A big new noise in the world of hearing aids is a company called Fortell which improves sound recognition in noisy spaces. CC-licensed photo by Mark Fonseca Rendeiro 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. Clearly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Researchers find what makes AI chatbots politically persuasive • Ars Technica

Jacek Krywko:

»

To see if conversational large language models can really sway political views of the public, scientists at the UK AI Security Institute, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and many other institutions performed by far the largest study on AI persuasiveness to date, involving nearly 80,000 participants in the UK. It turned out political AI chatbots fell far short of superhuman persuasiveness, but the study raises some more nuanced issues about our interactions with AI.

The public debate about the impact AI has on politics has largely revolved around notions drawn from dystopian sci-fi. Large language models have access to essentially every fact and story ever published about any issue or candidate. They have processed information from books on psychology, negotiations, and human manipulation. They can rely on absurdly high computing power in huge data centers worldwide. On top of that, they can often access tons of personal information about individual users thanks to hundreds upon hundreds of online interactions at their disposal.

Talking to a powerful AI system is basically interacting with an intelligence that knows everything about everything, as well as almost everything about you. When viewed this way, LLMs can indeed appear kind of scary. The goal of this new gargantuan AI persuasiveness study was to break such scary visions down into their constituent pieces and see if they actually hold water.

The team examined 19 LLMs, including the most powerful ones like three different versions of ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok-3 beta, along with a range of smaller, open source models. The AIs were asked to advocate for or against specific stances on 707 political issues selected by the team. The advocacy was done by engaging in short conversations with paid participants enlisted through a crowdsourcing platform. Each participant had to rate their agreement with a specific stance on an assigned political issue on a scale from 1 to 100 both before and after talking to the AI.

…Overall, AI models changed the participants’ agreement ratings by 9.4% on average compared to the control group. The best performing mainstream AI model was Chat GPT 4o, which scored nearly 12% followed by GPT 4.5 with 10.51%, and Grok-3 with 9.05%. For context, static political ads like written manifestos had a persuasion effect of roughly 6.1%. The conversational AIs were roughly 40–50% more convincing than these ads, but that’s hardly “superhuman.”

«

No, but it’s suprahuman, and this is only an early incarnation.
unique link to this extract

Aircraft crashed in Gloucestershire after 3D-printed part collapsed • BBC News

Maisie Lillywhite:

»

A plane crashed after a 3D-printed part softened and collapsed, causing its engine to lose power, a report has found.

The Cozy Mk IV light aircraft was destroyed after its plastic air induction elbow, bought at an air show in North America, collapsed.

The aircraft crashed into a landing aid system at Gloucestershire Airport in Staverton on 18 March at 13:04 GMT, after its engine lost power. The sole occupant was taken to hospital with minor injuries.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said in a report that the induction elbow was made of “inappropriate material” and safety actions will be taken in future regarding 3D printed parts.

Following an “uneventful local flight”, the AAIB report said the pilot advanced the throttle on the final approach to the runway, and realised the engine had suffered a complete loss of power.

“He managed to fly over a road and a line of bushes on the airfield boundary, but landed short and struck the instrument landing system before coming to rest at the side of the structure,” the report read.

It was revealed the part had been installed during a modification to the fuel system and collapsed due to its 3D-printed plastic material softening when exposed to heat from the engine.

«

Very unintended consequences.
unique link to this extract

A responsibility to the industry • LMNT

Louie Mantia, back in July, a month after the “Liquid Glass” design had been unveiled and developers were struggling to rewrite apps to look right with it:

»

Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.

If that sounds too dramatic, maybe the rest of this post won’t be for you.

One reason that developers struggle with implementing Liquid Glass is Apple’s own evolving implementation of it. From just the first few beta releases, enough of it has changed to make it difficult for some developers to understand what exactly Apple’s vision of it is. It also communicates a level of uncertainty about things that haven’t yet been addressed about its various concessions with long-standing UI elements in macOS especially. I do not want to list them all.

When Apple themselves have not yet reasonably prescribed what standard UI elements look like in this new design system, how can any developer responsibly implement them in good conscience? Isn’t there something about this that just reeks? Adopting a standard control means it can change without your involvement. This has always been true to some extent, but the stink of it keeps getting worse as trust in the company’s vision erodes over time, right?

Another reason that the industry is showing signs of reluctance is because Alan Dye did not prove he understood the platform, any platform, before he assumed the role of its lead designer. He’s not just a newcomer to these platforms, but to software design as a whole.

«

So much love for Meta’s new design guru. So much.
unique link to this extract

Bad Dye Job • Daring Fireball

John Gruber on Alan Dye’s departure from the top design job at Apple:

»

Dye’s replacement at Apple is longtime Apple designer Stephen Lemay. I’ve never met Lemay (or at least can’t recall meeting him), and prior to today never heard much about him. But that’s typical for Apple employees. Part of the job working for Apple is remaining under the radar and out of the public eye. What I’ve learned today is that Lemay, very much unlike Dye, is a career interface/interaction designer. Sources I’ve spoken to who’ve worked with Lemay at Apple speak highly of him, particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship. Those things have been sorely lacking in the Dye era. Not everyone loves everything Lemay has worked on, but nobody bats 1.000 and designers love to critique each other’s work. I’ve chatted with people with criticisms of specific things Lemay has worked on or led at Apple (e.g. aspects of iPadOS multitasking that struck many of us as deliberately limiting, rather than empowering), but everyone I’ve spoken to is happy — if not downright giddy — at the news that Lemay is replacing Dye. Lemay is well-liked personally and deeply respected talent-wise. Said one source, in a position to know the choices, “I don’t think there was a better choice than Lemay.”

The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)

«

Agree that. I’ve updated precisely one of my Apple devices to v26, and that’s a old “sacrifice” Mac which I used to see how it looked.

Points too to Gruber for the headline, which is so good I’ve made an exception to the normal style here and left in the capitalisations.
unique link to this extract

Telehealth weight-loss provider NextMed hit with FTC crackdown over deceptive pricing and fake reviews • MSN

Maryann Pugh:

»

The operators of NextMed, a telehealth weight-loss provider, have agreed to pay $150,000 and overhaul their business practices to settle Federal Trade Commission (FTC) allegations that they misled consumers with deceptive advertising, fake reviews, and hidden costs tied to their membership programs.

The FTC’s complaint accuses Southern Health Solutions, Inc., doing business as NextMed, along with founders Robert Epstein and CEO Frank Leonardo III, of violating federal consumer protection laws through a range of deceptive tactics. The company marketed access to medical providers for popular weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic, offering memberships starting at $138 or $188 per month. However, the FTC contends those advertised prices did not include key costs like the medications themselves, required lab work, or medical consultations.

The agency further alleges that customers were locked into one-year contracts with undisclosed early termination fees and faced widespread difficulty when attempting to cancel or obtain refunds due to understaffed customer service.

“Consumers who signed up for NextMed’s programs faced significant unexpected costs and the company’s customer service failures prevented consumers from cancelling or getting a refund,” said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

«

There was all sorts of scammy stuff here: an ad with a thin actress who hadn’t used it, fake reviews via VPNs, before/afters solicited on Craiglist, and didn’t tell people the medication wasn’t included in the subscription. The owners have to pay $150,000 back to scammed customers.

Where there’s a growth market, there’s a scam.
unique link to this extract

PaperDebugger: a plugin-based multi-agent system for in-editor academic writing, review, and editing • ArXiv

Junyi Hou et al at the National University of Singapore:

»

Large language models are increasingly embedded into academic writing workflows, yet existing assistants remain external to the editor, preventing deep interaction with document state, structure, and revision history. This separation makes it impossible to support agentic, context-aware operations directly within LaTeX editors such as Overleaf.

We present PaperDebugger, an in-editor, multi-agent, and plugin-based academic writing assistant that brings LLM-driven reasoning directly into the writing environment. Enabling such in-editor interaction is technically non-trivial: it requires reliable bidirectional synchronization with the editor, fine-grained version control and patching, secure state management, multi-agent scheduling, and extensible communication with external tools.

PaperDebugger addresses these challenges through a Chrome-approved extension, a Kubernetes-native orchestration layer, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) toolchain that integrates literature search, reference lookup, document scoring, and revision pipelines. Our demo showcases a fully integrated workflow, including localized edits, structured reviews, parallel agent execution, and diff-based updates, encapsulated within a minimal-intrusion user interface (UI).

«

There might not be a lot of readers who will be able to use this, but for the ones who can, it’s going to make a big difference.
unique link to this extract

I tested five AI browsers and lost my mind in the process • The Verge

Victoria Song:

»

Right now, AI browsers come in two main flavors. There are your regular browsers that have an AI assistant stapled on in a collapsible window, such as Chrome with its Gemini features, or Edge with Copilot Mode. Then there are more specialized AI browsers, most notably ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and The Browser Company’s Dia.

This second category often supplants your search bar with AI and sometimes includes an “agentic mode,” in which the AI can complete more complex, browser-related tasks for you. Theoretically, that includes helping you book reservations or add items to a shopping cart.

For testing, I decided on a few ground rules. I kept it to five browsers: Chrome, Edge, Atlas, Comet, and Dia. There are more available, but this felt like a representative mix of both AI browser categories from a variety of players in the field. I focused on desktop apps, and tried to make settings as uniform as possible: I generally instructed the AI browsers to keep answers snappy, shared my location information where possible, enabled memory settings, and described myself as a “tech journalist specializing in health and wearable tech.”

I also approached testing from a variety of AI skill levels. What would results look like if I was a complete AI newbie versus someone more adept at prompting? Lastly, if I tried one task in a browser, I gave it a go in all the browsers, down to the same exact prompt.

Ultimately, my question was not which AI browser you should use, but whether any of them are worth your time and energy. This was a journey to see whether any of them live up to the hype.

The short answer: they don’t.

«

Turns out you have to think hard, not about your search term, but about your prompt. New stuff, same old junk. Will it magically get better? Well, have the search terms you use got shorter or longer over time, and have you had to think more or less about what you’re going to type? That’s probably what’s going to happen here as websites figure out how to fool “agentic” browsers into paying attention to them.
unique link to this extract

IRS agents will be required to watch OnlyFans to determine if content fits ‘no tax on tips’ criteria • The Independent

Owen Scott:

»

IRS agents will be required to watch pornographic content on OnlyFans to determine if the content meets the “no tax on tips” law included in Donald Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill.

The president’s controversial tax and spending policies were passed on July 4, 2025, with the slashing of taxes on tips being designed to incentivize people to earn more tips at work.

However, the new law included a caveat. Pornographic creators and actors, including OnlyFans influencers, were not entitled to have taxes waived on their work.

Some campaigners have argued that the wording is too vague, with one accountant telling The New York Times that the line of what is considered pornography is unclear.

“Where’s the line?” said Katherine Studley, who works with several OnlyFans creators. “Just because you’re on OnlyFans, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s pornographic. You could have a cooking channel or a yoga channel.”

Defining what pornography actually is has often proven difficult for lawmakers, meaning that it usually has to be judged on a case-by-case basis. When the First Amendment is used to defend pornography in court, lawmakers have to view the material in question to make a judgment.

That means taxpayers who report tips from OnlyFans will likely need to have their content viewed by an IRS agent.

«

(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Want a Fortell hearing aid? Well, who do you know? • WIRED

Steven Levy:

»

A secret is percolating at dinner parties, salons, and cocktail gatherings among the august New York City elite. It’s whispered in the circles of financial masters of the universe, Hollywood stars, and owners of sports teams. Have you heard about Fortell?

Many haven’t—or if they did hear, they might not have made out the words through noisy cross-conversations. Once they do know—particularly if they’re boomers—they want it desperately. Fortell is a hearing aid, one that claims to use AI to provide a dramatically superior aural experience. The chosen few included in its beta test claim that it seems to top the performance of high-end devices they’d been unhappily using.

These testers have made pilgrimages to Fortell’s headquarters on the fifth floor of a WeWork facility in New York City’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, where they were fitted for the hearing aids—which from the outside look pretty much like standard, over-the-ear, teardrop-shaped devices. But the big moment comes when a Fortell staffer takes them down to street level. There, among street clatter, honking cabs, and delivery trucks backing up to luxury stores, they are asked to conduct a conversation with a Fortell worker. Two other employees stand behind them, adding their own loud discourse to the urban cacophony.

Despite the din, the testers clearly make out what the person in front of them is saying. The clouds lift. Angels croon. “This was so incredible that I burst into tears,” says Ashley Tudor, one of the seemingly few beta testers who isn’t famous or powerful (though she is married to a venture capitalist).

Among the age-related-hearing-loss set, getting into the Fortell beta test has become a weird status symbol, the aural-prosthetics version of a limited-edition Birkin bag. “This product has become a major flex for the post-70 set,” says one investor. When entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman got his—he’s buddies with an investor—he began getting calls from “very substantial” people. “They said, ‘Allen, we hear that you have these new great hearing aids,’” he says of these callers, who all wanted in. Those who finagled their way into the program include multiple Forbes 400 billionaires, a chart-topping musician, the producer of a beloved TV series, and Hollywood A-listers, both old and not-so-old. KKR private equity co-executive chair Henry Kravis raves about his Fortells, as does performer and beta tester Steve Martin.

«

As the article explains, the problem for hearing as you age is in focussing on the sounds you want to hear and ignoring the ones you don’t. The solution isn’t just making everything louder.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Head designer Alan Dye has left Apple to join Meta. His resignation was written in grey ink on light grey paper. CC-licensed photo by Kris Arnold 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. Indecipherable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Rare win for renewable energy: Trump Administration funds geothermal network expansion • Inside Climate News

Phil McKenna:

»

The U.S. Department of Energy has approved an $8.6m grant that will allow the nation’s first utility-led geothermal heating and cooling network to double in size.

Gas and electric utility Eversource Energy completed the first phase of its geothermal network in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 2024. Eversource is a co-recipient of the award along with the city of Framingham and HEET, a Boston-based nonprofit that focuses on geothermal energy and is the lead recipient of the funding.

Geothermal networks are widely considered among the most energy-efficient ways to heat and cool buildings. The federal money will allow Eversource to add approximately 140 new customers to the Framingham network and fund research to monitor the system’s performance.

The federal funding was first announced in December 2024 under the Biden administration. However, the contract between HEET and the Department of Energy was not finalized until Sept. 30 and was just announced Wednesday. The agreement, which allows construction to move forward, comes as the Trump administration is clawing back billions of dollars in clean energy funding, including hundreds of millions of dollars in Massachusetts. 

“This award is an opportunity and a responsibility to clearly demonstrate and quantify the growth potential of geothermal network technology,” Zeyneb Magavi, HEET’s executive director, said in a written statement.

The existing system provides heating and cooling to approximately 140 residential and commercial customers in the western suburb of Boston. The network taps low-temperature thermal energy from dozens of boreholes drilled several hundred feet below ground, where temperatures remain steady at 55ºF.

«

This is very small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. But as a New Yorker article points out, there’s enormous potential for geothermal energy (Iceland practically runs on it), and the techniques that fracking has refined make tapping geothermal power easier than ever. So maybe it could be the little acorn that grows into the big oak.
unique link to this extract

Apple design executive Alan Dye poached by Meta in major coup • Bloomberg via MSN

Mark Gurman:

»

Meta Platforms Inc. has poached Apple Inc.’s most prominent design executive in a major coup that underscores a push by the social networking giant into AI-equipped consumer devices. 

The company is hiring Alan Dye, who has served as the head of Apple’s user interface design team since 2015, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple is replacing Dye with longtime designer Stephen Lemay, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the personnel changes haven’t been announced.

Apple confirmed the move in a statement provided to Bloomberg News. 

“Steve Lemay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in the statement. “He has always set an extraordinarily high bar for excellence and embodies Apple’s culture of collaboration and creativity.”

The move represents a seismic shift in Silicon Valley and shows that Meta is committed to becoming a name-brand maker of hardware devices. For Apple, the departure extends an exodus of talent suffered by the design team since the exit of visionary executive Jony Ive in 2019.

Dye had taken on a more significant role at Apple after Ive left, helping define how the company’s latest operating systems, apps and devices look and feel. The executive informed Apple this week that he’d decided to leave, though top management had already been bracing for his departure, the people said. 

With the Dye hire, Meta is creating a new design studio and putting him in charge of design for hardware, software and AI integration for its interfaces.

He will be reporting to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs. That group is tasked with developing wearable devices, such as smart glasses and virtual reality headsets.

«

This is absolutely wonderful news. You are not going to find anyone who appreciates Apple design who is going to be sorry about this. Dye’s approach to Apple’s software design has had a sort of indifference to users’ needs in favour of stuff that wows people at demos but doesn’t stand up to being used. This week’s Accidental Tech Podcast, for which this is timely, will treat this as an early Christmas present.
unique link to this extract

Apple replaces head of AI with executive poached from Microsoft • Financial Times

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

»

Apple’s vice-president of artificial intelligence will be replaced by a top Microsoft executive as the iPhone maker struggles to recover from a slow start in the race to harness advanced AI.

John Giannandrea, senior vice-president for machine learning and AI strategy, will step down and serve as an adviser to Apple until retiring in the spring, the company said on Monday.

He will be replaced by former Microsoft executive Amar Subramanya, who leaves a job as a corporate vice-president for Microsoft six months after jumping ship from Google, where he worked on the Gemini chatbot.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said: “AI has long been central to Apple’s strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar . . . and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple.”

The leadership change in Apple’s AI division comes as Giannandrea faced mounting criticism for a faltering approach to deploying generative AI, the technology that underpins competitors’ products such as Gemini and ChatGPT.

Apple has been slow to catch up with the technology and roll out AI tools in recent years, as the popularity of chatbots has grown rapidly.

«

The roundabout continues. Microsoft-Google-Apple-Meta-OpenAI and everywhere, like a game of very well paid musical chairs.
unique link to this extract

John Mayer spotted playing Neural DSP Quad Cortex at Coachella • Guitar World

Matt Owen:

»

Tube amp loyalist and gear aficionado John Mayer has once again demonstrated his increasing affection for digital guitar gear by turning up to play at Coachella with an amp modeler – but it wasn’t one he has ever been spotted playing before.

On Sunday (April 13), the electric guitar giant joined German DJ and producer Zedd to perform two songs: Automatic Yes – a Zedd track Mayer features on – and Mayer’s own song, New Light, which was released in 2018.

For the short guest performance, though, the PRS signature artist opted against wheeling out his entire rig (it would have been entirely impractical to do so) and instead played through, for the first time on stage, a Neural DSP Quad Cortex.

As per the John Mayer’s Gear Instagram page, for the two-song cameo Mayer partnered his Faded Black Tee Satin Silver Sky with the acclaimed QC, which had been attached to what looked to be D’Addario’s XPND pedalboard.

Those familiar with Mayer’s guitar gear will be aware this isn’t the first time the guitarist has played through an amp modeler, either on stage or in the studio. At 2019’s Coachella, he performed with Khalid through a Fractal Axe-Fx III, and two years later he used a Fractal to record parts of Sob Rock.

Not only that, Mayer also reportedly owns a Kemper Profiler for casual use, and used a Fractal while supporting Ed Sheeran in 2023.

It is, however, the first time Mayer has opted to use the Neural DSP Quad Cortex in this capacity. Whether that means he’s decided to ditch his trusty Fractals altogether, or whether this was a one-time-only thing, it remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen whether this is the start of a formal partnership with Neural DSP. Did the team use their T.I.N.A robot to model Mayer’s hugely sought-after and beloved Dumble-loaded rig? The tones, by all accounts (footage is yet to surface online) were on point during the set, so it’s not entirely out of the question.

«

OK, so to a lot of people (including me) this is incomprehensible – the feeling captured by the classic tweet “I’m 50. All celebrity news looks like this: ‘Curtains for Zoosha? K-smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt’“.

Anyhow, the way that physical amplifiers are being replaced by digital versions is well explained in an Ars Technica article, which in effect riffs on the Mayer event. Software is eating the world. And its amplifiers.
unique link to this extract

Fraudulent gambling network may actually be something more nefarious • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Researchers have previously tracked smaller pieces of the enormous infrastructure. Last month, security firm Sucuri reported that the operation seeks out and compromises poorly configured websites running the WordPress CMS. Imperva in January said the attackers also scan for and exploit web apps built with the PHP programming language that have existing webshells or vulnerabilities. Once the weaknesses are exploited, the attackers install a GSocket, a backdoor that the attackers use to compromise servers and host gambling web content on them.

All of the gambling sites target Indonesian-speaking visitors. Because Indonesian law prohibits gambling, many people in that country are drawn to illicit services. Most of the 236,433 attacker-owned domains hosting the gambling sites are hosted on Cloudflare. Most of the 1,481 hijacked subdomains were hosted on Amazon Web Services, Azure, and GitHub.

On Wednesday, researchers from security firm Malanta said those details are only the most visible signs of a malicious network that’s actually much bigger and more complex than previously known. Far from being solely a financially motivated operation, the firm said, the network likely serves nation-state hackers targeting a wide range of organizations, including those in manufacturing, transport, healthcare, government, and education.

The basis for the speculation is the tremendous amount of time and resources that have gone into creating and maintaining the infrastructure over 14 years. The resources include 328,000 separate domains, which comprise 236,000 addresses that the attackers bought and 90,000 that they commandeered by compromising legitimate websites. It’s also made up of nearly 1,500 hijacked subdomains from legitimate organizations. Malanta estimates that such infrastructure costs anywhere from $725,000 to $17m per year to fund.

…“This combination—longevity, scale, cost, and sophistication—goes well beyond a typical ‘quickhit’ gambling scam or financially motivated crew,” Malanta said. “That’s why we classify it as an APT and describe it as state sponsored-level, while being careful not to assert that we have direct evidence tying it to a specific government entity.”

The focus on compromising government agencies in the US and Europe and a wide swath of industries is another reason for the assessment.

«

unique link to this extract

This AI bubble is more memory than dot-com • Culpium

Tim Culpan:

»

Since the AI sector at the model and token-making level is just like memory, the industry shakeout is likely to play out in the same way. DRAM used to be a big deal. For a while it was Intel’s bread and butter. These chips are fundamental to any computing system because they temporary hold data — often for milliseconds — which a processor uses to make calculations. In the early PC era, DRAM supply was the bottleneck for computer sales.

By the early 2000s, there were around a dozen memory-chip makers across South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the US. Most were backed by industrial conglomerates. Hynix, for example, was spun off from the Hyundai group after the chaebol’s boss realized electronics were an increasingly important part of cars. Nanya Technology was born out of Taiwan’s massive Formosa Plastics Group. But heavy competition, unstable earnings, and an unwillingness by corporate parents and banks to keep funding them lead to a wave of consolidations and shutdowns by the early 2010s. Today, the DRAM sector is dominated by just three companies: Samsung, SK Hynix — both from South Korea — and Boise, Idaho-based Micron.

What kept the leaders atop the market was both an unrelenting pace of capacity expansion, and continued technological development using the latest equipment. Both are crucial to maintaining price competitiveness on a per-bit basis. Assuming the product is largely reliable, price is the factor which truly differentiates.

Today’s AI leaders can be sorted into two categories: stand alone, and conglomerate-backed. OpenAI and Anthropic are startups that stand alone. A recent series of circular deals muddies the water a little: Nvidia is taking a stake in Open AI2, while the startup has a warrant for shares in Nvidia rival AMD. And Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI makes the software giant as much a sugar daddy as a conglomerate parent: it’ll last as long as Microsoft’s AI friend provides benefits.3 These companies are kind of like Micron. Although it found a wealthy industrialist to back it, Micron never benefited from having a conglomerate parent.

«

Culpan used to be Bloomberg’s technology correspondent based in Taiwan, and has long experience writing about the sector. The longer part of this article looks at whether the AI bubble (come on, it is) resembles the dot-com bubble, or the RAM bubble.
unique link to this extract

Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Micron is retiring the Crucial brand, marking the end of its line of budget-friendly solid-state drives (SSDs) and RAM kits, as reported earlier by VideoCardz. In an announcement on Wednesday, Micron says winding down its consumer-focused business will “improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments” — a.k.a. AI companies.

The brand’s shutdown is a huge blow for PC builders and hobbyists, who are already dealing with skyrocketing RAM prices linked to a surge in demand from AI companies. OpenAI, for example, struck a deal with SK Hynix and Samsung to make up to 900,000 DRAM per month for its Stargate project.

Now, there’s going to be one less brand selling consumer-focused memory for PCs, potentially intensifying the global memory shortage. Soaring demand for RAM is already impacting pricing at CyberPowerPC, Framework, and Raspberry Pi, while HP has even hinted at raising the prices of its devices or equipping them with less memory.

«

So RAM goes from being a hard-to-obtain specialist product in the 1970s to a ubiquitous, cheap product in the 2010s to a hard-to-obtain specialist product again.
unique link to this extract

WordPress’s vibe-coding experiment, Telex, has already been put to real-world use • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

WordPress’s experimental AI development tool, Telex, has already been put to real-world use, only months after its September debut. At the company’s annual “State of the Word” event on Tuesday in San Francisco, WordPress Project Cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg shared several examples where Telex had been used within a working WordPress shop to do things like create price comparisons, price calculators, and pull in real-time business hours plus a map link to a retail store, among examples.

Telex, which Mullenweg previously described as a “v0 or Lovable, but specifically for WordPress,” is essentially the publishing platform’s attempt to build its own vibe-coding tool for the AI era. The software allows developers to generate Gutenberg blocks — the modular bits of text, images, columns, and more — that make up a WordPress website.

While the software is still labeled as an experiment, Mullenweg was able to demonstrate several real-world examples that had been built by community creator Nick Hamze.

In the first example, Mullenweg showed off a pricing comparison tool built with Telex, noting that these sorts of rich, interactive web elements were something that a developer used to have to custom-build, but could now be created in a few seconds.

«

This is getting closer and closer to the ordinary person being able to use it.
unique link to this extract

The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing • EL PAÍS English

Manuel Ansede:

»

In the autumn of 2020, with humanity terrified by the deadly second wave of the coronavirus, a scientific journal published a study with a solution: jade amulets from traditional Chinese medicine could prevent COVID-19. The proposal was outlandish, but the editor-in-chief of the weekly, Spanish chemist Damià Barceló, defended its quality controls. That journal, Science of the Total Environment — one of the 15 that publishes the most studies worldwide — has just been expelled from the group of reputable publications by one of the leading evaluation companies, after dozens of irregular articles were discovered. The scandal exposes the windfall profits of scientific publishers, who in recent years have amassed billions of dollars in earnings from public funds earmarked for science.

Damià Barceló, 71, took over as editor of the journal in 2012. In just two years, he doubled the number of studies published. In a decade, he increased the number tenfold, with the journal reaching nearly 10,000 articles annually. As the number of articles increased, the quality declined, because there was a perverse incentive to accept mediocre work: to publish research open access in the journal, a scientist has to pay $4,150 plus taxes.

Emilio Delgado, professor of documentation at the University of Granada in Spain, explains it this way: “It’s clearly an open-door journal that takes almost anything. It’s what I call a mega-journal, that is, a mega-business.”

«

“Paper mills” are just there to make noise. As ever, Sturgeon’s Law applies: 90% of everything is crap. This was the crap.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Environment Agency was far too slow to respond to thousands of tonnes of illegally dumped waste near the river Cherwell. CC-licensed photo by Howard Stanbury 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. Rubbish. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI CEO declares “code red” as Gemini gains 200 million users in three months • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

The shoe is most certainly on the other foot. On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at the company to improve ChatGPT, delaying advertising plans and other products in the process,  The Information reported based on a leaked internal memo. The move follows Google’s release of its Gemini 3 model last month, which has outperformed ChatGPT on some industry benchmark tests and sparked high-profile praise on social media.

In the memo, Altman wrote, “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT.” The company will push back work on advertising integration, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant feature called Pulse. Altman encouraged temporary team transfers and established daily calls for employees responsible for enhancing the chatbot.

The directive creates an odd symmetry with events from December 2022, when Google management declared its own “code red” internal emergency after ChatGPT launched and rapidly gained in popularity. At the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai reassigned teams across the company to develop AI prototypes and products to compete with OpenAI’s chatbot. Now, three years later, the AI industry is in a very different place.

Google released Gemini 3 in mid-November, and the model quickly topped the LMArena leaderboard, a crowdsourced vibemarking site that allows users to compare two AI models and select the one with outputs that please them most. The launch has been accompanied by measured praise from some and bombastic hype from others. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote Sunday on X that he was switching to Gemini 3 after using ChatGPT daily for three years. “I’m not going back,” Benioff wrote. “The leap is insane.”

…Not everyone views OpenAI’s “code red” as a genuine alarm. Reuters columnist Robert Cyran wrote on Tuesday that OpenAI’s announcement added “to the impression that OpenAI is trying to do too much at once with technology that still requires a great deal of development and funding.” On the same day Altman’s memo circulated, OpenAI announced an ownership stake in a Thrive Capital venture and a collaboration with Accenture. “The only thing bigger than the company’s attention deficit is its appetite for capital,” Cyran wrote.

«

Shades of Facebook when Google announced Google+?
unique link to this extract

Rubbish mountain • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins goes to Oxford to look at the gigantic amount of waste dumped there by criminals some time earlier this year:

»

Eyewitness reports speak of convoys of lorries turning up at the site, delivering the rubbish to waiting excavators that moulded it into the extraordinary monument we see today. When I visited the area last weekend I estimated the pile to be around 170m long (roughly the length of the Gherkin in London), 12m wide and perhaps 5 or 6 deep, making it somewhere north of ten thousand cubic metres in size. It would take four or five hundred of the largest bin lorries to shift it all. This was not a few dodgy geezers in white vans, but a large criminal operation that must have involved dozens of people.

The sheer scale of the crime scene makes its location rather ironic, because this giant landfill sits just twelve hundred yards from the headquarters of Thames Valley Police in Kidlington, just north of Oxford. In fact visiting the town was a surreal experience in its own right – the local Sainsbury’s is such a notorious crime spot that the supermarket has installed a highly visible CCTV monitoring station in front of the exit, with a uniformed guard watching TV screens as you wander by with your shopping. Presumably this security theatre is supposed to comfort shoppers, but it made the place feel like some lawless outpost, a town in visible decline.

In fairness to the police, it’s hard to imagine a more convenient or secluded site to carry out this crime. Surrounded by trees, it was completely screened off from view until leaves began falling in the Autumn. In theory a public footpath crosses the land, but in practice nobody would ever walk down it – one end is hidden behind a crash barrier on the main road half a mile out of town, while the other terminates at the end of a field in the middle of nowhere, coming out on a small road with no parking nearby and no other paths to connect with.

In any case, Thames Valley Police have shown little interest in the crime – perhaps too busy with the local Sainsbury’s – and the job of dealing with it has fallen to the Environment Agency, the public body responsible for waste crime. They swung into action at the start of July, and in the spirit of being as fair as I possibly can, I’ll tell you their side of the story first.

«

There’s an embedded 10-minute YouTube video which shows this story in full, with terrific drone footage. It will surely make you angry at the sheer incompetence and indifference of the Environment Agency, which shows absolutely no interest in discovering the people behind this or using simple detection methods such as wildlife cameras. I’ve put more effort into finding a lost dog than they did into uncovering those behind a criminal enterprise that will poison a river.
unique link to this extract

UK ministers aim to ban cryptocurrency political donations over anonymity risks • The Guardian

Rowena Mason:

»

Ministers are working to ban political donations made with cryptocurrency but the crackdown is not likely to be ready for the elections bill in the new year, Whitehall sources have said.

The government increasingly believes that donations made with cryptocurrency pose a risk to the integrity of the electoral system, not least because the source can be hard to verify.

However, the complex nature of cryptocurrency means officials do not believe a ban will be workable by the time of the elections bill, due to be published shortly, which is set to lower the voting age to 16 and reduce loopholes in political finance.

The government’s ambition to ban crypto donations will be a blow to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which became the first to accept contributions in digital currency this year. It is believed to have received its first registrable donations in cryptocurrency this autumn and the party has set up its own crypto portal to receive contributions, saying it is subject to “enhanced” checks.

Government sources have said ministers believe cryptocurrency donations to be a problem, as they are difficult to trace and could be exploited by foreign powers or criminals.

Pat McFadden, then a Cabinet Office minister, first raised the idea in July, saying: “I definitely think it is something that the Electoral Commission should be considering. I think that it’s very important that we know who is providing the donation, are they properly registered, what are the bona fides of that donation.”

The Electoral Commission provides guidance on crypto donations but ministers accept any ban would probably have to come from the government through legislation.

Earlier this year, the Electoral Commission initially appeared to believe the risks of donations in cryptocurrency were manageable, saying they could be assessed like any other asset such as a work of art or donations in kind.

«

Interesting point: if donations are anonymous, then how can they be influence? But this is yet another form of hawala – the trust-based system of money transfer. You tell your target, in a secure way, that you’re making a donation of a specified amount; the donation turns up subsequently in a crypto transfer. The Electoral Commission is overoptimistic.
unique link to this extract

Google is experimentally replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one — but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that.

I read a lot of my bedtime news via Google Discover, aka “swipe right on your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel homescreen until you see a news feed appear,” and that’s where these new AI headlines are beginning to show up.

They’re not all bad. For example, “Origami model wins prize” and “Hyundai, Kia gain share” seem fine, even if not remotely as interesting as the original headlines. (“Hyundai and Kia are lapping the competition as US market share reaches a new record” and “14-year-old wins prize for origami that can hold 10,000 times its own weight” sound like they’re actually worth a click!)

But in the seeming attempt to boil down every story to four words or less, Google’s new headline experiment is attaching plenty of misleading and inane headlines to journalists’ work, and with little disclosure that Google’s AI is rewriting them.

The very first one I saw was “Steam Machine price revealed,” which it most certainly was not! Valve won’t reveal that till next year. Ars Technica’s original headline was the far more reasonable “Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one.”

…The good news is, this is a Google experiment. If there’s enough backlash, the company probably won’t proceed. “These screenshots show a small UI experiment for a subset of Discover users,” Google spokesperson Mallory Deleon tells The Verge. “We are testing a new design that changes the placement of existing headlines to make topic details easier to digest before they explore links from across the web.”

But the overall trend at Google has been to prioritize its own products at the expense of sending clicks to news websites.

«

Google used to be about the open web. More and more, it’s about keeping people inside its properties.
unique link to this extract

‘Unauthorized’ edit to Ukraine’s frontline maps point to Polymarket’s war betting • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

»

A live map that tracks frontlines of the war in Ukraine was edited to show a fake Russian advance on the city of Myrnohrad on November 15. The edit coincided with the resolution of a bet on Polymarket, a site where users can bet on anything from basketball games to presidential election and ongoing conflicts. If Russia captured Myrnohrad by the middle of November, then some gamblers would make money. According to the map that Polymarket relies on, they secured the town just before 10:48 UTC on November 15. The bet resolved and then, mysteriously, the map was edited again and the Russian advance vanished.

The degenerate gamblers on Polymarket are making money by betting on the outcomes of battles big and small in the war between Ukraine and Russia. To adjudicate the real time exchange of territory in a complicated war, Polymarket uses a map generated by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a DC-based think tank that monitors conflict around the globe.

One of ISW’s most famous products is its live map of the war in Ukraine. The think tank updates the map throughout the day based on a number of different factors including on the ground reports. The map is considered the gold standard for reporting on the current front lines of the conflict, so much so that Polymarket uses it to resolve bets on its website.

…ISW acknowledged the stealth edit, but did not say if it was made because of the betting markets. “It has come to ISW’s attention that an unauthorized and unapproved edit to the interactive map of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was made on the night of November 15-16 EST. The unauthorized edit was removed before the day’s normal workflow began on November 16 and did not affect ISW mapping on that or any subsequent day. The edit did not form any part of the assessment of authorized map changes on that or any other day. We apologize to our readers and the users of our maps for this incident,” ISW said in a statement on its website.

ISW did say it isn’t happy that Polymarket is using its map of the war as a gambling resource.

«

Gamblers are weird, weird people.
unique link to this extract

Companies have found a new way to advertise: ragebaiting. You’ll hate it • The Washington Post

Tatum Hunter and Nitasha Tiku:

»

Tech founder Avi Schiffmann spent around a million dollars this autumn papering New York City’s subways with ads proclaiming that Friend, an AI device worn like a necklace, is a better support system than human companions.

The ads were less about selling the device, he said, than getting people to talk about it — for good or ill.

On those terms, at least, it worked. Riders, angry at the encroachment of AI, vandalized many of the ads with scrawled messages such as “Stop capitalizing on loneliness” and “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died.” Anti-AI social media chatter featuring photos of the defaced ads started gaining traction online.

Schiffmann, 23, sat back and watched the attention roll in. When subway workers started washing the graffiti off the ads, he raced on foot to the West 4th Street station to beg them to stop.

“I wanted Friend to be a scapegoat for everything people don’t like about the world right now,” Schiffmann said. The campaign’s viral success, he added, was primarily the work of online posters rushing to smear Friend’s product and presentation. All he did was set the bait.

Schiffmann is hardly alone. Ragebait — the art of making people mad on social media — has graduated this year from a growth hack for online influencers to a corporate marketing strategy. This week Oxford University Press declared “rage bait” 2025’s word of the year, finding the term’s usage has tripled in the last 12 months.

«

Does it make you angry? Does it? (Most of this stuff is very resistible, if we’re honest.)
unique link to this extract

The Taiwan crisis of 2025 is here • National Security Journal

Robert E. Kelly:

»

Japan and China are now locked in a protracted spat over China’s claims to Taiwan.

What started as a minor flap is growing into a major contest in which regional players are desperately trying to avoid taking sides between the two rivals and are increasingly staking out opposed positions.

China’s designs on Taiwan are well known, but Beijing appears to have suddenly decided to force the issue in the region.

Beijing is using new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s words—that a Chinese assault on Taiwan would inevitably become a security issue for Japan—to bully the region to accept the Chinese position on Taiwan, namely, that it should be permitted to invade and conquer it with no outside intervention.

Japan is China’s primary antagonist in the region. No other economy is large enough to compete with China, and the US alliance with Japan is the linchpin of the US position in East Asia.

This position is turning into a major showdown. If Beijing can humble Japan—if it can force Takaichi, via trade coercion and military threats, to retract her words—then it will establish rhetorical dominance over its regional rival.

A Japanese capitulation will signal to other regional powers, such as South Korea and the Philippines, that they, too, should find an accommodation with Beijing.

For this reason, Japan is unlikely to back down. It cannot afford to swerve in a direct chicken contest with its primary competitor. This stalemate will therefore likely continue for a while.

That Japan and China might fall into a cold war over the future of East Asia is not a new observation.

The chill began under the premiership of Shinzo Abe in Japan and the presidency of Xi Jinping of China. But both sides had strong economic incentives to keep security competition muffled.

Their trade relationship is substantial. Both would suffer from a prolonged fallout. When the history of this standoff is written, much focus will be on why China chose this moment to plant its flag. Does it now feel ready to take Japan on directly?

«

Occasionally, geopolitics intrudes. This is important, even if it goes under the radar of all the Trumpist nonsense across the world. (Kelly is an analyst based in Korea who achieved fame when his children intruded on his BBC talking head spot in 2017.)
unique link to this extract

Nuclear Taskforce Tracker • Centre for British Progress

Centre for British Progress:

»

Tracking the progress of government departments, regulators and industry in implementing the UK Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce’s recommendations. The content in this tracker is partially AI-generated based on the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce report. We have worked hard to ensure it is accurate, but some of the titles, descriptions, etc. may be slightly different or truncated.

«

The Centre for British Progress describes itself as “a non-partisan think tank researching and producing concrete ideas for an era of British growth and progress.” So far everything’s on track! Though that’s only one recommendation completed. Many, many more to come.
unique link to this extract

Why Zipcar gave up on London • London Centric

Jim Waterson and Polly Smythe:

»

Zipcar’s planned closure date coincides with the mayor’s decision to introduce a new £13.50 daily congestion charge on electric vehicles, a move that would hit any Zipcar that is picked up outside the zone and driven through central London. The company had already said it would pass on the cost to drivers, substantially raising the price of a car journey through the heart of the capital — and making it much less financially attractive.

…The congestion charge extension might have been the final nail in Zipcar’s coffin. But looking at the company’s UK accounts, it’s clear the business model had been in deep trouble for several years due to rising costs and flatlining revenue.

Zipcar’s UK income fell by £3.95m to £47m in 2024, due to customers taking fewer and shorter trips in their cars. Costs increased, meaning post-tax losses widened dramatically to £11.6m. The company said the cost-of-living crisis “reduced members’ disposable income and impacted their demand for leisure activities”. Electric vehicles proved to be costly to buy and difficult to resell.

The arrival of Uber in the mid-2010s ate into Zipcar’s business model of enabling people nipping around London for short car trips. It’s also reasonable to assume that some people who might have been tempted by a one-way Zipcar Flex in the past are now choosing to pop on a much cheaper Lime e-bike. IKEA started doing delivery.

All in all, People just aren’t travelling as much and while a substantial number of Londoners came to rely on Zipcar as an emergency back-up travel option, that wasn’t enough to sustain it as a profitable business.

Parent company Avis Budget, which is already in financially dire straits, simply appears to have had enough and pulled the plug on this comparatively small part of its UK operation at short notice.

But what’s the impact going to be?

Moving house with one of Zipcar’s van and the help of a couple of friends became a rite of passage for many young Londoners. Zipcar claimed each of its vehicles removed 27 barely-used privately owned cars from the capital’s roads, with 12,000 businesses supposedly using its services.

«

Reading this, and an earlier London Centric report on how TfL isn’t hitting its (lowering) carbon emission targets unless it gets more EVs on the roads, one despairs a little of anybody being able to come up with a scheme where the left hand and right hand are in communication.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The car hire company Zipcar is shutting down its UK arm, partly blaming high electricity prices for charging its EVs. CC-licensed photo by Michael Coghlan 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. Discharged. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

your phone is a fake house • The Etymology Nerd

Adam Aleksic:

»

Only I have the motor memory to immediately open the Notes app on my phone. A stranger would have to look for it, but my fingers subconsciously understand where to go. Much like with my childhood home, I have an embodied knowledge of my home screen.

That phrase—“home screen”—has been on my mind recently. The language of the smartphone invites you to think of it as a house. You can “choose your wallpaper,” just like with a real house; you can “lock” your phone like a front door. The metaphor is that this is a private refuge from the outside world. It is a tiny dwelling in your pocket, which you can customize like an actual dwelling to affirm your identity. In doing so, you “tame” the technology, making it feel natural in your everyday life.

The phone, like your house, is a focal point. Everything revolves around it. When you need comfort in the physical world, you go back to the home; in the digital world, you go back to your home screen. There is something calming about a deeply personal environment. It provides a grounding presence which we can retreat to.

A computer, meanwhile, remains more functional. Phrases like “desktop” and “taskbar” create a metaphor that this is a workstation; you have “trash” and “files.” Of course, there are still work-like aspects to the phone and home-like aspects to the computer, but the phone takes on a far more domestic role in our lives. It is not a utility: it is an extension of self.

In his book The Poetics of Space the philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues that our intimate spaces are deeply intertwined with our imagination and sense of being. When you curl up in a comfortable nook in your home, for example, your consciousness is gathered inward. You have control over this small space, in contrast to the wild, turbulent outdoors. You can focus attention differently in miniature.

As I move between apps on my phone, I notice a vague emotion that I am entering different rooms, each with its own character. The settings app is the basement; the dating apps are the bedroom. No matter where I go, though, there is that coziness of being in a nook. This is my corner of the world; I am free to do what I want. I can let my mind relax, for I am safe and secure from the vast, terrifying world.

«

The subtlety of language; the seductiveness of the faux-private space. But is it really private?
unique link to this extract

The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake • The Verge

Benjamin Riley:

»

The AI hype machine relentlessly promotes the idea that we’re on the verge of creating something as intelligent as humans, or even “superintelligence” that will dwarf our own cognitive capacities. If we gather tons of data about the world, and combine this with ever more powerful computing power (read: Nvidia chips) to improve our statistical correlations, then presto, we’ll have AGI. Scaling is all we need.

But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.

Last year, three scientists published a commentary in the journal Nature titled, with admirable clarity, “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought.” Co-authored by Evelina Fedorenko (MIT), Steven T. Piantadosi (UC Berkeley) and Edward A.F. Gibson (MIT), the article is a tour de force summary of decades of scientific research regarding the relationship between language and thought, and has two purposes: one, to tear down the notion that language gives rise to our ability to think and reason, and two, to build up the idea that language evolved as a cultural tool we use to share our thoughts with one another.

Let’s take each of these claims in turn.

When we contemplate our own thinking, it often feels as if we are thinking in a particular language, and therefore because of our language. But if it were true that language is essential to thought, then taking away language should likewise take away our ability to think. This does not happen. I repeat: taking away language does not take away our ability to think. And we know this for a couple of empirical reasons.

«

This one will run and run. Is a word a representation of an idea? Is manipulating words in multidimensional space thinking, or is it just shuffling a dictionary?
unique link to this extract

Zipcar to exit UK car sharing market • Financial Times

Kana Inagaki:

»

Zipcar, the car-sharing giant owned by US rental group Avis Budget, has said it plans to exit the UK market, in the latest hit to the struggling industry. 

In an email to customers on Monday, James Taylor, the general manager of Zipcar UK, said it would suspend new bookings beyond December 31, pending the outcome of a consultation with British employees.

The group claims to be the UK’s biggest car-sharing club with more than 650,000 members, who can rent cars and vans for between an hour and seven days.

According to its latest accounts, the company had 71 employees last year, down from 92 in 2023. It cited high electricity costs as it reported an operating loss of £4m last year, compared with a profit of £303,000 in the previous 12 months.

“This particularly affected the company due to the size of the electric fleet and the fact that fuel costs are included in the cost of the rental,” it said.

In a statement on Monday, Avis Budget said Zipcar’s operations outside of the UK will not be affected.

…The company began operations in London in 2007 and now operates more than 1,000 electric vehicles in the city as part of a fleet of more than 3,000.

Zipcar’s plan to end its UK operations comes ahead of London’s introduction of a £13.50 a day congestion charge from January 2 for EVs, marking the first time the battery-powered cars will be hit with a fee for entering the city’s centre.

«

Christmas bookings assured; everything afterwards, not so much.
unique link to this extract

Airbus A320 recall: what the solar flare software update is all about • Gulf News

Jay Hilotin:

»

Airbus, the European planemaker, issued an urgent Alert Operators Transmission (AOT) on November 29, 2025, mandating immediate software updates or hardware protections for around 6,000 A320 family aircraft — over half the global fleet.

The move came after a detailed probe into a JetBlue A320 nosedive incident on October 30 revealed that intense solar radiation could corrupt key flight control data in the Elevator Aileron Computer (ELAC). Intense solar radiation incidents are sometimes blamed for the incineration of dozens of satellites.

The vulnerability affects aircraft with specific ELAC B software versions exposed to high-altitude radiation from solar flares. This, the planemaker said, risks uncommanded pitch or roll manoeuvres.

Airbus is collaborating with regulators like EASA, which has formalised an Emergency Airworthiness Directive effective 6pm CT on November 30, 2025.

…JetBlue A320 from Cancun (Mexico) to Newark (US) suddenly lost altitude mid-flight due to corrupted ELAC data. The incident, blamed on solar radiation, injured passengers and prompted an FAA investigation; this led to the global recall.

Intense solar radiation is seen behind data corruption in the ELAC (Elevator Aileron Computer) flight control system, potentially causing uncommanded manoeuvres like sudden altitude drops.

About 6,000 active A320s worldwide require fixes before next flights, impacting operators like IndiGo (338 affected), Air India (138), American Airlines (209 of 480), Jetstar, Wizz Air and others across Asia, Europe, Americas and the US.

Most software rollbacks take 2-3 hours per plane, but ~1,000 need hardware changes lasting weeks; this has caused thousands of cancellations and delays worldwide, stranding millions during holidays, though many airlines aim for completion by November 30.

«

A surprising little result of the solar flare activity. Sure to be written in to a streaming service’s cheap film in a year or two.
unique link to this extract

The triumph of logical English • Works in Progress Magazine

Henry Oliver:

»

The Elizabethans and Victorians wrote long tangled sentences that resembled the briars growing underneath Sleeping Beauty’s tower. Today we write like Hemingway. Short. Sharp. Readable. Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete. 

I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modelled more closely on spoken English.

What this should demonstrate is that shortness is the wrong dimension to investigate. We think we are looking at a language that got simpler; in fact we are looking at one that has created huge variation in what it can express and how, by adding new ways of writing. Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them.

…You might have read this essay and largely agreed with me but still been left with the feeling that something is different about modern prose as compared to the writing of the 1700s, not just the fact that we use less obscure vocabulary or the substituting full stops for colons and semicolons. Something else is still different. I think that something is that we increasingly write like we speak.

«

Write as we speak. Notwithstanding, it’s a fascinating (long) article. Furthermore, Works in Progress is rapidly becoming a must-read. They also do a print version.
unique link to this extract

Meet Rey, the admin of ‘Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters’ • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

A prolific cybercriminal group that calls itself “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” has dominated headlines this year by regularly stealing data from and publicly mass extorting dozens of major corporations. But the tables seem to have turned somewhat for “Rey,” the moniker chosen by the technical operator and public face of the hacker group: Earlier this week, Rey confirmed his real life identity and agreed to an interview after KrebsOnSecurity tracked him down and contacted his father.

Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLSH) is thought to be an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters. Members of these gangs hail from many of the same chat channels on the Com, a mostly English-language cybercriminal community that operates across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.

«

Krebs ranges far and wide, pulling in tiny pieces of information – passwords reused here, email scams used there – to eventually track down the person..

»

Specifically, Rey mentioned in several Telegram chats that he had Irish heritage, even posting a graphic that shows the prevalence of the surname “Ginty.”

Spycloud indexed hundreds of credentials stolen from cybero5dev@proton.me, and those details indicate that Rey’s computer is a shared Microsoft Windows device located in Amman, Jordan. The credential data stolen from Rey in early 2024 show there are multiple users of the infected PC, but that all shared the same last name of Khader and an address in Amman, Jordan.

The “autofill” data lifted from Rey’s family PC contains an entry for a 46-year-old Zaid Khader that says his mother’s maiden name was Ginty. The infostealer data also shows Zaid Khader frequently accessed internal websites for employees of Royal Jordanian Airlines. The infostealer data makes clear that Rey’s full name is Saif Al-Din Khader.

«

He’s 16, or claims to be.
unique link to this extract

Dutch study finds teen cybercrime is mostly just a phase • The Register

Connor Jones:

»

Young threat actors may be rebels without a cause. These cybercriminals typically grow out of their offending ways by the time they turn 20, according to data published by the Dutch government.

In a report examining the social cost of adolescent crime, the Dutch House of Representatives cited various research papers to show that teenagers tend to explore their criminal tendencies at similar ages, regardless of the type of crime.

The report stated that cybercriminals tend to develop their skills at an early age – no shocks there – and do so through “hacking games.” The number of teenage cyber offenders is similar to those involved in weapons or drug offenses; together they are the three least common offence types for adolescents. Property offences such as theft were the most common.

Young cybercriminals reach peak criminality at around age 20, although this tends to fluctuate by a few years, depending on the decade. For example, between 2010-2012 and 2018-2021, the peak age floated between 17 and 19, but, in between, it remained at 20.

Research also shows that these peak ages broadly apply to all crimes, cyber or otherwise.

In 2013, one study of 323 cybercriminals found that 76% of offenders reached peak offending at age 20, before veering away from the trade gradually in the following years.

Only around 4% of those who embark on an early black hat career maintain a high likelihood of continuing that into ages well beyond the 20 mark.

«

So only a couple more years for Krebs’s target. But you know there will be more to come.
unique link to this extract

Out of Eden Walk • Center for Geographic Analysis

»

The Out of Eden Walk is a 24,000-mile journalistic endeavor to create a global record of human life at the start of a new millennium as told by villagers, nomads, traders, farmers, soldiers, and artists who rarely make the news.  Sponsored and hosted by National Geographic Society, the project is led by Pulitzer Prize winning writer Paul Salopek who is walking the path of human migration across the globe, and recording what he encounters in the form of writing, photographs, video, and audio.

«

One of the most impressive parts is the 2013 “Walk Through Time” which shows human migration from the East Africa Rift valley through Africa and then the rest of the world.
unique link to this extract

Michel Bettane: Chinese wine now outshines France in technical precision • Vino Joy News

Vino Joy News:

»

French wine critic Michel Bettane says the overall technical standard of Chinese wines now surpasses what he and his team often encounter in their annual tastings in France — a sign, he believes, that China is undergoing an “astonishing awakening of terroir.”

The sixth edition of the Bettane + Desseauve China Wine Tasting concluded in Beijing and Shangri-La, Yunnan, in September 2025. Led by Bettane, the panel of six international experts and local judges evaluated more than 300 premium Chinese wines — a process that, he said, revealed how far the country’s winemaking has come.

Chinese wines, Bettane noted, have reached a level of maturity unimaginable 15 years ago. When he first visited, the market “was dominated by a few major brands” and “people focused on the label, not the land.” Today, from the deserts of Xinjiang to the mountains of Yunnan, he said, producers are “confidently expressing their terroir.”

What impressed him most, however, was the technical precision. “We encountered almost no wines with serious flaws,” he said. “The overall solidity of the winemaking standard is, in fact, superior to what we often find in our annual tastings in France.”

Among China’s emerging wine regions, Bettane highlighted two with strikingly different identities: Ningxia and Yunnan’s Deqin County.

«

How long before we’re seeing Chinese wine on our supermarket shelves? Though French wine has, to some tastes, been going downhill for a while.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Buyer beware – the “Pyrex” trademark has been licensed to companies which don’t make cooking glassware to the same standards as the original one. CC-licensed photo by ricky shore 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. Hot in here. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The world still hasn’t made sense of ChatGPT • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel on the third anniversary of the introduction of ChatGPT:

»

This is disruption, in the less technical sense of the word. In August, I wrote that “one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.” If you genuinely believe that we are just years away from the arrival of a paradigm-shifting, society-remaking superintelligence, behaving irrationally makes sense. If you believe that Silicon Valley’s elites have lost their minds, foisting a useful-but-not-magical technology on society, declaring that it’s building God, investing historic amounts of money in its development, and fusing the fate of its tools with the fate of the global economy, being furious makes sense.

The world that ChatGPT built is a world defined by a particular type of precarity. It is a world that is perpetually waiting for a shoe to drop. Young generations feel this instability acutely as they prepare to graduate into a workforce about which they are cautioned that there may be no predictable path to a career.

Older generations, too, are told that the future might be unrecognizable, that the marketable skills they’ve honed may not be relevant. Investors are waiting too, dumping unfathomable amounts of capital into AI companies, data centers, and the physical infrastructure that they believe is necessary to bring about this arrival. It is, we’re told, a race—a geopolitical one, but also a race against the market, a bubble, a circular movement of money and byzantine financial instruments and debt investment that could tank the economy. The AI boosters are waiting. They’ve created detailed timelines for this arrival. Then the timelines shift.

We are waiting because a defining feature of generative AI, according to its true believers, is that it is never in its final form. Like ChatGPT before its release, every model in some way is also a “low-key research preview”—a proof of concept for what’s really possible. You think the models are good now? Ha! Just wait.

Depending on your views, this is trademark showmanship, a truism of innovation, a hostage situation, or a long con. Where you fall on this rapture-to-bullshit continuum likely tracks with how optimistic you are for the future. But you are waiting nonetheless—for a bubble to burst, for a genie to arrive with a plan to print money, for a bailout, for Judgment Day. In that way, generative AI is a faith-based technology.

«

“Anniversary journalism” is usually a poor excuse for an article, but it’s important here to take stock of how truly disruptive this has all been. Not often in a good way.
unique link to this extract

Someone is trying to ‘hack’ people through Apple’s Podcasts app • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Something very strange is happening to the Apple Podcasts app. Over the last several months, I’ve found both the iOS and Mac versions of the Podcasts app will open religion, spirituality, and education podcasts with no apparent rhyme or reason. Sometimes, I unlock my machine and the podcast app has launched itself and presented one of the bizarre podcasts to me. On top of that, at least one of the podcast pages in the app includes a link to a potentially malicious website. Here are the titles of some of the very odd podcasts I’ve had thrust upon me recently (I’ve trimmed some and defanged some links so you don’t accidentally click one):

“5../XEWE2′””&#x22″onclic…”
“free will, free willhttp://www[.]sermonaudio[.]com/rss_search.asp?keyword=free%will on SermonAudio”
“Leonel Pimentahttps://play[.]google[.]com/store/apps/detai…”
“https://open[.]spotify[.]com/playlist/53TA8e97shGyQ6iMk6TDjc?…”

There was another with a title in Arabic that loosely translates to “Words of Life” and includes someone’s Gmail address. Sometimes the podcasts do have actual audio (one was a religious sermon); others are completely silent. The podcasts are often years old, but for some reason are being shown to me now.

I’ll be honest: I don’t really know what exactly is going on here. And neither did an expert I spoke to. But it’s clear someone, somewhere, is trying to mess with Apple Podcasts and its users.

«

Security experts agree: something weird is going on, apparently with the intent of launching an XSS (cross-site scripting) attack. Apple didn’t respond to Cox – which implies that it’s having a think about what’s going on here.
unique link to this extract

Survey says 97% of people struggle to identify AI music – but it’s not as bad as it seems • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

»

Streaming service Deezer ran an experiment recently, with the help of research firm Ipsos. The finding — that 97% of people can’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human-made music — was alarming. But it’s also not the whole story.

In the survey, 9,000 participants listened to three tracks and were asked to guess which, if any, were completely AI-generated. If the participant failed to guess all three correctly, they were put in the fail pile. That means if you got two of three correct, Deezer and Ipsos still said you couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and the real deal.

Deezer sent me the three tracks it used in the study, and so I decided to run my own (less scientific) experiment. I had ten people listen to the same tracks and gave them the same prompt. People did have trouble identifying which songs were fully AI. Only one person got all three right. But if I didn’t bundle the responses, the results were much less dire. People were able to successfully identify whether a track was AI or human-generated 43% of the time.

It’s also worth noting that several people told me one of the songs was so terrible, so obviously AI, that they thought it had to be a trap and guessed it was real.

Unsurprisingly, participants in Deezer’s study were a little caught off guard by how poorly they performed: 71% were surprised by the results, and 51% said it made them uncomfortable to not be able to tell the difference between AI- and human-created art.

«

This might get like autotune, which was reviled at first (when Cher’s Believe was a huge hit in 1998, music executives insisted the voice effect was a vocoder, not autotune. Nowadays, it’s all over the place. AI tunes with human vocals? Human musicians with AI vocals? It’s all on the table now.
unique link to this extract

From Olympic dreams to Nairobi jail: how an Indian teen got embroiled in doping scandal in Kenya • The Indian Express

Mihir Vasavda and Nihal Koshie:

»

Iten, a Kenyan town that runners consider their mecca and where world-beaters are forged at altitude, is where Aman Malik, all of 17, chose to go in May 2023. The budding cross-country and long-distance runner from Haryana’s Sonipat was convinced that the road to the Olympics ran through this town in East Africa.

Two years on, the script has flipped completely.

In September 2025, a Nairobi court handed Aman, now 19, a three-year sentence for being a part of an organised network that allegedly traffics prohibited substances into the country and gives banned substances to Kenyan athletes.

Now in a four-room enclosure that houses 30 inmates, Aman has been navigating an environment far removed from the training camps he once lived in. “They could have banned me from athletics or deported me to India, where I could have served a jail term,” he tells The Indian Express from the Nairobi jail, where he gets to use his phone for one hour daily.

A high-altitude town in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, Iten enjoys global fame as the ‘home of champions’ for the sheer number of world and Olympic winners it has produced, including David Rudisha, the 800m Olympic and world record holder; and Beatrice Chebet, the multiple Olympic and world championship gold medallist.

However, of late, this distance-running powerhouse has been battling a surge in doping violations, besides accounting for the highest number of doping cheats in track and field.

Aman left for Iten in May 2023. Two years later, while returning from training, Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations sleuths followed him and raided his room. According to Kenyan court documents, they found an “entire suitcase filled with prohibited substances, supplements and medication” in his possession. These “prohibited substances” included meldonium, a drug that had led to a 15-month ban on tennis star Maria Sharapova; a human growth hormone (HGH) made infamous by the Lance Armstrong doping scandal; and Mannitol, a masking agent.

The sleuths also allegedly seized a one-page agreement between Aman and athlete Reubin Mosin that states the Indian would “supply all that it takes” in return for 50% of the latter’s winnings.

«

Kenya has a colossal doping problem, and this starts to clarify how and why.
unique link to this extract

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: learning from Stoppard • Creative Screenwriting

Mike Fitzgerald:

»

Comparing two drafts of a script can be hugely instructive, revealing point-by-point how a writer went about improving the story. When I stumbled upon an earlier draft of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I discovered a dazzling, glittering trove of lessons as nourishing as eternal life itself. Well, nearly so.

Last Crusade was written by Jeffrey Boam, from a story by George Lucas and Menno Meyjes. So say the opening credits. Boam’s final draft, dated March 1, 1988 (ten weeks before production) differs drastically from the published script which reflects the released version of the film. Differences come as no shock, but with Last Crusade they aren’t just a few deleted scenes and some line changes. Whole sections of the Boam draft were reimagined, major set pieces were added, and the pacing and tone were markedly transformed. Whoever made these changes possessed a profound grasp of story craft.

So who was that? Spielberg himself made certain revisions, such as expanding the desert tank sequence from a few pages to over eleven – injecting some much-needed action into the story. Some scenes were filmed but omitted during the edit, like an extended chase through the Zeppelin in which Indy and Henry are pursued by a Gestapo agent and a World War One flying ace.

And then there was the uncredited script polish by Barry Watson – you know, the Barry Watson? Never heard of him? Perhaps if we peek under his pseudonym… ah, yes: Sir Tom Stoppard, a four-time Tony winner who later bagged an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. Since we can’t know whose pen revised which pages (although Spielberg did say that “Tom is pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue.” Let’s just call it a collaboration of some titans of storytelling.

«

There’s a similar breakdown elsewhere – which goes into scene-by-scene comparison. Apart from the pleasure of realising how much better the Stoppard-revised version is, it’s also a valuable lesson in writing generally: focus on character, learn how to time suspense, learn what amplifies a joke or tragedy. Useful for all writing. Well, all writing for humans.
unique link to this extract

San Francisco’s robotaxi takeover, as seen from city hall • Bloomberg

David Zipper:

»

…As the director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency since 2019, Jeffrey Tumlin has been immersed in his city’s self-driving saga. With unified oversight of transit, taxis, curbs and streets in San Francisco, SFMTA is more powerful than most urban transportation departments. Still, Tumlin and his colleagues struggled to handle robotaxi companies that are accountable only to state and federal regulators, not city officials.

DZ: You had worked in the transportation sector for decades before joining SFMTA, and you were already familiar with autonomous vehicles. What have you learned about self-driving technology in the last few years that most surprised you?
JT: As a regular Waymo user, I have watched the cars become better than I am at seeing pedestrians hidden from view and predicting their behavior. I didn’t think that was going to happen. I am surprised by how sophisticated they are with erratic human behavior, which I had assumed would be very challenging.

DZ: Overall, are robotaxis a positive or negative for San Francisco?
JT: So far, there is no net positive for the transportation system that we’ve been able to identify. The robotaxis create greater convenience for the privileged, but they create problems for the efficiency of the transportation system as a whole.

DZ: What do you mean by that?
JT: What I like about Waymo is that the user interface design works well. I don’t have to talk to a human, and the vehicle’s driving behavior is slow and steady. I think robotaxis offer the potential for significant upsides for personal convenience, but it remains to be seen whether they offer any overall benefit to the transportation system.

DZ: How would you respond to those who say robotaxis are making San Francisco a better city because the experience of using them is superior to other ways to travel?
JT: I agree that there are qualities or Waymos that outperform other modes. The vehicles are very nice. The driving behavior is slow and steady and predictable, and there is chill music.

But those are qualities that you can replicate in any mode. If we mandated speed governors, passenger cars can be slow and steady. If we regulated taxis in order to optimize for user convenience and safe driving behavior, taxis could emulate those same qualities as well. Similarly, if we had massive private funding, we could achieve the same level of quality in public transit.

«

(Article is free to read, apparently.)
unique link to this extract

It pays to speak fluent LinkedIn — if you can crack the bro code • The Times

Harry Wallop:

»

As on all social media platforms, LinkedIn does not show users a straightforward chronology of all the updates from the people they follow. Instead they are shown posts by a mix of people they follow, as well as those of strangers the algorithm thinks they might find interesting.

One woman, Cindy Gallop, was so suspicious LinkedIn had changed its algorithm that she conducted an experiment. Gallop, who is quite a big cheese on LinkedIn with 141,000 followers, got a fellow female businesswoman, Jane Evans, and two male colleagues to publish exactly the same post as her. Gallop’s reached 0.6% of her followers. Evans’s reached 8.3% of her 19,100 followers. The two men reached 51% and 143% of their respective follower numbers.

Some women have reacted by changing their profile on LinkedIn to pretend they are men. They have even started using “masculine” words to trick the LinkedIn algorithm into thinking they are men. Lots of “drive”, “accelerate”, “transform”, apparently, sees your posts reach more people. This is bro-coding. Speak like an obnoxious Silicon Valley tech bro, refer to forward-deployed engineers and how you are protein-maxxing when you get out of your ice bath at 5am, and your thoughts will be seen by more people.

Gallop and Evans are so enraged by this discovery they have started a petition. “We’re calling on LinkedIn to take urgent action,” they say, demanding “an independent equity audit of the algorithm and its impact on under-represented voices”.

At this point, you may want to scream. Who cares if LinkedIn, which has always been home to plenty of self-promoting, self-regarding and self-appointed “thought leaders”, amplifies the voices of some boastful men? If you hate LinkedIn so much, there’s no reason to spend time on this Microsoft-owned platform.

This fails to accept the reality of the modern business world. Over the past few years, being on LinkedIn has become almost mandatory. Microsoft claims LinkedIn has 1.3 billion users globally, with 44 million in Britain — an almost unbelievable number that is more than the 43.4 million adults in the country of working age.

«

It’s such an unserious platform, and yet because it’s become essential to people in business, it’s also unavoidable.
unique link to this extract

UK ‘not in favor’ of dimming the sun • POLITICO

Karl Mathiesen:

»

The British government said it opposes attempts to cool the planet by spraying millions of tons of dust into the atmosphere — but did not close the door to a debate on regulating the technology.

The comments in parliament Thursday came after a POLITICO investigation revealed an Israeli-US company Stardust Solutions aimed to be capable of deploying solar radiation modification, as the technology is called, inside this decade.

“We’re not in favor of solar radiation modification given the uncertainty around the potential risks it poses to the climate and environment,” Leader of the House of Commons Alan Campbell said on behalf of the government.

Stardust has recently raised $60m in finance from venture capital investors, mostly based in Silicon Valley and Britain. It is the largest ever investment in the field. 

The emergence of a well-funded, private sector actor moving aggressively toward planet cooling capability has led to calls for the global community to regulate the field.

Citing POLITICO’s reporting, Labour MP Sarah Coombes asked the government: “Given the potential risks of this technology, could we have a debate on how Britain will work with other countries to regulate experiments with the Earth’s atmosphere, and ensure we cooperate with other countries on solutions that actually tackle the root cause of climate change?”

Campbell signalled the government was open to further discussion of the issue by inviting Coombes to raise the point the next time Technology Secretary Liz Kendall took questions in parliament.

…Stardust is proposing to use high-flying aircraft to dump millions of tons of a proprietary particle into the stratosphere, around 12 miles above the Earth’s surface. The technology mimics the short-term global cooling that occurs when volcanoes blow dust and gas high into the sky, blocking a small amount of the sun’s heat.

Most scientists agree this could temporarily lower the Earth’s surface temperature, helping to avert some impacts of global warming. The side effects, however, are not well researched.  

«

unique link to this extract

What Is the difference between the two types of Pyrex? • Allrecipes

Meghan Glass:

»

Three basic types of glassware are typically found in most home kitchens: soda-lime, tempered, and borosilicate. Borosilicate glass includes boron trioxide, which has a low thermal expansion. This suggests unlike normal glass, it won’t break when exposed to major temperature shifts such as taking a dish from a fridge to an oven. This is thanks to boron trioxide, the element that makes glass resistant to major temperature changes. Pyrex is a sub-group of borosilicate.

Soda-lime glass is the most common glass type in kitchens since it’s used for most drinkware from juice cups to jars. Untreated soda-lime glass is more susceptible to breaking from extreme temperature changes. This shock expands the glass at different rates, resulting in cracks and fissures.

Tempered glass is just soda-lime glass that’s been heat-treated to make it more durable. During that heat-tempering process, the exterior of the glass is force-cooled so that it solidifies quickly, leaving the center to cool more slowly. As the inside cools, it pulls at the stiff, compressed outer layer, which puts the center of the glass in tension.

Are “PYREX” and “pyrex” the same? Historically, both trademarks were used interchangeably in the marketing of kitchenware products made up of both borosilicate and soda-lime glass. However, now Corning has licensed out the use of their PYREX (upper case lettering) and pyrex (lower case lettering) logos to other companies.

Lowercase “pyrex” is now mostly used for kitchenware sold in the United States, South America, and Asia. In Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, uppercase PYREX is still available.

Pyrex used to be made of the more heat-resistant borosilicate glass, which is more resistant to breakage when subjected to extreme shifts in temperature. Pyrex eventually switched to tempered glass most likely because boron is toxic and expensive to dispose of. Although tempered glass can better withstand thermal shock than regular soda-lime glass can, it’s not as resilient as borosilicate. This is what causes the shattering reaction people are talking about. Watch out for those casseroles.

In short: if the logo is in upper case lettering – PYREX – it’s most likely made of borosilicate, and thus safer.

«

Just in case anyone is thinking of doing some cooking this month. Too late for all the Americans at Thanksgiving, of course. Sorry folks!
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The release of details of the UK Budget ahead of time was done by simple URL hacking. An easy mistake for a web developer, with big consequences. CC-licensed photo by CafeCredit.com 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. Think of a location. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Robots and AI are already remaking the Chinese economy • WSJ via MSN

Brian Spegele:

»

A clothing designer reports slashing the time it takes to make a sample by more than 70% with AI. Washing machines in China’s hinterland are being churned out under the command of an AI “factory brain.”

At one of China’s biggest ports, shipping containers whiz about on self-driving trucks with virtually no workers in sight, while the port’s scheduling is run by AI.

Executives involved in China’s efforts liken the future of factories to living organisms that can increasingly think and act for themselves, moving beyond the preprogrammed tasks at traditionally-automated factories. It could further enable the spread of “dark factories,” with operations so automated that work happens around the clock with the lights dimmed.

The advances can’t come quickly enough for Communist Party leaders, who fear China could lose its status as the world’s factory floor. Its population is shrinking, young people are avoiding factory jobs, and pushback against Chinese exports has intensified in many countries. At the same time, President Trump is pledging to bring home vast numbers of manufacturing jobs through tariffs on China.

AI offers a lifeline to head off those risks, by helping China make and ship more stuff faster, cheaper and with fewer workers. Although some doubts are creeping in globally about how quickly AI will transform the world, China isn’t waiting: it wants to deploy what is available today quicker than the U.S. can, locking in any advantages.

“Only by proactively embracing change can we remain invincible in this revolution,” Hu Wangming, chairman of one of China’s largest steel groups, told state media this year. Its Shanghai-listed unit Baosteel had found 125 uses for AI by the end of last year—and is planning for 1,000.

China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, nearly nine times as many as the U.S. and more than the rest of the world combined, according to the International Federation of Robotics. China’s stock of operational robots surpassed two million in 2024, the most of any country.

«

Together with yesterday’s article about the problem of figuring out what other countries can usefully export to China, this doesn’t feel promising.
unique link to this extract

‘Mortified’ OBR chair hopes inquiry into budget leak will report next week • The Guardian

Heather Stewart:

»

The chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility has said he felt mortified by the early release of its budget forecasts as the watchdog launched a rapid inquiry into how it had “inadvertently made it possible” to see the documents.

Richard Hughes said he had written to the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the chair of the Treasury select committee, Meg Hillier, to apologise.

“I felt personally mortified by what happened. The OBR prides itself on our professionalism. We let people down yesterday and we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Reuters, the agency that first published excerpts of the outlook on its news wire, revealed on Thursday how it had obtained the document.

It said: “The document, which is usually published after the finance minister’s speech has ended, was uploaded to the OBR website and available to download on an unprotected link.

“The link was not advertised on the website but the OBR has used the same web address, or URL, for previous budget documents, changing only the date. A Reuters reporter, in preparation for covering the budget, went to the publicly available URL shortly after 1130 GMT on Wednesday.”

Hughes said Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, would provide expert input to the investigation into how the report was accidentally published.

«

Feels like Martin’s input isn’t really required. We already know absolutely everything about how this happened. URL hacking needed a bit of knowledge 20 years ago, but now? Any journalist worth their salt knows about it. Apple had the embarrassment of seeing the Apple Watch Series 4 unveiled ahead of its launch in 2018 when a programmer/journalist figured out where to find its marketing image URLs.

But you know that next time, there will be passwords and all sorts on the OBR site, and lots of obsessive checking of directory permissions.
unique link to this extract

Warner Music Group partners with Suno to offer AI likenesses of its artists • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Warner Music Group has struck a licensing deal with the AI music creation platform Suno. Under the agreement, WMG will allow users to create AI-generated music on Suno using the voices, names, likenesses, images, and compositions of artists who opt in to the program.

WMG, which owns record labels that have signed musicians like Ed Sheeran, Twenty One Pilots, Dua Lipa, and Charli XCX, says participating artists will have “full control” over how their likeness and music are used, though it doesn’t share how.

“These will be new creation experiences from artists who do opt in, which will open up new revenue streams for them and allow you to interact with them in new ways,” Suno says, adding that users will be able to “build around” an artist’s sounds “and ensure they get compensated.”

WMG is also dropping out of a lawsuit it originally filed with Universal Music Group and Sony, alleging Suno illegally ripped their copyrighted works from YouTube. In recent weeks, major music labels have begun to embrace AI, as WMG similarly settled with AI music maker Udio earlier this month, while UMG ended its litigation against the platform in favor of a licensing agreement. The “ethical” AI music platform Klay has also struck deals with UMG, Sony, and WMG.

«

Is this a capitulation by WMG, or is it cleverly getting in on the ground floor before AI music companies are dictating the terms? It feels like a little of both: the difference for the latecomers might be how much they can get from Suno.
unique link to this extract

New data shows Australia’s historic cervical cancer milestone • news.com.au

Claudia Poposki:

»

Australia is on track to become the first country to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035, according to a new report.

The Centre for Research Excellence in Cervical Cancer Control released a report that confirmed that cervical cancer rates among Australians continues to fall.

In 2020 the rate was 6.6 per 100,000 people. In 2021 it dropped to 6.3 per every 100,000. Now, for the first time since cervical cancer rates began to be documented in 1982, there were no cervical cancer diagnoses in women under 25 in 2021.

Survival rates have also improved with the five-year rate rising from 73.9% in 2016 to 76.8% in 2021.

Rebecca White, the Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care, Assistant Minister for Indigenous Health and the Assistant Minister for Women, said: “Australia is leading the world in cervical cancer elimination, but we must maintain momentum to make this goal a reality.

“The Albanese Government is determined to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035 and to ensure cervical screening is inclusive, accessible and effective.

“Australia’s early adoption of HPV vaccines for girls and young women and timely switch to cervical screening rather than Pap smears have us well on track to achieve elimination and save more lives,” Ms White added.

«

The key point is the lack of diagnoses in those under 25. HPV vaccination began in Australia for girls aged 12-13 in 2007, and boys of the same age began receiving it in 2013. And essentially, no female born from 2000 onwards has had a positive diagnosis.
unique link to this extract

The ultralight gummy bear power bank just got yanked from Amazon • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Amazon just yanked the Haribo gummy bear power bank from its website and is canceling orders for the ultralight device. In an email sent to customers, Amazon says it has “learned of a potential safety or quality issue” regarding the power bank, and that it’s not charging customers who recently purchased it.

The gummy bear theme may be a bit deceiving, but at 9.9 ounces, the $25 Haribo Mini Power Bank is one of the lightest 20,000mAh power banks around, making it a popular choice for backpackers (or anyone else who doesn’t feel like carrying around a hefty device). Now, the Amazon listing for the power bank no longer exists, and we don’t know when — or if — it’s coming back.

Last week, the 3D X-ray company Lumafield published scans showing the internals of the power bank and its battery, which is part of a broader line of Haribo-themed products.

Lumafield technical product marketing manager Alex Hao tells The Verge that the team found that the “battery quality is quite poor across the entire Haribo product line.” Hao calls attention to the “wavy nature” of the anodes that overhang the cathodes (the blue edge in the scan below), which “should be straight, or close to it,” indicating “poor process control.” Hao also found that in one area, the anode overhang measures around 0.27mm, which is less than the accepted industry standard of 0.5mm.

Lumafield uncovered similar quality issues with the Haribo-themed 10,000mAh mini power bank, which is now listed as “currently unavailable” on Amazon.

«

However: it took Lumafield doing these scans to alert Amazon to the risk that these power packs posed – to children in particular, since that’s who they’re aimed at. Low quality batteries can catch fire unexpectedly.
unique link to this extract

Okay, so Apple’s using 3D printing in the iPhone Air. But how? • iFixit

Shahram Mokhtari and Elizabeth Chamberlain:

»

We cheered with the world when the EU standardized charging ports for electronics. But when we tear down a phone and get down to the ports, we’re most interested in whether they’re modular: If they get damaged, can you swap them out?

In this case, ehh, sort of. It’s a hassle, more complicated than ideal.  

This time, though, Apple told the world that we should look a little closer at that port: its housing is 3D printed using recycled titanium, via laser powder bed fusion printers from BLT. This additive manufacturing process debuted simultaneously with the 3D-printed titanium shells in the Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3.

It’s cool to finally see 3D printing become capable of this sort of high-scale production. The shift to 3D printing also provides a significant benefit for sustainability nerds like ourselves: Apple reports that this process saves 33% to 50% in material consumption over traditional forging methods. At a time when overconsumption is a major concern, efficient resource use is a welcome development.

Once we’d taken apart the iPhone Air, we had to put the USB-C port under our Evident DSX2000 microscope. Magnified images of the USB-C port revealed a perplexing detail: a chainlink-like, circular surface pattern that stumped 3D printing veterans. At the 50µm scale, this pattern seemed highly unusual.

Early reports had suggested that Apple might be using binder jetting, a 3D printing process that involves joining a powder with a binder material, which acts as an adhesive. Two years ago, when it was first reported that Apple was experimenting with using 3D printing for Apple Watch cases, a Chinese company called EasyMFG showed off smartwatch cases printed via binder jetting. 

But under a microscope, binder jetting tends to look far less regular than the crop circle pattern we were seeing in the USB-C port housing. So our industry contacts doubted that was the process we were seeing here. 

«

There’s a lot to learn about 3D printing in this. Not least that Apple (or its assemblers) is using pulsed lasers for this process, which is dramatic in itself; then you add the fact that it’s doing this to make millions of phones (and, as the article explains, Apple Watch cases). We barely have a glimpse of the complexity of modern manufacturing.
unique link to this extract

Apple contests India’s antitrust penalty law with risk of $38bn fine, filing shows • Reuters

Aditya Kalra and Arpan Chaturvedi:

»

Apple is challenging India’s new antitrust penalty law under which the U.S. company could potentially face a fine of up to $38bn, a court filing at the Delhi High Court, seen by Reuters, shows.

The challenge is the first against India’s antitrust penalty law that since last year allows the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to use global turnover when calculating the penalties it imposes on companies for abusing their market dominance.

Since 2022, Tinder-owner Match and Indian startups have been locked in an antitrust battle with Apple at the CCI, where investigators last year issued a report saying the US smartphone company had engaged in “abusive conduct” on the apps market of its iPhone Operating System, iOS.

Apple denied all wrongdoing, and the CCI is yet to make a final decision in the case, including about any penalty.
The company is asking judges to declare as illegal the 2024 law that allowed the CCI to use global turnover, not just that in India, when calculating penalties, according to its 545-page court filing, which is not public.

Apple’s “maximum penalty exposure” at the rate of 10% of its average global turnover derived from all of its services globally for three fiscal years to 2024 could be around $38bn, it said in the filing. Such a “penalty based on global turnover…would be manifestly arbitrary, unconstitutional, grossly disproportionate, unjust,” it added.

Apple cited the CCI’s use of the new rules for the first time on November 10 in an unrelated case, where they were retrospectively applied to a violation by the affected company a decade earlier. Apple has “no choice but to bring this constitutional challenge now to avoid retrospective imposition of penalty against them,” it argued.

The company has maintained it is a small player compared to Google’s Android, which is the dominant player in the Indian market.

…In a private submission to the CCI, reported by Reuters in October, Apple opponent Match argued a fine based on global turnover could “act as a significant deterrent against recidivism”.

In its court filing, Apple argued India should only impose a penalty based on the Indian revenue of the specific unit which violates antitrust law, giving an example of a toy seller running a stationery business.

It would be arbitrary and disproportionate to levy a penalty on the stationery business’s total turnover of 20,000 rupees, when the contravention is only in relation to the toy business that earns 100 rupees, it said.

«

unique link to this extract

Fighting for water is on the rise, reaching a record last year • Los Angeles Times

Ian James:

»

In Algeria, water shortages left faucets [taps] dry, prompting protesters to riot and set tires ablaze.

In Gaza, as people waited for water at a community tap, an Israeli drone fired on them, killing eight.

In Ukraine, Russian rockets slammed into the country’s largest dam, unleashing a plume of fire over the hydroelectric plant and causing widespread blackouts.

These are some of the 420 water-related conflicts researchers documented for 2024 in the latest update of the Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology, a global database of water-related violence.

The year featured a record number of violent incidents over water around the world, far surpassing the 355 in 2023, continuing a steeply rising trend. The violence more than quadrupled in the last five years.

The new data from the Oakland-based water think tank show also that drinking water wells, pipes and dams are increasingly coming under attack.

“In almost every region of the world, there is more and more violence being reported over water,” said Peter Gleick, the Pacific Institute’s co-founder and senior fellow, and it “underscores the urgent need for international attention.”

The researchers collect information from news reports and other sources and accounts. They classify it into three categories: instances in which water was a trigger of violence, water systems were targeted and water was a “casualty” of violence, for example when shell fragments hit a water tank.

Not every case involves injuries or deaths but many do.

The region with the most violent incidents was the Middle East, with 138 reported. That included 66 in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both in Gaza and the West Bank.

«

The phrase “violence over water” in the original headline feels a bit misleading; is that fights on oceans? But conflicts for control of water, that’s a different thing, and one warned about for years.
unique link to this extract

OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates • FT Alphaville

Bryce Elder:

»

OpenAI is a money pit with a website on top. That much we know already, but since OpenAI is a private company, there’s a lot of guesswork required when estimating the depth of the pit.

HSBC’s US software and services team has today updated its OpenAI model to include the company’s $250bn rental of cloud compute from Microsoft, announced late in October, and its $38bn rental of cloud compute from Amazon announced less than a week later. The latest two deals add an extra four gigawatts of compute power to OpenAI’s requirements, bringing the contracted amount to 36 gigawatts.

Based on a total cumulative deal value of up to $1.8tn, OpenAI is heading for a data centre rental bill of about $620bn a year — though only a third of the contracted power is expected to be online by the end of this decade.

To check OpenAI ability to pay, HSBC’s team first had to build a model to forecast revenues.

…HSBC’s model assumes that OpenAI’s rental costs will be a cumulative $792bn between the current year and 2030, rising to $1.4tn by 2033. The projection matches OpenAI’s eight-year guidance that CEO Sam Altman is exasperated at being asked to discuss.

OpenAI’s cumulative free cash flow to 2030 may be about $282bn, it forecasts, while Nvidia’s promised cash injections and the disposal of AMD shares can bring in another $26bn. The broker also includes OpenAI’s $24bn of undrawn debt and equity facilities and, at the 2025 mid-year point, its $17.5bn of available liquidity.

Squaring the first total off against the second leaves a $207bn funding hole, to which HSBC adds a $10bn cash buffer for safety’s sake.

These estimates might prove overly cautious, though guessing how is a finger-in-the-air exercise.

«

All this of course ignores the certainty of a market crash in the meantime which will significantly impair growth and revenue availability.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Food bloggers are complaining that Google’s AI overviews are creating nonsense recipes and killing their traffic. CC-licensed photo by Lily Gicker 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. Lighlty done. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

TSMC sues former top executive who joined US rival Intel • Financial Times

Kathrin Hille:

»

TSMC said on Tuesday it had filed a lawsuit in Taiwan’s intellectual property and commercial court, which will seek damages for breach of contract from former vice-president Lo Wei-Jen, who retired from the company in July.

“There is a high probability that Lo uses, leaks, discloses, delivers, or transfers TSMC’s trade secrets and confidential information to Intel, thus making legal actions (including claiming damages for breach of contract) necessary,” TSMC said.

The case highlights the geopolitical pressures that are intensifying the race to manufacture the most cutting-edge semiconductors. TSMC, which supplies companies including Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and Apple, makes more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips and has in recent years widened its lead over rivals Samsung and Intel.

In August, the US government agreed to invest $8.9bn into Intel, giving it a 10% equity stake, as part of a push to strengthen America’s semiconductor industry and protect against risks such as a cut in supplies from Taiwan.

In a statement on Wednesday, Intel said it “maintains rigorous policies and controls that strictly prohibit the use or transfer of any third-party confidential information or intellectual property”.

“Based on everything we know, we have no reason to believe there is any merit to the allegations involving Mr Lo,” Intel said. “Talent movement across companies is a common and healthy part of our industry, and this situation is no different.”

Lo, who holds a PhD in solid state physics from UC Berkeley and a physics degree from National Taiwan University, oversaw research and development for several of the 21 years he spent at TSMC. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Having joined from Intel in 2004, he led core R&D teams and its advanced process technology programmes. He was later put in charge of TSMC’s overall technology development strategy.

«

Intel is strongly defending its hire:

»

“As part of this transformation, Intel has welcomed back Wei-Jen Lo, who previously spent 18 years at Intel working on the development of Intel’s wafer processing technology before joining TSMC, where he continued his work in their wafer processing technology development,” Intel said.

«

A beef between the world’s two biggest chip companies might be fun.
unique link to this extract

Google and AI slop are ruining Thanksgiving for food bloggers • Search Engine Land

Danny Goodwin:

»

For more than a decade, food bloggers could predict and rely on holiday traffic. Not this year. AI answers are replacing vetted recipes, cutting off creators’ main revenue streams, and confusing home cooks with stitched-together instructions that don’t always make sense.

Google’s AI Overviews now surface blended cooking steps from multiple bloggers, often above the links/sources they draw from.

Many food creators reported between 30% and 80% drops in Google traffic, with some calling this their worst holiday season yet. Meanwhile, AI-generated recipe slop is flooding Pinterest, Facebook, and Etsy, blurring the line between human-tested dishes and AI-invented food.

Google told Bloomberg that AI Overviews are “a helpful starting point” and that people still click through to real recipes. Bloggers said the opposite:
• 40% year-over-year decline: Eb Gargano’s recipe traffic cratered, replaced by AI summaries that even get basics wrong – like baking a 6in Christmas cake for three to four hours. “You’d end up with charcoal!”
• “Frankenstein recipes”: Adam Gallagher of Inspired Taste said Google mixes his ingredients with competitors’ instructions, even for brand-name searches. His cocktail click-through rate has decreased by 30%.
• Gemini 3’s new interactive recipe graphics remix creators’ photos, a move Gallagher said crosses into “plagiarized AI recipes.”

Sarah Leung of The Woks of Life said AI summaries dominate searches for Chinese ingredients, often pulling directly from their years of reference work while giving users little reason to click. Also:
• Multiple bloggers found AI-run sites cloning their entire catalogs, rewriting instructions, tweaking photos, and even generating synthetic images of their families.
• Carrie Forrest of Clean Eating Kitchen said she lost 80% of her traffic and revenue in two years, forcing her to lay off her team.

This Thanksgiving, more people will trust AI with their menus, even when the results defy basic kitchen science. Meanwhile, the creators who built the modern recipe web say they’re becoming invisible inside the very tools powered by their work.

«

You could argue this is the worst it will be. But maybe it can get worse.
unique link to this extract

OpenAI says dead teen violated TOS when he used ChatGPT to plan suicide • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Facing five lawsuits alleging wrongful deaths, OpenAI lobbed its first defence Tuesday, denying in a court filing that ChatGPT caused a teen’s suicide and instead arguing the teen violated terms that prohibit discussing suicide or self-harm with the chatbot.

The earliest look at OpenAI’s strategy to overcome the string of lawsuits came in a case where parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine accused OpenAI of relaxing safety guardrails that allowed ChatGPT to become the teen’s “suicide coach.” OpenAI deliberately designed the version their son used, ChatGPT 4o, to encourage and validate his suicidal ideation in its quest to build the world’s most engaging chatbot, parents argued.

But in a blogpost, OpenAI claimed that parents selectively chose disturbing chat logs while supposedly ignoring “the full picture” revealed by the teen’s chat history. Digging through the logs, OpenAI claimed the teen told ChatGPT that he’d begun experiencing suicidal ideation at age 11, long before he used the chatbot.

“A full reading of his chat history shows that his death, while devastating, was not caused by ChatGPT,” OpenAI’s filing argued.

Allegedly, the logs also show that Raine “told ChatGPT that he repeatedly reached out to people, including trusted persons in his life, with cries for help, which he said were ignored.” Additionally, Raine told ChatGPT that he’d increased his dose of a medication that “he stated worsened his depression and made him suicidal.” That medication, OpenAI argued, “has a black box warning for risk of suicidal ideation and behavior in adolescents and young adults, especially during periods when, as here, the dosage is being changed.”

«

Sure, the lawyers at OpenAI are telling them to take this line. But it’s a terrible look: “you’re not allowed to use our product that way” versus “we’re going to make sure our product can’t talk to people in that way”.
unique link to this extract

Electric vehicle owners to face pay-per-mile tax • BBC News

Pritti Mistry:

»

A new tax for electric and hybrid vehicles has been announced by the chancellor in the Budget.
From April 2028, electric car drivers will pay a road charge of 3p per mile, while plug-in hybrid drivers will pay 1.5p per mile, with the rates going up each year with inflation.

The new tax is about “half the fuel duty rate paid by drivers of petrol cars”, according to the government’s independent forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The chancellor also committed to extending the 5p cut in fuel duty until September next year, after which it is set to increase annually by the RPI measure of inflation.

Drivers will pay the charge based on how many miles they drive from April 2028. Motorists will have their mileage checked annually, typically during their MOT as is already the case, or for new cars, around their first and second registration anniversary, the Treasury said.

Payment will be integrated into the existing Vehicle Excise Duty system that is administrated by DVLA. Under the measures, an electric car driver clocking up 8,500 miles in the 2028-29 financial year is expected to pay about £255 – about half the cost per mile that petrol and diesel drivers pay in fuel tax.

However, mileage readings will be based on in-vehicle odometers, which the government acknowledges can be subject to tampering, or “clocking”. It recognises that the introduction of the tax “may increase the likelihood of motorists choosing to clock their vehicles”, and said it was looking at ways to mitigate this.

The government is now consulting on exactly how the scheme will work.

«

The fuel tax cut (kept at the same level since April 2010) is “being reversed” – ie fuel tax will go back up – but even so, this is a perverse incentive which seems unlikely to get people to stampede to electric vehicles.
unique link to this extract

The Vatican is the oldest computer in the world • The Slow Deep Hover

Andrew Brown:

»

One way of understanding the Roman Catholic Church is to think of the Vatican as the oldest computer in the world. It is a computer made of human parts rather than electronics, but so are all bureaucracies: just like computers, they take in information, process it according to a set of algorithms, and act on the result. 

The Vatican has an operating system that has been running since the days of the Roman Empire. Its major departments are still called “dicasteries”, a term last used in the Roman civil service in about 450 AD. 

Like any very long running computer system, the Vatican has problems with legacy code: all that embarrassing stuff about usury and cousin marriage from the Middle Ages, or the more recent “Syllabus of Errors” in which Pope Pius IX in 1864 denounced as heresy the belief that he, or any Pope, can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization,” can no longer be acted on, but can’t be thrown away, either. Instead it is commented out and entirely different code added: this process is known as development.

But changing the code that the system runs on, while it is running, is a notoriously tricky operation. For the Catholic Church it requires a church council, drawing bishops from all over the world into years of deliberation. 

«

Brown is clear that the broad metaphor isn’t his: “Francis Spufford once said that Bletchley Park was an attempt to build a computer out of human beings so the credit for this metaphor belongs to him.” But it’s a very neat way to look at it, and John Naughton (via whom this came) expands on it further, with useful pointers. I’m also reminded of the (human? Imaginary?) army in The Three Body Problem which is “programmed” to calculate the timings of astronomical events in the triple-solar system.

But the Vatican as an extremely slow-running computer is a novel view of it. Does that make the Pope an app?
unique link to this extract

A holiday gift guide: the newest, strangest gadgets and apps • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

We are entering a Surrealist phase of personal technology. Any device you might imagine can be found online courtesy of an obscure Chinese factory, ready to be shipped out for a loved one’s holiday enjoyment: pocket-size artificial-intelligence gizmos (Rabbit r1, $199), in-home hologram machines (Code 27 Character Livehouse, $558), human-size robot servants (1X NEO, $20,000).

The components of tech have become better and cheaper, from microchips to speakers and screens (have you seen how cheap a good TV is these days?), enabling out-there innovation. On the consumer side, we are bored of rote device designs; we’ve seen a dozen models of iPhone and crave something refreshingly different. Hence the proliferation of gadgets with nonsensical names, promising the same horsepower as major-brand equivalents but with new hardware twists and laughably low prices.

We live in the age of the Swype ($18), a “rechargeable disposable” vape with an integrated touch screen on which one can check the weather and get notifications via Bluetooth, mingling nicotine and dopamine hits. Who doesn’t want to find that in the bottom of their stocking? The apps and devices collected here fulfil that old promise of technology: making your life better, or at least more interesting, even if just by encouraging you to log off.

«

Maybe we are returning, in a way, to the mad times of the 1980s when computerised hardware went through a sort of Cambrian explosion as Z80 chips became affordable and plentiful, and injection-moulding improved along with distribution.
unique link to this extract

Computer maker HP to cut up to 6,000 jobs by 2028 as it turns to AI • The Guardian

Julia Kollewe:

»

Up to 6,000 jobs are to go at HP worldwide in the next three years as the US computer and printer maker increasingly adopts AI to speed up product development.

Announcing a lower-than-expected profit outlook for the coming year, HP said it would cut between 4,000 and 6,000 jobs by the end of October 2028. It has about 56,000 employees.

“As we look ahead, we see a significant opportunity to embed AI into HP to accelerate product innovation, improve customer satisfaction and boost productivity,” said the California company’s chief executive, Enrique Lores.

He said teams working on product development, internal operations and customer support would be affected by the job cuts. He added that this would lead to $1bn (£749m) savings a year by 2028, although the cuts would cost an estimated $650m.

News of the job cuts came as a leading educational research charity warned that up to 3m low-skilled jobs could disappear in the UK by 2035 because of automation and AI. The jobs most at risk are those in occupations such as trades, machine operations and administrative roles, the National Foundation for Educational Research said.

In the US, about 40% of jobs could be replaced by AI, in sectors ranging from education and healthcare to business and legal, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute released this week.

AI agents and robots could automate more than half of US work hours using technology that is available today, the US consultancy’s analysis found. It estimated that $2.9tn of economic value could be unlocked in the US by 2030.

«

Cutting jobs. But also, hey, sprinkle some magic AI fairy dust on the future revenues. Will it work? Can’t hurt.
unique link to this extract

Trump’s AI agenda sails toward an iceberg of bipartisan populist fury • Semafor

David Weigel:

»

The AI industry’s new super PAC, flush with cash to defend AI’s growth as critical to countering China, picked its first political target this month — and missed.

New York state Assemblyman Alex Bores is working to break out of a crowded field in the Democratic primary to succeed Rep. Jerrold Nadler. He wasn’t even close to frontrunner status when the Leading the Future PAC went after him.

But becoming the first enemy of a $100m pro-AI effort turned out to be a nice boost for the 35-year-old’s campaign. He was almost flattered that the industry would single out his RAISE Act, which requires new AI safety standards, among other changes.

“I appreciate that they’re being so direct,” Bores told Semafor. “They sound terrified that I will stand up to them on behalf of the people of this district, that I will be the biggest obstacle to their quest for unbridled control over the American worker, over our kids, over the environment. They’re right about that.”

This wasn’t the plan for Leading the Future, whose electoral plan aligns with Fairshake, the cryptocurrency PAC that Republicans thanked for beating Democrats last year. There’s one big difference between them: Fairshake was fighting for a product that only a small minority in the US owns, with fewer still getting rich off it. The AI industry is discovering populist anger that’s growing faster than many in both parties expected.

«

Interesting if there’s “populist anger” that is measurable in terms of votes. Apparently David Sacks, Trump’s AI adviser, is not popular with the masses. Not that that ever worried Sacks.
unique link to this extract

China is making trade impossible • Financial Times

Robin Harding:

»

On a recent trip to mainland China, I found myself posing the same question, again and again, to the economists, technologists and business leaders who I met with. “Trade is an exchange. You provide something of value to me, and in return, I must offer something of value to you. So what is the product, in the future, that China would like to buy from the rest of the world?”

The answers were revealing. A few said “soyabeans and iron ore” before realising this was not much help to a European [who can’t provide them]. Some observed that Louis Vuitton handbags are popular and then went on to talk about the export prospects for fast-rising Chinese luxury brands. “Higher education” was another common answer, qualified sometimes with the observation that Peking University and Tsinghua are harder to get into, and more academically rigorous, than anything on offer in the west.

Several of the economists, who had perhaps pondered the issue already, jumped ahead to a different point altogether: “This,” they said, “is why you should let Chinese companies set up factories in Europe.”

It is a train of thought that gives away the real answer to the question. Which is: nothing.

There is nothing that China wants to import, nothing it does not believe it can make better and cheaper, nothing for which it wants to rely on foreigners a single day longer than it has to. For now, to be sure, China is still a customer for semiconductors, software, commercial aircraft and the most sophisticated kinds of production machinery. But it is a customer like a resident doctor is a student. China is developing all of these goods. Soon it will make them, and export them, itself.

«

Harding expands on this thesis to reach a conclusion where the only logical endpoint is: either China lets its currency inflate (except its plans don’t include that), or Europe finds new axes of competition (such as technology – unlikely), or Europe turns protectionist.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A story about a Swedish startup training crows to clean up cigarette butts is true – except the startup closed last month. CC-licensed photo by shankar s. 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. Suicide or murder? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

GPU prices are coming to earth just as RAM costs shoot into the stratosphere • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

»

It’s not a bad time to upgrade your gaming PC. Graphics card prices in the 2020s have undulated continuously as the industry has dealt with pandemic and AI-related shortages, but it’s actually possible to get respectable mainstream- to high-end GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and 9070 series or Nvidia’s RTX 5060, 5070, and 5080 series for at or slightly under their suggested retail prices right now. This was close to impossible through the spring and summer.

But it’s not a good time to build a new PC or swap your older motherboard out for a new one that needs DDR5 RAM. And the culprit is a shortage of RAM and flash memory chips that has suddenly sent SSD and (especially) memory prices into the stratosphere, caused primarily by the ongoing AI boom and exacerbated by panic-fuelled buying by end users and device manufacturers.

… there’s no escaping these price increases, which affect SSDs and both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM kits of all capacities (though higher-capacity RAM kits do seem to be hit a little harder). If you’re thinking about an SSD upgrade, those increases haven’t become too ludicrous just yet, but if you were thinking about a RAM upgrade, your best bet is to hold on tight to whatever you already have and hope that nothing breaks any time soon.

Memory and storage shortages can be particularly difficult to get through. As with all chips, it can take years to ramp up capacity and/or build new manufacturing facilities. Not only do we need to meet today’s demand with supply levels that were decided years ago, but manufacturers also must try to decide tomorrow’s supply levels based on today’s demand. This was part of the problem during the pandemic-fueled chip shortages of 2021 and 2022—most companies weren’t prepared for the pandemic-fueled spike in demand for consumer tech, or for the lull in normal buying and upgrade patterns that followed (just look at PC sales, which went way up in 2020 and 2021, then crashed for a while, and then eventually returned to something resembling a normal pattern).

«

The table compiled by Ars Technica shows memory and storage prices rocketing – some quadrupling – just since August.
unique link to this extract

Can crows be trained to clean the streets? The idea refuses to die • Ubergizmo

Aiva Keller:

»

For a brief moment in early 2022, it felt as if humanity had finally learned to collaborate with one of the planet’s sharpest non-human minds.

A tiny Swedish startup called Corvid Cleaning AB suggested a scheme so irresistibly clever that it launched a thousand headlines: teach wild crows to pick up cigarette butts, reward them with food, and watch as nature’s most mischievous problem-solvers outsmart our waste problem. It sounded like the kind of idea a sci-fi writer would pitch as a metaphor for harmonious coexistence, except here it was, being quietly tested in a suburb southwest of Stockholm.

The underlying concept was pure operant conditioning, the same psychological mechanism behind vending machines for pigeons or the way your dog learns that “sit” equals treats. A crow drops a cigarette butt into a metal bin; a camera verifies the object; a food pellet drops.

In theory, the crow spreads the word, the flock imitates the behavior, and suddenly the city has an ultra-low-cost cleanup crew powered by curiosity and peanuts. It was whimsical, scientifically plausible, and deeply appealing in a future-tech sort of way. You could almost picture a crow dashing across a sidewalk like a tiny sanitation worker with wings.

But from the start, Swedish ethologists tapped the brakes. Cigarette butts are chemical cocktails of tar, nicotine, and microplastics. Asking wild birds to pick them up raises uncomfortable questions about animal welfare.

…And then.. quiet. No flashy municipal dashboard tracking crow productivity. No triumphant urban-innovation reports boasting a 75% reduction in cleanup costs. Instead, the story simply resurfaced every year or so, drifting through global media like an urban myth with a Scandinavian accent.

…The only concrete update arrived not from the environmental world but from Sweden’s company registry: in October 2025, Corvid Cleaning AB entered bankruptcy. According to filings, it had zero employees, around SEK 7,000 ($750 USD) in turnover, and no sign of becoming the global crow-powered sanitation empire that headlines imagined.

What remains is an idea, an undeniably enchanting one, that has not yet transformed into a viable solution.

«

Definitely a zombie idea: there are posts from only a few days ago showing this working successfully. But it’s only when you try to go to the Corvid Cleaning website that you discover it’s as dead as the proverbial parrot.

unique link to this extract

Why college students prefer TikTok over newspapers • The Verge

Victoria Le:

»

rather than read traditional journalistic outlets that do the work of reporting, [computer science major Ankit] Khanal still gets most of his news from aggregators like News Daddy. Social media is simply a more appealing news source for Khanal, who says he’s turned off by the biases and political leanings of traditional news outlets. News influencers, on the other hand, are “actually connected to the people they’re getting their news for.” Khanal’s behavior is not unusual. Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab polled 1,026 students at 181 two- and four-year institutions from December 19th to 23rd, 2024, on their media literacy practices.

In January of this year, the survey results were published, showing that social media is a “top news source” for nearly three in four students. Of those surveyed, “half at least somewhat trust platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to deliver that news and other critical information accurately.” And word of mouth ranked second among students’ most popular news sources, an avenue for half of those surveyed. Legacy media, primarily newspapers, on the other hand, are regular news sources for just two in 10 students, even though they indicate that newspapers are more likely to convey accurate information.

Professor Karen North, founder of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg digital media program, agrees with the study’s findings. At the beginning of each of her classes, North discusses with her students the day’s most relevant headlines. She asks them where they caught wind of those events. The three most common answers among her students each semester: “They get their news from Instagram and TikTok. And from their professors.” But North says classroom newsgetting is a distant third, far behind social media’s grip on student news sourcing culture.

«

Wonderful how they don’t like the biases and leanings of “traditional news” but can’t see that there must be a bias in other people’s output. Quite often one has to worry about American students.
unique link to this extract

New research on the real reason states first emerged thousands of years ago • The Conversation

Christopher Opie and Quentin Atkinson:

»

One theory suggests it was the intensification of agriculture that spurred the creation of states. Once fertilisation and irrigation were used, it produced a surplus that elites could extract to build and maintain states.

However, an alternative view, first put forward by anthropologist James Scott, is gaining ground. This proposes that states didn’t emerge from agriculture in general – rather, they almost invariably formed in societies that grew cereal grains.

Grasses such as wheat, barley, rice and maize grow above ground, ripen at a predictable time, and the grains they produce are readily stored. This makes them perfect for the systems of taxation that Scott argues fuelled state formation.

By Scott’s account, Mafia-style protection rackets forced people to produce grain, from which tax could be extracted and used to fund further exploitation. Scott proposed that these protection rackets were effectively the original states.

In the meantime, writing was invented and adopted as the information system to record those taxes. Once states had formed, writing had a huge influence on the structure and institutions of those societies. States, controlled by very small elites, used writing to build institutions and laws to maintain extreme hierarchies.

We tested these ideas, combining data from hundreds of societies worldwide with a global language family tree representing the ancestral relationships between those societies. We then used a mathematical model to evaluate claims about how statehood and its possible drivers evolved along the branches of this tree.

Our results suggest that intensive agriculture, with fertilisation and irrigation, was just as likely to be the result of state formation as it was to be its cause. On the other hand, grain agriculture consistently predicted subsequent state formation and the adoption of taxes.

We also found a strong correlation between non-grain agriculture and the formation of states. However, crops such as vegetables, fruit, roots and tubers – which were hard to tax – were more likely to be lost, not gained, as states were formed. This is consistent with the idea that grains were favoured over other forms of agriculture by emerging states for their taxation potential.

«

Congratulations to Opie and Atkinson on this research, which is published in Nature – and which Opie tells me was inspired (in part) by a link here on The Overspill back in September 2017, since when they’ve been working on this.

Next on their agenda: “This helps us understand current concerns about the destabilisation of modern nation states. Digital technologies and AI are disrupting how we generate, store and broadcast information; globalisation and cryptocurrencies are disrupting our taxation systems; and our agricultural production is under pressure because of climate change.”

For the avoidance of doubt: always happy to link to research projects inspired by Overspill links.
unique link to this extract

AI teddy bear back on the market after getting caught telling kids how to find pills and start fires • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

»

After pulling its AI-powered teddy bear “Kumma” from the market, the children’s toymaker FoloToy says it’s now restoring sales of the controversial product, which a safety group found would give inappropriate and potentially dangerous responses, including explaining how to find and light matches, locate pills, and discussing myriad sexual fetishes.

“After a full week of rigorous review, testing, and reinforcement of our safety modules, we have begun gradually restoring product sales,” the company said in a statement posted to social media Monday. “As global attention on AI toy safety continues to rise, we believe that transparency, responsibility, and continuous improvement are essential. FoloToy remains firmly committed to building safe, age-appropriate AI companions for children and families worldwide.”

…In its latest announcement, the company says it “strengthened and upgraded our content-moderation and child-safety safeguards,” and “deployed enhanced safety rules and protections through our cloud-based system.”

Neither FoloToy nor OpenAI responded to a request for comment. It’s unclear what AI model the company has chosen to be the default model for its toys going forward, or if the company had its access restored to OpenAI’s models.

«

This one could run and run.
unique link to this extract

Klarna launches stablecoin to cut cost of cross-border payments • Financial Times

Akila Quinio:

»

Klarna is launching a payment stablecoin, becoming the latest fintech to bet that the digital tokens will reshape cross-border payments.

The Swedish “buy now, pay later” lender said on Tuesday it had launched KlarnaUSD on a blockchain created by payment company Stripe and would use the digital token for international payments.

Klarna said the stablecoin would allow it to “dramatically reduce costs for both consumers and merchants”. One person familiar with the plans said it would reduce the costs for Klarna when moving large amounts of money globally by cutting out parties such as the Swift network.

While the launch was likely to help with Klarna’s internal payment infrastructure initially, it was expected to be rolled out for merchants and consumer payments eventually, the person added.

Stablecoins are a form of privately issued digital cash typically backed by short-term securities or cash-like assets, overwhelmingly linked to US dollars. There were $280bn worth of stablecoins in issuance in September, up from $200bn at the start of the year, according to Citigroup.

Klarna’s push into stablecoins follows a wave of similar announcements by payment companies including PayPal and Stripe.

«

This sounds sophisticated: cryptocoins! Blockchains! Yet in reality it’s just a sophisticated version of hawala – a system that has been used for effortless currency transfer for more than a thousand years.
unique link to this extract

Kagi News

Since we’re doing AI news aggregators, here’s Kagi’s effort, which pulls together multiple news sources and synthesizes them into written-through stories with references and “highlights” of the key points.

It is, indeed, impressive, as reader Karsten L suggested. Going to be a while before it’s picking out links and making snarky yet incisive comments yet though.
unique link to this extract

Obesity drug semaglutide fails to slow Alzheimer’s • BBC News

Michelle Roberts:

»

Drug maker Novo Nordisk, external says semaglutide, the active ingredient for the weight loss jab Wegovy, does not slow Alzheimer’s – despite initial hopes that it might help against dementia.

Researchers began two large trials involving more than 3,800 people after reports the medicine was having an impact in the real world.

But the studies showed the GLP-1 drug, which is already used to manage type 2 diabetes and obesity, made no difference compared to a dummy drug. The disappointing results are due to be presented at an Alzheimer’s disease conference next month and are yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Dr Susan Kohlhaas from Alzheimer’s Research UK said the results would come as a blow for people affected by Alzheimer’s. Martin Holst Lange, chief scientific officer and executive vice president of research and development at Novo Nordisk, said: “Based on the significant unmet need in Alzheimer’s disease as well as a number of indicative data points, we felt we had a responsibility to explore semaglutide’s potential, despite a low likelihood of success.

“While semaglutide did not demonstrate efficacy in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, the extensive body of evidence supporting semaglutide continues to provide benefits for individuals with type 2 diabetes, obesity, and related comorbidities,” he said.

«

Not quite a panacea. Still does some remarkable things.
unique link to this extract

An AI podcasting machine is churning out 3,000 episodes a week • The Wrap

Tess Patton:

»

There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That’s thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and its cultural impact, to a biography series on Anna Wintour. 

Its podcasting network Quiet Please has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and amassed 400,000 subscribers — so, yes, people are really listening to AI podcasts.

Inception Point’s ability to flood the market with audio episodes faster than any human team could match starkly illustrates both the promise of AI and the nightmare scenario that it can truly come after every job. Even as companies have shed more than a million jobs this year, with many citing AI as a reason, there was a belief that certain creative roles would be safe. The biggest allure of a podcast, after all, is the personality of its host. But Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts.

…At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach …With each episode only needing 20 listeners to turn a profit, it’s no wonder Inception Point prioritizes quantity. The company noted on its website that it monetizes with iHeartRadio as a partner, but representatives for the audio platform were unfamiliar with it. The company generates its revenue from programmatic ads that run during its episodes.

«

Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”) applies. Though I think in this, more like 100%. Also, there’s no evidence provided that there are any human listeners. Though the continuing existence of the company might argue that there are. Then again, the Corvid Cleaning story above shows that the number of stories is no measure of success.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Twenty years on, what has the One Laptop Per Child programme achieved? CC-licensed photo by Steve Rhodes 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. Not that cheap. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Don’t give your child any AI companions • After Babel

Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:

»

Large Language Models (LLMs) are not programmed by human beings in the same way that video games or spreadsheet software are. Like the human brain, they develop over time as they are fed vast quantities of training data. They behave in unexpected ways, often will not respond the same way twice to an identical question, and sometimes reveal information or patterns that were hidden in their training data.

Suppose that intelligent aliens landed on earth tomorrow, and that they seemed, at first, here to help us. Would we send our children off to play with them right away? Would we allow our adolescents to develop romantic attachments and sexual relationships with them? Or would we keep our children far away from them until we knew with high degrees of confidence that they were safe for kids?

We must not repeat the mistakes we made with social media. We cannot wait for the scientific community to come to full agreement about harm before we set clear boundaries on children’s digital lives, because consensus on such harms often takes decades to arrive. We should start with the assumption that new technologies that radically alter childhood are harmful until demonstrated to be safe, and we should be alert for early evidence of harm. We’ve already learned the hard way what happens when tech replaces real human connections.

Given the worrisome rate at which AI horror stories and lawsuits involving teens are surfacing, what do we expect to happen as chatbots enter the social lives of children and toddlers? We can be confident that these chatbots will replace — not augment — the human-to-human relationships that children need for their social and emotional development. An AI companion can imitate friendship, but it can’t actually be a friend. It can say “I understand you,” but it doesn’t. It can mirror a kid’s emotions, but that is not the same as empathy. An AI companion bot has no morals, no feelings, no shame. It is built to keep users of all ages “engaged” with it.

As we approach the holidays, my message to parents is simple: DO NOT GIVE YOUR CHILDREN ANY AI COMPANIONS OR TOYS. Give them toys, sporting equipment, and experiences that will strengthen their in-person relationships, rather than replacing them. (We note there have been several major advisories put out by leading health authorities, including Fairplay, the American Psychological Association, UNICEF, and the Children’s Commissioner of England.)

«

Too late for the parents who bought AI teddy bears.
unique link to this extract

‘It’s hell for us here’: Mumbai families suffer as datacentres keep the city hooked on coal • The Guardian

Luke Barratt, Atika Rehman and Sushmita:

»

Two coal plants plant run by the Indian multinationals Tata Group and Adani were due to close last year in a government push to cut emissions. But late in 2023, those decisions were reversed after Tata argued that electricity demand was rising too fast for Mumbai to go without coal.

Neither company responded to requests for comment.

Economic growth and the need for air conditioning in climate change-linked extreme heat have seen India’s electricity demand soar in recent years. But an investigation by SourceMaterial and the Guardian reveals the biggest single factor in the city’s failure to end its dependence on fossil fuels: energy-hungry datacentres.

Leaked records also reveal the scale of the presence of the world’s biggest datacentre operator, Amazon, in Mumbai. In the city’s metropolitan area, Amazon, on its website, records three “availability zones”, which it defines as one or more datacentres. Leaked records from last year seen by SourceMaterial from inside Amazon reveal the company used 16 in the city.

As India transforms its economy into a hub for artificial intelligence, the datacentre boom is creating a conflict between energy demand and climate pledges, said Bhaskar Chakravorti, who researches technology’s impact on society at Tufts University.

“I’m not surprised they’re falling behind their green transition commitments, especially with the demand growing exponentially,” he said of the Indian government.

Kylee Yonas, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said Mumbai’s “emission challenges” were not caused by Amazon. “On the contrary – Amazon is one of the largest corporate investors in renewable energy in India, and we’ve supported 53 solar and wind projects in the country capable of generating over 4m megawatt hours of clean energy annually,” she said. “These investments, which include our 99 megawatt wind project in Maharashtra, are enough to power over 1.3m Indian homes annually once operational.”

«

OK, 1.3m homes – or perhaps one data centre, while the 1.3m homes are coal-fired?
unique link to this extract

Elon Musk’s worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

Platforms not only goad users into posting more and more extreme and provocative content by rewarding them with attention; they also help people monetize that attention. Just before the 2016 election, BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander uncovered a network of Macedonian teens who recognized that America’s deep political divisions were a lucrative vein to exploit and pumped out bogus news articles that were designed to go viral on Facebook, which they then put advertisements on. Today it’s likely that at least some of these bogus MAGA accounts make pennies on the dollar via X’s Creator program, which rewards engaging accounts with a cut of advertising revenue; many of them have the telltale blue check mark.

As Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins noted on Bluesky, X’s architecture turns what should be an information ecosystem into a performative one. “Actors aren’t communicating; they’re staging provocations for yield,” he wrote. “The result is disordered discourse: signals detached from truth, identity shaped by escalation, and a feedback loop where the performance eclipses reality itself.” Beyond the attentional and financial rewards, platforms such as X have gutted their trust-and-safety or moderation teams in service of a bastardized notion of free-speech maximalism—creating the conditions for this informational nightmare.

The second lesson here is that X appears to be inflating the culture wars in ultimately unknowable but certainly important ways. On X this weekend, I watched one (seemingly real) person coming to terms with this fact. “Fascinating to look through every account I’ve disagreed with and find out they’re all fake,” they posted on Saturday. To be certain, X is not the main cause for American political division or arguing online, but it is arguably one of its greatest amplifiers. X is still a place where many journalists and editors in newsrooms across America share and consume political news. Political influencers, media personalities, and even politicians will take posts from supposed ordinary accounts and hold them up as examples of their ideological opponents’ dysfunction, corruption, or depravity.

How many of these accounts, arguments, or news cycles were a product of empty rage bait, proffered by foreign or just fake actors? Recent examples suggest the system is easily gamed: 32% to 37% of the online activity around Cracker Barrel’s controversial logo change this summer was driven by fake accounts, according to consultants hired by the restaurant chain.

«

(Gift link.)
unique link to this extract

The penicillin myth • Asimov Press

kevin Blake:

»

Everyone knows that penicillin destroys bacteria, and [Alexander] Fleming observed staphylococci seemingly being destroyed by a mould that produced penicillin.

However, upon closer reading of Fleming’s 1929 paper, it becomes clear that a great deal of work was either omitted or inadequately described. There is, for example, no description of the type of culture medium used; whether or not the plate had been incubated; how long it had been on the bench; and, most important of all, what species of Staphylococcus was being studied.

When publishing a scientific paper, scientists are expected to include a detailed description of their methods alongside their results. Like a recipe, these methods should clearly and comprehensively describe the materials used and the steps taken so that other scientists can replicate the experiment. And while incomplete or poorly-described methods are a perennial problem, the omission of these key experimental details (even in a report on an accidental discovery) is surprising.

This became a problem when, as interest in penicillin grew, other investigators tried to repeat Fleming’s discovery. In 1944, Margaret Jennings (who later married a long-time colleague and penicillin researcher, Howard Florey) spread purified penicillin onto plates of fully grown staphylococci. This should have had a more potent effect than Fleming’s, which was allegedly produced only with the crude “mould juice” from an accidental contaminant. Jennings, however, observed no visible change.

In 1965, the pathologist W.D. Foster attempted a similar experiment using penicillin crystals dropped directly onto staphylococcus colonies, creating “astronomical” concentrations within their vicinity. But still, the colonies remained unaffected.

Other attempts at replication called into question whether the mould could have even grown on a plate full of staphylococci. Pharmacologist D.B. Colquhoun claimed that, in 1955, he found that Penicillium mould refused to grow on a plate already full of staphylococcus colonies. Or, that, if it did, it produced no visible effect on the colonies.

«

Fascinating story about how a widely accepted story is almost surely not literally true, but instead happened by some other scientific process.
unique link to this extract

Iranians fear taps running dry as country faces worst drought in 60 years • ABC News

Matthew Doran and Leonie Thorne:

»

It was early November when the Iranian president was forced to make a startling admission.

Faced with a perfect storm of weather woes and decades of mismanagement, Masoud Pezeshkian issued a warning to his country that the situation could deteriorate even further. “We’ve run short of water. If it doesn’t rain, we in Tehran … must start rationing,” he said. “Even if we do ration and it still does not rain, then we will have no water at all. They [citizens] must evacuate Tehran.”

While it may seem like an exaggeration, it is the shocking reality facing the Iranian population — particularly in its capital, which has in excess of 15 million people across the broader metropolitan area. Taps are already running dry across Iran as the government enforces strict rationing to try to conserve what limited supplies it still has.

…Rainfall across much of the country is about 85% below average, with the worst drought conditions in about 60 years taking hold.

Decades of mismanagement of natural resources, including the construction of too many dams and a lack of enforcement when it came to drilling illegal wells, have combined with inefficient agriculture and adverse weather conditions to lead to the crisis.

“Tehran — the richest city of Iran, the most politically powerful city with more than 15 million in the metropolitan — is facing day zero in a few days or a few weeks,” Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, told the ABC earlier this month.

«

More outlets are noticing. But the problem of finding out what is happening remains as difficult as ever.
unique link to this extract

Apple’s ‘skinny’ iPhone falls flat with disappointing early sales • Financial Times

Michael Acton:

»

[Research group] IDC, which tracks iPhone sales through checks on Apple’s supply chain, found the company slashed production plans in half within weeks of the launch after the Air sold about a third of the tech group’s highest expectations.

Apple is seeking new ways to boost iPhone sales, which have flattened in recent years but accounted for $209bn in revenue in the year to September, roughly half of the group’s total sales.

Other devices in the iPhone 17 line-up, which launched at the same time as the Air, have sold well. Apple has forecast these sales will drive a record holiday quarter, far above Wall Street estimates.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimated the tech group could build 90m units of these new models in the second half of 2025, as many as 6m more than anticipated before the launch. The figures were “partially offset by relative weakness in the iPhone Air”, they added.

Apple declined to comment.

Slower sales of the Air came despite a flood of interest around its launch in September. The Air’s product page pulled in 1m views during the month, according to web intelligence platform Similarweb. It helped boost total online views around this year’s iPhone launch to 7.4m, 28% higher than the previous year’s products.

However, Similarweb found the conversion rate for the Air was about a third lower than other models, meaning the Air’s online audience translated to fewer sales.

“It created interest . . . showing the product innovation was still there,” said Dan Newman, chief executive of research company The Futurum Group. “[But] for a lot of people, the better camera features and battery life features on the Pro just outweighed the appeal of the Air.”

«

unique link to this extract

clone.fyi

I don’t know quite what to make of this: it’s a news aggregation site, but what the criteria for inclusion or being featured are isn’t stated, or clear. It’s linked to farcaster.xyz/clone which calls itself “your favorite founder’s favorite bookmark”, but beyond that?

The links are mostly news-based, but they don’t quite grab my attention.
unique link to this extract

Laptops in the long run: evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program in rural Peru • NBER

Santiago Cueto, Diether Beuermann, Julian Cristia, Ofer Malamud and Francisco Pardo:

»

This paper examines a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in 531 Peruvian rural primary schools. We use administrative data on academic performance and grade progression over 10 years to estimate the long-run effects of increased computer access on (i) school performance over time and (ii) students’ educational trajectories. Following schools over time, we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression. Following students over time, we find no significant effects on primary and secondary completion, academic performance in secondary school, or university enrollment. Survey data indicate that computer access significantly improved students’ computer skills but not their cognitive skills…

«

You can read more background about the OLPC project. The OLPC vision, if you need reminding, was “With access to this type of tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and create together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future. The best preparation for children isn’t test prep. It is ‘to develop the passion for learning and the ability to learn how to learn.'”

Doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.
unique link to this extract

The Turkish barbershops hiding a vast criminal network • Daily Telegraph

Danny Shaw on a police operation tackling crime in the surplus barber shops around Britain:

»

In April, as part of a three-week crackdown on high-street crime focusing on barbershops, police secured freezing orders over bank accounts totalling more than £1m, arrested 35 people, questioned 55 others about their immigration status and helped to safeguard 97 individuals in relation to potential modern slavery.

Tens of thousands of illegal cigarettes, vapes and packs of tobacco were seized – and two cannabis farms were found. The second, more extensive, phase of Machinize, this autumn, involved visits to 2,734 premises in the UK, 376 of which were barbershops. More than 900 people were arrested and more than £10.7m of suspected criminal proceeds seized.

The NCA operation followed the conviction of an Iranian Kurd who had used his barbershop in London as a base for an overseas criminal network smuggling 10,000 people into the UK in small boats. Hewa Rahimpur, who had claimed asylum after arriving in Britain in 2016, had set up the barber’s with a friend before renting a space for a food kiosk. In reality, he was the leader of a sprawling crime gang that sourced boats, engines and lifejackets for migrant crossings. In October 2024, he was jailed in Belgium for 11 years, with the case, along with the overall proliferation of barbershops, proving to be a “tipping point” for the authorities in the UK.

“From an NCA perspective, really, [it was] at the beginning of this year when we acknowledged that this problem had become too big for any one organisation to tackle in isolation,” says Sal Melki, the NCA’s deputy director of economic crime. “We needed to intervene,” he says.

For criminals, the main attraction of barbershops as fronts for crime is the ease with which they can be established. Countless high street properties lie vacant. All that’s needed to start up are a few chairs, hairbrushes and a pair of scissors. “You don’t need a huge amount in terms of stock, premises are widely available, it’s relatively easy in terms of planning permission and licensing,” says Melki.

«

My little market town has six barbershops, two (perhaps three) of them “Turkish”. There are about the same number of hairdressers, none “Turkish”. Peculiar. (Free to read with email registration.)
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The CEO of Mastodon is stepping down after ten years – partly in response to people’s attitude towards him online. CC-licensed photo by Alpha Photo 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. Is there a phrase for it? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta buried “causal” evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege • Reuters

Jeff Horwitz:

»

Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by US school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.

In a 2020 research project codenamed “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.

Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.

Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing.

“The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison ☹️”, an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”

Despite Meta’s own work documenting a causal link between its products and negative mental health effects, the filing alleges, Meta told Congress that it had no ability to quantify whether its products were harmful to teenage girls.

In a statement Saturday, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the study was stopped because its methodology was flawed and that it worked diligently to improve the safety of its products.

«

Amazing how the methodology is always flawed when it shows bad effects, but fine when it shows good ones.
unique link to this extract

My next chapter with Mastodon • Mastodon Blog

Eugen Rochko is the founder of the Mastodon project, and also its strategy and product advisor:

»

After nearly 10 years, I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit. Over the course of my time at Mastodon, I have centred myself less and less in our outward communications, and to some degree, this is the culmination of that trend.

Mastodon is bigger than me, and though the technology we develop on is itself decentralized—with heaps of alternative fediverse projects demonstrating that participation in this ecosystem is possible without our involvement—it benefits our community to ensure that the project itself which so many people have come to love and depend on remains true to its values. There are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities, and while I’d like to think myself an exception, I understand why people would prefer better guardrails.

But it would be uncouth for me to pretend that there isn’t some self-interest involved. Being in charge of a social media project is, turns out, quite the stressful endeavour, and I don’t have the right personality for it. I think I need not elaborate that the passion so many feel for social media does not always manifest in healthy ways. You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.

I remember somebody jokingly suggesting that I challenge Elon Musk to a fight (this was during his and Mark Zuckerberg’s martial arts feud), and quietly thinking to myself, I am literally not paid enough for that. I remember also, some Spanish newspaper article that for some reason, concluded that I don’t dress as fashionably as Jeff Bezos, based on the extremely sparse number of pictures of myself I have shared on the web. Over an entire decade, these tiny things chip away at you slowly. Some things chip faster.

«

People used to be enormously critical of Twitter’s (as it was) executives for not using Twitter, but increasingly – when you look at the experience of Rochko, and Bluesky’s Jay Graber – that looks like a smart move.
unique link to this extract

Magician loses password to his hand after RFID chip implant • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

It’s important to have your login in hand, literally. Zi Teng Wang, a magician who implanted an RFID chip in his appendage, has admitted losing access to it because he forgot the password.

It seemed like such a neat idea – get an RFID chip implanted in your hand and then do magical stuff with it. Except it didn’t work out that way. “It turns out,” said Zi, “that pressing someone else’s phone to my hand repeatedly, trying to figure out where their phone’s RFID reader is, really doesn’t come off super mysterious and magical and amazing.”

Then there are the people who don’t even have their phone’s RFID reader enabled. Using his own phone would, in Zi’s words, lack a certain “oomph.”

Oh well, how about making the chip spit out a Bitcoin address? “That literally never came up either.”

In the end, Zi rewrote the chip to link to a meme, “and if you ever meet me in person you can scan my chip and see the meme.”

It was all suitably amusing until the Imgur link Zi was using went down. Not everything on the World Wide Web is forever, and there is no guarantee that a given link will work indefinitely. Indeed, access to Imgur from the United Kingdom was abruptly cut off on September 30 in response to the country’s age verification rules.

Still, the link not working isn’t the end of the world. Zi could just reprogram the chip again, right?

Wrong. “When I went to rewrite the chip, I was horrified to realize I forgot the password that I had locked it with.”

«

Insufficiently advanced technology: definitely distinguishable from magic. And speaking of passwords…
unique link to this extract

Election 2025 Update • International Association for Cryptologic Research

»

This announcement is in connection with the recent IACR 2025 election conducted using the Helios electronic voting system. Regrettably, we have encountered a fatal technical problem that prevents us from concluding the election and accessing the final tally.

For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares.

Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.

This situation is visible on the public election page in Helios, where the trustees are listed: you can see that two trustees have successfully uploaded their decryption share material, whereas one has not. We point this out so that one can independently confirm that the issue arises from the strict cryptographic requirements of the system itself. You can consult this information at: https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/elections/e1130d04-aac6-11f0-95c8-3a40ecaef3ba/trustees/view

After careful consideration, we have decided that the only responsible course of action is to void this election and start a new election from scratch.

«

In the first place, hilariously ironic; second, shows why nobody used PGP before password managers (forgetting your passphrase is so easy, and that’s it forever); third, clearly means a lone trustee can void an election, thus delaying or preventing a result they think they will not like. Classic overdesign which fails to consider alternative malign motives.
unique link to this extract

Pornhub is urging tech giants to enact device-based age verification • Wired via Ars Technica

Jason Parham:

»

In letters sent to Apple, Google, and Microsoft this week, Pornhub’s parent company urged the tech giants to support device-based age verification in their app stores and across their operating systems, WIRED has learned.

“Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” reads the letter sent by Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, which owns Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube, and YouPorn. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”

The letter adds that site-based age verification methods have “failed to achieve their primary objective: protecting minors from accessing age-inappropriate material online.” Aylo says device-based authentication is a better solution for this issue because once a viewer’s age is determined via phone or tablet, their age signal can be shared over its application programming interface (API) with adult sites.

The letters were sent following the continued adoption of age verification laws in the US and UK, which require users to upload an ID or other personal documentation to verify that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit content; often this requires using third-party services. Currently, 25 US states have passed some form of ID verification, each with different provisions.

Pornhub has experienced an enormous dip in traffic as a result of its decision to pull out of most states that have enacted these laws. The platform was one of the few sites to comply with the new law in Louisiana but doing so caused traffic to drop by 80%. Similarly, since implementation of the Online Safety Act, Pornhub has lost nearly 80% of its UK viewership.

The company argues that it’s a privacy risk to leave age verification up to third-party sites and that people will simply seek adult content on platforms that don’t comply with the laws.

«

Certainly true that getting age verification done via sites doesn’t work well. Whereas by contrast the amount of data that they have for device IDs is colossal and hard to fake.
unique link to this extract

The remains of an ancient planet lie deep within Earth • Caltech

»

In the 1980s, geophysicists made a startling discovery: two continent-sized blobs of unusual material were found deep near the centre of the Earth, one beneath the African continent and one beneath the Pacific Ocean. Each blob is twice the size of the Moon and likely composed of different proportions of elements than the mantle surrounding it.

Where did these strange blobs—formally known as large low-velocity provinces (LLVPs)—come from? A new study led by Caltech researchers suggests that they are remnants of an ancient planet that violently collided with Earth billions of years ago in the same giant impact that created our Moon.

The study, published in the journal Nature on November 1, also proposes an answer to another planetary science mystery. Researchers have long hypothesized that the Moon was created in the aftermath of a giant impact between Earth and a smaller planet dubbed Theia, but no trace of Theia has ever been found in the asteroid belt or in meteorites. This new study suggests that most of Theia was absorbed into the young Earth, forming the LLVPs, while residual debris from the impact coalesced into the Moon.

The research was led by Qian Yuan, O.K. Earl Postdoctoral Scholar Research Associate in the laboratories of both Paul Asimow (MS ’93, PhD ’97), the Eleanor and John R. McMillan Professor of Geology and Geochemistry; and Michael Gurnis, the John E. And Hazel S. Smits Professor of Geophysics and Clarence R. Allen Leadership Chair, director of Caltech’s Seismological Laboratory, and director of the Schmidt Academy for Software Engineering at Caltech.

…why did Theia’s material clump into the two distinct blobs instead of mixing together with the rest of the forming planet? The researchers’ simulations showed that much of the energy delivered by Theia’s impact remained in the upper half of the mantle, leaving Earth’s lower mantle cooler than estimated by earlier, lower-resolution impact models. Because the lower mantle was not totally melted by the impact, the blobs of iron-rich material from Theia stayed largely intact as they sifted down to the base of the mantle, like the colored masses of paraffin wax in a turned-off lava lamp.

«

The reckoning now is that Theia came from the inner solar system and yeeted into the early Earth. Our existence looks more and more like the craziest set of coincidences.
unique link to this extract

Top MAGA influencers accidentally unmasked as foreign actors • Daily Beast

Jack Revell:

»

Elon Musk’s social media site X has rolled out a new feature in an effort to increase transparency—and unwittingly revealed that many of the site’s top MAGA influencers are actually foreign actors.

The new “About This Account” feature, which became available to X users on Friday, allows others to see where an account is based, when they joined the platform, how often they have changed their username, and how they downloaded the X app.

Upon rollout, rival factions began to inspect just where their online adversaries were really based on the combative social platform—with dozens of major MAGA and right-wing influencer accounts revealed to be based overseas.

“This is easily one of the greatest days on this platform,” wrote Democratic influencer Harry Sisson. “Seeing all of these MAGA accounts get exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States is a complete vindication of Democrats, like myself and many on here, who have been warning about this”.

Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria.

In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe. An Ivanka Trump fan account, IvankaNews, has 1 million followers and frequently posts about the dangers of Islam, the threat of illegal immigration and support for Trump. That account is based in Nigeria.

«

The revelations have been amazing. (They’re found by clicking on the “Joined” date with a disclosure arrow on the user’s profile.) A pro-Scottish independence account turned out to be based in Iran, operating via the Iran App Store – that is, the X app was downloaded from the Iranian version of the App Store.

There are surely plenty more to come. It’s a feature that looks obvious in retrospect; it’s revealing the many accounts based in India, Pakistan and other low-income countries where accounts have used the monetisation feature to post ragebait for profit.
unique link to this extract

A startup’s bid to dim the Sun • The New Yorker

Elizabeth Kolbert:

»

Stardust is the name of a small startup with enormous ambitions. The company, which is based in Israel and registered in Delaware, proposes to do nothing less than dim the sun. Its business plan is modelled on volcanoes. In a major eruption, millions of tons of sulphur dioxide get thrown up into the stratosphere. There, the gas reacts to form droplets of sulphuric acid that scatter sunlight back to space. The result is that less energy reaches the Earth and the planet cools. After Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, blew its top, in 1991, average global temperatures dipped by almost 1º Fahrenheit.

Stardust seeks to market eruptions of its own. It is working to develop highly reflective particles that could be sprayed above the clouds, where they would drift around, mirrorlike, and, the theory goes, help combat global warming. The company calls this scheme “sunlight reflection technology,” although it is more commonly known as solar geoengineering. In one form or another, the idea has been kicking around for decades, but Stardust has taken it a major—some might say terrifying—step forward.

The company says that it has created a new sort of reflective particle, the specific makeup of which it has so far declined to reveal. (It states that the particles are made from a material that is “safe for humans and ecosystems.”) And recently it announced that it had raised $60m in venture capital to pursue its plans, which include developing a dispersal system that could be used to spray the particles into the stratosphere.

«

As I’ve said before, geoengineering is going to be tried by scientists, governments, private investors and billionaires. Only two (maybe only one) of those take any notice of being told not to do things.
unique link to this extract

What about making space stations…inflatable? • Works in Progress Magazine

Angadh Nanjangud on how to create rotating space stations that could generate Earth-like gravity:

»

Assembling the ISS meant launching more than 40 rockets over several years (plus even more launches for cargo resupply and repairs). Even with all these launches, the resultant space station is so small that it can support a typical crew of only seven, a little over twice what the first ever space station, Salyut 1, managed in 1972.

Even with the huge cost reductions in delivering payloads into space made by SpaceX, the sheer scale of materials needed for one of these structures makes it hard to imagine that modular in-orbit assembly will scale to von Braun’s anticipated 80 humans or the 100 people that SpaceX’s Starship is intended to hold any time soon. Civilization-scale megastructures like the Stanford Torus and O’Neill cylinders, which might hold tens of thousands to millions of people, appear even more outlandish today than when they were first proposed half a century ago.

The bottleneck is using small ‘tin can’ modular spacecraft as the centrepiece for assembly. There is a viable alternative, but to find it we need to look to pre-Apollo space technology.

Between 1959 and 1962, NASA Langley explored architectures that progressed towards von Braun’s vision of a large space station, without the constraints imposed by modular construction.

A 1959 conference instigated by Larry Loftin, Director of Aeronautical Research at NASA Langley, came up with two prototypes for ‘unitized’ structures, structures that eliminated or reduced the need for in-orbit assembly.

The first idea explored inflating large Goodyear tire tubes into wheel-shaped space stations. Made from soft materials like rubber and nylon, the Langley team was concerned that these tires would be vulnerable to collisions with micrometeorites hurtling through space that could puncture the station, with fatal outcomes.

The second idea came from North American Aviation, which proposed a series of (mostly) rigid hexa gonal space stations. This resulted in a 15-foot prototype, made from six rigid hinge-connected pipes. This design folded neatly into a rocket for launch, deploying automatically once in orbit. The rigidity of its habitable elements offered better protection against micro meteorite collisions than Goodyear’s rubber donut. Another three inflatable pipes connected the outer habitat ring to a central hub via air-lock doors, which could be sealed in case of rupture.

«

The problem of space debris and the calamitous effect of a collision on something so comparatively large seem understated. But: inflatable space stations! It’s wonderfully bonkers.
unique link to this extract

Makran or Bust: Tehran’s water crisis gets worse • Global Threads

Peter Frankopan on Tehran’s worsening drought:

»

Coverage of the crisis in state-run outlets like IRNA and ISNA has become urgent, even bleak, in recent days.

IRNA’s daily update now reads as 24 hour updates of slow-motion collapse: reservoir levels edging ever further downward, a reminder that rainfall are totals stuck zero, and engineers talking about ‘emergency extraction protocols.’

The Latyan Dam, a critical artery for the capital, is being described as ‘dangerously close’ to inactive due to drought.

Things are looking desperate. Iran’s weather modification and cloud-seeding programmes have been modest in recent years; they have suddenly become central to hopes of salvation.

In the last week senior officials from the Organisation for the Development of Meteoric Water Technologies announced that aircraft (and soon drones) are being deployed to seed viable clouds in catchment regions feeding Tehran. State TV has run segments showing technicians loading flares onto the wings of a small plane, explaining that ‘inducing precipitation’ was now a matter of national security.

Iran has used cloud-seeding before, but never with this level of publicity, nor with this sense of urgency. The Iran Meteorological Organization said it expected rain in 18 of Iran’s 31 provinces; but because the ground is baked so hard, soils have not been able to absorb precipitation, such as at Abdanan in western Iran. Cloud-seeding is not delivering what is needed in the right scale, or in the right place.

Iranian social media has been full of videos showing apartment blocks filling buckets at in the middle of the night, trying to catch the last whisper of pressure before the nightly collapse. Young Tehranis have created crowd-sourced maps tracking water pressure by neighbourhood, shading parts of of the southern part of the city in red to show almost constant outages.

These maps care being circulated widely, sometimes crossing into state-media where they are labelled unreliable and ‘unverified’ – a standard formula when an inconvenient truth is too widespread to ignore entirely.

«

There really is very little about this drought in the rest of the media.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified