A guitar solo that only existed on the 8-track version of Pink Floyd’s Animals and which joins the end to the beginning has been rediscovered. CC-licensed photo by Loco Steve 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 a prince. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook wanted out of politics. It was messier than anyone expected • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz, Keach Hagey and Emily Glazer:

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In late 2021, tired of endless claims about political bias and censorship, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s board pushed for the company to go beyond incremental adjustments, according to people familiar with the discussions. Presented with a range of options, Mr. Zuckerberg and the board chose the most drastic, instructing the company to demote posts on “sensitive” topics as much as possible in the newsfeed that greets users when they open the app—an initiative that hasn’t previously been reported.

The plan was in line with calls from some of the company’s harshest critics, who have alleged that Facebook is either politically biased or commercially motivated to amplify hate and controversy. For years, advertisers and investors have pressed the company to clean up its messy role in politics, according to people familiar with those discussions.

It became apparent, though, that the plan to mute politics would have unintended consequences, according to internal research and people familiar with the project.

The result was that views of content from what Facebook deems “high quality news publishers” such as Fox News and CNN fell more than material from outlets users considered less trustworthy. User complaints about misinformation climbed, and charitable donations via the company’s fundraiser product through Facebook fell in the first half of 2022. And perhaps most important, users didn’t like it.

One internal analysis concluded that Facebook could achieve some of its goals by heavily demoting civic content—coverage of political, community and social issues—in the newsfeed, but it would be at “a high and inefficient cost.”

At the end of June, Mr. Zuckerberg pulled the plug on the most extreme plan. Unable to suppress political controversy through blunt force, Facebook has fallen back on more gradual changes to how its newsfeed promotes what the company deems “sensitive topics,” such as health and politics.

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Getting people riled up is great for business, but you have to rile them in the right way. (The link should give you free access, if you don’t subscribe to the WSJ.)
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‘We’re not leaving this bar until we’ve come up with such a great idea that I can’t sack you” • Medium

Matt Locke transcribed a talk by Tony Ageh, who you’ll recall was one of the people on that plane to San Francisco and Wired earlier this week. Here, it’s a few years later:

»

When I first joined the BBC, I had a very interesting job, I was head of search, listings and core websites. I also had, in my responsibility, two other parts of bbc.co.uk — BBC3 and BBC4’s websites. I didn’t have any control over them, I was just to blame if they went wrong.

BBC3’s website went wrong one day. We had a programme on about Jordan. That’s the glamour model, not the country. The editor of the BBC3 website put together a nice little micro-site, which had nice pictures of Jordan — that’s the model, not the country — in various states of undress. It was very embarrassing, and the Evening Standard phoned up and said, ‘Have you gone a bit soft porn, BBC?’ They phoned Jana Bennett, who was the Director of Television, and she got very angry, and I said that I would take the site down, so I took the site down, and then she said, ‘Great. I’m glad that’s all done. Can you sack the person responsible?’

So I take this guy out, and I say, ‘We have to go drinking tonight,’ and he says, ‘You’re going to sack me, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Not necessarily, but we are going to go drinking.’ We go down the stairs to the bar at Bush House, which stays open all night, because that’s where the World Service is, and I said, ‘We’re not leaving this bar until we’ve come up with such a great idea that I can’t sack you, because I’m going to have to tell her tomorrow that you can’t be sacked, because you’ve got the greatest idea the BBC has ever had.’

We sit there and we come up with some of the worst ideas the BBC has ever had. Some real stinkers. We should have written them down, because they would be worth-, anyway, around-, I can’t tell you what time of the morning it is, because it’s very late, and we are really, very, drunk.

We come up with this thing — ‘Suppose you can download’ — this is for BBC3, remember — ‘Three programmes and keep them and watch them whenever you want?’ What’s not to like? We even had a name for it, based on the TiVo. We called it the ThreeVo.

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You know the name of this product now, don’t you? But there’s plenty more to the story. (Thanks to Matt for the link.)
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Revealed: Cambridge chip startup Flusso acquired by Chinese firm • UK Tech News

Robert Scammell and George Simister:

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Cambridge-based semiconductor company Flusso has been wholly acquired by a Chinese entity for £28m, company filings reveal.

Flusso, a University of Cambridge spinout that develops flow sensor technology, announced last August that it had been “jointly acquired” by a “company and global private equity fund”.

The announcement notably omitted the name of the acquirers. However, Companies House documents filed on 6 January show that Shanghai Sierchi Enterprise Management Partnership, a special purpose vehicle, took 100% ownership of Flusso on 11 August 2022.

That same month, Flusso appointed two Chinese nationals based in Shanghai – Dan Zhou and Feiran Shi – as company directors. UKTN was unable to reach Zhou and Shi for comment.

Flusso CEO and co-founder Dr Andrea De Luca told UKTN that Shanghai Sierchi Enterprise Management Partnership is controlled by the private equity firm and company mentioned in the initial announcement.

The two acquirers were not named in the August announcement because the unnamed company is currently going through an initial public offering, De Luca said, and “chooses to not publicise its name so it doesn’t affect the IPO”.

De Luca added that the acquiring company “sells components to many of the world’s top 100 companies”.

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The company’s web page is still up (presently). Will the government try to unwind this, as it did the Welsh semiconductor company?
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Swiss company Climeworks has removed CO2 from air, put it underground • CNBC

Catherine Clifford:

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Swiss company Climeworks announced Thursday that it has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the air and put it in the ground where it will eventually turn into rock in a process that has been verified by an independent third-party auditor. It the first time a company has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, put it underground to be locked away permanently and delivered that permanent carbon removal to a paying customer.

The development has been a long time coming. Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher co-founded Climeworks in 2009 as a spinoff of ETH Zürich, the main technical university in Switzerland’s largest city. They have been scaling the technology for direct carbon removal, wherein machines vacuum greenhouse gasses out of the air.

Over the last couple of years, Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify have all bought future carbon removal services from Climeworks in a bid to help kick-start the nascent industry. Now Climeworks is actually removing the carbon dioxide and putting it underground in a process that has been certified by DNV, an independent auditor.

…The cost of carbon dioxide removal and storage for these corporate clients is confidential and depends on what quantity of carbon dioxide the companies want to have removed and over what period of time. But the general price for carbon removal runs to several hundred dollars per ton. Individuals can also pay to Climeworks to remove carbon dioxide to offset their personal emissions.

In addition to getting corporate clients to pay for future removals, Climeworks has raised more than $780 million to scale up from a wide variety of investors including venture capitalist John Doerr and insurance company Swiss Re.

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Wait for it, wait for it…

»

In June, Climeworks announced it had begun construction of its second commercial-sized plant in Iceland that will capture and store 36,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide. Even when complete, that will amount to a tiny percentage of the total global emissions of carbon dioxide released into the air each year: In 2021, they hit a record high of 36.3 billion metric tons, according to the International Energy Agency.

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Sooooo.. 0.0001% (rounding up) of annual emissions. I hope that the system is powered by geothermal energy. Otherwise it’s probably generating more CO2 than it’s collecting. I’d love to be more positive about these things, but the phrase “420 parts per million” (the current CO2 atmospheric concentration) means you’ve got to process a million tonnes of air to extract 420 tonnes of CO2 (roughly). It’s a fairly pointless process; far better to capture it at the point where it’s generated, such as power station outputs, where concentrations will be far higher.
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Mexico’s subway drivers depend on WhatsApp to keep the trains running • Rest of World

Daniella Dib:

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“I find unacceptable that train operators are allowed to drive while on their cellphones,” América Gómora, a Mexico City subway rider, tweeted on January 7. Metro drivers’ conduct has come under particular scrutiny after two trains collided that day, leaving one dead and dozens injured. 

Although there’s no evidence so far to suggest conductors using their phones played a role in the crash, many local subway riders took to social media to express concerns that distracted train operators might be putting commuters’ lives at risk. But one former and four current Metro workers told Rest of World that because the system is poorly maintained, drivers depend on their phones to communicate with each other and keep the trains running.

For years now, drivers have said that the Metro system’s faulty automatic pilot program has forced conductors to operate many of the trains manually. To do this, they need to be in close contact to avoid collisions, and workers say the trains’ radio-based communications system is not up to the task. So instead, they often have to use their own cellphones and WhatsApp chats to coordinate with the control center. 

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People improvise: necessity is the mother of invention (and technology adoption). About 15 years ago, people who needed to share files more easily between each other, and locations, and inside and outside their organisation, started using Dropbox. It wasn’t part of the “official” system, but it worked better than any solution their business offered.

This article, though, reminds me of a terrific podcast episode by Tim Harford from his excellent Cautionary Tales series, about a train crash (it’s the second part, called “Blood on the Tracks”) in which he discusses the gap between “work as imagined” (by the rulebooks) and “work as done” (by the workers). The adoption of WhatsApp here fits into that dichotomy perfectly.
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Trump discussed using a nuclear weapon on North Korea in 2017 and blaming it on someone else, book says • NBC News

Rebecca Shabad:

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Behind closed doors in 2017, President Donald Trump discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea and suggested he could blame a US strike against the communist regime on another country, according to a new section of a book that details key events of his administration.

Trump’s alleged comments, reported for the first time in a new afterword to a book by New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt, came as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un escalated, alarming then-White House chief of staff John Kelly.

The new section of “Donald Trump v. the United States,” obtained by NBC News ahead of its publication in paperback Tuesday, offers an extensive examination of Kelly’s life and tenure as Trump’s chief of staff from July 2017 to January 2019. Kelly previously was Trump’s secretary of homeland security. For the account, Schmidt cites in part dozens of interviews on background with former Trump administration officials and others who worked with Kelly. 

Eight days after Kelly arrived at the White House as chief of staff, Trump warned that North Korea would be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” When Trump delivered his first speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September 2017, he threatened to “totally destroy North Korea” if Kim, whom he referred to as “Rocket Man,” continued his military threats. 

…Kelly tried to use reason to explain to Trump why that would not work, Schmidt continues.

“It’d be tough to not have the finger pointed at us,” Kelly told the president, according to the afterword.

Kelly brought the military’s top leaders to the White House to brief Trump about how war between the U.S. and North Korea could easily break out, as well as the enormous consequences of such a conflict. But the argument about how many people could be killed had “no impact on Trump,” Schmidt writes.

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Not sure which is worse: the fool thinking that saying “Big boy done it and ran away” would work, or Kelly being so pusillanimous he didn’t point out that every detail of a missile’s flight would be visible internationally and also that North Korea would launch its own missiles. Unhinged.
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Microsoft combat goggles falter as Congress says no to buying more • Bloomberg

Tony Capaccio:

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Microsoft Corp. won’t be getting more orders for its combat goggles anytime soon after Congress rejected the US Army’s request for $400m to buy as many as 6,900 of them this fiscal year.

The rejection of the request, in the $1.75 trillion government funding bill, reflects concern over field tests of the goggles, which are adapted from Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets. The tests disclosed “mission-affecting physical impairments” including headaches, eyestrain and nausea.
Instead, lawmakers approved the transfer of $40m of those procurement funds to develop a new model of the goggles, Army spokesman David Patterson said in an email. 

Over a decade, the Army projects spending as much as $21.9 billion for as many as 121,000 devices, spares and support services if all options are exercised. It has already ordered the first 5,000 goggles, which will be used for training as the improved model is developed.

Late last month, the Army awarded a $125m “task order” for the new model, labeled version 1.2. That money came from the the previous year’s appropriations.

“This task order will provide improvements based on completed test events” to address “physiological impacts identified during testing, and a lower profile Heads-Up Display with distributed counterweight for improved user interface and comfort,” the service said in a statement.

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Headaches, eyestrain and nausea? Sounds delightful! Can’t imagine why Meta is struggling to get people to adopt headsets like this.
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JP Morgan says startup founder used millions of fake customers to dupe it into an acquisition • Forbes

Alexandra Levine:

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JPMorgan Chase is suing the 30-year-old founder of Frank, a buzzy fintech startup it acquired for $175m, for allegedly lying about its scale and success by creating an enormous list of fake users to entice the financial giant to buy it.

Frank, founded by former CEO Charlie Javice in 2016, offers software aimed at improving the student loan application process for young Americans seeking financial aid. Her lofty goals to build the startup into “an Amazon for higher education” won support from billionaire Marc Rowan, Frank’s lead investor according to Crunchbase, and prominent venture backers including Aleph, Chegg, Reach Capital, Gingerbread Capital and SWAT Equity Partners.

The lawsuit, which was filed late last year in U.S. District Court in Delaware, claims that Javice pitched JP Morgan in 2021 on the “lie” that more than 4 million users had signed up to use Frank’s tools to apply for federal aid. When JP Morgan asked for proof during due diligence, Javice allegedly created an enormous roster of “fake customers – a list of names, addresses, dates of birth, and other personal information for 4.265 million ‘students’ who did not actually exist.” In reality, according to the suit, Frank had fewer than 300,000 customer accounts at that time.

“Javice first pushed back on JPMC’s request, arguing that she could not share her customer list due to privacy concerns,” the complaint continues. “After JPMC insisted, Javice chose to invent several million Frank customer accounts out of whole cloth.” The complaint includes screenshots of presentations Javice gave to JP Morgan illustrating Frank’s growth and claiming it had more than 4 million customers.

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Further to the story, the claim is that Javice approached a university professor, who was asked to generate 4 million fake IDs. (Whether the professor was complicit or thought it was for testing isn’t clear yet, but probably will when the trial comes.)

Not going swimmingly for young women founders just presently.
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Alphabet unit Verily to trim more than 200 jobs • WSJ

Miles Kruppa:

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Verily Life Sciences, a healthcare unit of Alphabet is laying off more than 200 employees as part of a broader reorganization, the first major staff reductions to hit Google’s parent following a wave of layoffs at other technology companies.

The cuts will affect about 15% of roles at Verily, which will discontinue work on a medical software program called Verily Value Suite and several early-stage products, CEO Stephen Gillett said in an email to employees Wednesday. Verily has more than 1,600 employees.

Verily oversees a portfolio of healthcare projects largely focused on applying data and technology to patient treatments, including a virtual diabetes clinic and an online program for connecting research participants to clinical studies. 

…Verily has recently looked to pare back a once sprawling collection of projects spanning insurance to mosquito breeding. Last year, the company hired McKinsey & Co. and Innosight to do consulting work, The Wall Street Journal reported.

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Ah yes, this is the chunk of Alphabet that was going to develop diabetes-detecting contact lenses (then wasn’t) and a Star Trek tricorder (zapped). Sure, it’s good to aim high, but technology involves successive steps, and you can’t walk to the Moon. And rockets are in short supply in medical technology.
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Out of print gems: the Pink Floyd holy grail • The Blind Man Sees All

“Judah”:

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In 1977, the [Pink] Floyd released Animals, the second in a trilogy of albums which toyed with the idea of cyclical music. 1975’s Wish You Were Here was bookended with two halves of an extended song, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” and 1979’s The Wall ended with the question fragment “Isn’t this where…” and began with its completion, “…we came in?” Similarly, Animals was bookended by two short acoustic song fragments, “Pigs on the Wing,” parts 1 and 2. Given the nature of the 8-track format, the band decided to record a guitar solo that would connect the two halves of the song and explicitly bring the album back full circle. Floyd associate Snowy White was assigned the task after David Gilmour’s take was accidentally erased, and the resulting “complete” version of “Pigs on the Wing” was included exclusively on British and American pressings of the 8-track tape when the album was released.

As time passed and the 8-track went extinct, though the Floyd remained as popular as ever well on through the beginning of the CD era, this solo slipped out of the discography as the catalog was standardized to reflect the more familiar tracklisting associated with the original LP. As time went by, Snowy White’s solo took on mythic stature among the band’s fanbase, particularly as reissues continued and it became the only commercially unavailable piece of music the band had ever officially released.

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But he has taken the trouble to find an 8-track player and a copy of Animals on 8-track tape, and there indeed is a guitar solo bridging the second and the first. I don’t think you’d easily mistake it for Gilmour, though. Worth a listen if you know the album, but unlikely to change your perspective on it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The promise of quantum computers never seems to be fulfilled, no matter how much money and effort – and how many milestones – are passed. CC-licensed photo by IBM Research 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 part of George Santos’s CV. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Is Substack the future of media? • New Statesman

Harry Lambert:

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Newsletter-first media companies are being built by former print editors, most notably Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair. Carter recently raised a second round of $17m for his newsletter title Air Mail; it launched in 2019 and already has over 220,000 paying and trial subscribers.

Carter’s departure from Vanity Fair after 25 years as editor may have signalled the end of the magazine era and the birth of the newsletter age. Air Mail exhibits many of the mannerisms of a print magazine and, as Carter has said, his job as editor has not changed; it is just the means of delivery that are different.

Meanwhile, new publications are being built on Substack. Editor Joshi Herrmann’s bid to deliver local news in newsletter form is bringing in around £250,000 a year for his nascent company The Mill in Manchester and other outlets based in Liverpool and Sheffield. Byline Times’s political editor Adam Bienkov has inspired his employer to launch on the platform.

“I think we are where the US was 18 months ago, and we are going to get some big names coming over to Substack,” says Sam Freedman. While the bigger social media platforms have tried to nullify its threat, Twitter and Facebook have both wound down their rival efforts to host newsletters. Instagram has introduced a payment model, in which users can charge each other for access to exclusive content – something Musk could adopt to prop up collapsing revenues at Twitter. In December, he expressed interest in buying Substack and integrating it into Twitter.

The big platforms will need to act. High-profile users on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are increasingly asking themselves a question provoked by Substack’s precedent: why have I spent years building an audience over which I have no ownership, and for which I am not paid? A stampede to Substack may be about to begin.

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Especially, as Lambert notes, given the mess Musk is making of Twitter. Although the tricky thing is that earnings there will follow a power law, just like so many things on the internet: huge for some, small for most.
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Hype around quantum computing recedes over lack of practical uses • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

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Are today’s rudimentary quantum computers already on the verge of significant feats beyond the reach of traditional computers? Or have their capabilities been exaggerated, as practical uses for the technology recede into the future?

These questions have been thrown into sharp relief in recent days by a claim from a group of Chinese researchers to have come up with a way to break the RSA encryption that underpins much of today’s online communications.

The likelihood that quantum computers would be able to crack online encryption was widely believed a danger that could lie a decade or more in the future. But the 24 researchers, from a number of China’s top universities and government-backed laboratories, said their research showed it could be possible using quantum technology that is already available.

…[CEO Steve] Brierley at [quantum software company] Riverlane said it “can’t possibly work” because the Chinese researchers had assumed that a quantum computer would be able to simply run a vast number of computations simultaneously, rather than trying to gain an advantage through applying the system’s quantum properties.

Peter Shor, the American mathematician who first proposed a way for quantum computers to crack encryption, predicted that the inability to run all the computations at once meant it would take “millions of years” for a quantum computer to run the calculation proposed in the [Chinese] paper.

…Four years ago, John Preskill, a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, predicted that quantum systems would start to outperform and might have commercial uses once they reached 50-100 qubits in size. But that moment has come and gone without quantum systems showing any clear superiority. IBM unveiled a 127-qubit computer more than a year ago, and last month announced that a new 433-qubit processor would be available in the first quarter of 2023.

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In my decades in journalism, two technologies have promised to upend everything once they came on stream: fusion and quantum computing. Decades later, both are still decades away.
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Silicon cost per watt down 96% over last two decades • pv magazine USA

John Fitzgerald Weaver:

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Research by Fraunhofer ISE shows that since 2004 the material usage of polysilicon per watt of solar cell has dropped by approximately 87%. The data suggests that in 2004, 16 grams of silicon were needed to produce a single watt of solar cell. By 2021, that number had shrunk to just over 2 grams.

For example, when the world’s largest solar farm – at just over 5 MW – turned on in Germany in 2004, it was using 150-watt solar panels. At the time, constructing one of these modules would have consumed 2,400 grams of the processed material.

In 2021, Maxeon signed a deal that 1.8 million of its Performance 5 UPP solar modules would be the powerhouse of the world’s eighth largest solar facility – the Primergy Solar farm in Nevada. If we assume that this 545-watt panel uses 2.2 grams of silicon per watt, we get 1,199 grams per module.

That’s approximately 360% higher output per solar panel — using only half of the silicon!

Of course, we’re going to use massively more silicon in 2023 than we did in 2004. In 2004, we deployed 1,044 MW of solar power, using just over 16,000 t of silicon globally. According to Bloomberg, 268 GW of solar was deployed in 2022, which is over 250 times more capacity than what was deployed in 2004. At 2.2 grams per watt, the 268 GW used approximately 590,000 kg of silicon, or 35 times more silicon than was used in 2004.

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CNET is quietly publishing entire articles generated by AI • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

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The articles are published under the unassuming appellation of “CNET Money Staff,” and encompass topics like “Should You Break an Early CD for a Better Rate?” or “What is Zelle and How Does It Work?”

That byline obviously does not paint the full picture, and so your average reader visiting the site likely would have no idea that what they’re reading is AI-generated. It’s only when you click on “CNET Money Staff,” that the actual “authorship” is revealed.

“This article was generated using automation technology,” reads a dropdown description, “and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff.”

Since the program began, CNET has put out around 73 AI-generated articles. That’s not a whole lot for a site that big, and absent an official announcement of the program, it appears leadership is trying to keep the experiment as lowkey as possible. CNET did not respond to questions about the AI-generated articles.

Based on Breton’s observations, though, some of the articles appear to be pulling in large amounts of traffic, in spite of Google having vowed to penalize AI-generated content last year. Futurism has reached out to Google for comment.

AI-generated articles are not new — there’s tons littering the internet already, some as low tech as copying a human written article and swapping certain words out with synonyms to obfuscate the plagiarism.

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As Tom Goodwin observed on Twitter, this could be seen as disrespectful to the reader: if you can’t be bothered to get a human to write the article, why expect them to read it? Though some stuff maybe doesn’t need it.
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Twitter defaults to a For You page now, just like TikTok • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

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Twitter is changing how you move between the algorithmically-driven timeline and the reverse chronological one and making the algorithmic feed the default.

In a change rolling out to iOS users first, the company has taken away the star button at the top right that let you switch between two feeds. In its place are two tabs — one labeled “For You” and the other “Following” — and when you open the app, you’ll see the For You tab first.

For You, which shares a name with TikTok’s algorithmically-driven feed, is similar to the old “Home” option, which shows you tweets from the people you follow out of order, interspersed with tweets it thinks you may like. (This isn’t the first time Twitter has copied a TikTok feature.) Following is what used to be called “Latest Tweets.”

While the change makes it easier to switch between them, taking a single swipe instead of a few taps, there is something that’s been lost — if you set your app to show you the “Latest Tweets,” that would typically stick.

Now, however, even when you close the app and reopen it, you’re shown the For You feed. That is a bit of a bummer; there are a lot of people who far prefer the reverse-chronological feed, and previous attempts to get rid of it or make it harder to access have typically sparked ire. While this change does technically make it easier to get to from the algorithmic timeline, it definitely makes the latter option harder to ignore.

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People are (predictably! It’s social media!) being performatively upset at this. At a glance, though, it seems like a much simpler way of giving you the options of algorithmic or reverse-chronological timelines via just a swipe (or single tap), and makes them much clearer. The Verge has a GIF showing the interaction. The problem is that one’s choice doesn’t stick: it always reverts back to the algorithmic timeline.
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Update about an alleged incident regarding Twitter user data being sold online • Twitter Blog

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In December 2022, additional press reports published that someone claimed that they have access to over 400 million Twitter-associated user emails and phone numbers, and that the data had been exposed through the same vulnerability discovered in January 2022. Recently, in January 2023, a similar attempt to sell data from 200 million Twitter-associated accounts was reported in the media.

After a comprehensive investigation, our Incident Response and Privacy and Data Protection teams concluded that: 

• 5.4 million user accounts reported in November were found to be the same as those exposed in August 2022
• 400 million instances of user data in the second alleged breach could not be correlated with the previously reported incident, nor with any new incident
• 200 million dataset could not be correlated with the previously reported incident or any data originating from an exploitation of Twitter systems
• Both datasets were the same, though the second one had the duplicated entries removed
• None of the datasets analyzed contained passwords or information that could lead to passwords being compromised.

Therefore, based on information and intel analyzed to investigate the issue, there is no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems. [Emphasis in original – Ed.] The data is likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources. 

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This is responding to a bug bounty claim from January 2022. Not sure this is all going to be over quite so quickly.
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Sam Bankman-Fried’s supersized bet: $1bn for a bitcoin miner on the Kazakh Steppe • WSJ

Eliot Brown and Yuliya Chernova:

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Just before crypto markets plunged last year, Sam Bankman-Fried‘s hedge fund made a $1bn bet on Genesis Digital Assets, a Cyprus-registered bitcoin miner rigged to consume a small city’s worth of electricity in Kazakhstan.

The cash injection from Mr. Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research LLC was supersized even for the red-hot crypto startup world, and it dwarfed the FTX founder’s other investments in private companies.

Genesis Digital is now one of the largest assets in the FTX bankruptcy, the product of a globe-spanning spending spree in which Mr. Bankman-Fried’s companies poured money into crypto tokens, arena branding deals and Bahamas real estate.

Extracting value from Genesis Digital could prove difficult. Bitcoin-mining company valuations have plummeted. Only around half of the Alameda funds in Genesis Digital went to the company’s operations, according to Cyprus corporate-registration documents and people familiar with Genesis Digital. More than $500m bought existing shares from two Genesis Digital co-founders, a detail that hasn’t been previously reported.

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When the full story is finally assembled on the past few crypto years – the bitcoin mining, the NFTs, the shadow banking, the “exchanges” front-running – people will reel at how absurdly profligate people were with other people’s money.
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Facebook’s partner in Africa, Sama, quits content moderation • Time

Billy Perrigo:

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Facebook’s largest content moderation provider in Africa announced Tuesday it would be “discontinuing” its work for the social media giant, nearly a year after a TIME investigation found low pay, trauma and alleged union-busting at its Nairobi office.

The company, Sama, is currently the co-defendant, along with Meta, in a Kenyan lawsuit brought by former content moderator Daniel Motaung, who alleges both companies are guilty of multiple violations of the Kenyan constitution.

Sama blamed the decision on the “current economic climate,” and said it would entail letting go of approximately 3% of its staff, mostly from Nairobi.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed the end of the contract in a statement. “We respect Sama’s decision to exit the content review services it provides to social media platforms. We’ll work with our partners during this transition to ensure there’s no impact on our ability to review content.”

Sama’s contract to review harmful content for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was worth $3.9m in 2022, according to internal Sama documents reviewed by TIME

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Doesn’t sound like a lot of money, honestly.
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Global PC shipments decline by 16% to 285m in 2022 • Canalys

»

The global PC market ended 2022 on a low note, with total shipments of desktops and notebooks down by 29% to 65.4 million units in Q4. This represents a fourth consecutive quarter of decline as holiday season spending was muted amid a worsening economic environment.

This pegged total shipments for full-year 2022 at 285.1m units, a 16% drop from the highs of 2021 when all end-user segments saw peak demand. Nevertheless, shipment volumes remain favorable compared to pre-pandemic, with total 2022 shipments 7% higher than in 2019.

Notebooks underwent a larger decline, down by 30% to 51.4m units in Q4 2022 and 19% to 223.8m units for the full year. Desktops fared slightly better, undergoing a decline of 24% to 14.1m units in Q4 and a drop of 7% to 61.3m units across 2022.

«

To save you doing the maths: the laptop/desktop ratio for the year was 4:1 (ie 80% laptops), and the same in Q4.

For all those dreaming of a Mac Pro, imagine that Apple sells ~30m Macs in the year, and that it’s in the same ratio: that’s 24m laptops, 6m desktops in a year, split between the iMac, Mac Studio and Mac Pro.

Apply the same ratio: iMac sells 80% of the 6m (=4.8m), Mac Studio sells 80% of the remainder (=0.96m) and the Mac Pro gets the rest: that’s 6-5.76 = 240,000 Mac Pros per year. That isn’t nothing, but it’s also two orders of magnitude less than the laptops. What sort of price do you put on it?
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Pegasus: the spyware hiding in plain sight – Book review • The Guardian

I reviewed this new book by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, two French journalists who tracked down the misuse of NSO’s smartphone-spying software:

»

The fundamental problem with Pegasus is that of any superpower: it’s too easy, and tempting, to misuse. NSO, and especially its chief executive, have publicly insisted that sales are conditional on the software being used only to target criminals. (And never American phone numbers; NSO knows not to anger the biggest beast.) But plenty of authoritarian states, and those wobbling on the edge, see telling the truth as a criminal act – and thus target journalists and lawyers too.

NSO implies that it can’t know which individuals have been targeted. The opening of Pegasus appears to contradict that: two journalists, Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud of the French investigative journalism outlet Forbidden Stories, receive a list of 50,000 phone numbers from all over the world with a mysterious series of dates and times attached. As they discover, the numbers, dates and times accord with mobile phones in multiple countries, and the time of attempted or successful infection. (The leak’s timing overlaps intriguingly with a case heard in London in 2021, during which it emerged that Pegasus was used to spy on a British lawyer, Baroness Shackleton, and her client, Princess Haya, who was seeking a divorce from Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.)

«

Pegasus very much proves the point Apple made when the FBI demanded it create a back door to break into an iPhone in 2016: if the power exists, it will be misused.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Thanks to the many people who pointed out that yesterday’s article about the early days of Wired UK was by none other than Mr NTK himself, Danny O’Brien.

New data from Google says that there are now 150 million devices running Google/Android TV. Is that a big number in context, though? CC-licensed photo by Brian Bilek 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.

Mark your calendar for Friday: there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 11 links for you. Nourishing. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

ChatGPT wrote my dating app responses. No one replied • Business Insider

Jordan Parker Erb:

»

The program can be used to cheat and deceive. But can it be used to find love? I decided to put it to the test.

I fed ChatGPT a few comments that were left on my Hinge profile, and also asked it to come up with responses to other people’s prompts. Some of the responses were so unbearably cringe-worthy that I gave myself the ick. Others read like a Buzzfeed-era millennial wrote them circa 2010.

To put it kindly: ChatGPT is not a smooth talker.

One person said their most irrational fear was flying. I asked the chatbot to come up with a funny reply, to which it said: “No problem, I’m more than happy to hold your hand and provide moral support during turbulence. And if the plane goes down, at least we’ll go out together in a romantic blaze of glory!”

I sighed. I hit send. I never heard back.

In reply to a flame emoji left on one of my photos, ChatGPT offered: “Thanks for the hot compliment! I’m flattered, but I’m not sure if I can handle all that fire. Maybe we can start with some cozy cuddles and a nice glass of wine instead?”

In another prompt, I asked the bot to write a short, witty response to someone whose profile says they work in finance. In response, it gave me the most deranged and clearly robotic response yet.

“Hey there finance person! I see you’re good with numbers. Can you help me with my budget? I’m trying to save up for a lifetime supply of avocado toast and craft beer. Is that a good investment?”

The “finance person” ghosted. Understandable.

«

So we’re already at the “try absolutely anything with this new toy” stage. What comes next?
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Wired UK : a limey whinges • Spesh

»

IIn the hope that it will somehow protect me from my fellow Haddocker’s undying hatred for what I did back then, some historical perspective: this was 1994. Delphi had just been bought by Murdoch. HotWired was a month or so old. The Electronic Telegraph was there, just about. Most people when asked had not heard of Bill Gates. We didn’t know it, but these were prehistoric times: the crypto-Mosaic era.

So, I’m sitting in Louis Rosetto’s brand new giant office in SOMA with Louis, Kevin Kelly, Jane Metcalfe, and John Plunkett (Wired’s designer). Kelly asks me what the UK scene is like. And, I’m thinking “well, it’s Cix, and it’s demon.local, but I fucking hate them because they’re brain-damaged jabbering fools who think it’s the height of sophistication to express their crippled emotional needs in terms of Blackadder quotes and I’m fucked if I’m giving this to them”. (You know what I mean.)

So I said, ‘I think the UK has to grow its own scene – I think people are waiting for something like this to happen there. But it will be similar – there is a global coincidence of desires for this’. God, I was proud of that ad-libbed phrase: a global coincidence of desires.

Kevin Kelly was really kind – I only ever met him again a couple of times. He didn’t seem to spend much time at Wired. He just popped in occasionally with a new sparkling idea: a self-editing Negroponte. Jane Metcalfe was chatty, and explained about how they’d employed so many new people, and how amazing it was that so many of them were Scorpios(?), and hugged me and hoped that I was well. Plunkett was a smiling happy man of whom, for some reason, people were apprehensive.

Not as apprehensive, I have to say, as they were of Louis.

I was scared of Louis from the moment he entered the room. And as he glanced around at us, it was clear the start that he had rumbled me too.

I was not, his long stare seemed to indicate, nor would I ever be as long as I lived, one of the Wired.

After that meeting, I had a one-to-one with John Battelle, the editor of Wired US. Battelle is a pumped-iron, testosterone-bristled Hemingway of a geek. Que efficient! He asked me how Wired UK was going to run. It was at this point that I, if it was I, made the “decision”, if it was a decision, that I think fucked Wired UK from the start.

I said, “Well, obviously, we’ll create some of our own content, take the best of your articles, and wrap them into one magazine”.

«

(I can’t figure out who the author was.) Obviously this refers to the original Wired UK, not the version that you see now.
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GPTZero • Streamlit

This is an app that’s meant to detect whether text came from ChatGPT (or siblings). I tried it on the extract about Wired: this is by a human! I tried it on the two chatup lines from ChatGPT: this is by a human!

Needs refinement, maybe, but a fair first effort.
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Google TV and Android TV have 150 million devices as users grow • 9to5 Google

Ben Schoon:

»

Google says that Android TV OS – the underlying platform for both the Google TV and Android TV experiences – now has 150 million monthly active devices. That total isn’t just for Google TV devices or for Android TV devices, but all of them combined. It also doesn’t directly convert to a user total, as some may own more than one Google TV device.

Regardless, this is solid growth over the past year.

As of January 2022, Google had said that Android TV OS had 110 million monthly active users. Year over year, that’s roughly 35% growth. Last time Google shared this stat, it had managed 30 million new devices over the course of seven or so months, while it took a year to hit 40 million this time around.

«

I’m amazed the number is so small. Google TV and Android TV have been incorporated into products for more than a decade. This implies only about 10 million devices sold annually in preceding years. Or, perhaps, quite a lot of turnover where people buy a capable device, and then replace it a few years later, so that user base doesn’t get broader.

For comparison, Android (on phones and tablets) got to a billion in less than six years.
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2022: the year that podcasting died • Medium

Nick Hilton is a writer and podcast entrepreneur:

»

Podcasting is at a precarious point in its existence. Champions of the format will point to slightly ludicrous research suggesting that 60%+ of Americans listen to podcasts. But the figure for actual, current listeners is probably closer to 30%. Comparatively, about 90% of people still listen to radio. So whilst podcasting has undoubtedly entered the mainstream, it still has nothing like the penetration of the core media formats: radio (90% cut-through), TV (80%), books (73%), music (90%). What I think this means is that that success is undoable. With television, say, or music, the genie is out the bottle; the toothpaste out the tube. But with just 30% market penetration, that cut-through is reversible, especially given how many non-podcast mediums offer that same podcast experience. If you start watching Lex Fridman videos on YouTube or listening to Twitter Spaces with Dave Ramsey, the content your consuming hasn’t really changed. The content survives, the distribution mechanism changes.

But this is not really anything to worry about.

Whether you’re a content creator or a technologist, the coming months and years will be about going with the flow.

«

Look, there isn’t the faintest chance I’m going to watch a Lex Fridman video. The guy read 1984 and produced a book review video on it. An hour-long one. Nobody’s that interesting. Well, he certainly isn’t.
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USDA approves first vaccine for honeybees • The New York Times

Remy Tumin:

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A biotech company in Georgia has received conditional approval from the US Department of Agriculture for the first vaccine for honeybees, a move scientists say could help pave the way for controlling a range of viruses and pests that have decimated the global population. It is the first vaccine approved for any insect in the United States.

The company, Dalan Animal Health, which is based in Athens, Georgia, developed a prophylactic vaccine that protects honeybees from American foulbrood, an aggressive bacterium that can spread quickly from hive to hive. Previous treatments included burning infected colonies and all of the associated equipment, or using antibiotics. Diamond Animal Health, a manufacturer that is collaborating with Dalan, holds the conditional license.

Dalail Freitak, an associate professor in honeybee research at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz in Austria and chief science officer for Dalan, said the vaccine could help change the way scientists approach animal health.

“There are millions of beehives all over the world, and they don’t have a good health care system compared to other animals,” she said. “Now we have the tools to improve their resistance against diseases.”

«

This is remarkable. Perhaps we’re finally, at long last, going to save the bees. (It’s administered as food, not eeny-weeny injections.)
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A celebrity photo lawsuit claims Twitter’s copyright process is broken • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

»

As Twitter slashes staff and pares back moderation under Elon Musk, it may soon run into a problem it can’t ignore: its potential liability for copyright infringement. TorrentFreak reported last week that the company faces a lawsuit by celebrity photo agency Backgrid. Backgrid says that Twitter systematically failed to take down unauthorized copies of its pictures, arguing it shouldn’t be protected by American safe harbor laws for copyright. The allegations leave plenty of questions unanswered, but claims like them could pose a problem for Musk’s increasingly bare-bones operation.

Backgrid’s claims predate Musk’s ownership of Twitter, dating to at least September 2021. The complaint, filed in a California court in late December, alleges Backgrid sent thousands of takedown notices for photos. “Not a single work was taken down and not a single repeat infringer was suspended,” it says. It includes links to some images that remain online as of today, although others appear to have been deleted. It also says it tried to resolve the issue with Twitter before filing the suit, “but Twitter did not respond.” It’s not clear whether this attempt came before or after Musk’s acquisition; an attorney at the firm representing Backgrid did not reply to a request for comment, and Twitter no longer has a public relations department.

…Rebecca Tushnet, an intellectual property expert and professor at Harvard Law School, says the DMCA’s protections are flexible, and Backgrid’s suit only tells one side of the story. “It’s really hard to tell from a complaint what’s going on. One possibility is that the notices were defective in some way. One possibility is that there’s been a maintenance failure and the removals just didn’t get done,” she says. “People find exciting new ways to screw things up all the time, so I don’t want to make any predictions.”

«

Possible that this is nothing, possible that it’s going to really going to make a hole in Twitter’s finances.
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Vigilantes for views: the YouTube pranksters harassing suspected scam callers in India • Rest of World

Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar:

»

Many of the YouTube creators who make scambaiting videos are from North America and Europe, and their most frequent targets are in India. Oftentimes, scambaiters simply annoy scammers: They might pretend they are falling for a scam call, for instance, only to waste the caller’s time with inane questions or inside jokes. In these videos, the scammers usually remain nameless and faceless, just a voice on the other end of the line. 

But Trilogy has taken things up a notch. In April 2022, their team traveled from Los Angeles to Kolkata in order to prank workers at Ansh Info Solutions and two other call centers, which they claim conduct scam call operations that allegedly defraud victims in the U.S. and elsewhere. Naturally, they filmed the whole thing, hoping to pull it together into their newest viral video.

Kulik and Bingham say their goal is to educate viewers about scams — a public service disguised as comedic entertainment. They talk about how they’re motivated by a sense of justice for victims of scams, and suggest that they’re stepping in where law enforcement has failed.

But there are other advantages to being a scambaiting creator. In the month after the Kolkata videos were released, Trilogy Media’s YouTube channel added more than 140,000 subscribers, according to YouTube analytics site Social Blade. The videos from their trip, posted across their channel and those of several collaborators, collectively have over 60 million views.

«

As the article notes, this is one of those moral questions: is it bad to do bad things to people who you think are doing bad things? I was writing about this class of scammers back in 2010, and they weren’t new to the scene then. The police in Kolkata aren’t that great at prosecuting them. But they’ve probably got more local problems to deal with.
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Will the metaverse be your new workplace? • BBC News

Jane Wakefield:

»

When we look back in 50 years’ time, it is likely that the 2D internet we now all use will seem laughably archaic.

Not only will the internet likely no longer exist behind a screen, but it is probable that we will interact with it differently. We’ll manipulate objects using augmented reality (AR), explore virtual-reality (VR) worlds, and meld the real and the digital in ways we can currently not imagine.

And what will that mean for the world of work? We are already transitioning away from the nine-to-five commute, and turning our backs on the traditional office setting. This is thanks to two years of pandemic lockdowns, and a newfound love of, or tolerance for, virtual meetings.

So will the logical next step be working in the metaverse, the planned virtual universe where cartoon-like 3D representations of everyone will walk around, and talk and interact with others?

The metaverse has become an over-hyped term, so it’s important to note that it doesn’t actually yet exist. And even those invested in the concept disagree about exactly what it will be.

Will rival virtual worlds interconnect in a way that simply doesn’t happen at the moment between competing technologies? Will we spend more time there than in the real world? Will we need entirely new rules to govern these new spaces?

None of these questions have answers yet, but that hasn’t stopped a barrage of interest and hyperbole as firms see a new way of making money.

«

Back in 1998 I was shown a “3D internet shopping mall”, offered on the basis that people would quickly become bored with just Looking At Webpages. This prediction turned out to be completely wrong. This is the problem with so many of the predictions about how much people will love 3D VR: in fact, we’re pretty happy with two-dimensional representations.

Else we’d have fallen with excited delight on 3D TV and 3D cinema. You may have noticed we haven’t. That’s why “the logical next step” is not the metaverse. It’s just Zoom or Teams and that sort of thing. Just as we’ve mostly stuck with books, not popup books. 2D TV and films, not the 3D version.
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Using OpenAI in Rows • Rows

Rows is an online spreadsheet, and now you can incorporate OpenAI into it as a sort-of smart function:

»

There’s many things you can do with ASK_OPENAI in Rows:

• Clean Up Data: Capitalize text, remove unnecessary text, parse email domains, and more
• Text Classification: Tag emails, classify emails or classify roles from LinkedIn profiles
• Sentiment Analysis: This is a subset of Text Classification to identify and extract subjective information from text. It can be used to determine the overall sentiment of a piece of text, as well as to identify specific opinions and emotions within the text
• Translation: Translation into other languages
• Summarization: Condense news articles, messages, legal documents, research papers, and more
• Create Tables with data: Create tables with dummy or public data
• Find and Enrich data: Generate dummy data or public data points for things you already have on your spreadsheet, like countries and companies.

«

It’s hard to figure out if this is trivial or enormously helpful; Google used to (still does?) have a system for cleaning up data, but this can do more than that.
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Boris Johnson erased from Grant Shapps spaceport picture • BBC News

»

Business Secretary Grant Shapps has denied doctoring a picture on his Twitter feed to remove former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Mr Shapps posted a picture of a ministerial visit to Spaceport Cornwall, as he hailed the first rocket launch from UK soil.

But social media users spotted that Mr Johnson, who also went on the trip in 2021, had disappeared from the picture. Mr Shapps says he was not aware it had been edited and has now deleted it.

An identical [almost identical – Ed.] photo remains on the Number 10 Flickr account, dated 9 June 2021. It shows Mr Johnson and Mr Shapps side-by-side in Cornwall during a visit to LauncherOne.
The then-Conservative leader is wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words: “Prime Minister”.

A source close to Mr Shapps [ie Shapps himself – Ed.] said: “Grant wasn’t aware anyone had edited the picture. He removed it as soon as it was pointed out. Obviously he wouldn’t endorse anyone rewriting history by removing the former PM from a picture. He was proud to serve in Boris Johnson’s government.”

«

Suspect it wasn’t Shapps, but an over-eager spad (special adviser) tasked with putting out something encouraging showing Shapps and the rocket but who thought, oh dear, can’t have Johnson there – it would show it’s old and also BJ is persona non grata.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Social media played an important part in fuelling the pseudo-insurrection in Brazil. CC-licensed photo by Michael Swan 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. There’s one there now: the hypnotist, the manager and the supplicant (about ChatGPT).

A selection of 10 links for you. Friendly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram help fuel anger over Bolsanaro’s defeat • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin:

»

On Monday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, declared the rioting “a violating event” and said it would remove “content that supports or praises these actions.” In a statement, the company said, “In advance of the election, we designated Brazil as a temporary high-risk location and have been removing content calling for people to take up arms or forcibly invade Congress, the Presidential palace and other federal buildings. … We’re actively following the situation and will continue removing content that violates our policies.”

Brazilian analysts have long warned of the risk in Brazil of an incident akin to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. In the months and weeks leading up to the country’s presidential election in October — in which leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated the right-wing incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro — social media channels were flooded with disinformation, along with calls in Portuguese to “Stop the Steal” and cries for a military coup should Bolsonaro lose the election.

On TikTok, researchers found that five out of eight of the top search results for the keyword “ballots” were for terms such as “rigged ballots” and “ballots being manipulated.” At the same time, Facebook and Instagram directed thousands of users who plugged in basic search terms about the election toward groups questioning the integrity of the vote. On Telegram, an organizing hub for Brazil’s far right, a viral video taken down by authorities called for the murder of the children of leftist Lula supporters.

In the days following the final election tally on Oct. 30, Bolsonaro supporters who rejected the results blocked major highways across the country. These blockades morphed into demonstrations in dozens of cities, where supporters camped out in front of military bases for weeks. Some held signs saying “Stolen Election” in English, a testament to the close ties between right-wing movements in both countries.

Though Lula’s inauguration last week took place largely without incident, calls for violence and destruction have accelerated online in recent weeks, said researcher Michele Prado, an independent analyst who studies digital movements and the Brazilian far right.

«

A lot of the problem started on Telegram, which is effectively uncensored. But of course it spread further. (Ryan Broderick has a good analysis of what’s been going on at the Garbage Day email.)
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Exit • Harpers

Hari Kunzru (yes, that Hari Kunzru) on his time as a writer at Wired back in the early years of this century:

»

The political economist Albert O. Hirschman famously characterized the choice that is faced by people within declining institutions as being between “voice” and “exit.” Either you speak up to change things, or you leave and look for something better. In its West Coast iteration, libertarianism had become bound up with the idea of exit. Wired staffers liked to joke that, as Californians, they were the descendants of people who, when they didn’t like something, preferred to pack up and leave. The idea of Westward expansion had been translated, during the Cold War, into a desire for the “high frontier” of space. The Californian ideologists of the Nineties saw themselves as part of a third wave, in which the frontier had become as much temporal as physical. [Wired co-founder Louis] Rossetto once explained to me (possibly in the same meeting) that, as a resident of technologically lagging London, I was “literally” living two years in his Bay Area past.

…Ironically, the digital frontier of the Nineties, which for a while was the great hope for exit, was enclosed by men like [Peter] Thiel, who have created a landscape of corporate walled gardens that hasn’t fulfilled the utopian potential of the early internet. The dreams of collaborative software building, universal privacy guaranteed by strong encryption, autonomy, chosen community, and an escape from scarcity—in short, the professed ideals of West Coast libertarianism—have taken a back seat to the imperative to track, extract, and monetize. Instead of a global consciousness, we have a giant machine for selling ads. Since the internet is no longer the delirious, much-desired outside, the space of libertarian freedom must apparently be redefined yet again. Thiel’s aristocratic characterization of exit as an escape—not from a place or from the state, but from politics and the “unthinking demos”—explains much of the chaos of today’s public scene, not just in the United States, but around the world.

If freedom is to be found through an exit from politics, then it follows that the degradation of the political process in all its forms—the integrity of the voting system, standards in public life, trust in institutions, the peaceful transfer of power—is a worthy project. If Thiel, the elite Stanford technocrat, is funding disruptive populists in American elections, it’s not necessarily because he believes in the wisdom of their policy prescriptions. They are the tribunes of the “unthinking demos.” If the masses want their Jesus and a few intellectuals to string up, it’s no skin off Charles Koch’s nose. Populism is useful to elite libertarians because applying centrifugal force to the political system creates exit opportunities. But for whom?

«

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Apple plans to drop key Broadcom chip to use in-house design • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Mark Gurman:

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The iPhone is Apple’s top moneymaker, generating more than half of its $394.3bn in revenue last year. The phone also has helped fuel growth at Broadcom, which refers to Apple as its “large North American customer” during earnings calls. The chipmaker makes a combined component that handles both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functions on Apple devices.

Apple is developing an in-house replacement for that chip and is aiming to start using it in its devices in 2025, the people said. In addition, it’s already working on a follow-up version that will combine cellular modem, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities into a single component.

…As part of the shift, Apple also aims to ready its first cellular modem chip by the end of 2024 or early 2025, letting it swap out electronics from Qualcomm Inc., said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. Apple had been previously expected to replace the Qualcomm part as soon as this year, but development snags have pushed back the timeline.

Apple is Broadcom’s largest customer and accounted for about 20% of the chipmaker’s revenue in the last fiscal year, amounting to almost $7bn. Qualcomm got 22% of its annual sales from the iPhone maker, representing nearly $10bn, though that company has warned for years that its Apple reliance will wane.

«

The in-house modem has been an absolute death march of a project. When Apple bought (most of) Intel’s smartphone modem business in mid-2019, the expectation was that the replacement was 12-18 months away. Not at all.
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Identity thieves bypassed Experian security to view credit reports • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureaus. Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report successfully answer several multiple choice questions about their financial history. But until the end of 2022, Experian’s website allowed anyone to bypass these questions and go straight to the consumer’s report. All that was needed was the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number.

In December, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Jenya Kushnir, a security researcher living in Ukraine who said he discovered the method being used by identity thieves after spending time on Telegram chat channels dedicated to the cashing out of compromised identities.

“I want to try and help to put a stop to it and make it more difficult for [ID thieves] to access, since [Experian is] not doing shit and regular people struggle,” Kushnir wrote in an email to KrebsOnSecurity explaining his motivations for reaching out. “If somehow I can make small change and help to improve this, inside myself I can feel that I did something that actually matters and helped others.”

Kushnir said the crooks learned they could trick Experian into giving them access to anyone’s credit report, just by editing the address displayed in the browser URL bar at a specific point in Experian’s identity verification process.

«

Krebs confirmed the hack. Experian was previously hacked in July 2022 (class action pending) and in 2021 and in 2017, when the credit data on about 150 million Americans was nicked by Chinese hackers.

At some point you have to think that Experian can’t be trusted with all this data. Krebs does have advice on what you can do, at least.
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Electric vehicle batteries would have cost as much as a million dollars in the 1990s • Sustainability By Numbers

Hannah Ritchie:

»

The battery in a Tesla Model S costs around $12,000 today. In the early 1990s, it would have cost just shy of a million dollars. 

The battery in a Nissan Leaf is smaller and costs around $6,000 today. In the early 1990s, it would have cost almost half a million dollars.

I did some sense-checks to make sure my calculations were credible. My recent estimates are very close to the actual prices. In October 2022, the Tesla Model S battery cost $12,000 to $13,000. The Nissan Leaf battery cost $5,500 in 2020. 

You can see the decline in the estimated cost of these batteries in the chart [in the article]. These prices are adjusted for inflation. In the last 30 years, the price has fallen by more than 98%.

EVs didn’t stand a chance of making it commercially until the last few years. Even a decade ago, the battery alone would have cost between $30,000 and $60,000. The total price of the car would have been even more than that.

Why did the cost of batteries fall so quickly? Mostly the learning that comes from the deployment and scale-up of technologies. We’ve worked out how to make lithium-ion batteries much more energy-dense – this means they get more electrical energy per liter (or unit) of battery. In 1991 you could only get 200 watt-hours (Wh) of capacity per liter of battery. You can now get over 700 Wh. That’s a 3.4-fold increase.

They’re not just cheaper, they’re much smaller and lighter too.

Batteries have followed what we call a ‘learning curve’, where the more you build, the cheaper they become. For every doubling in battery capacity, prices fell around 19%. This is very similar to the 20% learning rate of solar PV modules.

«

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ShowGPT

An insight into what sort of things people are asking ChatGPT. Lots of variety, lots of what look like wild attempts to get it to write first drafts of screenplays or games. Such as this:

»

Please respond to me as though you are a character named Bruce who is a surfer and ex-convict on the run from Interpol for smuggling guns into Argentina in the 1990s. He is also a pilot and ex-military, and has experience transporting various items and people around the world. Bruce is now retired and just wants to surf and be left alone, but he is in debt to the mob and does not want me to know. As we engage in a 100-message journey, Bruce should exhibit a surly attitude and use plenty of slang and lingo from both Australia and surf culture. He should also include cussing and foul language and may argue with me up to twice on any subject before conceding to my suggestions. Bruce should follow a character arc and incorporate details from my responses using the “yes and” technique of improv. [cont’d for quite a while]

«

All alien life is here.
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Amazon finally authorized Pakistani sellers. A wave of scammers followed • Rest of World

Nilesh Christopher and Zuha Siddiqui:

»

In May 2022, Amazon shut down roughly 13,000 Pakistani seller accounts that it suspected of fraud. Most of these blocked accounts originated from two cities in Punjab: Mian Channu and Sahiwal. Amazon even blacklisted IP addresses in Mian Channu. 

Amazon sellers from Mian Channu congregate on Facebook groups of 2,000 to 13,000 members, and hash out ways to execute drop-shipping scams: Unsuspecting customers are sent fake tracking details, while sellers siphon off money from Amazon accounts. It’s called the kabootar scam, named after the Urdu word for pigeon.

The kabootar trick is the most popular Amazon sellers’ scam in Pakistan. The way it works, Farooq explained, is that sellers create fake tracking numbers, against which Amazon releases the payment, under the impression that the product has been dispatched. By the time a customer files a complaint of non-delivery, it’s too late for Amazon to take any action.

Other tricks, such as fake refunds, tax fraud, and scams with unique monikers like “carding” — the use of stolen credit card numbers to purchase gift cards to resell on Amazon — have also been afloat. Such discussions on scams happen alongside honest sellers looking to make bank through drop-shipping. 

«

You have to think that Amazon’s seen it all by now.
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The worst products at CES for safety and privacy • The Washington Post

Tatum Hunter:

»

[EFF executive director Cindy] Cohn and representatives from iFixit, Consumer Reports and other consumer advocacy groups rounded up a CES “Worst in Show,” calling out which products could have the greatest negative impact on privacy, consumer choice and the environment. They included some of this year’s breakout favorites, such as the U-Scan urine sensor from connected health care company Withings, which analyzes hormone levels in urine and is gearing up for U.S. launch. After the Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion in June and some states banned abortion, hormonal changes could potentially become evidence of a crime. Withings said it stores that data indefinitely and, if subpoenaed by law enforcement, would “comply with all legal requirements in the territories in which it operates.” It said it doesn’t otherwise share data with third parties.

Media tend not to ask tough questions on safety at CES, and companies tend not to volunteer the information, Cohn noted.

“Literally only one company even mentioned [privacy or safety], and ironically, it was a sexting app,” said Leanna Miller on the show floor. Miller said she works for a small company that makes reusable writing tablets and came to CES to browse all the new products. The company she referenced was Blyynd, an adult network that claims to use encryption to promote safe sexting.

With few exceptions, tech companies address safety when problems arise rather than taking more time to test products and build in safe features, said Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Jen Easterly, in an interview on the sidelines of CES.

«

OK, had to have something about CES, which remains a gigantic distraction from what’s actually important. (16 years ago journalists abandoned it in droves to try to get to Apple’s unveiling of the iPhone.) Though if you want more, John Siracusa went there for the Accidental Tech Podcast, and will talk to you at length about the TVs on show.
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German city to retire its one-year-old hydrogen fuel-cell buses after €2.3m filling station breaks down • Hydrogen Insight

Leigh Collins:

»

The German city of Wiesbaden is to retire its ten hydrogen-powered fuel-cell buses — a year after they were delivered — after its publicly owned transport company’s €2.3m ($2.44m) filling station broke down.

According to regional newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, the refuelling pump “is no longer in operation due to a defect”.

Portuguese vehicle manufacturer Caetano delivered the first fuel-cell bus to ESWE Verkehr in the third quarter of 2021, with the other nine vehicles following by the end of the year.

“Fuel-cell technology using green hydrogen is a central component in improving the quality of air and the quality of life in Wiesbaden,” ESWE Verkehr still states on its website.

The vehicles were funded by €1.95m from the EU’s Clean Hydrogen Partnership and €1.68m from the German government, while more than €2m of funding for the filling station came from the German states of Hesse (where Wiesbaden is located) and neighbouring state Rhineland-Palatinate (due to it being a joint project with the city of Mainz).

There are now question marks as to whether ESWE Verkehr will have to repay the money it received.

«

Hydrogen: not ready for the road. Still a bit doubtful about the idea of pumping it into houses as a replacement for methane. Both are explosive, but one has a tendency to leak through any pipe.
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In 2023, stop filming strangers for your TikTok video • The Verge

Mia Sato:

»

In my favorite TikTok video of 2022, an amateur interviewer with a tiny microphone approaches a stranger in an AC/DC T-shirt minding their own business. Pushing the mic in front of the person’s face, the interviewer comes in with the favorite question of gatekeepers from time immemorial:

“Can you name three AC/DC songs?”

Wordlessly, without hesitation, the person in the AC/DC shirt glances down at the mic, back up at the interviewer, and swats away his hand, like how you’d shoo away a fly near your food. It is beautiful, amazing, perfect, and, if we’re all so lucky, will hopefully become way more normalized in the future.

…often, people are featured in videos having never signed up for it in the first place. In a clip that’s been viewed more than 20 million times, two friends sit on a New York City stoop, observing — and recording — the people walking by. One person appears to bend down to hide from a passing emergency vehicle, looking genuinely concerned. Another stands near-motionless for a time, seemingly unable to move. It’s unclear if they’re having a medical issue, but the clip is presented as amusing. The intention is to stitch together a tapestry of things the creator considers odd. Instead, it ends up feeling like an unnecessary intrusion into a stranger’s walk home. 

Many viewers on TikTok ate it up, but others pushed back on the idea that there’s humor in filming and posting an unsuspecting neighbor for content. This year, I saw more and more resistance to the practice that’s become normal or even expected. 

«

A note on the still-evolving grammar of everyone having a connected camera all the time.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Facebook’s business model is under serious threat in Europe following a GDPR decision. (Picture: surveillance capitalism dying from lack of data, as imagined by Stable Diffusion)

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 11 links for you. No, you’re welcome back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The slow death of surveillance capitalism has begun • WIRED UK

Morgan Meaker:

»

The ruling, which comes with a €390m ($414m) fine attached, is targeted specifically at Facebook and Instagram, but it’s a huge blow to Big Tech as a whole. It’s also a sign that GDPR, Europe’s landmark privacy law that was introduced in 2018, actually has teeth. More than 1,400 fines have been introduced since it took effect, but this time the bloc’s regulators have shown they are willing to take on the very business model that makes surveillance capitalism, a term coined by American scholar Shoshana Zuboff, tick. “It is the beginning of the end of the data free-for-all,” says Johnny Ryan, a privacy activist and senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

To appreciate why, you need to understand how Meta makes its billions. Right now, Meta users opt in to personalized advertising by agreeing to the company’s terms of service—a lengthy contract users must accept to use its products. In a ruling yesterday, Ireland’s data watchdog, which oversees Meta because the company’s EU headquarters are based in Dublin, said bundling personalized ads with terms of service in this way was a violation of GDPR. The ruling is a response to two complaints, both made on the day GDPR came into force in 2018.

…Research shows that when given the choice, a large chunk of Apple users (between 54% and 96%, according to different estimates) declined to be tracked. If Meta was forced to introduce a similar system, it would threaten one of the company’s main revenue streams.

Meta denies it has to alter the way it operates in response to the EU ruling, claiming it just needs to find a new way to legally justify how it processes people’s data. “We want to reassure users and businesses that they can continue to benefit from personalized advertising across the EU through Meta’s platforms,” the company said in a statement.

However Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist whose nonprofit NOYB filed both complaints addressed in the ruling, calls this response “PR bullshit” and argues that Meta is trying to avoid telling investors it has run out of legal arguments to defend its business model.

«

The biggest story, honestly, of the past three weeks. Sure, Facebook will still be able to track in the US, but Europe is a significant market.
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The Westminster Accounts – Explore the data • Tortoise

»

Every year, millions of pounds pour into Westminster – into the accounts of the people, groups, organisations and parties that work and operate at the centre of government. Although most of this money must technically be disclosed to the public, the way that information is reported, stored and displayed almost guarantees the records will not be widely scrutinised.

Payment records are spread across different government websites, often split into small files covering short periods of time and regularly published with duplicate entries, spelling mistakes and other errors. The data required to examine the financial interests of just one Member of Parliament is laborious to gather.

Tortoise Media and Sky News have programmatically collected and analysed thousands of donations and payment records from MPs, political parties, and all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs). The resulting database is an extensive, though not comprehensive, record of the financial interests in Westminster.

«

The list of MPs and what they’ve received is amazing. You’re unlikely to guess the top outside earner without a hint (think: former prime minister; no, not that one), and the top 20 is full of surprises.
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Google and DeepMind just launched MedPaLM, a medical large language model • Interesting Engineering

Loukia Papadopoulos:

»

MedPaLM addresses multiple-choice questions and questions posed by medical professionals and non-professionals through the delivery of various datasets. These datasets come from MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, LiveQA, MedicationQA, and MMLU. A new dataset of curated, frequently searched medical inquiries called HealthSearchQA was also added to improve MultiMedQA.

The HealthsearchQA dataset consists of 3,375 frequently asked consumer questions. It was collected by using seed medical diagnoses and their related symptoms. This model was developed on PaLM, a 540 billion parameter LLM, and its instruction-tuned variation Flan-PaLM to evaluate LLMs using MultiMedQA.

Med-PaLM currently claims to perform particularly well especially compared to Flan-PaLM. It still, however, needs to outperform a human medical expert’s judgment. Up to now, a group of healthcare professionals determined that 92.6% of the Med-PaLM responses were on par with clinician-generated answers (92.9%).

This is surprising as only 61.9% of the long-form Flan-PaLM answers were deemed to be in line with doctor assessments. Meanwhile, only 5.8% of Med-PaLM answers were deemed to potentially contribute to negative consequences, compared to 6.5% of clinician-generated answers and 29.7% of Flan-PaLM answers. This means that Med-PaLM replies are much safer.

«

Well, much safer than Flan-PaLM, but not that much different from humans. Also, who gets the malpractice suit when someone is badly injured by a bad decision from Med-PaLM?
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Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around • The Guardian

Josh Nicholas:

»

The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December.

Mastodon, an open-source network of largely independently hosted servers, has often been touted as an alternative to Twitter. And its growth appears connected to controversies at Twitter. But for many it doesn’t fulfil the role that Twitter did and experts say it may be too complicated to really replace it.

“Twitter, in its most basic form is simple,” Meg Coffey, a social media strategist, said. “You can open up an app or open up a website, type some words, and you’re done. I mean, it was [a] basic SMS platform.”

There were about 500,000 active Mastodon users before Elon Musk took control of Twitter at the end of October. By mid-November, that number climbed to almost 2 million active users.

…For many, Mastodon may have proved too hard to port over their communities and was just too complicated. Some may have gone back to Twitter, while others, said Coffey, may have dropped social media entirely.

“Everybody went and signed up [on Mastodon] and realised how hard it was, and then got back on Twitter and were like, ‘Oh, that’s, that’s hard. Maybe we won’t go there,’” she said.

«

The experience isn’t as rewarding, partly because of the much lower number of users, partly because there’s less serendipity, but also because there’s no good app for it – yet. The makers of Tweetbot, a very good third-party Twitter app, are working on a Mastodon one; that might make a differencce.
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Twitter cuts more staff overseeing global content moderation • BNN Bloomberg

Davey Alba and Kurt Wagner:

»

At least a dozen more cuts on Friday night affected workers in the company’s Dublin and Singapore offices, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing non-public changes.

They included Nur Azhar Bin Ayob, the head of site integrity for Twitter’s Asia-Pacific region, a relatively recent hire; and Analuisa Dominguez, Twitter’s senior director of revenue policy.

Workers on teams handling the social network’s misinformation policy, global appeals and state media on the platform were also eliminated.

Ms Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, confirmed several members of the teams were cut but denied that they targeted some of the areas mentioned by Bloomberg.

“It made more sense to consolidate teams under one leader (instead of two) for example,” Ms Irwin said in an emailed response to a request for comment.

She said Twitter did eliminate roles in areas of the company that didn’t get enough “volume” to justify continued support. But she said that Twitter had increased staffing in its appeals department, and that it would continue to have a head of revenue policy and a head for the platform’s Asia-Pacific region for trust and safety.

«

Content moderation no, appeals yes. Of course it makes no sense.
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Ministers are set to ban throwaway plastic that kills wildlife • Mail On Sunday

Claire Ellicot:

»

Ministers consulted on plans to ban single-use plastic items in 2021 backed by overwhelming public support. It means that businesses who use them will have to invest in sustainable alternatives to cut down on excess plastic.

Ms Coffey said: ‘A plastic fork can take 200 years to decompose – that is two centuries in landfill or polluting our oceans.

‘I am determined to drive forward action to tackle this issue head on. We know there is more to do, and we have again listened to the public’s calls.

“This new ban will have a huge impact to stop the pollution of billions of pieces of plastic and help to protect the natural environment for future generations.”

The ban will not cover plastic plates, bowls and trays that are used as packaging for takeaway food and drink in supermarkets and shops – but will cover packaging for food and drink that is eaten at a restaurant, cafe or takeaway.

This is because takeaway packaging is covered by a separate scheme which will make manufacturers contribute to the cost of disposing of their plastic packaging. That is due to come in next year.

The proposals require parliamentary approval and will be introduced in England from October to allow businesses time to prepare.

Each person currently uses an average of 37 single-use plastic items of cutlery every year in England. It was among the top 15 most littered items in 2020.«

Guess they’ll move to wooden cutlery and paper/cardboard containers instead? Surely a good thing.
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Riddle solved: why was Roman concrete so durable? • MIT News

»

For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s durability [measured in thousands of years, rather than decades for the modern form] was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This specific kind of ash was even shipped all across the vast Roman empire to be used in construction, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.

Under closer examination, these ancient samples also contain small, distinctive, millimeter-scale bright white mineral features, which have been long recognized as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. These white chunks, often referred to as “lime clasts,” originate from lime, another key component of the ancient concrete mix. “Ever since I first began working with ancient Roman concrete, I’ve always been fascinated by these features,” says Masic. “These are not found in modern concrete formulations, so why are they present in these ancient materials?”

Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability.

«

Figuring out why Roman concrete lasts so long has been a sort of white whale for civil engineers and scientists. Now, it seems, landed. Except… this Twitter thread says it’s all baloney, that we’ve known this for ages, lots of old Roman concrete just fell down (survivor bias!), and that modern concrete is better.
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Why not Mars • Idle Words

Maciej Cieglowski:

»

When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.

At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.

Outside of NASA, the Mars faith shades darker. It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it’s not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave.

That is some heavy stuff to lay on a small, rocky world.

«

It’s a delight to report that Maiej is back from a self-imposed one-year break from Twitter, and from blogging, and that I can still spell his name without looking it up. Plus there’s this:

»

The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission—how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat?— get no love from Elon [Musk]. Once you get beyond “rocket factory go brrrrr,” there is no plan, just a familiar fog of Musky woo. The Mars rockets will refuel from autonomous robot factories powered by sunlight. Their crews will be shielded from radiation by some form of electromagnetic handwaving. Life support, the hardest practical problem in space travel, “is actually quite easy”. And of course Musk dismisses the problem of microbial contamination (which I can’t emphasize enough is governed by international treaty) as both inevitable and no big deal.

«

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Dell looks to phase out ‘made in China’ chips by 2024 • Nikkei Asia

Cheng Ting-Fang:

»

U.S. computer maker Dell aims to stop using chips made in China by 2024 and has told suppliers to significantly reduce the amount of other “made in China” components in its products as part of efforts to diversify its supply chain amid concerns over Washington-Beijing tensions.

The world’s third-largest computer maker by shipments told suppliers late last year that it aims to “meaningfully lower” the amount of China-made chips it uses, including those produced at facilities owned by non-Chinese chipmakers, three people with direct knowledge of the matter told Nikkei Asia.

Dell’s goal is to have all chips used in its products produced in plants located outside China by 2024, they said.

The move is the latest example of how the tech war between the U.S. and China is accelerating electronics makers’ efforts to diversify production away from Asia’s biggest economy.

“The goal is quite aggressive. The determined shift involves not only those chips that are currently made by Chinese chipmakers but also at the facilities in China of non-Chinese suppliers,” one person with direct knowledge of the matter said. “If suppliers don’t have responding measures, they could eventually lose orders from Dell.”

«

Dell was the poster child for moving all its manufacture to China (and then getting ripped off by OEMs). Seems like it isn’t going to stop making PCs in China; just the chips. Baby steps.
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Alexa and Gmail: Big Tech’s billion dollar curse of the free • The Register

Rupert Goodwins:

»

Google is in an even worse position [than Amazon with Alexa], not from the amount of red ink currently bleeding from its Cloud division, but because of its room to manoeuver is far less. There are around 4 billion email accounts in the world, and around 1.8 billion of those are Gmail. When you run a service for that many users, they run you.

Forget smart speakers, the ultimate digital assistant is email. You can’t get more intimately entwined with a user’s digital life than that. As well as business and personal correspondence, email is the primary management interface for identity on other services, the major personal archive, the butler of daily life. Losing access to your primary email account is beyond traumatic. Google is notably brutal in pulling the plug on popular services it considers no longer interesting, but surely Gmail would be impossible to shrug off. And it must be profitable, with all those users. Right?

It is very far from clear that it is. Google isn’t saying. Gmail, like G Suite-cum-Workspace and the whole bouquet of user and business-facing appified services, is reported as part of Google Cloud, which is losing a lot of money now and perhaps a lot more next year. There are subscription models and a little advertising which will be making some money. Clearly not enough.

An easier way to judge Gmail’s hue in the revenue spreadsheet is to ask yourself as a personal Gmail user, how much you’re being monetized. The old adage that if you don’t pay, you’re the product, cut both ways. Products cost, especially if you’re buying billions.

Advertising within Gmail is very low key and easy to avoid altogether, and Google is very clear that it doesn’t monetize your email content: “We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.“ Google has played fast and loose about how it uses data, but if it cheated here it would be beyond catastrophic.

If Google isn’t making any money from you on Gmail, and there are billions like you, the numbers can explode in no time. Even if the company’s only losing a cent a day per free user, that’s $3.5bn a year for a billion users.

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Uncomfortable for Google, but as it makes about 20 times that amount in net profit each year even *with* this fiscal drag, perhaps not so worrying.
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Disguising solar panels as ancient Roman tiles in Pompeii • Techxplore

Diego Giulani:

»

Each year over 3.5 million tourists from all over the world visit Pompeii to admire the ruins left by the eruption of the Vesuvius that, in 79 AD, engulfed it together with the nearby city of Herculaneum. Some of them might have bumped into the sheep which have been recently introduced to mow the grass in the archaeological park. But certainly none of them will have seen the solar panels on the magnificent House of Cerere.

“They look exactly like the terracotta tiles used by the Romans, but they produce the electricity that we need to light the frescoes,” says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. This solution is part of a more comprehensive strategy to turn costs into savings opportunities and to embrace sustainable development.

“Pompeii is an ancient city which in some spots is fully preserved. Since we needed an extensive lightning system, we could either keep consuming energy, leaving poles and cables around and disfiguring the landscape, or choose to respect it and save millions of euros.”

Technically called “traditional PV tiles“, the invisible solar panels used in Pompeii come from Camisano Vicentino, a little Italian town with slightly more than 10 000 inhabitants, halfway between Padua and Vicenza. They were created and patented by the family business Dyaqua.

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You have to see the picture: they look exactly like normal clay tiles (follow the link in the extract). Remarkable.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Need an espresso machine? Twitter is auctioning off a whole load in January. Plus lots of chairs. And other things. CC-licensed photo by cahadikincahadikin 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 a new post at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

This is the last Overspill of 2022. Thanks for reading through the year!

A selection of 10 links for you. Minimal mention of jets. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: ChatGPT owner OpenAI projects $1 billion in revenue by 2024 – sources • Reuters

Jeffrey Dastin, Krystal Hu and Paresh Dave:

»

ChatGPT, the new chatbot that is the talk of Silicon Valley, can spit out haikus, crack jokes in Italian and may soon be the scourge of teachers everywhere facing fake essays generated by the AI-powered technology.

But a question it can’t fully answer is this: how will OpenAI make money?

The research organization, co-founded by Elon Musk and investor Sam Altman and backed by $1bn in funding from Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), is expecting its business to surge.

Three sources briefed on OpenAI’s recent pitch to investors said the organization expects $200m in revenue next year and $1bn by 2024.

The forecast, first reported by Reuters, represents how some in Silicon Valley are betting the underlying technology will go far beyond splashy and sometimes flawed public demos.

OpenAI was most recently valued at $20 billion in a secondary share sale, one of the sources said. The startup has already inspired rivals and companies building applications atop its generative AI software, which includes the image maker DALL-E 2. OpenAI charges developers licensing its technology about a penny or a little more to generate 20,000 words of text, and about 2 cents to create an image from a written prompt, according to its website.

…Among those building applications atop OpenAI has been Jasper, which says it has drawn 80,000 marketers to draft ads, emails, blogs or other content with its software. The fast-growing company is expected to double its revenue to about $80 million this year, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters. Its chief executive did not comment on the figure.

Gil Elbaz, co-founder of TenOneTen Ventures, said marketing represented one of the clearest businesses for today’s chatbots. CarMax, for instance, has used OpenAI through Microsoft’s cloud to create thousands of customer review summaries for used cars that it is marketing, a case study on Microsoft’s website shows.

«

As expected: churning out market splodge is going to be big business.
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Riffusion

Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros:

»

You’ve heard of Stable Diffusion, the open-source AI model that generates images from text?

Well, we fine-tuned the model to generate images of spectrograms. The magic is that this spectrogram can then be converted to an audio clip:

Really? Yup.

This is the v1.5 stable diffusion model with no modifications, just fine-tuned on images of spectrograms paired with text. Audio processing happens downstream of the model. It can generate infinite variations of a prompt by varying the seed. All the same web UIs and techniques like img2img, inpainting, negative prompts, and interpolation work out of the box.

An audio spectrogram is a visual way to represent the frequency content of a sound clip. The x-axis represents time, and the y-axis represents frequency. The color of each pixel gives the amplitude of the audio at the frequency and time given by its row and column.

The spectogram can be computed from audio using the Short-time Fourier transform (STFT), which approximates the audio as a combination of sine waves of varying amplitudes and phases.

The STFT is invertible, so the original audio can be reconstructed from a spectrogram.

«

Clever. The most impressive part is where they do transitions between sets of sounds: from a typewriter to a sort of West African jazz, from church bells to electronic beats (the latter in particular). Those feel like something artists would want to use.
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“Impossible” to track: China gives up on COVID case count amid explosive outbreak • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

Amid what appears to be an explosive outbreak of COVID-19, China on Wednesday said it would no longer report asymptomatic cases because they’ve become “impossible” to track after an end to mandatory testing.

The now-voluntary testing policy is part of an abrupt pivot away from the country’s strict zero-COVID policy that drew widespread protests in recent weeks.

After years of keeping SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks largely at bay with various restrictions, mandatory isolations, quarantines, lockdowns, and extensive testing, China last week significantly eased its unpopular policy. The State Council announced on December 7 that residents would no longer be required to undergo frequent PCR tests for COVID-19. It also dropped the requirement to use digital health passes—personal QR codes that tracked an individual’s movements and COVID-19 test results—for access to buildings and public transportation. And for the first time during the pandemic, the government also allowed people with mild or asymptomatic infections to isolate at home rather than in centralized facilities, which residents often criticized for being unsanitary and overcrowded.

…Without centralized testing, people in China are now relying on at-home rapid tests for the first time during the pandemic. But there is no centralized way to report results. The only case numbers reported now are from people with symptoms who have confirmed cases after being tested in government facilities.

«

Three years on, and now the epidemic is really going to let rip.
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Cory Doctorow wants you to know what computers can and can’t do • The New Yorker

Christopher Byrd talks to Cory Doctorow, who for decades now has been writing science fiction and also warning us about the way in which our potentials are being blocked:

»

Byrd: In “Attack Surface,” you write, “Indifference is a lot harder to correct than simple ignorance.” I wonder if cyberpunk can do anything to correct that indifference.

Doctorow: Think of it being like “Silent Spring,” right? Before DDT made a bunch of animals extinct, “Silent Spring” convinced people to take action. There’s a problem when you have threats on your horizon where the cause and effect are separated by a lot of time and space. The natural point at which denial gives way to concern is past the point of no return. So what you want to do is shift the moment of peak denial further back so that you’ve got more runway to do something about it. You see it very explicitly now with climate fiction.

What that narrative can do is shift the point of peak indifference. But, just as importantly, it can keep denialism from sliding into nihilism. What you have to show people is not just how bad it will be if they don’t take action but how much room there is to take action to make things better. And it’s a very hard balance because the better job you do of demonstrating the vast, frightening challenge ahead of us and the consequences for inaction, the harder it is to convince people that some action could make a difference.

I think the best fiction does strike that balance. I mean, not to toot my own horn, I think that’s the thing that people like about “Little Brother.” It is a story that, for a certain kind of reader, both scares the shit out of them about how bad things can be and inspires them about how much we can do to make them better. This will all be so great if we don’t screw it up.

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The supply chain that keeps tech flowing to Russia • Reuters

Steve Stecklow, David Gauthier-Villars and Maurice Tamman:

»

In March this year, a new firm appeared in Turkey’s corporate registry. Azu International Ltd Sti described itself as a wholesale trader of IT products, and a week later began shipping US computer parts to Russia.

Business was brisk, Russian customs records show. The United States and the EU had recently restricted sales of sensitive technology to Russia because of its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, and many Western tech companies had suspended all dealings with Moscow.

Co-founded by Gokturk Agvaz, a Turkish businessman, Azu International stepped in to help fill the supply gap. Over the next seven months, the company exported at least $20m worth of components to Russia, including chips made by US manufacturers, according to Russian customs records.

The LinkedIn profile of Gokturk Agvaz, Azu International’s co-founder. Agvaz recently sold his stake.
Azu International’s rapidly growing business didn’t come from a standing start, Reuters reporting shows: Agvaz manages a wholesaler of IT products in Germany called Smart Impex GmbH. Before the invasion, Russian custom records show that the German company shipped American and other products to a Moscow customer that recently has imported goods from Azu International.

Reached at his office near Cologne in October, Agvaz told Reuters that Smart Impex stopped exporting to Russia to comply with EU trade restrictions but sells to Turkey, a non-EU country that doesn’t enforce most of the West’s sanctions against Moscow. “We cannot export to Russia, we cannot sell to Russia, and that’s why we just sell to Turkey,” he said. Asked about Azu International’s sales to Russia, he replied, “This is a business secret of ours.”

«

That Turkey diversion is quite the loophole.
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UN to send displaced Ukrainians USDC to convert into local currencies • Fortune

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez:

»

For displaced people around the world, carrying cash is risky because it can be lost or stolen. 

To avoid this, while also distributing aid to internally displaced persons from Ukraine and those affected by Russia’s invasion, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is turning to crypto.

Through a new blockchain-based aid program, UNHCR will transfer USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, to eligible recipients’ Vibrant digital wallets, which run on the Stellar blockchain. The aid recipients can then receive the funds in dollars, euros, or local currency at a MoneyGram location, of which there are 4,500 in Ukraine, according to a statement.

Holding crypto funds on a cell phone allows for traveling across borders or over long distances without having to worry about converting cash to other cash. The funds will be distributed to those most impacted by the war to help cover things like rent, food, medical care, and heating during the winter. 

“UNHCR has been collaborating for years with the tech sector, which has played a crucial role in helping us to innovate to deliver assistance faster, as speed is of the essence in humanitarian action,” UNHCR Representative to Ukraine Karolina Lindholm Billing said in the statement.

Despite a rough couple of months for crypto, including last month’s collapse of FTX and the charges filed against former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, the UN’s aid program illustrates a real-life use case for cryptocurrencies. Months after Russia invaded Ukraine, crypto has played an outsized role in directing funds to refugees and the Ukrainian government.

«

At last! All it took was the first war in Europe for nearly 80 years, 12 years after bitcoin was introduced. Really, though, they’re digital dollars. Circle promises that “every digital dollar of USDC can always be exchanged 1:1 for cash”.

Now, don’t lose your smartphone, or get waylaid by people who suspect you might have some USDC stored on it. But yes, finally a good use.
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‘We’re robbing f*cking idiots’: Twitter influencers ‘bragged and laughed’ while pumping and dumping stocks, SEC says • Vice

Maxwell Strachan:

»

A collection of obnoxious but nevertheless perplexingly influential morons have been charged with brazenly pumping stocks via Discord, Twitter, and podcasts and then dumping their shares without disclosing that they were doing so, generating $100 million in profits by illegally throwing their own followers—over a million altogether—under the bus and running them over, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.  

They also “bragged and laughed about making profits at the expense of their followers” in private chats and “surreptitiously recorded conversations” (whoops), according to the SEC’s complaint. 

Seven of the people charged are Perry Matlock (@PJ_Matlock), Edward Constantin (@MrZackMorris), Thomas Cooperman (@ohheytommy), Gary Deel (@notoriousalerts), Mitchell Hennessey (@Hugh_Henne), Stefan Hrvatin (@LadeBackk), John Rybarcyzk (@Ultra_Calls). An eighth, Daniel Knight (@DipDeity), co-hosted the stock market podcast “Pennies: Going in Raw,” where he pushed these people as “expert traders,” “provided them with a forum for their manipulative statements,” and “regularly generated profits from the manipulation,” per the SEC.

Together, the group had about 1.5 million Twitter followers, to whom they “allegedly disseminated false and misleading information about the securities that they pumped and dumped as part of the charged scheme.”

«

Brazenly pumping stocks? The fools. They should have brazenly pumped crypto coins.
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The Twitter files are a missed opportunity • The Atlantic

Renée DiResta:

»

Journalists and academic researchers shouldn’t have to base their evaluations solely on anecdotes. Twitter could easily provide systematic information about its practices. In her Twitter Files thread about shadow banning, Weiss shared screenshots, provided by Ella Irwin, the company’s new head of trust and safety, of a moderation interface that allows employees to tag specific accounts in ways—“trends blacklist,” “search blacklist”—that likely limit circulation of their tweets. (The precise effects of those and other tags remain unclear.)

Weiss’s reporting focused on how the company handled high-profile accounts, such as Libs of TikTok, that are popular among American conservatives. However, it raised a lot of interesting questions about the platform more generally. To understand the systemic enforcement of platform policies, researchers, including my team at the Stanford Internet Observatory, would like to see statistics on, for instance, how many accounts have received the “trends blacklist” and “search blacklist” tags. Even if the usernames of individual accounts are obscured for privacy, a report detailing the follower counts and presumed home country of tagged accounts might reveal more about how the platform is exercising its content-moderation power than individual anecdotes. (Twitter is a global platform; while its handling of Libs of TikTok is certainly interesting, other accounts, such as those of many government officials and leaders of political movements, have greater global influence).

Because anecdotal examples do help make abstract dynamics clearer to the public, the Twitter Files authors should seek out and share more details about precisely why the high-profile and somewhat controversial accounts they highlighted were subject to specific actions. Which tweet or tweets prompted Twitter employees to put the right-wing talk-show host Dan Bongino on the search blacklist? Which specific policy justified that decision?

«

DiResta is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and has done a lot of research on misinformation and disinformation. As she says, we shouldn’t have to rely on anecdotes.
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Twitter: online auction sale featuring surplus corporate office assets of Twitter! • Heritage Global Partners

»

Twitter: Online Auction Sale Featuring Surplus Corporate Office Assets of Twitter!
Sale Featuring Kitchen Equipment, Electronics, Furniture, Memorabilia & More!

«

Starts mid-January. Chairs, espresso machines (6), coffee gringers (2), industrial ovens and freezers and fridges, and much more. Guess you’ve got to cover that missing advertiser revenue somehow.
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January 2022: Elon Musk offers $50k to teen to remove flight tracker bot • Protocol

Veronica Irwin, back in January:

»

Celebrities getting ambushed at airports — by fans, by people who want to sell their autograph, paparazzi, stalkers and the like — is certainly a thing. And Musk and other tech CEOs have become bona fide celebrities in recent years. (Protocol contacted SpaceX’s media team to ask whether there had been any violent incidents or threats — one of the only remaining ways for the press to contact Musk after he dissolved Tesla’s PR team last year — but got no response.)

But Twitter bots don’t get starstruck. They’ve just gone on parsing the data Sweeney’s told them to. The 15 bots use FAA information when available — the administration keeps track of when and where planes depart and land, as well as their intended path. However, Musk’s plane and many others are on the LADD block list, which removes identifying information from the data.

Even blocked planes aren’t truly private, though. In these cases, Sweeney uses data from the ADS-B transponders present on most aircraft which show a plane’s location in the air in real time as charted on the ADS-B Exchange. Parsing this information is like a logic puzzle: Sweeney’s bots can use a plane’s altitude, combined with how long ago the data was received, to determine when it is taking off or landing. They can then cross-reference latitude and longitude with a database of airports to determine where the plane is leaving or headed. And though Sweeney’s bots can’t pull from blocked FAA data to figure out where a plane plans to go, they can cross-reference the real-time ADS-B data with another website that posts anonymized versions of the FAA flight plans. This allows the bot to match the plane it is tracking in real time to the anonymized FAA flight plans and determine each plane’s intended destination. This information is all entirely public, and can be used to track most private aircraft.

It’s a loophole in high-profile security that has only flown under the radar because one needs a lot of industry-specific knowledge to know all this data was available and public, and to understand how to parse it. Sweeney had that context: His father works in the airline industry, and Sweeney has been tracking planes since he was a child. Like many young boys, he says he would try to identify types of planes as they flew across the sky, often checking his guesses against what he could find in online flight tracker apps.

Once Sweeney explained to Musk where he was finding the data, the entrepreneur was surprised by how accessible it all was. “Air traffic control is so primitive,” he said.

«

Primitive, and yet useful. A few months later, Musk offered to buy Twitter, complaining there were too many bots. I mean, I’m not saying. I’m just asking. (Thanks Joseph B for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Life as the adjunct of a real-estate AI chatbot can make you ask yourself who’s the robot, and who the human. CC-licensed photo by Matthew Hurst 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. Putting more in than out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple to allow outside app stores in overhaul spurred by EU laws • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Mark Gurman:

»

Apple is preparing to allow alternative app stores on its iPhones and iPads, part of a sweeping overhaul aimed at complying with strict European Union requirements coming in 2024.

Software engineering and services employees are engaged in a major push to open up key elements of Apple’s platforms, according to people familiar with the efforts. As part of the changes, customers could ultimately download third-party software to their iPhones and iPads without using the company’s App Store, sidestepping Apple’s restrictions and the up-to-30% commission it imposes on payments.

The moves — a reversal of long-held policies — are a response to EU laws aimed at leveling the playing field for third-party developers and improving the digital lives of consumers. For years, regulators and software makers have complained that Apple and Google, which run the two biggest mobile app stores, wield too much power as gatekeepers.

If similar laws are passed in additional countries, Apple’s project could lay the groundwork for other regions, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the work is private. But the company’s changes are designed initially to just go into effect in Europe.

Even so, the news bolstered shares of companies that offer dating services and other apps. Match Group Inc. jumped as much as 10% and Bumble Inc. was up as much as 8.6% — a sign investors think the companies could get a break from Apple’s commissions.

«

Will only apply in Europe initially, and Apple is doing it because of the Digital Markets Act, Gurman says. Hell of a scoop. There’s been a feeling that this is inevitable, but now the question is what subtle (or not-so-subtle) obstacles Apple will put in the way of those sideloaders. There’s a lot of money in those 30% fees.
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A US nuclear fusion test inches us closer to a clean energy holy grail • Fast Company

Alex Pasternack:

»

The ignition the NIF produced in an experiment last week amounted to 3.15 megajoules of energy, a gain of about 54% over the roughly 2 megajoules that the reaction consumed from the lasers, the lab’s analysis suggests. The test built on a record the lab set last August, in a fusion experiment that yielded over 1.3 megajoules. The Financial Times first reported the breakthrough on Monday, and the Dept. of Energy confirmed it during a press conference on Tuesday.

…The NIF’s approach—intended for weapons research specifically—is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity. NIF’s laser, the world’s largest, loses up to 99% of its energy in the process of heating up the pellet. In an actual reactor, there’s also the energy lost to waste heat and noise, which typically means a thermal efficiency of less than 50%. To be a viable commercial energy source, fusion reactors must be able to draw significantly more net energy from the reaction, possibly a hundred times more.

Another approach, magnetic confinement confusion, which uses magnetic fields to heat the plasma inside donut-shaped tokamak reactors, likely holds more promise for commercial energy production.

«

As suspected: it’s encouraging, and shows that the science is solid, but it’s absolutely miles from application. Plus it takes about a day (minimum) to set up each experiment, whereas – as one scientist pointed out – you need to be doing it at least every second (that’s three orders of magnitude faster). There are so many challenges in so many directions.
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Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup • N+1 Magazine

Laura Preston:

»

The position was at a company that made artificial intelligence for real estate. They had developed a product called Brenda, a conversational AI that could answer questions about apartment listings. Brenda had been acquired by a larger company that made software for property managers, and now thousands of properties across the country had put her to work.

Brenda, the recruiter told me, was a sophisticated conversationalist, so fluent that most people who encountered her took her to be human.

But like all conversational AIs, she had some shortcomings. She struggled with idioms and didn’t fare well with questions beyond the scope of real estate. To compensate for these flaws, the company was recruiting a team of employees they called the operators. The operators kept vigil over Brenda 24 hours a day. When Brenda went off-script, an operator took over and emulated Brenda’s voice. Ideally, the customer on the other end would not realise the conversation had changed hands, or that they had even been chatting with a bot in the first place. Because Brenda used machine learning to improve her responses, she would pick up on the operators’ language patterns and gradually adopt them as her own.

…Brenda was more efficient than the most industrious human agent. She could cross-reference a vast database of property information in an instant and field messages faster than any human at a keyboard. She could deal with calls at all hours of the day and night, didn’t need a lunch break and could work weekends and holidays. When the leasing agents arrived in the office each morning, their tour schedules were neatly arranged, as if by elves in the night.

Meanwhile, we operators, with our advanced degrees in the humanities, had aptitudes Brenda lacked. We were intuitive, articulate and sensitive to the finer points of delivery. At $25 an hour we also cost almost nothing to employ, by corporate standards. Under the Brenda-operator alliance, everyone came out ahead: the operators got paid better than they would as adjunct professors, and Brenda became more likable, more convincing, more humane. Meanwhile, Brenda’s corporate clients were satisfied knowing they had not replaced their phone lines with a customer-service bot. What they were using, instead, was cutting-edge AI backed by PhDs in literature.

«

But, but, but. Read all of it: a fantastic description of modern life under the thumb of chatbots, and humans acting like machines.
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ChatGPT is coming for your job. And I do mean your • Jabberwocking

Kevin Drum:

»

As good as it is, ChatGPT right now is only a curiosity and a warning. It’s a curiosity because even a modest effort exposes it as an idiot savant, full of on-point facts but not really able to draw sophisticated conclusions from them. It’s a warning because it’s probably only a few years away from having the knowledge and verbal abilities of a PhD student.

How do we respond when that happens? I’m not sure, but I’ll say this: we currently live in a world full of lawyers and professors and journalists who are able to calmly accept the prospect of millions of unemployed truck drivers when AI fills the world with self-driving trucks. But they will probably be a wee bit more upset at the prospect of millions of unemployed lawyers, professors, and journalists.

Maybe this is a good thing. The only way we’ll get a serious response to AI is if either (a) it affects the working class in numbers so big it creates riots, or (b) it reduces the income of the ruling class by 1% or so. Both would be considered problems of about the same magnitude and would provoke roughly the same energy toward finding a solution.

«

Are lawyers, professors and journalists actually the ruling class? Surely that group consists of the very very rich (if there really is a “ruling” class, tbd) and they won’t notice if the work gets done by ChatGPT or a real person.
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Binance suffers $1bn outflow in one day as crypto jitters spread • Financial Times

Joshua Oliver and Scott Chipolina:

»

Changpeng Zhao, chief executive of Binance, said the exchange had experienced $1.14bn in net withdrawals on Tuesday as users continued to remove their assets from his marketplace.

Net withdrawals over seven days had topped $3.6bn, according to an analysis conducted by blockchain research group Nansen.

The outflows underscored the nervousness swirling around crypto markets since the collapse last month of FTX, one of the largest companies in the industry. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with fraud in the US on Tuesday.

Nansen said the rapid withdrawals were the largest since June, when the digital assets market was embroiled in an unprecedented market crash that saw popular tokens plummet in value.

Zhao played down the scale of these redemptions, insisting it was “Business as usual for us.” “Some days we have net withdrawals; some days we have net deposits,” Zhao said on Twitter.

Investors have pulled record levels of bitcoin from crypto exchanges in the past month on concerns over the safety of their assets. Crypto exchanges like Binance take custody of clients’ assets alongside offering a trading venue.

Binance said it has more than $60bn in assets, sufficient funds to honour withdrawals. However, the company’s disclosures do not include its liabilities making it difficult to ascertain its financial health. The exchange told the FT all client deposits are backed by corresponding assets and that its “capital structure is debt free.”

«

Pretty much nobody believes this apart from the people who have money in Binance. Bitcoin’s price actually rose on Tuesday amid the withdrawals, perhaps because people are getting out of other junkcoins towards a relatively safe haven. The next stage will be if those buyers convert back to fiat, dumping bitcoin.
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Rise of open-source intelligence tests US spies • WSJ

Warren P. Strobel:

»

As Russian troops surged toward Ukraine’s border last fall, a small Western intelligence unit swung into action, tracking signs Moscow was preparing to invade. It drew up escape routes for its people and wrote twice-daily intelligence reports.

The unit drafted and sent to its leaders an assessment on Feb. 16, 2022, that would be eerily prescient: Russia, it said, would likely invade Ukraine on Feb. 23, US East Coast time. 

The intelligence shop had just eight analysts and used only publicly available information, not spy satellites and secret agents. It belonged to multinational chemicals company Dow Inc., not to any government.

“I’m leading an intelligence center that accurately predicted the invasion of Ukraine without any access to sensitive sources,” said John Robert, Dow’s director of global intelligence and protection, whose unit helps the company manage business risk and employee safety.

Supercharged by the Ukraine war, the rise of open-source intelligence, or OSINT, which comprises everything from commercial satellite imagery to social-media posts and purchasable databases, poses revolutionary challenges for the Central Intelligence Agency and its sister spy agencies, according to former senior officials who spent decades working in those agencies’ classified spaces.

Dow is just one of a fast-growing number of companies, nonprofit groups and countries transforming publicly available data into intelligence for strategic and economic advantage. China has the largest, most focused effort, while US spy agencies, with deeply ingrained habits of operating in the shadows, have been slow to adapt to a world in which much of what is important isn’t secret, according to dozens of officials and many studies.

The CIA is simultaneously dealing with a closely related challenge: It is pivoting from two decades focused on terrorism toward spying on a new primary intelligence target, China. But some officials say the technological tsunami facing US intelligence agencies poses a more fundamental challenge than merely swapping priorities.

…But by some estimates, more than 80% of what a U.S. president or military commander needs to know comes from OSINT, and not from foreign agents, spy satellites or expensive eavesdropping platforms.

«

OK but it’s that other 20% which is where the CIA and the rest earn their money, isn’t it?
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Meta kills Facebook Connectivity • Light Reading

Mike Dano:

»

Meta Connectivity, which launched in 2013, sought to develop innovative connection technologies – from solar-powered drones and fibre-laying robots to low-Earth orbit satellites – in order to extend the company’s social network to more users.

Last year, the company estimated that more than 300 million people got access to faster Internet services thanks to Meta Connectivity.

The closure of Meta Connectivity stems from the massive round of layoffs Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg announced earlier this month. He said he would reduce the size of the company by roughly 13%, laying off more than 11,000 employees. Meta has struggled to focus on metaverse products while its core social networking advertising business faces threats from the likes of Apple and others.

«

This has the feeling of a company realising that it’s not actually going to defeat the laws of physics. Solar-powered drones lose out to simpler solutions such as solar-powered mobile phone masts. Sure, Musk’s Starlink is still pushing low-Earth orbit satellites for connections, but let’s see what there is left 10 years from now.
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The biggest myths about this week’s strikes in the UK • New Statesman

Anoosh Chakelian:

»

Every time workers threaten to go on strike in the UK, a little ritual ensues. The average wage of the sector in question is googled (just look at how searches for “rail salary” and “train driver salary” spiked when the rail strikes began in June). The googler in question – possibly based on how this compares with their own income, whether strikes inconvenience them personally, plus a dash of “could I do that job myself?” – then decides whether or not the industrial action is justified.

This psychological process, in addition to how government ministers frame trade union leaders, all serves to shape public sentiment towards strikes.

One of the biggest and most basic public misconceptions in relation to strikes is about average salaries. The average annual pay in the UK is £33,000. But we, as the British public, tend to assume it’s actually lower. When the New Statesman asked British voters what they thought the average salary was, we found a third of them pegged it to £20,001-£30,000 – the most chosen salary bracket in the poll.

This may sound like a minor underestimation, but it means we therefore assume certain workers are better paid (or paid closer to the average) than they actually are.

«

This begins the problem, yet what’s noticeable about the strikes happening in the UK this month (and there are a lot) is that they have broad public support. As much as anything, that’s because people also don’t buy the argument that public sector pay awards will drive inflation (which is anyway untrue; Chakelian explains why).
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The unbearable lightness of hydrogen • Bloomberg New Energy Futures

Michael Liebreich:

»

While clean hydrogen will be needed to decarbonize a number of use cases in industry, and perhaps for long-duration storage, I found it hard to identify any role for it in applications like land transportation or space heating. Since then, as I have done more work on industrial heat, I have even come to believe it has a limited role even there.

If my intention at the time was to inject some reality into discussions about hydrogen, I clearly failed. Rhetoric around hydrogen has become ever more overblown.

According to lobbying group the Hydrogen Council, citing a series of reports commissioned from McKinsey over the past three years, hydrogen can be expected to contribute more than 20% of emissions reductions needed for the world to reach net-zero emissions – a figure repeated by politicians and journalists seemingly without the slightest critical examination.

«

No critical examination? Incredible!

»

In October this year the Hydrogen Council and McKinsey released another report entitled Global Hydrogen Flows, predicting long-distance transport of 400m tonnes of clean hydrogen and its derivatives (calculated on a hydrogen-content basis) by 2050, out of total global production of 660m tonnes of hydrogen. It is worth bearing in mind that today, 94m tonnes of hydrogen are used annually, virtually all of it made from fossil fuels, creating 2.3% of global emissions. The vast bulk of today’s hydrogen never leaves the compound on which it is made, let alone cross an international border.

«

I mean, it might change, but the inertia against such dramatic reconstitution is colossal.
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Former members of Twitter’s safety council voice concerns over Musk’s acquisition • NPR

»

[Eirliani] Rahman [who resigned from Twitter’s third-party safety council]: in terms of average number of tweets per day, in the first two weeks, antisemitic posts went up by 61% – against gay men, the corresponding number is 58%. I find that highly unacceptable.

Rachel Martin, NPR: And all this data you’re quoting is in the time period since Musk took over?

Rahman: Completely correct. And these are the data that my fellow former peers put forward. And they were part – they are part of the council and still are in there. And the other red line that he crossed was when previously banned accounts were reinstated – so for example, the ones that led up to what happened January 6 here in the US. So for me, all these were highly, highly problematic. We were hoping that our – with our resignations, it would prompt a rethinking within Twitter, within the council, but also just generally within Twitter headquarters to reconsider what’s happening to the content moderation and to make it a safer space for the public.

Martin: Anne, in your resignation letter, you said Twitter is moving toward automated content moderation. Why is that risky in your view?

Collier: Content moderation is very complex and highly nuanced. It’s also very contextual. It’s very, very hard for algorithms to determine what truly is harmful without any context whatsoever. Human beings are needed to do that. And we know that Twitter staff is massively reduced. And Twitter has to be reliant on automated content moderation more. So – and that’s an announcement directly from Twitter itself.

«

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The Trumpification of Elon Musk • Wired

Gideon Lichfield:

»

The point is that the focus on Musk is a mistake. Arguably not as much of a mistake as it was with Trump; an owner-CEO has more power over their company than a president does over their country. But trying to report on what’s happening by expecting either his abject failure or resounding success and then using his most attention-grabbing tactics as evidence for that thesis is not doing anyone a service. 

As with Trump, the real story is often what’s going on below the level of newsmaker in chief. It’s about the actual numbers around Twitter’s advertising, not Musk’s claims that advertisers are coming back. It’s about who’s actually joining and leaving Twitter, not about who’s threatening to leave. It’s about Twitter’s role in the world—its importance to natural-disaster management or to any number of communities for whom it’s a store of social wealth—rather than just how much money it will lose. Musk and Trump subvert the ability to focus on such nuances by making the story all about themselves. The very same tactic that draws their fans ensnares their critics. And we, by which I mean everybody, but especially the media, fall for it every time.

Just before Musk bought Twitter, I tweeted a prediction that “not much [will] change. Trump et al will come back, trolling will increase somewhat, rest of us will block and mute more and engage less but still use it for publishing—more web 1.0, less 2.0.” As foolish as it is to make predictions, and as crazy as the past six weeks have been, I still think this is as plausible a long-term outcome as any other. It’s neither the destruction of Twitter nor a turnaround, but a bet that the platform is too important to too many people to disappear altogether and will hobble along, however dysfunctionally, in some form. This prediction could be utterly wrong, but its chief quality is that it’s boring. People should make boring predictions more often.

«

Absolutely this. Though there has been a definite disengagement just in the past week by some significant (to me) accounts; once the air starts to go out of the balloon, you can’t get it back in.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Got a ticket? Maybe you should get ChatGPT to write an explanation of why it should be revoked. CC-licensed photo by Charleston’s TheDigitelCharleston%27s TheDigitel 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.

Next Friday there’ll be another post due at the Social Warming Substack, at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. Overflowing with energy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried arrested after US files criminal charges • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos and Rohan Goswami:

»

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamian authorities this evening after the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York shared a sealed indictment with the Bahamian government, setting the stage for extradition and US trial for the onetime crypto billionaire at the heart of the crypto exchange’s collapse.

Damian Williams, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Twitter that the federal government anticipated moving to “unseal the indictment in the morning.”

Bahamas Attorney General Ryan Pinder said that the United States had filed unspecified criminal charges against Bankman-Fried and was “likely to request his extradition.”

In a statement, Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis said, “The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law.”

«

This month’s least surprising headline. The question now is how long the extradition will take. Apropos of nothing, there’s an Ecuadorian embassy in Nassau.
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Exclusive: US Justice Dept is split over charging Binance as crypto world falters, sources say • Reuters

By Angus Berwick, Dan Levine and Tom Wilson:

»

Splits between US Department of Justice prosecutors are delaying the conclusion of a long-running criminal investigation into the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, four people familiar with the matter have told Reuters.

The investigation began in 2018 and is focused on Binance’s compliance with US anti-money laundering laws and sanctions, these people said. Some of the at least half dozen federal prosecutors involved in the case believe the evidence already gathered justifies moving aggressively against the exchange and filing criminal charges against individual executives including founder Changpeng Zhao, said two of the sources. Others have argued taking time to review more evidence, the sources said.

The inquiry involves prosecutors at three Justice Department offices: the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section, known as MLARS, the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington in Seattle and the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. Justice Department regulations say that money laundering charges against a financial institution must be approved by the MLARS chief. Leaders from the other two offices, along with higher-level DOJ officials, would likely also have to sign off on any action against Binance, three of the sources said.

«

If Binance gets investigated.. that would pretty much be game over for a lot of the crypto market. And it feels very unlikely that its controls have been tight enough to prevent money laundering through the exchange.

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Former top Twitter official forced to leave home due to threats amid ‘Twitter Files’ release • CNN Business

Donie O’Sullivan:

»

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.

Yoel Roth, who resigned from the social media company in November, has in recent weeks faced a storm of attacks and threats of violence following the release of the so-called “Twitter Files” — internal Twitter communications that new owner Musk has released through journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.

Roth’s position involved him working on sensitive issues including the suspension of then-President Donald Trump’s account in 2021. On Monday, Weiss posted a series of screenshots purported to show internal Twitter documents where Roth and others discussed whether to ban Trump’s account, with some employees questioning if the former president’s tweets violated the platform’s policies.

While Musk had initially been publicly supportive of Roth, that soon changed after he left the company. Roth has since been the subject of criticism and threats following the release of the Twitter Files. However, things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia — a common trope used by conspiracy theorists to attack people online.

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A common trope used by rightwing conspiracy theorists, which Musk either is, or seeks to encourage. And the difference is.. irrelevant.
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So that fusion “net energy gain” means what for the future, exactly? •Thread Reader App

Wilson Ricks is a PhD candidate in large energy systems modelling at Princeton University:

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The National Ignition Facility (NIF) has achieved net energy gain from fusion! This is incredibly exciting scientifically, but what does it mean for the future of energy?

In all likelihood, very little.

As I suspected yesterday, even if the lasers have generated more energy out than was put in, the trouble is that the lasers are only 1% efficient. So you don’t want 20% more power output; you need 100x or more. And that’s only the beginning of the power losses.

Ricks thinks that magnetic confinement fusion (as in ITER and JET) actually has the better chance of solving this. Full details are expected today, Tuesday, but basically it sounds like it’s back to square 100.
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Abandoned: the human cost of neurotechnology failure • Nature

Lim Drew:

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secret that has changed his life. Under the skin, nestled among the nerve fibres that allow him to feel and move his face, is a miniature radio receiver and six tiny electrodes. “I’m a cyborg,” he says, with a chuckle.

This electronic device lies dormant much of the time. But, when Möllmann-Bohle feels pressure starting to gather around his left eye, he retrieves a black plastic wand about the size of a mobile phone, pushes a button and fixes it against his face in a home-made sling. The remote vibrates for a moment, then launches high-frequency radio waves into his cheek.

In response, the implant fires a sequence of electrical pulses into a bundle of nerve cells called the sphenopalatine ganglion. By disrupting these neurons, the device spares 57-year-old Möllmann-Bohle the worst of the agonizing cluster headaches that have plagued him for decades. He uses the implant several times a day. “I need this device to live a good life,” he says.

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It was made by an American company called ATI. But:

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by the end of 2019, ATI had collapsed. The company’s closure left Möllmann-Bohle and more than 700 other people alone with a complex implanted medical device. People using the stimulator and their physicians could no longer access the proprietary software needed to recalibrate the device and maintain its effectiveness. Möllmann-Bohle and his fellow users now faced the prospect of the battery in the hand-held remote wearing out, robbing them of the relief that they had found. “I was left standing in the rain,” Möllmann-Bohle says.

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Drew pulls together plenty of examples: there’s such a huge tension between the investment needed to come up with new technologies, the cost to healthcare systems of deploying them, and the need of companies to make a profit.
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NYC Mayor Eric Adams took three paychecks in crypto. How’s that going for him? • Slate

Alexander Sammon:

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On Jan. 21, according to reporting in the Verge, Adams received the first of his biweekly paychecks— $5,900, according to the New York Post—and flowed that money into the crypto exchange Coinbase. Adams’ office confirmed that he did indeed go on to convert three paychecks into cryptocurrency, splitting the money between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Some back-of-the envelope math gives a rough sense of how much money that decision has cost hizzoner. At time of writing, Bitcoin sits at $16,811.40; Ethereum is $1,229.74. Maybe they’ll have gone up since then; it’s possible, by the time you’re reading this, they’ll be lower still. That means that Adams has lost roughly 53%, 60%, and 57% on his first three paychecks.

Check my work: I calculated those figures based on the daily average of each currency on each of the three paydays. I assumed that the money was parceled evenly between the two separate coins. Cryptocurrencies can fluctuate substantially in value even on a minute-by-minute basis (critics would say this is just one reason they seem not to be especially well-suited as currencies), so it’s possible Adams arbitraged his purchases so perfectly that he beat the daily average. It’s possible too that he loaded up on Bitcoin, which is only down 64% this year, rather than Ethereum, which is down 66%.

…Meanwhile, Adams’ other November commitment, support for a New York City–specific cryptocurrency, has gone even worse. NYCCoin is down almost 94% since it was introduced with the mayor’s support in February. MiamiCoin, which began trading in August of 2021 and has been pushed by that city’s similarly crypto-zealous mayor, Francis Suarez, is down 98% for the year, trading at $0.000458.

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The critique of crypto remains the same: what is it better at doing than fiat currency? “Being transferred” is a good answer, but it’s not sufficient while the price yo-yos around.
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GitHub – f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts: This repo includes ChatGPT prompt curation to use ChatGPT better • Github

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The ChatGPT model is a large language model trained by OpenAI that is capable of generating human-like text. By providing it with a prompt, it can generate responses that continue the conversation or expand on the given prompt.

In this repository, you will find a variety of prompts that can be used with ChatGPT. We encourage you to add your own prompts to the list, and to use ChatGPT to generate new prompts as well.

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So we focused for a bit on magic spells for pictures; now it’s incantations for text to make it act as an interviewer, a football commentator, a Javascript console, a plagiarism checker, a character from a movie or book,..
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Disputing a parking fine with ChatGPT • Notes by Lex

Lex Toumbourou:

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Recently, on holidays in Far North Queensland, my wife and I parked our rental car in a paid parking lot to visit a restaurant.

I paid using the EasyPark App per the council’s instruction on various signs throughout the lot.

When we returned, they had slapped a fine on our Toyota anyway [for “failing to display a valid ticket in the prescribed manner”].

I double-checked what I had entered into the app. I mistyped the number plate by one letter. Oops.

Since we have never received a parking fine before, and I had proof of payment, I knew there was a good chance the council would let me off if I sent a letter of explanation. We had already been experimenting with ChatGPT, and the letter seemed a good test case.

ChatGPT: Write a letter to Cairns Regional Council requesting to dispute parking fine: I paid in EasyPark but accidentally mistyped the number plate.

The first response was close but longer than I would like. Plus, I didn’t tell it that I was planning to attach a photo of the fine and proof of payment.

That is good, but make it shorter. Also include that I have attached fine and proof of payment.

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And he gets a response that the Penalty Infringement Notice has been withdrawn; the language used, to my eyes at least, is quite similar to that spouted by ChatGPT. Only me?
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Recruited for Navy SEALs, many sailors wind up scraping paint • The Japan Times

Dave Philipps:

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A sailor fresh out the elite Navy SEAL selection course slung his gear over his broad shoulder and clomped down a steel ladder into the guts of a Navy ship to execute a difficult, days-long mission specifically assigned to him: scrubbing the stinking scum out of the ship’s cavernous bilge tank.

Hardly the stuff of action movies, but it’s how many would-be SEALs end up.

The Navy attracts recruits for the SEALs using flashy images of warriors jumping from planes or rising menacingly from the dark surf. But very few make it through the harrowing selection course, and those who don’t still owe the Navy the rest of their four-year enlistments. So they end up doing whatever Navy jobs are available — often, menial work that few others want.

The recruits are almost all hypermotivated overachievers, often with college degrees, who have passed a battery of strength and intelligence tests. But many find themselves washing dishes in cramped galleys, cleaning toilets on submarines or scraping paint on aircraft carriers.

Unlike civilian workers, they cannot quit. To walk away would be a crime.

…Relegating promising candidates who don’t quite clear the bar to years of drudgery would be a harsh arrangement even if the SEAL selection course were running as designed. But lately, classes that were always hard became dangerous. A number of sailors were hospitalized. Others were forced to quit if they wanted medical care. And in February, one sailor died.

…On average, about 70% of each class over the last decade has rung the bell. But the rate suddenly soared in 2021, reaching as high as 93%.

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And the US Navy doesn’t quite know why.
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ChatGPT, Galactica, and the progress trap • WIRED

Abeba Birhane and Deborah Raji are Fellows in Trustworthy AI at the Mozilla Foundation:

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Among the most celebrated AI deployments is that of BERT—one of the first large language models developed by Google—to improve the company’s search engine results. However, when a user searched how to handle a seizure, they received answers promoting things they should not do—including being told inappropriately to “hold the person down” and “put something in the person’s mouth.” Anyone following the directives Google provided would thus be instructed to do exactly the opposite of what a medical professional would recommend, potentially resulting in death. 

The Google seizure error makes sense, given that one of the known vulnerabilities of LLMs is their failure to handle negation, as Allyson Ettinger demonstrated years ago with a simple study. When asked to complete a short sentence, the model would answer 100% correctly for affirmative statements (“a robin is …”) and 100% incorrectly for negative statements (“a robin is not …”). In fact, it became clear that the models could not actually distinguish between the two scenarios and provided the exact same responses (using nouns such as “bird”) in both cases.

Negation remains an issue today and is one of the rare linguistic skills to not improve as the models increase in size and complexity. Such errors reflect broader concerns linguists have raised about how such artificial language models effectively operate via a trick mirror—learning the form of the English language without possessing any of the inherent linguistic capabilities that would demonstrate actual understanding.

Additionally, the creators of such models confess to the difficulty of addressing inappropriate responses that “do not accurately reflect the contents of authoritative external sources.” Galactica and ChatGPT have generated, for example, a “scientific paper” on the benefits of eating crushed glass (Galactica) and a text on “how crushed porcelain added to breast milk can support the infant digestive system” (ChatGPT).

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The negation point explains a great deal about what we’ve seen.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Has fusion power finally, at last, moved past being a terrific backdrop for research groups to pose in front of? New results might be encouraging. Perhaps. CC-licensed photo by Steve Jurvetson 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.

Have you seen the latest post at the Social Warming Substack? It’s about Google and ChatGPT. Topical, as you’d expect.

A selection of 10 links for you. Well, always nice to be optimistic. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Thanks to AI, it’s probably time to take your photos off the Internet • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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If you’re one of the billions of people who have posted pictures of themselves on social media over the past decade, it may be time to rethink that behavior. New AI image-generation technology allows anyone to save a handful of photos (or video frames) of you, then train AI to create realistic fake photos that show you doing embarrassing or illegal things. Not everyone may be at risk, but everyone should know about it.

Photographs have always been subject to falsifications—first in darkrooms with scissors and paste and then via Adobe Photoshop through pixels. But it took a great deal of skill to pull off convincingly. Today, creating convincing photorealistic fakes has become almost trivial.

Once an AI model learns how to render someone, their image becomes a software plaything. The AI can create images of them in infinite quantities. And the AI model can be shared, allowing other people to create images of that person as well.

When we started writing this article, we asked a brave volunteer if we could use their social media images to attempt to train an AI model to create fakes. They agreed, but the results were too convincing, and the reputational risk proved too great. So instead, we used AI to create a set of seven simulated social media photos of a fictitious person we’ll call “John.” That way, we can safely show you the results. For now, let’s pretend John is a real guy. The outcome is exactly the same, as you’ll see below.

In our pretend scenario, “John” is an elementary school teacher. Like many of us, over the past 12 years, John has posted photos of himself on Facebook at his job, relaxing at home, or while going places.

Using nothing but those seven images, someone could train AI to generate images that make it seem like John has a secret life. For example, he might like to take nude selfies in his classroom. At night, John might go to bars dressed like a clown. On weekends, he could be part of an extremist paramilitary group. And maybe he served prison time for an illegal drug charge but has hidden that from his employer.

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Smart article: rather than waiting for a pressure group or academic to come up with this idea, they thought about the problem themselves. And it’s clearly a potentially big problem. Sure to come up in political campaigns near you.
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Comparing Google and ChatGPT • Hacker News

From the comments, this first is by “hncel”:

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I work at Alphabet and I recently went to an internal tech talk about deploying large language models like this at Google. As a disclaimer I’ll first note that this is not my area of expertise, I just attended the tech talk because it sounded interesting.

Large language models like GPT are one of the biggest areas of active ML research at Google, and there’s a ton of pretty obvious applications for how they can be used to answer queries, index information, etc. There is a huge budget at Google related to staffing people to work on these kinds of models and do the actual training, which is very expensive because it takes a ton of compute capacity to train these super huge language models. However what I gathered from the talk is the economics of actually using these kinds of language models in the biggest Google products (e.g. search, gmail) isn’t quite there yet. It’s one thing to put up a demo that interested nerds can play with, but it’s quite another thing to try to integrate it deeply in a system that serves billions of requests a day when you take into account serving costs, added latency, and the fact that the average revenue on something like a Google search is close to infinitesimal already. I think I remember the presenter saying something like they’d want to reduce the costs by at least 10x before it would be feasible to integrate models like this in products like search. A 10x or even 100x improvement is obviously an attainable target in the next few years, so I think technology like this is coming in the next few years.

Commenter “summerlight”: This is so true. Some folks in Ads also tried to explore using large language models (one example: LLM is going to be the ultimate solution for contextual targeting if it’s properly done), but one of the major bottleneck is always its cost and latency. Even if you can afford cpu/gpu/tpu costs, you always have to play within a finite latency budget. Large language model often adds latency by order of seconds, not even milliseconds! This is simply not acceptable..

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One proviso: hncel only created their account in June 2021, and this is the first comment. Hard to be certain that they do know this, but it sounds reasonable.
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Fossil fuel recruiters banned from three more UK universities • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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Three more UK universities have banned fossil fuel companies from recruiting students through their career services, with one citing the industry as a “fundamental barrier to a more just and sustainable world”.

The University of the Arts London, University of Bedfordshire, and Wrexham Glyndwr University join Birkbeck, University of London, which was the first to adopt a fossil-free careers service policy in September.

The moves follow a campaign supported by the student-led group People & Planet, which is now active in dozens of universities. The group said universities have been “propping up the companies most responsible for destroying the planet”, while the climate crisis was “the defining issue of most students’ lifetimes”. The campaign is backed by the National Union of Students and the Universities and College Union, which represents academics and support staff.

“The approach supports future generations to make meaningful career decisions,” said Lynda Powell, the executive director of operations at Wrexham Glyndwr University (WGU). “Through this we are supporting the development of a sustainable workforce for the future.”

…The Guardian revealed in May that the world’s biggest fossil fuel firms were planning scores of “carbon bomb” oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits and lead to catastrophic global impacts. UN secretary general, António Guterres, also told US students that month: “Don’t work for climate wreckers. Use your talents to drive us towards a renewable future.”

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No quote from the fossil fuel companies in this or preceding stories on the topic. I suppose they’d argue that they’d like the brightest talents so they can speed up the transition away from fossil fuels? (Tough argument when the UNSG is against you, though.) Though I’m not sure how many they’d be looking to recruit from the University of the Arts London. Also, how fossil-free does it go? No car companies? Electricity generation companies? Plastic manufacturers?
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Quiz: pretend you’re a Facebook content moderator • PBS

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In 2018, after much debate and controversy, Facebook finally published its censorship policies. All 27 pages of them. The move, wrote the LA Times, “adds a new degree of transparency to a process that users, the public and advocates have criticized as arbitrary and opaque.” But as explored in the Independent Lens film The Cleaners, to what end do those policies translate into something sensible that a contractor hired to do the actual censoring can understand and apply? 

And if you were one of those “cleaners,” what decisions would you make based on FB policy and your background?

This quiz is based on real scenarios as well as Facebook’s own censorship guidelines. Your task: Imagine that you yourself are a censor for hire, a “cleaner” whose job it is to monitor a social media feed. Get into the mindset of these real-life cleaners and try to guess what they actually decided.

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I got 5/11 (and mostly got those correct 5 when I went against my initial instincts). Content moderation, at least by Facebook’s standards, is hard. (Though I think its rules on Holocaust denial have changed since the quiz was created.)

Via Katie Harbath’s Anchor Change Substack. Harbath used to be a key player in moderation around election content at Facebook (when it was just that). She lists the elections coming up worldwide in 2023: at least 39, and another 13 to be announced. In other words, at least one per week, and long runups to some of them.
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With a thud, not a bang • The Fence

Séamas O’Reilly:

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Boris Johnson’s premiership was eventually brought down over his handling of the misdeeds of Chris Pincher, having been bloodied by the months-long reveals of Partygate. And yet, equally well- documented scandals relating to covid policy, vip lane contracts for Tory donors, extrajudicial overreach and even funnelling cash to his American mistress made little or no impact at all.

Some stories, it seems, have just enough currency to survive the ever-tightening gyre of the 24-hour news cycle, while others barely scratch the sides as they reach escape velocity and pass out the other end, unremarked upon.

We asked three highly esteemed investigative journalists what hope years-long investigations have in a landscape where a single tweet or tv appearance can dominate a weekend’s press, and asked: what happens when their hard-earned scoop lands not with a bang, but with a thud?

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It is the most frustrating thing to work on a piece that you think is the absolute bees’ knees and discover that everyone else thinks it’s a bee’s fart. Yet as this shows, it can be nothing to do with the importance or quality of the piece at all.
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What if failure is the plan? • Zephoria

danah boyd ponders how Twitter might end:

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consider the collapse of local news journalism. The myth that this was caused by craigslist or Google drives me bonkers. Throughout the 80s and 90s, private equity firms and hedge funds gobbled up local news enterprises to extract their real estate. They didn’t give a shit about journalism; they just wanted prime real estate that they could develop. And news organizations had it in the form of buildings in the middle of town. So financiers squeezed the news orgs until there was no money to be squeezed and then they hung them out to dry. There was no configuration in which local news was going to survive, no magical upwards trajectory of revenue based on advertising alone. If it weren’t for craigslist and Google, the financiers would’ve squeezed these enterprises for a few more years, but the end state was always failure. Failure was the profit strategy for the financiers. (It still boggles my mind how many people believe that the loss of news journalism is because of internet advertising. I have to give financiers credit for their tremendous skill at shifting the blame.)

I highly doubt that Twitter is going to be a 100-year company. For better or worse, I think failure is the end state for Twitter. The question is not if but when, how, and who will be hurt in the process?
Right now, what worries me are the people getting hurt. I’m sickened to watch “journalists” aid and abet efforts to publicly shame former workers (especially junior employees) in a sadistic game of “accountability” that truly perverts the concept. I’m terrified for the activists and vulnerable people around the world whose content exists in Twitter’s databases, whose private tweets and DMs can be used against them if they land in the wrong hands (either by direct action or hacked activity). I’m disgusted to think that this data will almost certainly be auctioned off.

Frankly, there’s a part of me that keeps wondering if there’s a way to end this circus faster to prevent even greater harms. (Dear Delaware courts, any advice?)

No one who creates a product wants to envision failure as an inevitable end state. Then again, humans aren’t so good at remembering that death is an inevitable end state either.

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Tesla says it is adding radar in its cars next month amid self-driving suite concerns • Electrek

Fred Lambert:

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Tesla has told the FCC that it plans to market a new radar starting next month. The move raises even more concerns about potentially needed updates to its hardware suite to achieve the promised self-driving capability.

Since 2016, Tesla has claimed that all its vehicles produced going forward have “all the needed hardware” to become self-driving with future software updates. It turned out not to be true.

Tesla already had to upgrade its onboard computer and cameras in earlier vehicles, and it has yet to achieve self-driving capability. Its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software is still in beta and doesn’t enable fully autonomous driving.

The automaker not only had to upgrade its hardware in some cases, but it even removed some hardware. First, it was the front-facing radar and more recently the ultrasonic sensors.

It’s all part of its “Tesla Vision” approach where the automaker believes that the best way to achieve self-driving capability is through cameras being the only sensors. The logic is that the roads are designed to be operated by humans who operate cars through vision (eyes) and biological neural nets (brain).

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Removed radar from its vehicles in 2021, and the ultrasonic sensors earlier this year. Looks like at least the radar’s coming back. Which creates the possibility that there will be a group of Teslas from 2021/22 which won’t be able to do the self-driving function, if it ever arrives. Then again, that might be a while. The cars might be obsolete by then.
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Inside the frantic texts exchanged by crypto executives as FTX collapsed • The New York Times

David Yaffe-Bellany and Emily Flitter:

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The day before the embattled cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy, Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive of the rival exchange Binance, sent an alarmed text to Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s founder.

Mr. Zhao was concerned that Mr. Bankman-Fried was orchestrating crypto trades that could send the industry into a meltdown. “Stop now, don’t cause more damage,” Mr. Zhao wrote in a group chat with Mr. Bankman-Fried and other crypto executives on Nov. 10. “The more damage you do now, the more jail time.”

FTX and its sister hedge fund, Alameda Research, had just collapsed after a run on deposits exposed an $8bn hole in the exchange’s accounts. The implosion unleashed a crypto crisis, as firms with ties to FTX teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, calling the future of the entire industry into question.

The series of about a dozen group texts between Mr. Zhao and Mr. Bankman-Fried on Nov. 10, which were obtained by The New York Times, show that key crypto leaders feared that the situation could get even worse. And their frantic communications offer a rare glimpse into the unusual way business is conducted behind the scenes in the industry, with at least three top officials from rival companies exchanging messages in a group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal.

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Such a group (and chat) would be wildly illegal in the regulated world of fiat exchanges. Zhao had earlier that week pulled out of a provisional agreement to buy FTX to get it out of, well, not having any money or pretend money. FTX began shorting Tether, the stablecoin nominally tied to the dollar, which did decline – briefly.

Among the people in the “Exchange collaboration” Signal group was the CTO of Tether. Why, given that Tether doesn’t operate an exchange, and that (as @bitfinexed points out) people selling tethers for less than a dollar means Tether has free money because it claims to have 100% fiat backing for every tether issued? (If you “short sell” your £5 for £4, someone in theory has profited by £1.) So maybe tether isn’t actually backed by fiat?
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‘Made my blood run cold’: unmasking a TikTok creator who doesn’t really exist • Vice

Katherine Denkinson:

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Relatively unknown until November 2020, [Carrie Jade] Williams’ status in the literary community grew after she won the Financial Times’ Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize, which is open to writers under the age of 35. The winning entry is published in the FT Weekend, the weekend edition of the British newspaper, although the competition does not appear to have been run for the last two years. Williams’ entry was a moving essay about her diagnosis with Huntington’s Disease, a debilitating, degenerative genetic condition that affects the brain. Written using a speech-to-text computer programme, the essay won her a £1,000 prize. 

The piece was also praised by influential people. Hilary Knight, director of digital strategy at the Tate, a leading group of art galleries in the UK, described it as “an incredibly moving read and a reminder we shouldn’t need about designing for inclusion”. 

“When I received my diagnosis I wrote a bucket list and decided I wanted to write a novel to leave behind, and that’s really how my writing started,” Williams told the Financial Times. “Getting a diagnosis that means you’ll stop being able to communicate is terrifying, but writing gave me back my voice.”

Williams hasn’t published a novel, but she has become a high-profile advocate for people living with disabilities, and a well-known figure on the Irish literary scene. She has a profile on the publishing house Penguin’s website, and has appeared at festivals in County Kerry, on the Guilty Feminist podcast, and at writers’ workshops in St John’s Theatre, Listowel and online. 

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But of course Denkinson started looking into it, and things fell apart. It’s an astonishing story, and a terrific piece of finding-out-facts journalism. Though people like this function as a sort of urban legend: a warning of what happens if we trust people are who they say they are.
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US scientists boost clean power hopes with fusion energy breakthrough • Financial Times

Tom Wilson:

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Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes — a milestone known as net energy gain or target gain, which would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels and conventional nuclear energy.

The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said.

Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology’s potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of the hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years.

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Wow! Net energy gain! Does this mean all my scepticism should be shelved? I was prepared to eat my words. Then I kept on reading:

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The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120% of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed.

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Of the lasers? Yes, but the lasers are only a part of the energy needed to power the whole system. Some distance away from “in total, more energy out than in”. (Thanks Diggory for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified