Electric cars were nearly one in five of new cars sold in Britain in 2024, according to new data. But the number of ICEs in use still rose. CC-licensed photo by David Howard on Flickr.

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

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

Smartphones and computers are now exempt from Trump’s latest tariffs • CNN Business

Auzinea Bacon:

»

Electronics imported to the United States will be exempt from President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday.

Smartphones, computer monitors and various electronic parts are among the exempted products. The exemption applies to products entering the United States or removed from warehouses as early as April 5, according to the notice.

The exemption, which comes after the Trump administration on Wednesday imposed a minimum tariff rate of 145% on Chinese goods imported to the United States, does not include the 20% tariff on Chinese goods for the country’s role in the fentanyl trade. The tariff exemption would have a major impact on tech giants like Apple, which make iPhones and other products in China.

Roughly 90% of Apple’s iPhone production and assembly is based in China, according to Wedbush Securities’ estimates.

Analysts at Wedbush on Saturday called the tariff exclusion, “the best news possible for tech investors.”

“Big Tech firms like Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft and the broader tech industry can breathe a huge sigh of relief this weekend into Monday,” Wedbush said in a statement. “A big step forward for US tech to get these exemptions and the most bullish news we could have heard this weekend…now onto the next step in negotiations on the broader China tariff war which will take a number of months at least.”

«

A note sent out over the weekend: “According to IDC, more than 723 million devices* were sold in the US in 2024, generating $325bn in revenue. Smartphones alone accounted for 32% of that value.”

However on Sunday evening, Trump posted on Truth.Social that “There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday. These produces are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket’… We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations.”

So.. fentanyl tariffs? Nobody now knows what the hell is going on. By the time you read this, it may have change a couple more times.
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Nuclear power is back. and this time, AI can help manage the reactors • WSJ

Belle Lin:

»

A revival in nuclear power—partly fed by ravenous demand from data centers for artificial intelligence—is leading to greater interest in harnessing AI to make those nuclear plants more efficient.

The Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory, based in Lemont, Ill. and known for its work on nuclear reactors, has developed an AI-based tool that can assist with reactor design and help operators run nuclear plants, according to Richard Vilim, a senior nuclear engineer within the lab’s nuclear science and engineering division.

Argonne’s tool, called the Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis, or PRO-AID, marks a technological leap in a field that saw its heyday in the last quarter of the 20th century.

“The nuclear plants were built over 30 years ago,” Vilim said, “so they’re kind of dinosaurs when it comes to technology.”

Today, nearly all of the nation’s 94 operating nuclear reactors have had their licenses extended, and together still provide almost 20% of U.S. electricity. Their average age is roughly 42, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Argonne’s plan is to offer PRO-AID to new, tech-forward nuclear builds, but it’s also eyeing the so-called dinosaurs, some of which are being resurrected by companies like Amazon and Microsoft to help power their AI data centers. The global push for AI is poised to fuel a sharp rise in electricity demand, with consumption from data centers expected to more than double by the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency said Thursday.

«

You just knew that AI was going to get in on the act here. DeepMind said it could use it for helping to optimise the grid in the UK, which it demonstrated on a wind farm in 2019; no clear indication it got taken any further.
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iPadOS 19 will be “more like macOS in three ways” • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman today said that iPadOS 19 will be “more like macOS.”

Gurman said that iPadOS 19 will be “more like a Mac” in three ways:

• Improved productivity
• Improved multitasking
• Improved app window management

“I’m told that this year’s upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking and app window management — with an eye on the device operating more like a Mac,” said Gurman, in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter. “It’s been a long time coming, with iPad power users pleading with Apple to make the tablet more powerful.”

Gurman did not provide any specific details.

«

Ohh, Apple’s going to improve those things. And you thought it was going to make them worse as part of its update. This is the most amazingly vague report: how was it even worth Gurman’s time to report it?
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Netflix is testing a new OpenAI-powered search • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Netflix is starting to test search that’s powered by OpenAI, according to Bloomberg.

The new search engine will let users “look for shows using far more specific terms, including the subscriber’s mood, for example, the company said,” per the report. This OpenAI-powered search will also allow users to make queries that “go well beyond genres or actors’ names.”

The feature, which is opt in, is already available for some users to try in Australia and New Zealand on iOS.

Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou confirmed to The Verge that Bloomberg’s story is accurate. Zhou says that the test will expand to the US “in the coming weeks and months” and that there aren’t currently plans for the feature outside of iOS.

“It’s early days for the feature and we’re really in a learn and listen phase for this beta,” Zhou says.

«

I don’t understand how this would work. My mood? Why not just do it by things that are like what I’ve watched. Or – how about this for a wild idea – things that are actually rated highly by other viewers. Unfortunately Netflix’s recommendation algorithm seems to be too weak to do that. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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More than a million EVs on UK roads as vehicle ownership reaches new high • SMMT

Paul Large:

»

The number of vehicles on British roads reached its highest ever level in 2024, rising by 1.4% to 41,964,268, according to new Motorparc data published today by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

The number of cars in use also reached a new high, growing by 1.3% or 470,556 units to 36,165,401, marking the third consecutive year of growth and the second-biggest volume gain since 2016.1 The increase reflects growth in the new car market, which in 2024 saw 1.953 million new cars registered, with battery electric vehicles (BEVs) making up 19.6% of the market.

Van use grew to record levels, up 1.8% to 5,102,180 units, with more than one million of these workhorses added to roads since 2015.2 Heavy goods vehicle volumes remained almost unchanged, down just -0.1% or 364 units, at 625,509 units. Bus and coach volumes fell by just -0.1% to 71,718 units, although this means that the UK public transport fleet is now the smallest since records began.

«

Those BEVs sold number 383,000 by my calculation, which means that the number of fuel-powered (internal combustion engine, ICE) cars still rose. But perhaps we’ve reached peak ICE?
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Musk’s latest fraud finding isn’t what it seems • The New York Times

Emily Badger:

»

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency announced this week that they had found something especially startling in their government-wide hunt for fraud: tens of thousands of people claiming unemployment benefits who were over age 115, under the age of five or with birth dates in the future.

“Your tax dollars were going to pay fraudulent unemployment claims for fake people born in the future!” Mr. Musk posted on X, his social media platform. “This is so crazy that I had to read it several times before it sank in.”

He shared a claim by the group that it had even uncovered someone with a birth date in 2154 who claimed $41,000 in unemployment.

These were, indeed, probably fake people — but in a different way than Mr. Musk seemed to realize. It was also most likely a case of his team discovering fraud that had already been discovered by someone else.

The issue dates to early in the pandemic when millions of Americans surged onto state unemployment rolls in an unprecedented expansion of the safety net. The emergency aid program enacted during President Trump’s first term was also susceptible to fraud. As many as 15% of unemployment claims were fraudulent, often using stolen identities.

To preserve records of that fraud and protect victims of the identity theft, the U.S. Labor Department encouraged state agencies that administer unemployment benefits to create “pseudo claim” records — in effect, to tie real cases of fraud in their data to make-believe people. The implausibility of the records was the point. Agencies were seeking a way to keep track of fraud claims while detaching them from the identities of innocent people who might one day apply for unemployment benefits themselves.

«

How surprising that Elon Musk and his team of eager beavers haven’t bothered to find this out.
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Trump seeks to end climate research at premier U.S. climate agency • Science

Paul Vooren:

»

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to end nearly all of the climate research conducted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), one of the country’s premier climate science agencies, according to an internal budget document seen by Science. The document indicates the White House is ready to ask Congress to eliminate NOAA’s climate research centers and cut hundreds of federal and academic climate scientists who track and study human-driven global warming.

The administration is also preparing to ask for deep cuts to NASA’s science programs, according to media reports today.

The proposed NOAA cuts—which could be altered before the administration sends its 2026 budget request to Congress in the coming weeks—would cut funding for the agency’s research arm, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), to just over $171 million, a drop of $485 million. Any remaining research funding from previously authorized budgets would be moved to other programs. “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office,” the document states.

If approved by Congress, the plan would represent a huge blow to efforts to understand climate change, says Craig McLean, OAR’s longtime director who retired in 2022. “It wouldn’t just gut it. It would shut it down.” Scientifically, he adds, obliterating OAR would send the United States back to the 1950s—all because the Trump administration doesn’t like the answers to scientific questions NOAA has been studying for a half-century, according to McLean.

The administration’s plan would “eliminate all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes,” says the document, which reflects discussions between NOAA and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) about the agency’s 2026 budget request.

«

Taking the US back to the 1950s seems to be the principal aim of the current administration. It’s mad.
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Two in Oregon die of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease • oregonlive.com

Kristine de Leon:

»

Health officials in Hood River County say that two people have died of a rare brain disease.

County health officials say they’ve identified three cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the last eight months. One was confirmed by autopsy, while two are presumptive diagnoses.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob is a rare brain disorder caused by infectious proteins called prions, which causes rapid, progressive dementia, movement disorders and behavioral changes. It is considered incurable and universally fatal. There are about 350 cases per year in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health.

There’s no evidence the disease can be spread from person to person except through organ or tissue transplants or other unusual exposure to contaminated tissue.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 85% of all cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are considered sporadic, meaning there’s no clear cause. Most of the remaining cases are hereditary, linked to a genetic mutation passed on from a parent.

«

Of course one has to wonder whether these people ate meat from wild deer, and whether that has any bearing. No ages have been given for those who died.
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The action figure trend is the latest way people are misusing the power of AI – and I wish I could stop doing it • TechRadar

Lance Ulanoff:

»

I can understand why everyone is doing it. First of all, these images look just like real action figure packaging. The addition of interest accessories and, though I didn’t ask for it, an optional head, is perfect.

There is a proportional relationship between this quality and how quickly these AI image trends spread. The generative images are so good that as soon as they started to appear on social media, others started investigating how to make one for themselves.

AI Action Figures in packaging are so popular that there are, unsurprisingly, YouTube tutorials. That’s how I figured out how to do it. I found a Spanish-language one created about a week ago. The translation gave me just enough detail to know how to form the proper action figure prompt.

This is all good fun, but there are concerns.

First of all, AI image generation is not without cost. Sure, there’s the price of a ChatGPT Plus membership (around $20 / £16 / AU$30 a month), although you can generate around three images a day on the free tier, depending on current demand. Perhaps more importantly, there’s the cost of AI models like 4o.

A Queens University Library report claims, “Artificial Intelligence models consume an enormous amount of water and emit large amounts of carbon in their production, training, operation, and maintenance.” Another Cornell University study calls out AI’s growing freshwater use footprint, claiming “training the GPT-3 language model in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly evaporate 700,000 liters of clean freshwater.”

If you don’t think these AI trends and the memes they spawn are attracting wide use, stressing the system, and possibly eating natural resources, just look at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s comments. [“The GPUs are melting” Altman commented.]

We have a joke in my house that every time we create one of these AI memes, it kills a tree. That’s hyperbole, of course, but it’s safe to say that AI content generation is not without costs, and perhaps we should be thinking about it and using it differently,

«

The “action figure” viral meme vanished as quickly as it arose over the weekend.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if you had smart clothing that could measure your effort – but also was washable? CC-licensed photo by Tyler Read 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.

No post today at the Social Warming Substack. Perhaps next week?

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

Report reveals internal chaos behind Apple’s Siri failure • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

More than half a dozen former employees who worked in Apple’s AI and machine-learning group told The Information that poor leadership is to blame for its problems with execution, citing an overly relaxed culture, as well as a lack of ambition and appetite for taking risks when designing future versions of Siri .

Apple’s AI/ML group has been dubbed “AIMLess” internally, while employees are said to refer to Siri as a “hot potato” that is continually passed between different teams with no significant improvements. There were also conflicts about higher pay, faster promotions, longer vacations, and shorter days for colleagues in the AI group.

…Apple started a project codenamed “Link” to develop voice commands to control apps and complete tasks for the Vision Pro, with plans to allow users to navigate the web and resize windows with voice alone, as well as support commands from multiple people in a shared virtual space to collaborate. Most of these features were dropped because of the Siri team’s inability to achieve them.

The report claims that the demo of Apple Intelligence ‘s most impressive features at WWDC 2024, such as where Siri accesses a user’s emails to find real-time flight data and provides a reminder about lunch plans using messages and plots a route in maps, was effectively fictitious. The demo apparently came as a surprise to members of the Siri team, who had never seen working versions of the capabilities.

The only feature from the WWDC demonstration that was activated on test devices was Apple Intelligence ‘s pulsing, colorful ribbon around the edge of the display. The decision to showcase an artificial demonstration was a major departure from Apple’s past behavior, where it would only show features and products at its events that were already working on test devices and that its marketing team had approved to ensure they could be released on schedule.

Some Apple employees are said to be optimistic that Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell can turn Siri around.

«

This is another bombshell landing on Apple’s AI ambitions. Another part of the report suggests that the software group under Federighi amassed a huge number of its own AI/ML engineers – implying that the AIMLess group (they’re never going to live that down unless they absolutely blow the doors off within a year) simply wasn’t trusted to get anything done.
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Meta whistleblower alleges work with China on censorship • BBC News

Lily Jamali:

»

A Meta whistleblower told US senators on Wednesday that the company undermined national security in order to build a $18 billion business in China.

At a congressional hearing, Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global public policy director at Facebook, said she watched as executives decided to provide the Chinese Communist Party with access to the data of Meta users, including that of Americans.

Meta has disputed Ms Wynn-Williams’s statements. “Sarah Wynn-Williams’ testimony is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims,” said Meta spokesman Ryan Daniels.

Mr Daniels said CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been public about the company’s interest in offering its services in China, but added. “[T]he fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today.”

Meta does, however, generate advertising revenue from advertisers based in China. [Oops! – Overspill Ed.]

During her testimony before a Senate judiciary subcommittee, Ms Wynn-Williams also alleged the parent company of Facebook and Instagram worked “hand in glove” with Beijing to build censorship tools aimed at silencing critics of the Chinese Community Party.

Specifically, she said Meta capitulated to China’s demands that it delete the Facebook account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese dissident living in the US.

Meta maintains it unpublished Mr Guo’s page and suspended his profile because it violated the company’s Community Standards.

“One thing the Chinese Communist Party and Mark Zuckerberg share is that they want to silence their critics. I can say that from personal experience,” Ms Wynn-Williams said during her testimony.

«

Senator Josh Hawley said Meta has threatened to sue Wynn-Williams for $50,000 for “each material violation” of her non-disparagement agreement. Meta “declined to directly respond” when the BBC asked it whether she’d be sued for talking to Congress.
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Speaking truth to tech gods: I return to TED • How to Survive the Broligarchy

Carole Cadwalladr:

»

In 2019, I gave a talk at TED that created waves: first at the conference, then on the internet and then, convulsively, in my own life. TED is Silicon Valley’s sacred ground. It’s the most consequential tech conference in the world and, in 2019, my talk entitled “Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy” was a break with normal service. It was the first time, a speaker had implicated Silicon Valley directly in the political tumult of 2016. It ricocheted out of the conference and across the internet where it’s now been seen five million times. And, most cataclysmically of all, it precipitated a lawsuit that devoured my time, energy and health.

This week I returned.

It was a big deal on any number of levels. For me, personally, for TED, and, I believe, or at least, hope, for Silicon Valley. I got to send a message to the leaders of these companies from a platform that is inside the temple. I’ve lost my voice and I feel like I’ve lived through a tornado….but with the knowledge that it’s one I’ve chosen to unleash.

TED has just released it as the first talk from the conference. I got to name what is happening for what it is: a coup. I call the Silicon Valley companies who attend this conference and even sponsor it, collaborators who are complicit in a regime of fear and cruelty. And I accuse Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who is talking here on Friday not just of data theft but data rape.

There’s so much to say and I will write more soon but for now I’d be so grateful if you watch it and share it with your families and friends. In spite of everything, I’m grateful to have been given this platform and to be able to communicate what I believe are vital truths but I have paid a price for doing this work and the last week has been a rollercoaster of emotions: doubt, self-questioning, denial, overwhelm, fear.

«

Cadwalladr has gone through the most incredible mental assault course since that first talk. And The Observer, for which she wrote, is now owned (mostly?) by Tortoise rather than the Guardian Media Group. (Thanks Ian C for the link.)
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Court document reveals locations of WhatsApp victims targeted by NSO spyware • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

NSO Group’s notorious spyware Pegasus was used to target 1,223 WhatsApp users in 51 different countries during a 2019 hacking campaign, according to a new court document. 

The document was published on Friday 4 April as part of the lawsuit that Meta-owned WhatsApp filed against NSO Group in 2019, accusing the surveillance tech maker of exploiting a vulnerability in the chat app to target hundreds of users, including more than 100 human rights activists, journalists, and “other members of civil society.”

At the time, WhatsApp said around 1,400 users had been targeted. Now, an exhibit published in the court document shows exactly in what countries 1,223 specific victims were located when they were targeted with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. 

The country breakdown is a rare insight into which NSO Group customers may be more active, and where their victims and targets are located. 

The countries with the most victims of this campaign are Mexico, with 456 individuals; India, with 100; Bahrain with 82; Morocco, with 69; Pakistan, with 58; Indonesia, with 54; and Israel, with 51, according to a chart titled “Victim Country Count,” that WhatsApp submitted as part of the case.

There are also victims in Western countries like Spain (21 victims), the Netherlands (11), Hungary (8), France (7), United Kingdom (2), and one victim in the United States. 

«

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An antiviral chewing gum to reduce influenza and herpes simplex virus transmission • Penn Today

»

more common viral diseases also contribute to global health challenges and economic costs. For example, seasonal influenza epidemics occur annually, causing a substantial global disease burden and economic losses exceeding $11.2bn each year in the United States alone. Meanwhile, herpes simplex virus-1 (HSV-1), spread primarily through oral contact, infects over two-thirds of the global population and is the leading cause of infectious blindness in Western countries.

Low vaccination rates for influenza viruses and the lack of an HSV vaccine underscore the need for a new approach—one that targets reducing viral loads at the sites where transmission occurs. And for viruses like these, which are transmitted more efficiently through the mouth than the nose, this means focusing on the oral cavity.

Now, in a study published in Molecular Therapy, researchers at the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and collaborators in Finland, have done just that.

Building on their previous work—now in clinical trial—showing that a similar approach was able to reduce SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 patient saliva or swab samples by more than 95%, Henry Daniell, W.D. Miller Professor in Penn’s School of Dental Medicine, and collaborators tested the ability of a chewing gum made from lablab beans, Lablab purpureus—that naturally contain an antiviral trap protein (FRIL)—to neutralize two herpes simplex viruses (HSV-1 and HSV-2) and two influenza A strains (H1N1 and H3N2). The chewing gum formulation allowed for effective and consistent release of FRIL at sites of viral infection. 

They demonstrated that 40mg of a two-gram bean gum tablet was adequate to reduce viral loads by more than 95%, a reduction similar to what they saw in their SARS-CoV-2 study.

«

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Nice flex: AI-powered smart clothing logs posture, exercises • Cornell Chronicle

Patricia Waldron:

»

Researchers at Cornell have developed a new type of smart clothing that can track a person’s posture and exercise routine but looks, wears – and washes – just like a regular shirt.

The new technology, called SeamFit, uses flexible conductive threads sewn into the neck, arm and side seams of a standard short-sleeved T-shirt. The user does not need to manually log their workout, because an artificial intelligence pipeline detects movements, identifies the exercise and counts reps. Afterward, the user simply removes a circuit board at the back neckline, and tosses the sweaty shirt into the washing machine.

The team envisions that SeamFit could be useful for athletes, fitness enthusiasts and patients engaged in physical therapy.

Most existing body-tracking clothing is tight and restrictive or embedded with chunky sensors, according to Catherine Yu, a doctoral student in the field of information science and lead researcher on the project.

“We were interested in how we can make clothing smart without making it bulky or unusable,” Yu said, “and to push the practicality, so that people can treat it the way they would usually treat their clothing.”

Alternatively, athletes can choose fitness trackers, like smartwatches or rings, but these are extra devices that people may not want to wear while exercising, and can’t track movement across the entire body.

«

Not feeling sufficiently bullied by your smartwatch? Have we got something for you.
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France to tighten mobile phone ban in middle schools • The Guardian

Angelique Chrisafis:

»

France is to tighten its ban on the use of mobile phones in middle schools, making pupils at the ages of 11 to 15 shut away their devices in a locker or pouch at the start of the day and access them again only as they are leaving.

The education minister told the senate she wanted children to be fully separated from their phones throughout the school day in all French middle schools from September.

Élisabeth Borne said: “At a time when the use of screens is being widely questioned because of its many harmful effects, this measure is essential for our children’s wellbeing and success at school.”

In 2018, France banned children from using mobile phones in all middle schools – known as collèges. Phones must remain switched off in schoolbags and cannot be used anywhere in the school grounds, including at break-time.

Schools have reported a positive effect, with more social interaction, more physical exercise, less bullying and better concentration. But some did report a few children would sneak into the toilets to watch videos on phones at break.

Now the government says it is necessary to go further, fully separating children from their devices for the entire school day.

This enforced “digital pause” – as the French government calls it – has been tested in a pilot scheme in about 100 middle schools for the past six months, with children giving up their phones on arrival – placing them a locker or box, or in a special locked pouch that can only be unlocked by an electronic system at the school gates as they go home.

Devices are banned in primary schools.

«

They must be watching Adolescence and thinking “quoi?“
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Trump administration backs off Nvidia’s ‘H20’ chip crackdown • NPR

Emily Feng and Bobby Allyn:

»

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended a $1m-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago last week, a chip known as the H20 may have been on his mind.

That’s because chip industry insiders widely expected the Trump administration to impose curbs on the H20, the most cutting-edge AI chip U.S. companies can legally sell to China, a crucial market to one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Following the Mar-a-Lago dinner, the White House reversed course on H20 chips, putting the plan for additional restrictions on hold, according to two sources with knowledge of the plan who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The planned American export controls on the H20 had been in the works for months, according to the two sources, and were ready to be implemented as soon as this week.

The change of course from the White House came after Nvidia promised the Trump administration new U.S. investments in AI data centers, according to one of the sources.

American lawmakers have been pressuring the Trump administration for weeks to place stricter curbs on cutting edge technology related to artificial intelligence. In February, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., jointly called for export controls on the H20 chip after Chinese tech company DeepSeek unveiled a breakthrough AI chatbot that stunned the world in January.

The Trump administration’s decision to allow Chinese firms to continue to purchase H20 chips is a major victory for the country, said Chris Miller, a Tufts University history professor and semiconductor expert.

«

Miller’s reasoning: China is “critically reliant” on Nvidia’s chips.
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American Disruption • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

The key distinguishing feature of a better plan is that it doesn’t seek to own supply, but rather control it in a way the U.S. does not today.

First, blanket tariffs are a mistake. I understand the motivation: a big reason why Chinese imports to the U.S. have actually shrunk over the last few years is because a lot of final assembly moved to countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, etc. Blanket tariffs stop this from happening, at least in theory.

The problem, however, is that those final assembly jobs are the least desirable jobs in the value chain, at least for the American worker; assuming the Trump administration doesn’t want to import millions of workers — that seems rather counter to the foundation of his candidacy! — the United States needs to find alternative trustworthy countries for final assembly. This can be accomplished through selective tariffs (which is exactly what happened in the first Trump administration).

Secondly, using trade flows to measure the health of the economic relationship with these countries — any country, really, but particularly final assembly countries — is legitimately stupid. Go back to the iPhone: the value-add of final assembly is in the single digit dollar range; the value-add of Apple’s software, marketing, distribution, etc. is in the hundreds of dollars. Simply looking at trade flows — where an imported iPhone is calculated as a trade deficit of several hundred dollars — completely obscures this reality. Moreover, the criteria for a final assembly country is that they have low wages, which by definition can’t pay for an equivalent amount of U.S. goods to said iPhone.

…I get the allure of blanket tariffs; politics is often the art of the possible, and the perfect is the enemy of the good. The problem is this approach simply isn’t good: it’s actively detrimental to what should be the U.S.’s goals. It’s also ignoring the power of demand: China would supply factories in the U.S., even if the point of those factories was to displace China, because supply needs to sell. This is how you move past disruption: you not only exert control on alternatives to China, you exert control on China itself.

Fourth, there remains the problem of chips. Trump just declared economic war on China, which definitionally increases the possibility of kinetic war. A kinetic war, however, will mean the destruction of TSMC, leaving the U.S. bereft of chips at the very moment that A.I. is poised to create tremendous opportunities for growth and automation. And, even if A.I. didn’t exist, it’s enough to note that modern life would grind to a halt without chips.

«

Thompson thinks there is, broadly, a coherent vision somewhere in the cloud of Trump’s tariff announcements. My only wish is that he imposed a word limit on himself: sometimes he over-quotes from himself. (Sure, I’m a fine one to talk. Even so.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The first David Bowie websites – recently restored – were odd even by the standards of the mid-1990s. CC-licensed photo by Lutz Teutloff on Flickr.

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

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

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

Online suicide forum investigated under new UK digital safety laws • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

The UK communications regulator has announced its first investigation under the new digital safety laws with an inquiry into an online suicide forum.

Ofcom is investigating whether the site breached the Online Safety Act by failing to put in place adequate measures to shield its users from illegal content.

The law requires tech platforms to tackle illegal material – such as encouraging suicide – or face the threat of fines of up to £18m or 10% of global revenue. In extreme cases, Ofcom also has the power to block access to a site or app in the UK.

Ofcom, which is not naming the forum under investigation, said it was focusing on whether the site had put appropriate measures in place to protect UK users, whether it had failed to complete an assessment of the harms the site could cause, as required under the legislation, and whether it had responded adequately to a request for information.

“This is the first investigation opened into an individual online service provider under these new laws,” said Ofcom.

The BBC reported in 2023 that the forum, easily accessible to anyone on the open web, had been connected to at least 50 deaths in the UK and had tens of thousands of members with discussions including methods of suicide.

Last month, obligations came into force under the act requiring the 100,000 services under its scope – from small sites to big platforms such as X, Facebook and Google – to implement safeguards that take action against illegal harms. The legislation lists 130 “priority offences”, or illegal content, that tech companies must tackle as a priority by ensuring their moderation systems are set up to deal with such material.

«

Seems like a very literal case of a lack of online safety. Notable that it’s not been put on a blacklist to make it inaccessible. Given the lack of information about it, you have to wonder if it’s actually hosted in the UK (chances are.. not?) and how any fine would be extracted. Maybe that’s where the blacklisting would come in.
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OpenAI helps spammers plaster 80,000 sites with messages that bypassed filters • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Spammers used OpenAI to generate messages that were unique to each recipient, allowing them to bypass spam-detection filters and blast unwanted messages to more than 80,000 websites in four months, researchers said Wednesday.

The finding, documented in a post published by security firm SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs, underscores the double-edged sword wielded by large language models. The same thing that makes them useful for benign tasks—the breadth of data available to them and their ability to use it to generate content at scale—can often be used in malicious activities just as easily. OpenAI revoked the spammers’ account after receiving SentinelLabs’ disclosure, but the four months the activity went unnoticed shows how enforcement is often reactive rather than proactive.

The spam blast is the work of AkiraBot—a framework that automates the sending of messages in large quantities to promote shady search optimization services to small- and medium-size websites. AkiraBot used python-based scripts to rotate the domain names advertised in the messages. It also used OpenAI’s chat API tied to the model gpt-4o-mini to generate unique messages customized to each site it spammed, a technique that likely helped it bypass filters that look for and block identical content sent to large numbers of sites. The messages are delivered through contact forms and live chat widgets embedded into the targeted websites.

“AkiraBot’s use of LLM-generated spam message content demonstrates the emerging challenges that AI poses to defending websites against spam attacks,” SentinelLabs researchers Alex Delamotte and Jim Walter wrote.

«

But in the age of AI.. isn’t SEO dead?
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Crypto attorney sues US authorities to reveal Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity • Cryptoslate

Oluwapelumi Adejumo:

»

James Murphy, a prominent crypto attorney widely recognized as MetaLawMan, has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The April 7 legal action aims to uncover what the government may know about the identity of Bitcoin’s elusive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Murphy said the lawsuit was prompted by statements made during a financial intelligence conference in 2019.

At that event, a DHS official reportedly claimed the agency had discovered Nakamoto’s identity and interviewed him face-to-face in California. Three other individuals were present during that meeting, each of whom played a role in the development of Bitcoin.

The crypto attorney now wants access to internal DHS documents, emails, and notes that could confirm whether such an interview ever took place. He argued that if the encounter were real, it would almost certainly have left behind a paper trail. His legal action aims to bring those records to the public’s attention.

Meanwhile, Murphy called on DHS Secretary Christy Noem to release the information voluntarily.

«

Well, it would be an FOI discovery better than the JFK assassination or UFOs if it happens. What sort of probability do we give it – 1%? Less?
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David Bowie’s early websites, 1995–1997: Outside to Earthling • Cybercultural

Richard MacManus:

»

As the internet became more interactive over 1995, it became a more attractive place for musicians to set up a web presence. David Bowie was one of the first to do this.

On August 6, 1995, the domain http://www.davidbowie.com was registered on the World Wide Web. In September — most likely coinciding with the release of his new album, Outside, on 25 September 1995 — Bowie’s first website went live. Up till recently, this version had been lost to time (the first Wayback Machine copy isn’t until October 1996). But last November, a Reddit user with the handle JustMyselfAndI announced a restored version of the original 1995 site.

…One of the designers of the website, Michael Endres, added more context on the restoration on LinkedIn. He noted that his company at the time, The New Media Group, had started work on the website in July 1995, “just a few weeks after Netscape 1.1 was released.” The intention was to “create an image heavy website that would bring your 1400 baud modem to a crawl.” He added that the site “was intentionally obscure and ‘experiential’.”

«

Nowadays they’d just stick on a pile of Javascript and an offer to subscribe to their newsletter and a request to send notifications. That certainly was the time of designers who didn’t give a damn about usability.
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Trump: Apple building in China is “unsustainable”, could exempt some companies from tariffs • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

When asked whether he would consider exempting some U.S. companies from the tariffs in the future, Trump said that he would. “As time goes by, we’re going to take a look at it,” he said. “There are some that by the nature of the company get hit a little bit harder, and we’ll take a look at that,” he added, claiming that he will “show a little flexibility.”

During Trump’s first term, Apple CEO Tim Cook was able to persuade Trump to exempt Apple devices from the tariffs that Trump put in place, but Cook has not been successful this time around. Trump has not yet agreed to grant any companies a reprieve from the tariffs yet.

Trump announced the unexpectedly high tariffs last Wednesday, sending the stock market spiraling downward and causing Apple shares to drop close to 20%. Losses continued until today when the temporary pause was announced, and the market closed with Apple stock back at almost $200 a share after opening at $172.

Trump announced a 90-day pause on all of the special “reciprocal” tariffs that were in place, such as the 46% tariff on Vietnam and the 32% tariff on Taiwan. The 90-day pause does not apply to goods from China, and there is a 10% base tariff in place while the higher tariffs are on hold. Trump raised tariffs on China to 125%, effective immediately, and said that he put the other tariffs on hold because “people were getting a little queasy.”

When speaking to the press, Trump reiterated his aim of bringing manufacturing to the United States, and he claimed that Apple “building” in China is unsustainable.

«

The hypothesis that the world tariffs were a fake, and that Trump’s real target (or objective) is to move manufacturing of imports for the US out of China, gets stronger. Pretty difficult with the iPhone, though, even given the parts that are made outside China and then sent there for assembly.
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Bluesky’s quest to build nontoxic social media • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

Bluesky’s head of trust and safety, Aaron Rodericks, previously worked at Twitter, until Musk dismantled its content-moderation team and eventually forced him out. Rodericks told me that Bluesky performs “a foundational layer” of moderation, with more than a hundred contractors working to remove such things as child-sexual-abuse material and threats of violence. But more fine-grained filtering decisions are made at the individual level.

In Settings, users can choose from among hundreds of homespun labelling tools that flag or block certain posts in their feeds. The labels range from the straightforwardly functional (a red check mark for authenticated power users, akin to Twitter’s old blue checks) to the idiosyncratically satirical (a label that identifies landlords, private-school graduates, and associates of Jeffrey Epstein).

One of the platform’s most prominent feeds, Blacksky, which draws more than three hundred thousand users a month, offers a tool to identify and block racism and misogynoir. Bluesky as a company can afford to enable free speech because the platform’s smaller, optional communities have the power to police speech however they choose. Blacksky’s founder, Rudy Fraser, told me, “If anyone uses a slur anywhere—in a username, bio, in a post—we can get automatically alerted and take action.” He added, of moderation decisions, “If you’re making everyone happy, you’re maybe not serving a community.”

«

This is a long profile, mostly of Jay Graber who is Bluesky’s CEO. But there are also little insights like this into the vagueness that pervades Bluesky. The idea of a non-toxic social media platform is an impossible dream. There’s also vagueness around how it’s going to wash its face financially. If it’s not going to be adverts, and not licensing content for AI, it will have to be subscriptions – and that’s a tough row to hoe.
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Study reveals new findings on longevity of legacy magnetic audio tape • Council on Library and Information Resources

Kathlin Smith on a study of magnetic tape storage, in 2022:

»

The key findings were as follows:

• Test tapes in playable condition before accelerated ageing continued to be easily and cleanly windable after accelerated aging across a range of temperature and relative humidity values
• Physical and magnetic properties remained effectively un changed after one year of accelerated ageing, even at tempera tures above common remedial baking temperatures. This magnetic stability suggests that briefly applied baking treat ments likely have little detrimental effect on recorded content
• Certain chemical properties decreased after aging, consistent with hydrolysis and lubricant loss, but these changes occurred only at the most extreme aging conditions and not sufficiently to cause playback problems
• The observations indicated that under standard room tem perature conditions (20-25 °C), approximately 100 years would be needed for the tested playable tapes to reach the properties measured in unplayable tapes
• Estimates for magnetic tape longevity provided confidence that tapes currently in good condition are unlikely to rapidly turn unplayable under standard room temperature conditions of 20-25 °C
• Manufacturing variations appeared more indicative of risk than environmental factors. Environmental controls still benefit magnetic tape preservation, but understanding of collection tapes’ individual histories might be even more beneficial.

“Based on recommendations published 10 to 30 years prior to the time of this writing, the life expectancy for magnetic tapes was predicted to be 10 to 30 years if institutions adhered to published storage guidelines,” note the authors.

«

Certainly seems like Doge made a false economy getting rid of the mag tapes. (Thanks Mark C for the link.)
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The composer still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain • The Guardian

Rosamund Brennan:

»

In a darkened room, a fractured symphony of rattles, hums and warbles bounces off the walls – like an orchestra tuning up in some parallel universe. But there’s not a musician in sight.

If you look closely there is a small fragment of a performer. Albeit one without a pulse.

In the centre of the room, visitors hover around a raised plinth, craning to glimpse the brains behind the operation. Under a magnifying lens sit two white blobs, like a tiny pair of jellyfish. Together, they form the lab-grown “mini-brain” of the late US musician Alvin Lucier – composing a posthumous score in real time.

Lucier was a pioneer of experimental music who died in 2021. But here in the Art Gallery of Western Australia he has been resurrected with cutting-edge neuroscience.

“When you look down into that central plinth, you’re crossing a threshold,” says Nathan Thompson, an artist and a creator of the project, titled Revivification. “You’re peering down into the abyss and you’re looking at something that’s alive – just not in the same way as you.”

Revivification is the work of a self-described “four-headed monster”, a tight-knit team of scientists and artists who have spent decades pushing the boundaries of biological art – namely Thompson and his fellow artists Guy Ben-Ary and Matt Gingold, alongside a neuroscientist, Stuart Hodgetts.

Lucier was the perfect collaborator. In 1965 the composer became the first artist to use brainwaves to generate live sound in his seminal work Music for Solo Performer. Longtime fans of his work, the Revivification team started brainstorming ideas with him back in 2018. But it wasn’t until 2020, then aged 89 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, that the composer agreed to donate his blood to Revivification.

First, his white blood cells were reprogrammed into stem cells. Then, led by Hodgetts, the team transformed the cells into cerebral organoids – clusters of neurons that mimic the human brain.

«

This is the weirdest story I’ve read in ages.
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After leaving Substack, writers are making more money elsewhere • Digiday

Alexander Lee:

»

A year after leaving Substack in early 2024, newsletter writers are making more money peddling their words on other platforms.

Across the board, writers such as Marisa Kabas, Luke O’Neil, Jonathan M. Katz and Ryan Broderick — all of whom exited Substack in early 2024 following the publication of an open letter in December 2023 decrying the presence of politically extreme voices on the platform — told Digiday that they are receiving a higher share of subscription revenue after making the switch from Substack to rival newsletter services such as Ghost and Beehiiv.

Broderick, for example, estimated that revenue for his newsletter Garbage Day had increased by roughly 20% to 25% year over year since he left Substack in January 2024, though he didn’t provide exact figures. 

“The amount I was making at Substack was not enough to hire a full-time employee,” Broderick said. “Last month, I just hired Adam Bumas, my head of research, full time.”

Since leaving Substack, some writers’ subscriber counts have plateaued over the past year, while others have risen — but in both cases, creators said that their share of revenue has increased because Ghost and Beehiiv charge creators flat monthly rates that scale based on their subscriber counts, rather than Substack’s 10% cut of all transaction fees.

Both Beehiiv and Ghost offer a multitude of different pricing tiers based on both a newsletter’s size and the specific features desired by its creator.

«

That’s fine, but these tend to be people who had a substantial audience already, and took them along on their exit. The bigger question is how those with much smaller audiences can build a presence, and whether it’s easier or harder than on Substack.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Gaming PC company Razer has paused direct laptop sales in the US. Guess why. CC-licensed photo by Jon Russell on Flickr.

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

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

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

UK creating “murder prediction” tool to identify people most likely to kill • The Guardian

Vikram Dodd:

»

The UK government is developing a “murder prediction” programme which it hopes can use personal data of those known to the authorities to identify the people most likely to become killers.

Researchers are alleged to be using algorithms to analyse the information of thousands of people, including victims of crime, as they try to identify those at greatest risk of committing serious violent offences.

The scheme was originally called the “homicide prediction project”, but its name has been changed to “sharing data to improve risk assessment”. The Ministry of Justice hopes the project will help boost public safety but campaigners have called it “chilling and dystopian”.

The existence of the project was discovered by the pressure group Statewatch, and some of its workings uncovered through documents obtained by Freedom of Information requests.

Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one criminal conviction has been used.

The government says the project is at this stage for research only, but campaigners claim the data used would build bias into the predictions against minority-ethnic and poor people.

The MoJ says the scheme will “review offender characteristics that increase the risk of committing homicide” and “explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide”.

«

Ooh, I can help on this. Strong predictors: 1) male 2) any history of domestic abuse. It is a strange how people try to recreate Minority Report again and again, when there’s so much past evidence. If they’re hoping to predict deadly knife crime – that’s highly unlikely to work. Won’t stop some people poring over datasets though.
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Nvidia’s AI chip empire is under threat from Trump’s tariffs • Rest of World

Viola Zhou talks to Stephen Witt, whose new book is about the rise of Nvidia:

»

Viola Zhou: TSMC’s founder Morris Chang said globalization was “almost dead” when his company had to build a factory in Arizona. Now, we have these tariffs. How do you think Jensen Huang will navigate Trump’s policy? 

Stephen Witt: Jensen doesn’t talk politics, not with me, not with anybody. He is probably the most powerful tech figure in America to not attend Donald Trump’s inauguration. Now, Jensen must deal with politics. The disruption to his business is too severe. 

Nvidia had long benefited from no U.S. manufacturing. It’s completely outsourced, mostly to Taiwan. Personally, I’m certain he thinks these tariffs are a terrible idea. Whether he will ever say that out loud, I don’t know.

For Nvidia, one option is to just pay the tariffs. Nvidia can afford, almost uniquely, to pay these tariffs, because the margins are high. But profits will go down, and stock prices will go down. 

Second is to attempt to rebuild or onshore manufacturing into the United States. I think they are reluctant to do so because it seems likely that any politician, even another Republican, would undo or reverse these tariffs. The third option would be to just raise prices. 

VZ: Nvidia has also been opposing the U.S. government’s attempts to restrict chip exports to China. After the most powerful chips got banned, it has been selling billions of dollars worth of slightly inferior chips to Chinese tech companies. Why is Nvidia doing this?

SW: Jensen has made the point that China will simply just innovate out of this problem. He was saying that a couple of years ago, and then DeepSeek came along and proved that they could do so.

This is probably Jensen’s point of view: If we ban this stuff, [China] will just build it better and cheaper. It would actually be in our long-term strategic and competitive advantage to keep selling them because then there’s not going to be a domestic competitor. 

«

Multiple companies, all struggling with how to navigate these tariffs. Nvidia with perhaps the most to lose – but American companies also with the most to lose.
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Why we distrust technology • Quillette

Marian Tupy:

»

For most of our history, human survival depended less on technological ingenuity and more on cooperation and social cohesion. Our ancestors did not invent their way out of problems; they solved them through alliances, negotiations, and collective rulemaking. Food shortages, for instance, were addressed not by developing advanced agricultural techniques—those came much later—but by rationing resources, redistributing wealth within the tribe, and reinforcing norms against hoarding.

This survival strategy shaped our psychology. Over generations, humans became attuned to social fixes as the primary way to navigate crises. We evolved to seek consensus, enforce norms, and reward conformity—traits that helped small groups function efficiently in an unpredictable environment. As a result, when confronted with modern challenges, we instinctively default to social regulation over technological adaptation.

Today, this bias manifests in the way we talk about, for example, climate change. The dominant discourse does not emphasise nuclear fusion, carbon capture, or geoengineering, despite their potential to dramatically cut emissions. Instead, we hear calls for people to consume less, fly less, drive less, eat differently—as though the best way to tackle a global problem is through personal sacrifice. This isn’t a rational economic approach; it’s a deeply ingrained cognitive reflex.

Beyond evolutionary psychology, several well-documented cognitive biases reinforce our scepticism toward technological solutions. One of the most powerful is negativity bias, the tendency to focus more on potential downsides than on possible benefits. Innovations—especially large-scale ones like nuclear power or geoengineering—are often accompanied by uncertainties. A nuclear plant meltdown is a vivid disaster; the slow, cumulative benefits of abundant clean energy are far less emotionally gripping.

«

Good points. It’s just that the technological solutions are making only the merest dent on the problem, and the chemistry of carbon dioxide militates against any removal solution that doesn’t have unlimited free energy.
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The AI therapist can see you now • NPR

Katia Riddle:

»

New research suggests that given the right kind of training, AI bots can deliver mental health therapy with as much efficacy as — or more than — human clinicians.

The recent study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows results from the first randomized clinical trial for AI therapy.

Researchers from Dartmouth College built the bot as a way of taking a new approach to a longstanding problem: The U.S. continues to grapple with an acute shortage of mental health providers. “I think one of the things that doesn’t scale well is humans,” says Nick Jacobson, a clinical psychologist who was part of this research team. For every 340 people in the U.S., there is just one mental health clinician, according to some estimates.

While many AI bots already on the market claim to offer mental health care, some have dubious results or have even led people to self-harm.

More than five years ago, Jacobson and his colleagues began training their AI bot in clinical best practices. The project, says Jacobson, involved much trial and error before it led to quality outcomes.

“The effects that we see strongly mirror what you would see in the best evidence-based trials of psychotherapy,” says Jacobson. He says these results were comparable to “studies with folks given a gold standard dose of the best treatment we have available.”

«

The NEJM is somewhat second-division in science publications these days (it’s printed a lot of stuff that has been shown to be wrong, but hasn’t retracted). But anyway, this feels like the final vindication of Eliza, the original chatbot, just under 60 years later.
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Razer pauses direct laptop sales in the US as new tariffs loom • The Verge

Antonio G. Di Benedetto:

»

Razer’s upcoming Blade 16 and other laptops are no longer available for preorder or purchase on its US site. The configurator for preordering its new Blade 16 laptop was available as recently as April 1st, according to the Internet Archive — one day before the Trump administration announced sweeping US tariffs on China, Taiwan, and others that make laptop components. When asked recently if tariffs might affect Razer’s prices or availability, its public relations manager Andy Johnston told The Verge, “We do not have a comment at this stage regarding tariffs.”

Razer may not be openly talking about the impact of tariffs, but Framework halted sales of its entry-level Laptop 13 in the US on April 7th, and Micron reportedly confirmed surcharges for its memory chips will apply once the tariffs take effect after midnight tonight.

The direct link to the Blade 16 configurator now takes you to a 404 error page, and its product page only has a “notify me” button instead of anywhere to submit your preorder.

While shopping for other laptops on Razer’s site, only skins and accessories are available for purchase.

«

Razer in an American-Singaporean-Hong Kong company, but it’s not clear where its PCs are manufactured.
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Microsoft backs out of $1bn central Ohio data center plan • Colombus Dispatch

Max Filby:

»

A major tech company has backed away from its plans to build data centers in central Ohio, at least for the time being.

On Monday, Microsoft said it would no longer move forward with its plans to build data centers in Licking County. The company had planned to invest $1 billion initially toward three data center campuses in New Albany, Heath and Hebron.

“We will continue to evaluate these sites in line with our investment strategy,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Dispatch. “We sincerely appreciate the leadership and partnership of Ohio government officials and the support of Licking County residents.”

The spokesperson later on Monday said the company will continue to own the land and intends to proceed with the project at some point, although a specific timeframe was not given.

Microsoft plans to ensure the land at two of the three sites will be able to be used for farming and will still carry out development agreements to fund roadway and utility project upgrades, according to the company.

Each of the three data center campus were supposed to have one building at first with the potential for several buildings on each site, The Dispatch reported in 2024.

Microsoft’s initial investment was to consist of $700m in building costs and $300m in machinery expenses. The project was to create 20 jobs to start with.

…Microsoft walked back its plans for Licking County data centers as the company has ended leases for sizeable data center capacity in the U.S., Reuters reported. The move suggests there’s a potential oversupply at Microsoft as it builds out artificial intelligence infrastructure to meet a looming surge in demand.

«

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History suggests a tariff-induced downturn may cause a reckoning in the venture capital industry • Fortune

Jessica Mathews:

»

First you had a venture boom caused by more than a decade of low interest rates. Then a 2022 bear market as the post-pandemic recovery upended many business plans, followed by unprecedented amounts of money being plowed into AI companies. But the AI boom was missing a standard element of the private market ecosystem: IPOs and M&A. As a result, limited partners haven’t been getting many distributions for three years.

No surprise then that VC fundraising has been freefalling ever since 2022—and nearly all the capital that is available has flowed to a small group of funds. Last year, 75% of all the capital raised by VCs went to only 30 venture capital firms, according to PitchBook (see data here). Just nine firms raised half of all that capital. Nearly eight in 10 limited partners say they declined to re-up investments into at least one of the VCs in their portfolio this past year, according to Coller Capital’s annual survey.

The expectations going into this year were that the VC sector was due to get its groove back. Many Silicon Valley elites have been hopeful that Trump’s anti-regulation approach will revive M&A activity. And the IPO pipeline was starting to fill up again. CoreWeave’s public market debut wasn’t the blockbuster some might have wished for—the AI datacenter company ended up slashing the amount of money it raised and its stock has been whipsawed since it started trading on the Nasdaq—but there was hope that other IPO candidates, with cleaner balance sheets, might fare better.

As the Trump tariffs take effect, however, the equation is changing. Investors and startup founders must now consider the very real possibility of a sustained bear market or a recession. Companies like Klarna and StubHub have already decided to put their IPO plans on hold.

«

Question: which AI company will be the first to IPO? I’m pretty sure that the first search company to IPO was not Google (it didn’t go until 2004). Is the runway of their funds long enough to get them to takeoff?
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40% of world’s power clean but emissions rising – report • BBC News

Jonah Fisher:

»

More than 40% of the world’s electricity was generated without burning fossil fuels in 2024, according to a new report from the think-tank Ember..

But carbon dioxide emissions, which warm the planet, have risen to an all time high, the report says, with hot weather pushing up the overall demand for power.

That meant an increase in the use of fossil fuel burning power stations.

Solar power continues to be the fastest-growing energy source, with the amount of electricity it generates doubling in the last three years.

“Solar power has become the engine of the global energy transition,” said Phil Macdonald, the managing director of Ember. “Amid the noise, it’s essential to focus on the real signal. Hotter weather drove the fossil generation increase in 2024, but we’re very unlikely to see a similar jump in 2025.”

In a separate report, the European Copernicus climate service said March 2025 was the second hottest on record, extending a spell of record or near record breaking temperatures.

…Cheap and relatively easy to install, for the twentieth year in a row solar is the fastest growing electricity source. According to Ember, the amount generated by solar panels has doubled every three years since 2012.

…In the last five years, fast-growing Asian economies, in particular India and China, have continued expanding their use of fossil fuels to meet rapidly rising demand for electricity.

«

So it’s one of those good news, bad news things. At least it isn’t only bad news.
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Google DeepMind’s weapon in the AI talent war: aggressive noncompetes • Business Insider

Hugh Langley and Hasan Chowdhury:

»

The battle for AI talent is so hot that Google would rather give some employees a paid one-year vacation than let them work for a competitor.

Some Google DeepMind staff in the UK are subject to noncompete agreements that prevent them from working for a competitor for up to 12 months after they finish work at Google, according to four former employees with direct knowledge of the matter who asked to remain anonymous because they were not permitted to share these details with the press.

Aggressive noncompetes are one tool tech companies wield to retain a competitive edge in the AI wars, which show no sign of slowing down as companies launch new bleeding-edge models and products at a rapid clip. When an employee signs one, they agree not to work for a competing company for a certain period of time.

Google DeepMind has put some employees with a noncompete on extended garden leave. These employees are still paid by DeepMind but no longer work for it for the duration of the noncompete agreement.

Several factors, including a DeepMind employee’s seniority and how critical their work is to the company, determine the length of noncompete clauses, those people said. Two of the former staffers said six-month noncompetes are common among DeepMind employees, including for individual contributors working on Google’s Gemini AI models. There have been cases where more senior researchers have received yearlong stipulations, they said.

“Our employment contracts are in line with market standards,” a Google spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement.

«

I guess it’s a question of definition, but to me the one-year vacation isn’t strictly a “non-compete”. It’s a “you’re still an employee, but we don’t want you to do anything for us.” A non-compete would be “goodbye, but you can’t go to companies X or Y” (to which X and Y would agree – something which got Apple and Google into very expensive hot water in California a decade ago).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Tape storage is cheap, fast and reliable – yet DOGE is getting rid of it at a claimed annual saving of $1m. Can that last? CC-licensed photo by Seika on Flickr.

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

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

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

UK loses plea to keep Apple ‘backdoor’ case secret • The Register

Connor Jones:

»

Details of Apple’s appeal against the UK’s so-called “backdoor order” will now play out in public after the Home Office failed in its bid to keep them secret on national security grounds.

The confirmation comes after the Investigatory Powers Tribunal held a closed-door hearing on March 14, which was presumed to be related to Apple’s appeal itself, rather than about whether the appeal itself would be heard in public, the details of which were released on Monday.

Lawyers representing the Secretary of State, Yvette Cooper, applied to the tribunal to ensure the “bare details” of the case involving a Technical Capability Notice (TCN) being issued to Apple be kept secret. They argued that airing these was not in the public interest and would be prejudicial to national security.

TCNs are issued under the UK’s Investigatory Power Act 2016 – aka the Snooper’s Charter – and entities that receive one are forbidden from either confirming or denying its existence.

Thus far, the case of Apple vs the Home Office has been shrouded in secrecy, despite privacy campaigners and US politicians vehemently arguing for the details to be made public, honoring the principle of open justice.

However, there must be a careful balancing act between informing the public and preserving national security, and the tribunal said that despite its decision, it had to give considerable weight to the position of the Home Office.

Pablo Sandro, associate professor of public law and legal theory at the University of Leeds, said the tribunal’s deference toward the Secretary of State included “some worrying remarks.”

«

Sandro is worry that the IPT is too deferential. But it is at least not ruling out the possibility that the case might allow some media. The judgment is pretty vague; what really matters after this is the case management, ie who gets to attend, what they’re allowed to say, and when it all happens. This will be expensive, lawyer-wise.
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The trade war is about China • The Daily Scroll

Park MacDougald:

»

It’s certainly possible that the White House’s tariff scheme could turn out poorly—bets tend to come with risk, after all. But there does seem to be a method to the madness. As Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University, wrote in a Monday X thread (emphasis ours):

»

Three things you need to know about Liberation Day tariffs:

1. It’s not about the methodology.

The formula has been widely mocked, but that misses the point. The numbers aren’t meant to hold up in a PhD defense—they’re meant to shock, to create leverage. The more extreme the figure, the stronger the incentive for other countries to come to the negotiating table with the U.S.

2. It’s not even about the tariffs.

The real issue isn’t Vietnam’s tariff rates—it’s China’s trans-shipment tactics and its central role in global supply chains.

The aim is to isolate China and rewrite the rules of global trade. If a country like Vietnam is willing to align with that goal, it doesn’t matter much whether it sets its tariffs for American products at 0%, 5%, or even 9.4% (current rate).

3. It’s not personal with any country—except one. The tariffs are universal, affecting even places like Heard Island and McDonald Islands, sparking confusion and anger worldwide. But as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained, this blanket approach is designed to block every possible loophole China could exploit. In effect, all countries have become collateral damage in the U.S.-China economic standoff.

«

«

So the suggestion is that this is all part of a plan to get every country to impose tariffs on China? I didn’t agree with everything in this post, but it seemed worth considering.
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US government eliminates tape data storage at the GSA to save $1m per year, but tape isn’t dead yet • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

»

A Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) social media post boasts of the elimination of tape data storage facilities at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSE). A triumphant Tweet by DOGE says that a million dollars per year will be saved “by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.” However, many X users, and a Community Notes addition, highlight that despite its apparent elderliness, tape still remains the best choice in a range of data storage scenarios.

Hopefully, no official installed at DOGE or GSA assumed that because magnetic tape has been around for such a long time, it is outdated and, therefore, a prime target for replacement with new and improved storage tech. Recently, we reported that the tech behind tape storage, the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) standard, carries on with a robust development roadmap that continues to deliver higher densities.

…In the case of the 14,000 magnetic tapes that have been consigned to history by the government, Community Notes attached to the DOGE post reference articles about why tape is still popular for backups in organizations of all sizes and will still be around for “decades to come.” In brief, tape storage remains in favor for multiple reasons, but most importantly due to the format’s huge capacity, long-term development roadmap that continues to evolve, known durability (30 years estimated), low energy consumption, TCO, and suitability for cold storage.

It would be very interesting to know what storage system and media have been selected to replace the GSA’s tape system, but we don’t have these details to hand. We also wonder whether the DOGE-celebrated $1m per year change away from tape will stick.

«

Tape has a surprisingly low failure rate – well below that of disks. It also, counterintuitively, has a faster streaming rate (once you find the file) than disk. Perhaps DOGE is using SSDs – in which the failure rate is 1.2% past four years. Might turn out to be a false economy. Unless they’re trying to lose the data.
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Meta’s surprise Llama 4 drop exposes the gap between AI ambition and reality • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Saturday, Meta released its newest Llama 4 multimodal AI models in a surprise weekend move that caught some AI experts off guard. The announcement touted Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick as major advancements, with Meta claiming top performance in their categories and an enormous 10 million token context window for Scout. But so far the open-weights models have received an initial mixed-to-negative reception from the AI community, highlighting a familiar tension between AI marketing and user experience.

“The vibes around llama 4 so far are decidedly mid,” said independent AI researcher Simon Willison in a short interview with Ars Technica. Willison often checks the community pulse around open source and open weights AI releases in particular.

While Meta positions Llama 4 in competition with closed-model giants like OpenAI and Google, the company continues to use the term “open source” despite licensing restrictions that prevent truly open use. As we have noted in the past with previous Llama releases, “open weights” more accurately describes Meta’s approach. Those who sign in and accept the license terms can download the two smaller Llama 4 models from Hugging Face or llama.com.

The company describes the new Llama 4 models as “natively multimodal,” built from the ground up to handle both text and images using a technique called “early fusion.”

«

This reminds me of the early days of CPUs and GPUs, when each incremental shift would be explained in terms of changes that made no sense to the ordinary person.
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Social Security’s website keeps crashing, as DOGE demands cuts to IT staff • The Washington Post

Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson and Elizabeth Dwoskin:

»

Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to 7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50% cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.

Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.

«

It’s the Twitter model – strip the staff to the bone, rewrite the software any old way, who knows if it might work.
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An open letter to U.S. customers • Keyboardio

“Jesse and Kia”:

»

Let’s be real: we would rather make our products in the USA. Doing business in China is hard: a different language, a different culture, a different legal system, and a very long and expensive plane flight every time you have to pop over to help fix what’s gone wrong. So why don’t we make keyboards in the USA instead—and why don’t the vast majority of consumer electronics manufacturers, be they big or indie? 

Most of our electrical components are made in China. Sometimes we’ll use or consider components not made in China—and they’re made in Japan, Taiwan, or Germany. The USA doesn’t make the components we need.

Making keyboards is intrinsically a cross-border activity. (For us, some of that activity involves shipping American goods to China! We make a number of products that use American wood. Unfortunately, China has just announced they will now tax that lumber at 34% in a retaliatory tariff.)

We’re a small company making niche products; we don’t have the volume to justify opening our own factory. We definitely don’t have the capital to do it. We rely on contract manufacturing, where we pay a network of factories to make products to our specifications, without us owning the machinery or hiring the workers ourselves. 

Southern China, Guangdong and Shenzhen in particular, have developed an ecosystem of factories and suppliers within a small radius. Within about thirty miles, we work with a bunch of factories who are specialized in doing low volume production runs. Having so many companies close together saves a lot on transportation and freight. More importantly, it allows for local competition and sharing of knowledge—just like greater Los Angeles is the best place to make TV and movies even though other cities offer incentives, Guangdong is the best place to make consumer electronics.

…If you want to get a sense of what it costs to hand assemble keyboards in the USA, take a look at Norbauer & Co’s Seneca keyboard. It’s gorgeous and beautifully made. It’s also priced at $3600.

«

They presently face between $363 and $518 in import tariffs (the latter on a keyboard costing about $350). So they’re recommending people buy a keyboard now.

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The dire wolf is back • The New Yorker

D. T. Max:

»

Beth Shapiro, a noted ancient-DNA researcher who is now the chief science officer at Colossal [which produced the new “dire wolf” pups], said, “We have to figure out how to build a trillion-piece puzzle while working with pieces that were left outside during a hurricane, using the picture of a slightly different puzzle on the top of the box, and the contents of more than a hundred and fifty thousand different puzzles inside”—that is, the DNA of all the microbes and fungi that got into the animal’s bone after it died.

…Much of the dire wolves’ behaviour reminded me of dogs’. Romulus and Remus [two of the three existing animals] rested on their haunches in the sun. They chased falling leaves; they chewed sticks. One peed, and the other hurried over to roll in it. Other aspects seemed wolflike—when Romulus got nervous, he did a sideways slide while facing us. (James explained to me that this maneuver is a way to both check out a threat and look as large as possible.) And, when the wolves ran, they loped as if their lower legs had an extra joint. They didn’t howl, and their footfalls were silent. Was this distinctive dire-wolf behavior? How could anyone say?

Though Romulus and Remus are identical twins—they came from the same engineered cell line—I could see that they were already behaving differently. Remus was braver. He would come up within ten feet of us, then think better of it. Romulus hung back. They both gave off a sense of biding their time; since nothing formidable had yet been asked of them, they had done nothing formidable.

But they could; their bodies were clearly powerful. At one point, Remus seemed interested in getting behind us—he stopped when James looked at him—and I was reminded of the legend on the Dire Wolves card in Magic: The Gathering: “It’s amazing how scared a city kid can get at a dog.” I was told to keep a respectful distance. Lamm, though, seemed unafraid. “I pet Remus last week,” he said proudly. “But, you know, that’s because I’ve been around them forever.” (James says that around the time they enter puberty—at roughly a year old—they will likely be deemed too aggressive to be petted ever again. “We’re about to hit a trigger point,” he said.)

«

A long look at Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to bring multiple animals – the woolly mammoth, the dodo, the thylacine (a marsupial) – “back”. Except of course they don’t have the original DNA, or females to gestate them. But don’t let that get in the way of a story with a Game Of Thrones tinge and the ker-ching for a startup.
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Ukraine is stuck with Musk’s Starlink for now • POLITICO

Mathieu Pollet:

»

the European Union is on the lookout for backup options for Ukraine. One of those is Franco-British operator Eutelsat, which is pitching itself as a way for Kyiv to get out from under Musk’s thumb.

Working with Starlink “is a dependence that can be decided in the White House or [Trump’s private residence] Mar-a-Lago,” Eutelsat Chief Executive Officer Eva Berneke told POLITICO. “It’s good to have multiple options.”

But today’s Starlink alternatives aren’t ready to take on Musk — including Eutelsat, by Berneke’s own admission.

“If we were to take over the entire connectivity capacity for Ukraine and all the citizens, we wouldn’t be able to do that. Let’s just be very honest,” Berneke said. “But I do think we can provide capacity for some of the critical use cases of government.”

Few firms have invested in low-earth orbit satellites. Such systems offer faster connections and lower latency — crucial for real-time operations like drone warfare — but they remain costly and cumbersome to operate. Starlink, which is owned by Musk’s SpaceX, leads the market, with Eutelsat as a strong challenger and others, like Amazon’s Project Kuiper, still lagging behind.

“This type of solution that Starlink is offering is unique,” said Christopher Baugh, a space industry expert at consulting firm Analysys Mason. Starlink has “broken barriers technically” and “filled the void, because nothing else was available,” he said.
With cutting-edge, compact kits and a vast web of flexible beams, Starlink’s 7,000 satellites dwarf Eutelsat’s 600-strong fleet and comparatively clunkier terminals. Musk’s network can offer between 23 and 490 times the capacity of Eutelsat over Ukraine, depending on the use scenarios.

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(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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I remember how the darkness doubled • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

»

During the 1950s, the television set replaced the cinema as the focal point of American entertainment. At the decade’s start, fewer than one in ten households had a TV. By its close, nine in ten did. Americans were buying TVs at the rate of a hundred thousand a week. Gathering around the set became an evening ritual for most families, everyone on the couch or in an easy chair, watching situation comedies, game shows, variety shows, and dramas on the small screen. Moviegoing, a far more communal activity, dropped sharply.

…Popular TV shows, from I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best in the fifties to the Andy Griffith Show and the Beverly Hillbillies in the sixties to All in the Family and Good Times in the seventies, tended to be set in a familiar, middle-class domestic milieu. Even the occasional oddball show like My Favorite Martian, The Munsters, or Lost in Space shared that same quotidian setting. But there was one commonplace domestic activity you almost never saw people do on television: watch television. Even as television became the conduit and shaper of culture, it remained invisible in the products of culture. It’s not hard to understand why. Watching someone watch TV is boring.

…Like the TV before it, the smartphone has remained largely invisible in the products of culture, even as its dominion over culture has grown. Watching a person look into a phone screen is even more boring than watching someone watch TV. And because people with smartphones know everything that’s going on the instant it happens, a society of phone-wielders is resistant to the development of dramatic tension. There’s a reason so much narrative art is now set in fantasy worlds or in the past: there are no phones there.

That’s beginning to change now, at least in literary story-telling. Because much of what flows through phones takes the form of words, writers who have grown up with texting and social media are incorporating the rhythms and quirks of online writing into their work, just as writers of epistolary novels did after letter-writing became commonplace in the eighteenth century. As the rise of autofiction shows, the claustrophobic solitude that characterizes social-media use is seeping into art.

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If you recognise where the title of the post comes from (clue: 🎪🌚) then you will absolutely love this blogpost.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The American designers of the Scythe boardgame, along with others, are very worried by Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports. CC-licensed photo by Farley Santos on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Cutting it up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: how the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg got added to the White House Signal group chat • The Guardian

Hugo Lowell:

»

[Trump’s national security adviser Mike] Waltz’s phone had saved [Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey] Goldberg’s number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October.

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.

A day after that Goldberg story was published, on 22 October, Waltz appeared on CNN to defend Trump. “Don’t take it from me, take it from the 13 Abbey Gate Gold Star families, some of whom stood on a stage in front of a 30,000 person crowd and said how he helped them heal,” Waltz said.

According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.

The mistake went unnoticed until last month when Waltz sought to add Hughes to the Signal group chat – but ended up adding Goldberg’s number to the 13 March message chain named “Houthi PC small group”, where several top US officials discussed plans for strikes against the Houthis.

Waltz said in the immediate aftermath of the incident that he had never met or communicated with Goldberg. He also suggested on Fox News that Goldberg’s number had been “sucked” into his phone, seemingly in reference to how his iPhone had saved Goldberg’s number.

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People who can’t correctly add a phone number to their contacts, but sure, put them in charge of nuclear codes and the entire American economy.
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European Union prepares major penalties against Elon Musk’s X • The New York Times

Adam Satariano:

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European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, for breaking a landmark law to combat illicit content and disinformation, said four people with knowledge of the plans, a move that is likely to ratchet up tensions with the United States by targeting one of President Trump’s closest advisers.

The penalties are set to include a fine and demands for product changes, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing an ongoing investigation. These are expected to be announced this summer and would be the first issued under a new EU law intended to force social media companies to police their services, they said.

European authorities have been weighing how large a fine to issue X as they consider the risks of further antagonizing Mr. Trump amid wider trans-Atlantic disputes over trade, tariffs and the war in Ukraine. The fine could surpass $1bn, one person said, as regulators seek to make an example of X to deter other companies from violating the law, the Digital Services Act.

EU officials said their investigation into X was progressing independently from tariff negotiations after Mr. Trump announced major new levies this week. The investigation began in 2023, and regulators last year issued a preliminary ruling that X had violated the law.

«

That might be tariff leverage, in time.
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OpenAI, Google reject UK’s AI copyright plan • POLITICO

Joseph Bambridge:

»

Leading AI companies OpenAI and Google have rejected the U.K. government’s preferred solution to the thorny issue of AI and copyright.

Their positions, set out in responses to a consultation which closed in February, will pile further pressure on the government over the proposals, which have already sparked protests from creatives and lawmakers.

The submissions were requested by the U.K. parliament’s Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, after representatives of both companies declined to give evidence to MPs on their respective positions.

The government’s “preferred option” in the consultation proposed amending copyright law to allow AI companies to train their models on public content for commercial purposes without permission from rights holders, unless rights holders “reserve their rights” by opting out.

The changes would be coupled with greater transparency requirements on AI firms, according to the government’s proposal.

POLITICO has reported that ministers plan to commit to publishing reviews into technical solutions for how these conditions could be met in a bid to quell criticism of the plans.

But in its response to the consultation, OpenAI said experience from other jurisdictions including the EU shows that opt-out models face “significant implementation challenges,” while transparency obligations could see developers “deprioritize the market.”

“The U.K. has a rare opportunity to cement itself as the AI capital of Europe by making choices that avoid policy uncertainty, foster innovation, and drive economic growth,” the company said, calling for a broad copyright exemption.

«

A story repeated again and again: rapacious company says that if you make its life harder, well, then, you’re shooting yourself in the foot, so of course you have to exempt it from all the normal laws that apply to smaller companies.
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‘Netflix levy’ would ‘price out’ consumers, says Irish minister for media • RTE

»

Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan has expressed his opposition to proposals for a levy on streaming services like Netflix, saying that people would be priced out of being able to purchase entertainment services.

Speaking on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics, Mr O’Donovan said he did not see why a so-called ‘Netflix levy’ would be imposed on consumers, and would bring a memo to the Cabinet on the matter.

The legislation that established Comisiún na Méan provided for the streaming levy to be charged in order to provide funding for the production of home-produced programming.

Preparations for applying the levy had been taking place during the term of the previous minister, Catherine Martin.

Under the proposed changes Mr O’Donovan intends bringing to the legislation, the concept of levies on streaming platforms will be retained, but the decision to action such levies will have to be agreed by the minister.

«

The proposal is hardly gigantic: no fixed figure set, but perhaps 2-3% of each streamer’s national income. Hard to see how that would lead them to price people out of buying them. Plus what happened to the much-vaunted advertising version, which is at a lower price? The idea is that the levy then funds local productions.
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Doge’s attack on social security causing ‘complete, utter chaos’, staff says • The Guardian

Michael Sainato:

»

Office closures, staffing and service cuts, and policy changes at the Social Security Administration (SSA) have caused “complete, utter chaos” and are threatening to send the agency into a “death spiral”, according to workers at the agency.

The SSA operates the largest government program in the US, administering social insurance programs, including retirement, disability and survivor benefits.

An average of almost 69 million Americans per month will receive a social security benefit in 2025, totaling about $1.6tn in benefits paid during the year and accounting for 22% of the federal budget. While expensive and challenged by an ageing population, social security remains overwhelmingly popular with Americans. But the agency has been dubbed a “Ponzi scheme” by Elon Musk, the billionaire whose so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is currently slashing its staff and budgets.

“They have these ‘concepts of plans’ that they’re hoping are sticking but in reality, are really hurting American people,” said a longtime SSA employee and military veteran who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “No one knows what’s going on. They’re just coming up with ideas at the top of their head.”

The SSA website has crashed several times this month. Wired reported Doge staff want to migrate all social security data and rewrite code in months, which could cause system collapse and further outages.

The agency plans to eliminate the jobs of 7,000 workers at the agency through voluntary buyouts, resignations or firings, though the union representing SSA employees anticipate even more firings beyond cutting staff to 50,000 workers.

«

This is not going to be fixed quickly, or perhaps at all. The question is what the US will look like in the aftermath of all this. Tariffs hitting consumers; veterans and social security having payments delayed or denied. It’s a recipe for an uprising – except most of the people are far too old to take part in real rioting on the street.
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TikTok gets another 75-day reprieve from ban • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said that he is signing an executive order to keep TikTok running for an additional 75 days as his administration continues to work on the sale of the social network’s U.S. operations.

TikTok was barred from operating in the United States when the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act went into effect on January 19, but Trump at the time ordered the Department of Justice not to enforce the law for a 75-day period. The window was set to expire on Saturday, April 5 if TikTok did not reach a deal to sell to an American company, but TikTok now has another two and a half months.

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“Ehh, just don’t enforce the law! What could be the harm in that?”
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Trump tariffs terrify board game designers • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

»

Board game designer and entrepreneur Jamey Stegmaier has published hit games like Scythe and Wingspan—the latter a personal favorite of mine, with a delightfully gentle theme about birds—but this week found him in a gloomy mood.

“Last night I tried to work on a new game I’m brainstorming,” he wrote in a blog post on Thursday, “but it’s really hard to create something for the future when that future looks so grim. I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54% tariff on goods manufactured in China and imported to the US.”

Most US board games are made in China, though Germany (the home of modern hobby board gaming) also has manufacturing facilities. While printed content, such as card games, can be manufactured in the US, it’s far harder to find anyone who can make intricate board pieces like bespoke wooden bits and custom dice. And if you can, the price is often astronomical. “I recall getting quoted a cost of $10 for just a standard empty box from a company in the US that specializes in making boxes,” Stegmaier noted—though a complete game can be produced and boxed in China for that same amount.

Meredith Placko is the CEO of Steve Jackson Games, which produces titles like Munchkin, and she had a similar take. “Some people ask, ‘Why not manufacture in the US?’ I wish we could,” she wrote in a post on Thursday. “But the infrastructure to support full-scale boardgame production—specialty dice making, die-cutting, custom plastic and wood components—doesn’t meaningfully exist here yet. I’ve gotten quotes. I’ve talked to factories. Even when the willingness is there, the equipment, labour, and timelines simply aren’t.”

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Related: Switch 2 shipments to the US uncertain due to tariffs.
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Here’s the iPhone. Here’s the iPhone with tariffs • WSJ

Joanna Stern, Adrienne Tong and Nicole Nguyen:

»

Take a look at this iPhone 16 Pro. Your cost, for the 256GB version, is $1,100. The cost of all the hardware inside—aka the bill of materials—was about $550 to Apple when the phone was introduced, says Wayne Lam, research analyst at TechInsights, which breaks down major products. Throw in assembly and testing and Apple’s cost rises to around $580. Even when you account for Apple’s advertising budget and all the included services—iMessage, iCloud, etc.—there’s still a healthy profit margin.

Now factor in the newly announced tariff for goods from China, which currently totals 54%. The cost rises to around $850. That profit margin would shrink dramatically if Apple didn’t up the price. And you don’t become a trillion-dollar gadget company by charging for things at cost.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s pricing plans or manufacturing details.

So what about that American-made iPhone? Wouldn’t it at least save on tariffs? Apple would still pay levies on the device’s many imported parts. Plus, a manufacturing move to the U.S. would be “a massive, mammoth undertaking” that would take years, says Barton Crockett, senior research analyst at brokerage firm Rosenblatt Securities. 

And the phone itself would likely cost more—a lot more. The assembly ecosystem in China is labor intensive and wouldn’t make economic sense in the U.S., Crockett explains. “It’s not clear you can make a competitively priced smartphone here.”

By Lam’s estimates, the assembly labor that might cost $30 per phone in China could cost $300 in the U.S. And if every single component, from the touchscreen display to the internal storage were built here? Yep, a bajillion dollars. And maybe a magic wand.

«

There’s a ridiculous amount of magical thinking being used to support Trump’s tariffs, which are nonsensical on their face – based on trade deficits rather than actual tariffs (this More Or Less podcast episode explains it). Once these price changes start to hit, things are going to get wild.
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I study measles. I’m terrified we’re headed for an epidemic • The New York Times

Michael Mina:

»

We used to think of measles outbreaks in the United States as isolated events: short-lived and confined to close-knit communities with low vaccination rates. A flare here, a bubble there. But as those bubbles grow and converge, the United States could be at risk for tens of thousands of cases.

Measles was declared eliminated in this country in 2000. That didn’t mean the virus disappeared. It meant we stopped it from spreading freely. It was a hard-won public health triumph made possible by decades of vaccination. But that protection is now unraveling.

Vaccine skepticism has become increasingly mainstream, amplified by pandemic-era backlash, a torrent of online misinformation and support from the new health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been at the center of vaccine misinformation for over a decade. A growing outbreak in Texas, and cases in over a dozen states, shows how fragile our defenses have become.

Measles is among the most contagious viruses known. A single case can cause dozens more in places where people are unvaccinated. Infants too young for vaccination, immune-compromised people and the elderly are all at risk. Measles isn’t just a fever and rash. It can cause pneumonia, brain inflammation, permanent disability and death. The virus can go dormant in the body only to re-emerge a decade or so after infection and cause rapid and fatal brain tissue deterioration.

It also has a more insidious legacy, one I helped discover. In 2015, I led a team that found that measles can erase the immune system’s protective memory of prior infections. This “immune amnesia,” as it’s called, leaves people vulnerable to viruses and bacteria they were once protected against.

…The current measles outbreak, with more than 480 cases, largely in unvaccinated children, is gearing up to be the worst in years. And it’s likely just the beginning. Recent studies estimate that more than nine million American children are susceptible to measles. The number of people susceptible balloons further still when you add the 3.6 million infants who are too young to be vaccinated and the millions of immunocompromised Americans who can’t safely receive the vaccine.

«

Two children have died so far in Texas. It’s the most insane thing ever, though vaccine refusal was rising in some states. The CDC’s stats on this are years out of date.

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‘If you want dystopia, look out your window!’ Black Mirror is back – and going beyond tech hell • The Guardian

Gabriel Tate:

»

There is a more reflective, almost nostalgic tone to this seventh season. The episode Plaything flashes back to [Charlie] Brooker’s early years as a gaming journalist in a Bandersnatch-adjacent slice of computer-induced madness; Eulogy immerses Paul Giamatti in his memories as he literally enters decades-old photos; gaslighting parable Bête Noire forces Siena Kelly’s chocolatier to reckon with youthful misdemeanours; Hotel Reverie stars Emma Corrin as a 1940s matinee idol falling for Issa Rae’s modern film star, who plays her white, male love interest in an AI remake of a vintage romance.

“Quite a lot of the technology is being used to relive things or bring them back into the present,” concedes Brooker. “It wasn’t conscious, but then I have a lot more past than future. There’s probably more social commentary and more emotive or vulnerable episodes. That doesn’t mean we don’t go to disturbing places or deliver those chills, but people come to Black Mirror expecting to be surprised, so you can’t give them exactly what they want. I’d say there’s a little less dystopia. If you want that, there’s a 24-hour panel showing it called your window. You don’t necessarily want to see something saying: things are going to get worse.”

…As a family man, Brooker – “the most empathetic father I’ve ever seen,” reckons Rhoades – has some extra skin in the game. “If I play my hand too overtly, my sons will get all secretive about this stuff,” he shrugs. “Luckily, they haven’t got bogged down in the Andrew Tate world of algorithms spewing up shit, but I do worry about them sitting there in front of YouTube and then before you know it …” He grimaces. “I’ve installed all the parental controls you can, but it’s more that I’m struggling to keep up with the weird things they’ll come out with. [Bizarre YouTube animation] Skibidi Toilet is their pop music, their equivalent of ‘Turn that noise down!’ I’d have been into that at their age, I reckon.”

«

The new series is available from Thursday 10 April. The trailer looks very interesting.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Prices of PC system builders may rise by 20% or more due to new tariffs on imported parts imposed by the US, companies say. CC-licensed photo by Vasile Cotovanu 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. I apologise in advance.

A selection of 9 links for you. Well put together. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Trump’s tariffs put the iPhone in a tough spot • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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Gerrit Schneemann, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, doesn’t necessarily believe we’ll see an immediate price increase.

“I don’t foresee them… on a short-term basis just raising prices unnecessarily,” Schneemann told The Verge.

He points out that Apple’s margins (historically about 38%) give it more wiggle room to absorb the costs of the tariffs, at least in the short term. “But I think if this sticks, then probably with the 17 we could see a price hike,” he said, referring to the iPhone 17 expected in the fall.

If the goal with these tariffs is to get Apple to start making iPhones in the US, that’s not going to happen anytime soon, either. The company would face some massive challenges doing so.

“I don’t think we see a real path to a meaningful US smartphone industry production hub,” says Schneemann. Apple does some manufacturing in the US, but is largely limited to small-scale production. The iPhone and its network of specialized component suppliers are a different beast. Even if Apple established supply chains, a workforce, and manufacturing facilities for the iPhone in the US, the costs would be prohibitively high, likely more than the impact of the tariffs. These tariffs are being carried out through an executive order rather than Congress, so a new incoming president could change them in four years.

Apple will keep making iPhones overseas and finding ways to deal with the extra taxes to import them to the US. “There’s already been reports of [Apple] trying to get the supply chain to absorb some of that additional cost, which is something Apple is good at anyway,” says Schneemann. And if Apple raises prices with the iPhone 17 series, our tendency to buy phones through carrier subsidies could cushion the blow through slightly higher monthly payments.

«

Sonos is also trying to figure out what happens next; it shifted manufacturing out of China to Malaysia and Vietnam a few years ago to avoid tariffs being levied on US imports from China (hooray!) only to find out that those are being hit with 24% and 46% tariffs respectively (boo).
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PC prices up at least 20%: Trump tariffs may hurt U.S. system integrators most • Tom’s Hardware

Avram Piltch:

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PCs, particularly those built by smaller, boutique vendors may be hit hardest of all, makers and resellers tell Tom’s Hardware.

Large OEMs such as Dell and HP may be able to limit their exposure by moving production to less-tariffed countries. U.S. brands such as Maingear, iBuyPower and Falcon Northwest assemble their products in America — using parts that come almost exclusively from Asia.

“Tariffs have a direct impact on our cost structure… which we have to pass down to our customers,” Wallace Santos, CEO of Maingear, told us a few minutes before Trump released his latest round of tariffs. “Some of our suppliers are stopping their production lines to move out of China, causing scarcity, which ultimately causes FOMO, which causes even more scarcity.

After yesterday’s announcements, Santos said he expects prices for his PCs to go up 20 to 25% as a result of the tariffs.

On Wednesday, Trump announced his full suite of new tariffs, which include rates of 54% on China (+34% on top of the 20% already announced), 32% on Taiwan, 26% on South Korea and 46% on Vietnam. Those are all countries where a lot of PC components such as SSDs, RAM, PC cases and graphics cards are sourced. That 15% number could rise, in other words.

“Some of our GPU suppliers had to stop their Chinese lines to move to Taiwan or Vietnam, causing additional shortages,” Santos told us.

The tariffs had already worsened GPU shortages as manufacturers tried to move from China to less-taxed countries such as Vietnam. Now that those countries have tariffs of their own, there’s no place to go. These suppliers are less likely to move operations from China now that Vietnam and Taiwan also have huge tariffs applied to them.

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Doesn’t matter if you move – do more trade from a country, you’ll up the trade deficit with the US and the Trump Tariff will rise, because it’s tied to the trade deficit (in defiance of economic theory).
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UK seeks business views on response to US tariffs • GOV.UK

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Following the 10% reciprocal tariffs on a range of products announced by the Trump administration yesterday, UK companies are being invited to give their views on what any future UK response should look like by providing feedback to questions asking them the average value of their US imports, the impact of any possible UK tariffs and how they would adjust to them. 

The Business and Trade Secretary has also today [Thursday] published an indicative list of goods imported from the US that may be considered in a future UK response. This makes it clear to businesses that the Government would not consider products in the wider public interest issues such as medical supplies and military equipment. It marks the next stage in the government’s ongoing preparations and negotiations with the US on our economic relationship.

«

The full list is 419 pages. Lots of elements (as in hydrogen, helium, etc) are on there. Lots of makeup and cosmetics, print film, tyres, animal hides… printers too, and literally kitchen sinks.

There are thousands of categories. Only one problem: the PDF isn’t searchable, either on the web or when downloaded. (At least, for me – take any item eg vodka, which is in there.) I think it’s going to get fed into a lot of chatbots and queried.
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Meta is now the UFC technology partner, including for Quest • UploadVR

David Heaney:

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The companies say the partnership will see Meta “leverage its leading technologies to deliver unprecedented engagement with hundreds of millions of UFC fans around the world” and “immerse fans deeper into UFC content than ever before”.

The partnership will include Meta AI, smart glasses, Quest, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads.

“I’ve had a lot of great partners over the years that have helped us grow this sport, but Mark and his team at Meta are going to do things that will blow away UFC fans,” said UFC President and CEO Dana White. “Meta has the greatest minds in tech and they are going to take fan engagement to the next level. We’ve already started to work on some innovations with Meta around a new fighter rankings system that I’ll be sharing soon. The next few years will be an absolute game changer for fans of this sport.”

White joined Meta’s board of directors back in January, and has reportedly been Mark Zuckerberg’s intermediary to the Trump administration, currying favour for Meta with the US president.

Currently, the app Xtadium already lets Quest owners in the US watch select UFC fights in 2D immersive 180º for free, and for UFC Fight Pass subscribers to watch any fight on a large virtual screen.

«

Aside from the currying favour bit, this is exactly what Apple should have been doing already with the Vision Pro. It’s as though the company can’t walk and chew gum – lots and lots of content is what the device needs to sell itself to people. Everyone keeps on making this point, yet nothing happens.
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Man catches Hertfordshire hawk that attacked villagers for weeks • The Guardian

Esther Addley:

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A hawk that has been terrorising male residents of a Hertfordshire village for weeks has been captured by a local man after it stalked him through the village while he was jogging.

Dozens of villagers in Flamstead, near Luton, have reported being attacked from behind by the bird, identified as a Harris’s hawk. Some have been left bleeding and in at least one case requiring hospital treatment.

Tall men in particular have reported being swooped at and clawed for more than a month, leading many to wear hats or even cycling helmets when outside. Villagers became more concerned when the bird attacked an 11-year-old boy this week, and someone reported it swooping at other children walking home from school.

Steve Harris, 40, said he caught the hawk on Thursday after it followed him on his daily jog before landing in his garden.

Determined to stop the attacks after weeks of being forced to wear a cycling helmet while out running, he had finally managed it, he said, by clambering on to his shed and throwing a cage over the bird. He had previously tried to lure it into a cage with some chicken, but without success.

“I had just been out on a run. It was following me for a mile, hopping along all the telegraph poles,” he said. “It came into the garden, and I was holding the cage above my head. Eventually it sat in the shed, squawking at me.”

«

Could have been worse – could have been dropping tortoises on bald peoples’ heads.
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Everything TV taught you about autopsies is wrong • The Atlantic

Samuel Ashworth:

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Most Americans will never see a real autopsy, so our impressions of them are formed by TV portrayals. That’s how it was for me, until I spent two weeks observing autopsies in a hospital in Pittsburgh as part of research for a novel. In real life, autopsies are performed in brightly lit rooms. (Forensic autopsies must sometimes be completed in the field if, for example, a body cannot be safely moved.)

The autopsist begins with a Y-shaped incision into the sternum and works methodically through the body. Sometimes the internal organs are inspected in situ, but more typically they are removed, washed down, and dissected on a water table. The autopsist doesn’t just pick up an organ, look at it, make a diagnosis, and plop it back in; rather, they catalog as many of the body’s pathologies as possible, whether or not they’re suspected of causing death. They also take care to make sure that none of the evidence of this inspection would be visible in an open-casket funeral. It’s slow, comprehensive work that rarely involves fancy electronics.

Perhaps the most subtly ridiculous aspect of TV autopsies is the lack of personal protective equipment. In real autopsies, the people involved wear head-to-toe PPE—surgical scrubs, armguards, booties, an apron, a face mask, a splash shield, and a cap—because, when you open a human body up, all the blood, bile, and other fluids that a person had in life are still in there. Blood can still ooze from a wound, even when it’s not being pumped through the body.

«

Seems like they haven’t seen Silent Witness? But TV drama needs to be able to show faces, for emotion. It may be shocking to learn that TV sometimes (often?) fudges reality in order to create space for drama, but it’s possible that the Greek attack on Troy didn’t play out exactly as described in The Iliad either.
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AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia’s servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation’s bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50% since January 2024. It’s a scenario familiar across the free and open source software (FOSS) community, as we’ve previously detailed.

The Foundation hosts not only Wikipedia but also platforms like Wikimedia Commons, which offers 144 million media files under open licenses. For decades, this content has powered everything from search results to school projects. But since early 2024, AI companies have dramatically increased automated scraping through direct crawling, APIs, and bulk downloads to feed their hungry AI models. This exponential growth in non-human traffic has imposed steep technical and financial costs—often without the attribution that helps sustain Wikimedia’s volunteer ecosystem.

The impact isn’t theoretical. The foundation says that when former US President Jimmy Carter died in December 2024, his Wikipedia page predictably drew millions of views. But the real stress came when users simultaneously streamed a 1.5-hour video of a 1980 debate from Wikimedia Commons. The surge doubled Wikimedia’s normal network traffic, temporarily maxing out several of its Internet connections. Wikimedia engineers quickly rerouted traffic to reduce congestion, but the event revealed a deeper problem: the baseline bandwidth had already been consumed largely by bots scraping media at scale.

This behavior is increasingly familiar across the FOSS world. Fedora’s Pagure repository blocked all traffic from Brazil after similar scraping incidents covered by Ars Technica. GNOME’s GitLab instance implemented proof-of-work challenges to filter excessive bot access. Read the Docs dramatically cut its bandwidth costs after blocking AI crawlers.

Wikimedia’s internal data explains why this kind of traffic is so costly for open projects. Unlike humans, who tend to view popular and frequently cached articles, bots crawl obscure and less-accessed pages, forcing Wikimedia’s core datacenters to serve them directly. Caching systems designed for predictable, human browsing behavior don’t work when bots are reading the entire archive indiscriminately.

As a result, Wikimedia found that bots account for 65% of the most expensive requests to its core infrastructure despite making up just 35% of total pageviews. This asymmetry is a key technical insight: The cost of a bot request is far higher than a human one, and it adds up fast.

«

A strange new arms race: sites like Wikimedia don’t want to block AI bots, but they’d like them to behave a lot better.
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Amazon said to make a bid to buy TikTok in the U.S. • The New York Times

Lauren Hirsch, Maggie Haberman, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Karen Weise and Sapna Maheshwari:

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Amazon has put in a last-minute bid to acquire all of TikTok, the popular video app, as it approaches an April deadline to be separated from its Chinese owner or face a ban in the United States, according to three people familiar with the bid.

Various parties who have been involved in the talks do not appear to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously, the people said. The bid came via an offer letter addressed to Vice President JD Vance and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Amazon’s bid highlights the 11th-hour maneuvering in Washington over TikTok’s ownership. Policymakers in both parties have expressed deep national security concerns over the app’s Chinese ownership, and passed a law last year to force a sale of TikTok that was set to take effect in January.

President Trump, who has pledged repeatedly to save the app despite the national security concerns, delayed the enforcement of that law until Saturday, even after it was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court.
Amazon declined to comment. TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump met with top White House officials Wednesday to discuss TikTok’s fate. People familiar with the talks have outlined a potential deal that could involve bringing on a number of new U.S. investors, including Oracle, the technology giant; and Blackstone, the private equity firm, while sidestepping a formal sale. But it isn’t clear that such a structure would satisfy the conditions of the federal law.

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Satisfy the conditions of the law? That’s crazy talk!
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The crisis of zombie social science • The Garden of Forking Paths

Brian Klaas:

»

Many social phenomena can be sorted into two categories: “strong link problems” and “weak link problems.”

As the always insightful Adam Mastroianni points out, food safety is an example of a weak link problem, in which you have to worry about the weakest link. Even if 99.9% of a country’s food supply is free of toxic bacteria, the 0.1% can imperil everyone. A rowing crew is also a weak link problem: if seven rowers are Olympians but one scrawny rower is out of sync, the boat will slow to a crawl.

Strong link problems are the opposite: everything will be fine as long as the strongest link is really strong. Basketball, unlike rowing, is a strong link problem. LeBron James is good enough that even if there’s a really weak player on the bench, the Lakers are still going to win a lot. And, as Mastroianni convincingly argues, science is a strong link problem. It’s okay if there’s a lot of junk science out there being published in pseudoscience journals, because the strongest discoveries that change the world are what matter most. Pay attention to the best science, ignore the worst.

I see an exception to Mastroianni’s argument. Zombie Theories in social science short-circuit these dynamics. For the reasons mentioned above, it’s rarely universally agreed what the strongest links actually are in economics, political science, psychology, or sociology. Without being able to kill off the bad but influential theories through falsification, what should be a strong-link problem ends up just being a bit of a mess, with bad ideas lingering on, often obscuring better ones.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot of astonishingly good social science research. I’m often in awe of colleagues across disciplines who have devoted their lives to solving problems in the most innovative ways. My critique is not that social science is useless, but that it could be better.

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Klaas is associate professor of global politics at UCL, so has seen a lot of the good and the bad in social science research. This is a particularly interesting post on the “reproducibility problem” in that field.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new study finds that Thursday is the new Friday where post-work drinks are concerned. CC-licensed photo by chas B on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Soberly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Apple’s appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over the UK’s encryption ‘back door’ explained • Computer Weekly

Bernard Keenan:

»

the question turns on whether ordering Apple to compromise the integrity of the ADP [Advanced Data Protection, its end-to-end encrypted backup] system is proportionate to meeting the needs of national security and the prevention or detection of serious crime. The government will likely argue that the TCN [UK government’s Technical Capability Notice] merely requires Apple to facilitate the execution of lawful warrants which are in themselves subjected to careful necessity and proportionality checks. In theory this ensures such powers can only be used judiciously in a limited and targeted fashion. 

Government lawyers may also point out that Standard Data Protection still applies, and that is sufficient to protect the vast majority of users’ data. In effect, the government’s position is that commercial service providers do not have a right to unilaterally provide customers with perfect encryption that cannot be disabled where absolutely necessary. If the TCN is overturned, legitimate targets of state surveillance, including terrorists and child abusers, will “go dark”. 

Governments always argue that they must have access to communications. Yet while there is no doubt that malicious actors and foreign agents rely on encryption, so do millions of innocent people, including lawyers, journalists, businesses, and anyone who has a duty to take care of other people’s secrets. How should that balance be assessed? It is not just Apple that need to know the answer. As I noted in an article from 2019, a TCN could theoretically order communication providers to grant UK authorities the means secretly to disable or modify the operation of encryption protocols applied on behalf of users.

That was not idle speculation – in 2018, two GCHQ directors openly discussed an approach that would see encrypted platforms like WhatsApp modify the notifications function on a target’s device so that a law enforcement participant could be secretly added to an apparently secure chat without the target realising. All transmissions via the app would remain encrypted, but the content would be intercepted. Whether such a capability was actually developed is unknown, but it seemed unlikely to me, given the disproportionate risks to all users that such software modifications would create. 

But is that correct? We do not know what the measure of proportionality is in such a profoundly important matter. The tribunal should clarify these vitally important questions in public.

«

Journalists are doing their best to make sure that at least some part of this is heard in public, and Apple probably isn’t against it. The difficulty is finding which judge to trouble with the legal demand to attend the hearing(s).
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Welcome to the semantic apocalypse • The Intrinsic Perspective

Erik Hoel:

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A well-known psychological phenomenon, semantic satiation can be triggered by repeating a word over and over until it loses its meaning. You can do this with any word. How about “Ghibli?” Just read it over and over: Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. You just keep reading it, each one in turn. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli.

Try saying it aloud. Ghiiiiiiiii-bliiiiiii. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli.

Do this enough and the word’s meaning is stripped away. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. It becomes an entity estranged from you, unfamiliar. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. It’s nothing. Just letters. Sounds. A “Ghib.” Then a “Li.” Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Like your child’s face is suddenly that of a stranger. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Only the bones of syntax remain. Ghibli. Ghibli.

No one knows why semantic satiation happens, exactly. There’s a suspected mechanism in the form of neural habituation, wherein neurons respond less strongly from repeated stimulation; like a muscle, neurons grow tired, releasing fewer neurotransmitters after an action potential, until their formerly robust signal becomes a squeak. One hypothesis is that therefore the signal fails to propagate out from the language processing centers and trigger, as it normally does, all the standard associations that vibrate in your brain’s web of concepts. This leaves behind only the initial sensory information, which, it turns out, is almost nothing at all, just syllabic sounds set in cold relation. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. But there’s also evidence it’s not just neural fatigue. Semantic satiation reflects something higher-level about neural networks. It’s not just “neurons are tired.” Enough repetition and your attention changes too, shifting from the semantic contents to attending to the syntax alone. Ghibli. Ghibli. The word becomes a signifier only of itself. Ghibli.

(While writing this, I went to go read a scientific review to brush up on the neuroscience of semantic satiation. And guess what? The first paper I found was AI slop too. I’m not joking. I wish I were. There it was: that recognizable forced cadence, that constant reaching for filler, that stilted eagerness. Published 11 months ago.)

The semantic apocalypse heralded by AI is a kind of semantic satiation at a cultural level.

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Scott Alexander has a good followup post referencing this, The Colours of Her Coat. Both highly recommended.
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The impact of hybrid working on the high street • Centre for Cities

Paul Swinney and Oscar Selby:

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Five years after the UK went into lockdown, this briefing looks at the impact of hybrid working on spending patterns by workers in both city centres and their local neighbourhoods.

While life today looks much closer to what it did in 2019 than many predicted, it is certainly the case that home working is higher on Mondays and Fridays than it was pre-pandemic. And this has affected patterns of worker spending in several ways:

Workers now do a smaller share of their spending in city centres than they did in 2019.

But counter to predictions, this has not led to a boom in local spending. And the shift in spending that has happened has been led by a shift in grocery spending rather than by independent cafes, with suburban supermarkets appearing to have been the biggest winners.

Thursday has become the new Friday for the post-work drink in central London. But after-work socialising appears to have become less common post-pandemic in other large city centres.

Thursdays are now the most popular day for an after-work drink in London, but after-work socialising appears to be less popular post-pandemic in other large city centres outside of London.

A key reason why large city centres had vibrant high streets pre-pandemic was due to the volume of workers who commuted into them each day, creating a market for shops, bars and restaurants to sell to. Therefore, a reduction in worker footfall reduces this source of sales for city centres. The current picture is far better than those 2020 predictions suggested for city centre high streets, but is less positive than what it was in 2019.

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It’s weird that Friday has ceased to be the “let’s go out for a drink” night. The graphs suggest that outside London, people now go out on Saturday rather than Friday. (Via Jim Waterson’s London Centric.)
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BYD car sales soar as Tesla struggles in Europe • Financial Times

Kana Inagaki:

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Vehicle sales at China’s BYD soared 58% in the first quarter in a stark contrast to an expected fall in demand for Tesla’s electric cars, as European consumers shun Elon Musk’s brand.

The Shenzhen-based group on Tuesday said it delivered 986,098 passenger vehicles in the first quarter, of which 416,388 were pure EVs, up 39%.

The strong start to the year came after BYD’s latest annual sales figures recently topped $100bn for the first time, propelled by resurgent demand for hybrid vehicles in its home market.

BYD has benefited from strong domestic demand for its hybrid cars, and has also been making aggressive inroads into overseas markets.

By contrast, analysts warned figures set to be released on Wednesday for Tesla’s first-quarter sales were likely to show a drop of more than 10%, as demand in France and other European markets slumped in March despite a key model upgrade.

Tesla sales have plummeted in Europe since the start of the year, but analysts have been divided over whether the decline has mainly been driven by a backlash to chief executive Musk’s interventions in regional politics or an ageing product portfolio and increasing competition.

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This article was written on Tuesday; on Wednesday Tesla announced a sales fall of 12.9%, delivering 336,681 cars while making 362,615.

Saw a BYD car the other day. They’re probably going to focus a lot on the UK and EU, given the fat new tariffs imposed on Wednesday night by Trump.
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Shingles vaccine can decrease risk of dementia, study finds • The New York Times

Pam Belluck:

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Getting vaccinated against shingles can reduce the risk of developing dementia, a large new study finds.

The results provide some of the strongest evidence yet that some viral infections can have effects on brain function years later and that preventing them can help stave off cognitive decline.

The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that people who received the shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia in the seven years afterward than those who were not vaccinated.

“If you’re reducing the risk of dementia by 20%, that’s quite important in a public health context, given that we don’t really have much else at the moment that slows down the onset of dementia,” said Dr. Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at Oxford. Dr. Harrison was not involved in the new study, but has done other research indicating that shingles vaccines lower dementia risk.

Whether the protection can last beyond seven years can only be determined with further research. But with few currently effective treatments or preventions, Dr. Harrison said, shingles vaccines appear to have “some of the strongest potential protective effects against dementia that we know of that are potentially usable in practice.”

…In the United States, about one in three people develop at least one case of shingles, also called herpes zoster, in their lifetime, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. About a third of eligible adults have received the vaccine in recent years, according to the C.D.C.

Several previous studies have suggested that shingles vaccinations might reduce dementia risk, but most could not exclude the possibility that people who get vaccinated might have other dementia-protective characteristics, like healthier lifestyles, better diets or more years of education.

The new study ruled out many of those factors.

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The results emerged from vaccination in Wales – where a one-year cutoff at the age of 80 created two cohorts of nearly identical age who could be compared. The implication seems to be that having a shingles vaccination late in life has protective effects.

Anyhoooooow, the US can presumably kiss goodbye to the benefits of this since its health secretary doesn’t put any trust in this “vaccine” stuff.
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Glacier melt threatens water supplies for two billion people, UN warns • Carbon Brief

Ayesha Tandon:

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Climate change and “unsustainable human activities” are driving “unprecedented changes” to mountains and glaciers, threatening access to fresh water for more than two billion people, a UN report warns.

The 2025 UN world water development report finds that receding snow and ice cover in mountain regions could have “severe” consequences for people and nature.

Up to 60% of the world’s freshwater originates in mountain regions, which are home to 1.1bn people and 85% of species of birds, amphibians and mammals.

The report highlights a wide range of impacts, including reduced water for drinking and agriculture, stress on local ecosystems and increased risk of “devastating” glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).

It also notes the deep spiritual and cultural connections that mountain-dwelling communities around the world have with mountains and glaciers, from India’s Hindu Kush Himalaya to Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

One expert tells Carbon Brief that glacier loss is already causing “loss of life, loss of livelihood and most importantly of all, the loss of a place that many communities have called home for generations”. 

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I think the loss of the water is more important, to be honest.
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EU and UK fine carmakers millions over recycling cartel • DW

Matt Ford and agencies:

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The European Commission on Tuesday fined the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) and 15 of its members a total of €458m ($494.5m) for engaging in cartel-like behavior regarding the recycling of used cars.

German giant Volkswagen was handed the heftiest fine of €127m, followed by Renault/Nissan (€81.5 million), Opel parent company Stellantis (€75m), Ford (€41.5m), BMW (€25m), Opel itself (€25m) and Toyota (around €24m). The ACEA must pay €500,000.

Mercedes-Benz would have been liable for a €35m fine but avoided a penalty after reporting the long-running cartel in which it conspired with its rivals between 2002 and 2017.

The Commission found that the carmakers had entered into anti-competitive agreements and had exchanged confidential information to prevent competition on the stripping, scrapping and recycling of old cars.

One key finding was that the manufacturers had agreed not to advertise their recycling efforts, thus preventing consumers from factoring in environmental impact when choosing a vehicle and reducing any potential pressure on the companies to go beyond minimum legal requirements.

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The EC decision says that this was going on for 15 years. That’s a lot of cartel-ing.
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Something bizarre is happening to people who use ChatGPT a lot • Futurism

Noor Al-Sibai:

»

Researchers have found that ChatGPT “power users,” or those who use it the most and at the longest durations, are becoming dependent upon — or even addicted to — the chatbot.

In a new joint study, researchers with OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab found that this small subset of ChatGPT users engaged in more “problematic use,” defined in the paper as “indicators of addiction… including preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, loss of control, and mood modification.”

To get there, the MIT and OpenAI team surveyed thousands of ChatGPT users to glean not only how they felt about the chatbot, but also to study what kinds of “affective cues,” which was defined in a joint summary of the research as “aspects of interactions that indicate empathy, affection, or support,” they used when chatting with it.

Though the vast majority of people surveyed didn’t engage emotionally with ChatGPT, those who used the chatbot for longer periods of time seemed to start considering it to be a “friend.” The survey participants who chatted with ChatGPT the longest tended to be lonelier and get more stressed out over subtle changes in the model’s behavior, too.

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It’s the addiction more than the chatbot, though, isn’t it? If this were just Eliza, the original chatbot, they’d be on it in the same way too.
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Researchers suggest OpenAI trained AI models on paywalled O’Reilly books • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

»

OpenAI has been accused by many parties of training its AI on copyrighted content sans permission. Now a new paper by an AI watchdog organization makes the serious accusation that the company increasingly relied on non-public books it didn’t license to train more sophisticated AI models.

AI models are essentially complex prediction engines. Trained on a lot of data — books, movies, TV shows, and so on — they learn patterns and novel ways to extrapolate from a simple prompt. When a model “writes” an essay on a Greek tragedy or “draws” Ghibli-style images, it’s simply pulling from its vast knowledge to approximate. It isn’t arriving at anything new.

While a number of AI labs, including OpenAI, have begun embracing AI-generated data to train AI as they exhaust real-world sources (mainly the public web), few have eschewed real-world data entirely. That’s likely because training on purely synthetic data comes with risks, like worsening a model’s performance.

The new paper, out of the AI Disclosures Project, a nonprofit co-founded in 2024 by media mogul Tim O’Reilly and economist Ilan Strauss, draws the conclusion that OpenAI likely trained its GPT-4o model on paywalled books from O’Reilly Media. (O’Reilly is the CEO of O’Reilly Media.)

In ChatGPT, GPT-4o is the default model. O’Reilly doesn’t have a licensing agreement with OpenAI, the paper says.

«

Oh but come on, OpenAI was down to its last ten billion dollars. Coincidentally, there’s a big protest today (Thursday 3 April) about Meta’s use of the pirated LibGen database of books and articles (my books are in there, plus an article I wrote for Nature). The ALCS (Society of Authors) is writing an open letter to the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, who has offered pretty much zero response on this. Perhaps if we told her it’s a four-part Netflix drama?
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Lithium-ion battery waste fires are increasing, and vapes are a big part of it • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

2024 was “a year of growth,” according to fire-suppression company Fire Rover, but that’s not an entirely good thing.

The company, which offers fire detection and suppression systems based on thermal and optical imaging, smoke analytics, and human verification, releases annual reports on waste and recycling facility fires in the US and Canada to select industry and media. In 2024, Fire Rover, based on its fire identifications, saw 2,910 incidents, a 60% increase from the 1,809 in 2023, and more than double the 1,409 fires confirmed in 2022.

Publicly reported fire incidents at waste and recycling facilities also hit 398, a new high since Fire Rover began compiling its report eight years ago, when that number was closer to 275.

Lots of things could cause fires in the waste stream, long before lithium-ion batteries became common: “Fireworks, pool chemicals, hot (barbecue) briquettes,” writes Ryan Fogelman, CEO of Fire Rover, in an email to Ars. But lithium-ion batteries pose a growing problem, as the number of devices with batteries increases, consumer education and disposal choices remain limited, and batteries remain a very easy-to-miss, troublesome occupant of the waste stream.

All batteries that make it into waste streams are potentially hazardous, as they have so many ways of being set off: puncturing, vibration, overheating, short-circuiting, crushing, internal cell failure, overcharging, or inherent manufacturing flaws, among others. Fire Rover’s report notes that the media often portrays batteries as “spontaneously” catching fire. In reality, the very nature of waste handling makes it almost impossible to ensure that no battery will face hazards in handling, the report notes. Tiny batteries can be packed into the most disposable of items—even paper marketing materials handed out at conferences.

Fogelman estimates, based on his experience and some assumptions, that about half of the fires he’s tracking originate with batteries. Roughly $2.5bn of loss to facilities and infrastructure came from fires last year, divided between traditional hazards and batteries, he writes.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Baseball has finally started to make technological shifts, with the NY Yankees using bats shaped to improve hitting. CC-licensed photo by terren in Virginia on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Based. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Open-source genetic database shuts down to protect users from “authoritarian governments” • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The creator of an open source genetic database is shutting it down and deleting all of its data because he has come to believe that its existence is dangerous with “a rise in far-right and other authoritarian governments” in the United States and elsewhere.

“The largest use case for DTC genetic data was not biomedical research or research in big pharma,” Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, the founder of OpenSNP, wrote in a blog post. “Instead, the transformative impact of the data came to fruition among law enforcement agencies, who have put the genealogical properties of genetic data to use.”

OpenSNP has collected roughly 7,500 genomes over the last 14 years, primarily by allowing people to voluntarily submit their own genetic information they have downloaded from 23andMe. With the bankruptcy of 23andMe, increased interest in genetic data by law enforcement, and the return of Donald Trump and rise of authoritarian governments worldwide, Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media he no longer believes it is ethical to run the database.
 
“I’ve been thinking about it since 23andMe was on the verge of bankruptcy and been really considering it since the U.S. election. It definitely is really bad over there [in the United States],” Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media. “I am quite relieved to have made the decision and come to a conclusion. It’s been weighing on my mind for a long time.” 

…OpenSNP has been used for various scientific papers, most notably to show that an earlier paper about chronic fatigue syndrome pulled from 23andMe data could not be replicated and was based on erroneous science.

«

As a reminder, 23andMe had about 15 million genomes stored, so it’s impressive on its own that this dataset could refute work done there. But the world is really changing, and this seems like a very sensible move. Even if it won’t make much difference if the US government “acquires” the 23andMe dataset by some means.
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Cheap TVs’ incessant advertising reaches troubling new lows • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

TVs offer us an escape from the real world. After a long day, sometimes there’s nothing more relaxing than turning on your TV, tuning into your favourite program, and unplugging from the realities around you.

But what happens when divisive, potentially offensive messaging infiltrates that escape? Even with streaming services making it easy to watch TV commercial-free, it can still be difficult for TV viewers to avoid ads with these sorts of messages.

That’s especially the case with budget brands, which may even force controversial ads onto TVs when they’re idle, making users pay for low-priced TVs in unexpected, and sometimes troubling, ways.

An experience recently shared by an apparent Vizio TV owner illustrates how ads delivered via TV operating systems (OSes) can take ads from annoying to intrusive and offensive.

Reddit user DoubleJumps claimed last week that when their Vizio TV is idle, “it plays calming nature video, calming music, and then loops a message from the [T]rump admin[istration] telling illegal immigrants to gtfo over and over and over again.”

…what DoubleJumps detailed is completely within the scope of Vizio’s advertising efforts. Vizio TVs have something called Scenic Mode, which has the sets show, per Vizio, “relaxing, ambient content when your TV is idle for a period of time,” along with ads. Scenic Mode can be disabled, but if it’s enabled, the ads cannot be turned off. Vizio says the ads help it pay for things like the TVs’ free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels and help keep Vizio TV prices low.

Vizio also has ties to political ads. It has previously boasted about its work with “a political candidate on an ad campaign that combined CTV ads with our Household Connect omnichannel feature to reach potential voters both on their TV sets and on other opted in devices.” The company says it can play a “powerful role… in helping political campaigns reach their intended audiences.”

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I’d love to say I’m sympathetic, but if you live in a culture suffused with advertising and never try to erase it, this really is what you’ll get. Apparently the owner is going to get rid of the TV. That’s a start.
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Earth AI’s algorithms found critical minerals in places everyone else ignored • TechCrunch

Tim De Chant:

»

Earth AI emerged from Teslyuk’s graduate studies. Teslyuk, a native of Ukraine, was working toward a doctorate at the University of Sydney, where he became familiar with the mining industry in Australia. There, the government owns the rights to mineral deposits, and it leases them in six-year terms. Since the 1970s, he said, exploration companies are required to submit their data to a national archive.

“For some reason, nobody’s using them,” he said. “If I could build an algorithm that can absorb all that knowledge and learn from the failures and successes of millions of geologists in the past, I can make much better predictions about where to find minerals in the future.”

Teslyuk started Earth AI as a software company focused on making predictions about potential deposits, then approaching customers who might be interested in exploring sites further. But the customers were hesitant to invest, in part because they didn’t want to bet millions on the predictions of an unproven technology.

“Mining is a very conservative industry,” Teslyuk said. “Everything outside of the approved dogma is considered heresy.”
So Earth AI decided to develop its own drilling equipment to prove that the sites it identified were as promising as its software suggested. The company was accepted to Y Combinator’s spring 2019 cohort, and it spent the next few years refining its hardware and software. In January, Earth AI raised a $20m Series B.

«

Slight correction on the optimistic headline: Earth AI’s algorithms claimed to have found critical minerals. Without digging there, nobody knows. The company’s website doesn’t show any proof of discovery, though it’s an interesting idea – why not apply ML to all that data?
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The Yankees’ ‘Torpedo’ bats that are breaking baseball, explained • SBNation.com

James Dator:

»

The New York Yankees have cracked the code when it comes to hitting dingers, and it’s raising massive questions about whether they’re simply leveraging existing rules, or bending them entirely too much. This year the club introduced a new bat featuring what they call a “Torpedo Barrel,” and it’s quite literally breaking the game of baseball.

This was most apparent on Saturday night in a 20-9 win over the Milwaukee Brewers in which the Yankees hit an astonishing nine home runs across seven players. Even if we take that game as an outlier, New York is still crushing the ball at an unseen rate — more than tripling the competition.

In 2024 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams averaged 182 home runs across the season for an average of 1.12 homers a game. Thus far in 2025 the Yankees already have 15 in three games, on pace for a record-breaking 810. The sample size is small, and obviously that won’t hold — but the result is still staggering as New York leads MLB in home runs, hitting three more than the Dodgers, despite playing two fewer games. That’s largely in part to the Torpedo Barrel.

At the most basic level it’s a new shape of bat. Rather than having an even taper from tip to grip, the Torpedo has a pronounced bulge in the barrel designed to redistribute the center of mass in the bat from the end, moving it down and where players most often make contact. The difference in bats is astonishing when seen side-by-side with a standard MLB bat.

Essentially what this change means is that the hitting of Yankees players is fundamentally altered. They are making contact with the sweet spot far more often, and plays which would normally be tip balls or flares are now converting into home runs.

«

It’s astonishing that it has taken this long – professional baseball has existed in the US since 1876. But these bats, which do what larger rackets did for tennis in the 1970s (enlarge the sweet spot/move it to where you actually make contact) have only been around since 2022. US pro baseball seems to be very resistant to change – right down to the use of a specific sort of mud that is rubbed into baseballs before they’re put into play.
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Anthropic can now track the bizarre inner workings of a large language model • MIT Technology Review

Will Douglas Heaven:

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The AI firm Anthropic has developed a way to peer inside a large language model and watch what it does as it comes up with a response, revealing key new insights into how the technology works. The takeaway: LLMs are even stranger than we thought.

The Anthropic team was surprised by some of the counterintuitive workarounds that large language models appear to use to complete sentences, solve simple math problems, suppress hallucinations, and more, says Joshua Batson, a research scientist at the company.

It’s no secret that large language models work in mysterious ways. Few—if any—mass-market technologies have ever been so little understood. That makes figuring out what makes them tick one of the biggest open challenges in science.

But it’s not just about curiosity. Shedding some light on how these models work exposes their weaknesses, revealing why they make stuff up and why they can be tricked into going off the rails. It helps resolve deep disputes about exactly what these models can and can’t do. And it shows how trustworthy (or not) they really are.

Batson and his colleagues describe their new work in two reports published at the end of March. The first presents Anthropic’s use of a technique called circuit tracing, which lets researchers track the decision-making processes inside a large language model step by step. Anthropic used circuit tracing to watch its LLM Claude 3.5 Haiku carry out various tasks. The second (titled “On the Biology of a Large Language Model”) details what the team discovered when it looked at ten tasks in particular.

“I think this is really cool work,” says Jack Merullo, who studies large language models at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and was not involved in the research. “It’s a really nice step forward in terms of methods.”

Circuit tracing is not itself new. Last year Merullo and his colleagues analyzed a specific circuit in a version of OpenAI’s GPT-2, an older large language model that OpenAI released in 2019. But Anthropic has now analyzed a number of different circuits inside a far larger and far more complex model as it carries out multiple tasks. “Anthropic is very capable at applying scale to a problem,” says Merullo.

Eden Biran, who studies large language models at Tel Aviv University, agrees. “Finding circuits in a large state-of-the-art model such as Claude is a nontrivial engineering feat,” he says. “And it shows that circuits scale up and might be a good way forward for interpreting language models.”

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Fun! But also: does that actually help us? At all?
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As AI takes his readers, a leading history publisher wonders what’s next • Big Technology

Alex Kantrowitz:

»

Late last year, Jan van der Crabben’s AI fears materialized. His World History Encyclopedia — the world’s second most visited history website — showed up in Google’s AI Overviews, synthesized and presented alongside other history sites. Then, its traffic cratered, dropping 25% in November.

Van der Crabben, the website’s CEO and founder, knew he was getting a preview of what many online publishers may soon experience. His site built a sizable audience with plenty of help from Google, which still accounts for 80% of its traffic. But as AI search and bots like ChatGPT ingest and summarize the web’s content, that traffic is starting to disappear. Now, his path forward is beginning to look murky.

“There used to be this implicit agreement between publishers and Google that basically, Google could scrape, analyze, process, and do whatever they wanted with publishers’ content and in return, they would send traffic to the publishers, send them readers,” he told me. “Now, this unspoken contract is kind of breaking.”

World History Encyclopedia is just one site and Van der Crabben’s anecdote is just one story, but the migration of readers from the web to AI summaries will likely continue. The internet has always favored ease. And using generative AI to find the most valuable parts of the web’s evergreen content — like recipes, personal finance, and history content — can be a better experience than poking through sites one by one.

…Van der Crabben is well aware that Google has helped him scale in the first place, but what’s different now, he said, is that the arrangement is no longer mutually beneficial. “Now it’s just Google that benefits,” he said. “And the same is true, let’s be honest, for ChatGPT, for Anthropic, for many of the AI chatbots that gobble up the content. And, for most of them, unless you sue them — which only a big corporation like Reuters can do — they are not going to pay you for it.”

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Why does Britain feel so poor? • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins:

»

Speaking at a rail conference last year, HS2 Chair Sir Jon Thompson said: “To build a railway between Euston and Curzon Street in Birmingham, I need 8,276 consents from other public bodies, planning, transport, the Environment Agency or Natural England. They don’t care whether parliament did or didn’t approve building a railway.”

Imagine for a moment the sheer human effort, the cost, the entire lives consumed by the gigantic national project of ticking each of those 8,276 checkboxes. It is absolutely correct that we have additional checks and balances, but this is an organically-grown system operating with no overall oversight or coherent strategy, spawning busy-work for thousands of people, much of it duplicated, unnecessary or redundant, much of it – like the infamous bat tunnel – having little provable benefit for things like environmental protection in the first place.

Indeed, improving things like the environment is not the de facto goal of this system, it is not what it was ‘designed’ or incentivised to accomplish. If it were, much of the money would be far better spent. I cannot stress this enough: this is not a battle between, say, infrastructure and the environment. It’s a battle between people who think we can do both, better; and people who seriously believe that a bat tunnel is the best way to spend £120m to support wildlife, a proposition for which no compelling evidence has ever been provided.

Meanwhile, local government veers towards bankruptcy, in large part because they’re mandated to write blank cheques for social care with no support or strategy from central government.

«

Robbins puts his finger on what feels wrong in this post. The box-ticking is certainly a big thing. The inability of anyone to cut through the Gordian knots is becoming destructive.
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Waltz and staff used Gmail for government communications, officials say • The Washington Post

John Hudson:

»

Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.

The use of Gmail, a far less secure method of communication than the encrypted messaging app Signal, is the latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials already under fire for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.

A senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict, according to emails reviewed by The Post. While the NSC official used his Gmail account, his interagency colleagues used government-issued accounts, headers from the email correspondence show.

Waltz has had less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information sent to his Gmail, such as his schedule and other work documents, said officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe what they viewed as problematic handling of information.

«

As a reminder, it was the hacking of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s Gmail account in 2016 which led to a raft of insane stories. Here we aren’t even starting with the hacking.
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Elon Musk says his AI business xAI has acquired X • Axios

Dan Primack:

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Elon Musk said on Friday that xAI has acquired X, the social media app previously known as Twitter.

This is Musk trying to prevent his Twitter investors from losing money, and highlights his eagerness to meld different parts of his corporate empire.

Musk said that the all-stock merger valued xAI at $80bn and X at $45bn (including $12bn of debt). A source familiar with the situation says that the combined company would be valued at xAI plus X, absent some small adjustments.

For context, Musk paid $44bn to buy Twitter in late 2022, and some of its investors had marked the shares down by more than 70%. xAI was most recently valued at $50bn, in a late 2024 fundraising round.

The two companies have many shareholders in common, including venture firm Sequoia Capital and mutual fund manager Fidelity.

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This is just transparent nonsense. There’s no way in the world that X is worth that amount of money compared to when it was sold: not in terms of users, not in terms of advertising it can attract, not in terms of revenue, not in terms of profit. So the number is totally made up, which makes the purchase a misuse of the xAI funds. But the investors won’t care because they’re getting shares in an AI company, and everyone knows they’re the New Fabulous Thing, at least until they turn out to be about as unique and sought-after as NFTs.
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The Signal chat leak and the NSA • Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier:

»

It’s common knowledge that the NSA’s mission is breaking into and eavesdropping on other countries’ networks. (During President George W. Bush’s administration, the NSA conducted warrantless taps into domestic communications as well—surveillance that several district courts ruled to be illegal before those decisions were later overturned by appeals courts. To this day, many legal experts maintain that the program violated federal privacy protections.) But the organization has a secondary, complementary responsibility: to protect US communications from others who want to spy on them. That is to say: While one part of the NSA is listening into foreign communications, another part is stopping foreigners from doing the same to Americans.

Those missions never contradicted during the Cold War, when allied and enemy communications were wholly separate. Today, though, everyone uses the same computers, the same software, and the same networks. That creates a tension.

When the NSA discovers a technological vulnerability in a service such as Signal (or buys one on the thriving clandestine vulnerability market), does it exploit it in secret, or reveal it so that it can be fixed? Since at least 2014, a US government interagency “equities” process has been used to decide whether it is in the national interest to take advantage of a particular security flaw, or to fix it. The trade-offs are often complicated and hard.

Waltz—along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the other officials in the Signal group—have just made the trade-offs much tougher to resolve. Signal is both widely available and widely used. Smaller governments that can’t afford their own military-grade encryption use it. Journalists, human rights workers, persecuted minorities, dissidents, corporate executives, and criminals around the world use it. Many of these populations are of great interest to the NSA.

At the same time, as we have now discovered, the app is being used for operational US military traffic. So, what does the NSA do if it finds a security flaw in Signal?

Previously, it might have preferred to keep the flaw quiet and use it to listen to adversaries. Now, if the agency does that, it risks someone else finding the same vulnerability and using it against the US government. And if it was later disclosed that the NSA could have fixed the problem and didn’t, then the results might be catastrophic for the agency.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Might the beautiful people in New York go to the restaurants with the best reviews? Perhaps! CC-licensed photo by Michele Ursino on Flickr.

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

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

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

Things you should never do, part I • Joel on Software

Joel Spolsky:

»

We’re programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.

There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: it’s harder to read code than to write it.

This is why code reuse is so hard. This is why everybody on your team has a different function they like to use for splitting strings into arrays of strings. They write their own function because it’s easier and more fun than figuring out how the old function works.

As a corollary of this axiom, you can ask almost any programmer today about the code they are working on. “It’s a big hairy mess,” they will tell you. “I’d like nothing better than to throw it out and start over.”

Why is it a mess?

“Well,” they say, “look at this function. It is two pages long! None of this stuff belongs in there! I don’t know what half of these API calls are for.”

Before Borland’s new spreadsheet for Windows shipped, Philippe Kahn, the colourful founder of Borland, was quoted a lot in the press bragging about how Quattro Pro would be much better than Microsoft Excel, because it was written from scratch. All new source code! As if source code rusted.

The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Au contraire, baby! Is software supposed to be like an old Dodge Dart, that rusts just sitting in the garage? Is software like a teddy bear that’s kind of gross if it’s not made out of all new material?

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This is in the context of the Musk project to rewrite the code of the Social Security Agency (SSA) from COBOL to Java. And sure, you can use AI to help! (It won’t help. You’ll need to check everything. And that’s before we get to the subsystems that rely on it.)

One commenter yesterday pointed out that this is essentially a ruse to make SSA collapse because the code doesn’t work, and make people use private means instead. Of course it won’t work, for the reasons Spolsky explains above. The US is about to enter a very dark time.
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Twitter (X) hit by 2.8 billion profile data leak in alleged insider job • Hackread

“Waqas”:

»

ThinkingOne, a well-known figure on Breach Forums for their skill in analyzing data leaks, decided to combine the 2025 leak with the 2023 one, producing a single 34GB CSV file (9GB compressed) containing 201 million merged entries. To be clear, the merged data only includes users that appeared in both incidents, creating a confusion of public and semi-public data.

This messy combination led many to believe that the 2025 leak also contained email addresses, but that’s not the case. The emails shown in the merged file are from the 2023 breach. The presence of emails in the merged dataset has given the wrong impression that the contents of the 2025 leak also include email addresses.

As of Jan 2025, X (formerly Twitter) had around 335.7 million users, so how is it possible that data from 2.8 billion users has been leaked? One possible explanation is that the dataset includes aggregated or historical data, such as bot accounts that were created and later banned, inactive or deleted accounts that still lingered in historical records, or old data that was merged with newer data, increasing the total number of records.

Additionally, some entries might not even represent real users but could include non-user entities like API accounts, developer bots, deleted or banned profiles that remained logged somewhere, or organization and brand accounts that aren’t tied to individual users.

Another possibility is that the leaked data wasn’t exclusively obtained from Twitter itself but rather scraped from multiple public sources and merged together, including archived data from older leaks or information from third-party services linked to Twitter accounts.

«

Or, how about this for a third possibility, it’s mostly junk. It’s just about possible that there have, historically, been more than a billion entries in the Twitter (now X) database, but this all feels fanciful. And also: unimportant, for the most part.
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LooksMapping

Riley Walz:

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I scraped millions of Google Maps restaurant reviews, and gave each reviewer’s profile picture to an AI model that rates how hot they are out of 10. This map shows how attractive each restaurant’s clientele is. Red means hot, blue means not.

The model is certainly biased. It’s certainly flawed. But we judge places by the people who go there. We always have. And are we not also flawed? This website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day. A mirror held up to our collective vanity.

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There’s a paper explaining the methodology of the website. Which has a wonderfully retro 2005 “look we discovered the Google Maps API!” appearance. Walz has form for doing interesting little projects like this.
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Can an interstellar generation ship maintain a population on a 250-year trip to a habitable exoplanet? • Centauri Dreams

Paul Gilster:

»

One issue is not mentioned, despite the journey duration. Over the quarter millennium voyage, there will be evolution as the organisms adapt to the ship’s environment. Data from the ISS has shown that bacteria may mutate into more virulent pathogens. A population living in close quarters will encourage pandemics. Ionizing radiation from the sun and secondaries from the hull of a structure damages cells including their DNA. 250 years of exposure to residual GCR and secondaries will damage DNA of all life on the starship.

However, even without this direct effect on DNA, the conditions will result in organisms evolving as they adapt to the conditions on the starship, especially the small populations, increasing genetic drift. This evolution, even of complex life, can be quite fast, as the continuing monitoring of the Galápagos island finches observed by Darwin attests. Of particular concern is the creation of pathogens that will impact both humans and the food supply.

In the 1970s, the concept of a microbiome in humans, animals, and some plants was unknown, although bacteria were part of nutrient cycling. Now we know much more about the need for humans to maintain a microbiome, as well as some food crops. This could become a source of pathogens. While a space habitat can just flush out the agricultural infrastructure and replace it, no such possibility exists for the starship. Crops would need to be kept in isolated compartments to prevent a disease outbreak from destroying all the crops in the ECLSS [Environmental Control and. Life Support System].

If all this wasn’t difficult enough, the competition asks that the target generation population find a ready-made terrestrial habitat/terraformed environment to slip into on arrival. This presumably was prebuilt by a robotic system that arrived ahead of the crewed starship to build the infrastructure and create the environment ready for the human crew. It is the Mars agricultural problem writ large, with no supervision from humans to correct mistakes. If robots could do this on an exoplanet, couldn’t they make terrestrial habitats throughout the solar system?

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It’s a long post, but this part stood out to me.
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The tech fantasy that powers AI is running on fumes • The New York Times

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

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Behold the decade of mid tech!

That is what I want to say every time someone asks me, “What about A.I.?” with the breathless anticipation of a boy who thinks this is the summer he finally gets to touch a boob.

…Most of us aren’t using A.I. to save lives faster and better. We are using A.I. to make mediocre improvements, such as emailing more. Even the most enthusiastic papers about A.I.’s power to augment white-collar work have struggled to come up with something more exciting than “A brief that once took two days to write will now take two hours!”

Mid tech’s best innovation is a threat.

A.I. is one of many technologies that promise transformation through iteration rather than disruption. Consumer automation once promised seamless checkout experiences that empowered customers to bag our own groceries. It turns out that checkout automation is pretty mid — cashiers are still better at managing points of sale. A.I.-based facial recognition similarly promised a smoother, faster way to verify who you are at places like the airport. But the T.S.A.’s adoption of the technology (complete with unresolved privacy concerns) hasn’t particularly revolutionized the airport experience or made security screening lines shorter. I’ll just say, it all feels pretty mid to me.

The economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo call these kinds of technological fizzles “so-so” technologies. They change some jobs. They’re kind of nifty for a while. Eventually they become background noise or are flat-out annoying, say, when you’re bagging two weeks’ worth of your own groceries.

Artificial intelligence is supposedly more radical than automation. Tech billionaires promise us that workers who can’t or won’t use A.I. will be left behind. Politicians promise to make policy that unleashes the power of A.I. to do … something, though many of them aren’t exactly sure what. Consumers who fancy themselves early adopters get a lot of mileage out of A.I.’s predictive power, but they accept a lot of bugginess and poor performance to live in the future before everyone else.

The rest of us are using this technology for far more mundane purposes. A.I. spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our calendars are overscheduled and helps write emails that no one wants. That’s a mid revolution of mid tasks.

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These days, it’s quite easy to be an AI sceptic. But also: it’s hard to find the things that most of us find really useful.
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Careless People book review: Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Facebook memoir reveals Meta’s global problems • Rest of World

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya:

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In recounting events, the author glosses over her own indifference to repeated warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. that ultimately led to serious harm to communities. She briefly mentions how Facebook’s local staff was held at gunpoint to give access to data or remove content in various countries — something that had been happening since as early as 2012. Yet, she failed to grasp the gravity of these risks until the possibility of her facing jail time arises in South Korea — or even more starkly in March 2016, when Facebook’s vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, was arrested in Brazil.

Her delayed reckoning underscores how Facebook’s leadership remains largely detached from real-world consequences of their decisions until they become impossible to ignore. Perhaps because everyone wants to be a hero of their own story, Wynn-Williams frames her opposition to leadership decisions as isolated; in reality, powerful resistance had long existed within what Wynn-Williams describes as Facebook’s “lower-level employees.”

…Throughout her recollections, Wynn-Williams describes extravagant off-sites, high-profile meetings, and grandiose visions to “sell” Facebook to world leaders. But the truth is, policy outside the U.S. took unglamorous and thankless grunt work, deep contextual and political expertise, and years of trust-building with communities — all faced with the routine risk of arrests and illegal detention. By trying to be the Everyman, she undermines experts, civil society, and local teams who informed her work. These glaring omissions speak to both Facebook’s indifference and moral superiority toward the rest of the world — even from its most well-meaning leaders.

Despite telling an incomplete story, Careless People is a book that took enormous courage to write. This is Wynn-Williams’ story to tell, and it is an important one. It goes to show that we need many stories — especially from those who still can’t be heard — if we are to meaningfully piece together the complex puzzle of one of the world’s most powerful technology companies.

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Enzyme engineering: new method selectively destroys disease-causing proteins • Phys.org

Scripps Research Institute:

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Scientists have long struggled to target proteins that lack defined structure and are involved in cancer, neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease, and other serious illnesses. Now, a new study from Scripps Research demonstrates a proof of concept for a new strategy: engineering proteases—enzymes that cut proteins at specific sites—to selectively degrade these elusive targets with high precision in the proteome of human cells.

Published on March 24, 2025, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study shows how to reprogram a protease from botulinum toxin to target α-Synuclein—a protein with unstructured regions used here as a model. The study marks one proof point in a broader approach that could be applied to a wide range of targets across the proteome.

“This work highlights how we can use the power of laboratory evolution to engineer proteases that offer a new way to treat diseases caused by hard-to-target proteins,” says senior author Pete Schultz, the President and CEO of Scripps Research, where he also holds the L.S. “Sam” Skaggs Presidential Chair. “It’s an exciting step toward developing new therapeutic strategies for diseases that lack effective treatments.”

The research builds on botulinum toxin, a bacterial protein best known for its use in Botox, a medication utilized for cosmetic purposes and certain medical conditions. This toxin naturally contains a protease. In its original form, the protease only targets SNAP-25—a protein essential for transmitting signals between nerve cells. By degrading SNAP-25, botulinum toxin disrupts nerve signaling, leading to the temporary paralysis effect seen after Botox treatments.

To reprogram this precision for α-Synuclein, the research team modified the enzyme using directed evolution, a laboratory process that involves introducing mutations and selecting variants with improved function over multiple cycles. The result: Protease 5.

…When tested in human cells, Protease 5 nearly eliminated all α-Synuclein proteins, suggesting it could help prevent the harmful buildup seen in Parkinson’s disease. And because the enzyme was designed to precisely target α-Synuclein, it didn’t cause toxicity or disrupt essential cellular functions.

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Only a proof of concept, but a really interesting one. You can imagine that they have their eyes on Alzheimer’s disease, which also involves malformed protein deposits.
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The Gen X career meltdown • The New York Times

Steven Kurutz:

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Gen X-ers [born between the mid-1960s and late 1970s] grew up as the younger siblings of the baby boomers, but the media landscape of their early adult years closely resembled that of the 1950s: a tactile analog environment of landline telephones, tube TV sets, vinyl records, glossy magazines and newspapers that left ink on your hands.

When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn’t seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete.

More than a dozen members of Generation X interviewed for this article said they now find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields.

“My peers, friends and I continue to navigate the unforeseen obsolescence of the career paths we chose in our early 20s,” Mr. Wilcha said. “The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed — it’s just gone. It’s startling.”

Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.

Karen McKinley, 55, an advertising executive in Minneapolis, has seen talented colleagues “thrown away,” she said, as agencies have merged, trimmed staff and focused on fast, cheap social media content over elaborate photo shoots.

“Twenty years ago, you would actually have a shoot,” Ms. McKinley said. “Now, you may use influencers who have no advertising background.”

In the wake of the influencers comes another threat, artificial intelligence, which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5% of the industry’s work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester.

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Apple might buy $1bn worth of Nvidia servers • Quartz

Ece Yildrim:

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The tech giant is reportedly placing roughly $1bn worth of orders of Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 server platform, including the company’s next-generation Blackwell Ultra chips, built by Super Micro and Dell. With each server costing around $3.7m to $4m, Baruah estimates that Apple is buying approximately 250 servers. Apple didn’t immediately respond to Quartz’s request for comment.

Baruah expects Apple to use these servers to run or train generative AI large language models. The move could have stemmed from the intense backlash Apple received in response to its decision to delay a much-anticipated generative AI upgrade of its voice assistant Siri.

Apple began working on integrating advanced AI technology into its products as part of its Apple Intelligence initiative, which the company introduced last June at its annual developer conference, WWDC.

The tech giant first teased a so-called “LLM Siri” based on advanced large language models last year, in an effort to scale its generative AI capabilities and catch up to industry rivals like OpenAI and Amazon.

Although an arrival date was never publicly set, LLM Siri was widely anticipated to come in an iOS 18.4 upgrade expected next month. Now, the AI-infused Siri will likely be unveiled next year. Apple pulled its previous ads featuring the capability.

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If this is Apple’s response, then.. it’s a little late? Unless they really think they can train these models up that quickly and make a difference, in which case the new Siri leadership has lit a fire under the staff.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified