Hard drive maker Seagate has been fined $300m – payable in 20 easy instalments – for flouting an export ban to Huawei. CC-licensed photo by Kenming Wang 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 at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time: it’s about the site we don’t seem to talk about any more. Free signup.

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

BuzzFeed News defined the 2010s • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel worked at Buzzfeed News (which is being closed down) from 2013 to 2019:

»

One can attribute the site’s cultural relevance, the industry enthusiasm around the work, and even the rivalries and haters to BuzzFeed News’s unofficial mission: to report on the internet like it was a real place, and to tell stories in the honest, casual tone of the web. At the time I joined, this was, if not a new kind of journalism, certainly an updated model for seeking out stories—one that’s now been fully absorbed by the mainstream. At its simplest, it might have meant mining a viral tweet or Reddit thread for ideas, but more often than not, it meant bearing witness to the joy, chaos, and horrors that would pour across our timelines every day and using them as a starting point for real reporting. It meant realizing, as I and my colleagues did, during the on- and offline manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, that a new culture of internet vigilantism was beginning to take hold in digital communities and that the media no longer unilaterally shaped broad news narratives.

Reporting on the internet like it was a real place led some of my colleagues to peer around corners of our politics and culture. In 2015, Joseph Bernstein outlined the way that “various reactionary forces have coalesced into a larger, coherent counterculture”—a phenomenon bubbling up in message boards such as 4chan that he called a “Chanterculture.” To read the piece now is to see the following half decade—reactionary MAGA politics, Trump’s troll armies, our current digital culture warring—laid out plainly. The Chanterculture story is a BuzzFeed News archetype: Movements like this weren’t hard to see if you were spending time in these communities and taking the people in them seriously. Most news organizations, however, weren’t doing that.

People afflicted with Business School Brain who didn’t understand BuzzFeed News (including one of the company’s lead investors) often described it like a tech start-up. This was true only in the sense that the company had an amazing, dynamic publishing platform—a content-management system that updated almost daily with new features based on writer input. But the secret behind BuzzFeed News had nothing to do with technology (or even moving fast). The secret was cultural. Despite the site’s constant bad reputation as a click farm, I was never once told to chase traffic. No editor ever discussed referrals or clicks. The emphasis was on doing the old-fashioned thing: finding an original story that told people something new, held people to account, or simply delighted. The traffic would come.

«

It’s so hard to make money from news online. There’s a slew of sites – many documented here over the years – which have tried and, regrettably, failed. Seems like the best way to make a small amount of money in online news is to start with a large amount of money.

unique link to this extract

US resident? Claim your piece of the $725m Facebook settlement if you used the platform during the last 15 years • Business Insider via Yahoo News

Aaron McDade:

»

Anyone in the US who’s had a Facebook account in the last 15 years can now submit a claim for their share of a $725m settlement from the Cambridge Analytica privacy-class action lawsuit.

Current or former Facebook users can submit claims through a website for the lawsuit by the August 25 deadline. The exact payment amounts per person will depend on how many claims are submitted.

A hearing is scheduled for September 7 when a judge is expected to approve the final details of the settlement. Unless other appeals are filed to delay the case, the site says the court will approve the settlement, and payments “will be distributed as soon as possible.”

Anyone who lived in the US and had a Facebook account from May 24, 2007, through December 22, 2022, is eligible to submit a claim, even if the account is no longer active. The claim form, which takes a few minutes to fill out, asks for a name, address, and email associated with the account, as well as when it was last used if the account is no longer active.

The settlement can be paid out in a variety of ways. Claimants can choose from a prepaid Mastercard, direct deposit to a bank account, or digital payment apps like PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle.

According to the site’s FAQ section, users also can opt out of eligibility for the settlement, which would allow them to retain the rights to be involved in potential future lawsuits over the claims involved in the Cambridge Analytica case.

«

If you’re in the US, get your claim in! The longer you were a Facebook user, the more you could be in line for. Though it’s probably not going to pay for your next dream home. More like a few cups of coffee.

(I expect there’s a similar case in the works in the UK, but don’t have any knowledge of one.)
unique link to this extract

Apple tester claims to be ‘blown away’ by AR/VR headset, says there was giant development leap • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Leaker Evan Blass, who has provided accurate insight into Apple’s plans in the past, claims to know a person who has had opportunities to “demo” the headset. Blass said that over the course of the last few months, the tester has gone from “lamenting its ‘underwhelming’ capabilities” to being “blown away” by the experience and the hardware.

“The leap they’ve made since [late last year] is giant,” the Apple tester told Blass. “I was so skeptical; now I’m blown away in a ‘take my money kind of way,'” they said. Blass shared the details on his Twitter account, which is private.

Apple has been working on the AR/VR headset for years now, and its debut has been pushed back multiple times as the company has aimed to solve development issues with the design and the software. Apple is now ready to preview it, and is expected to do so at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Back in March, The New York Times reported that several Apple employees it had spoken to were skeptical about the headset’s potential for success. The employees have questioned whether the headset is a “solution in search of a problem” and if it is “driven by the same clarity” as other Apple devices.

Apple CEO Tim Cook in April said that with everything the company has done, there have always been “loads of skeptics.” It comes with the territory of doing “something that’s on the edge,” Cook said.

The AR/VR headset is shaping up to be similar to the Apple Watch in terms of early functionality. It will be expensive at over $3,000, and limited in usefulness to begin with.

«

I’m suspicious of the existence of this tester altogether, but especially that they’ve gone from “blah” to “wow” in the course of a few months. It wouldn’t be impossible for someone to be feeding lines that they think the public discourse wants. I still think it would be crazy for Apple to introduce a headset at WWDC: the time, the economy, everything’s all wrong for it. I’ve seen far lesser products be hyped to the heavens with a certainty of a launch.. and then not appear.
unique link to this extract

Alphabet merges AI-focused groups DeepMind and Google Brain • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

Alphabet is merging an internal Google Research team called Brain with DeepMind, a move designed to bring two groups focused on artificial intelligence closer together as the battle for AI heats up.

Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for a reported $500m and has until now run it as an independent unit out of the UK. DeepMind has been one of Alphabet’s “other bets,” performing futuristic work, such as teaching computer systems to beat top-ranked players of the Chinese board game Go.

“Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in blog post Thursday.

Jeff Dean, who currently leads Google’s AI efforts, will be promoted and given the title of chief scientist at Google, reporting to Pichai. He’ll head up the “most critical and strategic” technical projects related to AI, the first of which will be a series of powerful, multimodal AI models.

The move marks Google’s latest reorganization in response to the rapid developments in AI, following OpenAI’s launch of the chatbot ChatGPT late last year. CNBC previously reported that Google reshuffled its Assistant organization to prioritize the company’s AI chatbot Bard.

“The pace of progress is now faster than ever before,” Pichai wrote. “To ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI, we’re creating a unit that will help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly.”

DeepMind has been able to operate separately from Google’s core research, enabling it to move quicker on breakthroughs such as AlphaFold, which can predict 3D models of protein structures. The two divisions, DeepMind and Google Research, have also reportedly had tensions in the past, leading DeepMind to seek more independence. 

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis will lead the development of “the most capable and responsible general AI systems,” Pichai said. That research, he added, “will help power the next generation of our products and services.” 

«

Doesn’t sound like this is going to bring peace and light. More like they’re putting them into a sack to see who emerges victorious. Dean, from Brain, will report to Pichai, while Hassabis works on general AI systems? Sparks will fly.
unique link to this extract

‘What time is’ SEO: Google direct answers cut out publishers • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

»

Google appears to have called time on an SEO tactic that has delivered millions of dubious clicks for publishers: the “what time is” story.

Stories like “what time is Eastenders on tonight” supercharged the traffic growth of websites such as the Daily Mirror and the Telegraph a decade ago.

Written for Google, these stories take a trending search term and manage to confect a news story out of answering it. They tend to reverse the conventional architecture of a news story by burying the relevant information near the bottom of a story, so readers spend more time on the page before arriving at a simply-told answer.

The most notorious form of this article purports to answer a question and then fails to do so. It might have the headline “when will Film X be released on Netflix” only to reveal in the final paragraph that the release date has yet to be revealed.

Google sought to stop surfacing these sort of articles in search with its “helpful content” algorithm update of August last year.

«

Perhaps it will do the same on “all we know about the [unreleased product]” stories, but that may be too much to hope for. I tried one of the examples shown in the story – “grand national 2023 time” (the Grand National is an annual very big horse race; think Kentucky Derby big) – and got informative answers in the excerpted text on DuckDuckGo. Seems fair to publishers.
unique link to this extract

‘I’ve never hired a writer better than ChatGPT’: how AI is upending the freelance world • Forbes

Rashi Shrivastava:

»

Melissa Shea hires freelancers to take on most of the basic tasks for her fashion-focused tech startup, paying $22 per hour on average for them to develop websites, transcribe audio and write marketing copy. In January 2023, she welcomed a new member to her team: ChatGPT. At $0 an hour, the chatbot can crank out more content much faster than freelancers and has replaced three content writers she would have otherwise hired through freelancing platform Upwork.

“I’m really frankly worried that millions of people are going to be without a job by the end of this year,” says Shea, cofounder of New York-based Fashion Mingle, a networking and marketing platform for fashion professionals. “I’ve never hired a writer better than ChatGPT.”

Shea has not posted a job on Upwork since she discovered ChatGPT (though she still has five freelancers working for her). After it was released in November 2022, ChatGPT amassed more than 100 million users, sparked an AI arms race at companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon and has given rise to a flurry of AI startups. And for small businesses looking to trim costs, the free tool can automate swaths of their operations, providing a cheaper alternative to freelance workers. Built on recent advances in generative AI, ChatGPT and its image-based sibling DALL-E 2 can carry out work that spans most of the freelancing spectrum, from writing articles and compiling research to designing graphics, coding and decrypting financial documents.

Now, freelancers who are less experienced and don’t offer specialized skills stand to lose their gigs, according to five clients Forbes interviewed. But rather than steering clear of the AI tool that could make them obsolete, more and more freelancers are relying on ChatGPT to do some if not all their work for them. Clients on job marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr are being flooded with nearly identical project proposals written by ChatGPT. A bitter side effect: it’s making clients dubious of the authenticity of work turned in by freelancers and causing transactional disputes and mistrust in the freelancing community.

«

If you’ve never hired a writer better than ChatGPT, you’ve really been hiring some terrible writers. Or perhaps more accurately, you’ve been commissioning some terrible work that good writers can’t be bothered with. Nevertheless: the AI tsunami is coming.
unique link to this extract

Space Elevator

Neal Agarwal:

»

Welcome to the space elevator, the only elevator that goes to space.

«

Very fun illustration of the scale that everything’s at when you’re heading to space. You’ll be surprised by how high a bird can fly. A helicopter too for that matter.
unique link to this extract

See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart • Washington Post

Kevin Schaul, Szu Yu Chen and Nitasha Tiku:

»

Chatbots cannot think like humans: They do not actually understand what they say. They can mimic human speech because the artificial intelligence that powers them has ingested a gargantuan amount of text, mostly scraped from the internet.

This text is the AI’s main source of information about the world as it is being built, and it influences how it responds to users. If it aces the bar exam, for example, it’s probably because its training data included thousands of LSAT practice sites.

Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.

To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google’s C4 [“Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus”] data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT)

The Post worked with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI on this investigation and categorized the websites using data from Similarweb, a web analytics company. About a third of the websites could not be categorized, mostly because they no longer appear on the internet. Those are not shown.

…Kickstarter and Patreon may give the AI access to artists’ ideas and marketing copy, raising concerns the technology may copy this work in suggestions to users. Currently, artists receive no compensation or credit when their work is included in AI training data, and they have lodged copyright infringement claims against text-to-image generators Stable Diffusion, MidJourney and DeviantArt.

The Post’s analysis suggests more legal challenges may be on the way: The copyright symbol — which denotes a work registered as intellectual property — appears more than 200 million times in the C4 data set.

«

One-third of the training sites aren’t on the internet any more? That seems like a lot to me. Sadly, The Overspill doesn’t appear in the training corpus; some interloper called “overspillsite.wordpress.com”, which mostly seems to be motivational messages. Pah.

unique link to this extract

When is a photo not a photo? The looming spectre of artificially generated photographs • Vanity Fair

Fred Ritchin is dean emeritus of the the school at New York’s International Center of Photography:

»

In 1984, when photographers were still using film, I began exploring the early use of computers to undetectably modify photographs. In an article in The New York Times Magazine I wrote that “in the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart. We may have to rely on the image maker, and not the image, to tell us into which category certain pictures fall.”

…In a news cycle often dominated by conspiracy theories and fake news, legitimate, unaltered photographs—instead of confronting us with realities from which we cannot look away (as happened during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement)—will more easily and automatically be rejected out of hand. It is not a coincidence, for example, that no single iconic image emerged to initiate or sustain a societal discussion about the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest in US history. Or that Western support for Ukraine, in its response to Russia’s brutal and ongoing invasion, was galvanized largely by the persistent video and online dispatches of Ukraine’s media-savvy president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, rather than by a series of iconic photographs.

Certainly, other factors have contributed to the photograph’s reduced role as witness: the disappearance of the newspaper front page, the billions of competing images on social media. But now, rather than the photograph, it is the occasional amateur video, posted online along with a fuller background narrative—such as of the footage of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer—that manages to mobilize meaningful, broad-based response.

«

unique link to this extract

Seagate to pay $300m penalty for shipping Huawei 7m hard drives • Reuters

Karen Freifeld:

»

Seagate Technology has agreed to pay a $300m penalty in a settlement with US authorities for shipping over $1.1bn worth of hard disk drives to China’s Huawei in violation of US export control laws, the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday.

Seagate sold the drives to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021 despite an August 2020 rule that restricted sales of certain foreign items made with US technology to the company. Huawei was placed on the Entity List, a US trade blacklist, in 2019 to reduce the sale of US goods to the company amid national security and foreign policy concerns.

The penalty represents the latest in a string of actions by Washington to keep sophisticated technology from China that may support its military, enable human rights abuses or otherwise threaten US security.

Seagate shipped 7.4m drives to Huawei for about a year after the 2020 rule took effect and became Huawei’s sole supplier of hard drives, the Commerce Department said.

The other two primary suppliers of hard drives ceased shipments to Huawei after the new rule took effect in 2020, the department said. Though they were not identified, Western Digital Corp and Toshiba were the other two, the US Senate Commerce Committee said in a 2021 report on Seagate.

«

Seagate’s latest financials (on Thursday!) show that it usually has about a 30% gross margin, and 16% operating margin. So a $300m fine on $1.1bn of drives essentially takes away its gross margin, leaving it revenue-neutral, not really fined. And the payment is being made in $15m chunks, quarterly, for five years.

Anyway, what’s Huawei doing for hard drives now?
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Modern faming uses GPS to plough and plant precisely – which is great until the GPS satellite you rely on goes dark. CC-licensed photo by NRCS Oregon 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. Inaccurate? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The iPhone setting that thieves use to lock you out of your Apple account • WSJ

Nicole Nguyen and Joanna Stern:

»

Greg Frasca has been locked out of his Apple account since October, and he’ll do just about anything to get back in.

He has offered to fly from Florida to Apple’s California headquarters to prove his identity in person, or write a check for $10,000 to reclaim the account. It holds the only copies of eight years of photos of his young daughters.

This is all because the thieves who stole Mr. Frasca’s iPhone 14 Pro at a bar in Chicago wanted to drain cash from his bank account and prevent him from remotely tracking down the stolen phone. They used his passcode to change the 46-year-old’s Apple ID password. They also enabled a hard-to-find Apple security setting known as the “recovery key.” In doing so, they placed an impenetrable lock on his account.

In February, we reported that thieves, often in and around bars at night, watch iPhone owners tap in their passcodes, then steal the targets’ phones. With this short four- or six-digit string, criminals can change the Apple account password and rack up thousands of dollars in charges using Apple Pay and financial apps.

Dozens of victims contacted The Wall Street Journal after the report was published, confirming similar crimes in at least nine US cities, including New York, New Orleans, Chicago and Boston. Many are able to get their money back, but those locked out of their Apple accounts by thieves using the recovery key face a bigger challenge: finding a way through Apple’s complex policies and bureaucracy to retrieve their lost photos, contacts, notes, messages and other files.

Apple introduced the optional recovery key in 2020 to protect users from online hackers. Users who turn on the recovery key, a unique 28-digit code, must provide it when they want to reset their Apple ID password.

iPhone thieves with your passcode can flip on the recovery key and lock you out. And if you already have the recovery key enabled, they can easily generate a new one, which also locks you out.

…How to protect yourself: Set a complicated passcode. You should always try to use Face ID when in public, but when you can’t, rely on an alphanumeric passcode, which includes letters and numbers. To set it up, go to Settings – Face ID & Passcode – Change Passcode. When selecting a new passcode, tap Passcode Options.

Use parental controls on yourself. [This is the better method – CA] Apple’s Screen Time—which lets parents place limits on their children’s accounts—can also help you protect your Apple account. But you have to enable a Screen Time passcode. (Remember to make that passcode different from your iPhone’s.)

In Settings, go to Screen Time and scroll down to set a passcode, if you haven’t already. Then go to Content & Privacy Restrictions, and toggle on Content & Privacy Restrictions. Scroll down to Allow Changes, then tap on Account Changes and select Don’t Allow.

«

Nightmare for those hit by this. A problem for Apple, which needs to find a way to beat this.

unique link to this extract

Social media is doomed to die • The Verge

Ellis Hamburger was at The Verge, then left to spend seven years at Snapchat before leaving that too:

»

the other day, I received a push notification from the app telling me to wish my nemesis a happy birthday. This might read as normal or even expected to most of you, but I recognized the notification for what it really was: a death knell for a social media platform past its prime.

From its earliest days, Snap wanted to be a healthier, more ethical social media platform. A place where popularity wasn’t always king and where monetization would be through creative tools that supported users — not ads that burdened them. I preached that friends mattered more than followers and acquaintances and that moments consumed in chronological order (like in real life) were better than those mixed up by an algorithm. And I impressed on new hires that we were building something different from the Facebooks and Twitters of the world and would never resort to their manipulative growth hacking.

This was why I joined Snapchat in the beginning, but in the end, Snap had given in to the most common of growth hacks: a push notification demanding the shallowest of interactions. To me, this notification didn’t indicate an imminent death for Snap’s revenue streams, which could take many years to dwindle, but of its relevance to those of us who use it every day. Because when you’re begging your users to just open the app, something isn’t quite working.

«

Of course it’s the people who’ve been inside the machine who can tell when it isn’t working right. Fascinating piece.
unique link to this extract

OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over • WIRED

Will Knight:

»

OpenAI has delivered a series of impressive advances in AI that works with language in recent years by taking existing machine-learning algorithms and scaling them up to previously unimagined size. GPT-4, the latest of those projects, was likely trained using trillions of words of text and many thousands of powerful computer chips. The process cost over $100m.

But the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, says further progress will not come from making models bigger. “I think we’re at the end of the era where it’s going to be these, like, giant, giant models,” he told an audience at an event held at MIT late last week. “We’ll make them better in other ways.”

Altman’s declaration suggests an unexpected twist in the race to develop and deploy new AI algorithms. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, Microsoft has used the underlying technology to add a chatbot to its Bing search engine, and Google has launched a rival chatbot called Bard. Many people have rushed to experiment with using the new breed of chatbot to help with work or personal tasks.

Meanwhile, numerous well-funded startups, including Anthropic, AI21, Cohere, and Character.AI, are throwing enormous resources into building ever larger algorithms in an effort to catch up with OpenAI’s technology. The initial version of ChatGPT was based on a slightly upgraded version of GPT-3, but users can now also access a version powered by the more capable GPT-4.

Altman’s statement suggests that GPT-4 could be the last major advance to emerge from OpenAI’s strategy of making the models bigger and feeding them more data. He did not say what kind of research strategies or techniques might take its place. In the paper describing GPT-4, OpenAI says its estimates suggest diminishing returns on scaling up model size. Altman said there are also physical limits to how many data centres the company can build and how quickly it can build them.

«

So LLMs have already hit their wall: now it’s down to fine tuning. Yet making them more domain-specific could make them far more useful than the generality that we presently see.

unique link to this extract

Sweden public radio exits Twitter, says audience already has • Associated Press

»

Sveriges Radio said on its blog that Twitter has lost its relevance to Swedish audiences. National Public Radio and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, meanwhile, have pointed to Twitter’s new policy of labeling them as government-funded instititutions, saying it undermines their credibility.

“For a long time, Sveriges Radio has de-prioritised its presence on Twitter and has now made the decision to completely stop being active on the platform, at the same time that we are shutting down a number of accounts,” said Christian Gillinger, head of the broadcaster’s social media activities.

He cited a recent study showing only some 7% of Swedes are on Twitter daily and said the platform “has simply changed over the years and become less important for us.”

“The audience has simply chosen other places to be. And therefore Sveriges Radio now chooses to deactivate or delete the last remaining accounts,” Gillinger said.

The broadcaster’s news service, SR Ekot, which has been labeled “publicly funded media,” will remain on Twitter but has been marked inactive.

«

Had been on Twitter since 2009. Quite possibly this would have happened anyway, though Sveriges Radio also pointed to the “recent turbulence” and indicated concern about the dramatic cuts in Twitter’s workforce.

Anyway, this defection of news outlets is likely to be a slow drain over this year; a dripping tap on an emptying canister.
unique link to this extract

National Weather Service accounts were not granted API exemptions by Twitter • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

On Friday and throughout the weekend, multiple National Weather Service (NWS) accounts announced that Twitter had removed their API access, which would disrupt crucial potentially life-saving automated emergency updates. The move came as Twitter prepares to transition its currently free API service to a paid subscription model starting at an exorbitant $42,000 per month for Enterprise access.

Twitter users were immediately outraged by the decision. Many advocated for the company to make exemptions for important public service accounts, like the NWS, which provides vital alerts during extreme weather events. Then, suddenly, a few verified “breaking news” Twitter accounts shared an update: Twitter had reversed course. Elon Musk and company was going to make that exception for NWS accounts and allow them access to the API without limits. Media outlets like CNN(opens in a new tab) quickly covered Twitter’s apparent change of heart. Twitter users were jubilant over the news.

Only, it’s not true.

…It appears that the report(opens in a new tab) that Twitter was making an exemption for NWS accounts originated with a Twitter account that goes by the name “T(w)itter Daily News.”

“NEWS: Twitter will allow the National Weather Service accounts to continue Tweeting weather alerts without limits,” the account tweeted on Saturday night. “Great Job @TwitterDev.”

«

Guess what: the account had a blue tick, which led some lazier folk to assume it was verified – ie real. Instead it was just a paid-for tick. A neat illustration of what Musk has messed up.
unique link to this extract

Russian gets 21 years for cheesecake-poisoning of US doppelgänger • Agence France-Presse via The Guardian

»

A Russian-born woman has was sentenced to 21 years in a US prison for trying to kill her American lookalike with poisoned cheesecake and then stealing her identity.

Viktoria Nasyrova, 47, was found guilty of attempted murder by a New York jury in February.

“A ruthless and calculating con artist is going to prison for a long time for trying to murder her way to personal profit and gain,” the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, said in a statement.

Nasyrova visited the home of her then 35-year-old victim in August 2016 bearing the gift of a cheesecake.

At the time, the pair resembled one another – both spoke Russian, had dark hair, the same skin complexion and shared other physical traits – the trial heard.

The woman ate the dessert and began to feel sick before passing out.

The next day, a friend discovered the victim unconscious. Pills were scattered around her to make it look like she had tried to kill herself, prosecutors said.

«

You’re probably thinking: oh, I read a doppelgänger story here recently, this must be the upshot. Not at all: that one was in Germany, reported about three months ago, and the victim died. Risky thing being a double.
unique link to this extract

Paytm speakers help India’s merchants with digital payments • Rest of World

Adnan Bhat:

»

Abbas Ali, a vegetable vendor in an upscale neighborhood in New Delhi, started accepting digital payments in 2021. But every time a customer paid online, the 48-year-old, who can neither read nor write, would need to call his son to confirm that the payment had been received.

The customers, often in a rush, would get impatient. Ali would have to spend more time attending to them than he had back when he accepted only cash. Eventually, a fellow vendor suggested he subscribe to a “sound box” — a nifty internet-connected device that reads out payment confirmation messages. “Earlier, I had to wait for five to 10 minutes after every transaction to get confirmation,” Ali told Rest of World. “I can now focus on other customers while the payment is being made. I have installed two sound boxes … one from Paytm and the other one from PhonePe.”

The sound box device — first introduced by India’s largest fintech company, Paytm, in 2019 — has been a runaway hit among small Indian businesses. Neighborhood mom-and-pop stores (kiranas) and street vendors, who had traditionally shied away from paying for tech services, have warmed up to the sound box.

The smart device — essentially a speaker bearing the logo of the fintech company facilitating the transactions — comes with a built-in SIM card. Most sound boxes can read out payment confirmation messages in English and multiple Indian languages, such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and Punjabi. In Indian cities and towns, sound boxes can now be seen across diverse businesses — from kiranas and clothing stores to produce carts and shops selling smoking products. 

«

So simple, so clever, so useful. India was one of the first countries to make heavy use of Google’s voice search facility (and voice readback) on Android phones a decade ago, and Google noticed it. Perhaps this is a missed opportunity for that.

Meanwhile, Rest Of World remains a terrific site, picking up fabulous stories nobody else does.
unique link to this extract

Farmers ‘crippled’ by satellite failure as GPS-guided tractors grind to a halt • Sydney Morning Herald

Mike Foley:

»

Tractors that pull seed-planting machinery, as well as the massive combine harvesters that reap Australia’s vast grain crops, are high-tech beasts that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They are enabled with GPS tracking and can be guided to an accuracy within two centimetres, enabling seed-planting equipment to sow crops with precision to drive up efficiency, prevent wastage and boost environmental sustainability.

All that went out the window when the Inmarsat-41 satellite signal failed.

Katie McRobert, general manager at the Australia Farm Institute, said Australian farmers sourced their GPS signal from one satellite, which was a critical risk to rural industries.

“Having all your GPS eggs in one basket is a vulnerability on a good day, and a fatal weakness on a bad one,” McRobert said.

«

Had no idea that Inmarsat had any role in GPS navigation; I thought it was all the US constellation. Explains why I’m not a farmer.
unique link to this extract

Taylor Swift didn’t sign $100m FTX sponsorship because she was the only one to ask about unregistered securities, lawyer says • Business Insider

Pete Syme:

»

Taylor Swift avoided signing a $100m sponsorship deal with FTX because she was the only celebrity to question the crypto exchange, according to the lawyer handling a class-action lawsuit against several FTX promoters.

Adam Moskowitz appeared on “The Scoop” podcast to discuss the lawsuit, and said that the plaintiffs are seeking over $5bn from FTX’s celebrity endorsers, including Shaquille O’Neal, Tom Brady, and Larry David.

The lawyer alleged that celebrities didn’t do their due diligence to check whether FTX was breaking the law. “The one person I found that did that was Taylor Swift,” Moskowitz told The Scoop’s Frank Chaparro, adding that Swift pulled out of the deal and never promoted the now-bankrupt exchange

The singer – whose father used to work for Merrill Lynch – began discussing the $100m tour sponsorship with FTX in the fall of 2021, per the Financial Times.

The terms included selling tickets as NFTs, although FTX marketing staff told the Times that “no one really liked the deal” and they thought it was “too expensive from the beginning.”

“In our discovery, Taylor Swift actually asked them: ‘Can you tell me that these are not unregistered securities?'” Moskowitz said.

«

Suspect Swift’s father might have had just something to do with that query.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The final issues of the final computer magazines to be printed in the US are on newsstands now. Sic transit gloria mundi. CC-licensed photo by Dru Kelly 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. Not available in print. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google devising radical search changes to beat back AI rivals • The New York Times

Nico Grant:

»

Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology.

Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3bn in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20bn is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

AI competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with AI features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

…The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162bn last year. Although it was not clear whether Microsoft’s work with AI was the main reason Samsung was considering a change after the last 12 years, that was the assumption inside Google. The contract is under negotiation, and Samsung could stick with Google.

But the idea that Samsung, which makes hundreds of millions of smartphones with Google’s Android software every year, would even consider switching search engines shocked Google’s employees.

After some workers were told that the company was looking for volunteers this month to help put together material for a pitch to Samsung, they reacted with emojis and surprise. “Wow, OK, that’s wild,” one person responded.

«

I wonder if Samsung would wait to see what Apple would do, and then follow suit. Also, why does the NYT use “AI” in its headline but then insist on “A.I.” in the story? (I edit the full stops out.)
unique link to this extract

How can we remove CO2 from the atmosphere? • Phind

Phind calls itself “the AI search engine for developers”, though it looks to me like a front end stuck on an LLM. The answers to the question above are pretty solid, and the sourcing is provided. It’s almost like Wikipedia on the fly.
unique link to this extract

Silicon valediction? Our road trip to tech industry hotspots as the sector cools • The Guardian

Kari Paul:

»

does this ballooning crisis really mean the end of Silicon Valley as we know it? As someone who has been covering tech for nearly a decade and lived in the Bay Area for the past four years, I wanted to see for myself. And so there I was, bumper to bumper, making my way from my apartment in East Oakland to downtown San Francisco.

Although the traffic was back to its pre-pandemic normal, the scene in San Francisco was more aligned with the recent “doom loop” narrative, when a city gets stuck in a negative cycle wherein various financial struggles fuel one another. What has been called “the most empty downtown in America” was indeed desolate – with visible signs of homelessness and crime, and very few workers on its empty sidewalks.

The financial district was once a bustling center of high-earning workers enjoying $17 salads for lunch and synergizing over coffee meetings – with headquarters for companies like Uber, Twitter and Salesforce centralized in the hub. Today, the streets were nearly silent.

I stopped for coffee at the market below the headquarters of Twitter and previously Uber, once a popular morning coffee spot for many tech workers. But there was none to be had – the shop closed three months ago due to lack of demand, a worker told me. “The workers left during Covid, and they never came back,” she said.

I hopped in my car and headed to the South Bay, the birthplace of tech giants like Apple, HP, Adobe, Paypal and Google, to see if the prospects were less bleak.

«

Neat idea for a feature. Things are definitely quieter.
unique link to this extract

Google Pixel Fold, the firm’s first folding phone, to launch in June • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

Google will launch its first foldable smartphone sometime in June, challenging Samsung’s market-leading foldable phone business, according to internal communications viewed by CNBC. It plans to announce the device at its annual developer conference, Google I/O, on May 10.

The Pixel Fold, known internally by the codename “Felix,” will have the “most durable hinge on a foldable” phone, according to the documents. It will cost upward of $1,700 and compete with Samsung’s $1,799 Galaxy Z Fold 4.

Google plans to market the Pixel Fold as water-resistant and pocket-sized, with an outside screen that measures 5.8in across, according to the documents. Photos viewed by CNBC show that the phone will open like a book to reveal a small tablet-sized 7.6in screen, the same size as the display on Samsung’s competitor. It weighs 10oz, slightly heavier than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4, but it has a larger battery that Google says will last for 24 hours, or up to 72 hours in a low power mode.

The Pixel Fold is powered by Google’s Tensor G2 chip, according to the documents. That’s the same processor that launched in the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones last year.

«

The Pixel is already a niche – it hardly sells anything, in relative terms – so it makes a sort of sense to sell it in a ludicrously expensive form which is itself a niche.

unique link to this extract

Major retail players are walking back their metaverse strategies • Modern Retail

Maria Monteros:

»

For some of the largest retail companies and brands, the metaverse is losing its lustre.

Walmart has reportedly shut down its Universe of Play metaverse experience on Roblox just six months after its launch, according to consumer advocacy group Tina.org. Walmart, for its part, said it discontinued the experience “as planned.” Walt Disney has axed the next-generation storytelling and consumer-experiences unit that was mapping out the company’s metaverse strategies late last month. This string of news came after social media giant Meta reported that its metaverse division generated a loss of $4.3bn in the fourth quarter.

These reports have raised questions on the metaverse’s ability to yield returns on the investments companies have made in it. Retailers and brands have mainly been using the metaverse to build brand experiences and marketing, but many have yet to report on its conversion rate. In an economic environment where retailers and brands have been attempting to cut costs, experts said that retailers would likely pare down unprofitable areas of their businesses. 

“One of the biggest challenges was really figuring out the right [key performance indicators] and also just figuring out if there weren’t even implications for many brands when it came to their physical product,” said Melissa Minkow, director of retail strategy at digital consultancy firm CI&T. “It was just such a big, broad, abstract landscape that it seemed there was kind of a lack of direction.”

«

Winter again in the metaverse: after Second Life came and went, I make this the third. (There was another one back in the mid-90s, but most people hadn’t heard about it.) Then again, AI went through multiple winters before hitting its stride. Nowadays you’ll meet people in the street who are routinely using ChatGPT in their work. So the metaverse might arrive in a big way. But it’s probably going to be a while yet.
unique link to this extract

NSO developed three new ways to hack iPhones, Citizen Lab says • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

»

Israeli spyware maker NSO Group deployed at least three new “zero-click” hacks against iPhones last year, finding ways to penetrate some of Apple’s latest software, researchers at Citizen Lab have discovered.

The attacks struck phones with iOS 15 and early versions of iOS 16 operating software, Citizen Lab said in a report Tuesday. The lab, based at the University of Toronto, shared its results with Apple, which has now fixed the flaws that NSO had been exploiting.

The attacks targeted human rights activists who were investigating the 2015 mass kidnapping of 43 student protesters in Mexico, other suspected military abuses, and the related government response, Citizen Lab said. Mexico has been a major NSO customer.

According to Citizen Lab, one of the attacks, in September 2022, coincided with a report by international experts challenging government evidence in the 2015 case and its interference with the investigation.

It’s the latest sign of NSO’s ongoing efforts to create spyware that penetrates iPhones without users taking any actions that allow it in. Citizen Lab has detected multiple NSO hacking methods in past years while examining the phones of likely targets, including human rights workers and journalists.

«

As fast as you kill one spyware company, the other one keeps going.
unique link to this extract

Reddit wants to get paid for helping to teach big AI systems • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

»

In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or API, the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing AI systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new AI systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.

Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for API access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.

«

Could be worth millions to Reddit.

unique link to this extract

The end of computer magazines in America • Technologizer

Harry McCracken:

»

The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you—assuming there is a newsstand near you. They’re the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both publications will be available in digital form only.

But I’m not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I’m writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended.

It is possible to quibble with this assertion. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been around since 1984 and can accurately be described as a computer magazine, but the digest-sized publication has the production values of a fanzine and the content bears little resemblance to the slick, consumery computer mags of the past. Linux Magazine (originally the U.S. edition of a German publication) and its more technical sibling publication Admin also survive. Then again, if you want to quibble, Maximum PC and MacLife may barely have counted as U.S. magazines at the end; their editorial operations migrated from the Bay Area to the UK at some point in recent years when I wasn’t paying attention. (Both were owned by Future, a large British publishing firm.)

Still, I’m declaring the demise of these two dead-tree publications as the end of computer magazines in this country. Back when I was the editor-in-chief of IDG’s PC World, a position I left in 2008, we considered Maximum PC to be a significant competitor, especially on the newsstand. Our sister publication Macworld certainly kept an eye on MacLife. Even after I moved on to other types of tech journalism, I occasionally checked in on our erstwhile rivals, marveling that they somehow still existed after so many other computer magazines had gone away.

I take the loss personally, and not just because computer magazines kept me gainfully employed from 1991-2008.

«

Some of these magazines were colossal: hundreds of glossy pages. There was a lot of money sloshing around print. Now it sloshes around the internet.
unique link to this extract

The challenges of conducting open source research on China • bellingcat

Alison Killing:

»

The People’s Republic of China is well known for its efforts to restrict the free flow of information online. With this in mind, this guide provides an overview of some of the challenges facing open source researchers investigating China-  focusing primarily on those outside China. For those who are just getting started in open source research on China, it is designed to give an idea of the difficulties you may face. Since 2017 evolving censorship tactics and increased regulations that reduce anonymity online have made open source research on China increasingly difficult. Methodologies that researchers have used successfully in the past are often rendered useless by new restrictions if Chinese authorities become aware of them. Access to Chinese websites and social media apps, as well as methods for investigating them, are therefore currently shrinking. 

The current range of difficulties may sound bleak – and to a certain extent it is – but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t finding creative ways to work around them, or that there aren’t clear ways that developers and other researchers can work to improve things.

«

bellingcat has come a long way since it was one bloke using YouTube and other open source content to identify missiles in Syria.
unique link to this extract

Can Intel become the chip champion the US needs? • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

»

Sales of PCs — still Intel’s main market — have fallen back after a pandemic-era boom, and many Wall Street analysts believe the company’s predictions about the market in the long term are unrealistic. To make matters worse, Apple recently dropped Intel in its Macs in favour of its own silicon chip designs, while AMD has taken advantage of TSMC’s superior manufacturing to claim an estimated 35% of the PC market.

“Thirty% of their [PC] market has vanished,” Rasgon says of Intel, once synonymous with the PC industry. But now, even some of its biggest customers seem ready to move on.

“I think it’s important for Intel to succeed, and they’ve been a great partner,” says Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Technologies. “But if they don’t succeed, we’ll use something else.” That could include new chip designs not based on the core chip architecture found in Intel’s main products, he adds. “Competition’s a good thing.”

Meanwhile, in servers, Intel processors face a barrage of competition, as cloud computing giants such as Google and Amazon have turned to designing their own chips. The data-intensive work of training AI systems has also boosted demand for different classes of chips. Wall Street’s belief that Nvidia will be the main winner from the AI race has lifted its shares by 90% this year and added $360bn to its value — or more than two and a half times Intel’s entire market capitalisation.

One response from Intel has been to diversify into new chip architectures to compete. Another has been to open up its manufacturing to other chip companies, in the hopes of bringing in enough outside business to support the huge investments it needs to make.

«

That’s a big chunk of the PC market gone to AMD: add in Apple’s share and it’s about 40% lost in just a few years. Add in the shift to GPUs and Intel looks lost.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Does nobody remember Ananova, the first AI newsreader, launched 23 years ago this month? CC-licensed photo by Nick Richards 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. See today’s corrections! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A.I. pop culture is already here • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

In a 2022 interview, David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, used the phrase “aesthetic accelerationism” to describe the profusion of generated imagery enabled by public AI tools. It evokes a world in which every style, every idea, and every possible remix is generated as fast and frictionlessly as possible, and the successful ones stick and get attention, like “Harry Potter by Balenciaga” and the swagged-out Pope.

It may be less because they are artistically great than because they solved some formula of attention. Perhaps the successful creation is unimaginably bizarre, the seamless merging of two unrelated things. Or it’s driven by the fascination of the perfect replica, something that we know isn’t real but which is easy to see or briefly perceive as such, like a trompe-l’oeil painting.

For the past few days, I’ve been looping a new hip-hop track over and over. It’s called “Savages,” by the French outfit AllttA. The song is sweetly nostalgic, with synthesized strings and a snare backbeat; it features what sounds like Jay-Z trading verses with AllttA’s Mr. J. Medeiros in a throwback style.

But, of course, it’s not Jay-Z; it’s an AI model of his voice, used, presumably, without the artist’s permission. It’s another example of illusory realism. The human-written song is good on its own, and would be perfectly fine without the fake Jay-Z, but the familiar voice adds something ineffably compelling to the track, making it sound like an unreleased B-side from the nineteen-nineties. It has more than two hundred thousand plays on YouTube. “The thought of enjoying this and it’s AI is beyond me,” one user wrote in the comments. I feel the same kind of existential confusion. It sticks in my brain like an unsolved puzzle. I don’t care that it’s not actually Jay-Z, in large part because the AI quality is good enough that I, a non-expert, can barely tell the difference.

«

More recently there’s the AI “Drake vs The Weeknd” song (sorry, not my bag). But this is what I meant by the AI tsunami, which I wrote, good grief, back in August last year, before ChatGPT was a thing and when the AI illustrators were still using crayons: for now, the creation is being prompted in the first place by humans (on shrooms, in the case of the swagged Pope), but give it just enough time – less than you might think – and the human will just be the gatekeeper, and then the person standing in the face of the tsunami.
unique link to this extract

Reddit moderators brace for a ChatGPT spam apocalypse • Vice

Laurie Clarke:

»

The two-million-strong AskHistorians forum allows non-expert Redditors to submit questions about history topics, and receive in-depth answers from historians. Recent popular posts have probed the hive mind on whether the stress of being “on time” is a modern concept; what a medieval scribe would’ve done if the monastery cat left an inky paw print on their vellum; and how Genghis Khan got fiber in his diet. 

Shortly after ChatGPT launched, the forum was experiencing five to 10 ChatGPT posts per day, says [forum moderator and postdoc associate at Cornell University, Sarah] Gilbert, which soon ramped up as more people found out about the tool. The frequency has tapered off now, which the team believes may be a consequence of how rigorously they’ve dealt with AI-produced content: even if the posts aren’t being deleted for being written by ChatGPT, they tend to violate the sub’s standards for quality.

The moderators suspect some ChatGPT posts are aimed at “testing” the mods, or seeing what the user can get away with. Other comments are clearly part of astroturfing and spamming campaigns, or engaged in “karma farming,” where accounts are set up to accumulate upvotes over time, giving them the appearance of being authentic, so that they can be deployed for more nefarious purposes later on.

But it’s not just one well-moderated forum encountering the issue. In fact, Reddit’s ChatGPT-powered bot problem is “pretty bad” right now, according to a Reddit moderator with knowledge of the platform’s wider moderation systems, who wished to remain anonymous. Several hundred accounts have already been removed from the site, and more are being discovered daily, they said, adding that most of the removals are being done manually because Reddit’s automated systems struggle with AI-created content. Reddit declined to offer any comment on this. 

«

Predictable. We’re going to need really sophisticated CAPTCHAs to defeat this.
unique link to this extract

The fascinating and evolving story of bacteria and cancer • Ground Truths

Eric Topol:

»

It was medical dogma: cancer tissue is sterile. That’s what we had learned and taught in medical school for decades even though bacteria were detected in tumours more than 100 years ago. When studies were reported asserting that bacteria were present in tumour tissue, they were consistently debunked as representing contaminants.

Then came new tools that include single-cell sequencing and sophisticated spatial profiling (I’ll describe more on this later) providing high-resolution portraits of tumours. The new dogma is that bacteria have a pervasive (yet variable) presence within and across solid tumours—the ”presence of intratumoural bacteria being designated a hallmark of cancer.” Furthermore, where bacteria are more apt to be found within tumour regions, T cell recruitment and function is suppressed. These regions of tumour are micro-niches exhibiting immune evasion.

Just as that had been determined, there was a new twist this week: engineering bacteria to induce a potent T cell immune response to kill the tumour. This can be viewed as the polar opposite. Instead of bacteria improving a tumour’s ability to duck our immune response and spread, this represents clever ways to genetically manipulate bacteria (aka “designer bugs”) to make it considerably more antigenic, a new route to immunotherapy.

«

This is indeed fascinating, and really new: the presence of bacteria not being contamination, but something else, was only confirmed in 2020. Now they’re being used against the tumours. It also shows how deeply enmeshed our cells and bodies are with bacteria.
unique link to this extract

Ford commits to continued CarPlay support as GM, Tesla, and Rivian face backlash for holding out • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

As companies like GM and Rivian face a backlash for failing to adopt Apple’s CarPlay platform, Ford is doing the exact opposite. In a statement to 9to5Mac, Ford explained its reasoning for supporting CarPlay…and it has us pondering the future of Ford’s relationship with Apple and next-gen CarPlay.

Ford is using its commitment to CarPlay as a selling point over other EVs [electric vehicles] from the likes of GM, Tesla, and Rivian. In the last two weeks, GM revealed that it will no longer support CarPlay in its EVs, starting with 2024 model-year vehicles, while Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe doubled down on his company’s resistance to CarPlay.

GM’s decision and Scaringe’s comments have faced widespread backlash from CarPlay fans. Tesla, of course, also continues to be a CarPlay holdout, and there’s no indication that it will ever change.
In a statement to 9to5Mac on Thursday, Ford made it clear that it has no plans to abandon CarPlay, unlike some of its counterparts.

“We continue to offer Apple CarPlay and Android Auto because customers love the capability that enables easy access and control of their smartphone apps – especially our EV customers because some EVs currently do not offer the features,” a spokesperson said.

«

This does raise the question of whether CarPlay and Android Auto are really essential to the experience, or whether the EV makers such as Rivian and Tesla can nail the software stack so well that nobody will worry about using their phone for messages, maps, or music/podcasts – and will find Bluetooth does the job well enough. Far from a “backlash”, I think it’s all still to play for: possibly if enough people become acquainted with CarPlay/Android Auto in their present cars, they’ll demand it in the EVs. But I wouldn’t take that as absolutely given.
unique link to this extract

Kuwait unveiled its first AI-powered news presenter. Could it be an ethics nightmare? • AFP/Euronews

Sophia Khatsenkova :

»

A media outlet in Kuwait is launching its first virtual news presenter using artificial intelligence (AI). Named “Fedha,” the AI anchor made her debut on the Twitter account of Kuwait News.

The deputy editor-in-chief for Kuwait News told AFP the move tested AI’s potential to offer “new and innovative content” and the virtual anchor might be used to present news bulletins.

The presenter’s blonde hair and light-coloured eyes reflect the country’s diverse population of Kuwaitis and expats, according to the editor.

…But the rapid rise of AI globally has also sparked fears over its potential to spread disinformation and erode trust in mainstream media, according to Brandi Geurkink, strategy and technology advisor at Reset.

Kuwait ranked 158 out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders 2022 World Press Freedom Index. 

Experts are raising questions about whether replacing humans with AI could lead to less freedom of expression for reporters in the country. 

“I think that news broadcasting was of last bastion of truth for a lot of people to be able to see a person’s face, hear their voice and understand who this person is and whether I trust them, is important,” said Geurkink in an interview with Euronews.

«

Oh suuuure they chose the blonde hair to fit in with the “diverse population”. The idea that you need humans to discern whether something’s true is a strange one. People on TV (politicians) lie to you all the time.

Also, does nobody remember Ananova? An AI newsreader wayyy back in the day: 23 years ago this month. (Went nowhere.)
unique link to this extract

More than half of journalists could be set to leave Twitter, survey says • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

»

According to a Semrush ranking, Twitter is only the 16th most popular social media network generally with 436 million users – some way behind Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp, Instagram, Wechat, Tiktok and Youtube which all have ore than one billion active monthly users.

And when asked if they have considered leaving Twitter in the last year some 50% of the journalist respondents said yes versus 44% who said no and 7% who were not sure.

The utility of Twitter for journalists is made clear in the survey. Of those who use the platform, some 83% use it to follow the news, 78% use it to promote their work and 69% use it to find sources.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter in October journalists were already concerned about safety on the platform. Female journalists in particular have been subjected to threats and abuse on social media, with Twitter among the most challenging platforms – largely due to the presence of anonymous “trolls”.

Concerns about the future of Twitter have been ramped up by the platform’s plan to charge journalists and news organisations for “verified” status. Previously, blue-tick verifications were seen as a way of curbing fake news and promoting genuine sources.

But news publishers are now being issued with a bill for more than £1,000 a month to retain their verified status on the platform.

«

Journalists who were surveyed cited “follow the news” (83%), “promote my work” (78%), “find sources” (69%), “connect with other journalists” (67%), “connect with my audience/readers” (61%), plus “discover new voices” (48%) and “share my opinion” (43%). I think “considered leaving” is about as reliable as those celebrities who, before elections, say they’ll leave the country if X gets in, and are found still there when X has been in charge for years.
unique link to this extract

Dumping iron nanoparticles into the oceans might save the planet

Kristin Houser:

»

We know from natural events in the past that increasing the amount of iron in these seas can dramatically increase the growth of phytoplankton. When iron-rich ash from volcanic eruptions has fallen on the ocean’s surface, it has triggered phytoplankton blooms large enough to see from space.

This knowledge led oceanographer John Martin to put forth something called the “iron hypothesis,” which suggests that “fertilizing” the ocean with iron could increase the amount of carbon-sucking phytoplankton — theoretically enough to cool the entire Earth. “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age,” he famously quipped during a lecture in 1988.

In 1993, shortly after Martin’s death, his colleagues at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories tested the hypothesis by increasing the concentration of iron over 64 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. They then observed the area for 10 days and saw the amount of plant biomass double.

“All biological indicators confirmed an increased rate of phytoplankton production in response to the addition of iron,” they wrote in a paper detailing the experiment.

…In 2009, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory tracked the impact of a major ocean fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica by measuring carbon particles 800 meters below the surface of the water in the area for a year — and their findings were less than encouraging.

“Just adding iron to the ocean hasn’t been demonstrated as a good plan for storing atmospheric carbon,” said researcher Jim Bishop. “What counts is the carbon that reaches the deep sea, and a lot of the carbon tied up in plankton blooms appears not to sink very fast or very far.”

While researchers are still trying to figure out why that is, there are a number of theories, including ones centered on the feeding habits of creatures that live off phytoplankton and the presence of iron-binding organic compounds in ocean water. 

Some climate scientists aren’t ready to give up on the idea of ocean fertilization just yet, though.

«

When you read what their plans are, though – specially coated nanoparticles! – you realise that they should. “Boil-the-ocean” plans abound. The oceans remain unboiled.
unique link to this extract

Israeli spyware maker Quadream closes, fires all employees • Haaretz

Omer Benjakob:

»

The cyberoffensive company QuaDream, which operates from Israel and specializes in hacking iPhones on behalf of government clients, called its employees in for a pre-termination hearing on Sunday.

For several months, the company has been undergoing significant downsizing, even losing entire teams to competitors, as Israel continues to curtail the sale of local spyware in wake of U.S. pressure.

Last week, Citizen Lab, which focuses on human rights and technology, published a report revealing that QuaDream’s spy software was used against journalists and dissidents around the world. According to people familiar with the local cyber arms industry, the report, as well as lack of sales and Israeli regulations, caused the company to halt its operations in Israel.

«

“Lack of sales” for a spyware company that hacks iPhones? Either Apple is getting better all the time, or they weren’t that good at it. Coin flip between them.
unique link to this extract

Russia claims bots are caught only 1% of the time, Discord leak says • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

»

The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known, boosting lies about Ukraine’s military and the side effects of vaccines with hundreds of thousands of fake online accounts, according to documents recently leaked on the chat app Discord.

The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1% of the time, one document says.

That claim, described here for the first time, drew alarm from former government officials and experts inside and outside social media companies contacted for this article.

“Google and Meta and others are trying to stop this, and Russia is trying to get better. The figure that you are citing suggests that Russia is winning,” said Thomas Rid, a disinformation scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He added that the 1% claim was probably exaggerated or misleading.

Many of the 10 current and former intelligence and tech safety specialists interviewed for this article cautioned that the Russian agency whose claims helped form the basis for the leaked document may have exaggerated its success rate.

But even if Russia’s fake accounts escaped detection only 90% of the time instead of 99%, that would indicate Russia has become far more proficient at disseminating its views to unknowing consumers than in 2016, when it combined bot accounts with human propagandists and hacking to try to influence the course of the U.S. presidential election, the experts said.

«

(Thanks Matthew for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: one short, one long.
Short: “rodomontade” means “boastful or inflated talk/behaviour”; it is not synonymous with “quotidian” (everyday or mundane, which is the meaning I was reaching for. Thanks Jason.)

Longer: Rodrigo from Brazil writes re the Brazil/Twitter article yesterday: “Last Monday, Ministry of Justice met with social platforms. A Mexican lawyer from Twitter (because Brazil’s Twitter was closed) shocked everyone by saying pictures of users glorying school shooters weren’t violating its terms of use. (Flávio Dino’s quote from Bloomberg was a response to this.)

“Article here (please use an online translator).

“Twitter is a cesspool of hatred since ever, but it got worse with Musk. A few days before Santa Catarina shooting, a teenage from São Paulo killed a teacher. He announced and was incentivized on Twitter. Here’s a good report on this.”

Could the technology that created ChatGPT help us understand sperm whales’ language? And would we know what they meant if it could? CC-licensed photo by Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith 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 was another post at the Social Warming Substack last Friday: it’s about how the flywheel of Twitter is slowing down.

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

It’s not just the Discord leak. Group chats are the internet’s new chaos machine • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

In every group chat, no matter the size, participants fall into informal roles. There is usually a leader—a person whose posting frequency drives the group or sets the agenda. Often, there are lurkers who rarely chime in. Different chats, depending on the size, develop their own sets of social rules and hierarchies. “The key to every group chat is mutually assured destruction,” the New York Times reporter Astead Herndon tweeted in 2021. “If you’re the only one dropping tea, you’re at risk. [If] one person is a little too silent, they gotta go.” Larger group chats are not immune to the more toxic dynamics of social media, where competition for attention and herd behavior cause infighting, splintering, and back-channeling.

According to the [Washington] Post’s reporting, [21-year-old Jack] Teixeira was fixated on capturing the attention of—and winning approval from—his Discord community. “He got upset” when people in the chat ignored his long, detailed summaries of classified documents, and he threatened to stop posting altogether, one server member told the newspaper. Eventually, Teixiera started sharing photos of the classified documents with the chat because they were more engaging. As the national-security reporter Spencer Ackerman wrote this week, Teixeira “didn’t leak for patriotism, principle, or even money.” His motivation was far less aspirational but, as Ackerman notes, it was “uncomfortably familiar”: He was showing off for the group chat.

Group chats aren’t just good for triggering geopolitical crises—they’re also an effective means to start a bank run, as the world learned last month. The investor panic that led to the swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March was effectively caused by runaway group-chat dynamics. “It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” a start-up founder told Bloomberg in March. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.”

…This presents a major issue: Unlike traditional social media or even forums and message boards, group chats are nearly impossible to monitor. As law enforcement, journalists, and researchers have learned, trying to track extremist groups such as QAnon or right-wing militias is much harder when they retreat to smaller, private chat apps.

«

unique link to this extract

Elon Musk just shut down automation for important public safety accounts • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

Since acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk maintained that one of his major objectives was to eliminate the bots.

Last night, Twitter did just that. One problem, though: The bots blocked are the good ones.
Numerous public service Twitter accounts have lost their ability to automatically post breaking news and events. Twitter has been removing API access, which allows many of these accounts to post in an authorised way by the platform, as it switches to Musk’s new high-priced paid API system.

Many of these affected Twitter accounts have automated updates, but aren’t the type of hands-off bot accounts that some may think of when they hear the term “bot.” 

For example, numerous National Weather Service accounts that provide consistent updates, both automated and manually posted by humans, shared that they could no longer provide their up-to-the-minute, potentially life-saving updates.

«

Would it be too contrarian to say that if you’re getting your weather alerts from Twitter, you’re doing it wrong? It seems to me that it was only ever making up space, and that nobody’s really going to miss those ones. But there are lots of rodomontade bots posting far less important (or not at all important) information that people are going to miss.
unique link to this extract

Twitter clashes with Brazil over school violence posts • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Andrew Rosati, Rachel Gamarski and Daniel Carvalho:

»

A sudden spike in killings in education centers across Brazil — where school shootings are uncommon — prompted authorities this week to clamp down on social media companies that were hosting messages that lauded the attacks.

Twitter, which has espoused a free-speech ethos since being taken over by billionaire Elon Musk last year, initially resisted over 500 requests from Brazil’s Justice Ministry to take down posts and profiles. The stance sparked widespread backlash and the issuing of an executive decree late Wednesday that threatens Twitter and other platforms with fines — or even a potential ban for failure to comply.

“A child’s life is worth more than all the terms of use in all the platforms,” Justice Minister Flavio Dino said Wednesday evening in Brasilia after announcing the decree.

The Justice Ministry’s offensive comes as the nation is still reeling from the murder of four children caused by a hatchet-wielding man at a daycare center in southern state of Santa Catarina this month.

Investigators often point to the existence of active groups in the far-reaches of the Internet that celebrate such attacks as one of the reason violence in schools keeps multiplying.

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. Internet activists and enraged Twitter users struck back at the website with posts containing #TwitterApoiaMassacres, or Twitter supports massacres, which later appeared to be blocked on the platform.

«

Fun how Bloomberg has to explain that “school shootings are uncommon” for its American audience. Of course Brazil is now run by Lula, not Bolsonaro; the latter delighted in stirring up trouble online. For Twitter, though, the question is: what did it really do wrong? There’s no clear indication that the attacks were inspired by Twitter users. The reference the authorities are using is Columbine – another US school massacre.
unique link to this extract

Artist refuses prize after his AI image wins at top photo contest • PetaPixel

Michael Zhang:

»

A photographer has stirred up fresh controversy and debate after his artificial intelligence (AI) image won first prize at one of the world’s most prestigious photography competitions. He has since declined to accept the prize while the contest has remained silent on the matter.

Berlin-based “photomedia artist” Boris Eldagsen participated this year in the World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Awards, a leading photo contest that offers prizes that include $5,000 cash, Sony camera equipment, a trip to London for the awards ceremony, and/or worldwide publicity through a book and exhibition.

Eldagsen submitted an image titled THE ELECTRICIAN to the Creative category of the 2023 Open competition. It picture appears to be a portrait of two women captured with a photographic process from the early days of photography.

The photo is part of a series titled PSEUDOMNESIA: Fake Memories that Eldagsen has been working on since 2022.

“PSEUDOMNESIA is the Latin term for pseudo memory, a fake memory, such as a spurious recollection of events that never took place, as opposed to a memory that is merely inaccurate,” the artist writes on the project page. “The following images have been co-produced by the means of AI (artificial intelligence) image generators.

“Using the visual language of the 1940s, Boris Eldagsen produces his images as fake memories of a past, that never existed, that no one photographed. These images were imagined by language and re-edited more between 20 to 40 times through AI image generators, combining ‘inpainting’, ‘outpainting’, and ‘prompt whispering’ techniques.

«

Eldagsen’s picture is very impressive: you won’t be saying “AI can’t do hands/fingers” any more. But he argues that it’s not a photo, so shouldn’t win a photo contest.

unique link to this extract

Low heat pump uptake ‘an embarrassment’ • The Times

Andrew Ellson:

»

A flagship green energy scheme to encourage homeowners to ditch their gas boilers has been branded an “embarrassment” after uptake in the first year was only a third of the planned level.

The government’s boiler upgrade scheme had a budget of £150m to subsidise 30,000 ground or air source heat pump and biomass boiler installations between its launch in May last year and the end of March this year. Yet figures published by the energy regulator Ofgem show that fewer than 10,000 installations were completed under the scheme in this period.

Ministers have set a target of 600,000 heat pump installations a year within the next five years and the sale of gas boilers will be banned by 2035.

Heat pumps work by drawing heat from the air or ground to provide hot water and central heating.

An air source pump can cost between £7,000 and £14,000 to buy and install, while a ground source pump costs between £15,000 and £35,000. The government scheme provides a subsidy of between £5,000 and £6,000 depending on the type of system used. In addition to the grant, there is no VAT on installation, offering a further saving of thousands of pounds.

…[Mike Foster, chief executive of the trade body the Energy and Utilities Alliance which represents the heating and hot water industry] said: “It takes a certain type of genius to fail to give away £150 million of taxpayers’ money and this wretched scheme looks like it has done just that. When will the government actually listen to the people, the majority of whom simply cannot afford a heat pump, subsidised or not.

“It does little for carbon saving compared to investment on insulation. It does not help people keep bills low. It takes from the poor to give to the wealthy and it is an embarrassment of a policy.”

He added: “More taxpayer-subsidised heat pumps have probably been fitted in Cornish holiday homes than the whole of Britain’s second city, Birmingham. That is shameful. People are still hurting with high energy bills, insulating the homes of those most in need should be the priority, not giving hard-earned taxpayers’ cash to those who were going to buy a heat pump anyway. It’s utterly wasteful.”

«

Probably they would work better in (generally warm) Cornwall than (rather less generally warm) Birmingham, but the “hot water industry” rep has a point. Insulation would be a better idea.
unique link to this extract

Montana lawmakers approve statewide ban on TikTok • WSJ

Meghan Bobrowsky and Stu Woo:

»

Montana lawmakers on Friday approved a first-of-its-kind bill to ban TikTok across the state, setting the stage for future court battles that could determine the fate of the popular, Chinese-owned social-media app in the US.

The Montana House voted 54-43 to send the bill to Gov. Greg Gianforte’s desk. The governor’s office declined to say whether he would sign the bill but noted Mr. Gianforte had previously banned TikTok on government-issued devices and urged the state university system to do the same.

The bill said the ban would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024. It would prohibit TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., from operating within the state, and would also bar app stores from offering TikTok within the state. It would fine any entity violating this law $10,000 per violation. It is unclear how some elements of the legislation would be enforced.

…The bill’s authors ahead of the vote said they expect legal challenges that could ultimately reach the US Supreme Court should Mr. Gianforte sign the legislation.

Critics including the American Civil Liberties Union said the bill amounts to censorship and violates free-speech rights protected under the First Amendment.

«

Nobody is quite sure how this would work: how can Apple or Google know that someone’s in Montana (pop. 1 million, area 147,040 square miles)? What if someone downloads it while out of state and comes back into the state? Would ISPs have to block it? What about people using VPNs? As ever, the internet is mighty uncooperative with laws that try to limit it geographically.
unique link to this extract

Toward understanding the communication in sperm whales • ScienceDirect

Jacob Andreas et al from various academic institutions think it might be possible to use a Large Language Model approach to translate sperm whale speech:

»

the recent state-of-the-art Transformer models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) was pre-trained on a large language corpus comprising over 10^11 data points. While unsupervised structure discovery is also possible without self-supervised representation learning, recent studies have also shown that unsupervised structure discovery can provide benefits.

It is difficult to make an exact analogy between tokens in human languages and whale vocalizations. And, for comparison, the Dominica Sperm Whale Project (DSWP) dataset contains less than 10^4 coda clicks collected over a longitudinal study since 2005. It is thus apparent that one of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communications using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets capturing a wide range of attributes.

Secondly, human linguistic corpora are easier to deal with because they are typically pre-analyzed (i.e., already presented in the form of words or letters) and verification against ground truth is available, whereas in bioacoustic communication data, the relevant units must be inferred bottom-up with no ground truth available. Given this highly complex learning objective, we expect larger datasets will facilitate the discovery of meaning-carrying units.

«

It’s ambitious, but I’m reminded of the Wittgenstein saying: if a lion could speak, we could not understand it. A sperm whale’s world and motivations are so different from ours that it would be almost impossible to find the interface between them.
unique link to this extract

How nerds (almost) took over the world • Financial Times

Self-confessed nerd Stephen Bush:

»

The new Dungeons & Dragons film sums up the cultural moment. If you’ve seen a Marvel superhero film you’ll be familiar with the approach it takes: a lot of quips and self-consciously ironic dialogue. It is hardly a classic of modern cinema but it is not actively bad either. But while it shares a setting and captures something of the anarchic feeling of a session playing Dungeons & Dragons, the interest in what makes a game of Dungeons & Dragons “fun” feels wholly absent from the film. Instead what we are treated to is a dutiful run-through of some of the franchise’s most famous locations and spells.

That might be the most harmful consequence of nerds’ greater purchasing power: that instead of seeking new things to do with old stories, much of our common culture is dominated by low-quality remakes, made to secure a fast buck rather than to tell a good story.

We nerds are drivers of the problem, too. Sometimes it can appear that the thing we dislike most of all is someone making the thing we love more accessible or widely known. The TikToker Francis Bourgeois — real name Luke Nicolson — is castigated for being an insufficiently “real” trainspotter and for making money out of his hobby by appearing in adverts for Gucci, despite engaging millions of new fans in the trainspotting world. Star Wars fans appear to be divided between those who complain when the franchise simply replays the hits of the past as in The Rise of Skywalker, and those who become bitterly angry when it doesn’t, as in The Last Jedi: sometimes the biggest thing the nerd dollar does is pay to keep things exactly as they are.

«

The dreadful inertia of the Nerd Franchises – Marvel, Star Wars, Lord of the sodding Rings – really has squashed culture. The escapees from beneath it, notably Succession, intentionally restrict themselves: you won’t see spinoffs or prequels because they’re sufficient unto themselves.
unique link to this extract

The end of faking it in Silicon Valley • The New York Times

Erin Griffith:

»

Not only has funding dried up for cash-burning startups over the last year, but now, fraud is also in the air, as investors scrutinize startup claims more closely and a tech downturn reveals who has been taking the industry’s “fake it till you make it” ethos too far.

Take what happened in the past two weeks: Charlie Javice, the founder of the financial aid startup Frank, was arrested, accused of falsifying customer data. A jury found Rishi Shah, a co-founder of the advertising software startup Outcome Health, guilty of defrauding customers and investors. And a judge ordered Elizabeth Holmes, the founder who defrauded investors at her blood testing startup Theranos, to begin an 11-year prison sentence on April 27.

Those developments follow the February arrests of Carlos Watson, the founder of Ozy Media, and Christopher Kirchner, the founder of software company Slync, both accused of defrauding investors. Still to come is the fraud trial of Manish Lachwani, a co-founder of the software startup HeadSpin, set to begin in May, and that of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who faces 13 fraud charges later this year.

Taken together, the chorus of charges, convictions and sentences have created a feeling that the startup world’s fast and loose fakery actually has consequences. Despite this generation’s many high-profile scandals (Uber, WeWork) and downfalls (Juicero), few startup founders, aside from Ms. Holmes, ever faced criminal charges for pushing the boundaries of business puffery as they disrupted us into the future.

«

Actions have consequences? This is incredible.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A coroner has warned that millions of people are at risk of death if they use full-face snorkelling masks. CC-licensed photo by Enrico Strocchi 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. Try another. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Air National Guardsman arrested as FBI searches his home • The New York Times

Aric Toler, Michael Schwirtz, Haley Willis, Riley Mellen, Christiaan Triebert, Malachy Browne, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Julian E. Barnes:

»

Although gaming friends would not identify the leader of an online group linked to the leak of classified United States intelligence files, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The New York Times led toward Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

An online gaming profile in Airman Teixeira’s name connected him to photographs of the location where leaked documents were photographed — a kitchen countertop inside his childhood home.

An image shows a leaked document on a background that appears to be a textured countertop above a white tile floor.

The granite countertop bearing a distinctive pattern and white floor tiles are visible in the margins of some of the leaked intelligence briefings. The same interior décor is visible in photographs of the family home posted online by one of Airman Teixeira’s immediate relatives.

Mr. Teixeira was arrested by the FBI in North Dighton, Massachusetts, on Thursday afternoon.

«

The main link is to the full-length story with everything about yesterday’s arrest, but this is the part that is most relevant. On Tuesday, bellingcat said that “Creases can be seen on the documents with items, such as a hunter’s scope box and some Gorilla Glue visible in the background of those dated from early March”. To which I commented that “With details like that, bellingcat will probably pin down precisely when and where they were photographed in a few days.”

The top byline on Thursday’s story above: Aric Toler of bellingcat.
unique link to this extract

Streaming services urged to clamp down on AI-generated music • Financial Times

Anna Nicolaou:

»

Universal Music Group has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.

UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists.

AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests “left and right”, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology.

“We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists,” UMG wrote to online platforms in March, in emails viewed by the FT.

“This next generation of technology poses significant issues,” said a person close to the situation. “Much of [generative AI] is trained on popular music. You could say: compose a song that has the lyrics to be like Taylor Swift, but the vocals to be in the style of Bruno Mars, but I want the theme to be more Harry Styles. The output you get is due to the fact the AI has been trained on those artists’ intellectual property.” 

«

Much like the claim that Getty is bringing against Stable Diffusion on roughly this basis: it was trained on our content, so it’s breaking our copyright. (I’m not convinced Getty will prevail, but there’s a long way to go yet.)
unique link to this extract

Google will shut down Currents, the work-focused Google Plus replacement • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

»

Google has announced that it’ll shut down Currents, which was introduced in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus for G Suite. In a blog post, the company says it’s “planning to wind down” Currents, and that it’ll push the people who were using it to Spaces, which is sort of like Google Chat’s version of a Slack channel or Discord room.

Google says that it’s making the change so users won’t have to work in a “separate, siloed destination” — instead, they’ll be using Chat and Spaces, which will soon be prominently integrated into Gmail. The company promises it’s going to make Spaces a more suitable replacement over the next year, saying it’ll “deliver new capabilities” like “support for larger communities and leadership communication, investments in advanced search, tools for content moderation, and more.”

…Currents hasn’t gotten a lot of love from Google. I was only able to find three blog posts about it on Google’s Workspace Updates site — the one announcing it, one in 2020 announcing that it was widely available, and the one from Thursday announcing it was being shut down. It was included on Google’s main list of apps that come with Workspace at one point according to the WayBack Machine, but it seems like it was removed sometime in November 2021.

«

Another one bites the dust. Along with some of the job cuts, maybe Google could figure out how to focus on products and iteratively improve them, rather than binning them and expecting people to migrate. Microsoft has managed it with Teams, for example.
unique link to this extract

The US cracked a $3.4bn crypto heist—and bitcoin’s anonymity • WSJ

Robert McMillan:

»

[James] Zhong moved the stolen bitcoins [accrued via a bug in the Silk Road dark web site] from one account to another for eight years to cover his tracks. By late 2021, the red-hot crypto market had raised the value of his trove to $3.4bn [from $600,000 when he exploited it in 2012]. He still lived in a modest house in Athens, Ga., and dressed in shorts and T-shirts. He also had a lake-house getaway in Gainesville, Ga., a Lamborghini sports car and a $150,000 Tesla.

In November 2021, federal agents surprised Mr. Zhong with a search warrant and found the digital keys to his crypto fortune hidden in a basement floor safe and a popcorn tin in the bathroom. Mr. Zhong, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday in New York federal court, where prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of less than two years.

Mr. Zhong’s case is one of the highest-profile examples of how federal authorities have pierced the veil of blockchain transactions. Private and government investigators can now identify wallet addresses associated with terrorists, drug traffickers, money launderers and cybercriminals, all of which were supposed to be anonymous. 

Law-enforcement agencies, working with cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain-analytics companies, have compiled data gleaned from earlier investigations, including the Silk Road case, to map the flow of cryptocurrency transactions across criminal networks worldwide. In the past two years, the US has seized more than $10bn worth of digital currency through successful prosecutions, according to the Internal Revenue Service—in essence, by following the money. Instead of subpoenas to banks or other financial institutions, investigators can look to the blockchain for an instant snapshot of the money trail. 

«

So bitcoin turns out to be the extremely nonymous currency, because it hasn’t expanded into real-world uses, which means that any time someone tries to cash out to useful currency, the exchanges are obliged to keep details of who’s doing the transaction. And they’ll get people with badges knocking at the door. (Link should work for free.)
unique link to this extract

Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee: tech exec’s alleged killer also worked in tech • Mission Local

Joe Eskenazi:

»

Mission Local is informed that the San Francisco Police Department early this morning made an arrest in the April 4 killing of tech executive Bob Lee, following an operation undertaken outside the city’s borders. The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew.

We are told that police today were dispatched to Emeryville with a warrant to arrest a man named Nima Momeni. The name and Emeryville address SFPD officers traveled to correspond with this man, the owner of a company called Expand IT.

Multiple police sources have described the predawn knifing last week, which left the 43-year-old Lee dead in a deserted section of downtown San Francisco, as neither a robbery attempt nor a random attack. 

Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect. 

Some manner of confrontation allegedly commenced while both men were in the vehicle, and potentially continued after Lee exited the car. Police allege that Momeni stabbed Lee multiple times with a knife that was recovered not far from the spot on the 300 block of Main Street to which officers initially responded. 

«

Lee’s killing stirred up lots of strong feelings among the tech community: he was clearly widely adored by many who had encountered him. Yet there were details about the stabbing that were out of kilter: why was he out on his own at 3am, in a relatively safe part of the city, and had he really been stabbed randomly, given that nothing had been stolen from him?

The usual assumption about murder – you were killed by someone you know – seems to have prevailed.
unique link to this extract

Twitter to let users access stocks, crypto via eToro in finance push • CNBC

Ryan Browne:

»

Twitter will let its users access stocks, cryptocurrencies and other financial assets through a partnership with eToro, a social trading company.

Starting Thursday, a new feature will be rolled out on the Twitter app. It will allow users to view market charts on an expanded range of financial instruments and buy and sell stocks and other assets from eToro, the company told CNBC exclusively.

Currently, it’s already possible to view real-time trading data from TradingView on index funds like the S&P 500 and shares of some companies such as Tesla. That can be done using Twitter’s “cashtags” feature — you search for a ticker symbol and insert dollar sign in front of it, after which the app will show you price information from TradingView using an API (application programming interface).

With the eToro partnership, Twitter cashtags will be expanded to cover far more instruments and asset classes, an eToro spokesperson told CNBC.

You’ll also be able to click a button that says “view on eToro,” which takes you through to eToro’s site, and then buy and sell assets on its platform. EToro uses TradingView as its market data partner.

«

Chasing the stonk (sic) market. This will wipe out the crypto scams, right?
unique link to this extract

Elon Musk’s free-speech charade is over • The Atlantic

Adam Serwer:

»

until Musk bought Twitter late last year, conservatives were arguing that the company’s moderation decisions violated the First Amendment, even though Twitter is a private company and not part of the government. Now that Musk is using his editorial discretion as owner of the company to promote people and ideas he supports—primarily right-wing influencers—and diminish the reach of those he does not, the constitutional emergency has subsided. At least until his allies and defenders on Substack found themselves unable to promote their work on Twitter, free speech had been restored, because “free speech” here simply means that right-wing ideas and arguments are favoured. This outcome—that Twitter under Musk would favour right-wing content—was predictable, and I’m saying that because I wrote last April that that’s what would happen.

The episode reveals something important about the way that many conservative jurists and legal scholars now approach the principle of free speech. Florida and Texas passed laws prohibiting social-media companies from moderating user-generated content, in retaliation for what they characterized as liberal “censorship.” A federal judge appointed by Trump, Andrew Oldham, then upheld the Texas law with a ruling that scoffed at the idea that “editorial discretion” constituted a “freestanding category of First-Amendment-protected expression” and insisted that the platforms’ moderation decisions did not qualify for that protection.

«

Hypocrisy on a gigantic scale. It’s what Musk does best.
unique link to this extract

The mounting human and environmental costs of generative AI • Ars Technica

Sasha Luccioni is a researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face:

»

For large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, we’ve gone from around 100 million parameters in 2018 to 500 billion in 2023 with Google’s PaLM model. The theory behind this growth is that models with more parameters should have better performance, even on tasks they were not initially trained on, although this hypothesis remains unproven.

Bigger models typically take longer to train, which means they also need more GPUs, which cost more money, so only a select few organizations are able to train them. Estimates put the training cost of GPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters, at $4.6m—out of reach for the majority of companies and organisations. (It’s worth noting that the cost of training models is dropping in some cases, such as in the case of LLaMA, the recent model trained by Meta.)

This creates a digital divide in the AI community between those who can train the most cutting-edge LLMs (mostly Big Tech companies and rich institutions in the Global North) and those who can’t (nonprofit organisations, startups, and anyone without access to a supercomputer or millions in cloud credits).

Building and deploying these behemoths requires a lot of planetary resources: rare metals for manufacturing GPUs, water to cool huge data centers, energy to keep those data centres running 24/7 on a planetary scale… all of these are often overlooked in favour of focusing on the future potential of the resulting models.

«

$4.6m doesn’t sound wildly beyond the funding possibilities of some Silicon Valley startups. But increasingly I feel like we’re heading towards IBM president Thomas Watson’s prediction from 1943 – “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Oh, but what computers.
unique link to this extract

Full-face snorkel caused death of Red Sea tourist • The Times

Jonathan Ames:

»

Full-face snorkel masks could be putting millions of people at risk, a coroner has warned after the death of a British tourist in Egypt.

Angela Kearn, an experienced snorkeller, collapsed and died at a Red Sea resort while using equipment from the retailer Decathlon, an inquest was told. A coroner found that she had developed immersion pulmonary oedema — a concentration of fluid in her lungs — and that the mask “contributed” to her difficulties.

Kearn, 63, had recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure and was taking hormone replacement therapy to relieve symptoms of menopause, the inquest was told. She was unaware that this made her vulnerable when using the mask, a point that was allegedly not made clear in the packaging.

Caroline Topping, the assistant coroner for Surrey, has written to the General Medical Council, National Trading Standards and Decathlon in the UK to raise concerns about the potential threat the masks pose. An estimated 16 million people have bought them.

In a prevention of future deaths report, Topping wrote: “Many millions of the full-face masks have been sold and the safety concerns about their use by those with ongoing cardiovascular and respiratory issues has not been widely publicised or brought to the attention of those who already own the masks.”

«

Sixteen million. Even if the death rate is only one in a million, that’s 16 avoidable deaths. To make matters worse, there’s no British Standard for these masks – so you don’t know how safe or dangerous they might be for you.
unique link to this extract

Teens don’t care as much about VR as tech companies do • Fortune

Prarthana Prakash:

»

Digitally obsessed teens are a target market for companies selling virtual reality headsets that transport users into entirely new worlds. But it turns out, the younger set isn’t particularly interested—even though tech companies are spending billions on VR. 

Very few teens use VR devices daily, according to a study published Tuesday by investment bank Piper Sandler. The bank surveyed over 5,600 US teens and found that close to a third of them owned VR devices, but only 4% use them every day and only 14% use them every week. 

“To us, the lukewarm usage demonstrates that VR remains ‘early days’ and that these devices are less important than smartphones,” Piper Sandler analysts said in their report.

The report noted that between the second half of last year and now, use of VR devices has remained flat. Compared to the same time last year, use has actually dropped to 14% compared to 17%. 

Piper Sandler’s results reflect the relatively slow adoption of VR among younger people given that 95% of teens in the US own smartphones and 80% own gaming consoles, according to Pew Research.

«

OK, you could have said this about smartphone ahead of the iPhone’s launch, and about tablets ahead of the iPad’s launch, and about wireless headphones ahead of the Airpods’ launch. Even so, this doesn’t feel like a market waiting to happen.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the Ukraine conflict, Russia’s tanks have been particularly vulnerable to mines. But why, when they have protective systems to destroy them? CC-licensed photo by manhhai 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. Mine, all mine. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk BBC interview: Twitter boss on layoffs, misinfo and sleeping in the office • BBC News

James Clayton:

»

Running Twitter has been “quite painful” and “a rollercoaster”, Elon Musk has said, in a hastily arranged live interview with the BBC.

The multi-billionaire entrepreneur also said he would sell the company if the right person came along.

Mr Musk, who also runs car maker Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, bought Twitter for $44bn (£35.4bn) in October.

The interview from the firm’s HQ in San Francisco covered the mass lay-offs, misinformation and his work habits.

But he admitted he only went through with the takeover because a judge was about to force him to make the purchase. And he confirmed Twitter will change its newly added label for the BBC’s account from “government funded media” to say it is “publicly funded” instead.

During the conversation – in which Mr Musk tried to do the interviewing as much as the other way around – he defended his running of the company.

Asked whether he had any regrets about buying Twitter, the world’s second richest man said the “pain level has been extremely high, this hasn’t been some kind of party”.

Talking about his time at the helm so far, Mr Musk said: “It’s not been boring. It’s been quite a rollercoaster.” It has been “really quite a stressful situation over the last several months”, he added, but said he still felt that buying the company was the right thing to do.

«

The most expensive example of buyer’s regret ever. As you’d expect, the BBC filleted the scoop. Musk predictably enough sought to turn the tables on Clayton during the interview, demanding to have examples of hate speech when Clayton said it was on the rise. (Poor preparation by Clayton, to be honest; but he had been taken by surprise when Musk abruptly agreed to the interview.) Clayton concluded in a radio interview that Musk “has a puerile sense of humour”. Puerile sense of everything, really, as the interview and all the rest demonstrates.
unique link to this extract

NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media’ • NPR

David Folkenflik:

»

Most of NPR’s funding comes from corporate and individual supporters and grants. It also receives significant programming fees from member stations. Those stations, in turn, receive about 13% of their funds from the CPB and other state and federal government sources.

It isn’t clear that a withdrawal from Twitter will materially affect NPR’s ability to reach an online audience. NPR’s primary Twitter account has 8.8 million followers — more than a million more than follow the network on Facebook. Yet Facebook is a much bigger platform, and NPR’s Facebook posts often are far more likely to spur engagement or click-throughs to NPR’s own website. NPR Music has almost 10 times more followers on YouTube than it does on Twitter, and the video platform serves as one of the primary conduits for its popular Tiny Desk Series.

NPR’s decision follows a week of public acrimony, as Musk has used his platform to cast doubt on the legitimacy of major news organizations.

«

Quite the burn from NPR: we’re really big but it’s Twitter that got small. Now let’s see how things go as the network effect unravels and the flywheel slows down.
unique link to this extract

Why so many Russian tanks fall prey to Ukrainian mines • The Economist

»

Tank crews have various ways of navigating minefields in relative safety. Since the Second World War they have made safe lanes with rollers that are pushed ahead of the vehicle to set off mines. In theory, one tank in each Russian platoon should use a KMT (koleinyi minnyi tral or tracked mine trawl) which has rollers to set off pressure mines, plough blades to push buried mines out of the way and an electromagnetic device to trigger magnetic ones. But tank crews do not seem to trust their efficacy. One widely circulated video shows a Russian tank being blown up when its KMT fails to detonate a mine. Many Russian tank crews reportedly dumped their KMT last summer.

Platoons without KMTs rely on specialist engineer units to clear their way. Russian engineers have BMR-3MS mine ploughs or UR-77 Meteorits, which launch explosive cables to blast a clear path 90 metres long and six metres wide. In theory these provide safe routes through minefields. But tank drivers may panic under enemy fire and drive out of the lane. If defenders knock out the lead vehicle in a column it blocks the path, forcing those behind it to leave the safe route or reverse under fire. Britain’s Ministry of Defence has said that during the battle for Vuhledar Ukrainian forces fired RAAM rounds into lanes cleared by Russian engineers.

Russia’s inability to punch through minefields has seriously hampered its offensives. In the coming weeks, Ukraine will need to show mastery of what Russia has not.

«

In my first year at university one of the study topics on my course was a branch of mathematics about how energy moves in fields of specific shapes. I mentioned this proudly to my father, who had done Mathematics at university and then gone into the civil service in the early 1940s.

“Oh yes,” he replied. “We used that method in the Second World War to calculate whether heavy mats rolled in front of tanks would set off all the mines in an area, or if some might be missed due to predictable variations in the energy distribution.”

Don’t let them tell you higher maths doesn’t have real-world applications.
unique link to this extract

Galactic revelations: molecular precursors of life discovered in the Perseus Cloud • Scitech Daily

»

Susan Iglesias-Groth, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and Martina Marín-Dobrincic, of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, have discovered the presence of numerous prebiotic molecules in the star formation region IC348 of the Perseus Molecular Cloud, a young star cluster some 2-3 million years old.  

Some of these biological molecules are considered essential building bricks for the construction of more complex molecules such as amino acids, which formed the genetic code of ancient microorganisms, and brought about the flourishing of life on Earth. Getting to know the distribution and the abundances of these precursor molecules in regions where planets are very probably forming is an important challenge for astrophysics.

The Perseus Cloud is one of the closest star-forming regions to the Solar System. Many of its stars are young, and have protoplanetary discs where the physical processes which give rise to planets can take place. “It is an extraordinary laboratory of organic chemistry” explains Iglesias-Groth, who in 2019 found fullerenes in the same cloud. These are complex molecules of pure carbon that often occur as building blocks for the key molecules of life.

In the inner part of this region the new research has detected common molecules such as molecular hydrogen (H2), hydroxyl (OH), water (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2) and ammonia (NH3) as well as several carbon-bearing molecules which could play an important role in the production of more complex hydrocarbons and prebiotic molecules, such as hydrogen cyanide (HCN), acetylene (C2H2), diacetylene (C4H2), cyanoacetylene (HC3N), cyanobutadiyne (HC5N), ethane (C2H6), hexatriyne (C6H2) and benzene (C6H6).

The data also show the presence of more complex molecules such as the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and the fullerenes C60 and C70.

«

Mix into soup, warm for a few billion years, voila!
unique link to this extract

People are sick and tired of all their subscriptions • WSJ

Rachel Wolfe and Imani Moise:

»

We’re finally reckoning with our expensive subscription habits.

For two straight quarters, cancellations have outpaced new subscriptions for digital memberships, food-of-the-month clubs and a host of other purchases, according to personal finance app Rocket Money. Streaming services have been particularly impacted, with cancellations for Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max and others up 49% in 2022 from the previous year, according to subscriber-measurement firm Antenna.  

“People are taking stock of their subscriptions and trying not to make the same mistakes they made in 2022 given that budgets are getting a lot tighter,” said Courtney Alev, consumer financial advocate at Credit Karma. 

The decision to cancel had been building up for some time, financial analysts said. Even though inflation cooled last month to its lowest level in nearly two years, budgets continue to be squeezed by higher prices.

About a third of respondents to a December Credit Karma survey said their biggest financial mistake last year was paying for services they never used. Americans were also paying about $133 more than the $86 they thought they were paying for subscriptions each month, according to a 2022 survey from market research firm C+R Research. 

Retiree John Ritzinger, 72 years old, said canceling subscriptions he never used would spare him needing to penny pinch at the grocery store.   

First to go was the satellite radio in two cars he never drove, saving him $45 a month. Next, the MotorTrend magazines that lived in an unread stack on the coffee table and a $1,000 annual, dining-only membership to his local Dayton, Ohio, country club in favor of ordinary restaurants. Stopping the $750-a-year pest control service was more of a debate with his wife.

«

Yes, I know, it’s the WSJ, which has been a subscription service since it went online. But the link should be free to read. The amounts that people are spending without really realising it is quite shocking. Even so, America really is the Land of the Unasked-For Extra, where stuff gets added on to your bill unless you watch like a hawk. (Thanks G for the link.)
unique link to this extract

YouTube’s top creators are burning out and breaking down en masse • Polygon

Julia Alexander:

»

[Elle] Mills announced on Twitter that she was taking a break from YouTube and social media. She couldn’t keep up with the pressure, and told her fans that while she was safe, and in good hands, she needed time to recuperate and remember why she loved making videos in the first place.

Sam Sheffer, a popular YouTuber who burst into the spotlight after appearing in multiple Casey Neistat videos, recently took a break from Twitter for similar reasons. In his own video, Neistat addressed Mills’s questions about why she was so unhappy when everything she ever wanted was finally coming together.

“I’ve often talked about the pressures of being a YouTuber and it’s a tricky thing to talk about because to find success on YouTube is to live the dream,” Neistat said. “Like, this is the ultimate. And if you achieve this kind of success on this platform, which so many people try to do, like, how dare you complain about it? It is difficult to talk about because unless you’ve been in this position, I think it’s challenging to empathize with it.”

The backlash to YouTubers and Twitch streamers who publicly take time away from the spotlight shows its face in almost any comments section about mental health and creators. Their fans are mostly supportive, telling their favorite creators to take time and work on their mental health, but most people who don’t keep up with the day-to-day uploads or aren’t as tuned in to YouTube culture have trouble sympathizing.

…There’s a pressure for YouTubers to remain in the spotlight. This is something that PewDiePie, who uploads at least once a day, has said the rigorous pace of YouTube video creation led him to his own obsessions with the platform. Those obsessions turn into eventual dismay over producing and not enjoying the one thing that made him successful.

«

So predictable that the unrelenting nature of it, and the competition, would lead to this.
unique link to this extract

ChatGPT – where can it go on iOS, iPadOS and macOS? • iMore

Daryl Baxter:

»

It’s hard to imagine Apple not acknowledging AI at WWDC, so we asked [independent developer Hidde van der] Ploeg what he would like to see from Apple to take [his ChatGPT app for the Watch and iPhone] Petey even further. “I would love to get access to those great new Siri voices. The ones we’re getting as developers now feel quite old. Live Activities on watchOS would be amazing too, as it shows value on Petey for iOS.”

Finally, as we’ve used Petey on Apple Watch since its launch, we’ve realized that it could be a great tool to use ChatGPT for accessibility – it could tell the user what’s nearby or if any appliances are on nearby, that should be switched off.

We asked Ploeg if he also thought there was a future for Petey with accessibility. “I think AI will be great at making complex things understandable. Focussing on Watch, we could look at really quickly getting answers to complex questions and or being able to translate complex health-related insights to be easier to understand. Machine Learning always has been great for this, but access to data has always been the hardest part.”

With more and more trained models being available for developers, it will be interesting to see where things will go. The only thing I’m a bit scared of is being Sherlocked by a great new version of Siri (you can’t beat integration like that). However, the Siri brand really needs a shot in the arm, and I will always try to explore new ways of solving problems. So if anything, I’m excited!”

Jordi Bruin has built two ChatGPT apps – MacGPT (opens in new tab) and MacWhisper (opens in new tab) – that ‘Mac-ify’ the AI experience, but help in different ways. MacGPT lets you bring up the AI through a Spotlight bar, the Menubar, or the app. You can chat with it for suggestions and advice, and you can use it with the faster and more refined ChatGPT-4 if you wish.

You can drag and drop audio files into MacWhisper and the app will use ChatGPT to transcribe them, and you can jump back and forth in the transcription to copy and paste certain sections.

“I compare it to having access to a new API or framework from Apple after a big iOS or macOS update,” Bruin told me. “Using APIs such as ChatGPT makes it possible to add certain features that would not easily be possible before.”

«

Impressive how these apps are integrating the functionality.
unique link to this extract

I wanted to scream at other parents: ‘You don’t know how lucky you are’ • The Guardian

Tim Jonze:

»

In the summer of 2017, I’d been losing weight and feeling low, and my GP had rather reluctantly sent me for a blood test. At the follow-up, she explained how it had all come back “normal”, and it was only when I pointed to her computer screen and said: “So what does that big red cross mean, then?” that she said: “Oh, that’s just your platelets … they are a little bit high, I suppose. Would you like another test, just to be sure?”

There was a lot of this kind of thing, because nobody suspects blood cancer in a healthy-looking man in his 30s. During a bladder scan following a urine infection, a nurse slid the cold, jelly-laden device over my abdomen and gasped: “Oh!” – which is not something you want a nurse to gasp while conducting a bladder scan. “Are you aware that you have a massive spleen?” she asked. “It’s three times as big as it should be, and it’s pushing your liver and kidneys right around your back.” This didn’t sound ideal.

Still, nothing much happened, and I carried on trying to get on with life with my high platelets and my gigantic spleen and an increasing anxiety weighing on my shoulders. Every time I Googled these symptoms, the search results failed to reassure me. I worried that I had something seriously wrong with me. The fact that I had spent my life worrying I had something seriously wrong with me (but inevitably didn’t) was only faintly reassuring. When I told a friend that my jeans were starting to fall down, he joked that this would be the last time he saw me. But when I finally got an urgent referral letter through the post, my wife Helen Jane stopped saying: “So how’s your pretend cancer today?”

«

This is a long read, but so worthwhile.
unique link to this extract

Make Something Wonderful • Steve Jobs

There’s an amazing new ebook/website with extracts from Steve Jobs’s speeches and correspondence. (If you view in a browser, it can take a while to pull in all the book. Or you can just download the file. Or it’s available free on Apple Books.)

I was struck by this early reminiscence from his childhood, which he gave in an oral history to the Smithsonian in 1995 about how he got properly interested in electronics and manufacturing through his experience of DIY assemblies called Heathkits:

»

These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together, and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and colour coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself.

I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of operation. But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean, you looked at a television set, and you would think, “I haven’t built one of those—but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog, and I’ve built two other Heathkits, so I could build a television set.”

Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous degree of self-confidence that, through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

«

One lesson I’ve always tried (not always successfully) to impress on my children is that “everything is a system” – even biological things. Once you understand the necessity for things to work together, you can diagnose why things aren’t happening by tracing forward or backward through the system.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Would you have guessed that Google has too many staplers? But according to its CFO, that’s one place where economies are needed. CC-licensed photo by Eric E Castro 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 11 links for you. Fewer staples too? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

This high schooler invented colour-changing sutures to detect infection • Smithsonian Magazine

Theresa Machemer:

»

Healthy human skin is naturally acidic, with a pH around five. But when a wound becomes infected, its pH goes up to about nine. Changes in pH can be detected without electronics; many fruits and vegetables are natural indicators that change colour at different pH levels.

“I found that beets changed colour at the perfect pH point,” says [Iowa City West High School pupil Dasia] Taylor. Bright red beet juice turns dark purple at a pH of nine. “That’s perfect for an infected wound. And so, I was like, ‘Oh, okay. So beets is where it’s at.’”

Next, Taylor had to find a suture thread that would hold onto the dye. She tested ten different materials, including standard suture thread, for how well they picked up and held the dye, whether the dye changed colour when its pH changed, and how their thickness compared to standard suture thread. After her school transitioned to remote learning, she could spend four or five hours in the lab on an asynchronous lesson day, running experiments.

A cotton-polyester blend checked all the boxes. After five minutes under an infection-like pH, the cotton-polyester thread changes from bright red to dark purple. After three days, the purple fades to light gray.

Working with an eye on equity in global health, she hopes that the colour-changing sutures will someday help patients detect surgical site infections as early as possible so that they can seek medical care when it has the most impact. Taylor plans to patent her invention. In the meantime, she’s waiting for her final college admissions results.

“To get to the Top 40, this is like post-doctoral work that these kids are doing,” says Maya Ajmera, the president and CEO of the Society for Science, which runs the Science Talent Search. This year’s top prizes went to a matching algorithm that can find pairs in an infinite pool of options, a computer model that can help identify useful compounds for pharmaceutical research and a sustainable drinking water filtration system.

«

This is utterly brilliant.
unique link to this extract

Global PC shipments suffered a drop of 33% in Q1 2023 • Canalys

»

The first quarter of 2023 brought further turmoil to the global PC market, with total shipments of desktops and notebooks declining 33% to 54m units, representing the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit annual declines. The weak holiday season toward the end of 2022 extended into the new year as demand for PC remained muted and the channel pushed forward with inventory clearance as a key priority. Of the product categories, notebook shipments suffered a large decline, falling 34% year-on-year to 41.8m units. Desktop shipments performed slightly better, undergoing a 28% decline to 12.1m units.

…39% of partners surveyed by Canalys in January 2023 reported having more than five weeks of PC inventory, with 18% reporting nine weeks or more. Meanwhile, demand across all customer segments remains dampened, with more pressure arising from further interest rate increases in the US, Europe and other markets, where reducing inflation is a top priority.

«

Nine weeks of inventory heading into a 12-week quarter means you’re carrying a lot of baggage. Canalys reckons that Apple’s sales dropped 45%, more than any other PC maker. Which is possible, but Apple sells a lot through its own stores rather than third parties. We’ll only know when the financial results come out later this month.

Oddly, the analysts rush to publish PC numbers as soon as the quarter ends, but always wait for the financials before publishing their smartphone sales estimates.
unique link to this extract

Apple shifts headset production from Pegatron to Luxshare • Apple Insider

Malcolm Owen:

»

Apple’s production partner for the long-rumored VR and AR headset has changed, with long-time AirPods assembler Pegatron out in favor of Luxshare.

Apple was expected to introduce its AR/VR headset during WWDC, but at the end of March, it had reportedly pushed back the mass production schedule by one or two months. It now seems that the delay is due to changes in assembly partner.

According to DigiTimes, Apple was going to employ Pegatron as the exclusive assembly partner of the headset. However, Apple allegedly asked Pegatron in March to give up manufacturing duties and the assembly operations to Luxshare.

It is believed that the change occurred due to Pegatron shifting its production capacity away from China into other regions. Moves said to trigger the shift include selling a manufacturing facility in Shanghai to Luxshare.

«

Ah, so the headset is “delayed” already? My anticipation for something not happening at WWDC is even greater.
unique link to this extract

SIG Sauer P320, a popular handgun with police, is firing on its own • The Washington Post

Champe Barton and Tom Jackman:

»

The P320 is one of the nation’s most popular handguns. A variant of the weapon is the standard-issue sidearm for every branch of the U.S. military. Since the gun’s introduction to the commercial market in 2014, manufacturer SIG Sauer has sold the P320 to hundreds of thousands of civilians, and it has been used by officers at more than a thousand law enforcement agencies across the nation, court records show.

It has also gruesomely injured scores of people who say the gun has a potentially deadly defect.
More than 100 people allege that their P320 pistols discharged when they did not pull the trigger, an eight-month investigation by The Washington Post and The Trace has found. At least 80 people were wounded in the shootings, which date to 2016.

«

Guns don’t kill people, people… no, actually, it really is the guns.
unique link to this extract

The real-world costs of the digital race for bitcoin • The New York Times

Gabriel JX Dance:

»

In Texas, where 10 of the 34 mines are connected to the state’s grid, the increased demand has caused electric bills for power customers to rise nearly 5%, or $1.8bn per year, according to a simulation performed for The Times by the energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

The additional power use across the country also causes as much carbon pollution as adding 3.5m gas-powered cars to America’s roads, according to an analysis by WattTime, a nonprofit tech company. Many of the Bitcoin operations promote themselves as environmentally friendly and set up in areas rich with renewable energy, but their power needs are far too great to be satisfied by those sources alone. As a result, they have become a boon for the fossil fuel industry: WattTime found that coal and natural gas plants kick in to meet 85% of the demand these Bitcoin operations add to their grids.

…In some states, notably New York, Pennsylvania and Texas, Bitcoin operators’ revenue can ultimately come from other power customers. The clearest example is Texas, where Bitcoin companies are paid by the grid operator for promising to quickly power down if necessary to prevent blackouts.

…Many academics who study the energy industry said Bitcoin mining was undoubtedly having significant environmental effects.

“They’re adding hundreds of megawatts of new demand when we already face the need to rapidly cut fossil power,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton professor who studies electrical grid emissions. “If you care about climate change, then that’s a problem.”

«

unique link to this extract

What happens when ChatGPT lies about real people? • The Washington Post

Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus:

»

One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list.

The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: no such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said he’d never been accused of harassing a student.

A regular commentator in the media, Turley had sometimes asked for corrections in news stories. But this time, there was no journalist or editor to call — and no way to correct the record.

“It was quite chilling,” he said in an interview with The Post. “An allegation of this kind is incredibly harmful.”
Turley’s experience is a case study in the pitfalls of the latest wave of language bots, which have captured mainstream attention with their ability to write computer code, craft poems and hold eerily humanlike conversations. But this creativity can also be an engine for erroneous claims; the models can misrepresent key facts with great flourish, even fabricating primary sources to back up their claims.

«

On its face this sounds like an easy case to make. Chatbot publishes something that’s untrue; untrue thing is libellous (in that anyone who reads it would have a lowered opinion of the person). Except: libel requires knowledge of what’s true and what isn’t. Chatbots don’t have that knowledge. And their operators didn’t put that data in. However, that doesn’t mean judges will take the same view.

Quite possibly the next step will be to stop using the names of live people in output. Can’t libel the dead.
unique link to this extract

Google to save money on employee laptops, services and staplers • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

In separate documents viewed by CNBC, Google said it’s cutting back on fitness classes, staplers, tape and the frequency of laptop replacements for employees.

One of the company’s important objectives for 2023 is to “deliver durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency.” Porat said in the email. “All PAs and Functions are working toward this,” she said, referring to product areas. OKR stands for objectives and key results.

The latest cost-cutting measures come as Alphabet-owned Google continues its most severe era of cost cuts in its almost two decades as a public company. The company said in January that it was eliminating 12,000 jobs, representing about 6% of its workforce, to reckon with slowing sales growth following record head count growth.

Cuts have shown up in other ways. The company declined to pay the remainder of laid-off employees’ maternity and medical leaves, CNBC previously reported.

In her recent email, Porat said the layoffs were “the hardest decisions we’ve had to make as a company.”

“This work is particularly vital because of our recent growth, the challenging economic environment, and our incredible investment opportunities to drive technology forward — particularly in AI,” Porat’s email said.

Porat referred to the year 2008 twice in her email.

«

Google staff are the first to suffer from AI taking people’s jobs: it’s so expensive they have to be sacrificed.

Also note that the paperless office definitely hasn’t happened. Staplers, eh.
unique link to this extract

Before meeting with Elon Musk, top advertisers privately debate his “racist rhetoric” • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

[Elon] Musk is slated to speak on April 18 at the Possible conference from MMA Global, the premier digital marketing association. He’ll be interviewed by NBCU ad chief Linda Yaccarino and make the case that advertisers — who have abandoned Twitter because they don’t believe it’s a safe place to advertise — should return.

But a private email thread among the organization’s board members, obtained by Semafor, suggests he will face a skeptical audience. Top advertisers, including McDonald’s and Colgate-Palmolive, are concerned that Musk’s comments about race and the platform’s openness to racist speech have rendered Twitter toxic.

“For many communities, his willingness to leverage success and personal financial resources to further an agenda under the guise of freedom of speech is perpetuating racism resulting [in] direct threats to their communities and a potential for brand safety compromise we should all be concerned about,” wrote McDonald’s chief marketing and customer experience officer, Tariq Hassan.  “Further, all of us who lead our brand’s investments across platforms were required to navigate a situation post-acquisition that objectively can only be characterized as ranging from chaos to moments of irresponsibility.”

Colgate-Palmolive’s vice president and general manager of consumer experience and growth, Diana Haussling, wrote to the group that she was “both excited for the success of the conference while also mindful of the harmful and often racist rhetoric of Elon Musk.”

«

Twitter is trying to set up private meetings between advertisers and Musk after his appearance, as you’d expect, but he may not be that good at playing the supplicant, particularly at a time when budgets are tightening.
unique link to this extract

Musk’s Twitter on collision course with Europe, with exit possible • EURACTIV.com

Luca Bertuzzi:

»

According to a source involved in the Code of Practice, Twitter’s withdrawal from Europe would not be surprising since its engagement with the Code has been steadily fading, and its capacity to keep up with commitments is no longer guaranteed.

Whilst the Code is a voluntary agreement, it will become binding under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s brand-new content moderation rulebook. The landmark legislation will introduce a strict regime for very large online platforms, those with more than 45 million users in the EU, by this autumn.

Failing to comply with the EU law could lead to hefty fines, up to 6% of the company’s global annual turnover, or even a complete ban in case of repeated offences.

Musk and other senior company officers have kept a reassuring tone with EU officials, and Twitter has not contested the designation as a very large online platform. Still, the company has been moving in the opposite direction, dismantling the existing transparency and safety features.

“Sooner or later, Twitter will have to decide whether to comply with the DSA,” an EU official told EURACTIV.

That decisive moment might come later in the year when very large online platforms must publish their first risk assessment to be vetted by external auditors.

“Twitter has no capacity to start undertaking the required risk assessments. If they produce nothing, they are probably done in Europe,” Rebekah Tromble, director of the George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics, told EURACTIV.

«

Musk tweeted about having had a “good meeting” with Thierry Breton, one of the EU commissioners, back in January. We’ll see how that works out.
unique link to this extract

Ice Ice MATRIX • YouTube

»

Welcome to the future, where anything is possible and you never know what to believe. On one hand, you may be convinced we somehow assembled the original cast of The Matrix along side the ghost of Wilford Brimley to record one of the greatest rap covers of all time. On the other hand, you may find it more believable that we’ve been experimenting with AI voice trainers and lip flap technology in a way that will eventually open up some new doors for how we make videos. You have to admit, either option kind of rules.

</blockquote

This is an amazing piece of deepfakery which also lets you hear the lyrics of Ice Ice Baby, now classified as a valuable historical document. Well, a historical document. (Via Benedict Evans.)
unique link to this extract

Cardiff flat owner gets tax bills for 11,000 Chinese firms • BBC News

»

When Dylan Davies went to check his post last November, 580 brown envelopes fell to the floor.

Over the next six months he got tax bills for 11,000 Chinese companies after they fraudulently used his Cardiff address to register for VAT.

“It’s been horrendous,” said Mr Davies, who got letters from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) demanding tax amounting to £500,000.

HMRC admitted the situation did not raise alarm bells at the tax office.

“You’d think there’d be a systems with the technology today that would have picked it up immediately,” Mr Davies said. He told the police and HMRC but the brown letters just kept coming.

When letters from debt collection agencies started to arrive, he got even more worried that bailiffs may come “charging the door down” and feared that the amount of money involved meant his property could be taken.

He said HRMC only started to take notice when he took his concerns to BBC Wales consumer programme X-Ray.

The head of HMRC admitted the problem in a letter to the Commons public accounts committee.
Permanent secretary Jim Harra said: “2,356 of the businesses have a tax debt and we have acted to prevent any further contact with this address in relation to these debts.” Mr Harra said investigations “so far have found no evidence of fraud or fraudulent intent” and 70% of the businesses registered to Mr Davies’s address operated in online marketplaces.

«

Strange how they all chose his address: there must be something particular about it. And why all at once? Did one company in China decide to use his address, and lots of others followed suit quickly?
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The profusion of weather apps hasn’t led to a concomitant improvement in forecasts. Why not? CC-licensed photo by Markus Binzegger 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.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Wrap up warm, or not. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why are weather apps still so bad? • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

Weather apps are not all the same. There are tens of thousands of them, from the simply designed Apple Weather to the expensive, complex, data-rich Windy.App. But all of these forecasts are working off of similar data, which are pulled from places such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

Traditional meteorologists interpret these models based on their training as well as their gut instinct and past regional weather patterns, and different weather apps and services tend to use their own secret sauce of algorithms to divine their predictions. On an average day, you’re probably going to see a similar forecast from app to app and on television. But when it comes to how people feel about weather apps, these edge cases—which usually take place during severe weather events—are what stick in a person’s mind. “Eighty% of the year, a weather app is going to work fine,” Matt Lanza, a forecaster who runs Houston’s Space City Weather, told me. “But it’s that 20% where people get burned that’s a problem.”

No people on the planet have a more tortured and conflicted relationship with weather apps than those who interpret forecasting models for a living. “My wife is married to a meteorologist, and she will straight up question me if her favorite weather app says something different than my forecast,” Lanza told me. “That’s how ingrained these services have become in most peoples’ lives.” The basic issue with weather apps, he argues, is that many of them remove a crucial component of a good, reliable forecast: a human interpreter who can relay caveats about models or offer a range of outcomes instead of a definitive forecast.

…What people seem to be looking for in a weather app is something they can justify blindly trusting and letting into their lives—after all, it’s often the first thing you check when you roll over in bed in the morning. According to the 56,400 ratings of Carrot in Apple’s App Store, its die-hard fans find the app entertaining and even endearing. “Love my psychotic, yet surprisingly accurate weather app,” one five-star review reads. Although many people need reliable forecasting, true loyalty comes from a weather app that makes people feel good when they open it.

«

unique link to this extract

From Discord to 4chan: the improbable journey of a US intelligence leak • bellingcat

Aric Toler:

»

Bellingcat has seen evidence that some documents [detailing a planned Ukrainian offensive against Russian forces] dated to January could have been posted online even earlier, although it is unclear exactly when. Bellingcat also spoke to three members of the Discord community where the images had been posted who claimed that many more documents had been shared across other Discord servers in recent months.

As the channels were deleted following the controversy generated by the leaked documents, Bellingcat has not been able to confirm this claim. 

Bizarrely, the Discord channels in which the documents dated from March were posted focused on the Minecraft computer game and fandom for a Filipino YouTube celebrity. They then spread to other sites such as the imageboard 4Chan before appearing on Telegram, Twitter and then major media publishers around the world in recent days.

Ukrainian officials have cast doubt on the veracity of the documents, with Mykhailo Podolyak, the adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, stating on Telegram that he believes Russia is behind the purported leak. But US security officials quoted by the New York Times appeared to hint at their authenticity.

Russian Presidential spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told CNN that the documents showed the extent of US and NATO involvement in Ukraine. Yet one pro-Russian Telegram channel that has been providing updates on the conflict wasn’t convinced and said it was possible the documents could be Western disinformation.

The documents appear to detail events and offer analysis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine up until March 2023.

None of the documents seen by Bellingcat had been scanned but rather had been photographed. Creases can be seen on the documents with items, such as a hunter’s scope box and some Gorilla Glue visible in the background of those dated from early March. This appears to indicate that at least some of the documents were photographed in the same location. 

«

With details like that, bellingcat will probably pin down precisely when and where they were photographed in a few days. There’s a suggestion that the documents were published as part of a row between two Minecraft participants about who knew the most about the Ukrainian conflict.
unique link to this extract

Europe is bracing for (another) devastating drought • WIRED UK

Chris Baraniuk:

»

What happens during the next few months will really matter. Abundant rainfall could ease the situation and stave off the worst-case scenario. But Europe needs a lot. “We’re talking about a sea, a sea’s worth of water,” says Hannah Cloke at the University of Reading in the UK. In terms of volume, hundreds of millions of cubic liters of rain would have to fall across the continent to fill the deficit, she estimates. It would have to amount to higher-than-average rainfall for France and certain other places, including parts of the UK. The chances of that are, unfortunately, not high.

The UK’s weather agency, the Met Office, estimates there’s a 10% chance of a wetter-than-average March, April, and May. Conversely, there’s a 30% chance that this period will be drier than average—and that is 1.5x the normal chance at this time of year. The Met Office stresses that this is a “broad outlook,” and there might still be patches of very wet weather even if it remains dry overall.

Any rain that does fall also has to fall in the right way and in the right places. “There’s always this chance that if we do get it all in two days, we see some very serious floods,” says Cloke. “What we want is to see sustained, reasonably gentle rain over the next few months.” 

Another important factor is how hot it gets this summer, says Cammalleri. Heat waves push up water consumption and increase evaporation rates. He indicates that European forecasts do not suggest that temperatures will be quite as blisteringly hot as last year—though there is some uncertainty there too.

«

unique link to this extract

Twitter fails to report some political ads after promising transparency • POLITICO

Jessica Piper:

»

Twitter has failed to disclose some political ads running on its site since early March, according to a review of its activity by POLITICO. At least three promoted fundraising tweets were not included in Twitter’s own data, seemingly contradicting the company’s policies and raising doubts about the integrity of the platform’s data and how many other political ads could go unreported.

The tweets identified by POLITICO spanned politicians from both parties, including the accounts of Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), and Adam Frisch, the Democrat who is again challenging Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s 3rd District this cycle.

Stefanik’s tweet, which promised the opportunity to win a signed MAGA hat, included a link to her joint fundraising committee’s WinRed page, where users could donate. The tweets from Fetterman and Frisch included links to their respective campaign’s ActBlue pages. All three were labeled as “promoted” in users’ feeds and would seem to fall under Twitter’s political content policy, which allows for political ads — defined to include several types of promoted political content, including tweets that “solicit financial support” — but says they will be subject to public disclosure.

The lack of disclosure casts doubt on all of the political advertising data released by the platform and makes it hard to assess which groups are using Twitter to fundraise or sway voters ahead of 2024. It also highlights the hodgepodge of voluntary transparency efforts that experts say falls short when it comes to informing voters about who is trying to influence them online.

«

Applying Hanlon’s Razor to the absolute mess that is Twitter, I’ll go with cockup over conspiracy.
unique link to this extract

Twitter: BBC objects to ‘government funded media’ label • BBC News

James Clayton:

»

The BBC is objecting to a new label describing it as “government funded media” on its main Twitter account.

The corporation has contacted the social media giant over the designation on the @BBC account to resolve the issue “as soon as possible”.

“The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee,” it said.

Elon Musk said he believed the BBC was one of the “least biased” outlets. When BBC News highlighted to the Twitter boss that the corporation was licence fee-funded, Mr Musk responded in an email, asking: “Is the Twitter label accurate?”

He also appeared to suggest he was considering providing a label that would link to “exact funding sources”. It is not clear whether this would apply to other media outlets too.

In a separate email seeking to clarify his earlier comments, Mr Musk wrote: “We are aiming for maximum transparency and accuracy. Linking to ownership and source of funds probably makes sense. I do think media organizations should be self-aware and not falsely claim the complete absence of bias. …All organizations have bias, some obviously much more than others. I should note that I follow BBC News on Twitter, because I think it is among the least biased.”

The level of the £159 ($197) annual licence fee – which is required by law to watch live TV broadcasts or live streaming in the UK – is set by the government, but paid for by individual UK households.

While the @BBC account, which has 2.2m followers, has been given the label, much larger accounts associated with the BBC’s news and sport output are not currently being described in the same way.

«

As ever, Musk can’t even screw things up well. Expect this row to rumble on: the BBC is annoyed.
unique link to this extract

Researchers develop mRNA-based treatment for peanut allergy • Interesting Engineering

Mrigakshi Dixit:

»

Nearly three million Americans are said to be allergic to peanuts and tree nuts. Not just this, approximately one in every fifty children suffers from peanut allergies, which can sometimes result in a fatal immune reaction. 

However, there is some good news for you. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) are developing the first mRNA-based medicine to treat peanut allergies. The treatment has been inspired by the way mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines function.

“As far as we can find, mRNA has never been used for an allergic disease. We’ve shown that our platform can work to calm peanut allergies, and we believe it may be able to do the same for other allergens, in food and drugs, as well as autoimmune conditions,” said Dr. André Nel, the paper’s co-corresponding author, in a statement. 

For this treatment, they delivered the mRNA inside a nanoparticle to the liver, where it targeted specific cells to tolerate peanut proteins. The nanoparticles were tested on mice, which demonstrated that the medicine not only reversed peanut allergies but also prevented the development of severe conditions.

Several trials on mice revealed that the nanoparticle treatment was able to improve the animal’s peanut tolerance. 

According to the authors, with a few more lab studies, the nanoparticle treatment could be ready for clinical trials within three years.

«

Mice get all the good stuff first. But: good to see mRNA applications expanding.
unique link to this extract

Paris votes overwhelmingly to ban shared e-scooters • TechCrunch

Rebecca Bellan:

»

In a major blow to shared micromobility companies Lime, Dott and Tier, Paris has voted to ban rental e-scooters from its streets. Many in the industry fear the move in Paris, where free-floating scooters initially took off in 2018, will have ripple effects in other cities.

Paris has been one of the most heavily regulated e-scooter markets, something companies have pointed to as an example of how they can play nice with cities. Yet, despite limiting scooter top speeds to as slow as 10 kilometers per hour (about 6 miles per hour) and requiring riders to use dedicated parking areas or pay fines, Paris has become the first city to completely reverse its policy on offering contracts to shared micromobility companies.

In a referendum on Sunday organized by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, Paris residents voted 89% against keeping shared e-scooters in the city. The three companies that pay for contracts to operate in the City of Light will have to pull their fleets — a total of 15,000 e-scooters — out of the city by September 1.

«

Brutal. But when you consider how lethal Paris’s roads and pavements are already, you wouldn’t want its residents (or visitors) careening around on those scooters as well.
unique link to this extract

New Orleans teens’ Pythagorean proof gains compelling backing • The Guardian

Ramon Antonio Vargas:

»

As of Friday, [schoolgirls Calcea Rujean] Johnson and [Ne’Kiya] Jackson did not appear to have widely released their proof. The American Mathematical Society has only said it has encouraged the pair to submit their work to a peer-reviewed journal. But a YouTube account, MathTrain, reconstructed the proof using slides from Johnson and Jackson’s presentation visible in the WWL report.

Lozano-Robledo reviewed MathTrain’s reconstruction, broke it down in his own video and concluded that the students had done what they said.

In a follow-up video, he summarized how the proof involved “a fractal of similar triangles” as well as “infinite series” to compute the shapes’ sides.

“It’s so ingenious,” Lozano-Robledo said. “The proof itself is just so beautiful and so elegant.”

But Lozano-Robledo also said people who pointed to at least one other trigonometric, noncircular proof of Pythagoras’s theory were correct to do so.

Jason Zimba, then at Bennington College in Vermont, established in 2009 that sin2x+cos2x=1 could be derived independently of the Pythagorean theorem, though he took a different route.

In text under his video, Lozano-Robledo said it was not Johnson and Jackson’s fault that people had the impression they were claiming to have done something not done in more than 2,000 years. He said the students did not say that in their abstract.

«

Nice to see this progressing.
unique link to this extract

Why movies today look so dark today, in theaters and at home • Polygon

A.B. Allen:

»

Take, for instance, Wes Craven’s 1996 horror classic Scream — a film often remarked on for just how lit everything in it is at all times. An early scene depicts protagonist Sidney Prescott embracing her boyfriend Billy Loomis in the wake of a terrifying home invasion and her near-death at the hands of a masked killer. After Sidney throws her arms around Billy, Craven cuts to a tight close-up on Billy’s face, which is illuminated by a harsh, ominous, icy-cool light that telegraphs his sinister intentions.

But where is that light coming from? The bedroom they’re in has no lamps switched on. Could it be the moon? Hard to justify, as the only windows in the space are behind Billy, and the light we’re staring at is so much brighter and closer than the moon could ever be. So what on Earth is that light?

The answer is, simply enough, nothing. Craven often didn’t feel any real need to rationalize why a bright light would suddenly appear one second before disappearing again in the following shot. It’s a purely stylistic choice, employed for that one moment to cast doubt on Billy’s trustworthiness in the audience’s mind. It’s an extremely stagey choice that fits neatly within the larger series’ heightened, melodramatic style. Scream wouldn’t really be Scream without it.

The hyper-lit style was a staple of cinematography in American films during the ’90s, and like all trends, it eventually fell out of fashion — in this case, a few years after Scream hit theaters. The 2000s saw filmmakers embracing more directional, shadowy lighting styles, evoking a grittier, more “grounded” aesthetic while retaining a sense of classic Hollywood polish. The 2010s featured another huge shift in style, this time toward hyper-naturalism. Even broad, big-budget blockbusters like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 embraced a look torn straight from indie cinema. Not only are the lights in that film always motivated, they’re realistic.

Where earlier films might have used the presence of the moon or a table lamp to justify much brighter lighting, movies like Deathly Hallows, Interstellar, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes let the light of a lamp simply look like a lamp. That resulted in darker, more directionally lit sets.

«

Nice to have it explained so simply.
unique link to this extract

How AI could disrupt video-gaming • The Economist

»

Gamemakers showed off their latest ai tricks at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month. Ubisoft, a French developer of blockbusters such as “Assassin’s Creed”, unveiled Ghostwriter, a tool that generates dialogue for in-game characters. Roblox, an American platform for diy games, launched one that draws materials from text commands, like “stained glass”, and an autocomplete helper for programmers. A few weeks earlier Straight4 Studios previewed a new driving game, “GTR Revival”, with personalised racing commentary delivered by ai.

AI represents an “explosion of opportunity”, believes Steve Collins, technology chief of King, which makes “Candy Crush Saga”, a hit mobile game. King, which bought an AI firm called Peltarion last year, uses AI to gauge levels’ difficulty. “It’s like having a million players at your disposal,” says Mr Collins. This year Electronic Arts, another big gamemaker, and Google both received patents for using AI in game testing. Unity, a game-development “engine”, plans a marketplace for developers to trade AI tools. Danny Lange, Unity’s head of AI, hopes it will “put creators of all resource levels on a more equal playing-field”.

Making a game is already easier than it was: nearly 13,000 titles were published last year on Steam, a games platform, almost double the number in 2017. Gaming may soon resemble the music and video industries, in which most new content on Spotify or YouTube is user-generated. One games executive predicts that small firms will be the quickest to work out what new genres are made possible by AI. Last month Raja Koduri, an executive at Intel, left the chipmaker to found an AI-gaming startup.

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A significant proportion of men are red/green colourblind – but modern web design makes little allowance for them. CC-licensed photo by Jam Willem Doormembal 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 was another post last Friday at the Social Warming Substack: TikTok, Instagram and the lessons never learnt. Free signup.

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

ChatGPT leaking Samsung chip secrets is the tip of the iceberg • EENews Europe

Peter Clarke:

»

Apparently engineers and other workers at many companies are recruiting ChatGPT to work for them, to write software and prepare reports for example. This is sometimes with, and sometimes without, their employers’ approval.

The Digitimes report mentions three specific cases of leaks caused by engineers sharing information with ChatGPT. In one case an engineer uploaded faulty code and asked ChatGPT to find the fault and optimize the software. But as a result the source code became part of ChatGPT’s database and learning materials.

Another case was where ChatGPT was asked to take the minutes of meeting. By default the discussion and exactly who attended the meeting – both confidential – were stored on the ChatGPT database and thus ChatGPT was able to divulge the material to anyone who asked.

As a result of such events, Samsung, SK Hynix, LG and many other companies are scrambling to either ban or draw up guidelines for the use of ChatGPT and other AI chatbot services in the workplace, according to The Korea Times.

The Korea Times seemed to confirm Samsung’s mishaps and said that a message on an in-company bulletin had been posted calling attention to the misuse of ChatGPT. SK Hynix has blocked the use of ChatGPT on its internal computer network and employees must obtain security approval before using ChatGPT, the newspaper said.

The newspaper also quoted Kim Dae-jong, a professor of business administration at Sejong University, saying that the use of ChatGPT in the workplace was spreading.

«

The original report about Samsung workers leaking secrets to ChatGPT (which might want to know them) is said to have appeared in Digitimes. I’ve drawn a blank.
unique link to this extract

Samsung forecasts a shocking 96% drop in profits for Q1 2023 • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Samsung’s next quarter is shaping up to be even worse than Samsung’s last quarter, which was already at an eight-year low. The company warned investors today that it’s a shocking 95.8% year-over-year drop in operating profit for Q1 2023. If that expectation holds, this will be the company’s worst quarter since 2009, which dates back to the company’s pre-smartphone era.

Samsung doesn’t have much explanation for the drop other than a weakening economy and lowered demand for chips. Preliminary results have the company making only 600bn won ($450m) in profit for Q1 2023, compared to 14.12trn won in profit ($10.7bn) for Q1 2022.

While phones and TVs are probably Samsung’s biggest consumer-facing products, the company’s nigh-invisible component business makes up most of Samsung’s profits. Components like RAM and NAND storage chips don’t just ship in Samsung products, but also land in most other phones, laptops, desktops, TVs, and other electronics from Samsung’s competitors. A DigiTimes breakdown of Samsung’s business for 2022 has the memory division at 55% of profits, mobile at 22%, and displays at 11%, so Samsung’s profits mostly go up and down with the memory business.

«

Lower chip demand means worse economies of scale. But the worst since 2009? That’s going back a long way. But you can expect that it’s going to come back. Samsung is, in its way, the most determined animal in the technology world.
unique link to this extract

DPReview closure: an update • Digital Photography Review

Scott Everett is general manager of DPReview:

»

Dear readers,

We’ve received a lot of questions about what’s next for the site. We hear your concerns about losing the content that has been carefully curated over the years, and want to assure you that the content will remain available as an archive.

We’ve also heard that you need more time to access the site, so we’re going to keep publishing some more stories while we work on archiving.

Thank you to this community and the support you’ve shown us over the years.

«

Hard to know if this is happening because of the outcry, or was planned all along. But you’d think if it had been planned earlier, they would have said it along with the news of the closure.
unique link to this extract

Introducing Substack Notes • Substack

Hamish McKenzie:

»

While Notes may look like familiar social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. This changes everything. 

The lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed is attention. In legacy social networks, people get rewarded for creating content that goes viral within the context of the feed, regardless of whether or not people value it, locking readers in a perpetual scroll. Almost all the attendant financial rewards then go to the owner of the platform. 

By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing worthy work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content.

As we develop Notes, we will focus on building a system that lets people control the contours and boundaries of their subscription universe so that it is easy to keep trolls out and even easier to let valuable contributors in. The goal here is not to create a perfectly sanitized information environment, but to set the conditions for constructive discussion where there is enough common ground to seek understanding while holding onto the worthwhile tension needed for great art and new ideas. It won’t feel like the social media we know today.

Many of us have grown so used to talk of hellsites and doomscrolling—while wondering if social media is driving us mad—that we have forgotten that the internet can be good.

«

Which is why Elon Musk has thrown all pretence of “free speech” out of the window (not that he hasn’t many times already) and first blocked Substack links from being posted, and then saw them labelled as “malware”. Perhaps that will have changed by now. Who knows.
unique link to this extract

Time set for national mobile phone emergency alert test • BBC News

Brian Wheeler:

»

A siren will go off on nearly every smartphone in the UK on Sunday 23 April, the government has announced.

The 10 seconds of sound and vibration at 15:00 BST will test a new emergency alerts system.
The test had originally been planned for the early evening but was moved to avoid clashing with an FA Cup semi-final, which kicks off at 16:30.

The government was also keen to avoid a clash with the London Marathon, which starts at 09:30 on that Sunday.

The alert system will be used to warn of extreme weather events, such as flash floods or wildfires. It could also be used during terror incidents or civil defence emergencies if the UK was under attack.
The minister in charge of the system, Oliver Dowden, said it would be used only in situations where there was an immediate risk to life.

«

Such a diary clash! Marathon and the FA Cup final. When is there time to momentarily terrify all the population?
unique link to this extract

Who has contributed most to global warming? • Sustainability By Numbers

Hannah Ritchie:

»

we can look at how much warming each country has contributed to date. This is the sum of warming caused by emissions of all three gases, and from all sources.

You can see these contributions in the map – or use our interactive chart to explore the data in more detail. If you’re screaming that this should be in per capita terms, I hear you and address this at the end.

The rankings of countries probably won’t surprise you. Countries with large populations such as China and India are among the top contributors. The United States and the European Union, with long histories of fossil fuel burning and rich lifestyles, are also up there.

The US has caused 0.28°C of warming, followed by China at 0.2°C, and the EU at 0.17°C.

As a share of total warming, that puts the US at 17%, China at 12%, and the EU at 10%.

A final note: if you’re looking at the warming caused by your country and thinking “that’s so tiny, why do we even bother?” you might want to read my recent article on why ‘negligible emitters’ really do matter.

«

The per capita question is, as she points out, complicated because how do you measure population, which keeps changing? Today’s number isn’t the same as the number when the emissions were happening.
unique link to this extract

Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud • bioRxiv

Saul Justin Newman:

»

The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers.

Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. In the UK, Italy, Japan, and France remarkable longevity is instead predicted by regional poverty, old-age poverty, material deprivation, low incomes, high crime rates, a remote region of birth, worse health, and fewer 90+ year old people.

In addition, supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five: patterns indicative of widespread fraud and error.

«

In other words, those people over 100? Often just faked. The full PDF is fun towards the end (para 745 onward) when it poses the question of how you’d determine how old someone is when they’re really old.
unique link to this extract

This is what it looks like to be colourblind • The Verge

Andy Baio:

»

About 8% of men, roughly 1 in 12, have some form of colour vision deficiency. (It’s hereditary, so figures will vary from region to region.) My mom’s colour vision is even worse than mine, which is very unusual: only about 0.5% of women globally are colourblind, about 1 in 200.

I’ve had a lot of conversations about my colourblindness with people who aren’t colorblind. (Pro tip: when you meet a colourblind person, don’t repeatedly point to things and ask what colour they are.) It seems like the very idea of colourblindness is hard for them to visualize. 

Despite what many think, I can see most colours! My world isn’t a black-and-white movie. Achromatopsia, or total colourblindness, is much more rare, affecting about 1 in 30,000 people. (Unless you were born on the Pingelap atoll in the South Pacific, where 10% of the population have inherited the gene.) 

Ninety-nine% of colourblind people, like me, have a form of red-green colourblindness. I was born with the most common type, deuteranopia, a genetic mutation that affects the ability of the green-sensitive cones in my eyes to absorb light.

As a result, some hues of green and red look like each other, converging on a muddy brown. Other colours, like shades of purple and blue, bright orange and green, or even pink and grey, can look very similar. People with other kinds of colourblindness will confuse different colours.

For example, at a glance, barring other context clues like texture and toppings, avocado toast and peanut butter toast look pretty much the same to me.

Apparently, this is nauseating to people? That’s my life.

Because red and green are complementary colours opposite one another on the colour wheel, they’ve become the default colours for every designer who wants to represent opposites: true and false, high and low, stop and go.

Inconveniently, these are also the two colours most likely to be mixed up by people with colour vision deficiencies.

I wish every designer in the world understood this and would switch to, say, red and blue for opposing colours. But I know that won’t happen: the cultural meaning is too ingrained.

«

Although in the UK the danger of colourblind (male) electricians was realised after WW2, and mains plug wiring changed from red (live)/ black (neutral)/ green (earth) to brown (L)/ blue (N)/ yellow green (E). (First applied 1969, yet not universal until 2004.)It can be done.
unique link to this extract

Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars • Nasa Hubble Site

»

The universe is so capricious that even the slightest things that might go unnoticed could have profound implications. That’s what happened to Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum when he was looking through Hubble Space Telescope images and noticed a suspected blemish that looked like a scratch on photographic film. For Hubble’s electronic cameras, cosmic rays skimming along the detector look like “scratches.”

But once spectroscopy was done on the oddball streak van Dokkum realized it was really a 200,000-light-year-long chain of young blue stars located over halfway across the universe. Van Dokkum and his colleagues believe that it stretches between a runaway monster black hole and the galaxy from which it was ejected.

The black hole must be compressing gas along its wake, which condenses to form stars. Nothing like it has ever been seen anywhere else in the universe before.

«

You can read the preprint paper. Plus there isn’t just one of these: there’s another one heading in the exact opposite direction, doing just the same.
unique link to this extract

Google will drop Dropcam and Nest Secure in 2024 • The Verge

Nathan Edwards:

»

Google is ending support for the Dropcam and the Nest Secure home security system in one year, on April 8th, 2024. They are among the few remaining Nest products that haven’t been brought over to Google Home, and their demise hints that the new Google Home app might almost be here. At least, no more than a year away. Surely.

Google is also winding down the last few legacy Works with Nest connections, but not ‘til September 29th.

Existing Dropcam cameras will keep working until April 8th, 2024, after which you won’t be able to access them from the Nest app. To soften the blow, Google’s offering a free indoor wired Nest Cam to Dropcam owners who subscribe to Nest Aware. Nonsubscribers will get a 50 percent-off coupon. The promotion runs until May 7, 2024, so you can keep using your Dropcam until it stops working.

The Dropcam (fka Dropcam HD) came out in 2012, and the Dropcam Pro in 2013. Then, Google bought Nest, and Nest bought Dropcam. In 2015, Google spun Nest out when it formed Alphabet, and for a while, Google and Nest were both making smart home products. Then, Google reabsorbed Nest in 2018, and there’s been a whole lot of messy business trying to integrate Nest products into the Google Home app — and killing off the ones that can’t be integrated.

Now that it’s dropping Dropcam and Nest Secure, the Nest Protect smart smoke alarms are the only Nest App-only devices left, and Google has promised to bring them to the new Google Home app. The updated app has been in public preview since October, and there’s still no firm date, but it must be getting close, right?

«

Ten years seems like a fair run – but it’s hardly as if the need for home security cameras has gone away. It’s all a bit messy: Nest, Dropcam, Google Home? Google’s hardware strategy is still in pieces.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified