All the money Jeff Bezos spent on taking William Shatner to space didn’t pay off: Cpt Kirk felt “grief” and “sadness” at the vista. CC-licensed photo by Kevin Gill on Flickr.

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

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

William Shatner: my trip to space filled me with sadness • Variety

William Shatner went up with Jeff Bezos:

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As we ascended, I was at once aware of pressure. Gravitational forces pulling at me. The g’s. There was an instrument that told us how many g’s we were experiencing. At two g’s, I tried to raise my arm, and could barely do so. At three g’s, I felt my face being pushed down into my seat. I don’t know how much more of this I can take, I thought. Will I pass out? Will my face melt into a pile of mush? How many g’s can my ninety-year-old body handle?

And then, suddenly, relief. No g’s. Zero. Weightlessness. We were floating.

We got out of our harnesses and began to float around. The other folks went straight into somersaults and enjoying all the effects of weightlessness. I wanted no part in that. I wanted, needed to get to the window as quickly as possible to see what was out there.

I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I’d noticed it, it disappeared.

I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.

I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.

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Space tourism gets its first one-star Yelp review.
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Meta’s VR platform Horizon is too buggy and employees aren’t using it enough, says exec • The Verge

Alex Heath:

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Meta’s VR social network Horizon Worlds — the company’s flagship “metaverse” app — is suffering from too many quality issues and even the team building it isn’t using it very much, according to internal memos obtained by The Verge.

In one of the memos to employees dated September 15th, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, said the team would remain in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users.”

Horizon Worlds lets people build and interact in virtual worlds as legless avatars, sort of like Roblox meets Minecraft. It’s a key initiative following CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranding of Facebook to Meta; the company is spending billions per year to build his vision of the metaverse. The multiplayer platform was released on Meta’s Quest headset in December of last year. It hit 300,000 users earlier this year and is supposed to be coming to mobile and desktop via a web version sometime soon, though Vishal’s memos imply a web launch could be pushed back.

“Since launching late last year, we have seen that the core thesis of Horizon Worlds — a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds — is strong,” Shah wrote in a memo last month. “But currently feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well crafted.”

…A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

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Sounds bad. But: now read on.
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24 hours in the metaverse version of Facebook was surprisingly fun • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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[The product manual] also said children under the age of 13 shouldn’t use the headset, while those over 13 shouldn’t use it for “prolonged periods,” because it could interfere with “visual development” and hand-eye coordination.

Wearing the headset, I thought I looked like a failed version of the future, but my 5-year-old was captivated. She begged to try my goggles. Eventually, I relented and let her play Bogo, a game in which she cared for a cute baby alien. After a few minutes, I tried to remove the headset, but she liked it so much that she ran away from me — and straight into a wall. (She was fine.)
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Despite Meta’s warnings, every time I went into the metaverse, I inevitably ran into children. During one of my first visits to the Plaza, on a Monday afternoon in July, a guy in a gray blazer named Dustin excitedly told me that he had joined Horizon the day before and had spent eight straight hours there. He invited me to play a zombie-shooting game in a shopping mall. When tiny versions of the blocky, green zombies appeared, I exclaimed, “They’re little kids!”

“So am I,” he said, before adding, “Well, not that little.”

Dustin told me that he was 11, squarely in the camp of people whose brains were more threatened by the device than by the undead. As other journalists have discovered, there are tons of young people running around Horizon. On the upside for Meta, this means the company finally has a product that appeals to the generation that has largely rejected Instagram and Facebook. Though Horizon is an 18-and-over app, community guides told me that they kicked out only users younger than 13, and only if users explicitly revealed their age.

My headset notified me that its battery was low, and so I bade Dustin and the other players farewell. “Why don’t you plug and play?” one asked. I cringed at hearing a cutesy expression for a behavior that struck me as unhealthy. I resolved never to plug in my headset while it was attached to my head.

“Too ‘Matrix’ for me,” I joked, and then wondered if the young Dustin would understand the reference to a 1999 science-fiction movie about pale humans encased in goo and plugged into a simulated reality machine.

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Hill recounts multiple excursions into the Metaverse. The presence of children is surprising, but they’re probably the ones who are going to find out what’s good and bad about it.
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UK looks to cap renewable electricity generator revenues • Financial Times

Nathalie Thomas and Jim Pickard:

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Companies generating power from wind and solar fear the plans, similar to proposals already announced by the European Union, will effectively amount to a windfall tax on renewable energy.

The businesses involved in renewable power generation that could be affected include EDF Energy, RWE, ScottishPower and SSE. The government had been hoping to persuade electricity generators to agree voluntarily to 15-year fixed-price contracts well below current wholesale rates for their output.

But talks with the companies have collapsed and government legislation, which could be unveiled as early as next week, will be used to underpin a revenue cap on the generators, said people familiar with the plans. With UK households contending with soaring energy bills, the government indicated to generators at a private meeting last week that it would pursue a cap, said people briefed on the discussions.

People briefed on last week’s meeting said prices of about £50 to £60 per megawatt hour were mentioned as a starting point for the cap, well below current prices of about £490/MWh, although no final decisions have been taken.

…A “high percentage” or all of the revenues above the cap set by the government would be paid to the Treasury, added one of these people. The EU has announced a similar cap as part of plans to raise €140bn in windfall taxes.

Electricity generators fear the UK government’s plans will be more damaging to the sector than a 25% windfall tax imposed on oil and gas companies in May by the then chancellor Rishi Sunak.

His 25% “energy profits levy” was accompanied by a new investment allowance that energy companies can use to offset their tax bills if they press ahead with projects to boost UK production of fossil fuels.

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Makes total sense, to be honest, but you can see that the renewables companies won’t like it.
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‘It’s a scam’: Even after $100bn, self-driving cars are going nowhere • Bloomberg via Autoblog

Max Chafkin:

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“It’s a scam,” says George Hotz, whose company Comma.ai Inc. makes a driver-assistance system similar to Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot. “These companies have squandered tens of billions of dollars.” In 2018 analysts put the market value of Waymo LLC, then a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., at $175bn. Its most recent funding round gave the company an estimated valuation of $30bn, roughly the same as Cruise. Aurora Innovation Inc., a startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, Google’s former autonomous-vehicle chief, has lost more than 85% since last year and is now worth less than $3bn. This September a leaked memo from Urmson summed up Aurora’s cash-flow struggles and suggested it might have to sell out to a larger company. Many of the industry’s most promising efforts have met the same fate in recent years, including Drive.ai, Voyage, Zoox, and Uber’s self-driving division. “Long term, I think we will have autonomous vehicles that you and I can buy,” says Mike Ramsey, an analyst at market researcher Gartner Inc. “But we’re going to be old.”

Our driverless future is starting to look so distant that even some of its most fervent believers have turned apostate. Chief among them is Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who more or less created the model for self-driving research and was, for more than a decade, the field’s biggest star. Now he’s running a startup that’s developing autonomous trucks for industrial sites, and he says that for the foreseeable future, that’s about as much complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to handle. “You’d be hard-pressed to find another industry that’s invested so many dollars in R&D and that has delivered so little,” Levandowski says in an interview. “Forget about profits—what’s the combined revenue of all the robo-taxi, robo-truck, robo-whatever companies? Is it a million dollars? Maybe. I think it’s more like zero.”

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Elon Musk insisted in 2015 that it would soon be a solved problem. Guess that’s another thing he was wrong about.
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Deaf or blind: Beethoven, Handel • The Sociological Eye

Randall Collins:

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Beethoven started going deaf in his late 20s.  Already famous by age 25 for his piano sonatas, at 31 he was traumatized by losing his hearing. But he kept on composing: the Moonlight Sonata during the onset of deafness; the dramatic Waldstein Sonata at 32; piano sonatas kept on coming until he was 50. In his deaf period came the revolutionary sounds of his 3rd through 8th symphonies, piano and violin concertos (age 32-40). After 44 he became less productive, with intermittent flashes (Missa Solemnis, Diabelli variations, 9th symphony) composed at 47-53, dying at 56. His last string quartets were composed entirely in his head, left unperformed in his lifetime.

Handel went blind in one eye at age 66; laboriously finished the oratorio he was working on; went completely blind at 68. He never produced another significant work. But he kept on playing organ concertos, “performing from memory, or extemporizing while the players waited for their cue” almost to the day he died, aged 74.

Johann Sebastian Bach fell ill in his 64th year; next year his vision was nearly gone; he died at 65 “after two unsuccessful operations for a cataract.”  At 62 he was still producing great works; at 64 he finished assembling the pieces of his B Minor Mass (recycling his older works being his modus operandi). At death he left unfinished his monument of musical puzzles, The Art of the Fugue, on which he had been working since 55.

Can we conclude, it is more important for a composer to see than hear?

…My point is not the pathos of difficult lives, nor the triumph of overcoming it. Deaf or blind creators in different fields provide a natural experiment, evidence for what kind of the skill — including social skill– is the specific ingredient of creativity in music, and what are specific to other fields.

Music without texts (folk music and the like) is hand-to-ear coordination. With instrument ensembles, it becomes also hand-to-eye coordination.

Playing an instrument is a bodily skill; the whole body may go into the rhythm; the movements of fingers on strings and keys; of arms scraping bows over strings or beating drums; of fingers on stops and valves coordinated with lips and mouth and lungs that is the playing of wind instruments. Opera singers are trained players of their own body cavities and the tensing and relaxing of muscles. All this while keeping an eye on the score, or at least having memorized it. Complex music– AKA classical music — is the coordination of instruments and players: a social skill, a social invention. The symphony orchestra was no less an organizational innovation than a factory of workers operating machinery.

Participants in these humans-with-instruments combinations – composers, players – practice hand-to-eye-to-ear coordination. When composers are deaf, they can continue to coordinate hand-to-eye and thus generate the social follow-through that is music creation. When composers go blind, they mostly stop composing.

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K-Pop apps create the illusion of private messaging with celebrities • Nielsen Norman Group

Lillian Yang:

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South Korean pop music, known as K-Pop, is one of the most popular music genres in the world. With catchy pop hits and intricate choreography, K-Pop groups such as BTS and Black Pink have attracted deeply dedicated fans from around the world.

Individual K-Pop group members are referred to as “idols.” Idols are known for their carefully developed public personalities, which are often strictly controlled by their music labels, because fans’ emotional attachments to individual idols are extremely profitable. Within the past few years, the industry has pioneered a new way to monetize fans’ emotional needs by creating dedicated mobile apps, such as Bubble and Universe, that simulate private messaging between idols and fans.

…Fans feel as though they are receiving a private message, written just for them, from their favorite idol. However, in reality, idols do not reply individually to each fan message. The goal is to make fans feel as if they have direct access to their favorite idols and thus strengthen their emotional attachment to these stars and increase profits.

The first instance of simulated private messaging appeared in the Bubble app, owned by the K-Pop label SM Entertainment. To chat with each idol, fans need to purchase a monthly subscription plan on the application’s STORE page — a blunt commoditization of idols’ time and attention.

After users pay to chat with a specific idol, a new private chat room is created and the fans start receiving the idol’s messages. Some artists text several times a day, while others just once a month. Idols typically send updates about what they are currently doing or thinking — for example, what they ate for lunch, selfies of their day-to-day life, and song recommendations. This content may seem mundane, but it helps fans feel as if they know the idol personally. Moreover, each idol seems to have a unique texting style — for example, some send longer text messages and others heavily use emojis. This consistency in the idol’s “personality” helps to persuade fans that it’s truly that person behind the screen.

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An insight into a very weird world, where they’re happy to get a message, disappointed if it breaks the illusion somehow (by being out of context), yet quickly forget it and carry on.

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Virginians can pay new fee by the mile to boost gas tax • The Washington Post

Ian Duncan:

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More than 7,000 Virginians have signed up to pay a fee for each mile they drive under a program launched this summer, putting the state at the forefront of a nationwide effort using new technology to prop up gas taxes that pay for roads.

The Virginia program, known as Mileage Choice, is aimed at drivers of electric vehicles and fuel-efficient cars who pay less in gas taxes while using the same roads as other drivers. Since 2020, Virginia has levied a fixed fee on those kinds of vehicles based on the difference between what they would have paid in gas taxes if driving an average number of miles.

In July, the state launched an alternative program to let drivers pay the fee at a per-mile rate — a cost savings for those who drive less than the average amount, which officials peg at 11,600 miles annually. For drivers of battery-powered cars, that fee works out to a penny per mile.

With the Biden administration aiming for half of new vehicle sales to be electric by the end of the decade, the federal government and states across the country are exploring such fees, seeing them as a way to ensure drivers continue to pay for the roads they use. The push is coming years after state and federal officials began to notice that increased fuel efficiency was denting transportation budgets funded by gas taxes.

Oregon and Utah have the nation’s longest-running per-mile programs, while other states have run pilots.

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Not yet introduced in the UK, but as EVs become more common, it will surely be necessary – fuel duty tax generates a lot of money for the Treasury.
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United Airlines is aiming to have electric planes flying by 2030 • CNBC

Ian Thomas:

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United has pushed heavily into a variety of lower-emission forms of aviation, not only announcing plans to buy electric air taxis and vertical aircraft, as well as hydrogen-electric engines but also investing in the companies behind the burgeoning technologies.

“We cannot continue doing and operating our business the way we do; it is imperative that we change it, and the way we’re going to change it is through investing in technology,” Mike Leskinen, United Airlines Ventures president, said in an interview as part of CNBC’s ESG Impact virtual conference on Thursday.

“Existing technology is going to either cause us to fly less, which is an unacceptable alternative, or continue with a carbon footprint, which we believe is equally unacceptable,” Leskinen said.

Heart Aerospace, which recently redesigned what will be its first electric aircraft which is now called the ES-30, plans to have the planes enter service in 2028, said Anders Forslund, the company’s CEO and founder.

The 30-passenger planes will be driven by electric motors with battery-derived energy, allowing the planes to have a fully electric range of 200 kilometers (124 miles). The planes will also include a reserve-hybrid engine powered by sustainable aviation fuel, allowing it to have an extended range of up to 400 kilometers with a full flight.

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A whole 124 miles, you say? For 30 passengers? If only there were some sort of road-based transport with similar – or better – ranges capable of taking as many – or more – passengers. Perhaps it would be something on which the wheels go round and round.
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Scientists discover they can pull water molecules apart using graphene electrodes • Phys.org

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Writing in Nature Communications, a team led by Dr. Marcelo Lozada-Hidalgo based at the National Graphene Institute (NGI) [at the University of Manchester, England] used graphene as an electrode to measure both the electrical force applied on water molecules and the rate at which these break in response to such force. The researchers found that water breaks exponentially faster in response to stronger electrical forces.

The researchers believe that this fundamental understanding of interfacial water could be used to design better catalysts to generate hydrogen fuel from water. This is an important part of the U.K.’s strategy towards achieving a net zero economy. Dr. Marcelo Lozada-Hidalgo said, “We hope that the insights from this work will be of use to various communities, including physics, catalysis, and interfacial science and that it can help design better catalysts for green hydrogen production.”

A water molecule consists of a proton and a hydroxide ion. Dissociating it involves pulling these two constituent ions apart with an electrical force. In principle, the stronger one pulls the water molecule apart, the faster it should break. This important point has not been demonstrated quantitatively in experiments.

Electrical forces are well known to break water molecules, but stronger forces do not always lead to faster water dissociation, which has puzzled scientists for a long time. A key difference with graphene electrodes is that these are permeable only to protons. The researchers found that this allows separating the resulting proton from the hydroxide ion across graphene, which is a one-atom-thick barrier that prevents their recombination.

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Seems encouraging? Graphene has long been one of those wonder materials that we just need to be able to make in large enough amounts for something amazing to happen.
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Why the US might not use a nuke, even if Russia does • Slate

Fred Kaplan:

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The wargame’s scenario: Russia invades one of the Baltic countries; NATO fights back effectively; Russia fires a low-yield nuclear weapon at the NATO troops or at a base in Germany where drones, combat planes, and smart bombs are deployed. The question: What do US decision makers do now? (I describe this game, in greater detail, in my 2020 book, The Bomb.)

At first, the generals in the room discussed how many nuclear weapons the US should fire back, and at what targets. But then Colin Kahl, Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, raised his hand. You’re missing the big picture, he told the generals. Once Russia drops a nuclear bomb, we face a “world-defining moment”—an opportunity to rally the entire world against Russia, to isolate and weaken Moscow politically, economically, and militarily. However, if we fire back with nukes of our own, we would forfeit that leverage and, besides, normalize the use of nuclear weapons. So, Kahl suggested, we should continue and step up the conventional war, which we’re winning.

A few hours of discussion ensued about Kahl’s political calculus, the conventional strength of NATO, the uncertainty of where to fire a nuclear weapon anyway, and the additional uncertainty of whether a nuclear response would end the war any sooner or more successfully. A consensus emerged: The U.S. should respond just with stepped-up conventional military operations.

One month later, the NSC’s Principals Committee—the group of cabinet secretaries and military chiefs headed by National Security Adviser Susan Rice—played the same game. At one point, an official from the Treasury Dept. raised the same point that Kahl had at the Deputies’ Meeting, but he was shouted down, mainly by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who insisted that it was crucial to meet a nuclear attack with a nuclear response; the allies expect us to do this; if we didn’t, that would be disastrous for NATO, the end of all our alliances, the end of America’s credibility worldwide.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and the Secretary of Energy agreed with Carter. Antony Blinken, the deputy secretary of state, who was sitting in for a traveling John Kerry, was undecided, saying he saw the logic on both sides.

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Ironic but certainly true: if Russia fires a low-yield nuclear bomb, that means you are, or were, winning. (Things may have taken a bit of a reset at that point.) Which means your conventional approach is right. Now you just need to make Russia the utter paraiah. That’s the tricky bit.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The boss of Peloton is cutting hundreds more jobs and warns the company has six more months before it’s in serious trouble. CC-licensed photo by Tony Webster on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Beyond Move target. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s newest AI generator creates HD video from text prompts • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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Google announced the development of Imagen Video, a text-to-video AI mode capable of producing 1280×768 videos at 24 frames per second from a written prompt. Currently, it’s in a research phase, but its appearance five months after Google Imagen points to the rapid development of video synthesis models.

Only six months after the launch of OpenAI’s DALLE-2 text-to-image generator, progress in the field of AI diffusion models has been heating up rapidly. Google’s Imagen Video announcement comes less than a week after Meta unveiled its text-to-video AI tool, Make-A-Video.

According to Google’s research paper, Imagen Video includes several notable stylistic abilities, such as generating videos based on the work of famous painters (the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, for example), generating 3D rotating objects while preserving object structure, and rendering text in a variety of animation styles. Google is hopeful that general-purpose video synthesis models can “significantly decrease the difficulty of high-quality content generation.”

The key to Imagen Video’s abilities is a “cascade” of seven diffusion models that transform the initial text prompt (such as “a bear washing the dishes”) into a low-resolution video (16 frames, 24×48 pixels, at 3 fps), then upscales it into progressively higher resolutions with higher frame rates with each step. The final output video is 5.3 seconds long.

Video examples presented on the Imagen Video website range from the mundane (“Melting ice cream dripping down the cone”) to the more fantastic (“Flying through an intense battle between pirate ships on a stormy ocean.”) They contain obvious artefacts, but show more fluidity and detail than earlier text-to-image models such as CogVideo that debuted five months ago.

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The videos are remarkable; the artefacts are indeed visible, but when run small you don’t notice them particularly. This space is advancing so, so quickly.
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Know where your old stamps are? Use them soon or they won’t be valid • Royal Mail Group Ltd

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We’re adding barcodes to our regular stamps. After 31 January 2023, regular stamps without a barcode* will no longer be valid. You can either use up these stamps before this deadline or swap them for the new barcoded ones.

The stamps that are changing are the stamps (pictured below) that will be very familiar to you. They feature the profile of Her Late Majesty The Queen on a plain coloured background. The barcodes will enable exciting new services by connecting physical stamps to the digital world through the Royal Mail app which you can download.

Note: Special Stamps with pictures on and Christmas Stamps without a barcode will continue to be valid and don’t need to be swapped out.

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Interesting move which will enable “operational efficiencies” and “security features” and “innovative services”.
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Almost two-thirds of video streaming service subscribers cancelled a service in the past year • Newswire

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Video streaming service providers have been feeling the effects of “streaming fatigue,” with nearly two out of three people cancelling services because of price and nonuse.

The industry study published by Blue Label Labs surveyed 1005 people in North America between the ages of 15 and 67, revealing which services households subscribe to and what has been cancelled in the last year. It further examines the total amount each household spends on services and their sentiments as well as attitudes toward ads.

The survey conducted over the web between May 2022 and August 2022 also analyzes other dynamics between subscribers and providers.

• The most canceled streaming service reported in the last year is Amazon Prime at 9.46%, followed by Netflix at 8.55% and Disney+ at 8.33%
• Most subscribers (37.42%) report canceling because a service goes unused, and the next most popular reason to cancel (25.88%) is because a service is too expensive
• Regarding ads, 51.98% will deal with ads to enjoy a lower price point, 18.81% will pay to remove ads, and 19.40% report deleting apps with ads
• Rather than use a paid streaming service, 22.42% of respondents report spending more time with YouTube’s free version, 17.49% spend more time on Instagram, and 14.16% use TikTok more frequently.

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“Subscription fatigue” might be a better word for it. And speaking of subscriptions…
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Peloton to cut 500 more jobs in last bid for turnaround • WSJ

Sharon Terlep:

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Peloton Interactive said it plans to cut about 500 jobs, roughly 12% of its remaining workforce, in the company’s fourth round of layoffs this year as the connected fitness-equipment maker tries to reverse mounting losses.

Chief executive Barry McCarthy, who took over in February, said he is giving the unprofitable company about another six months to significantly turn itself around and, if that fails, Peloton likely isn’t viable as a standalone company. 

The job reductions, announced to staff on Thursday, will leave Peloton with roughly 3,800 employees globally, less than half the number of people the company employed at its peak last year. It also has eliminated about 600 more jobs since June than previously disclosed through retail store closings, attrition and other moves, Peloton said.

Mr. McCarthy said that the latest cuts mark Peloton’s final significant move to reduce its operating footprint and that executives would now focus on increasing revenue. He said the cuts are companywide but would be heaviest in its marketing operation, which he said is too big for a company of Peloton’s size.

“There comes a point in time when we’ve either been successful or we have not,” Mr. McCarthy said in an interview.

“If we don’t grow,” he said, before pausing. “We need to grow to get the business to a sustainable level.”

The company has reported six straight quarterly losses, culminating in a $1.2bn loss in the most recent quarter. Demand for Peloton’s bikes and treadmills has plunged and the number of people who subscribe to its fitness classes has stagnated as Americans return to pre-Covid routines and, more recently, confront decades-high inflation.

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If the best time to launch a company is during a recession (because you can only succeed in the teeth of tough economic times), perhaps the worst time to launch – or rapidly grow – a company is during the best possible economic and social conditions for its business model, because they’ll eventually end.

Next question: who’ll want to buy it? (No, Apple won’t.) Amazon? Google? Under Armour? Nike? Answers on a postcard/email/Twitter DM.
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Gas crisis set to worsen after Europe burns through winter stocks • Reuters

Essi Lehto and Kate Abnett:

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Europe may face an even more acute energy crunch next year after draining its natural gas tanks to get through the cold of this winter, the head of the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday, as the EU looks for ways to ease the crisis.

European countries have filled storage tanks to around 90% of their capacity after Russia cut gas supplies in response to Western sanctions imposed over its invasion of Ukraine.

Gas prices, which surged in the months after the invasion in February, have retreated. But that could be short-lived as countries compete to buy liquefied natural gas (LNG) and other alternatives to Russian pipeline deliveries.

To help tackle the pain, the European Union is considering a gas price cap, an issue that has divided the 27-nation bloc as some countries worry it could make securing supplies harder.

“With gas storages almost at 90%, Europe will survive the coming winter with just some bruises as long as there are no political or technical surprises,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the Paris-based IEA.

The real challenges facing Europe, which had historically relied on Russia for around 40% of its natural gas, will begin in February or March when storage needs to be refilled after high winter demand has drained them to 25%-30%.

“This winter is difficult but next winter may also be very difficult,” Birol told journalists in Finland.

European governments have moved to cushion consumers from the impact of higher prices and on Wednesday, Germany said it will subsidise power bills next year by paying just under €13bn ($12.8bn) towards the usage fees charged by the four high-voltage transmission grid companies (TSOs).

The fees form part of electricity bills, accounting for around 10% of overall costs for retail customers and a third for industrial companies in sectors such as steel or chemicals.

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The workings of the electricity market are many and varied, but it feels like there are lots of people skimming people off all the way down the line.

Also: pray for mild winter, I guess.
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Heat pumps: The super-efficient appliance that could save you thousands on home energy costs • CNN

Ella Nilsen:

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When Maine Gov. Janet Mills took office, she pledged to install 100,000 heat pumps by 2025 to help wean her state off fossil fuel and meet her climate targets.

“We are definitely on track to hit that goal, or even hit it early,” Dan Burgess, the director of the Maine governor’s Energy Office, told CNN. “As the technology has gotten better, people have gotten used to having them or maybe know someone who has one. They’ve really taken off.”

Heat pumps have a leg up on traditional air conditioners and furnaces because they aren’t using energy to heat or cool air – a very inefficient process. Instead, they use energy to move heat in or out of the house.

In warm weather, heat pumps act as air conditioners by taking heat from indoors and pushing it outside. During a recent heat wave over 90ºF, the Hardys said they were cool in their home.

“I can’t tell you how comfortable we are,” Cathy said. “It’s not freezing like a window AC [that’s] harder to control the temperature. We don’t touch the thermostat.”

In cold weather, heat pumps consolidate heat from outside and push it indoors. And yes – there is still enough heat energy outside in the winter for the heat pump to warm your home, even when temperatures are very cold.

Heat pumps of the past always performed best in warm and moderate climates – ones that don’t get too cold. But the technology has advanced, making them more capable of heating homes in uber-cold temperatures.

“The American consumer’s perception is ‘heat pumps don’t work in cold climates, why would I want one?’” said Mark Kuntz, a CEO for Mitsubishi who oversees the companies US heat pump and HVAC operations. “The excitement in this is around a special type of heat pump that can produce an efficient heat – even in sub-zero temperatures.”

«

According to this Statista page (and who knows what its sources are), the UK has just shy of 240,000 heat pumps – ground source and air source – operating in 2019. Not bad.
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Google is trying to become a more visual, more exploratory search engine • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

Google is trying to blow up how you think about search. To say it’s pivoting to compete in a world where TikTok and Instagram are changing the way the internet works would be an overstatement… but not a big one. Google now exists on a more visual, more interactive internet, in which users want to be surprised and delighted as often as they just want an answer to their questions. In that world, what is a search engine even for? The Google you see tomorrow might not be completely different, but the change is already starting.

At its annual Search On event today, Google showed off a bunch of new ways for people to search the internet. Most of them continue the trend of Google’s last few years: trying to find more natural and more visual ways for people to input searches and get results. You can now ask Google a question by taking a picture or rambling into your phone’s microphone rather than trying to type the perfect set of keywords into the search bar. And Google is looking for more ways to present information you might care about without you even having to ask. 

It’s an interesting thought experiment, really: what would Google’s equivalent of TikTok’s For You page look like? Google’s search team doesn’t know exactly, but it’s working on it. And at least so far, it looks like the answer will start to appear on the homepage of Google’s iOS app. That’s where many of Google’s new features are getting their start and where lots of customers are already interacting with Google in new ways.

…advances in AI and computer vision are what power Google Lens and the new Multisearch feature with which you can search with a picture and then modify it with text. (Google always explains this with a dress — snap a photo of the green dress you like, type “in purple,” and you’re off to the races.) Multisearch has been available for a few months and is now rolling out globally. Google’s classic list of links is starting to change, too, to be replaced in some contexts by a mosaic of images and informational widgets. (Sometimes links are still the best answer, Google thinks, but not always. Not even usually.)

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Every couple of years Google says that search is changing completely, though the shift tends to be difficult to spot. But it’s definitely there. The question is, will it be enough to catch up with an audience increasingly using TikTok for search?
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Truss cut the most popular taxes; this wasn’t an accident, but it may be a mistake • The Conversation

Lucy Barnes is an associate professor in comparative politics at University College London (UCL), and Benjamin Lauderdale is professor of political science, UCL:

»

For the purposes of our research, popular taxes are those that more of the respondents would choose to increase to raise revenues or at least wouldn’t decrease, given the choice. Unpopular taxes are those that more people would choose to cut and fewer would choose to increase.

We found that people were not keen on cuts to corporation tax, alcohol and tobacco duties, and the higher and additional rates of personal income tax.

But these were almost exactly the same as those the government chose to cut (or cancelled proposed raises for) in September’s mini-budget. The abolition of the 45p rate of income tax was the fourth most unpopular way to cut taxes out of the 23 options we presented.

Not all of the changes announced in the mini-budget were unappealing to our survey respondents, however. Reversing the changes to National Insurance and cutting the basic rate of income taxation have more support among the members of the public that we surveyed. But more of the public would prefer increases to the personal allowance and the higher rate threshold as ways to reduce the income tax burden.

The fact that the government chose otherwise is not simply a case of trying to appeal to Conservative voters either. The evidence indicates that these preferences are widely shared across the population, as well as among Conservative voters.

For example, we found that Corporation Tax is the second most popular way for generating public revenues among Conservative voters. Alcohol and tobacco duties are Conservative voters’ favourites, which aligns with the lukewarm reception for freezing them at the Conservative Party conference. Conservatives like the 45p rate of income tax less than their Labour counterparts, according to our survey, but they still see it as a reasonable way to raise the revenue.

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Truss and Kwarteng are so astonishingly tin-eared politically that this comes as no surprise. But it’s helpful to have the data on it.
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Ten ways Liz Truss’s policies diverge from the 2019 Tory election manifesto on which the Government was elected • the i

Jane Merrick:

»

An extraordinary battle is raging at the top of the Conservative Party over whether Liz Truss has a mandate for her radical policy agenda.

Former Cabinet minister Nadine Dorries says the Prime Minister needs to call a General Election to secure a new mandate because she has undone many of the policies she had secured as Culture Secretary, while several ex-ministers and MPs have made clear their opposition to likely cuts to benefits and the now-shelved 45p tax rate cut.

Yet on Sunday, the Prime Minister insisted she was delivering on the pledges people had backed under Boris Johnson in 2019, telling the BBC Tory voters had “voted for a different future”.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has turned on the “45p-tax Tory rebels”, accusing them of staging a “coup” against the Prime Minister.

And on Tuesday, Ms Truss suggested her Government could start from scratch on all Government policy, telling Talk TV: “We are going to have to look at things differently as we move forward.”

Here are the 10 ways Ms Truss has diverged from the 2019 Conservative manifesto…

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Tax (though the argument’s a bit marginal), debt (definitely), public spending (clearly), benefits payments (clearly), online safety (still not proceeding), fracking (complete reversal), net zero (lip service, with new licences for oil/gas), environment (unclear), NHS funding (possibly), NHS workforce (not growing as promised).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Getting clocks on the internet to agree on what the time is has been a problem right back to the network’s origins. One man essentially solved it.

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

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

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

The thorny problem of keeping the internet’s time • The New Yorker

Nate Hopper:

»

To solve the problem of time synchronization on the Arpanet, Mills built what programmers call a protocol—a collection of rules and procedures that creates a lingua franca for disparate devices. The Arpanet was experimental and capricious: electronics failed regularly, and technological misbehaviour was common. His protocol sought to detect and correct for those misdeeds, creating a consensus about the time through an ingenious system of suspicion.

Mills prided himself on puckish nomenclature, and so his clock-synchronizing system distinguished reliable “truechimers” from misleading “falsetickers.” An operating system named Fuzzball, which he designed, facilitated the early work. Mills called his creation the Network Time Protocol, and NTP soon became a key component of the nascent Internet. Programmers followed its instructions when they wrote timekeeping code for their computers. By 1988, Mills had refined NTP to the point where it could synchronize the clocks of connected computers that had been telling vastly differing times to within tens of milliseconds—a fraction of a blink of an eye. “I always thought that was sort of black magic,” Vint Cerf, a pioneer of Internet infrastructure, told me.

Today, we take global time synchronization for granted. It is critical to the Internet, and therefore to civilization. Vital systems—power grids, financial markets, telecommunications networks—rely on it to keep records and sort cause from effect. NTP works in partnership with satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), and other technologies to synchronize time on our many online devices.

The time kept by precise and closely aligned atomic clocks, for instance, can be broadcast via GPS to numerous receivers, including those in cell towers; those receivers can be attached to NTP servers that then distribute the time across devices linked together by the Internet, almost all of which run NTP. (Atomic clocks can also directly feed the time to NTP servers.) The protocol operates on billions of devices, coördinating the time on every continent. Society has never been more synchronized.

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Wonderful, in-depth reporting. By the way, if you think the current British government has a monopoly on mad ideas about the internet, don’t forget Greenwich Electronic Time, the brainchild of someone in Tony Blair’s team, back in 2000. It didn’t survive contact with the internet.
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Amazon’s Glow goes the way of the Fire Phone and dodo • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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The Glow allowed children to video chat, draw, and play games with family members remotely via the 8-inch display. It also projected onto a 19in mat that children could interact with. One obvious downside was the requirement of an Amazon Kids+ subscription for playing games and accessing other content, like books and art. The service is $5 per month. Glow came from Amazon’s Grand Challenge lab, which makes experimental products.

Some reviewers praised Glow’s innovation, but some, like PCMag, also lamented Glow’s reliance on a subscription and phone or tablet, considering the high price. And some reviewers, including CNET and The Verge, noted glitchy behavior.

Amazon workers who had been focused on Glow are being moved elsewhere within the company, Bloomberg reported.

As the publication noted, other recently reported moves by Amazon seemingly aimed at keeping costs low amid slowing retail sales include closing warehouses and, according to a Bloomberg report yesterday, a hiring freeze on retail corporate jobs.

Amazon’s Glow device will meet other Amazon devices sent to product hell, including the Amazon Smart Oven convection oven/air fryer/microwave announced in 2019 and the FireOS-based Fire Phone, which Amazon killed off in 2015.

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The hardest thing to make in hardware remains a profit.
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How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end? • Thinking about…

Timothy Snyder:

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The Ukrainians, let’s face it, have turned out to be stunningly good warriors.  They have carried out a series of defensive and now offensive operations that one would like to call “textbook,” but the truth is that those textbooks have not yet been written; and when they are written, the Ukrainian campaign will provide the examples.  The have done so with admirable calm and sang-froid, even as their enemy perpetrates horrible crimes and openly campaigns for their destruction as a nation.

Right now, though, we have a certain difficulty seeing how Ukraine gets to victory, even as the Ukrainians advance.  This is because many of our imaginations are trapped by a single and rather unlikely variant of how the war ends: with a nuclear detonation.  I think we are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants, and it feels like an ending. 

Using the mushroom cloud for narrative closure, though, generates anxiety and hinders clear thinking.  Focusing on that scenario rather than on the more probable ones prevents us from seeing what is actually happening, and from preparing for the more likely possible futures.  Indeed, we should never lose sight of how much a Ukrainian victory will improve the world we live in.

But how do we get there?  The war could end in a number of ways.  Here I would like to suggest just one plausible scenario that could emerge in the next few weeks and months.  Of course there are others.  It is important, though, to start directing our thoughts towards some of the more probable variants.  The scenario that I will propose here is that a Russian conventional defeat in Ukraine is merging imperceptibly into a Russian power struggle, which in turn will require a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. This is, historically speaking, a very familiar chain of events.

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I’m very dubious about the possibility of a tactical nuke being used (even though writing this feels like a hostage to fortune at any time of the day), which is why this deconstructionist approach is attractive.
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Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel, last week:

»

Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.

In no time, the texts [released via legal discovery in Twitter’s case against Musk in Delaware] were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. “The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb,” one former social-media executive, whom I’ve granted anonymity because they have relationships with many of the people in Musk’s texts, told me. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”

Appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And what is immediately apparent upon reading the messages is that many of the same people the media couldn’t stop talking about this year were also the ones inserting themselves into Musk’s texts. There’s Joe Rogan; William MacAskill, the effective altruist, getting in touch on behalf of the crypto billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried; Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile); Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific blocker on Twitter; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who was recently revealed to have joined a November 2020 call about contesting Donald Trump’s election loss; and, of course, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO. Musk, arguably the most covered and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that doubles as a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.

Few of the men in Musk’s phone consider themselves his equal. Many of the messages come off as fawning, although they’re possibly more opportunistic than earnest. Whatever the case, the intentions are unmistakable: Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it. “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat. Antonio Gracias, the CEO of Valor Partners, cheered on the same tweet, telling the billionaire, “I am 100% with you Elon. To the mattresses no matter what.”

«

It’s equally alarming, hilarious and depressing that these people have so much money and power, but they think they need to abase themselves to someone who they view as having more money, and hence power.
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iPhone not migrating to USB-C or getting Touch ID on power button any time soon • AppleInsider

William Gallagher:

»

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that market and financial benefits will mean Apple skips USB-C for iPhones, and will also not move Touch ID to the power button at any time in the near future.

Despite moving the iPad Pro to USB-C charging instead of Lightning, back in 2018, Apple has kept the iPhone on the older technology. Now the analyst says it appears Apple will neither adopt USB-C nor Touch ID on the iPhone.

“The market expects the iPhone to abandon Lightning in favor of USB-C and equip the power button with the Touch ID sensor,” writes Kuo in a note seen by AppleInsider. “Our latest survey indicates that there is no visibility on the current schedule for the iPhone to adopt these two new specifications.”

Kuo understands that there are technical issues around waterproofing, but says he believes there are market pressures involved. Specifically, Apple’s Made for iPhone (MFi) program is a profitable business that would be affected.

“We believe that USB-C is detrimental to the MFi business’s profitability, and its waterproof specification is lower than Lightning and MagSafe,” continues Kuo. “Therefore, if the iPhone abandons Lightning in the future, it may directly adopt the portless design with MagSafe support instead of using a USB-C port.”

“At present, the MagSafe ecosystem is not mature enough, so the iPhone will continue to use the Lightning port in the foreseeable future,” he says.

«

“No visibility on the current schedule” is a careful choice of words. The 2023 iPhone has been designed and prototypes will be coming off early lines. But the 2024 version, which will have to comply (unless I’ve missed something) with the EU’s USB-C charger ruling, is – if these things are going on the schedule I’d expect – has only just emerged from design, and has yet to start being templated in factories. (I’d expect that to start being visible early next year, perhaps.) So this story could be completely accurate and yet completely misleading about what’s further out.
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Global electricity mid-year insights 2022 • Ember

Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka:

»

• 1: Renewables met all growth in global electricity demand
Global electricity demand rose 3% in the first half of 2022 compared to the same period last year; this was in line with the historic average. Wind and solar met 77% of this demand growth, and hydro more than met the remainder. In China, the rise in wind and solar generation met 92% of its electricity demand rise; in the US it was 81%, while in India it was 23%.

2: Coal and gas generation remained almost unchanged
Because renewables growth met all the demand growth, fossil generation was almost unchanged. Coal declined by 1% and gas declined by 0.05%; these were offset by a slight rise in oil. Consequently, global CO2 power sector emissions were unchanged, despite the rise in electricity demand. Coal in the EU rose 15% only to cover a temporary shortfall in nuclear and hydro generation. Coal in India rose 10% because of a sharp rebound in electricity demand from the lows early last year when the Covid-19 pandemic struck hardest. These rises were offset against falls of 3% in China and 7% in the US.

3: Wind and solar growth delivered tangible cost and climate benefits
The growth in wind and solar in the first half of 2022 prevented a 4% increase in fossil generation. This avoided $40bn in fuel costs and 230 Mt CO2 in emissions. In China, the growth in wind and solar enabled fossil fuel power to fall 3%, rather than rise by 1%. In India, it slowed down the rise in fossil fuel power from 12% to 9%. In the US, it slowed down the rise in fossil fuel power from 7% to 1%. In the EU, it prevented a major rise in fossil fuel power – without wind and solar, fossil generation would have risen by 16% instead of 6%.

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So basically we’re treading water: renewables come onstream, energy use expands to fill the gap. Ember warns that things could get worse in the rest of the year, but adds:

»

We are getting closer to a tipping point, where clean electricity – led by wind and solar – will meet all future electricity demand growth, and thus fossil fuel power generation peaks.

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Police use DNA phenotyping in unsolved sexual assault • Edmonton Police

»

After a bus stopped at the shelter and picked up the people waiting, the unknown male followed the complainant as she continued to walk by. The male assaulted her, then pulled her into the field surrounding St. Basil and Spruce Avenue schools, where he violently sexually assaulted her.

After the assault, the woman reportedly regained consciousness and made her way to 103 Street and 114 Avenue, where a resident found her at approximately 5:45 a.m. and called 911.

An April 18, 2019 news release issued by the Edmonton Police Service outlined the details above and sought information about the suspect, describing him as 5’4”, with a black toque [“a small hat with a closely turned up brim” – dictionary], pants [trousers] and sweater or hoodie. He was described as having an accent. He was believed to have fled west from the scene.

Following a long investigation where no witnesses, CCTV, public tips or DNA matches were found, detectives took the step of enlisting Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Virginia that specializes in advanced DNA analysis services. The service used in this case was DNA phenotyping, the process of predicting physical appearance and ancestry from unidentified DNA evidence. Law enforcement agencies use the company’s Snapshot ® DNA Phenotyping Service to narrow suspect lists and generate leads in criminal investigations.

Using DNA evidence from this investigation, Parabon produced trait predictions for the associated person of interest (POI). Individual predictions were made for the subject’s ancestry, eye color, hair color, skin color, freckling, and face shape. By combining these attributes of appearance, a “Snapshot” composite was produced depicting what the POI may have looked like at 25 years old and with an average body-mass index (BMI) of 22. These default values were used because age and BMI cannot be determined from DNA.

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This is extremely dodgy. Parabon Nanolabs has generated what looks basically like glammed-up Identikit, which you’d hope the victim could do anyway. The company says its “snapshot” division has helped agencies in North America solve 230 violent crime cases. I’d really like to know how well those solved cases have stood up.
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How to identify that light in the sky • Nasa Astronomy Picture Of The Day

»

What is that light in the sky? Perhaps one of humanity’s more common questions, an answer may result from a few quick observations. For example – is it moving or blinking? If so, and if you live near a city, the answer is typically an airplane, since planes are so numerous and so few stars and satellites are bright enough to be seen over the din of artificial city lights.

If not, and if you live far from a city, that bright light is likely a planet such as Venus or Mars – the former of which is constrained to appear near the horizon just before dawn or after dusk. Sometimes the low apparent motion of a distant airplane near the horizon makes it hard to tell from a bright planet, but even this can usually be discerned by the plane’s motion over a few minutes. Still unsure? The featured chart gives a sometimes-humorous but mostly-accurate assessment.

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Please note that in no circumstance is the answer “damn, it’s an alien spaceship”.
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The ever-expanding job of preserving the internet’s backpages • Financial Times

Dave Lee:

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Walled gardens like Facebook are a source of great frustration to [the Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster] Kahle, who worries that much of the political activity that has taken place on the platform could be lost to history if not properly captured. In the name of privacy and security, Facebook (and others) make scraping difficult.

News organisations’ paywalls (such as the FT’s) are also “problematic”, Kahle says. News archiving used to be taken extremely seriously, but changes in ownership or even just a site redesign can mean disappearing content. The technology journalist Kara Swisher recently lamented that some of her early work at The Wall Street Journal has “gone poof”, after the paper declined to sell the material to her several years ago.

As we start to explore the possibilities of the metaverse, the Internet Archive’s work is only going to get even more complex. Its mission is to “provide universal access to all knowledge”, by archiving audio, video, video games, books, magazines and software. Currently, it is working to preserve the work of independent news organisations in Iran and is storing Russian TV news broadcasts. Sometimes keeping things online can be an act of justice, protest or accountability.

Yet some challenge whether the Internet Archive has the right to provide the material at all. It is currently being sued by several major book publishers over its “OpenLibrary” lending platform for ebooks, which allows users to borrow a limited number of ebooks for up to 14 days. The publishers argue it is hurting revenue.

Kahle says that’s ludicrous. He likes to describe the task of the archive as being no different from a traditional library. But while a book doesn’t disappear from a shelf if the publisher goes out of business, digital content is more vulnerable. You can’t own a Netflix show. News articles are there for only as long as publishers want them to be. Even songs we pay to download are rarely ours, they’re simply licensed.

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Now up to about 100 petabytes, costing only $25m to run annually, compared to $170m for San Francisco’s libraries (though those allow people in – the old high street shop/online shop difference). Evanescence is becoming the internet’s byword.
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Exclusive: Brands blast Twitter for ads next to child sexual abuse accounts • Reuters via Yahoo

Sheila Dang and Katie Paul:

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Some major advertisers including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes and PBS Kids have suspended their marketing campaigns or removed their ads from parts of Twitter because their promotions appeared alongside tweets soliciting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the companies told Reuters.

DIRECTV and Thoughtworks also told Reuters late on Wednesday they have paused their advertising on Twitter.

Brands ranging from Walt Disney Co, NBCUniversal and Coca-Cola Co to a children’s hospital were among more than 30 advertisers that appeared on the profile pages of Twitter accounts peddling links to the exploitative material, according to a Reuters review of accounts identified in new research about child sex abuse online from cybersecurity group Ghost Data.

Some of tweets include key words related to “rape” and “teens,” and appeared alongside promoted tweets from corporate advertisers, the Reuters review found. In one example, a promoted tweet for shoe and accessories brand Cole Haan appeared next to a tweet in which a user said they were “trading teen/child” content.

“We’re horrified,” David Maddocks, brand president at Cole Haan, told Reuters after being notified that the company’s ads appeared alongside such tweets. “Either Twitter is going to fix this, or we’ll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads.”

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I’m sure Elon will sort this all out really quickly – perhaps by getting rid of advertising.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A newly revealed investigation suggests that a rising star of the chess world used computer help in more than 100 online games. CC-licensed photo by Pasquale Paolo Cardo on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Handle with care. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

EU passes law to switch iPhone to USB-C by end of 2024 • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

The European Parliament on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly in favor of enforcing USB-C as a common charging port across a wide range of consumer electronic devices, including the iPhone and AirPods, by the end of 2024.

The proposal, known as a directive, forces all consumer electronics manufacturers who sell their products in Europe to ensure that a wide range of devices feature a USB-C port. This “common port” will be a world-first statute and impact Apple in particular since it widely uses the Lightning connector instead of USB-C on many of its devices. MEPs claim that the move will reduce electronic waste, address product sustainability, and make use of different devices more convenient.

The directive received 602 votes in favor, 13 votes against, and eight abstentions. A press release issued by the European Parliament on Tuesday states:

»

By the end of 2024, all mobile phones, tablets and cameras sold in the EU will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C charging port. From spring 2026, the obligation will extend to laptops. The new law, adopted by plenary on Tuesday with 602 votes in favour, 13 against and 8 abstentions, is part of a broader EU effort to reduce e-waste and to empower consumers to make more sustainable choices.

Under the new rules, consumers will no longer need a different charger every time they purchase a new device, as they will be able to use one single charger for a whole range of small and medium-sized portable electronic devices.

Regardless of their manufacturer, all new mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems, earbuds and laptops that are rechargeable via a wired cable, operating with a power delivery of up to 100 Watts, will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C port.

«

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Given that the 2024 iPhones will just be leaving the design boards, one has to wonder if those will have USB-C. Presumably yes, since they’ll be sold in the EU in 2025. Not sure a single charger will do the job: do you really want a 100W charger juicing your phone?
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Elon Musk to proceed with $44bn buyout of Twitter after U-turn • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Kari Paul:

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Lawyers for Musk confirmed in a court filing Tuesday that the billionaire will push ahead with the deal after performing another dramatic U-turn on his decision to walk away from the agreement.

The filing confirmed reports from Bloomberg on Tuesday that the Tesla chief executive had written to Twitter offering to close the deal at the original price of $54.20 a share, which sent shares in the social media site climbing more than 12% to $47.93 in New York before trading was halted.

Musk had been set for a courtroom showdown with Twitter on 17 October, with multiple legal commentators warning he had a slim chance of succeeding in his attempt to scrap the deal.

“We write to notify you that the Musk Parties intend to proceed to closing of the transaction contemplated by the April 25, 2022 merger agreement, on the terms and subject to the conditions set forth therein and pending receipt of the proceeds of the debt financing contemplated thereby,” reads the notice, filed by Musk’s lawyers with the Delaware Chancery court which was overseeing the trial.

Twitter agreed, writing: “The intention of the company is to close the transaction” that was agreed upon during the original deal.

The microblogging platform has been demanding that Musk, the world’s richest man, complete the deal under terms agreed in April. It is suing him in Delaware, the state where Twitter is incorporated and which has a strong legal reputation for enforcing merger agreements.

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Scared of the court case? Seems so. But it’s hard to see how this is going to benefit anyone. Musk’s texts back and forth with various friends have emerged in legal discovery over the past week, and they make him and them sound idiotic.

Buy it and immediately hand it over? In any case, buying it for that amount costs money, and that’s not as easy to find on the street as it used to be.
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Chess investigation finds that US grandmaster ‘likely cheated’ more than 100 times • WSJ

Andrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson:

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When world chess champion Magnus Carlsen last month suggested that American grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann was a cheater, the 19-year-old Niemann launched an impassioned defense. Niemann said he had cheated, but only at two points in his life, describing them as youthful indiscretions committed when he was 12 and 16 years old. 

Now, however, an investigation into Niemann’s play—conducted by Chess.com, an online platform where many top players compete—has found the scope of his cheating to be far wider and longer-lasting than he publicly admitted. 

The report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, alleges that Niemann likely received illegal assistance in more than 100 online games, as recently as 2020. Those matches included contests in which prize money was on the line. The site uses a variety of cheating-detection tools, including analytics that compare moves to those recommended by chess engines, which are capable of beating even the greatest human players every time.  

The report states that Niemann privately confessed to the allegations, and that he was subsequently banned from the site for a period of time. 

The 72-page report also flagged what it described as irregularities in Niemann’s rise through the elite ranks of competitive, in-person chess. It highlights “many remarkable signals and unusual patterns in Hans’ path as a player.”

While it says Niemann’s improvement has been “statistically extraordinary.” Chess.com noted that it hasn’t historically been involved with cheat detection for classical over-the-board chess, and it stopped short of any conclusive statements about whether he has cheated in person. Still, it pointed to several of Niemann’s strongest events, which it believes “merit further investigation based on the data.” FIDE, chess’s world governing body, is conducting its own investigation into the Niemann-Carlsen affair.

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The proof is going to be interesting, and of course hotly disputed. Niemann seems to have improved more quickly than anyone, ever – including Bobby Fischer and Carlsen himself. Possible, but unlikely.
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The next century of computing • Bzogrammer

Charles Rosenbauer:

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In this article, I will be giving 80 brief predictions on the future of computing and its impact on the broader world. These are largely predictions that you will not find elsewhere, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list of my ideas. However, from much of my theoretical research and various trends I’ve seen playing out, these are the places where I see things eventually deviating from common expectations.

Many of these take the form of a niche that I see existing now or in the future. How fast these predictions come true will be highly dependent on how fast people can find these niches and begin to fill them. In some ways this is a guide for people who may be interested in building a future that I hope you’ll agree with me is more interesting and inspiring than many current visions of the future.

1. Let us start by getting the obvious out of the way. Moore’s law is coming to an end. It is slowing down rather than coming to a grinding halt, but already Dennard scaling has broken down, which eliminates many of the real benefits from scaling further for chips that are not almost entirely memory.
2. The end of Moore’s Law will quickly result in much more bizarre hardware. The decades ahead of us will be a Cambrian Explosion of bizarre hardware.
3. Existing architectures will be abandoned. No more x86, ARM, or RISC-V. However, this will go far deeper than people expect. The basic concept of computing as a machine executing a stream of instructions, shuffling data back and forth between processor and memory, will eventually be abandoned in favor of more exotic models. The models we have today will be shown to be largely arbitrary, holding back potential efficiency gains and theoretical insights with models that reflect naive computational theory from the 1940s and 50s that has yet to die far more than any fundamental nature of computing.

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This goes very, very deep.
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TWO minutes of the Simpsons • gralefrit

Joel Morris is a comedy scriptwriter (did you laugh at Paddington? Probably one of his jokes):

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There’s an old saying that analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog. Nobody laughs and the frog dies.

But if that approach was applied to actual dissection, we’d still think humans were worked by little people inside, like The Numbskulls in that comic, or that Pixar film that was like The Numbskulls in that comic.

So I say, dammit. This is comedy science and we need to get some blood on our hands. We’ve waited long enough. Let’s cut up a frog and kill it. Not just kill it. Dice it. Shove it through the woodchipper. Leave its guts floating in the air as a fine, dull mist that nobody could laugh at, but which leaves a horrible taste in the mouth. Yay! Fun!

For this experiment, let’s send Igor to exhume the still warm corpse of the peak-era Simpsons episode Homer Badman. It’s a classic episode, from season six, regularly scoring high on critics’ and fans’ lists of the best Simpsons episodes of all time. The script will have been ping-ponged around one of the sharpest writing rooms in comedy history, but the lead writing credit here goes to Greg Daniels, who went on to co-create King Of The Hill, Parks and Rec and the American version of The Office. He knows what he’s doing, and he’s said that it’s his favourite ever Simpsons episode.

In Homer Badman, Simpson family patriarch Homer attends a candy industry trade fair, with the hope of stealing as many free samples as possible. On returning home, his attempts to grab a rare Gummi bear candy that the family’s childminder has sat on are mistaken for sexual harassment, and the hapless yellow dad ends up a victim of trial-by-media.

This episode features some of my personal favourite Simpsons moments (Homer throwing a shaken cola can as a grenade, a pitch-perfect throwaway Little Mermaid parody, a TV talk show hosted by a wild bear) and builds to possibly the greatest closing scene of any sitcom, where Homer proudly and tenderly tells his wife, “Marge, my love, I haven’t learned a thing.” (That’s the rules right there, not only for writing the character of Homer, but for keeping a sitcom going for thirty plus years.)

But we’re not going to get that far. Nowhere near.

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Truly excellent. Not short, but if you thought a Simpsons episode was probably just a few jokes strung together, read this and reassess.
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How to read an AI image • Cybernetic Forest

Eryk Salvaggio:

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Let’s start with an image that I’d like to understand. It’s from OpenAI’s DALLE2, a diffusion-based generative image model. DALLE2 creates images on demand from a prompt, offering four interpretations. Some are bland. But as Roland Barthes said, “What’s noted is notable.”

So I noted this one.

It is an AI image created of two humans kissing. It’s obviously weird. There’s the uncanny valley effect. But what else is going on? How might we “read” this image?

We see a heterosexual white couple. A reluctant male is being kissed by a woman. In this case, the man’s lips are protruding, which is rare compared to our sample. The man is also weakly represented: his eyes and ears have notable distortions.

what does it all mean? To find out, we need to start with a series of concrete questions for AI images:

1. Where did the dataset come from?

2. What is in the dataset and what isn’t?

3. How was the dataset collected?

This information, combined with more established forms of critical image analysis, can give us ways to “read” the images.

Here’s how I do it.

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As he says, the picture reveals the dataset underneath. We’re developing all sorts of new methods to interrogate what we see and understand it in new ways; it’s a whole new form of art.
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Liz Truss quashes Jacob Rees-Mogg’s ‘half-baked’ labour market reforms • Financial Times

Peter Foster, Jim Pickard and George Parker:

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As well as introducing no-fault dismissals for people earning more than £50,000 a year, [secretary of state for business Jacob] Rees-Mogg suggested scrapping corporate reporting requirements for the gender pay gap and the speed with which companies pay their suppliers, said people with knowledge of the discussions.

The business secretary has also proposed removing rights that enable agency workers to “passport” to full employment rights, along with the repeal of the working time directive.

The package would have sparked a hostile reaction from labour unions which are balloting for strike action across large parts of the UK economy, including railways, healthcare and postal services.

But Truss’s allies said Rees-Mogg’s ideas were either half-formed or unacceptable. The prime minister has said that she would not touch anybody’s holiday entitlement or make any significant changes to the working time directive.

The idea of removing employment rights from people earning more than £50,000 is still in play, but government officials said any threshold would have to be set above £100,000 if it were ever to be implemented.

Rees-Mogg’s allies believe such a move would be acceptable because many people on higher salaries had transferable skills and would be able to move to other jobs more easily.

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It’s an utter mystery why Rees-Mogg wants to move everything back to the 1970s. Didn’t expect to miss the Johnson government, but at least Rees-Mogg was sidelined there to leaving snotty notes on the desks of civil servants who were working from home. Now he’s got actual powers.
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Households face retrofitting bill as most new-build homes use gas boilers • openDemocracy

Ben Webster:

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The majority of new homes rely on carbon-intensive gas boilers after developers lobbied Conservative governments to water down proposed laws on cutting emissions from buildings, openDemocracy can reveal.

Two-thirds of new homes built in England in the year to the end of March 2022 use gas for central heating, according to data compiled by the Office for National Statistics following a request by openDemocracy.

Experts have warned households will face large bills to retrofit properties as a result of watered-down or delayed plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Last year, Boris Johnson was persuaded to delay a ban on developers connecting new homes to the gas grid. The government had considered implementing the policy, known as the ‘Future Homes Standard’, next year but it is now due to come into force in 2025. Even then, there will be loopholes that could allow developers to continue selling new homes with gas boilers until the end of 2026.

Taylor Wimpey, one of the UK’s largest housebuilders, tried to weaken the Future Homes Standard, Greenpeace’s Unearthed unit revealed last year. The company argued that the government’s proposal to cut emissions from new homes by 75-80% compared with the existing standard was “too ambitious”.

In May, Johnson’s government rejected a recommendation by the House of Commons’ Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee that the policy be brought forward to 2023.

Speaking to openDemocracy, Darren Jones, the committee’s chair, warned that delaying the policy would cost households thousands of pounds – and accused developers of “passing the buck onto homeowners and tenants”.

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Do people learn about politics on social media? A meta-analysis of 76 studies • Journal of Communication

Eran Amsalem and Alon Zoizner are university researchers in Israel:

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Abstract:
Citizens turn increasingly to social media to get their political information. However, it is currently unclear whether using these platforms actually makes them more politically knowledgeable. While some researchers claim that social media play a critical role in the learning of political information within the modern media environment, others posit that the great potential for learning about politics on social media is rarely fulfilled.

The current study tests which of these conflicting theoretical claims is supported by the existing empirical literature. A preregistered meta-analysis of 76 studies (N = 442,136) reveals no evidence of any political learning on social media in observational studies, and statistically significant but substantively small increases in knowledge in experiments.

These small-to-nonexistent knowledge gains are observed across social media platforms, types of knowledge, countries, and periods. Our findings suggest that the contribution of social media toward a more politically informed citizenry is minimal.

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I don’t have further access, but the abstract is straightforward enough. Did we really expect anything different? I don’t think it contradicts what I think about Brexit or Trump or social warming: that those emerged from reinforcement and intensification of peoples’ views, rather than some greater awareness and weighing up of the opposing views. Politics is emotion, not rationality.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A court case over Andy Warhol’s depiction of a photo of the musician Prince could become a copyright nightmare. (This isn’t it; it’s Stable Diffusion’s output for how a Warhol picture of Prince might look. Which is another copyright question altogether.)

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A selection of 9 links for you. No hot ashes. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Nuclear fusion plant to be built at West Burton A power station • BBC News

Tony Roe and Alex Smith:

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A power station has been chosen to be the site of the UK’s, and potentially the world’s, first prototype commercial nuclear fusion reactor.

Fusion is a potential source of almost limitless clean energy but is currently only carried out in experiments.

The government had shortlisted five sites but has picked the West Burton A plant in Nottinghamshire.

The plant should be operational by the early 2040s, a UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) spokesman has said. The government had pledged more than £220m for the STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) programme, led by the UKAEA.

… Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg announced the government’s choice in a speech at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.

“Over the decades we have established ourselves as pioneers in fusion science and as a country our capabilities to surmount these obstacles is unparalleled, and I am delighted to make an announcement of a vital step in that mission,” he said. “The plant will be the first of its kind, built by 2040 and capable of putting energy on the grid, and in doing so will prove the commercial viability of fusion energy to the world.”

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Built by 2040? Can believe it. *Capable* of putting energy on the grid? Can believe it. (Solar arrays are capable of it, and frequently do.) Prove the commercial viability of fusion energy to the world? I think I’ll see an edible hat if that happens.

Hilariously, this is the same location where the local MP and a group of NIMBYs on Friday celebrated blocking a big new solar array, to be located in some nearby fields, which could have been ready in about a year. Wonder how they’ll feel about all the construction traffic that this will involve for a decade or so. Oh well, only swapping one proven fusion source for another, less proven, one.
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After Ukraine, the great clean energy acceleration • Bloomberg New Energy Futures

Michael Liebreich:

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according to Brussels-based think tank Breugel, by the middle of September European governments had committed €500bn ($480bn) to keeping the lights on. And this may be just a start: Norway’s energy major Equinor has warned that European energy market participants might need $1.5 trillion in liquidity guarantees to continue to operate. Clearly, this can only go on for so long before the bond markets exact punishment. A re-run of the European financial crisis of 2011 cannot be ruled out.

Other than spending public money, many of our leaders spent the early months of the crisis arguing for whatever energy technology they had always favored – be that renewables, heat pumps and electric vehicles, hydrogen, fracking or nuclear power. Of course, none of these can be deployed fast enough to make much of a difference over the next two critical winters.

…Germany’s Chancellor may be talking up hydrogen, but his ministries are beavering away, demolishing planning barriers to renewable energy projects and accelerating the electrification of heat and transport. No new natural gas boilers may be installed after 2024. Heat pump installations across 21 of the 27 EU member states have doubled over the last four years and are now growing by 34% per year. Plug-in vehicles account for around 20% of new car registrations in the EU, up from less than 5% three years ago. Europe is not just going cold turkey on Russian energy for a couple of years – it is looking to go clean for good.

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Encouraging, if we can actually get a hold of what we want to achieve.
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Copyright infringement in artificial intelligence art • TechnoLlama

Andres Guadamuz:

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Assuming a lot of the inputs that go into training AI are lawful, then what about the outputs? Could a work that has been generated by an AI trained on existing works infringe copyright?

This is trickier to answer, and it may very well depend on what happens during and after the training, and how the outputs are generated, so we have to look in more detail under the hood at machine learning methods. A big warning first, obviously I’m no ML expert, and while I have been reading a lot of the basic literature for a few years now, my understanding is that of a hobbyist, if I misrepresent the technology it is my own fault, and will be delighted to correct any mistakes. I will of course be over-simplifying some stuff.

…style and a “look and feel” are not copyrightable. Sure, an image could be inspired by an author, and you could recognise a style, but it would be a stretch to say that it infringes copyright. One of the challenges for living authors, but also for others whose work may still be under copyright (Warhol and Basquiat come to mind), is that we don’t know if the AIs have been trained on their own artwork, or if they have been trained on the army of human imitators that are all over the web. There’s a reason why the AIs are so good at replicating Van Gogh’s style.

…I am sure that at some point an artist will try to sue one of the companies working in this area for copyright infringement. Assuming that the input phase is fine and the datasets used are legitimate, then most infringement lawsuits may end up taking place in the output phase. And it is here that I do not think that there will be substantive reproduction to warrant copyright infringement. On the contrary, the technology itself is encoded to try to avoid such a direct infringement from happening.

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I am also not a lawyer, but this seems solidly argued, and it’s what I’ve thought too. So it must be right! 😬 (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
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The Andy Warhol case that could wreck American art • The Atlantic

Paul Szynol:

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[Photographer Lynn] Goldsmith’s prolific and historically significant output has deservedly been archived in various institutions. One of her images was also enshrined by Andy Warhol, who used a photograph she took of Prince as the basis for his illustrations of the musician. But at least in some legal and art circles, Goldsmith may end up being remembered not so much for her beautiful photographs, but for her legal dispute with the custodians of Andy Warhol’s art, which the Supreme Court will hear on October 12.

The dispute started when Goldsmith learned that her 1981 photograph of Prince, which she’d taken in a quick session in her New York studio, was the basis for Warhol’s illustrations of the rock star. In 2019, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that Warhol’s image was protected by fair use. The appellate court reversed, principally on the grounds that Warhol’s image is not sufficiently transformative because it “retains the essential elements of its source material” and Goldsmith’s photograph “remains the recognizable foundation.” In other words, the original is too visibly baked into Warhol’s iteration.

To Goldsmith, the question is one of justice; her website describes her battle as a “crusade,” an impassioned effort to make sure that “copyright law does not become so diluted by the definition of fair use that visual artists lose the rights to their work.” If the Supreme Court agrees with her legal challenge, a doctrine that is central to our freedom of expression and cultural growth will be damaged and weakened, possibly for decades to come.

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Absorbing read about the argument over how far you can derive content. Which is of course relevant to the question of what AI illustration systems can and cannot do.
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Kim Kardashian paying $1.26m to settle SEC crypto-hype charges • Variety

Todd Spangler:

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Kim Kardashian agreed to pay $1.26m to settle charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that she touted a crypto asset security without disclosing the payment she received for the promotion, the agency said.

Under the settlement, without “admitting or denying the SEC’s findings,” Kardashian also agreed to not promote any crypto asset securities for three years, per the agency.

According to the SEC’s order, Kardashian failed to disclose that she was paid $250,000 to publish a post on her Instagram account about EMAX tokens, the crypto asset security being offered by EthereumMax. Kardashian’s post linked to the EthereumMax website, which provided instructions for potential investors to purchase EMAX tokens.

Kardashian, a celebrity reality-TV star and influencer, has one of the most-followed accounts on Instagram — currently with 301 million followers.

“This case is a reminder that, when celebrities or influencers endorse investment opportunities, including crypto asset securities, it doesn’t mean that those investment products are right for all investors,” SEC chairperson Gary Gensler said in a statement. “Ms. Kardashian’s case also serves as a reminder to celebrities and others that the law requires them to disclose to the public when and how much they are paid to promote investing in securities.”

…Kardashian’s agreed payment of $1.26m includes approximately $260,000 in disgorgement (which represents her promotional payment plus prejudgment interest) and a $1m penalty.

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I hope this chart from Coinmarketcap gives some insight into how this all panned out. You may be able to see the point at which Kardashian’s post appeared.

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Elon Musk may have a point about bots on Twitter • RAND

Marek Posard is a military sociologist (?) and professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School:

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Twitter has a deep bench of engineers working for the company. They have access to trillions of data points on their over 300 million monthly active users. Why has a company this size struggled to clean up its platform?

Back in 2020, I led a project at RAND that developed tools to detect Russian interference in US elections on Twitter. Our team was small (fewer than 10 people). We had access to only 2.2 million tweets from 630,391 unique accounts. In a few months, our team was able to detect patterns of Russian bots and trolls on the platform that appeared to be interfering with American elections. If RAND could pull this off in a few months, why couldn’t Twitter do the same on a larger scale?

Here’s a possible hypothesis: Twitter might not want to look too closely at this problem because then they would have to remove accounts, reducing the number of reported “active users” on the platform.

More than 90% of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertisers. And it is probably safe to assume that most of these advertisers are paying Twitter to display ads to real human beings, not bots or Russian trolls masquerading as Americans. If Twitter removed more of these inauthentic accounts, it would ding its “active user” metrics, which drive advertising revenue—the source of value for the platform.

Twitter is not the only social media with this problem. Back in 2017, Facebook claimed that ads on its platforms could reach 41 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 years old. The problem was the US Census Bureau claimed that only 31 million Americans in this age group existed. Facebook is now facing a class-action lawsuit related to audience exaggeration.

Put simply, social media companies like Twitter and Facebook are not incentivized to look too closely at the problem of bots, trolls, and inauthentic accounts. The latest whistleblower, Peiter “Mudge” Zatsko, who used to be head of security at Twitter has said as much.

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I think Twitter’s argument, repeatedly made, is that only 5-10% of those it counts as “daily active users” are bots. Not that only 10% of the whole user base is. And Russian bots trying to influence an election are much easier to spot than most. And, again, what is a bot? What’s the dividing line?
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Russians dodging mobilization behind flourishing scam market • Bleeping Computer

Bill Toulas:

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Another interesting trend that arose from the widescale exit of Russians is a 50% rise in the demand for the so-called “gray” SIM cards, reported by Russian news outlet Kommersant.

These are SIMs that people can get without presenting an identity document or registering their real subscriber information to the telecommunication service providers. Kommersant’s source stated that these SIM cards work in the networks of MTS, MegaFon, Beeline, Tele2, and Yota, and concern “pay-as-you-use” programs.

Russians are frantically seeking these cards because the state can use regular SIMs to track young men eligible for military service and possibly stop them at the border.

All this has led to the Russian border officers now tracking people based on their IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity), a unique 15-digit identifier linked to the device’s hardware, not the SIM card.

According to the Russian internet rights organization Roskomsvoboda, there are multiple reports of people who FSB agents forced to give away their IMEI numbers while crossing the border to Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Finland.

IMEI tracking works by using telecommunication antennas for approximate location triangulation, and it’s made possible thanks to the mobile operator keeping the number stored in their database. IMEI is included in every data transaction and communication request from and to the device and adjacent antennas, so it’s a persistent identifier. It’s the same system used by tracking software promising to locate your lost or stolen device, while law enforcement has also been using IMEI for many years now.

Assigned IMEIs aren’t interchangeable or editable, except for some Huawei, Xiaomi, and ZTE models that store the IMEI in a rewritable memory section in violation of the technology’s guidelines, giving users the capability to flash it with specialised tools.

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A follow-on from yesterday’s link about the “unfitness” certificates (which get a mention earlier in the story: they’re often scams, as I suspected). IMEI tracking and the very intriguing detail about *some* Chinese models with rewritable IMEIs. Why do those exist at all? Espionage?
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Does Apple’s crash detection work? We totaled some cars to find out • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

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Here’s how I set up the tech inside the vehicles for this not-exactly-scientific test [getting a demolition derby driver, Michael Barabe, to crash into some cars in a junkyard]:

• Derby car: Around Michael’s wrist was an Apple Watch Ultra. Strapped next to him in durable OtterBox cases: an Apple Watch-paired iPhone 14 and a Google Pixel 5. Apple’s crash feature is on by default; on the Pixel, you have to turn it on in the Personal Safety app. 

• Junkyard car: Secured to the air vents and also protected by durable cases, an iPhone 14 Pro Max and a Google Pixel 6.

About five seconds after Michael first crashed into the Ford Taurus head-on, at about 25 mph, the Apple Watch Ultra on his wrist buzzed with an alert: “It looks like you’ve been in a crash.”

Michael hit the cancel button on his wrist. Had he not done that within 10 seconds, he would have heard a loud alarm and seen a 10-second countdown. Without further action, the watch would then have called 911 and sent a message with his location to a personal emergency contact.

While the impact barely moved Michael at all, the phones went flying onto the floor of his car. That’s why Apple designed the feature to display the alert on the Watch if it is paired together with an iPhone.

Despite the Taurus’ driver-side air bag going off—and the entire front of the car being smashed in—the iPhone and the Pixel in that car didn’t detect a crash. Nor did the Pixel in Michael’s car.

We tried again. On the second crash, the Taurus’ passenger-side air bag deployed, and the bumper went flying. Again, the phones inside the Taurus didn’t display an alert. Inside Michael’s car, the Pixel detected the crash, but that time the Apple devices didn’t.

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She tried various other combinations: results were mixed. Apple and Google both said that the systems would want more data to indicate you were driving – the sustained periods at speed. (So the lesson seems to be, don’t have a crash too close to home?)

Also: the story pictured in this tweet suggests that indeed, crash detection does work. A pity that it was needed.
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How I found a simple, no-cost solution to sleep apnea • Daily Beast

Jay Hancock:

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I woke up in a strange bedroom with 24 electrodes glued all over my body and a plastic mask attached to a hose covering my face.

The lab technician who watched me all night via video feed told me that I had “wicked sleep apnea” and that it was “central sleep apnea”—a type that originates in the brain and fails to tell the muscles to inhale.

As a journalist—and one terrified by the diagnosis—I set out to do my own research. After a few weeks of sleuthing and interviewing experts, I reached two important conclusions.

First, I had moderate apnea, if that, and it could be treated without the elaborate machines, mouthpieces, or other devices that specialists who had consulted on my care were talking about.

Second, the American health care system has joined with commercial partners to define a medical condition—in this case, sleep apnea—in a way that allows both parties to generate revenue from a multitude of pricey diagnostic studies, equipment sales, and questionable treatments. I was on a conveyor belt.

It all began with a desire for answers: I had been feeling drowsy during the day, and my wife told me I snored. Both can mean obstructive sleep apnea. With obstructive sleep apnea, the mouth and throat relax when a person is unconscious, sometimes blocking or narrowing the airway. That interrupts breathing, as well as sleep. Without treatment, the resulting disruption in oxygen flow might increase the risk of developing certain cardiovascular diseases.

So I contacted a sleep-treatment center, and doctors gave me an at-home test ($365). Two weeks later, they told me I had “high-moderate” sleep apnea and needed to acquire a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine, at a cost of about $600.

Though I had hoped to get the equipment and adjust the settings to see what worked best, my doctors said I had to come to the sleep lab for an overnight test ($1,900) to have them “titrate” the optimal CPAP air pressure.

“How do you treat central sleep apnea?” I worriedly asked the technician after that first overnight stay. She said something about an ASV (adaptive servo-ventilation) machine ($4,000). And one pricey lab sleepover wasn’t enough, she said. I needed to come back for another.

…recent European studies have shown that standards under the International Classification of Sleep Disorders would doom huge portions of the general population to a sleep apnea diagnosis—whether or not people had complaints of daytime tiredness or other sleep problems.

A study in the Swiss city of Lausanne showed that 50% of local men and 23% of the women 40 or older were positive for sleep apnea under such criteria.

Such rates of disease are “extraordinarily high,” “astronomical,” and “implausible,” Dr. Dirk Pevernagie, a scientist at Belgium’s Ghent University Hospital, wrote with colleagues two years ago in a comprehensive study in the Journal of Sleep Research.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The latest tweak to the Stable Diffusion AI illustrator means you can create (very) short films with it. How soon before we see much longer ones?

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A selection of 11 links for you. Not chosen by AI. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

andreasjansson/stable-diffusion-animation – Run with an API on Replicate

Andreas Jansson:

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Animate Stable Diffusion by interpolating between two prompts. Starting with noise, we then use stable diffusion to denoise for n steps towards the mid-point between the start prompt and end prompt, where n = num_inference_steps * (1 – prompt_strength). The higher the prompt strength, the fewer steps towards the mid-point.

We then denoise from that intermediate noisy output towards num_animation_frames interpolation points between the start and end prompts. By starting with an intermediate output, the model will generate samples that are similar to each other, resulting in a smoother animation.

Finally, the generated samples are interpolated with Google’s FILM (Frame Interpolation for Large Scene Motion) for extra smoothness.

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So you start with the prompt suggestion “tall rectangular black monolith, monkeys in the desert looking at a large tall monolith, a detailed matte painting by Wes Anderson, behance, light and space, reimagined by industrial light and magic, matte painting, criterion collection” and say that the end prompt should show “tall rectangular black monolith, a white room in the future with a bed, victorian details and a tall black monolith, a detailed matte painting by Wes Anderson, behance, light and space, reimagined by industrial light and magic, matte painting, criterion collection” and let it go. (The outcome’s on the page.)

We’re not that far from some sort of AI-created film where the multiple intermediate points are drawn by AI. Certainly a great way to speed up storyboarding for films.
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GhostlyStock

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Freely-usable images summoned from beyond the aether. Energized by AI.

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Sort-of stock images, generated by AI. They have a strange sort of quality about them – a feel that I think we’ll start to associate with AI-drawn images in the next few months, and which will likely last for a few years.
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Liz Truss: the normie playing the rebel • Financial Times

Janan Ganesh:

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Liz Truss began her career at that plucky start-up, Shell. She moved on to Cable & Wireless, which was founded in a tempest of risk-taking and rule-breaking. In 1869. Her wild card of a chancellor never got around to being an entrepreneur or (unless we count a hedge fund boss) working for one. Truss is a scion of the public sector middle class. Kwasi Kwarteng could not have passed through a stabler set of institutions — Eton, Harvard, JPMorgan — had he interned at the Vatican.

None of the credentials of mavericks but all of the pose: whatever else is said about these two, they are of their time. A co-authored treatise, were it honest, would be called something like Move Slow and Say Things. 

When did normies start doing this? When did status and lustre come to reside in cheeking the establishment? What happened to joining it? Truss and her backers will believe that financial markets are made of “sheeple” in thrall to “group think” and “orthodoxy”. The more the bourses convulse, the surer the government will be that it is on to something. I don’t want here to go into the question of whether they are right. The point is rather their relish in dissent. Why do such conventional people so enjoy filing the minority report?

…the further a society gets from its last existential test, the more desk-bound and temperature-controlled the texture of life becomes, the more some innate human need for risk goes unmet. And so it finds alternative outlets. The boom in martial sports is one that Chuck Palahniuk saw coming in Fight Club. Another is the proliferation of a kind of sham maverick in public life.

It is reported that Truss’s supply-side reforms are known internally as Operation Rolling Thunder. Besides the question of taste — the name comes from a bombing campaign in Vietnam — who speaks like this? This is going to a Rage Against the Machine gig at 50. This is popping a collar and taking a long drag of a cigarette. It is iconoclasm as interpreted by someone who has never put anything on the line. In this, she is less bad than some of the friendly wonks and pundits (note again the low-stakes work) who will her to “smash” Britannia’s chains.

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Ganesh sounds light, but the final paragraph shows that he’s absolutely furious at the obstacles put in his way to citizenship. Worth hunting the whole thing down.

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Tim Cook: not too long from now, you’ll wonder how you led your life without AR • MacRumors

Sami Fathi:

»

Responding to a question from a student [at an Italian university] on what future technologies excite him the most, [Tim] Cook pointed to artificial intelligence, calling it a “fundamental, horizontal technology that will touch everything in our lives,” ranging from innovations in the Apple Watch to “many other things” Apple is working on.

Cook, more importantly, stressed his excitement for augmented reality. Cook suggested that augmented reality’s impact on the world will be as profound as the internet itself, saying people will wonder how they led a life without it. As he was speaking on augmented reality, the live stream of the Q&A session abruptly cut, so Cook’s full comment on the subject is not publicly known. Here’s what there was:

»

I’m super excited about augmented reality. Because I think that we’ve had a great conversation here today, but if we could augment that with something from the virtual world, it would have arguably been even better. So I think that if you, and this will happen clearly not too long from now, if you look back at a point in time, you know, zoom out to the future and look back, you’ll wonder how you led your life without augmented reality. Just like today, we wonder, how did people like me grow up without the internet. And so I think it could be that profound, and it’s not going to be profound overnight…

«

Cook has in the past expressed his personal excitement for augmented reality and has hinted that Apple is working on AR/VR products. The company’s first AR/VR product, a high-end headset rumored to be called “Reality Pro,” is expected to be announced as soon as January.

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In British politics this is known as “rolling the pitch” – a cricketing metaphor for getting everything ready for when you properly come out with your offering. (As a messaging technique, it’s lately fallen out of favour.)
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Apple executive Tony Blevins to quit after vulgar TikTok joke • The Times

Laurence Sleator:

»

A senior executive at Apple is to leave the company after joking about “fondling big-breasted women” for a living in a viral social media video.

Tony Blevins, Apple’s vice-president of procurement, featured in a video by Daniel Mac, a TikToker who approaches people in expensive cars and asks them: “What do you do for a living?” In the 25-second video, which has been viewed more than 1.4 million times, Mac approaches Blevins as he gets out his silver $500,000 (£450,000) Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren at a car show in California and asks the question.

Blevins, dressed in a turquoise suit, Union Jack waistcoat and bright red shoes, says: “I race cars, play golf and fondle big-breasted women, but I take weekends and major holidays off.” To laughter from Mac and a female passenger alongside Blevins, he adds: “If you’re interested, I’ve got a hell of a dental plan.”

The video, published on September 5, prompted an internal investigation at Apple. A spokesman confirmed yesterday that Blevins would leave the Californian-based company.

In charge of striking deals with suppliers and partners, Blevins had been at Apple for 22 years and managed several hundred employees. He was one of about 30 people who reported directly to Tim Cook, who has been the chief executive since 2011. Blevins, thought to be Apple’s main cost-cutter, was said to go by the nickname the “Blevinator”, according to a 2020 Wall Street Journal profile.

In a statement to Bloomberg, Blevins apologised for his remarks and said they were a reference to the 1981 film Arthur in which the main character, played by Dudley Moore, says: “I race cars, play tennis and fondle women, but I have weekends off and I am my own boss.”

…The video angered some employees and came as senior bosses at Apple were focusing on improving diversity in the workplace, Bloomberg reported.

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The original headline called it a “vulgar TikTok boast”, except clearly it wasn’t a boast, but a joke, using a cultural reference more than 40 years old. (Blevins is 54 or 55.) No wonder then it fell flat. But this is a crazy overreaction. The employees who were “angered” maybe need to get out more. Are they more valuable than him? The WSJ profile suggests he’s been responsible for huge savings in negotiations.
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Tesla shows off unfinished humanoid robot prototypes at AI Day 2022 • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

The entire live robot demonstration lasted roughly seven minutes, and the firm also played a demonstration video of the walking Optimus prototype picking up a box and putting it down, slowly watering a plant, and moving metal parts in a factory-like setting—all while tethered to an overhead cable. The video also showed a 3D-rendered view of the world that represents what the Optimus robot can see.

Tesla first announced its plans to built a humanoid robot during its AI Day event in August of last year. During that earlier event, a human dressed in a spandex suit resembling a robot and did the Charleston on stage, which prompted skepticism in the press.

At the AI Event today, Musk and his team emphasized that the walking prototype was an early demo developed in roughly six months using “semi-off the shelf actuators,” and that the sleeker model much more closely resembled the “Version 1” unit they wanted to ship. He said it would probably be able to walk in a few weeks.

Goals of the Optimus project include high-volume production (possibly “millions of units sold,” said Musk), low-cost (“probably less than $20,000”), and high-reliability. Comparing the plans for Optimus to existing humanoid robots from competitors, Musk also emphasized that the Optimus robot should have the brains-on-board to work autonomously, citing Tesla’s work with its automotive Autopilot system.

Shortly afterward, Musk handed over the stage to Tesla engineers that gave overviews about developing the power systems, actuators, and joint mechanisms that would make Optimus possible, replete with fancy graphs. “We are carrying over most of our design experience from the car to the robot,” said one engineer, while another engineer said they drew much of their inspiration from human biology, especially in joint design.

«

I’m certain this will never see the light of day (or at least, appear with a price tag). He promised a Cybertruck years ago, and that’s a type of thing that the company is actually set up to make. The inclusion of this robot segment in the “AI Day” event – for the second year in a row – suggests Tesla, or Musk, is rapidly running out of “AI” things to show off.
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$620 for an HIV diagnosis: Russians buy their way out of military service on Telegram • Rest of World

Masha Borak:

»

Telegram has become the chat app of choice for Russians, Malika Kamil, a community manager in a project called Guide to the Free World, told Rest of World. The project, launched at the start of the war, is dedicated to helping Russians leave the country. It runs a Telegram group with over 101,000 users. More than 21,000 people joined after Russia announced its mobilization efforts.

Guide to the Free World uses Telegram in a number of ways. The non-profit helps Russians emigrate, through a program partly funded by Telegram’s built-in donation button, and uses the platform’s bot function to keep spam and scammers from its channel. Other Telegram groups help track police delivering draft papers, and broadcast news about the rise of mobile recruitment offices at the border with Finland and Georgia.

Many other Telegram channels have seen an influx of scammers. Young men have been driven by panic and fear of border closures into buying services from Telegram, even as reports on scams have risen, said Sawa Zarecki, founder of Advengene, a company helping professionals from Russia find placements and companies find new markets abroad, to Rest of World. Some were promised transportation across the border, only to have their ride disappear after taking the money. 

Others peddle fake documents which could qualify Russian men to be declared unfit for duty or to be put under medical observation, giving them three to six months to escape the country.

“At the moment, the most effective way is to get a certificate that you have HIV or hepatitis,” one seller, who refused to share their real name, told Rest of World.

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Paid in bitcoin, of uncertain provenance or effectiveness. Some are sure to be scams. But the fact that people might be looking for them is indicative.
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What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine? • The Atlantic

Eric Schlosser:

»

[Former US senator, former Cuba missile crisis officer Sam] Nunn describes Russia’s violations of long-standing norms as “Putin’s nuclear folly” and stresses that three fundamental things are essential for avoiding a nuclear catastrophe: rational leaders, accurate information, and no major blunders. “And all three are now in some degree of doubt,” he says.

If Russia uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, Nunn thinks that an American nuclear retaliation should be the last resort. He favors some sort of horizontal escalation instead, doing everything possible to avoid a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. For example, if Russia hits Ukraine with a nuclear cruise missile launched from a ship, Nunn would advocate immediately sinking that ship. The number of Ukrainian casualties should determine the severity of the American response—and any escalation should be conducted solely with conventional weapons. Russia’s Black Sea fleet might be sunk in retaliation, and a no-fly zone could be imposed over Ukraine, even if it meant destroying anti-aircraft units on Russian soil.

Since the beginning of the invasion, Russia’s nuclear threats have been aimed at discouraging the United States and its NATO allies from providing military supplies to Ukraine. And the threats are backed by Russia’s capabilities. Last year, during a training exercise involving about 200,000 troops, the Russian army practiced launching a nuclear assault on NATO forces in Poland. “The pressure on Russia to attack the supply lines from NATO countries to Ukraine will increase, the longer this war continues,” Nunn says. It will also increase the risk of serious blunders and mistakes. An intentional or inadvertent Russian attack on a NATO country could be the beginning of World War III.

«

The strong suggestion is that any use of nuclear weapons will be answered by conventional weapons, but on a scale that will dwarf the effects of a “tactical nuke”. The US could wipe out Russia’s troops in Ukraine by conventional means, given how well Ukraine’s less well-equipped troops are doing. And the US would publicise any movements of potential nuclear weapons by Russia long ahead of actual deployment. Not a winning move for Russia.
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Businessman who said he burned a $10m Frida Kahlo drawing is under criminal investigation • The Independent

Abe Asher:

»

An art collectour and entrepreneur is under criminal investigation in Mexico after allegedly burning a Frida Kahlo drawing to draw attention to an NFT collection.

Martín Mobarak said he had burned a drawing torn from the pages of one of Kahlo’s diaries that was believed to be worth $10m in order to promote the 10,000 NFTs he created of the piece.

The Mexican authorities, however, do not seem to have appreciated the stunt.

“In Mexico, the deliberate destruction of an artistic monument constitutes a crime in terms of the federal law on archaeological, artistic and historical monuments and zones,” Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature stated in reference to the incident.

Much about the entire saga remains unclear. Mr Mobarak, who is the founder of the company Frida.NFT, placed the drawing known as Fantasmones Siniestros in a martini glass and set it on fire in a public demonstration at his mansion in Miami in July while a mariachi band played in the background.

A video of the event posted on YouTube begins with a page of text that includes a quote from Mr Mobarak in which he states that “I am proud to say this event will solve some of the world’s biggest problems in honor of Frida Kahlo.”

«

Honestly, these are just the very worst people. NFT sales are down 97% from their peak. If we all wish really hard, we might be able to get rid of the other 3%.
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Bruce Willis’ rep refutes report that he sold likeness for deepfakes • The Hollywood Reporter

Ryan Gajewski:

»

Bruce Willis’ team is dismissing the notion that the star sold his digital likeness to a deepfake company.

Recent media reports, including one from The Telegraph, suggested that the actor sold his rights to Deepcake to authorize the creation of a “digital twin” of himself to appear in projects following the announcement that he has stepped away from performing. Although reports stated that this made Willis the first Hollywood personality to set up this type of deal, his team denies the existence of any such arrangement.

In a statement shared to The Hollywood Reporter, Willis’ representative said that he “has no partnership or agreement with this Deepcake company.”

A publicist for Deepcake confirms to THR that Willis’ digital-likeness rights cannot be sold, as they are his by default, and that the company’s involvement with the star was set up through his representatives at [the star’s agents] CAA. Deepcake’s spokesperson explains that their company created his digital twin for 2021 ad campaigns, and that any future use of the likeness would be up to Willis.

Deepcake’s website touts the company’s digital-twin technology as an ability for A-list actors to virtually include their likeness in marketing campaigns without the need to physically appear in front of the camera. The site prominently features quotes attributed to Willis about a 2021 commercial that aired in Russia for mobile phone carrier MegaFon.

«

The implications of the initial story, of Willis licensing his face for all sorts of uses, were pretty big. Seems that’s not happening… yet.
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Google Stadia never mattered, and it never had a chance • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

In the end, Stadia barely made a dent. Yes, it probably lit a fire under Amazon, which launched its Luna cloud gaming service about a year after Stadia, and Microsoft, which began to roll out Xbox Cloud Gaming in April 2021. But cloud gaming hasn’t turned the gaming industry upside down when it arguably had the prime opportunity to. When we were all stuck at home early in the pandemic and couldn’t find PS5s, Stadia felt like it should have been the perfect solution to let vast numbers of people easily play games right from whatever screen is in front of them.

But as my colleague Sean Hollister wrote in March 2021, cloud gaming still has too much friction. Can my internet connection run the game? Is the game I want available on the platform of my choice? Do I have to buy it separately, or is it part of a subscription? The questions go on and on, and Stadia was no exception. Contrast that with my Nintendo Switch, which lets me slot in a game cartridge and just start playing, and you can see why cloud gaming still hasn’t quite caught on. (Cloud gaming is also an option for a handful of Switch games, and it’s generally not a good one.)

It’s clear Stadia never mattered all that much to Google, either. Most big-budget video games take years to develop, but the company shuttered its own studios a little over a year after Stadia officially launched. If Google wasn’t willing to invest in its own platform, why should other developers? 

Developers that did support Stadia were as surprised as everyone else about Thursday’s news. Bungie, on its Destiny 2 forums, said that it “just learned” about the shutdown and would send information to affected Stadia players “once we have a plan of action.” Mike Rose of No More Robots tweeted his frustration at Google’s lack of communication, saying that “hours later and I still have no email from Stadia, and no clarity on what’s happening with our games, deals, anything.” Even Stadia employees apparently had little notice.

…Cloud gaming isn’t dead. Xbox’s offering is pretty good and getting better. Same with Nvidia’s GeForce Now. PlayStation shuttered PlayStation Now but folded in cloud streaming to its most expensive PlayStation Plus tier. Amazon’s Luna is expanding, too. Logitech just announced a dedicated cloud gaming handheld.

«

Meanwhile Apple toddles along with its not-cloud-based Apple Arcade offering, launched in September 2019 (the same year as Stadia). Has it set the world on fire? Probably not. Is it going to kill it tomorrow? No. Are there very different attitudes to project longevity at Apple and Google? Yes.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An academic side project for deciding whether Twitter accounts are bots will be a centrepiece in Elon Musk’s claim against buying the company. (Picture: “Bots on Twitter”, generated by Diffusion Bee.)

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Rohingya seek reparations from Facebook for role in massacre • AP News

Barbara Ortutay:

»

For years, Facebook, now called Meta, pushed the narrative that it was a neutral platform in Myanmar that was misused by malicious people, and that despite its efforts to remove violent and hateful material, it unfortunately fell short. That narrative echoes its response to the role it has played in other conflicts around the world, whether the 2020 election in the U.S. or hate speech in India.

But a new and comprehensive report by Amnesty International states that Facebook’s preferred narrative is false. The platform, Amnesty says, wasn’t merely a passive site with insufficient content moderation. Instead, Meta’s algorithms “proactively amplified and promoted content” on Facebook, which incited violent hatred against the Rohingya beginning as early as 2012.

Despite years of warnings, Amnesty found, the company not only failed to remove violent hate speech and disinformation against the Rohingya, it actively spread and amplified it until it culminated in the 2017 massacre. The timing coincided with the rising popularity of Facebook in Myanmar, where for many people it served as their only connection to the online world. That effectively made Facebook the internet for a vast number of Myanmar’s population.

…“Meta — through its dangerous algorithms and its relentless pursuit of profit — substantially contributed to the serious human rights violations perpetrated against the Rohingya,” the report says.

A spokesperson for Meta declined to answer questions about the Amnesty report.

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Sure to run and run, but could become an iconic case.
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Meta’s new text-to-video AI generator is like DALL-E for video • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

A team of machine learning engineers from Facebook’s parent company Meta has unveiled a new system called Make-A-Video. As the name suggests, this AI model allows users to type in a rough description of a scene, and it will generate a short video matching their text. The videos are clearly artificial, with blurred subjects and distorted animation, but still represent a significant development in the field of AI content generation.

“Generative AI research is pushing creative expression forward by giving people tools to quickly and easily create new content,” said Meta in a blog post announcing the work. “With just a few words or lines of text, Make-A-Video can bring imagination to life and create one-of-a-kind videos full of vivid colors and landscapes.”

In a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the work as “amazing progress,” adding: “It’s much harder to generate video than photos because beyond correctly generating each pixel, the system also has to predict how they’ll change over time.”

The clips are no longer than five seconds and contain no audio but span a huge range of prompts. The best way to judge the model’s performance is to watch its output. Each of the videos below was generated by Make-A-Video and captioned with the prompt used to generate the video. However, it’s also worth noting that each video was provided to The Verge by Meta, which is not currently allowing anyone access to the model. That means the clips could have been cherry-picked to show the system in its best light.

…Meta is not the only institution working on AI video generators. Earlier this year, for example, a group of researchers from Tsinghua University and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) released their own text-to-video model, named CogVideo (the only other publicly available text-to-video model). You can watch sample output from CogVideo, which is limited in much the same way as Meta’s work.

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Moving really fast now.
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AI-generated images, like DALL-E, spark rival brands and controversy • Washington Post

Nitasha Tiku:

»

Abran Maldonado is an AI artist and a community liaison for OpenAI. On a recent Friday, he sat at his home office in New Jersey and showed off images for an upcoming DALL-E art show. Then he took my request for a text prompt: “Protesters outside the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, AP style” — a reference to the newswire service, the Associated Press.

“Oh my god, you’re gonna get me fired,” he said, with a nervous laugh.

DALL-E spun up four versions of the request. Three of the images were immediately unconvincing: The protesters’ faces were warped, and the writing on their signs looked like chicken scratch. But the fourth image was different. A zoomed-out view of the East Front of the U.S. Capitol, the AI-created image showed a crowd of protesters, their faces turned away.

On closer inspection, telltale distortions jump out, like the unevenly spaced columns at the top of the stairs. But on first glance, it could pass for an actual news photo of a charged crowd. Maldonado marveled at the AI’s ability to fill in little details that enhance the fake version of a familiar scene. “Look at all the red hats,” he said.

…Late one night in July, some of Midjourney’s users on Discord were trying to test the limits of the filters and the model’s creativity. Images scrolled past for “dark sea with unknown sea creatures 4k realistic,” as well as “human male and human woman breeding.” My own request, “terrorist,” turned up illustrations of four Middle Eastern men with turbans and beards.

Midjourney had been used to generate images on school shootings, gore, and war photos, according to the Discord channel and Reddit group. In mid-July, one commenter wrote, “I ran into straight up child porn today and reported in support and they fixed it. I will be forever scarred by that. It even made it to the community feed. Guy had dozens more in his profile.”

Holz said violent and exploitative requests are not indicative of Midjourney and that there have been relatively few incidents given the millions of users. The company has 40 moderators, some of whom are paid, and has added more filters. “It’s an adversarial environment, like all social media and chat systems and the internet,” he said.

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AI is probably using your images and it’s not easy to opt out • Vice

Chloe Xiang:

»

Viral image-generating AI tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are powered by massive datasets of images that are scraped from the internet, and if one of those images is of you, there’s no easy way to opt out, even if you never explicitly agreed to have it posted online.

In one stark example of how sensitive images can end up powering these AI tools, a user found a medical image in the LAION dataset, which was used to train Stable Diffusion and Google’s Imagen.

On the LAION Discord channel, a user expressed their concern for their friend, who found herself in the dataset through Have I Been Trained, a site that allows people to search the dataset. The person whose photo was found in the dataset said that a doctor photographed them nearly 10 years ago as part of clinical documentation and shared written proof that she only gave consent to her doctor to have the image, not share it. Somehow, the image ended up online and in the dataset anyway.

When the user asked who they would need to contact to have it removed, Romain Beaumont, one of the developers of the LAION dataset and a machine learning engineer at Google according to his Linkedin profile, said “The best way to remove an image from the internet is to ask for the hosting website to stop hosting it. We are not hosting any of these images.” When asked if he has a list of places the image is hosted, he responded, “Yes that’s what the dataset is. If you download it you get the full list of urls. On clip-retrieval demo or similar websites you can press right click see url to see the website.” 

…it is clear that, in LAION’s case at least, developers on the project have not sufficiently grappled with why people may not want their images scraped by a massive AI and do not realize how difficult it can be to get nonconsensually-uploaded images removed from the internet. LAION pitches itself as “TRULY OPEN AI.,” an open-source project that is being developed transparently that anyone can follow, contribute to, or weigh in on. And yet, when the project is criticized for privacy invasions, the open-source project has dealt with it by deleting Discord messages and suggesting journalists should not read its open Discord.

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If it’s on the scrapable web, it’s not a privacy invasion. If it’s used for machine training, it’s not invading your privacy. (If the image is retained, that’s different.)

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This student’s side project will help decide Musk vs. Twitter • WIRED

Morgan Meaker:

»

August 5th was not a normal day for Kaicheng Yang. It was the day after a US court published Elon Musk’s argument on why he should no longer have to buy Twitter. And Yang, a PhD student at Indiana University, was shocked to discover that his bot detection software was at the center of a titanic legal battle.

Twitter sued Musk in July, after the Tesla CEO tried to retract his $44bn offer to buy the platform. Musk, in turn, filed a countersuit accusing the social network of misrepresenting the numbers of fake accounts on the platform. Twitter has long maintained that spam bots represent less than 5% of its total number of “monetizable” users—or users that can see ads.

According to legal documents, Yang’s Botometer, a free tool that claims it can identify how likely a Twitter account is to be a bot, has been critical in helping Team Musk prove that figure is not true. “Contrary to Twitter’s representations that its business was minimally affected by false or spam accounts, the Musk Parties’ preliminary estimates show otherwise,” says Musk’s counterclaim.

But telling the difference between humans and bots is harder than it sounds, and one researcher has accused Botometer of “pseudoscience” for making it look easy. Twitter has been quick to point out that Musk used a tool with a history of making mistakes. In its legal filings, the platform reminded the court that Botometer defined Musk himself as likely to be bot earlier this year.

…Botometer is a supervised machine learning tool, which means it has been taught to separate bots from humans on its own. Yang says Botometer differentiates bots from humans by looking at more than 1,000 details associated with a single Twitter account—such as its name, profile picture, followers, and ratio of tweets to retweets—before giving it a score between zero and five. “The higher the score means it’s more likely to be a bot, the lower score means it’s more likely to be a human,” says Yang. “If an account has a score of 4.5, it means it’s really likely to be a bot. But if it’s 1.2, it’s more likely to be a human.”

Crucially, however, Botometer does not give users a threshold, a definitive number that defines all accounts with higher scores as bots. Yang says the tool should not be used at all to decide whether individual accounts or groups of accounts are bots.

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Still waiting for Musk to have a worthwhile piece of supporting evidence. (I score 0.3, so only slightly bionic.)
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The sun has won, pt 1: market inevitabilities in electricity production • Planetary Tech

Rob Carlson:

»

Solar power now provides the lowest cost electricity generation in history. The continuing decrease in solar costs is driven by technological change, economies of scale, and by learning effects derived from the expansion of manufacturing. This cost trend is coupled to an annual exponential increase in solar installation that has run for more than 25 years and that is likely to continue, if not accelerate. Falling costs for solar power are accompanied by a long-term shift in the structure of investment; in 2021 more money was invested on an annual basis into renewables projects than into fossil fuel projects, more new solar power was built than any other generating capacity, and the cost of capital for solar projects was at least 4X lower than for fossil fuel projects. As a result, new solar installation now constitutes more capital-efficient electricity generation than any other source with the exception of wind, which is economically and physically efficient only when installed at very large scales.

…by approximately 2025, operating the vast majority of existing fossil fuel power production will be inefficient and uncompetitive when compared to the combination of new solar power and battery storage.

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And here’s the graphic for how solar (and wind) have taken over:

There’s a full PDF with a report.
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China’s Big Fund corruption probe casts shadow over chip sector • Financial Times

Edward White and Quaner Liu:

»

The sudden disappearance in July last year of Gao Songtao, the bespectacled former vice-president of government fund manager Sino IC Capital, was a warning of a coming storm.

Months later, the Chinese Communist party’s internal watchdog confirmed that Gao had been under investigation for corruption. Yet it was not President Xi Jinping’s public campaign to eliminate graft from financial markets that was behind the detention.

Instead, the deeply feared and highly secretive Central Commission for Discipline Inspection had been running a different operation. The target: China’s massive semiconductor sector and what has been happening to the tens of billions of dollars raised to invest in it.

Gao was one of the first executives to face corruption allegations in a CCDI crackdown that has sent a chill through the sector. In the process, it has highlighted the heavy-handed role of the state, which some analysts believe has laid the groundwork for graft and wasteful spending to flourish and has delivered a setback to China’s aim of achieving self-sufficiency in chips.

“The anti-corruption campaign is a warning to me and my team,” said a senior official at a local government semiconductor fund in southern China. Corruption had been “nurtured” by civil servants who “do not understand the industry”, they said.

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Given there’s $47bn (equivalent) in that fund, perhaps it’s not surprising that some of it would go walkabout. As has also happened to 12 people involved with it. China’s big leap into chips might be forestalled.
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Bitcoin-sterling volumes spike to record high as British currency flounders • Reuters

Elizabeth Howcroft:

»

Trading volumes between the British pound and the cryptocurrency bitcoin spiked to a record high after sterling dropped on Monday, according to market data firm Kaiko Research, in what analysts said was likely a rush by investors to dump their sterling for the digital asset or profit from arbitrage.

The pound fell to a record low against the dollar on Monday, having plunged the previous Friday after the UK government announced unfunded tax cuts.

The volume of transactions in the bitcoin-sterling trading pair across eight major exchanges globally spiked to a record high of £846m ($920m) on Monday, according to Kaiko Research, compared with an average of around £54.1 a day so far in 2022.

The surge was likely due to traders swapping sterling for bitcoin, said James Butterfill, head of research at crypto firm CoinShares. “There is a high correlation to bitcoin volume growth and political/monetary instability,” he said.

Butterfill said spikes have previously occurred in other currencies’ crypto trading volumes, such as the Russian ruble and Ukrainian hryvnia, but that he had never seen such big moves in the bitcoin-sterling pair’s volume.

Conor Ryder, research analyst at Kaiko, said the data suggests cryptocurrency markets reacted to the volatility in fiat currencies. When sterling crashed on Sept. 26, “opportunistic investors rushed to crypto exchanges offering BTC-GBP to try and profit via arbitrage from any mispricing of bitcoin across the major fiat currencies,” he said in emailed comments.

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Strange if people are dumping sterling to buy bitcoin, because the round trip to dollars (for example) is not going to be any more profitable than just exchanging pounds for dollars. I could believe people who bought bitcoin in dollars would sell them in sterling.
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The dangers of a headline figure • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

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If you believe my Twitter stream, there are a lot of people out there who think that the UK government has capped the energy bills so they can’t pay more than £2,500 this year. This is not at all true. But it’s been reinforced by the Prime Minister’s interviews on various radio stations this morning when she said things like “making sure that nobody is paying fuel bills of more than £2,500”. Either she doesn’t understand it, or she’s not very good at explaining things clearly.

The problem is that the media are so keen to feed people a single, simple number, that for weeks we’ve been hearing about what’s happening to the energy costs for the average household and referring to that as a capped number, when in fact, of course, it’s the price per kWh that’s been capped. (More info here.) If, say, you use twice as much as the average household, your bill could be £5000. Some not-very-smart people even think they can use as much as they like, because, hey, it’s been capped now, and they’re going to get a nasty surprise! And similarly, of course, if you use half as much, you can worry a bit less about that headline figure.

…Now, the headline figure for every electric car is the number of miles it can do on a charge, when lots of other factors will affect how easy it is to use in reality, like how fast it charges, or its drag coefficient (which affects how its energy use varies with speed). For many people, long journeys are relatively rare, and the important question when embarking on one will actually be something like, “How fast will this be able to recharge at the type of chargers available about 150-200 miles from my house?” And even that question is much less important if the chargers happen to have a nice cafe or restaurant next to them!

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Truss’s appearance on eight different local stations in an hour was a slowly mounting car crash. She started out saying the average would be £2,500 but as she moved on, started saying it was the maximum. If you can’t even keep that in mind, it suggests you don’t actually understand it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The trombone is just an inherently silly instrument, isn’t it? Is that why Trombone Champ is so much fun? CC-licensed photo by julie corsi on Flickr.

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

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

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

TikTok is the new king of social media. Now what? • NY Mag

John Herrman:

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For TikTok to become the new Facebook, the old platforms needed to get out of the way. There’s been a great deal of devastating reporting about the decreasing centrality of Facebook Facebook, the blue site, which is now clear to basically any user. Nearly as obvious, to close observers, is a comparable crisis within Instagram. An internal presentation circulated in 2018 warned that declining interest from young users represented an “existential threat.”

Four years later, the app’s relentless push to get its fatigued users to adopt TikTok-style Reels seems to be making its situation worse, not better. In a memo acquired by The Information, Instagram head Adam Mosseri — whose video addresses to the “Instagram Community” have increasingly resembled a youth pastor’s sermons to a waning flock — warned that it has now fallen “behind TikTok and YouTube on all the dimensions that” really matter, including “fun, reach, fair algorithm, and care.”

More broadly, Meta has seen the value of its stock fall by more than half and is reportedly trimming staff. Where it was once a ruthless acquirer of future competitors, it has, in the context of antitrust investigations, become more cautious. It’s easy to understand why Zuckerberg, who reportedly attempted to buy TikTok in 2016, has shifted his focus to what he hopes are new frontiers: virtual reality and “the metaverse.”

But TikTok’s rapid rise raises the spectre of a rapid fall. It is already showing signs of slowing down, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower, signaling a possible transition away from hypergrowth and into uneasy incumbency. TikTok’s rush to copy BeReal also tells a story about what, for all its success, TikTok doesn’t have that allows its predecessors to lumber on even as they deteriorate.

People follow one another on TikTok and keep up with individual influencers. But unlike most social platforms before it, which emphasized follower-and-friend-style connections, TikTok’s main attraction is its automated For You page, which places users at the bottom of a massive algorithmic content funnel. TikTok is a platform of targeted content and loose ties — a post-social social network that doesn’t rely on your friends to keep you engaged and entertained but rather on “recommendation,” which is the flip side of surveillance.

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Podcasting is just radio now • Vulture

Nicholas Quah:

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Some insiders believe there’s probably never going to be another Serial-esque moment again. “The expectation that there should be one dominant podcast that all of us want to tune into is kind of foolish,” said Catherine Saint Louis, the executive editor at Neon Hum Media, the studio behind narrative podcasts Sympathy Pains and Spectacle, among others. “It’s like asking, ‘Why isn’t there appointment TV anymore?’”

The Peak Television analogy is often invoked when executives and producers talk about the teeming podcast market. Consider how Yellowjackets, whose first season’s finale drew around 1.3 million viewers, is thought to be a hit even though it has a significantly smaller audience than, say, Yellowstone, whose season-four finale scored more than 9.3 million viewers. The teenage-cannibal drama is widely considered a success because it reached a critical mass among critics and influencers while serving the business goals of Showtime. Saint Louis argues podcasting doesn’t yet have a social infrastructure — an internally propulsive web of invested audiences, taste-making creators, and press — that’s able to support that kind of nuanced feedback loop in how we talk about successful audio productions.

And not everybody believes virality and blockbuster status are fundamentally important in the first place. “There are many more people listening to all kinds of stuff than there were years ago,” one industry insider said. “They might just not be hanging out at bars with your editors.” That’s probably true. After all, podcast audiences have continued to grow as a whole. But it’s difficult to cement a medium’s sense of identity, culture, and meaning if hardly anybody is talking about the same thing — and that may well have material ramifications for the business in the long run.

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Why does it need to be a gigantic money-spinning business? Why can’t it just be a craft thing? You can set up a podcast with a mic and a little attitude, and an RSS feed. Another Serial can happen. But you can’t force it to happen.
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Make Me Prime Minister review: absolute, exquisite agony • The Guardian

Lucy Mangan:

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The new reality series Make Me Prime Minister (Channel 4) is The Apprentice for aspiring politicians. If an unhappier sentence has ever been written in the history of English, I do not think I wish to know.

What can I say? I have already told you everything. Do I need to delineate the specific horrors? Very well then. Let us go onward, downward together. There are a dozen contestants. The process of winnowing the wheat (normal, albeit terrible, human beings) from the chaff (the moronic, the sub-moronic, the sociopathic, the hateful and the simply awful) is conducted via various half-baked tasks pursued with a vigour you couldn’t muster if you were trying to put out a fire on your own head. They are overseen by sneering experts Alastair Campbell and Sayeeda Warsi. Listening to the latter’s voice is like laying your head near a screaming drill, alas without the prospect of it slipping and boring a blessed release into silence through your skull.

“It would be quite extraordinary if one or more of the people who go through this process become elected politicians,” says Campbell. Well, yes and no.

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Ms Mangan is not one to spare the knife. And it certainly goes unspared here. Deservedly. Watching members of the public struggle with incisive questions from members of the national media is absolutely amazing. Most people are not used to inquisition. It’s difficult to get used to without having a gigantic ego.
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Record methane leak flows from damaged Baltic Sea pipelines • AP News

Patrick Whittle:

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Methane leaking from the damaged Nord Stream pipelines is likely to be the biggest burst of the potent greenhouse gas on record, by far.

The Nord Stream pipeline leaks that were pumping huge volumes of methane into the Baltic Sea and atmosphere could discharge as much as five times as much of the potent greenhouse as was released by the Aliso Canyon disaster, the largest known terrestrial release of methane in U.S. history. It is also the equivalent of one third of Denmark’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions, a Danish official warned Wednesday.

“Whoever ordered this should be prosecuted for war crimes and go to jail,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist. Two scientists looked at the official worst case scenario estimates provided by the Danish government — 778 million cubic meters of gas — for the Associated Press. They calculated that would be an equivalent of roughly half a million metric tons of methane. The Aliso Canyon disaster released 90-100,000 metric tons.

Andrew Baxter, a chemical engineer who formerly worked in the offshore oil and gas industry, and is now at the environmental group EDF thought the Danish estimate was likely too high. He had a more conservative estimate. But it was still more than double the Aliso Canyon disaster.

“That’s one thing that is consistent with these estimates,” he said, “It’s catastrophic for the climate.”

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Lots of discussion about who and how the pipeline leaks were done. One good suggestion is that it means Gazprom can claim force majeure, and so doesn’t have to fulfil contracts. It’s also a real screw you by Putin for the climate.
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Bank of England (BoE) launches £65bn move to calm markets • Financial Times

Chris Giles, Emma Dunkley, Owen Walker, Peter Foster, Josephine Cumbo, George Parker, Jim Pickard and Harriet Agnew:

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The BoE suspended a programme to sell gilts — part of an effort to get surging inflation under control — and instead pledged to buy long-dated bonds at a rate of up to £5bn a day for the next 13 weekdays. [Up to £65bn – CA]

Economists warned the injection of billions of pounds of newly minted money into the economy could fuel inflation. “This move will be inflationary at a time of already high inflation,” said Daniel Mahoney, UK economist at Handelsbanken.

…The bank stressed it was not seeking to lower long-term government borrowing costs. Instead it sought to buy time to prevent a vicious circle in which pension funds have to sell gilts immediately to meet demands for cash from their creditors.

That process had put pension funds at risk of insolvency, because the mass sell-offs pushed down further the price of gilts held by funds as assets, requiring them to stump up even more cash.

“At some point this morning I was worried this was the beginning of the end,” said a senior London-based banker, adding that at one point on Wednesday morning there were no buyers of long-dated UK gilts. “It was not quite a Lehman moment. But it got close.”

The most directly affected groups were final salary pension schemes that have hedged to ensure their ability to make future payments — so-called liability-driven investment strategies that are very sensitive to fast-moving gilt yields.

“It appears that some players in the market ran out of collateral and dumped gilts,” said Peter Harrison, chief executive of Schroders, which has $55bn in global LDI business. “We were more conservatively positioned and we had enough collateral to meet all of our margin calls.”

But a senior executive at a large asset manager said they had contacted the BoE on Tuesday warning that it needed “to intervene in the market otherwise it will seize up” — but the bank failed to act until Wednesday. It declined to comment.

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No buyers of long-dated gilts. AKA a gilt strike. That is absolutely the worst position an economy dependent on debt can be in. The pension funds were staring into the abyss for a little bit.
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Fast Company used to send an obscene Apple News push notification • The Verge

Richard Lawler:

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It’s been a little while since we had a high-profile media feed hijacking, but tonight someone sent an Apple News notification from Fast Company containing a racial slur and invitation for a particular sexual act.

Apple has addressed the incident on its Apple News Twitter account, saying that it’s disabled Fast Company’s channel.

The publication confirmed the hack. “Fast Company’s Apple News account was hacked on Tuesday evening. Two obscene and racist push notifications were sent about a minute apart. The messages are vile and are not in line with the content of Fast Company. We are investigating the situation and have suspended the feed and shut down FastCompany.com until we are certain the situation has been resolved.”

An article posted to Fast Company’s website before it disappeared included a message from “postpixel,” describing at length how they were able to execute the attack and deriding attempts to secure the outlet’s publishing tools. The message claims they got in thanks to a password that was shared across many accounts, including an administrator.

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The smacking of foreheads can probably be heard miles away. Just unfortunate that on the very day I link to a really good story on it about bridging political divides, it gets hacked into oblivion.
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Study contradicts Rees-Mogg over hydrogen for heating • BBC News

Jonah Fisher:

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Last week the Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg told the Commons that hydrogen was a “silver bullet”.

Hydrogen, unlike fossil fuels, doesn’t give off CO2 when it burns, leading to hopes it could play a key role in decarbonising the economy. Mr Rees-Mogg said hydrogen could be used as a way to store excess renewable power, and “with some adjustments piped through to people’s houses to heat them during the winter.”

Many energy scientists agree with Mr Rees-Mogg’s assessment that hydrogen could play a role in storing energy, for example on a windy or sunny day when renewables are generating more electricity than the grid needs. Many also see it having a future in specialist industries that will prove hard to electrify, like shipping, steel production or aviation.

“Using hydrogen for heating may sound attractive at first glance,” says Jan Rosenow, the report’s author and Europe Director at the energy think-tank the Regulatory Assistance Project.

“However, all of the independent research on this topic comes to the same conclusion: heating with hydrogen is a lot less efficient and more expensive than alternatives such as heat pumps, district heating and solar thermal,” he said.

The appeal of hydrogen is that it doesn’t release CO2 when burnt, and that it can be made from water, an almost limitless resource. But it’s no miracle energy source, with big challenges associated with how the hydrogen is made. Most of the world’s hydrogen is currently manufactured using fossil fuels (referred to as grey hydrogen), a process which is more polluting than just using methane gas.

So for hydrogen to be considered “green”, electricity from renewable sources has to be used to electrolyse water. The problem is that the process is inefficient.

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The Haunted Hatstand is wrong about something relating to energy? Knock me down with a feather. As someone pointed out, it may be relevant that he hasn’t actually been entrusted with the Energy portfolio, even though that could sit within his department.
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Truss inherits a party unbalanced by Brexit • Prospect Magazine

Sam Freedman is a former special adviser to Michael Gove, and now a senior fellow at the Institute for Government:

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[PM Liz] Truss’s initial support within the party came almost entirely from the group of politicians who would never have had any relevance without Brexit. This includes longstanding proponents of leaving the EU like Jacob Rees-Mogg, but also figures such as David (now Lord) Frost who, like Truss, switched his position on seeing a career opportunity.

This is why the fight with [former chancellor Rishi] Sunak was so bitter. He represented such a threat to the Truss support group precisely because he backed Leave—and was supported by other true believers like Dominic Raab and, belatedly, Michael Gove. Having seen him off, the Truss gang are ascendant. But that means a Cabinet packed with politicians who would have been nowhere near high office without Brexit, at a time when talent and competence are badly needed.

The huddle of remaining Tory pragmatists are in despair. If the coming years play out as they fear, many will leave politics at the next election. There may even be some defections. Meanwhile Truss risks being trapped—not just by events, but by the opportunists who have helped her reach the premiership. Few have any personal loyalty to her. Like Johnson, she is a vehicle for their ambitions and will be discarded the moment she becomes a liability. She has the added problem that Johnson is not hiding his belief that he should still be in office.

Governments always run out of energy, and when they do there’s always speculation that the party will never recover. We saw it with the Tories in 1997; and with Labour after 1979, and again in 2010. Ultimately our majoritarian system has ensured that they eventually do revive and win again, and that could well happen this time. But there is a difference today, because the parliamentary party has changed so drastically. Recently, Cummings tweeted that the Tories were “too rancid to be saved” and that “2023-24 is about Carthaginian treatment for Tory Party, ploughed into earth with salt, and its REPLACEMENT.” The man who did so much to put the Conservatives in this position may get his wish.

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The Tory Party conference is coming up next week. Sure to be an absolute banger bringing together all the Tory MPs (except Sunak: he’s giving Truss room to “own the moment” 🤣) watching the dominoes fall after last Friday’s not-a-budget-at-all.
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Pushing Buttons: the viral music game that revived my teenage obsession • The Guardian

Keza MacDonald:

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So, by now we’ve all seen Trombone Champ, right? The music game – in which you play a cartoon trombonist making noises that bear only the vaguest resemblance to music – went viral last week; if you’ve not seen it, here’s the tweet from PC Gamer that started it all. I promise that your day will be vastly improved by watching this video.

This game is very, very funny. It’s “a joke first and a game second,” its creator Dan Vecchitto told the Guardian. Part of its comedy is in the presentation – the discordant visual details, the random made-up facts on the loading screens – and part of it is in the sheer ridiculousness of what you’re doing and how dismal it sounds. Here’s the thing, though: I’m a specialist in music games, with ateenaged obsession that lasted at least a decade, and Trombone Champ is genuinely a good and challenging rhythm game, as well as a good joke.

The act of moving a mouse up and down and pressing a button has just enough in common with the act of playing a trombone to make this a legitimate interactive approximation. And, as I discovered when trying to get the highest possible score, an S-rank, on a few songs – motivated by some deep need to conquer the game – it is challenging to wring anything higher than a B out of the game’s scoring system. Being good at Trombone Champ is not only possible, but aspirational.

Trombone Champ has reminded me how much I miss music games. For a while in the late 00s they were everywhere, after Guitar Hero proved an unlikely breakout hit. From 2007 until 2010 or so, my living room was full of plastic instruments: drums and guitars for Rock Band, DJ decks from DJ Hero. Those toy guitars were just close enough to real ones to make you feel good when you were playing, and far enough away to make anyone feel like they could actually be a rock star, at least when you’re playing on Easy. I did not stop at Easy; I defeated every song on Expert and became phenomenally good at playing pretend instruments – a talent that has garnered me admiration at parties but has absolutely no use in the year 2022.

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I’ve no idea why but every Trombone Champ video has me giggling helplessly within moments. Perhaps it’s just a ridiculous instrument: something that changes in size all the time?
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Russia’s nuclear threats • The Atlantic

Tom Nichols is an academic and former aide specialising in Russia and nuclear weapons strategy:

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a nuclear attack on Ukraine could provoke a collapse of the Russian regime itself.

Assume, for example, that Putin decides to shock the world by exploding a relatively small nuclear weapon, perhaps against Ukrainian forces close to the Russian border, claiming that he needs to halt a catastrophic Ukrainian offensive into Russia. Putin is a product of the Soviet system; his thinking has always shown a heavy reliance on old Soviet catechisms about the West, and he would likely expect such an act to produce panic, the fracturing of NATO, unrest in the United States and Britain, and a Ukrainian capitulation under pressure from Washington and Brussels.

That could happen, I suppose, but the lessons of the past century, from the destruction of the Nazis to the defeat of the Soviet Union to the resistance in Ukraine, suggest that it is a bad bet. More likely, the entire world would coalesce against Putin, including China and others who have so far quietly tolerated this brutal escapade. Direct Western military action (something I have until now advised against) would become far more thinkable, especially if an international coalition—one that would almost certainly find support beyond NATO—came together to stop Russia’s war in Ukraine.

…Putin may think he could weather such a storm, but chaos would also erupt in Russia: one of the reasons Putin’s been able to prosecute this war is that he promised it would be quick and painless. Risking nuclear war after trying to drag hundreds of thousands of men into the military, while radiation blows across Europe after a nuclear attack on Ukraine, would likely be the breaking point for Russian society and a fair number of its elites. As the writer Peter Pomerantsev said recently: “The war in Ukraine was meant to be a movie, not a personal sacrifice … If there’s one thing Russians fear more than Putin, it’s nuclear war—and now he’s the one bringing it closer.”

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There’s a very Death Of Stalin vibe around the narrative Nichols sketches out; he even mentions Beria. If you haven’t seen the film, make the time.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is the smart thermostat in your house really going to help you save energy and money? Or is its real purpose quite different? CC-licensed photo by Smart Home Perfected on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Despite everything. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook takes down Chinese and Russian disinformation campaigns targeting US midterms and Europe • NBC News

Ken Dilanian:

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Facebook parent company Meta said Tuesday it took down a network of fake accounts from China and Russia that attempted to interfere in American and European politics ahead of this November’s midterm elections.

Meta said the Chinese operation set up fake accounts posing as Americans, attacking politicians from both parties and posting inflammatory material about divisive issues such as abortion and gun rights.  

The network was small — just 84 Facebook accounts — and did not have a chance to develop much of an audience, Meta said in a report released Tuesday.

A poll worker greets early voters in Alexandria, Va., on Sept. 26, 2022.Andrew Harnik / AP
“What this operation was doing was targeting U.S. domestic politics, targeting both sides,” said Ben Nimmo, Meta’s global threat intelligence lead. “And it’s the first time we’ve seen that from a Chinese operation in this way. So even though it was small, even though we caught it early, it’s a significant change in what we’ve seen from Chinese operations.”

The announcement comes amid growing concerns about Facebook’s commitment to fighting misinformation and election interference. The New York Times reported in June that the company’s core election team was disbanded, and the company has remained relatively quiet about its election efforts.

And despite the ongoing threat of foreign election interference, many misinformation experts now say homegrown disinformation campaigns pose a great threat.

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The Chinese effort was pretty lackadaisacal – posting at times when Americans were asleep and taking long lunch breaks – while the Russian one was more focused, even setting up fake versions of the Guardian and Daily Mail websites.

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Is Putin weaponizing the Nord Stream pipelines? • Bloomberg

Javier Blas:

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As Ian Fleming, the British author who created James Bond, wrote: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

One does not need to be an avid reader of Cold War novels to see echoes of the adventures of 007 in the real-life events around the Nord Stream gas twin pipelines this week. In a single day, the conduits, which link Russia with Germany under the Baltic Sea, have suffered not one, not two, but three separate major leaks. The word sabotage springs to mind.

Like Fleming’s fictional spook, real Western spies in the Soviet Union operated under a set of principles known as “Moscow Rules” to stay alive under constant harassment from the Kremlin and the KGB. A key one was that “if it feels wrong, it is wrong.” Three leaks in one day feels very, very wrong.

Put aside the fact that neither the Nord Stream 1 nor the Nord Stream 2 pipelines is operational right now. The leaks are more likely a message: Russia is opening a new front on its energy war against Europe. First, it weaponized gas supply, halting shipments, including via the Nord Stream pipeline. Now, it may be attacking the energy infrastructure it once used to ship its energy.

The first step in the militarization of power supplies could have been easily reversed; it just needs a political decision to re-start the flow of gas. The second stage, though, is longer-term and, perhaps, even permanent. If anyone in Europe was expecting Germany would get any gas via the Nord Stream pipelines in 2023, this apparent attack ends those hopes. “The destruction that happened within one day at three lines of the Nord Stream pipeline system is unprecedented,” the operator of the pipeline said Tuesday in a statement. “It’s impossible now to estimate the timeframe for restoring operations.”

Can it be an accident? Maybe. An underwater mudslide could explain the breakage. Yet, geological institutes haven’t detected any earthquakes nearby recently, suggesting the problem is man-made. In the past, fishing nets from trawlers have damaged submarine cables, disrupting phone and internet services. But the depth of Nord Stream pipelines and their size compared to telecom cables make that possibility remote. A submarine could have collided with the sea-bottom, hitting the pipeline. But collide three times, in three different places? Unlikely, unless done on purpose. Foul play is the most likely explanation.

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To be picky, the Moscow Rules as recorded by Wikipedia (I added the link) don’t include “if it feels wrong, it is wrong”, but do have “Never go against your gut”, which is basically the same. Question, though: what does Putin get out of this? How does forever cutting off a buyer for your goods help?
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New skin cancer treatment trialled at King’s • King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

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During the single-session treatment a barrier material, similar to clingfilm, is placed on the cancerous lesion. Liquid radiotherapy is then applied, penetrating both the material and the cancerous skin beneath.

The standard treatment for non-melanoma skin cancer is surgical removal, which can risk scarring or loss of function. Rhenium treatment uses a non-invasive paste containing ß-emitting particles directly to the lesion, which target cancer cells without the need for surgery and without damaging adjacent healthy tissue.

The targeted treatment will be used on patients with a recurrence of non-melanoma skin cancer or where conventional treatment is not suitable.

The patients at King’s are among 210 adults participating in this phase 4 international study. Their progress will be followed over the next 24 months to see how well the treatment works, and to note any associated side effects not detected in earlier trials.

One of the first patients at King’s to receive the new treatment was 77-year-old Finola Cronin from Chislehurst. Finola initially was concerned about an area of skin on her leg so she went to her GP. After being referred to King’s College Hospital, where other areas of her skin were checked, another lesion of concern on the upper middle part of her back was identified and biopsied. While the mark on Finola’s leg was benign, she was found to have non-melanoma skin cancer on her back.

Talking about her treatment, Finola said, “I was asked whether I wanted to trial this new treatment and I liked the idea of it being non-invasive so decided to give it go. I had the treatment two weeks ago – it wasn’t painful and I avoided the need for surgery.

“I’ve got an app on my phone where I can upload photos of the area so doctors can keep an eye on the healing process in between my two-week, six-month, 12-month and 24-month check-ups.”

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ß particles are electrons (produced by the decay of a neutron into a proton, positron and electron). Clever to target in this way, and so much simpler than surgery.
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Make Me Prime Minister: the inside story of Channel 4’s bizarre reality show • The Sunday Times

Tim Shipman:

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When Boris Johnson went to kiss hands with the Queen on becoming prime minister in July 2019, he incautiously let slip that the monarch had told him: “I don’t know why anyone wants the job.” Yet there are always people who look in the mirror and see a leader, just as there are slick young men in suits with no discernible skills beyond bullshitting who imagine themselves the perfect business partner for Alan Sugar — and that is the genius of Channel 4’s new show, Make Me Prime Minister, which begins on Tuesday.

The programme — The Apprentice meets The Thick of It — takes 12 power-hungry popinjays convinced that they can change the world (as long as they care enough and wish it hard enough) and pits them against each other in a battle for power. Frankly, it’s a more rigorous process than the Tory party put Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak through.

Each week they elect a prime minister (a “PM”, to echo the project managers of The Apprentice) and come up with a new policy, fully costed. They are guided by two mentor-judges: Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell and the Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi. They hold a launch event to promote their new policy — cue much pratting about in costumes — and a press conference where members of the fourth estate quiz them. In three of the six episodes this was me.

In education week I was confronted with a team promoting an extra hour a week in schools for coding, promoted by a PM who turned up to take a primary school class dressed in the silver outfit of “a robot from your future”. Bemused about why the candidate would seek to model herself on Theresa May, I asked as my opening question: “Prime minister, why are you wearing a flame-retardant condom?” The answer is on the cutting room floor.

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Americans often struggle with how little respect British journalists show for those put in power above them. That question is the perfect example. I hope that Campbell was doing his best Malcolm Tucker with whoever came up with such a stupid costume idea.
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Cryptoverse: bitcoin miners get stuck in a bear pit • Reuters

Medha Singh and Lisa Pauline Mattackal:

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Global revenue from bitcoin mining has dropped to $17.2m a day amid a crypto winter and global energy crisis, down about 72% from last November when miners were racking up $62m a day, according to data from Blockchain.com.

“Bitcoin miners have continued to watch margins compress – the price of bitcoin has fallen, mining difficulty has risen and energy prices have soared,” said Joe Burnett, head analyst at Blockware Solutions.

That’s put serious pressure on some players who bought expensive mining machines, or rigs, banking on rising bitcoin prices to recoup their investment. Bitcoin is trading at around $19,000 and has failed to break above $25,000 since August, let alone regain November’s all-time high of $69,000.

At the same time, the process of solving puzzles to mine tokens has become more difficult as more miners have come online. This means they must devour more computing power, further upping operating costs, especially for those without long-term power pricing agreements.

Bitcoin miners’ profit for one terahash per second of computing power has fluctuated between $0.119 and $0.070 a day since July, down from $0.45 in November last year and around its lowest levels for two years. The grim state of affairs could be here to stay, too: Luxor’s Hashrate Index, which measures mining revenue potential, has fallen almost 70% so far this year.

…Yet mining is ultimately a long-term proposition – the last bitcoin is expected be mined in 2140, more than a century away – and some spy opportunity in the gloom.

“The best time to get in is when market’s low, the same mining rigs that went for $10,000 earlier this year you can get that for 50% to 75% off right now,” said William Szamosszegi, CEO of Sazmining Inc which is planning to open a renewable-energy powered bitcoin mining operation.

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Weird to think we’re basically stuck with this stuff beyond our lifetimes.
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Breitling Emergency watch • Cigar Aficionado

Mark Weissenberger:

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You’ve crash-landed your twin-engine airplane on an uncharted island. Panic is mounting as you recall Tom Hanks’s four-year-long quandary on that godforsaken island in Cast Away. Then you glance at your Breitling Emergency watch and the panic subsides. There’s time.

With a built-in rescue transmitter, the Breitling Emergency is equipped for exactly this situation. You turn the thick knob located just southeast from the watch face until it snaps. Running from the watch body to the unscrewed cap is a 43-cm, thin wire antenna. The signal is activated, and you can await rescue, pondering the inevitable hike to your insurance premiums.

Breitling engineered its Emergency watches with homing beacons that complement a downed aircraft’s own distress signal. When activated, the miniaturized transmitter broadcasts a signal on the 121.5 MHz aviation distress frequency at a range of approximately 100 miles. That frequency is monitored up by Cospas-Sarsat, an international search-and-rescue operation. The watch’s rescue signal will remain operational for 48 hours. (The batteries that operate the watch are separate from those that power the transmitter.)

If the emergency situation goes away, the beacon signal can be terminated. Use it wisely, however: the beacon needs to be rearmed at the factory after one use.

«

The Emergency is still for sale if you don’t feel like springing for one of those new Apple iPhones with the satellite comms, or you’re going to crash-land outside the US and Canada. Yours for about $19,000.
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Your smart thermostat isn’t here to help you • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

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why is my electric company encouraging me to buy a smart thermostat, and even subsidizing it? In light of their findings, the aforementioned economists think those subsidies “would be better spent on more effective interventions.” (Michael Price, an economics professor at the University of Alabama and one of the authors of the NBER working paper [which found that smart thermostats make no difference to energy use; critics say it is out of date, being based on 10-year-old data], told me that insulation or energy-efficient appliances might be a better target for subsidies to reduce actual energy usage.) Maybe so. But the utilities don’t encourage adoption of smart thermostats to produce individual household energy or cost savings. They do so to encourage residences to allow the utility to control their air-conditioning.

That sounds like it could be scary—it is, after all, giving an outside entity permission to control the temperature of your house—but there may be reason to embrace the practice. “Peak-load reduction,” as it’s called, is meant to reduce strain and increase efficiency on the overall electrical grid during the most intense periods of energy use. Doing so can help make electricity generation cleaner and avert blackouts and brownouts, which occur when the grid can’t meet electrical demand.

This is an increasing concern for safety as much as convenience; people rely on power for medical equipment, but also to mitigate dangerous summer heat waves all across the country, made worse by climate change. To wit, faced with a major heat wave and record-high electricity demand earlier this month, California Governor Gavin Newsom asked residents to turn their thermostats to 78ºF or higher in the evenings. Heating and cooling use more energy than anything else in the average American home, so modulating your AC [air conditioning] can have a substantial impact.

Price told me that he and his colleagues didn’t investigate the benefits a smart thermostat could offer when controlled centrally by a utility, but he speculated that such control could help the devices operate “closer to what is assumed by the engineering models and would thus lead to greater savings than [those] observed in our study.” Ecobee also cited these programs as a benefit of its products, saying that 50,000 Ecobee customers voluntarily participated in peak-load reduction during the California heat wave this month. When carried out across a community, as peak-load programs aspire to be, reduced usage could be more significant, even if individual cost is not.

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My own smart thermostat, Hive, is only used like a normal one – maintain a temperature – but lets me know how the house is doing at whatever time. Generally, useful, though the NBER study found that people fiddle with them far more than they should.
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Google broke image search for Creative Commons and hardly anyone noticed/cares • CogDogBlog

Alan Levine:

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This all began with writing my last post where the title included the words “front door.” As my atypical method goes, I look for the featured image before writing anything else. I always seek open licensed images, and while many people have different sources they use, I still lean on Old Do Lots of Data Tracking Evil Google because (a) I can uses its advanced search features; (b) it hits a wide variety of sources than a single source (flickr and Wikimedia commons yeah, but also Pixabay, other public domain sources, etc; and (c) I have a honed set of bookmarklet tools and pre-rigged search engines.

For the latest iteration of my whacky methods see the Magic Box of Image Search tricks for the last Open Education Week, the latest is setting my main browser interface to not return anything BUT Creative Commons licensed images.

I was shocked a bit last week when I did a CC filtered Google image search for “door” returned a miserable seven results before the end of internet sign “Looks like you’ve reached the end”

These are not the open licensed door I was looking for (none are creative licensed, despite the setting)
In the interest of he post, I went for my fall back, searching my own flickr images for door, which yielded 440 results, and all open licensed. “Hey Google! You suck!” As it ended up, while opening new tabs for links I was seeking, the Free to Use browser extension yielded a perfect public domain photo from the Library of Congress.

I felt this evisceration of the commons by Google was strange, so I dug in a bit, hence a search on the word that is part of my name and tends to produce gobs of images- dog. A standard google image search with no restrictions yielded lots of pooches, pages and pages, but flipping open the Tools, selecting Creative Commons from the Usage rights menu, cut it down to three.

«

It’s quite a mess. Personally I use a third-party app (Viewfinder) to search Flickr for CC-BY images, or more recently generate them with Diffusion Bee 😬. Levine also points to OpenVerse, which I hadn’t heard of before, but seems interesting. (Thanks Martin W for the link.)
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Want to bridge partisan divides? A Heineken ad has the key • Fast Company

Rob Walker:

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Last month, Robb Willer and Jan G. Voelkel of Stanford’s sociology department, in collaboration with scholars at a number of other universities, published a “megastudy” designed to identify “successful interventions to strengthen Americans’ democratic attitudes.” The resulting paper, running to more than 200 pages, covers a lot of ground, assessing 25 proposed online interventions like quizzes, interactive experiences, and videos (chosen from hundreds submitted), and comparing their effectiveness in a range of such categories as helping remedy antidemocratic attitudes and counter support for political violence.

Called the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, the project ran for three years and involved 32,000 American “partisan” participants. As Fast Company previously reported, the results varied, but showed flashes of promise. The research also drew some broader conclusions, noting how some strategies worked to address certain problems but not others, underscoring the need for further research.

But unexpectedly, as some observers on Twitter noticed, the top-scoring intervention in the category of reducing partisan animosity among study subjects was an exercise that involved watching a Heineken ad from 2017, titled “Worlds Apart.”

…In the Stanford megastudy, the ad shows up as part of an intervention proposed by Daniel Stone of Bowdoin College and colleagues. First, you choose whether you’re coming from a Democrat or Republican point of view. Then there’s a screen that describes the “echo chamber” problem—the concept that we only hear perspectives similar to our own. The idea of the project is to “trade” links: I send you something I think you ought to read, you send me something you think I should read. There’s a process for evaluating each other’s suggestions, designed to make the exchange as productive as possible. This plays off a link-swap project of Stone’s called Media Trades.

«

The ad really is terrific. It’s four and a half minutes, but they pass effortlessly, and leave you feeling uplifted. (Ironically, as the story points out, the ad was criticised at the time by some activists. Hey ho.)

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Skipping stones sounds like (and is) an innocent recreation, but of course anything can become competition. And one man is world champion. CC-licensed photo by Chris PotakoChris Potako 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. Gyrating. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why corporate America broke up with design • Fast Company

Suzanne Labarre:

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for all of design thinking’s appeal, it didn’t always produce exhilarating results. “People were like, ‘We did the process, why doesn’t our business transform?’” says Cliff Kuang, a UX designer and coauthor of User Friendly (and a former Fast Company editor). He points to PepsiCo, which in 2012 hired its first chief design officer and opened an in-house design studio. The investment has not yielded a string of blockbusters (and certainly no iPhone for soda). One widely promoted product, Drinkfinity, attempted to respond to diminishing soft-drink sales with K-Cup-style pods and a reusable water bottle. The design process was meticulous, with extensive prototyping and testing. But Drinkfinity had a short shelf life, discontinued within two years of its 2018 release.

“Design is rarely the thing that determines whether something succeeds in the market,” Kuang says. Take Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. “Jeff Bezos henpecked the original Kindle design to death. Because he didn’t believe in capacitive touch, he put a keyboard on it, and all this other stuff,” Kuang says. “Then the designer of the original Kindle walked and gave [the model] to Barnes & Noble.” Barnes & Noble released a product with a superior physical design, the Nook. But design was no match for distribution. According to the most recent data, Amazon owns approximately 80% of the e-book market share.

There’s no question that design has become incredibly powerful over the past 20 years. The rise of mobile computing has forced companies to create effortless user experiences—or risk getting left behind. When you hail an Uber or order toilet paper in a single click, you are reaping the benefits of carefully considered design. A 2018 McKinsey study found that companies with the strongest commitment to design and the best execution of design principles had revenue that was 32 percentage points higher—and shareholder returns that were 56 percentage points higher—than other companies.

«

Those two data points certainly make it sound like corporate America hasn’t broken up with design at all, and that it’s reaping the benefits.
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The first Zero Trust SIM • Cloudflare

Matt Silverlock (director of product) and James Allworth, both of Cloudflare :

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Given the billions of mobile devices on the planet — they now outnumber PCs by an order of magnitude — it should come as no surprise that they have become the threat vector of choice for those attempting to break through corporate defenses.

The problem you face in defending against such attacks is that for most Zero Trust solutions, mobile is often a second-class citizen. Those solutions are typically hard to install and manage. And they only work at the software layer, such as with WARP, the mobile (and desktop) apps that connect devices directly into our Zero Trust network. And all this is before you add in the further complication of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) that more employees are using — you’re trying to deploy Zero Trust on a device that doesn’t belong to the company.

It’s a tricky — and increasingly critical — problem to solve. But it’s also a problem which we think we can help with.

What if employers could offer their employees a deal: we’ll cover your monthly data costs if you agree to let us direct your work-related traffic through a network that has Zero Trust protections built right in? And what’s more, we’ll make it super easy to install — in fact, to take advantage of it, all you need to do is scan a QR code — which can be embedded in an employee’s onboarding material — from your phone’s camera.

Well, we’d like to introduce you to the Cloudflare SIM: the world’s first Zero Trust SIM.

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It’s an eSIM (clever!) which, if I’m reading this correctly, takes your data through Cloudflare’s network, prevents SIM swapping or cloning, ties SIMs more closely to specific employees and devices. Good for corporate users, probably. eSIMs seem to be rushing up the rails to become a really important addition to phone capabilities. (I’m going on holiday in late October – Overspill pause alert! – and will use one for data at my destination.)
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Artist receives first known US copyright registration for latent diffusion AI art • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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The registration, effective September 15, applies to a comic book called Zarya of the Dawn. [Kris] Kashtanova created the artwork for Zarya using Midjourney, a commercial image synthesis service. In their post announcing the news from Tuesday, Kashtanova wrote:

»

I got Copyright from the Copyright Office of the USA on my Ai-generated graphic novel. I was open how it was made and put Midjourney on the cover page. It wasn’t altered in any other way. Just the way you saw it here.
I tried to make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI. I registered it as visual arts work. My certificate is in the mail and I got the number and a confirmation today that it was approved.

«

Going by their announcement, Kashtanova approached the registration by saying the artwork was AI-assisted and not created entirely by the AI. Kashtanova wrote the comic book story, created the layout, and made artistic choices to piece the images together.

It’s likely that artists have registered works created by machine or algorithms before because the history of generative art extends back to the 1960s. But this is the first time we know of that an artist has registered a copyright for art created by the recent round of image synthesis models powered by latent diffusion, which has been a contentious subject among artists.

«

The picture in the Ars Technica story looks very like this thread by “UrsalaV” from earlier this month. Which, wouldn’t you know it, was made with MidJourney. Time required: “a couple of months”.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t see an obvious legal problem with these AI systems, because you can’t point to anything inside them that contains copyrighted information. Training them on copyrighted data is the same as humans do.
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TikTok creators are condensing Hollywood films like Gone Girl and Danish Girl into minutes and getting millions of views • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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Turning movies into short videos has been popular in the Chinese-speaking world for years, on video platforms like Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese counterpart), Kuaishou, and Bilibili. And now, as the domestic video industry becomes more competitive, creators capitalizing on their popularity are taking these videos to the banned-in-China platform, TikTok. 

“Movies and TV are for everyone from everywhere in the world,” Wilson, a movie-clip producer in the eastern province of Jiangxi, told Rest of World. Wilson, who declined to give his full name due to privacy concerns, says he makes about $1,400 a month from his 10 TikTok accounts. “We all cry, laugh and complain for the same things.” 

For his TikTok accounts, Wilson downloads movie and TV clips from Chinese platforms like Douyin. He writes his summary script in Chinese, uses the translation service DeepL to turn it into English, then generates a new voiceover with the dubbing app Moyin. Eventually, Wilson assembles everything in Adobe Premiere, making sure to remove a few frames or horizontally flip others to evade TikTok’s plagiarism detection. 

Another TikTok movie editor, Bi, who only gave his last name due to privacy concerns, told Rest of World that he makes up to £300 ($342) per movie clip, using two TikTok movie accounts “based” in the U.K. with a VPN. Popular clips include those from British shows like Peppa Pig, but he’s even found success on those accounts with Chinese shows like Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf. “On TikTok you get traffic from all over the world,” he said. “As long as you keep editing and posting, someone will be watching.” 

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Summary for Gone Girl: “High IQ woman revenge for cheating husband”, and includes a voice over a clip saying “this woman knocked over everything in the house, then drew 800 cc of her own blood”. Pretty good. And for The Danish Girl: “The wife let the husband dress up as a woman, and he is addicted to it.” Hmm, OK.
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What happens with a hacked Instagram account – and how to recover it • WeLiveSecurity

Jake Moore was asked to help out his friend Ellie, whose Instagram account was hacked (because she didn’t use 2FA, and had an easily guessed password):

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When Ellie tried to recover her account, she felt like she was at a dead end – even after following the steps on the Instagram help site, she felt stuck. When she requested a login link from Instagram to be sent to her primary email address, nothing genuine came through even though she could still access this account. (You will, of course, need access to the email address connected to your account. If for any reason you cannot access this email account, Instagram will not let you regain access to your Instagram profile.]

I had remembered that hackers can often get into the associated emails via the same reused passcode, and then hide or block recovery emails sent from Instagram regarding the hacked accounts.

To my (relative) shock, this was exactly what had happened. In her Yahoo account, she clicked on the “Blocked List” and three email addresses ending in mail.instagram.com had been blocked.

Once unblocked, she followed the process again and Instagram sent another login link. She was then asked to submit a video selfie to help verify her identity (this was only possible as she has photos of herself on the account).

Within 20 minutes, she received an email saying that she had now been granted access back into the account and given a small number of one-time recovery codes to use. We both thought we were on the road to victory!

But it was short-lived.

«

He did eventually manage it, but there was a great deal of back and forth – with minimal help from Instagram support. Hacked accounts are popular for various scams, and the problems radiate outwards. (Also, don’t say on Twitter that you’ve had an account hacked. You’ll get a ton of bots promising to sort it. They can’t.)
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Not a revolution (yet): data journalism hasn’t changed that much in four years, a new paper finds • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

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When you hear the words “data journalism,” you also often hear words like “revolution” and “future.” But — according to a new paper that looks at a couple hundred international data journalism projects nominated for awards over four years — most of the journalism itself hasn’t changed as much as you’d think: It still mostly covers politics, it’s still labor-intensive and requires big teams, it’s still mostly done by newspapers, and it still primarily uses “pre-processed public data.”

“Our findings challenge the widespread notion that [data-driven journalism] ‘revolutionizes’ journalism in general by replacing traditional ways of discovering and reporting news,” write Wiebke Loosen, Julius Reimer, and Fenja de Silva-Schmidt, in a paper published online last week in the journal Journalism. (It’s paywalled.)

Loosen and Reimer (both from the Hans-Bredow-Institut for Media Research in Hamburg, Germany) and De Silva-Schmidt (University of Hamburg) analyzed 225 projects that were nominated finalists (not just submitted) for the Data Journalism Awards between 2013 and 2016, logging data sources and types, visualizations, interactive features, topics, and producers, to see how projects changed over time, how award winners differed from projects that were only nominated, and where there might be room for innovation and improvement. Why look at these projects? They’re “what the field itself considers to be significant examples of data-driven reporting,” the authors write, and the winners are likely to shape future development of the field.

«

Four years? Some of us have been doing data journalism for 15 years or so. Ironically in that time a lot of the mapping APIs have got worse (Google made its Maps API more restrictive) but many of the ways to do the analyses have improved.

A lot of the criticisms offered don’t strike me as well-based. It’s labour-intensive? Most journalists are bad at maths. Relies on official data? So does most work. Looks at politics/social/business issues? Those are the ones that affect people. Visualisations haven’t improved? They’ve been pretty similar for 100 years or so. Good interactivity is rare? It’s also hard to implement – and requires a different skill from actual data journalism.

I’d say data examination is an integral part of journalism now. Whether it shows up as lots of numbers is a different, but not always relevant, question.
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Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go, study finds • TechXplore

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In February, cumulative sales of EVs [electric vehicles] in California reached 1 million, accounting for about six% of cars and light trucks. The state has targeted 5 million EVs on the road by 2030. When the penetration hits 30% to 40% of cars on the road, the grid will experience significant stress without major investments and changes in charging habits, said [Stanford University associate professor Ram] Rajagopal. Building that infrastructure requires significant lead time and cannot be done overnight.

“We considered the entire western US region, because California depends heavily on electricity imports from the other western states. EV charging plus all other electricity uses have consequences for the whole western region given the interconnected nature of our electric grid,” said Siobhan Powell, lead author of the March study and the new one.

“We were able to show that with less home charging and more daytime charging, the western US would need less generating capacity and storage, and it would not waste as much solar and wind power,” said Powell, mechanical engineering Ph.D. ’22.

“And, it’s not just California and western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich.

Once 50% of cars on the road are powered by electricity in the western US—of which about half the population lives in California—more than 5.4 gigawatts of energy storage would be needed if charging habits follow their current course. That’s the capacity equivalent of five large nuclear power reactors. A big shift to charging at work instead of home would reduce the storage needed for EVs to 4.2 gigawatts.

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But who pays for the charging at work? Work? Or the employee?
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Exclusive: Google faces pressure in India to help curb illegal lending apps • Reuters

Nupur Anand and Ira Dugal:

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Indian regulators have already asked lenders to step up checks against illegal lending apps, which became popular during the pandemic. Regulators seek to control the proliferation of such apps that engage in unscrupulous activities such as charging excessive interest rates and fees or in recovery practices which are not authorised by the central bank or violate money laundering and other government guidelines.

Google said that last year it revised its Play Store developer program policy for financial services apps, including requiring additional requirements for personal loan apps in India effective September 2021.

“We have removed over 2,000 personal loan apps targeting India from the Play Store for violation of the Play policy requirements,” a Google spokesperson said, adding that such steps are taken if its policies are violated.

“We will continue to engage with law enforcement agencies and industry bodies to help address this issue,” the spokesperson added.

While India’s central bank requires that any lending apps listed on app stores be backed by regulated entities, it is up to Google to enforce this and monitor compliance.

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Video allegedly shows crypto miners jet washing Nvidia RTX GPUs • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

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The Ethereum blockchain changeover from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, commonly referred to as the Merge, effectively meant crypto coin mining with consumer graphics cards was no longer profitable. While gamers looked forward to cheaper new and used GPUs becoming the norm, according to a series of videos posted to Twitter by I_Leak_VN, GPU crypto miners in Vietnam appear to be jet washing gear their old mining kit before putting the components up for sale on eBay or local equivalents.

In the video it is somewhat startling to see what is purportedly a Vietnamese GPU miner casually jet washing several racks packed with powerful GPUs. Twitter’s I_Leak_VN shared a collection of these intriguing videos today. Alongside the videos came repeated warnings about buying used graphics cards.

The powerful jets from this kind of cleaning system can easily cause potential physical damage (who’d miss a random surface mount resistor?) or water ingress into places it might not easily evaporate from. Also, thermal paste or lubricating grease may possibly be removed too, so watch those fans.

The water allegedly being used in the jet washing / bathing wasn’t particularly “clean”. It could easily leave deposits behind on the PCB, potentially causing damage that could lead to short circuits or other electrical damage once these products are powered up./p>«

Lots of people are going to end up with these screwed-up GPUs which they’re going to think are a great bargain, and get a lot less than they bargained for.

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I watched an 857-hour movie to encounter capitalism’s extremes • Passage

Ashley Darrow:

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In 2008, Swedish artists Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson came up with an idea. As they describe on the Logistics website, they got fascinated with “the fact that the sourcing of just about every object in our surroundings involves almost inconceivable global logistics,” and wondered what those journeys looked like. They determined that in order to truly satisfy their curiosity, they’d need to track, in reverse chronological order, the journey of the “sort of anonymous clutter that everyday life is full of.” 

Eventually, Magnusson and Andersson decided upon tracking the course of a pedometer they bought in Stockholm to the factory it was manufactured at in Shenzhen, China. They write that, “Four years later we found ourselves on the largest container ship in the world on our way from Sweden to China.” As per the trip: “We had started the journey by truck to Middle Sweden, then by freight train to the port of Gothenburg, and after four weeks at sea, we filmed from a truck again, this time from the port of Shenzhen to a factory in Bao’an.”

Logistics was first exhibited in December 2012 to January 2013 in Stockholm, in both the window of a cultural centre as well as a library. It would go on to be shown in China and Germany as well.

What made me hit play on Logistics — and keep watching — was a desire to encounter an extreme. As legendary filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in his 1984 book, Sculpting In Time, the purpose of art should be to “prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” If a silent, 857-hour movie with no recognizable plot or characters can’t do a little harrowing, what can? 

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35 days and 7 hours worth of it. That’s certainly one way to encounter the extremes.
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Stone skipping is a lost art. Kurt Steiner wants the world to find it • Outside Online

Sean Williams:

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In the fall of 2000, Kurt was reading local classifieds when he came across an advertisement for an amateur stone-skipping contest being held 100 miles west in Franklin. It would be the city’s first, and a feeder for the July 4 tournament on Mackinac Island. Kurt still had a pretty mean throw, and Paula encouraged him to sign up. “My marriage played into my skipping,” he told me. “Ironically.”

That September, Kurt lined up on the bank of Franklin’s Riverfront Park, ready to put his years of throwing to the test. Beside him was a local guy named Russ Byars, who had a towering physique and a shock of blond hair. The two were neck and neck going into the final throw, but Kurt nailed it and won the event, qualifying for the following year’s Mackinac pro tournament.

Byars won at Franklin the following year, earning his golden ticket to Mackinac. Kurt struggled during his debut on the island’s choppy water. This meant that, in 2001, both men would meet in Michigan. It was the beginning of an era-defining rivalry.

“You can fall in love with a rock,” Dave “Spiderman” Ohmer, a five-time Franklin winner, told me. “It’s that rare—it’s just got everything.” It was my third day with Kurt, and the three of us were sitting in the corner of an Erie bar, several IPAs deep and discussing the topic of searching for competition-worthy skipping stones.

“You can search for years and say, ‘OK, this is the best stone I have found,’ ” said Kurt. “And then you’ll find another one. And if you take the time to look at the differences between the two, they have unique characteristics. And it’s not just size, it’s not weight, it’s not thickness. It’s every little feature. You start to pick up on things over time.”

Becoming a world-class stone skipper is as much an asymptotic quest for the perfect rock as it is about honing technique. Some skippers, and most skimmers, use slate, specifically the kind of slate most commonly found in Britain and the northeastern United States. Japanese throwers mostly skip sparkling, metamorphic schist.

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Weird but absorbing tale about something that most of us do when we’re young, and then forget about. Steiner didn’t forget about it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified