Google getting out of hardware altogether would not surprise me. There comes a point when years of investment dollars and managerial/talent resources just become too hard to justify when there is little to nothing to show for such efforts. The rationale that these companies gave for being in hardware in the first place has never been strong either.

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Since then Microsoft’s hardware chief has jumped ship (to Amazon, whose hardware chief departed). There’s a definite feeling that the hardware space has been wrung absolutely dry.
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Microsoft’s Surface Go 4 gets a much-needed performance boost • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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Microsoft has announced the Surface Go 4 — the latest version of its affordable 2-in-1 laptop series — at its Surface device launch event today. The new Go 4 features some minor performance upgrades over its predecessor, but it won’t be sold to consumers — the company says it’s specifically targeted at businesses and frontline workers.

…But the overall design being near-identical to its predecessor doesn’t particularly bode well for the Surface Go 4. In our review of the Surface Go 3, The Verge lambasted the convertible device for its flimsy build quality, poor battery life, and being too expensive for what you’re actually getting.

A quick hands-on test of the Surface Go 4 confirmed our suspicions. Performance was slow when running through some everyday tasks like web browsing and took embarrassingly long to switch between display orientations. Still, Microsoft is claiming that performance on the Windows 11 Pro version of the Surface Go 4 should be 80% faster than its predecessor.

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Businesses only? One could imagine that this is a sign of Microsoft retreating from the wider market, perhaps.
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The social media panic-mongers have pivoted to AI • The Daily Beast

Louis Anslow:

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Over a hundred influential leaders in media, government, philanthropy, and business gathered in New York City to hear [Tristan] Harris and his Center for Humane Technology co-founder, Aza Raskan, make a presentation which opened with a comparison of AI to nuclear weapons. This analogy was designed to evoke fear, leaving no room for nuanced discussions of risk and benefit (nuclear technology is also a critical tool for carbon free energy, for example.) This notion was seemingly borrowed from Yuval Noah Harari, whose quote, “What nukes are to the physical world… AI is to everything else,” was also featured later in the presentation.

It was the kind of rhetoric worthy of people the neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan has labeled “science populists”—a group she defined as “gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific ‘facts’ in simple, emotionally persuasive language.” Narayana’s piece focused on Harari, but could have just as easily been about Harris.

Harris and Raskan’s presentation fit this description throughout and, thankfully, at least two veteran journalists in the audience saw through it. Steven Levy, editor in chief of Wired magazine, wrote a scathing article in March 2023 titled, “How to Start an AI Panic,” laying into their populist, sensationalist rhetoric—and comparing it to the Reefer Madness tone of [Netflix film] The Social Dilemma.

In a post-presentation interview with Harris, veteran tech reporter Kara Swisher asked about the claim that “50% of AI researchers predict a 10% chance of extinction,” noting that the statistics were drawn from “a non-peer reviewed survey, a single question one, with around 150 responses.”

Harris retorted: “Don’t trust one survey.”

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Anslow makes a valid point: for some people, mongering fear about The New Hotness become a way of life, and when The New Hotness cools down, their options are to cool down with it, or find a New New Hotness to get bothered about. He isn’t sparing over who he points to either.
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NFT crash: 95% of the market is now worthless, study finds • Business Insider

Phil Rosen:

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Are NFTs dead? 

A recent study looking at the price of thousands of collections seems to suggest the answer is “yes.” 

A report by dappGambl based on data provided by NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap indicated that 95% of non-fungible tokens were effectively worthless. Out of 73,257 NFT collections, 69,795 of them had a market cap of zero ether.

By their estimates, almost 23 million people hold these worthless assets.

“This daunting reality should serve as a sobering check on the euphoria that has often surrounded the NFT space,” the researchers said. “Amid stories of digital art pieces selling for millions and overnight success stories, it is easy to overlook the fact that the market is fraught with pitfalls and potential losses.”

NFTs are digital representations of art or collectibles tied to a blockchain, typically ethereum, and each one has a unique signature that cannot be duplicated. In 2021 and 2022, the NFT market saw a huge bull run, at one point leading to $2.8bn in monthly trading volume. [That’s $2.8bn of Monopoly money, not real money – Overspill Ed.]

During that time, popular collections such as Bored Apes and CryptoPunks were selling for millions of dollars, and celebrities such as Stephen Curry and Snoop Dogg participated in the hype. The boom coincided with cryptocurrency’s peak when bitcoin was trading close to $70,000. On Wednesday, the price of the crypto hovered just above $27,000.

But as dappGambl’s study suggests, that’s all come crashing down. 79% of all NFT collections currently remain unsold, and the surplus of supply over demand has created a buyer’s market that isn’t doing anything to revive enthusiasm.

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Hard to choose between “shocked, I tell you, shocked” and “Oh no! Anyway…” But: 23 million people were that credulous? Well done internet for finding the world’s dimmest people.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A lawsuit has been filed by the author of Game Of Thrones – and others – against OpenAI, claiming copyright infringement. CC-licensed photo by vagueonthehow 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Didn’t humans write the final season? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Data analysis reveals surprisingly high number of Wordle cheaters • Discover Magazine

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The Times has since introduced some interesting analytics to help users understand the game, explore tactics and to see how they fare compared to other players and against the newspaper’s in-house Wordle computer, called Wordlebot.

Now James Dilger, from Stony Brook University in New York, says that this analytics page reveals far more data than is actually displayed. His analysis of this data over several months reveals a range of insights into the game, including the inescapable conclusion that up to 10,000 players cheat outrageously. “It happens consistently every day!” says Dilger, in his light-hearted paper.

His conclusions come via a fortuitous discovery. Every day, Wordlebot displays the dozen or so most popular words that players use for their first guess, plus some selected other words, such as the ranking of an individual’s first guess.

Dilger imagined that analyzing this data over time might reveal some interesting insights, so he copied and pasted it into an Excel spreadsheet. To his surprise, he ended up with the data for the top fifty most popular word guesses, most of which are never displayed on the webpage.

He collected this data between 3 May and 31 August 2023 and then analysed the trends that emerged. The results clearly show that many players cheat. The game has an internal vocabulary of 2315 words (five years’ worth) from which the correct answer is chosen. The chances that one of these is a first guess are 1/2315 or 0.043% at best. The actual probability is smaller because most users will not know the precise contents of this list.

And yet Dilger’s data shows that the percentage of players who guess correctly on their first try never drops below 0.2%, equivalent to 4000 players. “Some days it’s as high as 0.5% (10,000 players),” he complains. Dilger is strident in his conclusion. “What shall we call these people?” he asks. “Hmmm, “cheaters” comes to mind, so that’s what I call ‘em!”

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I don’t doubt that he’s right, though like him I don’t see what first-word cheaters get out of it. Is it the ones who play in family groups and want bragging rights?
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John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and more authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement • AP News

Hillel Italie:

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John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin are among 17 authors suing OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale,” the latest in a wave of legal action by writers concerned that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without permission.

In papers filed Tuesday in federal court in New York, the authors alleged “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and called the ChatGPT program a “massive commercial enterprise” that is reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

The suit was organized by the Authors Guild and also includes David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand among others.

“It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement. “Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI.”

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Hasn’t GRRM got a few books to finish? Also, where does he think OpenAI has been reading his content? Or is the complaint that it read the scripts of the first few series of Game Of Thrones and that’s his stuff?

Anyway, read on…
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Why George R.R. Martins’s lawsuit against generative AI will cost authors even if they win • Arkavian

Arkavian is a company that developed open source software for making deepfake pictures:

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what happens if Martin does win the lawsuit? Well, it’s not going to turn out the way he hoped. Sure, he will get awarded some money for damages. And probably, LLMs won’t be able to legally train on datasets with his book — in the US, anyway. But other countries — Japan, for instance — don’t see training data as a violation of copyright. So LLMs can legally train on datasets in Japan or another country, even if they contain Martin’s book – completely negating the effect of the lawsuit since they could just train in other countries with more relaxed laws. 

If this lawsuit makes US copyright law stricter against AI, all it would do is make companies hesitant to develop and innovate in their products. Limits on datasets could put a halt to innovations in the technology and put the US on the back foot for AI development and use. Restrictions on AI could translate into restrictions on how websites like Amazon use AI to recommend books to its customers — and authors don’t want that.

The best-case scenario for all authors would be for this lawsuit to get thrown out. There’s just no good way to restrict AI development via copyright that won’t harm authors, publishers, and their ability to sell through new channels in the US. And any restrictions on AI will harm not only AI companies, but authors everywhere. 

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The gruesome story of how Neuralink’s monkeys actually died • WIRED

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron:

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Fresh allegations of potential securities fraud have been leveled at Elon Musk over statements he recently made regarding the deaths of primates used for research at Neuralink, his biotech startup. Letters sent this afternoon to top officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by a medical ethics group call on the agency to investigate Musk’s claims that monkeys who died during trials at the company were terminally ill and did not die as a result of Neuralink implants. They claim, based on veterinary records, that complications with the implant procedures led to their deaths.

Musk first acknowledged the deaths of the macaques on September 10 in a reply to a user on his social networking app X (formerly Twitter). He denied that any of the deaths were “a result of a Neuralink implant,” and said Neuralink’s researchers had taken care to select subjects who were already “close to death.” Relatedly, in a presentation last fall, Musk claimed that Neuralink’s animal testing was never “exploratory,” but conducted instead to confirm fully formed scientific hypotheses. “We are extremely careful,” he said.

Public records reviewed by WIRED, and interviews conducted with a former Neuralink employee and a current researcher at the University of California, Davis primate center, paint a wholly different picture of Neuralink’s animal research.

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This is indeed gruesome reading. And of course Musk doesn’t care about the collateral damage on the path to his perhaps-impossible dream.
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Amazon’s all-new Alexa voice assistant is coming soon, powered by a new Alexa LLM • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy,:

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Amazon’s Alexa is about to come out of its shell, and what emerges could be very interesting. At its fall hardware event Wednesday, the company revealed an all-new Alexa voice assistant powered by its new Alexa large language model. According to Dave Limp, Amazon’s current SVP of devices and services, this new Alexa can understand conversational phrases and respond appropriately, interpret context more effectively, and complete multiple requests from one command. 

Voice assistants need a shake-up. A general lack of innovation and barely imperceptible improvements around comprehension have turned them into basic tools instead of the exciting technological advancements we hoped for when they broke onto the scene over a decade ago.

Generative AI has looked like their best shot at survival for a while. But while these digital assistants have always had an element of AI, they’ve lacked the complex processing abilities and more human-like interactions generative AI is capable of. This is a big moment for the smart home, as it could take home automation to the next level, moving it from a remote control experience to a home that’s, well, actually smart. 

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Chatty rooms! What an idea. Though this was inevitable; the only question was whether it would be Google or Amazon (or maybe Microsoft, but its announcement is Thursday) that would do this first.
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UK net zero policies: what has Sunak scrapped and what do changes mean? • The Guardian

Helena Horton:

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Rishi Sunak has announced a watering-down of the UK’s net zero policies, though claims he still wishes to meet the legally binding 2050 target. The prime minister said this was to save money for families, declaring: “If we continue down this path, we risk losing the consent of the British people and the resulting backlash will not just be against specific policies, but against the wider mission itself.”

But what has he scrapped? Will it actually save the people of the UK any money? And what will it mean for the climate crisis? The Guardian has looked into each policy and what the change means.

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Nothing good. What’s astonishing is that there’s so much obvious evidence of why these moves are bad. And yet the Tories have the audacity to trumpet that they’re “ending the ban on onshore wind” – a ban which they put in place in 2015.
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Gaia Vince says: we need to prepare for mass climate migration • Prospect

Philippa Nuttall:

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“Playground politics,” sighs Gaia Vince. The science journalist and author of Nomad Century is outraged—but unsurprised—by the UK government’s “stop the boats” campaign. When we speak, the Bibby Stockholm barge is being filled with asylum seekers, despite questions about its suitability, and Number 10 is apparently considering flying those it doesn’t want in the country to Ascension Island, if its Rwanda policy fails. Meanwhile, Lee Anderson, deputy chair of the Conservative party, has suggested asylum seekers refusing to be housed on the barge “fuck off back to France”. Vince, whose book advocates a pragmatic, organised and compassionate response to climate migration, is not short of adjectives to describe these methods. They are “unbelievable”, “depressing” and “unsustainable”, she says in only the first minute of our conversation.   

Published last summer and about to appear in paperback, Nomad Century argues that climate change will make large swathes of the planet uninhabitable, and that the only proper response is “a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken.” The alternative, Vince writes, is “calamitous chaos” with “enormous loss of life, or terrible wars and misery, as the wealthy erect barriers against the poorest.”

…In any case, she says, migration is happening “whether we like it or not. We can either deal with it in a sensible way or close our eyes and do nothing.” Ignorance, she suggests, is the UK government’s current choice—instead of proper policies, it is “responding in a way that drives division and maybe gets applause from a small pool of worshippers.” Since ideas such as flying people to Ascension Island are “ridiculous”, Vince wonders whether the government’s long-term plan might be similarly unthinkable. “Is that all 17-year-olds are conscripted into armies to fight these people on the borders?”

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Ironically – or perhaps not – the latter scenario is the setup for The Wall, a book by John Lanchester.
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Google DeepMind AI tool assesses DNA mutations for harm potential • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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Scientists at Google DeepMind have built an artificial intelligence program that can predict whether millions of genetic mutations are either harmless or likely to cause disease, in an effort to speed up research and the diagnosis of rare disorders.

The program makes predictions about so-called missense mutations, where a single letter is misspelt in the DNA code. Such mutations are often harmless but they can disrupt how proteins work and cause diseases from cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anaemia to cancer and problems with brain development.

The researchers used AlphaMissense to assess all 71m single-letter mutations that could affect human proteins. When they set the program’s precision to 90%, it predicted that 57% of missense mutations were probably harmless and 32% were probably harmful. It was uncertain about the impact of the rest.

Based on the findings, the scientists have released a free online catalogue of the predictions to help geneticists and clinicians who are either studying how mutations drive diseases or diagnosing patients who have rare disorders.

A typical person has about 9,000 missense mutations throughout their genome. Of more than 4m seen in humans, only 2% have been classified as either benign or pathogenic. Doctors already have computer programs to predict which mutations may drive disease but because the predictions are inaccurate, they can only provide supporting evidence for making a diagnosis.

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There’s a DeepMind blogpost. I find this very encouraging: a really sensible use of AI to evaporate the difficult part of the problem and leave the relevant bits behind.
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How to navigate Apple’s shift from Lightning to USB-C • The New York Times

Brian X Chen:

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The problem with USB-C cables is that while they usually look the same, the cheaper, low-quality cords offer no such protection for your device. They may have the correct oval connector, but inside, they lack chips to protect your phone.

So if you need a USB-C cable, don’t grab any cheap wire, like the $5 ones you’ll see at a gas station kiosk. Invest in a durable cable from a reputable company. Brands like Anker, Belkin and Amazon Basics are well known for their high-quality power cables that cost roughly $9 to $30, according to John Bumstead, the owner of RDKL Inc., a repair shop that refurbishes MacBooks. Buy the cables from trusted retailers or directly from the brands themselves — and avoid purchasing used wires on sites like eBay.

Be careful what you plug into.

Many USB-C cables lack chips to restrict the current powering your phone. So if you plug it into a source that charges at a higher voltage than your phone accepts, you could electrocute your phone, Ms. Jones said.

The lesson here is to be careful about what you plug your cord into. Those USB ports embedded into airplane back seats, hotel room walls or car consoles are a big no-no because it’s unclear what their charging rates are. It’s safest to plug your USB-C cable only into a high-quality charging brick that protects your phone. Wirecutter, our sister publication, recommends USB-C power bricks from Anker, RAVPower and Spigen that do a good job replenishing your phone quickly without damaging it.
There’s always wireless.

For iPhone owners who aren’t planning on upgrading right away but need new chargers, the most cost-effective alternative to buying another Lightning cable is to go wireless. The E.U. mandate applies only to wires that plug directly into devices — not wireless charging devices that replenish your phone via magnetic induction, such as Apple’s puck-shaped MagSafe

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But those USB ports embedded into airplane back seats are all USB-A, surely? Those aren’t going to fry your phone. For the rest, though, yup: USB-C needs colour coding, doesn’t it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified