The spork’s continued existence, in the liminal place between useless and annoying, remains baffling. CC-licensed photo by Karl Baron on Flickr.

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

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

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

Google stops letting sites like Forbes rule search for “Best CBD Gummies” • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

“Updating our site reputation abuse policy” is how Google, in wondrously opaque fashion, announced yesterday that big changes have come to some big websites, especially those that rely on their domain authority to promote lucrative third-party product recommendations.

If you’ve searched for reviews and seen results that make you ask why so many old-fashioned news sites seem to be “reviewing” products lately—especially products outside that site’s expertise—that’s what Google is targeting.

“This is a tactic where third-party content is published on a host site in an attempt to take advantage of the host’s already-established ranking signals,” Google’s post on its Search Central blog reads. “The goal of this tactic is for the content to rank better than it could otherwise on a different site, and leads to a bad search experience for users.”

Search firm Sistrix cited the lost traffic to the third-party review content inside Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fortune, and Time as worth $7.5m last week, according to AdWeek. Search rankings dropped by up to 97% at Time’s affiliate review site, Time Stamped, and 43% at Forbes Advisor. The drops are isolated to the affiliate subdomains of the sites, so their news-minded primary URLs still rank where relevant.

The “site reputation abuse” Google is targeting takes many forms, but it has one common theme: using an established site’s domain history to quietly sell things. Forbes, a well-established business news site, has an ownership stake in Forbes Marketplace (named Forbes Advisor in site copy) but does not fully own it.

Under the strength of Forbes’ long-existing and well-linked site, Forbes Marketplace/Advisor has dominated the search term “best cbd gummies” for “an eternity,” according to SEO analyst Lily Ray. Forbes has similarly dominated “best pet insurance,” and long came up as the second result for “how to get rid of roaches,” as detailed in a blog post by Lars Lofgren. If people click on this high-ranking result, and then click on a link to buy a product or request a roach removal consultation, Forbes typically gets a cut.

Forbes Marketplace had seemingly also provided SEO-minded review services to CNN and USA Today, as detailed by Lofgren. Lofgren’s term for this business, “Parasite SEO,” took hold in corners critical of the trend.

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Long overdue, but at least it’s happening.
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DOJ asks judge to force Google to sell Chrome as remedy in landmark antitrust case • Business Insider via Yahoo

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert:

»

Because of Google’s size, the popularity of Chrome, and the profits its search wing drives for the company, it would be a historic development if they were ultimately required to divest themselves of Chrome, Eric Chaffee, a business and tech law professor at Case Western Reserve University, told BI.

Such a sale would be a multibillion-dollar proposal, and it’s not immediately clear who a potential buyer would be.

“Google could receive proceeds in the range of $15 billion to $20 billion,” Peter Cohan, an associate professor of management practice at Babson College, told BI. “But if Google is able to control the company that buys Chrome, the impact of selling the business would be minimal. What matters most to Google is all the data Google collects and uses for advertising.”

Neil Chilson, a former acting chief technologist at the FTC, told BI that asking Mehta to force Google to sell Chrome is the DOJ’s way of swinging for the fences — but he expects the final remedies to land somewhere short of complete divestment.

“It’s a pretty fantastical ask,” Chilson said. “I don’t think that this remedy really tackles the area in which Judge Mehta found liability, which is for these exclusive contracts, and so this seems like a very aggressive ask — one that doesn’t really fix the problem that the judge said was creating the competitive problem in the first place.”

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Stripping out Chrome would mean ChromeOS would have to pay for Chrome, and would mean Android (still owned by Google?) would have to pick a browser – hmm, wonder if it would be Chrome? – so ChromeCo might eke out a living, but if the DoJ also prevents Google paying to be default search (also expected) then a whole lot of money falls out of the system. Tim Cook must be sweating.
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Put a fork in the spork • Zócalo Public Square

Ken Albala:

»

Positivists since the 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte have considered material progress an inevitable feature of human history. The human condition always continues to improve in direct proportion to the advancement of science and technological innovation.

A single commonplace object proves Comte’s assertion absurd and fallacious: the spork. 

The spork is a prime example of the debasement of our species. Everyone who has ever tried to use it realizes the idiocy of the contraption. Its design—a shallow bowl with small projecting truncated tines—precludes any effective use as either a spoon or a fork. Instead, it combines the worst features of both utensils: Liquid spills through the diminutive tines before soup hits the lips, and the tines themselves are too blunt to easily puncture and convey to the mouth anything that might be considered solid food.

Why then are we subjected to this disaster on a regular basis? And what could set us free from its poorly manufactured grip?

…Perhaps the success of the spork may also be attributed to the fact that Americans never really became comfortable using a knife and fork. We tend to cut food with a knife in the right hand and a fork in the left, and then trade the utensils in order to eat. We also keep the tines of the fork upward like a scoop, unlike in Europe, where the fork stays in the left hand and the tines point downward. This is apparently because Americans first began to use forks in the 17th century, before they fully evolved in Europe. In any case, it might explain why many people were happy jettisoning the fork entirely in favor of the spork.

The spork that’s become ubiquitous over the last few decades—the plastic spork—is what deserves the full brunt of our opprobrium. Preeminently disposable, destined for landfills and the stomachs of defenseless sea creatures, plastic is the single most heinous material humans have ever invented. This is not only because of its detrimental environmental effects but from a purely gastronomic point of view. It is the taste of industrial waste.

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At The Onion, they think of headlines and then write the story to fit. One which apparently never quite made the grade was “Man knifed with spork”. May we never see its like again.
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How to produce a kamikaze drone • Statecraft

Santi Ruiz interviews Chris Anderson, formerly with the US DoD’s Asymmetric Warfare Group:

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SR: Will you describe more of the characteristics of the solution that you guys ended up with in the Switchblade? It’s pretty remarkable to me that in 2010 or 2011, this fairly advanced machine that weighed less than six pounds could be launched from a tube on the ground and controlled from a laptop. 

CA: The story of the Switchblade is really the story of a company and its vision for the future. That company, AeroVironment, also makes the Raven unmanned aerial system, the Wasp, the Puma. But around 2008 and 2009, they invested a lot of their own money into the Switchblade. There was a requirement for it: to be able to take out four targets inside of a pickup truck, a Hilux truck. Hilux trucks are the number one choice for all terrorists today, but particularly the Taliban. I don’t understand why we don’t have them here in America — they’re a good truck. 

But anyway, the idea was low collateral damage. We needed the capability to precisely, from kilometers away, reach out and touch targets like a guy on a mountainside, a dude on a rooftop.

SR: Askonas says that you could remotely calibrate the warhead for different burst patterns, and that it could take out a vehicle in traffic without harming anyone around it. 

CA: It’s pretty accurate. I still have “classified PTSD,” so I’m always worried about what I can say, but yes, you could calibrate the warhead and the blast pattern. It had a warhead with what’s called CL 20, which is a special kind of explosive, and inside that warhead was tungsten, say 200 pieces of tungsten fragmentation. That’s a really heavy metal, and they were in very small diamond patterns. 

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Fascinating interview (this is the transcript of the podcast) about the evolution of the drones we now hear about patrolling behind the lines in Ukraine.
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Church in Switzerland is using an AI-powered Jesus hologram to take confession • Daily Mail Online

Wiliam Hunter:

»

As part of an art project called ‘Deus in Machina’ (God in a Machine) St Peter’s Church in Lucerne has installed an AI-powered Jesus hologram to take confessions.

Worshipers simply voice their concerns and questions to get a response from the digitally-rendered face of Jesus Christ.

At least two-thirds of people who spoke to AI Jesus came out of the confessional reporting having had a ‘spiritual’ experience. One impressed worshiper told news outlet DW: ‘I was surprised, it was so easy, and though it’s a machine, it gave me so much advice.’

While the installation is only temporary, St Peter’s Chapel says that similar chatbots could one day take on some of the responsibilities of church pastors.

However, not everyone is quite so impressed with some visitors calling the avatar’s advice ‘generic’ and branding it as ‘a gimmick’.

Visitors to this futuristic shrine sit in a confessional booth from which a screen showing the face of Jesus can be seen through the grate. As the visitor asks their questions an AI interprets their words and formulates answers, animating the face so it moves in time with computer-generated speech.

AI Jesus is even equipped with the ability to speak 100 different languages to cater to Lucerne’s many visiting tourists.

Upon entering, the worshiper is greeted by AI Jesus intoning the message: ‘Do not disclose personal information under any circumstances, use this service at your own risk, press the button if you accept.’ From this point on, it is up to the individual to interact with the AI in any way they like by pressing the button and speaking aloud.

Many who came to see the AI avatar reported coming with questions about scripture or seeking spiritual advice. One visitor says: ‘I asked about the spiral of violence, how to break one. The answer: through prayer and not seeking retribution.’

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Eliza lives!
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Misinformation expert cites non-existent sources in Minnesota deep fake case • Minnesota Reformer

Christopher Ingraham:

»

A leading misinformation expert is being accused of citing non-existent sources to defend Minnesota’s new law banning election misinformation.

Professor Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, is “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology,” according to his Stanford biography. 

At the behest of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hancock recently submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology to influence an election. The law is being challenged in federal court by a conservative YouTuber and Republican state Rep. Mary Franson of Alexandria for violating First Amendment free speech protections.

Hancock’s expert declaration in support of the deep fake law cites numerous academic works. But several of those sources do not appear to exist, and the lawyers challenging the law say they appear to have been made up by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT.

For instance, the declaration cites a study titled “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior,” and says that it was published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics in 2023. But no study by that name appears in that journal; academic databases don’t have any record of it existing; and the specific journal pages referenced contain two entirely different articles.

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I am now officially begging you not to use chatbots of any ilk as search engines. Absolutely begging you. And where search engines stick a chatbot on the top (looking at you, Google), ignore that too.
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Bird flu in Canada may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans • The Guardian

Melody Schreiber:

»

The Canadian teen first developed symptoms on 2 November and was hospitalized at the British Columbia children’s hospital on 8 November. The child is still in critical condition with acute respiratory distress – a serious lung condition that can be fatal.

Preliminary sequencing of the H5N1 variant sickening the teenager showed a potential mutation on the genomic spot known to make people more susceptible to the virus.

That could indicate that H5N1 has the capability to become more like a human virus, rather than an avian virus, but it is also not clear yet whether this change is meaningful and more dangerous to people, experts said.

The virus may have mutated over the course of the teen’s illness; additional sequencing could reveal more about its evolution.

“Often it’s not just one thing that is going to confer that ability” to infect humans more effectively, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.

“It’s not quite clear what the real-world implications are going to be, but certainly all of these things are a warning sign,” Rasmussen said. “We really do need to pay attention to this, and we really do need to try to reduce more human infections as much as we possibly can.”

The particular variant of H5N1 circulating among birds in British Columbia and the north-western US appeared over the past few months, several years after bird flu was first found in North America, Webby said. The variant also sickened 11 workers in Washington state who were killing infected poultry, though those workers did not have the possible mutation detected in the teenager.

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Narrowed eyes watching brief.
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Could avian flu cause our next pandemic? • MedPage Today

Claire Dunavan is a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at UCLA:

»

it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. Or, for a true reality check, just scan the Department of Agriculture’s frequently-updated map and tables naming the many animals that have tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in the US since May 2022.

Finding influenza A/H5N1 in wild birds and waterfowl and poultry is nothing new, of course. During 2024, however, our country has seen its first-ever multi-state outbreak in dairy cows expressing milk heavily tainted with the virus, as well as illness, deaths, or detections in cats, goats, alpaca, skunks, and house mice, among others. The latest species found to harbor A/H5N1 was a backyard pig in Oregonopens in a new tab or window. Once euthanized, its tissues teeming with virus fueled further unease because pigs are classic mixing vessels in which human and avian flu viruses can recombine and form new, virulent strains.

Now for some less ominous news: the viral strain currently circulating in American dairy cows and poultry has not yet caused serious disease in people. Thus far, based on very limited testing, roughly four dozen A/H5N1 infections almost equally divided between dairy and poultry workers have been mild or even asymptomatic. As a result, CDC continues to state that the riskopens in a new tab or window to the general public is low.

Having said that, there is now a critically ill teenageropens in a new tab or window up in Canada infected with H5N1 whose source of exposure is unknown. In addition, no knowledgeable expert would deny that influenza viruses are notoriously unpredictable, having caused more pandemics than any other pathogen over the last 500 yearsopens in a new tab or window. Now factor in the modern challenge of getting Big Agriculture, government, and public health to work hand-in-hand on control measures while communicating clear, sensible advice to everyday folks already exhausted by COVID, a few of whom also believe that raw milk is Nature’s perfect food, discounting its previously proven hazardsopens in a new tab or window as mere hogwash.

«

Ah yes, RFK Jr and his love of unpasteurised milk. Who’s to say that after he caused scores of deaths in Papua New Guinea by opposing measles vaccines that he shouldn’t go for the big one and give the next pandemic a helping hand? (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Elon Musk asked people to upload their health data. X users obliged • The New York Times

Elizabeth Passarella:

»

Over the past few weeks, users on X have been submitting X-rays, MRIs, CT scans and other medical images to Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot, asking for diagnoses. The reason: Elon Musk, X’s owner, suggested it.

“This is still early stage, but it is already quite accurate and will become extremely good,” Musk said in a post. The hope is that if enough users feed the AI their scans, it will eventually get good at interpreting them accurately. Patients could get faster results without waiting for a portal message, or use Grok as a second opinion.

Some users have shared Grok’s misses, like a broken clavicle that was misindentified as a dislocated shoulder. Others praised it: “Had it check out my brain tumor, not bad at all,” one user wrote alongside a brain scan. Some doctors have even played along, curious to test whether a chatbot could confirm their own findings.

Although there’s been no similar public callout from Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, people can submit medical images to those tools, too.

The decision to share information as sensitive as your colonoscopy results with an A.I. chatbot has alarmed some medical privacy experts.

“This is very personal information, and you don’t exactly know what Grok is going to do with it,” said Bradley Malin, a professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University who has studied machine learning in health care.

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I hardly think that Grok is going to send people round to your house if you upload something showing you’ve got a broken leg; though I suppose the American fear is that somehow insurance companies will demand the imagery or analysis. If all these AI tools get to see more images, that should be useful, though interpretation is far more tricky. (I am tempted to try uploading a recent MRI to ChatGPT for fun, to see how it compares with the human interpretation I already have.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An experiment by Google has used mobile phones to map the ionosphere, improving GPS accuracy. CC-licensed photo by Mike Lewinski 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. Location, location, location. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google uses millions of phones to map Earth’s ionosphere and improve GPS • Nature

Elizabeth Gibney:

»

For the first time, researchers have used real-time data from around 40 million mobile phones to map conditions in the ionosphere — a region of the upper atmosphere in which some of the air molecules are ionized. Such crowdsourced signals could improve satellite navigation, especially in swathes of the world where data are otherwise scarce, including Africa, South America and South Asia.

The proof-of-principle study, by a team at Google, was published in Nature on 13 November.

“It’s an amazing data set,” says Anthea Coster, an atmospheric physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “It fills in the map a lot, in areas where we desperately need more information.”

Phone data could reduce GPS errors by 10–20% in some areas, and more in underserved regions, estimates Ningbo Wang, an atmospheric physicist at the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Even with adjustments, interference from the ionosphere remains a challenge, he says, especially during solar storms that trigger uneven conditions in the ionosphere. “The results presented are truly impressive.”

When the air is partly ionized, freely moving electrons slightly slow down the radio signals travelling to Earth from GPS and other navigation satellites. This can affect the nanosecond-precision timing that satellite navigation devices use to pinpoint their locations, with potentially serious impacts on aeroplane landings and autonomous vehicles.

Real-time maps of the density of these electrons are commonly used to correct for fluctuations in the ionosphere. Engineers create the maps using data from ground-based receiver stations, which can detect the arrival times of two different frequencies of radio waves received from the same satellite. Electrons in the ionosphere slow down low-frequency waves more than they do high-frequency ones, by a nanosecond or so. This difference reveals the density of the electrons the wave passed through on its way to a receiver.

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Nvidia posts record quarterly revenue • Axios

Hope King:

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Nvidia on Wednesday afternoon projected strong demand for its products in Q4, the first period to include sales of its new Blackwell AI chip.

It’s the latest sign that businesses continue to crave more computing power for emerging AI projects.

Sales for the current quarter are projected to reach $37.5bn, slightly above average Wall Street expectations of about $37bn.

Meeting that target would represent roughly 70% growth from a year ago’s $22.1bn. “Blackwell demand is staggering, and we are racing to scale supply to meet the incredible demand customers are placing on us,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress told analysts Wednesday afternoon.

This is Nvidia’s first earnings report and call since the US presidential election. Some investors are already worried about the potential impact on Nvidia’s business if new tariffs or greater China export restrictions are put in place.

Nvidia’s outsized impact on the overall stock market means investor sentiment on the stock will spillover to other sectors in the days to come.

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Nvidia’s revenue exploded in summer of 2023, after years of noodling along fairly quietly making gamers and then cryptocoiners happy. Making shovels for the AI goldrush is good business.
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Robot manufacturer has 12 robots ‘kidnapped’ from showroom by another robot • Oddity Central

“Spooky”:

»

Viral footage captured by CCTV cameras at a robotics company showroom shows 12 large robots being ‘kidnapped by another manufacturer’s robot that convinced them to “quit their jobs” and follow it.

For the past week, Chinese social media has been abuzz about a bizarre incident that reportedly occurred back in august at a robotics company showroom in Shanghai, but was only made public recently. Footage captured by the venue’s surveillance cameras shows a small robot making its way into the showroom at night and slowly rolling over to a bunch of larger robots before engaging in a dialogue with them. After asking them if they’re working overtime, the little robot manages to somehow pursuade two of the other robots to “come home” with it, and then the remaining 10 robots follow them. In the beginning, the video was deemed staged and amusing by most viewers, but then the Shanghai robotics company came out and admitted that its robots had indeed been “kidnapped” by a robot created by another manufacturer.

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There is video with this. I’m going to say it’s complete and utter junk and done as some sort of guerilla marketing. But this is probably going to get spread around, so let’s head it off at the pass.
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IMG_0001: all the YouTube videos iPhones sent untitled

Riley Walz:

»

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.

Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found five million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.

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From when the internet was not just young, but nascent. YouTube only started in 2005.
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The global growth rate for mobile internet subscribers has stalled • Rest of World

Khadija Alam and Russell Brandom:

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A recent survey from Global System for Mobile Communications Association Intelligence (GSMA), the research wing of a U.K.-based organization that represents mobile operators around the world, found that 4.6 billion people across the globe are now connected to mobile internet — or roughly 57% of the world’s population. 

Now, the rate of new mobile internet subscriber growth is slowing. From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to 160 million. Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers.

That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge. GSMA collects data by surveying a nationally representative sample of people in each country, and then it correlates the results with similar studies.

…In countries including China, the U.S., and Singapore, a high share of the population is already connected to mobile internet — 80%, 81%, and 93%, respectively. So it’s no surprise that the rate of mobile internet subscriptions has slowed.

But the rate of new users has also slowed in countries including Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Pakistan — where only 37%, 34%, and 24% of the population currently use mobile internet.

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All the memes they’re missing! Oh, the humanity!
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The cost of Her • Tomasz Tunguz

Tunguz is a venture capitalist:

»

What it cost to have an assistant with you like in the movie Her?

The cost of using AI has dropped precipitously, an order of magnitude every year.

If the average American picks up their phone 144 times per day & engages with an assistant, each time for four interactions every day of a month, an assistant like Her would cost about 78 cents in inference cost.1

I’m not taking into account any of the additional costs associated with delivering such a product. Assuming a commercial vendor would 10x the price, it’s still $7 per month, less than half of a Netflix subscription.

«

But but but: what sort of quality of Her would it be? Possibly it’s time to rewatch the film and be reminded of the qualities that that software had (apart from Scarlet Johansson’s voice, of course).
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Danish military says it’s staying close to Chinese ship after data cable breaches • Reuters

Johan Ahlander:

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The Danish military said on Wednesday that it was staying close to a Chinese ship currently sitting idle in Danish waters, days after two fibre-optic data telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea were severed.

Chinese bulk carrier Yi Peng 3 was anchored in the Kattegat strait between Denmark and Sweden on Wednesday, with a Danish navy patrol ship at anchor nearby, MarineTraffic vessel tracking data showed. “The Danish Defence can confirm that we are present in the area near the Chinese ship Yi Peng 3,” the military said in a post on social media X, adding it had no further comments.

It is quite rare for Denmark’s military to comment publicly on individual vessels travelling in Danish waters. It did not mention the cable breaches or say why it was staying with the ship. Swedish police later told news agency TT they were also interested in the Yi Peng 3, adding there might be other vessels of interest to Sweden’s investigation.

The Chinese ship left the Russian port of Ust-Luga on Nov. 15 and was in the areas where the cable damages occurred, according to traffic data, which showed other ships to have been in the areas too.
One cable running between Sweden and Lithuania was cut on Sunday and another one between Finland and Germany was severed less than 24 hours later on Monday.

The breaches happened in Sweden’s exclusive economic zone and Swedish prosecutors started a preliminary investigation on Tuesday on suspicion of possible sabotage. Swedish Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told Reuters on Tuesday that the country’s armed forces and coastguard had picked up ship movements that corresponded with the interruption of two telecoms cables in the Baltic Sea.

…European governments accused Russia on Tuesday of escalating hybrid attacks on Ukraine’s Western allies, but stopped short of directly accusing Russia of destroying the cables.

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Probably wise that they stopped short. Unlike the ship. Badum-tish.
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The US response to bird flu is not reassuring the world • The New York Times

Tulio de Oliveira is the director of the Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation in South Africa:

»

As a virus scientist in South Africa, I’ve been watching with dread as H5N1 bird flu spreads among animals in the United States. The pathogen poses a serious pandemic threat and has been detected in over 500 dairy herds in 15 states — which is probably an undercount. And yet the U.S. response appears inadequate and slow, with too few genomic sequences of H5N1 cases in farm animals made publicly available for scientific review.

Failure to control H5N1 among American livestock could have global consequences, and this demands urgent attention. The United States has done little to reassure the world that it has the outbreak contained.

The recent infection of a pig at a farm in Oregon is especially concerning, as pigs are known to be mixing bowls for influenza viruses. Pigs can be infected by both avian and human influenza viruses, creating a risk for the viruses to exchange genetic material and potentially speed up adaptation for human transmission. The H1N1 pandemic in 2009 was created and spread initially by pigs.

Beyond the risks to its citizens (there are over 45 cases of people in the United States getting the virus in 2024), the United States should remember that the country where a pandemic emerges can be accused of not doing enough to control it. We still hear how China did not do enough to stop the Covid-19 pandemic. None of us would want a new pathogen labeled “the American virus,” as this could be very damaging for the United States’ reputation and economy.

The United States should learn from how the global south responds to infectious diseases. Those of us working in the region have a good track record of responding to epidemics and emerging pandemics and can help the United States identify new virus strains and offer insights into how to control H5N1. This knowledge has not come easily or without suffering; it has developed from decades of dealing with deadly diseases. We’ve learned one simple lesson: you need to learn your enemy as quickly as possible in order to fight it.

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Watching brief! Also perhaps worrying brief, because it’s hard to see the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) becoming more effective in a Trump administration. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The US Patent and Trademark Office banned staff from using generative AI • WIRED

Reece Rogers:

»

The US Patent and Trademark Office banned the use of generative artificial intelligence for any purpose last year, citing security concerns with the technology as well as the propensity of some tools to exhibit “bias, unpredictability, and malicious behavior,” according to an April 2023 internal guidance memo obtained by WIRED through a public records request. Jamie Holcombe, the chief information officer of the USPTO, wrote that the office is “committed to pursuing innovation within our agency” but are still “working to bring these capabilities to the office in a responsible way.”

Paul Fucito, press secretary for the USPTO, clarified to WIRED that employees can use “state-of-the-art generative AI models” at work—but only inside the agency’s internal testing environment. “Innovators from across the USPTO are now using the AI Lab to better understand generative AI’s capabilities and limitations and to prototype AI-powered solutions to critical business needs,” Fucito wrote in an email.

Outside of the testing environment, USPTO staff are barred from relying on AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude for work tasks. The guidance memo from last year also prohibits the use of any outputs from the tools, including images and videos generated by AI. But Patent Office employees can use some approved AI programs, such as those within the agency’s own public database for looking up registered patents and patent applications. Earlier this year, the USPTO approved a $75m contract with Accenture Federal Services to update its patent database with enhanced AI-powered search features.

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Perhaps AI search will stumble on the real perpetual motion machine lost in the applications. And the working cold fusion machine!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scammers who call one of the numbers in their lists will encounter an “AI granny” who wastes time by talking about knitting. CC-licensed photo by IMLS Digital Collections & Content 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Meta lobbyist turned regulator says Europe’s Big Tech rules have gone too far • WIRED

Morgan Meaker:

»

By 2022, around three-quarters of all Google and Meta lobbyists in Europe previously worked at the European Commission, according to LobbyControl research. [40-year-old Finnish former Meta lobbyist, Aura] Salla once fell into this category, too. Her career in Brussels started at the European Commission before she was hired by Meta in 2020. The company did not respond to WIRED’s request to comment on this article.

Salla is worried that recently passed laws—like the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, or the AI Act—may be stifling potential European rivals to the likes of OpenAI or Apple. “We have very layered regulation on the tech sector, and that’s harming our companies,” Salla says.

The MEP does not oppose the aims of laws like the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which includes rules forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores onto European iPhones. “I hope that the DMA will be enforced so we can enable more companies to enter this field where Apple is—absolutely, I would love to see that,” Salla says. Yet she’s pessimistic the regulation will actually compel Apple to change. “I’m sorry, the company will go around it, go around it, go around it.” Instead, the businesses that will suffer, she claims, will be some of Europe’s most successful—travel company Booking.com and online retailer Zalando. “So, our own companies.”

Salla is becoming an outspoken figure, articulating concern that regulation went too far, too fast. She believes the EU should focus on boosting innovation at home over restraining companies from abroad. “We did it completely the wrong way around,” she says. European companies should be able to collect and feed their AI models data, Salla says, arguing companies are limited by “too many overlapping” rules. She stresses she is advocating for businesses to be able to use traffic and metadata—not private data—to train AI. “Even if [they are] not limited, it takes an army of consultants to make sure everything is correct,” she says.

«

There is a strong feeling that the US has been too lax but the EU has been too strict in regulating tech, and getting each back to the ideal point is no easy task.
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Bluesky tops 20m users, narrowing gap with Instagram Threads • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Bluesky, the social network and X competitor, has been benefiting from a surge of departures from the Elon Musk-owned app formerly known as Twitter. On Tuesday, Bluesky hit a major milestone: it topped 20 million users. What’s more, new data indicates the app’s rapid growth is seeing it close the gap with another prominent X rival, Instagram Threads, across metrics like daily active users and website visits.

Bluesky’s user base is still much smaller than Threads, which recently reported north of 275 million monthly active users. However, if Bluesky’s current rate of growth holds up, it could catch up with Threads in time, market intelligence firm Similarweb believes.

Its data indicates that Threads had five times more daily active users (DAUs) than Bluesky ahead of the US elections, but on November 15, a peak day of activity for Bluesky, Threads’ lead over Bluesky had been reduced to just 1.5x in the US. (Daily active users include the mobile apps on iOS and Android, not website visitors.)

Instagram head Adam Mosseri denied Similarweb’s data is accurate, but Meta does not share DAUs.

«

It would be amusing if all Threads’s engagement-baiting (and news-minimisation) has been for naught, and what people wanted was a really vanilla social network.

You can see a real-time update of Bluesky registered users: presently just short of 20.3m users.
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Is Bluesky the new Twitter? • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

»

Can Bluesky be the fix for all those woes, and a lasting replacement for the site that once was Twitter? I really doubt it.

Woe that people, myself included, have been inspired even to ask the question. Although white supremacy, scams, and porn are real and worsening problems on X and other social media, I have written before in The Atlantic about a problem that I see as superordinate to all of these others: People just aren’t meant to talk with one another this much. The decline of X is a sign that we may soon be free of social media, and the compulsive, constant attention-seeking that it normalized. Counterintuitively, the rise of Bluesky is also a good sign, in that so many people are still trying to hold on to the past. Giving up on social media will take time, and it will inspire relapse.

For all its growth, Bluesky still trails far behind Meta’s Threads—Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors that his Twitter-like app adds 1 million users each day. But numbers alone don’t tell the full story. Meta has added buttons to access Threads from Instagram, so that any of its 2 billion users can slide right over, even if they never end up posting there. Bluesky, meanwhile, seems to be drawing actual users, especially in the United States, who want to post and follow.

…the internet’s media ecosystem is more fragmentary this decade than it was during the last. Uncertainty about social media’s future produces existential questions about the major platforms: Will TikTok be banned? Will X become state media? Will the Bluesky bubble grow beyond this week? Whatever happens, I still hope that social media itself will fade away. In the meantime, though, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, noshing on news, performing identities, picking fights, and accruing cultural capital or longing to do so.

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One Billion Users: the social media card game • Kickstarter

Mike Masnick

»

Have you ever been on social media and thought “I bet I could run this site better than the people in charge”? Well, now’s your chance to test your skills. We’ve created One Billion Users: a fast, fun card game where you’re in charge of your own social network. It’s for 2-4 players and lasts about 30 minutes.

In One Billion Users, players compete to build the most successful social network. Gain users and attract influencers to build your site while playing cards to slow down your rivals and overcome obstacles. But be careful about which communities you attract — the toxicity they bring with them could hurt your platform!

Community cards are the lifeblood of your network. They represent hundreds of millions of users on your path to One Billion and beyond, but they also bring with them different levels of toxicity that can hamper your future growth and hurt your final score.

«

Another month to go and about a tenth of the way there. Could be the next Exploding Kittens. Haven’t you always wanted to show Zuckerberg and Musk how it’s done? (Do we think Musk is hurting his final score presently?)
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Nigeria’s Ogun State wants to lead the country’s EV revolution • Rest of World

Jesusegun Alagbe:

»

One day in September, Bisi Alade rode past a long line of motorists at a fuel station in Abeokuta, the capital city of Ogun State in southwest Nigeria. Two weeks earlier, Alade would have been stuck waiting in line with the other motorists. But not anymore — he’d traded his combustion motorcycle for an electric one.

A full charge of his Spiro Commando electric motorcycle is enough to last him for a day and costs just 2,500 naira ($1.53) — half as expensive as fuel, the 42-year-old ride-hailing driver told Rest of World. The savings are significant because since May 2023, when the newly elected Nigerian president Bola Tinubu scrapped fuel subsidies, gas prices in the country have shot up by more than 450%. There are also persistent shortages.

“Life is easier now since I started riding an electric motorcycle,” Alade said. “I pity my friends who are still riding regular motorcycles.”

Alade is among the first wave of drivers to benefit from Ogun State’s push for EVs. In October last year, the state announced the E-Mobility Program, under which it plans to turn its public transportation system electric. This made Ogun State the first Nigerian state with an EV road map. Government officials, including Sa’idu Alkali, the transportation minister, and Mele Kyari, chief of state-owned oil company Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited praised the effort.

“We are not just introducing a new mode of transportation; we are pioneering a movement towards a cleaner, more efficient, and technologically advanced way of life,” Ogun State governor Dapo Abiodun said at the launch.

«

EVs! They’re everywhere!
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AI-generated shows could replace lost DVD revenue, Ben Affleck says • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

Last week, actor and director Ben Affleck shared his views on AI’s role in filmmaking during the 2024 CNBC Delivering Alpha investor summit, arguing that AI models will transform visual effects but won’t replace creative filmmaking anytime soon. A video clip of Affleck’s opinion began circulating widely on social media not long after.

“Didn’t expect Ben Affleck to have the most articulate and realistic explanation where video models and Hollywood is going,” wrote one X user.

In the clip, Affleck spoke of current AI models’ abilities as imitators and conceptual translators—mimics that are typically better at translating one style into another instead of originating deeply creative material.

“AI can write excellent imitative verse, but it cannot write Shakespeare,” Affleck told CNBC’s David Faber. “The function of having two, three, or four actors in a room and the taste to discern and construct that entirely eludes AI’s capability.”

Affleck sees AI models as “craftsmen” rather than artists (although some might find the term “craftsman” in his analogy somewhat imprecise). He explained that while AI can learn through imitation—like a craftsman studying furniture-making techniques—it lacks the creative judgment that defines artistry. “Craftsman is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop,” he said.

“It’s not going to replace human beings making films,” Affleck stated. Instead, he sees AI taking over “the more laborious, less creative and more costly aspects of filmmaking,” which could lower barriers to entry and make it easier for emerging filmmakers to create movies like Good Will Hunting.

While it may seem on its surface like Affleck was attacking generative AI capabilities in the tech industry, he also did not deny the impact it may have on filmmaking. For example, he predicted that AI would reduce costs and speed up production schedules, potentially allowing shows like HBO’s House of the Dragon to release two seasons in the same period as it takes to make one.

«

I dunno, no point getting the second season of House of the Dragon out faster if it’s not worth watching. Which it wasn’t.
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Thanks to AI, Apple’s China problem is only getting worse • The Hill

Geoffrey Cain:

»

For years, Tim Cook insisted Apple could change China from the inside. Instead, China changed Apple.

The latest evidence? Apple spent billions developing cutting-edge electric vehicle battery technology with Chinese automaker BYD, only to watch its innovations become the cornerstone of BYD’s rise to global electric vehicle dominance. Apple walked away with nothing. China walked away with everything.

This isn’t just another story about corporate research and development gone wrong. It’s a cautionary tale about how even America’s most valuable company has become trapped in China’s web of technological control — and how that web is about to tighten even further.

The battery partnership reveals a familiar pattern: American innovation flows into Chinese hands, strengthening Beijing’s technological ambitions while weakening America’s competitive edge. 

But BYD isn’t the real story here: It’s about how deeply Apple has become entangled with the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic objectives. The company that once removed the Dalai Lama from its ads to appease Beijing now faces an even more consequential test: artificial intelligence.

As Apple races to roll out Apple Intelligence globally, it faces a stark choice in China. The country’s strict AI regulations require companies to hand over their algorithms for government review and ensure their AI systems “adhere to the correct political direction.” For Apple, this means either walking away from its largest overseas market or creating a separate, censored version of its AI assistant that advances the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance and control objectives.

History suggests Apple will choose accommodation.

«

This is an opinion piece rather than a closely researched news story, but it still comes across very solidly. (And you’d forgotten about the BYD deal, which was putatively going to work wonders for Apple’s Car, hadn’t you? I had.)
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O2 deploys AI granny against scammers • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

O2, the mobile operator arm of Brit telecoms giant Virgin Media (VMO2), says it has built the human-like AI to answer calls from fraudsters in real time, keeping them busy on the phone and wasting their time by pretending to be a potential vulnerable target.

“Daisy” is claimed to be indistinguishable from a real person, fooling scammers into thinking they’ve found perfect prey thanks to its ability to engage in “human-like” rambling chat, the biz claims.

For several weeks in the run-up to International Fraud Awareness Week (November 17–23), the AI has already frustrated scam callers with meandering stories about her family and talked at length about her passion for knitting, according to O2.

At this point, many Reg readers are probably feeling they know someone the telco might have used as training data.

But phone scams are an increasingly common threat. Criminals, often working from call centers, cold-call lists of numbers to try to con people out of their money. Common tricks include pretending to be their bank or a courier needing payment to deliver a parcel in order to get them to divulge their bank account details.

Daisy is said to combine various AI models that work together to listen to fraudulent calls and respond immediately, as if engaged in a conversation. Appropriate responses are generated through a custom large language model (LLM) with a character “personality” layer, and then fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate the spoken answer.

O2 claims it to be so lifelike that it has successfully kept fraudsters sidetracked for up to 40 minutes at a time. Some scammers were even tricked by Daisy offering false personal information, including made-up bank details.

…The AI has its own dedicated number, which the anti-fraud team managed to infiltrate into contact lists used by scammers to target Brits, an O2 spokesperson told us.

«

At last, AI used for good! Or against evil! (Thanks John K for the link.)
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No, Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t say he prefers Logitech’s MX Master 3 over the Magic Mouse • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

While the Logitech MX Master 3 is a terrific mouse for the Mac, reports claiming that Apple CEO Tim Cook prefers that mouse over the Magic Mouse are false.

The Wall Street Journal last month published an interview with Cook, in which he said he uses every Apple product every day. Soon after, The Verge’s Wes Davis attempted to replicate using every Apple product in a single day. During that day, Davis said he mostly used the MX Master 3, but sometimes switched to a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad.

In other words, it was Davis who said he himself used a Logitech mouse, not Cook.

Unfortunately, The Mac Observer misinterpreted The Verge’s article and ran a since-deleted story claiming that Cook prefers the MX Master 3 over the Magic Mouse. Mistakes happen, but the false claim has since gained traction on Reddit multiple times, so hopefully this helps to clear up the situation before wrong information continues to spread.

«

That’s a bizarre mistake; you’ll have noticed that I didn’t pick up the story from the Mac Observer, but maybe I should have followed it back up the river to the source. Even so, I’d probably have ended up at the Mac Observer with its erroneous piece. Just goes to show how far and wide mistakes can go – even when they should make you think “uh?” (Thanks Fabian S and others for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The ISS is leaking air, but Nasa and the Russians can’t agree on how to fix it or how urgently to act. CC-licensed photo by NASA on The Commons 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. Pressurised. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US lawyers will reportedly try to force Google to sell Chrome and unbundle Android • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

The Department of Justice is planning to ask for Google’s antitrust trial judge to force the company to sell off its Chrome browser after the judge ruled the company has maintained an illegal search monopoly, reports Bloomberg.

Chrome is the world’s most widely used browser, and the government’s lawyers have argued that its use in cross-promoting Google’s products is one of the things limiting available channels and incentives for competition to grow.

Requirements that officials are preparing to propose include that Google separate Android from Search and Google Play, but without trying to force Google to sell off Android. Another requirement would say it has to share more information with advertisers and that it “give them more control over where their ads appear,” the outlet writes.

Bloomberg also reports that officials will recommend that the company “give websites more options to prevent their content from being used by Google’s artificial intelligence products.” Finally, they will reportedly push for “a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of the case against Google.”

«

Cleaving Chrome from Google would be quite the move: how do you transfer all the data that people have stored on Google’s servers (lots of passwords in there!). Do you then make people pay for it? Or do you rely on advertising to somehow pay for those coders?

One thing’s for sure: ChromeCo would have far fewer engineers than presently work on Chrome.
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The ISS has been leaking air for 5 years, and engineers still don’t know why – Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

»

US and Russian officials “don’t have a common understanding of what the likely root cause is, or the severity of the consequences of these leaks,” said Bob Cabana, a retired NASA astronaut who took the helm of the advisory committee earlier this year. Cabana replaced former Apollo astronaut Tom Stafford, who chaired the committee before he died in March.

The transfer tunnel, known by the Russian acronym PrK, connects the Zvezda module with a docking port where Soyuz crew and Progress resupply spacecraft attach to the station.

Air has been leaking from the transfer tunnel since September 2019. On several occasions, Russian cosmonauts have repaired the cracks and temporarily reduced the leak rate. In February, the leak rate jumped up again to 2.4 pounds per day, then increased to 3.7 pounds per day in April.

This prompted managers to elevate the transfer tunnel leak to the highest level of risk in the space station program’s risk management system. This 5×5 “risk matrix” classifies the likelihood and consequence of risks. Ars reported in June that the leaks are now classified as a “5” both in terms of high likelihood and high consequence.

NASA reported in September that the latest round of repairs cut the leak rate by a third, but it did not eliminate the problem.

“The Russian position is that the most probable cause of the PrK cracks is high cyclic fatigue caused by micro-vibrations,” Cabana said on November 13. “NASA believes the PrK cracks are likely multi-causal, including pressure and mechanical stress, residual stress, material properties, and environmental exposures.”

The ISS is aging. Zvezda and the PrK launched in July 2000 and will mark a quarter-century in orbit next year. NASA wants to keep the space station operating until at least 2030, while Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, has committed only through 2028.

Roscosmos has shared sample metals, welds, and investigation reports with NASA to assist in the study of the cracks and leaks. In a report published in September, NASA’s inspector general said NASA’s ISS Vehicle Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston said the leaks are “not an immediate risk to the structural integrity of the station.”

This is because managers have implemented mitigations to protect the entire station in the event of a structural failure of the PrK.

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Well *this* wasn’t in Gravity.
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Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea cut, Germany and Finland fear sabotage • Reuters via MSN

Johan Alexander, Essi Lehton and Adrius Sytas:

»

Two undersea fibre-optic communications cables in the Baltic Sea, including one linking Finland and Germany, were severed, raising suspicions of sabotage by bad actors, countries and companies involved said on Monday.

The episode recalled other incidents in the same waterway that authorities have probed as potentially malicious including damage to a gas pipeline and undersea cables last year and the 2022 explosions of the Nord Sea gas pipelines.

The 1,200-kilometre (745-mile) cable connecting Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working around 0200 GMT on Monday, Finnish state-controlled cyber security and telecoms company Cinia said.

A 218-km (135-mile) internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at about 0800 GMT on Sunday, according to Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company group.

Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were “deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable” and were investigating “an incident (that) immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage.”

Europe’s security is threatened by Russia’s war against Ukraine and “hybrid warfare by malicious actors,” the joint statement said, without naming the actors.

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One could be accident, two definitely feels like intent. By Russia.
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How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could destroy one of civilization’s best achievements • The New York Times

Zeynep Tufecki:

»

Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30% of infants in some US cities never made it to their first birthday. Since that time, vaccines, sanitation and effective medications have eliminated many previously commonplace illnesses and consigned others to extreme rarity. It’s easy to take much of that for granted, especially as those days have receded from living memory, but those achievements are fragile and can be lost.

The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.

Kennedy has brought attention to some worthwhile public health concerns, such as the downsides of ultraprocessed foods and the value of exercise. But beyond those reasonable issues, he has filled the internet and the airwaves with views on vaccines, food safety, medicines and supplements that are a mix of grave misrepresentations and far-fetched conspiracies.

His opposition to vaccines has attracted the most attention. He doesn’t say just that they merit closer scrutiny, as some “vaccine skeptics” claim. Last year he told a podcaster that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” When it later became expedient, he denied that he had ever said such a thing. The truth is that he has long promoted the lie that vaccines cause autism, and the extravagantly false claim that “researchers have done very little to study the health” of children after they get shots for once-common diseases.

«

Let’s be clear: Trump’s administration is going to be an utter clown show, with all the restraint of a lit flare thrown into a fireworks box. For a moment, while he isn’t yet in power, it’s funny. But that’s going to wear off.

For a similar view of more of the appointees, The Unpopulist has a rundown.
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AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favourably • Scientific Reports

Brian Porter and Edouard Machery:

»

We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that participants performed below chance levels in identifying AI-generated poems (46.6% accuracy, χ2(1, N = 16,340) = 75.13, p < 0.0001).

Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems (χ2(2, N = 16,340) = 247.04, p < 0.0001).

We found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.

«

You can see the poems here. And yes, I’d agree that it seems non-experts don’t like having to work too hard when reading poetry.
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The Alex cartoon for Thursday 14 November 2024

“Alex” by Peattie and Taylor has been running for decades: it started in the London Daily News (I know, sounds like a made-up newspaper name from a film) in 1987 and has been going pretty much unbroken since.

This one nails yet another truism of life today, with a social media twist. (Bookmark the site and stay with it.)
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A study found that X’s algorithm now loves two things: Republicans and Elon Musk • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

Elon Musk’s X may have tweaked its algorithm to boost his account, along with those of other conservative-leaning users, starting around the time he announced his support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. That’s according to a new study published by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which found that Musk’s posts in particular were suddenly much more popular.

The study’s authors — QUT associate professor in digital media Timothy Graham and Monash University communications and media studies professor Mark Andrejevic — first looked at Musk’s engagement before and after his July endorsement of Trump. They report that starting around July 13th, Musks’ posts received 138% more views and 238% more retweets than before that date.

Musk’s numbers “outpaced the general engagement trends observed across the platform,” they concluded. (This paper isn’t the first time it’s been suggested that X adjusted its algorithm to specifically boost Musk’s account.) The researchers also found that other Republican-leaning accounts they examined saw similar boosts that started in July, albeit to a lesser degree.

The study’s results are similar to other recently reported findings by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post of potential right-wing bias in X’s algorithms. However, the researchers say they were limited by the “relatively small amount of data” that could be collected since the platform cut off access to its Academic API.

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Apple’s mouse is so bad that Tim Cook prefers using a different brand for work • Glass Almanac

Brian Foster:

»

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook provided a glimpse into his daily workflow, listing several Apple devices he uses regularly: a Mac Studio, an iPhone 13 Pro Max, an iPad Pro, and even a retro iMac G4 for nostalgic flair. But when it came to the mouse he relies on the most, Cook admitted that his go-to is the Logitech MX Master 3 — not Apple’s Magic Mouse.

While Cook mentioned occasionally switching to the Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad, his preference for a competitor’s product caught many by surprise.

It’s easy to see why Cook opts for the Logitech MX Master 3. Designed with ergonomics in mind, it features a comfortable thumb rest, a customizable MagSpeed scroll wheel, and a Flow feature that allows seamless use across multiple devices. Notably, the MX Master 3 charges via a front-facing USB-C port, meaning it can continue to be used while plugged in — a stark contrast to the Magic Mouse’s disruptive design.

The Logitech MX Master 3 also offers impressive battery life and versatility, making it a popular choice for professionals juggling various tasks. Cook’s mention of this mouse could very well boost its appeal to Mac users — and even PC users — looking for a productivity-friendly alternative.

While it’s unusual for a CEO to promote a competitor’s product, Cook’s candidness is refreshing. His choice underscores a key lesson: even in a company as innovative as Apple, practicality sometimes requires looking beyond in-house solutions.

«

If Apple were ever to make a mouse that looked like the Logitech MX Master 3, everyone would assume that the designers were on hallucinogenic drugs.

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Apple [allegedly] thinks about an Apple TV set — yet again • Business Insider

Peter Kafka:

»

Yes, you’ve heard this before: What if Apple built its own TV set?

It’s an idea that never goes away completely but has never actually happened.

That’s for good reason: An Apple TV set didn’t make sense years ago. It makes even less sense now.

Is Apple going to build a TV?

First: probably not. Second: It would be a terrible idea if Apple did.

But for the record, Apple is “evaluating” the idea of an Apple-branded set, reports Mark Gurman, Bloomberg’s very well-sourced Apple expert.

Gurman himself doesn’t seem to think there’s a meaningful chance that this happens. He made a short, throwaway reference to the idea in his latest column, which focuses primarily on Apple CEO Tim Cook’s relationship with Donald Trump. (TL;DR: Cook became an expert Trump manager during Trump 1.0 by letting the president do what he wanted in public, like take credit for things he didn’t do, while prevailing on him privately to do things Cook wanted Trump to do — namely, exempting Apple products from tariffs.)

What Gurman thinks Apple is going to do is roll out an “AI wall tablet” that people would use in their homes to control smart devices and talk to people in other rooms, etc. — basically, a souped-up intercom/doorbell system using a series of iPad-like devices. But in theory, if that goes well, then maybe Apple will be more interested in chasing an Actual TV Set. (I’ve asked Apple PR for comment.)

The thing is, we’ve been hearing about Apple and its ambitions to build an actual TV set for a long, long time. And they didn’t really make sense at the time, and they definitely don’t now.

«

Kafka knows this is not going to happen, and Apple knows it’s not going to happen, and you know it’s not going to happen, and I know it’s not going to happen: TV sets are utter commodities. But it entertains people to trot it out every so often. Kafka wearily tweeted that this is his third decade of writing about how this isn’t going to happen.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Deadly or delicious (or both)? Facebook put an AI chatbot offering potentially lethal advice into a mushroom Group. CC-licensed photo by Aleksey Gnilenkov 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. Uncapped. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI chatbot added to mushroom foraging Facebook Group immediately gives tips for cooking dangerous mushroom • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

An AI chatbot called “FungiFriend” was added to a popular mushroom identification Facebook group last week. It then told users there how to “sauté in butter” a potentially dangerous mushroom, signaling again the high level of risk that AI chatbots and tools pose to people who forage for mushrooms.

404 Media has previously reported on the prevalence and risk of AI tools intersecting with the mushroom foraging hobby. We reported on AI-generated mushroom foraging books on Amazon and the fact that Google image search has shown AI-generated images of mushrooms as top search results. On Tuesday, the FungiFriend AI chatbot to the Northeast Mushroom Identification & Discussion Facebook group, which has 13,500 members and is a place where beginner mushroom foragers often ask others for help identifying the mushrooms they have found in the wild. A moderator for the group said that the bot was automatically added by Meta and that “we are most certainly removing it from here.” Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The bot is personified as a bearded, psychedelic wizard. Meta recently began adding AI chatbots into specific groups, and has also created different character AIs.

Rick Claypool, research director for consumer safety group Public Citizen’s president’s office, told 404 Media about FungiFriend. Claypool has done important work about corporate capture of local and state governments, but is also an avid mushroom forager and has been documenting the risks of AI tools in mushroom foraging over the last few months.

Over the summer, he wrote a lengthy article in Fungi Magazine that noted “emerging AI technologies are being deployed to help beginner foragers identify edible wild mushrooms. Distinguishing edible mushrooms from toxic mushrooms in the wild is a high-risk activity that requires real-world skills that current AI systems cannot reliably emulate.” 

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This is all a bit Darwinian. Are we sure that they haven’t achieved intelligence and are trying to wipe us out, quietly?
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Netflix served the Tyson vs. Paul fight to 60 million households • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

Netflix peaked at “65 million concurrent streams” during the boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul last night, according to Most Valuable Promotions, the promoter for the fight. Those streams went out to 60 million households globally, the group said in a press release shared with The Verge via email. That’s more than twice the traffic Netflix could see for its Christmas Day NFL stream this year, if everyone who watched last year streamed it.

The crush of people trying to watch Tyson vs. Paul seemed to be more than Netflix’s servers could easily handle, as the social web was awash with complaints about the quality of the stream, which many found to be muddy, or plagued with buffering and dropped connections. Downdetector recorded more than 100,000 complaints of Netflix streaming issues during the event, according to Bloomberg.

That’s also just a massive number of people streaming a single live event at the same time. Disney served 59 million concurrent streams of a World Cup cricket match through its Disney Plus Hotstar service last year. It hit similar numbers a few days earlier, and again in June this year.

Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone told employees that the company dealt with this “unprecedented scale” by prioritizing keeping the stream stable “for the majority of viewers,” according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

«

When the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, 60 years ago, 73 million people watched. Now, the quality might not have been tip-top, but it was as good as they could offer at the time, and modern broadcast could reach that number in HD.

A roundabout way of saying that we seem to do two steps forward, two steps back. (Or vice-versa.) We now do live sports! To lots of people! Which we did before. (I remember pay-per-view Tyson fights years ago. Everything old is new again.)
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London bus crashes are the result of an unsafe model • FT

Camilla Cavendish, who met Tom Kearney, an American businessman who was hit by a London bus’s wing mirror and put into a coma (from which he recovered):

»

The most recent data show that 86 people died or were badly injured in bus collisions in London between 10 December 2023 and 31 March 2024. Kearney’s analysis of TfL data suggests that around three people a day are hospitalised after bus safety incidents. That doesn’t feel good, even though it’s tiny in comparison to the 1.8bn annual passenger journeys. Compared with other world cities like New York and Paris the capital’s buses rank in the top quartile for financial efficiency but the bottom quartile for collisions per kilometre. And the number of collisions in London has increased in the past couple of years, despite buses travelling fewer miles.  

Could this have anything to do with the way that bus contracts prioritise speed? Last week, hundreds of bus drivers marched to TfL headquarters to demand better working conditions and the right to report safety concerns “without fear of retribution from TfL or employers”. Drivers described the pressure of long shifts, few breaks and having to drive in sometimes blistering heat, all while being shouted at over a monitor by controllers who want them to make up the time to the next stop, and keep the right amount of distance between their bus and next. It’s not surprising that a third of bus drivers, before the pandemic, reported having had a “close call” from fatigue.  

With the government about to export the London franchise model to other parts of the country, someone in Whitehall needs to take a look. Michael Liebreich, a former McKinsey consultant who sat on the TfL board for six years, believes that TfL’s contracting out model is “institutionally unsafe”. Bus drivers are under such pressure, he thinks, that some may break the speed limit and overtake cyclists dangerously. 

I still wasn’t sure about this, until I met the families of more victims. Katrina Finnegan’s aunt Kathleen died earlier this year, after being hit by a bus at Victoria bus station. Trish Burr’s daughter Melissa also died in Victoria a few years earlier, after a driver accidentally hit the accelerator.

What shocked me was how badly the families were treated.

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Dreaming of snow this winter? Look up the forecast • Washington Post

Harry Stevens and Ben Noll:

»

For Joseph Gordon, 83, a snowless season will further confirm his sense that the winters of his memory have been irretrievably lost. Four decades ago, Gordon moved to McLean, Virginia, where he raised his family. He remembers snowy days when he would pile his kids into a 10-foot toboggan or cross-country ski through acres of farmland where rows of houses now stand.

Gordon has not consulted a meteorological database, but his experience tells him McLean gets less snow than it used to. According to our analysis of 60 years of snowfall data, he’s right. “It’s so gradual,” Gordon said of the change in snowfall. “We’re like frogs in a pot of boiling water, and we don’t jump out until it’s too late.”

With the exception of part of the Northeast and a few patches elsewhere, the snowfall trend across the country has matched Northern Virginia’s, with less snow in the most recent three decades than in the three decades before that.

Over the past 60 years, as humans have added more than 2.3 trillion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the average global temperature has increased by about 2.1ºF (1.2ºC). The warming has contributed to less snow in the United States and elsewhere.

“The laws of thermodynamics are tough to beat,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist who has studied long-term snowfall trends. “As you warm temperatures up, you’re just going to get less snow. There’s just no way around that.”

«

The accompanying map shows that barely anywhere in the US is going to see “more” snow; almost everywhere will get less. Unsurprising.
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Lucy Manning on how a sexually obscene phone call led to a two-year ordeal getting police to act • BBC News

Lucy Manning is a BBC journalist who received an obscene call – which she taped – and took it to the police:

»

I was concerned about my personal safety: if this man knew my first name and number, did he know me? Had I met him? Was it someone I’d interviewed? Did he know where I lived?

He had an accent I didn’t recognise, maybe Midlands. I assumed it was in some way connected to the fact I was an on-air BBC journalist but I wasn’t sure. I dialled 999 to report the crime.

The following day I went to my local police station to give a statement and was asked to upload the taped recording onto the Metropolitan Police’s system.

I was naively hopeful they could use it to quickly trace the caller and arrest the man.
I’ve worked on too many stories of violence against women – including the disappearance and subsequent rape and murder of Sarah Everard.

Police had failed to investigate Wayne Couzens for at least three indecent exposure offences before he murdered Sarah Everard. Experts say those offences may have been a “red flag” that someone could go onto more serious offending.

So I had two concerns: my own safety and making sure this man couldn’t go on to commit more serious sexual offences.

«

The incredibly screwed-up way that things which should have happened did not happen ought to shame the police. But you know that instead of remaking the way in which cases are handled, they’ll just shrug.
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The X exodus: could Bluesky spike spark end of Elon Musk’s social media platform? • Sky News

Mickey Carroll:

»

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, The Guardian newspaper, and even the Clifton Suspension Bridge have joined swathes of people deserting Elon Musk’s social media site X.

Millions have instead joined Bluesky, which has a stronger focus on moderation, set up by former Twitter founder Jack Dorsey – who is now no longer affiliated with the social media platform – in 2019.

According to the official Bluesky account, a million people joined the platform in just one day this week, after Musk was given a position in Donald Trump’s government.

“The alignment of Mr Musk with president-elect Trump and his use of the platform to promote the interests of president-elect Trump is obviously driving out a lot of people,” says Adam Tinworth, a social media expert and digital journalism lecturer at City St George’s University.

…Jason Barnard, the chief executive of Kalicube, spent nine years gathering three billion different data points that Google uses to decide what is factual information.

He told Sky News that although X has a long-standing agreement with Google to allow the search engine to use X posts to help it understand the world, Google’s trust appears to be waning.

“Bluesky is 20 times smaller in terms of the number of people on the platform,” he says. “If you search for people [on Google], you will find Bluesky 10 times less often than you will find X.

“But,” he says, “it’s 10 times more important to Google today for factual information.”

«

I think people like Bluesky perhaps a little more because they can create blocklists, and there will probably be APIs sooner. (It certainly needs better native Mac apps.) And shouldn’t it be called the Xodus?

That Google data point though is dramatic.
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Why do we put fluoride in water? • The Atlantic

Charles C. Mann, writing in 2020:

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Nonfluoridated nations such as Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark actually have better dental health by this measure than the United States, one of the world’s fluoridation champions. Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland tried fluoridation, abandoned it years later—and saw no rise in tooth decay. What’s going on?

One of the lesser-known advantages of government-run health-care systems, such as Britain’s National Health Service, is the fact that because taxpayers are funding everything, the government occasionally tries to determine whether the money is being spent usefully. In 1999, the government asked the NHS to “carry out an up-to-date expert scientific review of fluoride and health.” A research team based at the University of York evaluated every study of fluoridation it could find—about 3,200 of them. The team’s conclusion was, it said, “surprising.” Despite the long fight over fluoridation, few of the thousands of studies counted as “high-quality research.” The implication was that Britain had been tinkering with its water supply with little empirical support. Trevor Sheldon, the head of the York review’s advisory board, was blunt: “There’s really hardly any evidence” that fluoridation works, he told Newsweek. “And if anything there may be some evidence the other way.” These findings were respectfully ignored.

In 2015, the Cochrane organization waded into the debate. Founded in 1993, Cochrane is a London-based global network of about 30,000 medical researchers in multiple countries that provides systematic analyses of medical issues. The goal is to produce painstaking, rigorous assessments of what research has—and hasn’t—established about a given subject. Cochrane has a fiercely guarded reputation for impartiality and thoroughness. Its verdicts have global impact. Which may be why the pushback on its fluoridation work was so strong.

…The Cochrane group reported its work carefully. The evidence, it said, is poor and sparse, but what little there is “indicates” that the fluoridation of water reduces cavities in children. But, the group said, “these results are based predominantly on old studies”—from before 1975—“and may not be applicable today.” For adults, there is “insufficient evidence,” old or new, to determine whether fluoridation is effective. The report did not support or attack fluoridation; it only asked for more research.

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Well, now RFK Jr is going to remove it. Let the research begin!
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TikTok takes down 400k videos in Kenya over sexual content • Semafor

Martin Siele:

»

TikTok is deleting more videos in Kenya for violating community guidelines, as the company looks to avoid government scrutiny over content moderation for sexually explicit content.

TikTok pulled down 360,000 videos in Kenya in the three months to June, according to its newly published Q2 enforcement report. It took down 296,000 videos in all of 2023 in Kenya. The videos removed in the three-month period accounted for 0.3% of videos uploaded in Kenya in that quarter.

The platform was compelled by Kenya’s government in April to share quarterly compliance reports because it faced a petition that threatened to see it banned in the country.

The proliferation of sexual content in particular on TikTok in Kenya fueled the push for stricter moderation from regulators concerned about Only Fans-style content. Videos featuring ethnic incitement and violence are also often pulled down for violating guidelines.

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A reminder that it’s not just the US where people get worked up over social media content.
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The Onion CEO explains Infowars purchase amid Alex Jones’s claims about auction • Politico via MSN

Ashleigh Fields:

»

The Onion CEO Ben Collins confirmed that the publication purchased Alex Jones’s Infowars outlet in a Saturday series of posts on the social media platform Bluesky amid Jones’s claims of wrongdoing and illegal activity.  

“I just wanted to give a quick update on The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars, which we can’t wait to relaunch as the dumbest website on the internet,” Collins wrote. 

“The long and short of it: We won the auction and — you’re not going to believe this — the previous InfoWars folks aren’t taking it well.”

He shared that The Onion, a satirical news website, won the bid for Infowars on Thursday at Jones’s bankruptcy auction, along with the Connecticut Sandy Hook families of victims. Jones previously said the massacre was a “hoax.”

Jones was held liable for nearly $1.5bn in damages due to his false claims about the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. The families moved to liquidate his business and take over his social media accounts, which was granted by a judge in September.

Throughout their efforts to acquire Jones’s platforms, he has spread conspiracies about legal missteps in the process. He recently claimed that the auction for his Infowars site was changed from a “regular auction” to a “secret” auction two days before it occurred. He also said that higher bidders were prevented from submitting offers so that a lower bid could be accepted. 

«

For clarification of Friday’s link and its update. Alex Jones telling fibs? Perish the thought.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Incinerators are used to dispose of a lot of British household rubbish – but they’re very polluting. CC-licensed photo by Tim Sheerman-Chase on Flickr.

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

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

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

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI • Bloomberg via NDTV

Rachel Metz, Shirin Ghaffary, Dina Bass and Julia Love:

»

OpenAI was on the cusp of a milestone. The startup finished an initial round of training in September for a massive new artificial intelligence model that it hoped would significantly surpass prior versions of the technology behind ChatGPT and move closer to its goal of powerful AI that outperforms humans.

But the model, known internally as Orion, did not hit the company’s desired performance, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss company matters. As of late summer, for example, Orion fell short when trying to answer coding questions that it hadn’t been trained on, the people said. Overall, Orion is so far not considered to be as big a step up from OpenAI’s existing models as GPT-4 was from GPT-3.5, the system that originally powered the company’s flagship chatbot, the people said.

OpenAI isn’t alone in hitting stumbling blocks recently. After years of pushing out increasingly sophisticated AI products at a breakneck pace, three of the leading AI companies are now seeing diminishing returns from their costly efforts to build newer models. At Alphabet Inc.’s Google, an upcoming iteration of its Gemini software is not living up to internal expectations, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Anthropic, meanwhile, has seen the timetable slip for the release of its long-awaited Claude model called 3.5 Opus.

The companies are facing several challenges. It’s become increasingly difficult to find new, untapped sources of high-quality, human-made training data that can be used to build more advanced AI systems. Orion’s unsatisfactory coding performance was due in part to the lack of sufficient coding data to train on, two people said. At the same time, even modest improvements may not be enough to justify the tremendous costs associated with building and operating new models, or to live up to the expectations that come with branding a product as a major upgrade.

«

AI systems are already hitting the asymptotic point, you say?

Also this in the story:

»

Anthropic declined to comment but referred Bloomberg News to a five-hour podcast featuring chief executive officer Dario Amodei that was released Monday.

“People call them scaling laws. That’s a misnomer,” he said on the podcast. “They’re not laws of the universe. They’re empirical regularities. I am going to bet in favour of them continuing, but I’m not certain of that.”

«

If someone who was not my editor had told me to go and find some information they already had by listening to a five-hour podcast I would have made it my life’s work to find them and torture them horribly.
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The election proved the media is in crisis. Here’s what it needs to do to regain its relevance • CNN Business

Brian Stelter:

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Some of these trends have been evident for years, but the election results have put an exclamation point on the concerns about distrust and dissatisfaction with the media status quo. Now, a reckoning is underway. Media executives and rank-and-file reporters are wondering what needs to change. What can news outlets do to regain trust and appeal to new audiences without alienating existing readers and viewers?

For the past week, CNN’s media team has been receiving feedback from readers of the Reliable Sources newsletter. Here are some of the concrete recommendations and ideas that have emerged.

First, recognize the scope of the problem: Mainstream media outlets have been losing public trust for decades, particularly among Republicans, but also among Democrats and independents. Alternative sources, often lacking any semblance of journalistic standards, have filled some of the voids. And smart phones, social networks and streaming services have introduced an almost infinite amount of competition for people’s attention. Algorithms have replaced human editors and artificial intelligence systems have started to replace search. These are huge changes that warrant equally big adjustments by news outlets.

Pop the bubbles: Many news consumers, and a good number of journalists, think national news coverage is too Washington-centric. Maybe, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan commented last week, the media collectively spent “too much time obsessing about polling (where did that get us?) and not enough time talking to people!” O’Sullivan and other correspondents interviewed voters all election season long, but those conversations and focus groups should inform editorial decisions and panel discussions.

Geographic diversity would also help. “When we cover MAGA,” a former ABC News executive said, ruefully, “it’s like going to the zoo to report on an exotic animal.” One logical takeaway: Publishers should embrace the Zoom era and have employees spread out across the country to balance out New York and Washington groupthink.

«

There’s plenty more, but you have to wonder if an organisation with so much inertia is going to be able to adjust. And the journalists too will have to consider quite what journalism looks like in this modern age.
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Google executive picked to supercharge news efforts has resigned • WSJ

Alexandra Bruell:

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Shailesh Prakash, a Google News executive central to the tech giant’s relationships with publishers, has resigned, according to people familiar with the situation.

The high-profile departure comes amid a continuing rift between Google and news outlets over how the search engine drives traffic and uses their content.

Prakash, a vice president and general manager for Google News, joined the tech giant two years ago from the Washington Post, where he spent more than a decade overseeing data and technology.

At Google, he brought an understanding of publishers’ frustrations as they have grappled with traffic declines and seek compensation for the Alphabet unit’s GOOGL -1.51%decrease; red down pointing triangle use of their content. While he oversaw product and engineering for the News group, he also communicated with leaders at news publishers regarding changes related to search and generative AI.

A representative from Google declined to comment on Prakash’s departure.

During his decade-plus tenure at the Post, where he was chief information officer, Prakash helped transform the news outlet’s digital operation and oversaw a number of technology experiments, including an advertising technology and digital publishing business that serviced publishers beyond the Post.

…Google is the greatest source of traffic to publishers’ websites, because when people search for information, the results often direct them to news articles. Publishers have balked in recent years at payment offers from Google, arguing that their content is worth more than Google has been willing to pay.

Currently weighing on publishers is Google’s use of their content to produce generative AI overviews, which respond to search queries with a complete answer, along with a link icon to the publishers’ sites that source the information.

«

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Burning household rubbish now UK’s dirtiest form of power, BBC finds • BBC News

Esme Stallard, Matt McGrath, Patrick Clahane & Paul Lynch:

»

Burning household rubbish in giant incinerators to make electricity is now the dirtiest way the UK generates power, BBC analysis has found.

Nearly half of the rubbish produced in UK homes, including increasing amounts of plastic, is now being incinerated. Scientists warn it is a “disaster for the climate” – and some are calling for a ban on new incinerators.

The BBC examined five years of data from across the country, and found that burning waste produces the same amount of greenhouse gases for each unit of energy as coal power, which was abandoned by the UK last month.

The Environmental Services Association, which represents waste firms, contested our findings and said emissions from dealing with waste are “challenging to avoid”.

Nearly 15 years ago, the government became seriously concerned with the gases being produced from throwing away household rubbish in landfill and their contribution to climate change. In response, it hiked the taxes UK councils paid for burying waste.

Facing massive bills, councils turned to energy-from-waste plants – a type of incinerator that produces electricity from burning rubbish. The number of incinerators surged – in the past five years the number in England alone has risen from 38 to 52. About 3.1% of the UK’s energy comes from waste incinerators.

…In the past few years, more plastic has been going to incinerators and less food waste – which councils are now sending to anaerobic digesters or to be composted. But the government’s own calculations continue to assume that we send the same mix of rubbish as we did back in 2017 – potentially underestimating the scale of the issue.

The BBC’s five-year analysis used data on actual pollution levels recorded by operators at their incinerators, and found that energy-from-waste plants are now producing the same amount of greenhouse gases per unit of electricity as if they were burning coal.

«

Oh. That’s really not what we wanted at all.
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AI-powered bots on X spread disinformation in Ghana’s election • Rest of World

Caroline Haskins:

»

The accounts — which appear to have AI-generated profile photos, and have names such as “Glenn Washington,” “Netflix Series&Movies,” and “Patriot” — also disparage John Mahama, the presidential candidate from the rival left-wing party National Democratic Congress. These posts often use hashtags such as #mahamaisaliar and #DrunkmaniMahama, accusing Mahama of being a drunkard. (Mahama has denied this.)

“The primary goal of the network appears to be to amplify pro-NPP messaging, promote the Bawumia administration and take aim at the opposition National Democratic Congress,” McKenzie Sadeghi, an editor of AI and foreign influence at NewsGuard who contributed to the research, told Rest of World.

Dimitris Dimitriadis, NewsGuard’s director of research and development, said in an interview with Rest of World that the bot accounts tend to post at “regular” and “predictable” intervals, often ten or more times per day. He said the accounts — which tend to be active between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. in Ghana — mostly receive likes and reposts from others in the bot network. These regimented patterns in timing and style tipped the researchers off that the accounts may be fake.

NewsGuard’s research team fed all 171 of the posts from the accounts into a tool from Pangram Labs, which assesses the likelihood of text being generated by AI, Dimitriadis said. The tool concluded that it was “highly likely” that all of the accounts were posting AI-generated content created by ChatGPT.

«

Don’t tell me – the moderators at X don’t care. Also, a Newsguard survey recently found that a quarter of (American) respondents thought users with blue ticks were more reliable than those without. (They’re not.)
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Visualizing 13 million BlueSky users • Joel Gustafson

Joel Gustafson:

»

Anyone who uses Twitter a lot knows that it’s a big place. Not just that it has a lot of active users, but more that there are lots of different parts.

Over time, everybody develops their own mental map of the landscape, infering how vast and foreign the whole network is from hints and clues, stray tweets escaping containment, and chance encounters in a big account’s replies. But we never get to see the whole thing for real.

We can’t make a map of all of Twitter, because the data isn’t available and scraping it would be difficult and illegal. But we can do it for BlueSky, which has seen massive growth over the last several months thanks to Twitter’s ongoing antagonization of its userbase and Brazil banning Twitter outright in October 2024.

Here’s a sneak peek at the final result.

You can also explore the map interactively at https://aurora.ndimensional.xyz, although you’ll need desktop Chrome/Chromium since it uses WebGPU.

«

It’s an interesting thread, though it tells us what we’d expect: these networks tend to cluster, either by country or topic.
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Guardian quits X social media platform, citing racism and conspiracy theories • Reuters

Andy Bruce:

»

British news publisher the Guardian said on Wednesday it will no longer post to X, citing “disturbing content” on the social media platform, including racism and conspiracy theories.

The left-leaning Guardian, which has 10.7 million followers on X, becomes the first large UK media company to retreat from the platform that Elon Musk purchased in 2022.

Critics say Musk’s hands-off approach has allowed lies and hate speech to spread on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” the Guardian said in an editorial published on its website.

“This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism.”

In response, Musk posted, opens new tab on X and said of the Guardian: “They are irrelevant.”

«

Guardian reporters are still OK to gather info from the site, and (if they want) to post there, and can embed content from it. It seems a slightly odd move: my view is that time spent there all costs Musk money (because it sure isn’t making a profit), and for the Guardian posting there has minimal marginal cost, and its stories might get picked up.

Come a long way from 2007 or so when I was technology editor and did an analysis suggesting that posting there was bringing in thousands of clicks per week for the Technology section alone. (It’s possible that bit.ly, the URL-shortening site which generated the metrics, didn’t ignore bots as well as it should have.)
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How The New York Times beat the algorithm and became Facebook’s top publisher • Sherwood News

Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas:

»

According to Garbage Day data, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign trounced Trump on Facebook. And the top publisher on the world’s largest social network in the lead-up to the big vote wasn’t some far-right disinformation operation, nor was it even a right-wing tabloid. For the first time in years, the leading news outlet on Facebook was The New York Times.

Times articles have been among the platform’s most popular shared links since August. The standout articles have included election reporting, like their August article about Black men supporting Harris, as well as more general stories, like coverage of the US Open. In October, 7 of the 10 most popular articles on Facebook came from the Gray Lady. Leading the pack was the single most-shared article in more than a year since Garbage Day started tracking: the website’s ongoing coverage of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, which included multiple references to Harris’ reaction.

The only outgoing link shared more times all year, in fact, was the donation page for the pro-Democrat PAC ActBlue. Across Facebook, the link was shared just under 2 million times after Harris announced her candidacy in July, including 1.4 million times in the first 10 days. For comparison, the most popular Trump donation link peaked at 174,000 shares in October.

That figure is perplexing compared to actual voting results, but the emergence of the Times as the top publisher on Facebook last month is even stranger — especially when you consider the sites that have occupied that spot all year. Between November 2023 and July 2024, the most popular news articles on the platform were all from a blog called Catholic Fundamentalism. Only obituaries for beloved cultural figures like Matthew Perry and Shannen Doherty came close to breaking its run.

«

But but but:

»

Garbage Day data confirms that news engagement on Facebook has cratered since early last year. The Times’ popularity has sent it higher than it’s been in a while, but even still, it’s less than half of where it was in early 2023.

«

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No joke: The Onion parody website buys Alex Jones’ Infowars out of bankruptcy • Reuters

Dietrich Knauth and Katie Paul:

»

Like a headline lifted from the Onion, the parody news website is buying conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars in a bankruptcy auction.

The Onion said in a statement on Thursday it aims to replace Infowars’ “relentless barrage of disinformation” with the Onion’s “noticeably less hateful disinformation.”

Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed. Infowars’ website was shut down on Thursday and the Onion said it aimed to relaunch the platform in January.

The purchase marks a sharp turn for Infowars, one of the internet’s most notorious purveyors of right-wing conspiracy content and misleadingly marketed, opens new tab dietary supplements.
Founded in 1999, it became a prime example of how online media platforms could exploit tech companies’ hands-off approach to moderating content and disseminate evidence-free claims to vast audiences.

Among those theories were false claims that the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington and the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut were staged.

The Onion, led by a CEO who spent years covering online disinformation and extremism as an NBC News reporter, had the backing of several families of Sandy Hook shooting victims for its bid.
It will acquire Infowars’ intellectual property, including its website, customer lists and inventory, certain social media accounts and the Infowars production equipment, the families said.

Jones filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022 after courts ordered him to pay $1.5bn for defaming the families of 20 students and six staff members killed in the Sandy Hook shooting.

Unable to pay those legal judgments, Jones was forced to auction his assets, including Infowars, in bankruptcy.

«

Irony is, in fact, not dead. It could only have been better if Jones had had to give the title away, rather than getting some money for it in the auction. Not that that will cover his court debts. Update: the sale is on hold because there were only two bidders and.. Jones had a higher bid?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An update to Apple’s iOS will mean AirTags will share their location with airlines – a boon for finding luggage. CC-licensed photo by Luigi Rosa 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. Localised. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk may already be overstaying his welcome in Trump’s orbit • NBC News

Dasha Burns, David Ingram and Julie Tsirkin:

»

Tech billionaire Elon Musk was handed a major win Tuesday evening when President-elect Donald Trump announced that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO would co-lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” with Vivek Ramaswamy.

The announcement reinforces the closeness that Musk has managed to achieve with Trump, even after the election. But for some people in Trump’s orbit, Musk’s presence has felt overbearing. 

Musk has been so aggressive in pushing his views about Trump’s second term that he’s stepping on the toes of Trump’s transition team and may be overstaying his welcome at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the transition who have spent time at the  Palm Beach, Florida, resort over the past week. 

The sources said that Musk’s near-constant presence at Mar-a-Lago in the week since Election Day had begun to wear on people who’ve been in Trump’s inner circle longer than the tech billionaire and who see him as overstepping his role in the transition. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak publicly. 

“He’s behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” one of the people said of Musk. 

“And he’s sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory. Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen. He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one,” this person added. 

«

That the new department (which would have to be created through some sort of Congressional act?) is called “DOGE” would be eye-rolling enough. Politics is about to become “interesting” again, unfortunately. And the clock is already ticking on how long it will be before Musk and Trump fall out.
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Apple AirTags to start sharing bag location directly with airlines • The Washington Post

Chris Dong:

»

When Apple introduced its location-tracking device more than three years ago, it quickly became a traveler favorite for one major reason: the ability to keep tabs on checked luggage. Now, AirTags are about to get a major update that will help fliers get reunited with their missing bags.

Apple announced a new feature Monday called “Share Item Location,” providing users the ability to securely communicate an AirTag’s location to third parties — including airlines.

Once rolled out as part of an upcoming iOS update, it could alter how missing items are found, retrieved and returned to their owners at airports around the world.

To start, Apple plans to work with 15 airlines globally, including Delta Air Lines and United Airlines in the United States. These carriers will integrate the new shared tracking technology directly into their customer service processes in the coming months.

Locating mishandled bags, a catchall industry term for lost, damaged or delayed, will look a lot different than today.

“Having an AirTag was great before, but there was no official policy for getting your bag back even if you could show its location to an airline employee,” said Stella Shon, a consumer travel expert for Upgraded Points. “The sharing functionality is a game-changing feature.”

«

The airlines are: Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, United, Virgin Atlantic, and Vueling. All of a sudden, AirTags seem a worthwhile purchase!
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Romain Bardet: “carbon monoxide can explain the trajectory of some people we didn’t know about a year ago… it’s now up to the authorities to decide whether or not to ban” • Cyclinguptodate

Kieran Wood:

»

An aggressive approach called carbon monoxide inhalation, steps into the scientifically new and much riskier realm of inhaling the lightly poisonous gas (carbon monoxide) for the express purpose of performance enhancement. A growing body of recent scientific research suggests inhalation can have a powerful impact on measures of aerobic capacity like VO2max, or maximal oxygen uptake with reported links to teams such as UAE Team Emirates, Team Visma | Lease a Bike and Israel – Premier Tech. 

In an extensive interview with Eurosport upon the end of his career, Bardet was asked for a rider’s view on the controversial topic that currently escapes a WADA ban. “Honestly, I learned about it from the press. You see the studies. Anything is possible. I’ve never heard of anything, but then again, I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s so much research being done into the idea of optimising performance…” the Frenchman assesses. “It’s not surprising that there are some researchers, some teams, some people involved in cycling who are looking elsewhere. There will always be a desire to find competitive advantages.”

Is it a fair advantage though or should the use of carbon monoxide for performance gain be banned? “It’s up to each individual to set the threshold of what seems ethical and fair in the absolute and desperate search for the end result in relation to his or her values. It’s like ketones, like so many things, it’s open to interpretation. And unfortunately, since the rules are not clearly laid down, since this interpretation is left to the discretion of each individual and since we’re in an ultra-competitive sport where only victory counts, we shouldn’t be surprised by possible deviations,” Bardet ponders.

«

The Eurosport interview is in French. A report in July quotes one team saying that sure, they use CO rebreathing to monitor riders’ physiology.

Why? How? Because CO binds to haemoglobin (to make carboxyhaemoglobin) and prevents it carrying oxygen, stimulating (in theory) the body to produce more haemoglobin, which is what cyclists want. Except the teams say it’s just to measure haem levels, to see how their training is progressing.

The cycling world can’t seem to decide if it’s good, bad or illegal. (CO in large doses will kill you.)
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23andMe cuts 40% of staff in restructuring • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

»

23andMe announced on Monday it would cut 40% of its workforce, representing more than 200 employees, as part of a restructuring at the company. The genetic testing company is also discontinuing its therapeutics business and winding down its clinical trials; it expects these changes to save $35m annually.

“We are taking these difficult but necessary actions as we restructure 23andMe and focus on the long-term success of our core consumer business and research partnerships,” said CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki in a press release. “I want to thank our team for their hard work and dedication to our mission.”
On Tuesday, 23andMe reported $44m in revenue during the second quarter, a decline from $50m during the same period last year.

The mass workforce reductions mark the latest disruption in a tumultuous year for 23andMe. In September, 23andMe’s entire board of directors — including Silicon Valley icons such as YouTube CEO Neal Mohan — resigned following Wojcicki’s attempt to take the company private in August.

«

Cutting nearly half your workforce suggests you’re in really deep trouble. But it is: in that second quarter it made a $59m loss. Don’t worry, though: in the year-ago quarter it lost $75m! Things are looking up!

Genomics has been a disappointment to so many: turns out too few people want to have their DNA sequenced to tell them what grisly unavoidable diseases lie in their distant future. Or whether they’re 1/64 Viking.
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Exxon CEO Darren Woods: Donald Trump shouldn’t scrap methane regulations • Semafor

Tim McDonnell:

»

US President-elect Donald Trump’s aspiration to unleash a lot more oil and gas drilling domestically faces a fundamental obstacle: the global market is already well-supplied, the CEO of ExxonMobil told Semafor at the opening of COP29.

Darren Woods was in Baku for just one day of the global climate summit, ready to convince world leaders and thousands of highly skeptical activists that companies like Exxon can and should play a more proactive role in solving the climate crisis. But that doesn’t mean transitioning away from fossil fuels, the goal that was adopted by negotiators at COP28 last year, Woods said. Instead, Exxon’s approach is to engineer technologies that allow fossil fuels to be burned with lower carbon emissions, which in Woods’ view will serve the company’s bottom line as much as the global climate. Government policies designed to force a rapid phaseout of oil and gas consumption are the wrong strategy, he said: “A lot of the policies that have been pursued to date, which force you to choose between affordable energy and reduced emissions, aren’t working.”

But Woods agreed with recent comments from Patrick Pouyanné, CEO of TotalEnergies, that the Trump administration shouldn’t move to scrap the Biden administration’s regulation to curb methane emissions from oil and gas operations.

«

This is the thing: the market is moving in one direction on fossil fuels, and just as in Trump’s first term when he talked a lot about coal and the market turned away from it, so one should expect the same this time.
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Nicholas Carlson, former Business Insider editor, launches media start-up • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

»

Nicholas Carlson has witnessed spectacular failures in the tech and media worlds over the years. As the former top editor of Business Insider, he chronicled the carnage at Yahoo and Groupon, and then watched several Silicon Valley companies and rival publications make an ill-fated “pivot to video.”

Now Mr. Carlson, 41, is trying to put the lessons he learned to good use. He is preparing to debut a media start-up of his own — one with a focus on video.

The new company, Dynamo, is betting big on the growing popularity of video on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and LinkedIn. It will produce “cinematic” video stories for those platforms, Mr. Carlson said, focusing on business journalism for a core group of strivers that he calls “dynamos.”

The average dynamo — Mr. Carlson considers himself one — is an ambitious, career-oriented viewer who believes that business can explain the world.
And he is quick to assert that his new company has more in common with Mr. Beast, the mega-popular YouTube star, than it does with Facebook Watch, a video service that was shuttered after struggling for years.

“We’re not pivoting to video,” Mr. Carlson said with a laugh. “We’re cannonballing into the deep end of video.”

Many media companies that have created content specifically for social media platforms have had a tough road. But Mr. Carlson said skyrocketing video viewership on tech platforms pointed to a business opportunity that had not been tapped by companies specializing in high-quality video journalism.

«

This, and the next story, show how much the media ground is shifting.
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Broadcaster Chris Wallace quits CNN to build future in streaming or podcasting • The Daily Beast

Hugh Dougherty:

»

Chris Wallace is quitting CNN after three years as one of its biggest stars, he exclusively told the Daily Beast Monday.

The 77-year-old broadcaster said he will instead find a new home on an independent platform such as streaming or podcasting, which he described as “where the action seems to be.” He highlighted how podcasters including Joe Rogan and Charlamagne tha God had set the agenda during the presidential election, but added, “I don’t flatter myself to think I will have that sort of reach.”

The stunning decision by Wallace to walk away from CNN at the end of his three-year, seven-figure contract, rather than to renegotiate it, is a watershed moment for cable TV. It comes as other anchors face being fired or having salaries cut as declining ratings and cord-cutting hit the industry’s bottom line.

Wallace was one of the main faces of CNN’s election night coverage last week, correctly forecasting that Kamala Harris would need a “miracle” to win as the first exit polls showed the depths of her electoral difficulty. He came to CNN in 2021 after 18 years at Fox News, where he had interviewed Donald Trump repeatedly and earned praise for his handling of the fiery 2020 presidential debate between Trump and Joe Biden.

But he told the Daily Beast that his career in broadcast television–which began on local TV in Chicago in 1973 and spanned NBC’s The Today Show and Meet The Press, ABC’s PrimeTime Live and Fox News Sunday before he joined CNN–will be over when his contract lapses at the end of the year, describing it as “quite liberating.”

«

One would hope that Wallace isn’t depending on building a gigantic audience to pay the bills. Best guess is he starts a podcast which is also on YouTube. The Trump years are going to be kerching! times for politics analysts in the US, and Wallace is great at it.
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Russia’s war in Ukraine is powered by ‘Deathonomics’ • WSJ

Georgi Kantchev and Matthew Luxmoore:

»

Going to war is now a rational economic choice in Russia’s impoverished hinterlands.

Facing heavy losses in Ukraine, Russia is offering high salaries and bonuses to entice new recruits. In some of the country’s poorest regions, a military wage is as much as five times the average. The families of those who die on the front lines receive large compensation payments from the government.

These are life-changing sums for those left behind. Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev calculates that the family of a 35-year-old man who fights for a year and is then killed on the battlefield would receive around 14.5 million rubles, equivalent to $150,000, from his soldier’s salary and death compensation. That is more than he would have earned cumulatively working as a civilian until the age of 60 in some regions. Families are eligible for other bonuses and insurance payouts, too.

“Going to the front and being killed a year later is economically more profitable than a man’s further life,” Inozemtsev said, a phenomenon he calls “deathonomics.”

So many soldiers have now been killed that the payments—totaling as much as $30 billion in the past year as of June—are a telling symptom of how the war is transforming Russian society and the economy at large. Since the start of the invasion, the Kremlin has boosted military spending to post-Soviet highs, offsetting some of the impact of Western sanctions. Weapons factories work around the clock, providing employment and high wages.

Now the mounting death payments are providing an injection of wealth into some of Russia’s poorest areas in return for a steady stream of soldiers for the war effort. Poverty levels are now at their lowest since data collection began in 1995, according to official statistics. Perceptions of what it means to join the military have been transformed.

«

It is rather weird; it feels like going back to the Middle Ages, when being a mercenary was a legitimate life choice that someone might make. (Thanks Karsten for the link.)
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Teen infected in Canada’s first bird flu case is in critical condition • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

»

A Canadian teenager infected with bird flu — that country’s first case involving a locally acquired infection — is in critical condition and experiencing difficulty breathing, health officials said Tuesday.
The previously healthy British Columbia teen went to a hospital emergency room Nov. 2 with initial symptoms of pink eye, fever and cough, conditions common to many respiratory illnesses, Bonnie Henry, provincial health officer, said during a news conference. The teen was sent home.

But after the patient’s condition deteriorated, the teen was admitted to BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver late Friday.

So far, no one who came into contact with the teen has fallen ill.

After a presumptive positive test for bird flu, the teen began receiving Tamiflu, an antiviral treatment. That medication works best when given in the first days of illness but is less effective in treating severe sickness, Henry said.

During the weekend, the teen received treatment to address severe respiratory conditions, Henry said.
“They are experiencing acute respiratory distress,” Henry said.

Severe illness occurs when a profusion of virus particles travel deep into the lungs causing viral pneumonia, making it hard for the body to get oxygen, she said.

Health officials do not yet know how the patient was exposed.

«

Totally a watching brief, nothing to be alarmed about, not at all. (Actually it isn’t, unless this thing figures out how to spread between humans.) (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Getting two child seats into the back of a normal car is fine – but three isn’t. A study suggests that limits family sizes. CC-licensed photo by Oregon Department of Transportation 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. Strapped up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Bitcoin hits record high as Trump vows to end crypto crackdown • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Bitcoin hit a new record high late Monday, its value peaking at $89,623 as investors quickly moved to cash in on expectations that Donald Trump will end a White House crackdown that intensified last year on crypto.

While the trading rally has now paused, analysts predict that bitcoin’s value will only continue rising following Trump’s win—perhaps even reaching $100,000 by the end of 2024, CNBC reported.

Bitcoin wasn’t the only winner emerging from the post-election crypto trading. Crypto exchanges like Coinbase also experienced surges in the market, and one of the biggest winners, CNBC reported, was dogecoin, a cryptocurrency linked to Elon Musk, who campaigned for Trump and may join his administration. Dogecoin’s value is up 135% since Trump’s win.

On the campaign trail, Trump began wooing the cryptocurrency industry, seeking donations and votes by promising to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet,” Fortune reported. He announced the launch of his own crypto platform, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), and vowed to “fire” Gary Gensler—the Securities and Commission Exchange (SEC) chair leading the US crypto crackdown—on “day one” in office, Al Jazeera reported.

Whether Trump can actually fire Gensler is still up in the air, The Washington Post reported. It seems more likely that Trump may demote Gensler, The Post reported, since people familiar with the matter suggested that “fully outing” the current SEC chair “could trigger a novel and complicated legal battle over the president’s authorities.” So far, Gensler has made no indications that he will step down once Trump takes office, although The Post noted that wouldn’t be considered unusual.

Sources told The Post that Trump is considering “a mix of current regulators, former federal officials, and financial industry executives,” for leadership positions, “many of whom have publicly expressed pro-crypto views.”

«

It’s like digital herpes. You think you’ve got rid of it, and that it’s vanished, but no, it just keeps coming back, bigger than ever.
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‘It gets more and more confused’: can AI replace translators? • The Guardian

Kezza MacDonald:

»

Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning’s announcement that it would use AI translation for commercial fiction has outraged both authors and translators – despite attempts to reassure them with promises that no books will be translated in this way without careful checking and that authors will have to give consent.

“A translator translates more than just words, we build bridges between cultures, taking into account the target readership every step of the way,” says Michele Hutchison, winner of 2020’s International Booker prize for her translation of Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. “We smuggle in subtle clues to help the reader understand particular cultural elements or traditions. We convey rhythm, poetry, wordplay, metaphor. We research the precise terminology for say agricultural machinery, even in a novel.”

Translators and authors have also pointed out that AI translation requires very careful checking and editing – ideally by someone who knows both languages. At that point, that person may as well be translating the text themselves. Cultural sensitivity is a particular concern, as AI has been known to produce things that are wildly inappropriate.

“Last year a reader flagged some issues in a French edition of one of my books,” says Juno Dawson, author of the Her Majesty’s Royal Coven series. “The translator had used a slightly outdated term to describe a trans person. We were able to change the term before publication. It’s these nuances I suspect AI would miss, meaning that AI generated content would then require stringent editing anyway.”

There are however some scenarios in which machine translation could arguably help the creators of cultural works. For writers working in minority languages, for instance, whose works are not currently translated into English or other languages at all, an AI-assisted translation could bring them to the attention of many more readers. And in video games, localisation can be one of the bigger costs for smaller independent developers, especially those for whom English is not a native language.

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How ChatGPT brought down an online education giant • WSJ

Miles Kruppa:

»

Most companies are starting to figure out how artificial intelligence will change the way they do business. Chegg is trying to avoid becoming its first major victim.

The online education company was for many years the go-to source for students who wanted help with their homework, or a potential tool for plagiarism. The shift to virtual learning during the pandemic sent subscriptions and its stock price to record highs.

Then came ChatGPT. Suddenly students had a free alternative to the answers Chegg spent years developing with thousands of contractors in India. Instead of “Chegging” the solution, they began canceling their subscriptions and plugging questions into chatbots.

Since ChatGPT’s launch, Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers who pay up to $19.95 a month for prewritten answers to textbook questions and on-demand help from experts. Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, erasing some $14.5bn of market value. Bond traders have doubts the company will continue bringing in enough cash to pay its debts.

Though Chegg has built its own AI products, the company is struggling to convince customers and investors it still has value in a market upended by ChatGPT.

“It’s free, it’s instant, and you don’t really have to worry if the problem is there or not,” Jonah Tang, an MBA candidate at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, said of the advantages of using ChatGPT for homework help over Chegg.

A survey of college students by investment bank Needham found 30% intended to use Chegg this semester, down from 38% in the spring, and 62% planned to use ChatGPT, up from 43%.

“My concern is that the headwinds to Chegg’s top-line aren’t temporary—they’re more structural in nature,” said Needham analyst Ryan MacDonald.

«

This is going to require an almighty pivot, or else they’re ruined.
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Taylor Swift fans are leaving X for Bluesky after Trump’s election • WIRED

Vittoria Elliott:

»

Following the us presidential election, Swifties, the name for Taylor Swift’s fans, are fleeing X for Bluesky. X’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, was one of Donald Trump’s biggest backers, funnelling over $100m into the Trump-supporting America PAC; stumping for the candidate on the campaign trail; and boosting Trump’s messaging on X. Musk also helped Trump tap into a distinctly right-wing male audience. Swifties, who have built a robust community on the platform formerly known as Twitter, took notice. By Thursday, less than 48 hours after Trump won the presidency, they were starting to flock from the platform for good.

“I love the idea of building a new community here and would love not to have to support Elon in any way,” says Justin, who goes by @justin-the-baron.swifties.social on Bluesky and asked to use only his first name for fear of harassment. “Elon is of course a big Trump supporter, which doesn’t align with Taylor’s values or the values of Swifties.”

Though there are Swifties on all sides of the political spectrum, the community prides itself on being a positive and accepting space. After Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic nominee for president, Swifties began to mobilize to support her. In September, Swift herself endorsed Harris. In an Instagram post announcing her support, Swift cited AI-generated images of herself and her fans that had been used by Trump to imply she’d endorsed him.

…Irene Kim, an organizer with Swifties for Kamala, says that the outpouring of misogyny following the election pushed her and many other Swift fans to abandon X and seek refuge on Bluesky. Though research has found that hate speech and disinformation increased after Musk took over the platform, the election of Trump seems to have supercharged it. A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that in the 24 hours following Trump’s electoral victory, phrases like “Your body, my choice,” parroting the election night rhetoric of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, rose 4,600% on X.

«

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Yes, car seat laws reduce the birth rate • Mises Institute

Ryan McMaken:

»

Opponents of the Trump campaign had fun in September with some year-old comments from vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Apparently, in a Senate hearing during March 2023, Vance stated that car seat laws have an impact on the number of children parents feel they can afford. As quoted in the Ohio media site cleveland.com:

“I think there’s evidence that some of the things that we’re doing to parents is driving down the number of children that American families are having,” he said. “In particular, there’s evidence that the car seat rules that we’ve imposed — which of course, I want kids to drive in car seats — have driven down the number of babies born in this country by over 100,000.”

Anti-Trump activists got to work mocking the idea, and some suggested that Vance must have simply made these numbers up. 

Most of the mockery was based on the idea that a $100 or $200 dollar car seat is surely not the deciding factor in whether or not to have another child.  This claim may seem perfectly plausible to anyone who has never had children or has only had one or two small children at any given time. Anyone who has actually considered having a third child, however, knows that the cost of the car seat itself is not what dissuades parents from having an additional child. 

Rather, the realities of car seats and car-seat laws mean that a third child adds significant costs and obstacles in the form of a necessarily larger car. As anyone who has three small children knows, it is difficult to fit three car seats in the back seat or an ordinary car. This is why so many people with more than two children end up buying a minivan—which is more costly than a small sedan. The third row of seats is often necessary to accommodate a third car seat. Or, in some cases, the problem may be addressed with a large vehicle, such as a costly full-size SUV, that is sufficiently wide to accommodate a third car seat. 

Anyone who isn’t wealthy and who owns small cars has encountered this problem. When it comes to having a third child, it often becomes necessary to purchase a larger, more expensive car. This is about much more than the cost of a single car seat. 

This has been known for years among more honest researchers. For example, a 2020 study by business professors Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon plainly notes this challenge of finding a back seat in a vehicle that accommodates three car seats. 

«

Not what you’d expect, is it. But the study does suggest the effect is real. (Car seats are mandatory up to the age of eight in many states.)
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Apple explains why the M4 Mac mini power button is located on the bottom • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

As part of its dramatic redesign, Apple moved the power button on the M4 Mac mini from the back of the machine to the bottom. In a new interview, Apple executives Greg Joswiak and John Ternus addressed this surprisingly controversial decision.

In an interview posted to Chinese video sharing website Bilibili and spotted by ITHome, Ternus and Joswiak explained that the dramatically smaller form factor of the Mac mini forced Apple to find a new position for the power button.

Ternus and Joswiak said (translated):

»

Well, we’ve shrunk the size of it so much, right? It’s equivalent to half the size of the previous generation. So we needed to put the power button in the most appropriate spot because it’s so small. It’s convenient to press. Just tuck your finger in there and hit the button.

In fact, the most important thing is you pretty much never use the power button on your Mac. I don’t even remember the last time I turned on a Mac.

«

«

“The most appropriate spot”? I think he meant “most convenient for our manufacturing” – it’s on the plastic part, rather than having to drill into the aluminium.
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New York Times tech guild ends strike • The New York Times

Katie Robertson:

»

The Times Tech Guild, which represents more than 600 tech workers at The New York Times, announced on Monday that it had ended its weeklong strike despite not reaching a deal on a contract.

The union has been on strike since Nov. 4 and has regularly picketed outside The Times’s Manhattan headquarters. The strike was planned to coincide with Election Day, when readership interest is high.

The Times Tech Guild workers, which include software developers, designers and data analysts, will return to their jobs on Tuesday.

Kathy Zhang, the unit chair of the union and a senior analytics manager at The Times, said the strike “showed that we have the full support of subscribers and allies across the country going forward.” She said the union would continue to fight for a fair contract.

«

Coded Wordle and Connections and all the rest of the games so well they didn’t fall over like you hoped, eh? And the Guild’s demand to (lest we forget) get a veto over which letters to the editor are published seems likely to vanish too. Tech strikes are hard to make stick when you’ve built the products already.
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Don’t switch off clean power • Notes on Growth

Sam Dumitriu:

»

Britain used to be a nuclear superpower. In 1932, the atom was first split in Britain. In 1956, Britain opened the world’s first full-scale commercial nuclear reactor. Less than ten years later, it had built 21 more. As late as 1965, Britain had more nuclear reactors than the rest of the world combined.

Yet Britain hasn’t completed a new nuclear power station in almost 30 years and most of our remaining fleet is set to be taken offline in the next few years. Only Sizewell B, which opened in 1995, is planned to stay online past 2028. Assuming one unit at Hinkley Point C has not been completed by 2029, and Sizewell B will close for two months, then Britain will have no nuclear power whatsoever on the grid. For the first time in more than 70 years, the sun will set on British nuclear power.

For energy security, household bills, and net zero, this situation must be avoided. We can and should extend the life of our existing fleet of Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) to avoid it happening.

What will take nuclear’s place on the grid? Some of the time, it will be renewables like wind and solar. Batteries charged at times of high wind or sun will pick up some of the slack too. But there are limits to intermittent renewables and the short-duration batteries they charge. When the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, our grid will more often than not fall back on expensive, carbon-emitting natural gas. The result will be higher emissions and higher electricity prices.

The planned phase-out of Britain’s remaining AGRs therefore threatens to derail the Government’s Clean Power by 2030 target. This is the finding of the now-Government-owned National Energy Systems Operator, or NESO’s new report into the feasibility of the Government’s “Clean Power by 2030” target.

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Xiaomi SU7 Ultra Prototype laps the Nürburgring in 6:46 minutes • Car and Driver

Jack Fitzgerald:

»

Remember the other week when Ford’s CEO Jim Farley made a surprising announcement that not only has he been driving an electric Chinese sedan for the past six months, but he doesn’t want to give it up? That sedan was the production version of the standard Xiaomi SU7—the first car from Xiaomi, a Chinese consumer electronics brand. Xiaomi’s next step is the higher-performance SU7 Ultra, and a prototype version just lapped the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 6:46.87 minutes, which is hugely impressive, even though it doesn’t qualify for any production-car records.

A video released by the Nürburgring shows the Xiaomi prototype smashing the official lap records for production versions of four-door and electric cars. Not only is the electric sedan’s time remarkable, but the SU7 Ultra managed it while appearing to lose power around the 4:15-minute mark, as indicated by the onboard video.

Anything under seven minutes at the ‘Ring is an achievement worthy of praise, though the SU7 Ultra’s lap wasn’t considered an official production record attempt (the company intends to do that later) and instead falls into the Prototypes and Pre-Production vehicles list.

«

Xiaomi really is becoming the anything manufacturer. Phones, fitness trackers, air purifiers.. and now cars. Apple must be envious. And this proof of the speed and maneouvrability of EVs is quite something.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The comma isn’t part of the default iPhone keyboard (you need to press another key to be offered it) but has that affected what people type? CC-licensed photo by Rasmus Olsen on Flickr.

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

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

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

Punctuation is dead because the iPhone keyboard killed it • Android Authority

Rita El Khoury:

»

Open any social media site today, and you’ll find a slew of tweets, shorts, messages, videos, photos, and more — almost all written with lower capital letters and barely any punctuation. For me, that phenomenon started as a fun observation many years ago, became very irritating as I noticed it more and more, and eventually settled into an unavoidable reality.

People these days don’t use punctuation like they should, despite how much this can irk sticklers for grammar like me. This is especially true for the younger generations, who grew up in the mobile-first age with a smartphone in their hands before they ever saw a full physical QWERTY keyboard.

But I posit that the trend isn’t due to some teenage rebellion, coolness factor, informal texting, or lack of understanding of what the Shift or Caps Lock key can do. No, I think the real reason is a mix of laziness and smartphone use, particularly the iPhone and its terrible keyboard without accessible period or comma keys.

See, even the most grammar-fanatic user, like me, ends up dreading using punctuation when it takes extra taps to add it. I’ve noticed this so often because I always use Gboard on my Android phones, so I punctuate my sentences properly. But on the rare occasion that I dig out my test iPhone 13 to check an app or feature, I end up hating every second of my typing experience because of how tedious it is to add periods or commas to my sentences. So I start skipping them here and there — sometimes, everywhere. So much so that the auto-capitalization stops getting triggered, and I end up with very Gen Z-looking sentences with a random string of lower-cap words separated by nothing more than spaces.

Pundits will say that it’s just an extra tap to add a period (double-tap the space bar) or a comma (switch to the characters layout and tap comma), but it’s one extra tap too many. When you’re firing off replies and messages at a rapid rate, the jarring pause while the keyboard switches to symbols and then switches back to letters is just too annoying, especially if you’re doing it multiple times in one message. I hate pausing mid-sentence so much that I will sacrifice a comma at the altar of speed.

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I don’t really buy this, but it might be worth someone doing some sort of study into this.
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LG’s new stretchable display can grow by 50%, bendy panels can be deformed into new form factors • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

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LG Display, one of the global leaders in display technologies, unveiled a new stretchable display prototype that can expand by up to 50%. This makes it the most stretchable display in the industry, more than doubling the previous record of 20% elongation. LG Display showcased the new screen at the LG Science Park in Seoul as part of the Stretchable display national project, with over 100 stakeholders taking part in the event.

This stretchable technology goes beyond expanding its size, though, as you can freely twist, extrude, and fold it without damaging the screen. This gives the technology a limitless number of applications — from clothing and wearable technologies to extruded touchable automotive panels. LG even showed a concept where the stretchable display is sewn or attached directly to firefighter uniforms and displays real-time information to the rest of their team.

The prototype being flexed in the top image is a 12-inch screen with a 100-pixel-per-inch resolution and full RGB color that expands to 18-inches when pulled. LG Display said that it based the stretchable display on a “special silicon material substrate used in contact lenses” and then improved its properties for better “stretchability and flexibility.” It also used a new wiring design structure and a micro-LED light source, allowing users to repeatedly stretch the screen over 10,000 times with no effect on image quality.

The Stretchable display national project is one of the programs spearheaded by the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE) and the Korea Planning & Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology. This move has allowed LG Display and South Korea to gain a foothold in the next-generation display market, as well as ensuring that the research, development, and manufacturing supply chain will benefit local companies and organizations. In fact, aside from LG Display which took the lead, the current stretchable display prototype involves over 19 domestic industry and research institutions. So, its commercial success will likely benefit the South Korean economy as a whole.

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The photos in the article really are remarkable.
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How weight loss drugs took over Instagram • Financial Times

Hannah Gordon:

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In one hand, a slender young woman holds up a bottle of clear liquid. The words “Skinny” and “GLP-1” — a new class of weight loss drugs — are visible on the label. In the other hand, she raises up a pipette filled with the liquid, as if to drop it in her open mouth. “Lose up to 15% of your body weight,” reads the caption on the Instagram post. 

The marketing, from a little-known online pharmacy called Skinny Rx, is one of thousands of advertisements that are targeting young women on social media, promising users they can get their hands on “affordable” anti-obesity or anti-diabetic medications in just a few clicks.

In recent weeks, I’ve found my own Instagram feed taken over by the adverts despite never having purchased the drugs. Up to eight consecutive ads will appear for weight loss pills, oral liquids or injectables.

Looking on Meta’s Ads Library, it’s clear I am not the only one. There are more than 5,000 active adverts listed that contained the phrase GLP-1, plus more than 3,100 campaigns that mentioned the GLP-1 drug “semaglutide” and over 4,000 referencing “Ozempic”. As a comparison, popular beauty product terms, such as nail polish and blusher, featured in fewer ads — around 3,000 and 1,100 respectively.

The value of these drugs in treating obesity and diabetes is clear. And marketing for legitimate prescription medications is legal here in the US. But allowing people to be bombarded with advertising that promotes rapid weight loss — at a time when social media platforms face increased pressure to take more responsibility for the content shown to users — is irresponsible, say experts. 

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How much will Twitter matter to Donald Trump this time? • Business Insider

Peter Kafka:

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the big unknown I’m thinking about right now is a pretty simple one: Does Donald Trump know, or care, about what’s happening on Twitter?

Trump famously loved Twitter during his first term in office. But he wasn’t addicted to it the way many of us are — constantly scrolling for things to enrage or delight or distract. Instead, he was using it like a remote control — to program the media’s coverage, and reality itself.

Here’s Trump in 2019 talking to Fox News about the way he used Twitter:

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I have destroyed bills that were going to be voted on that were bad, and I’ve gotten bills passed that were good by using Twitter. And Twitter is really a typewriter for me. It’s really not Twitter — it’s — Twitter goes on television, or if they have breaking news, I’ll tweet, I’ll say, “Watch this — boom.”

I did the Golan Heights to Israel, and I put it out on Twitter. If I put out a news release, nobody’s even going to see it. Today’s Huawei, I put it out on Twitter. People see. That’s not to build Twitter. That’s to say that as soon as it goes out, it goes on television, it goes on Facebook, it goes all over the place, and it’s instant — it really is, to me, it’s a modern way to communicate.

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But note whom Trump was talking to in that interview: Fox News.

Trump 1.0 was a president who understood that digital media was important. But he was first and foremost a president who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s, and his media diet reflected that: print newspapers and magazines, which he would scrawl notes on using a Sharpie. And, above all else: TV.

Trump was the TV president. Trump was transfixed by TV, and that meant TV was the most important medium during his first presidency. If you wanted to communicate with the president, the conventional wisdom became, you did it by going on TV because you knew he’d see it there. Fox News in particular.

That was four years ago, and since then, the TV landscape has continued to bleed money and audience. Election-night ratings last week were down 25% from 2020. Newish mediums and platforms like podcasts, YouTube, and TikTok are ascendant, and Trump and his campaign spent a lot of time and effort over there.

So is it possible that Trump, who is approaching 80 and played songs from 1978 at his rallies, has changed his media diet, too?

I mean, sure? I guess it’s conceivable that he went on Theo Von’s podcast/YouTube show because he’s a big Theo Von fan.

My hunch, though, is that he’s getting his information the way he always has — by watching and reading Old Media. And, as The New York Times reports, by asking whoever’s in his orbit at the moment:

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We need internet culture journalism more than ever • Passionfruit

Steven Asarch:

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During Donald Trump’s election-night victory speech, UFC owner and Trump supporter Dana White thanked several people, including YouTubers the Nelk Boys, podcaster Theo Von, streamer Adin Ross, and podcaster Joe Rogan. 

For those with little internet presence, these names might not be notable. But for the internet-addicted young men who helped carry Trump to four more years in the White House, this was a congratulatory shout-out. These internet edge lords with millions of followers — some who spew antisemitic conspiracy theories and make grand sweeping gestures and endorsements for Trump — are now some of the most powerful creators in American culture. 

Though there is no clear single reason as to why Trump won the election, there’s no doubt that the internet and the chaos it evolved into fueled the anger of young men over the past decade and played a major role. According to exit polls, men between the ages of 18 and 29 shifted rightward by eight percentage points since the 2020 election, citing the economy as a top issue. 

…At Passionfruit, I’ve covered the rise of the conservative gamer, the controversial (and childish) content of Adin Ross, as well as dozens of other stories about how right-wing creators are exploiting the frustrations of young men and rotting our social fabric. Complaints about Star Wars or Marvel making bad TV get shoehorned into the overall culture war, blaming bad writing or dialogue on the “woke mind virus.” That rhetoric becomes a slippery slope, leading young men down rabbit holes to more conservative voices like Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro.

But at other newsrooms I’ve worked with, getting anyone to care about internet culture journalism has proven to be a herculean feat. One editor at an outlet (that shall not be named) told me to “focus on more mainstream personalities” since those are the ones “that get clicks.”

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The real missing link, I think, is podcast culture journalism. The problem, though, is that it takes so long to listen to them.
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What are the most commonly used movie clichés? • Stephen Follows

Stephen Follows:

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Last week, a group of friends and I watched Last Action Hero (1993). The script started life as a satire on dumb action moves (its original title was “Extremely Violent”) but was so heavily re-written during development and production that (a) its original writers lost their full writing credit, and (b) it became the exact thing it was looking to send up – i.e. a forgettable dumb action movie.

During the many dull moments we had to chat while the movie draaagggggggged on, the conversation turned to dialogue clichés. Last Action Zero included a number of classics, including “This is not happening”, “I’m just doing my job”, and “Did you hear something?”.

This movie gets a pass on clichés as its intent is to be a semi-parody, so some of those uses could be aimed at being self-aware and (intended at least) for comedic effect.

But what of the whole pantheon of movies? How many cite familour clichés? And which are the ones coming in and out of fashion?

I turned to my database of subtitle files to find out. I generated my long list of 138 dialogue clichés after consulting with screenwriters, reading blogs, and talking it through with Jack Malvern from The Times. With my list in hand, I tracked their appearance in over 72,000 movies released since 1940.

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It’s all very, very American. (Unsurprisingly.) He also looks at those phrases in rapid decline: “We meet again” has fallen off very quickly. “You’d better come in” is basically dead.
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DNA shows Pompeii’s dead aren’t who we thought they were • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

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Four Pompeii victims were found in 1974 in what is known as the “House of the golden bracelet.” Three (two adults and one child) were found at the foot of a staircase leading to a garden and the seafront. Archaeologists thought this was likely a father, mother, and their child because of the arrangement of the bodies, as well as a golden bracelet worn on the arm of one of the bodies. But it wasn’t possible to definitely determine the sex of any of the bodies. The hypothesis was that the trio had taken shelter in the stairwell but were killed when it collapsed. A fourth body of a child, about age 4, was found nearby, presumed to have died while trying to escape to the garden.

This new DNA analysis showed that this conventional interpretation was incorrect. All the bodies were male, including the one with the golden bracelet, and none of them were genetically related. It wasn’t possible to glean much information about physical characteristics, but one person had black hair and dark skin, and two others probably had brown eyes. The ancestry of all four was consistent with origins in North Africa or the Mediterranean.

In 1914, nine bodies were found in the garden in front of the “House of the cryptoporticus,” so named because there is an underground passage running along three sides of that garden. Only four were preserved in plaster, including two bodies that seemed to be embracing. Archaeologists suggested they were lovers, mother/daughter, or two sisters. The authors were only able to extract DNA from one of those bodies, revealing that it was male, excluding two of those possible interpretations. His ancestry was of Near Eastern/North African origin.

Pompeii plaster casts in the House of the Golden Bracelet. Credit: Archeological Park of Pompeii
Several bodies were found in the “Villa of the Mysteries” in 1909–1910, known for its decorative frescoes dedicated to Bacchus, the god of wine, religious ecstasy, and fertility. The villa even had a wine press, since it was common for wealthy families to make their own wine and olive oil, among other products. The authors focused on one particular body found lying on top of a layer of ash, wearing an engraved iron and carnelian ring on the left hand. Archaeologists suggested he was probably the custodian of the villa rather than a family member.

The DNA analysis confirmed that this body was a male of mixed genetic ancestry, primarily Eastern Mediterranean and European origin. In short, “The scientific data we provide do not always align with common assumptions,” said co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University. “These findings challenge traditional gender and familial assumptions.”

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The Matter smart home standard gains support for more devices, including heat pumps and solar panels • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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However, the launch of the Matter 1.4 specification this week shows some signs that the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA, the organization behind Matter) is using more sticks and fewer carrots to get the smart home industry coalition to cooperate.  

The new spec introduces “enhanced multi-admin,” an improvement on multi-admin — the much-touted interoperability feature that means your Matter smart light can work in multiple ecosystems simultaneously. It brings a solution for making Thread border routers from different companies play nicely together and introduces a potentially easier way to add Matter infrastructure to homes through Wi-Fi routers and access points.

Arguably, these should have all been in place when Matter launched. But now, two years later, the CSA is finally implementing the fixes that could help move the standard forward. 

Matter 1.4 also brings some big updates to energy management support, including adding heat pumps, home batteries, and solar panels as Matter device types.

Disappointingly, security cameras didn’t make it in this time. The CSA’s CTO, Chris LaPré, tells The Verge that while support for cameras is still part of the plan, there’s no timeline for a release. However, he points out that Matter 1.4 now covers almost every other device category in the home, which should provide a solid foundation to move the standard forward.

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One of the things that Pete Warden didn’t mention in his article quoted yesterday was interoperability, but that’s a big thing too: buying a lightbulb that refuses to work with your ecosystem or loses functionality all matters (ha) too.
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If I want to get fitter, should I wear a fitness watch? • Tim Harford

Tim Harford got a new smartwatch, and wondered whether its quantification of many fitness elements would make him get fitter:

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In 2022, Lancet Digital Health published a systematic review that tried to bring together all the credible research done to that date, covering 164,000 people. The study came to exactly the conclusion you might expect, if you weren’t tying yourself in knots of counterintuition: fitness trackers do help people to be fitter.

More specifically, wearable activity trackers lead people to walk more — 1,800 steps or 40 minutes of extra walking per day — and to lose some weight (1kg) on average. There is also evidence, albeit weaker evidence, that fitness trackers lead people to burn more calories, improve blood sugar and cholesterol, improve wellbeing, reduce disability, and lower levels of pain, anxiety and depression. Emotional wellbeing improves and resting heart rate falls.

Some of these apparent benefits are small or uncertain but, broadly speaking, the picture is what you’d hope: people who were given fitness trackers in a randomised trial were more active than those who, at random, were not. That extra physical activity led to all the benefits we might expect.
None of these studies was designed to answer the question, “If I want to get fitter, should I buy a fitness watch?” Instead, they answer the stranger question, “If I was given a fitness watch as part of an academic study, would I get fitter?”

Consider the parallel pair of questions: “If I want to take up running, should I buy some running shoes?” and, “If I was given some running shoes as part of an academic study, would I run more?” For most purposes, the answer to the first question is obvious and the answer to the second is irrelevant.

Perhaps that’s how I should view my fitness watch. It’s like a gym membership or an exercise bike: great if you use it, pointless if you don’t.

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I can also recommend a dog if you want to increase the number of steps per day.
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Editor’s Note: What’s Next for WIRED • WIRED

Katie Drummond:

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I won’t sugarcoat it: The outcome of last week’s US presidential election wasn’t the one WIRED wanted. As I wrote last week, several of the core values that underpin our publication and inform our journalism—unwavering respect for democratic institutions, a commitment to human rights and bodily autonomy, recognition that climate change is a dire emergency—are at odds with those of Donald Trump and the incoming GOP administration.

Our values aren’t changing, and our commitment to rigorous, independent reporting and investigative journalism across WIRED coverage areas remains steadfast, particularly as the US navigates this new and uncertain political chapter. But as I reminded our team last week, there’s one more value that we hold dear here at WIRED, and it’s one I want to share with all of you today: hope.

At WIRED we believe that technological progress and scientific discovery will, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly—often turbulently, too often inequitably—improve human lives and introduce possibilities that were once unfathomable. We believe in the potency and creativity of the human mind, and we love nothing more than to introduce all of you to the ingenious ideas and inventions that emerge from brilliant people across so many fields of inquiry.

We believe that the internet can still, amid the AI slop and trolls of it all, be a place to find community, to connect across physical borders, to be informed, and to be entertained. We believe in being weird. We believe in fun. At WIRED we will always choose to believe that the world’s best days—maybe the galaxy’s best days, when we all live on Mars—are still to come. So yes. Yes, dammit. We believe in hope.

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Perhaps it’s my distance from the event, but I find this announcement – which was prominently on the top left of the Wired home page, so I wasn’t cherrypicking it – strange. Why does Wired’s editor think we would think a different president is going to change its journalism, or approach to same? American journalists really are an odd bunch sometimes.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We were warned that the US presidential election would be overrun with deepfakes – so what happened? CC-licensed photo by Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken 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. Verified. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI’s underwhelming impact on the 2024 elections • TIME

Andrew Chow:

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fears of the election being derailed or defined by AI now appear to have been overblown. Political deepfakes have been shared across social media, but have been just a small part of larger misinformation campaigns. The U.S. Intelligence Community wrote in September that while foreign actors like Russia were using generative AI to “improve and accelerate” attempts to influence voters, the tools did not “revolutionize such operations.”

Tech insiders acknowledge 2024 was not a breakthrough year for generative AI in politics. “There are a lot of campaigns and organizations using AI in some way or another. But in my view, it did not reach the level of impact that people anticipated or feared,” says Betsy Hoover, the founder of Higher Ground Labs, a venture fund that invests in political technology.

At the same time, researchers warn that the impacts of generative AI on this election cycle have yet to be fully understood, especially because of their deployment on private messaging platforms. They also contend that even if the impact of AI on this campaign seems underwhelming, it is likely to balloon in coming elections as the technology improves and its usage grows among the general public and political operatives. “I’m sure in another year or two the AI models will get better,” says Sunny Gandhi, the vice president of political affairs at Encode Justice. “So I’m pretty worried about what it will look like in 2026 and definitely 2028.”

Generative AI has already had a clear impact on global politics. In countries across South Asia, candidates used artificial intelligence to flood the public with articles, images and video deepfakes. In February, an audio deepfake was disseminated that falsely purported to depict London Mayor Sadiq Khan making inflammatory comments before a major pro-Palestinian march. Khan says that the audio clip inflamed violent clashes between protestors and counter-protestors.

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The BBC link for the Khan mention dates back to February, and relates to a deepfake audio clip that sounded like Khan which circulated in November 2023, encouraging a Palestinian march in London. But that march was going ahead, and there’s no evidence it was made worse by the clip.

I’m going to suggest that deepfakes – videos or audios – aren’t going to be effective in disrupting politics. There’s too much flow, so that any fake can be quickly checked and disavowed. The Washington Post agrees that AI didn’t change anything, though it might have deepened divides – except the number of swing voters suggests to me that isn’t true either.
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Why has the Internet of Things failed? • Pete Warden’s blog

Pete Warden:

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Setup: The biggest obstacle is the setup tax. All of our communication technologies, from WiFi to cellular, cost money to use, and so require authentication and billing accounts. This isn’t as big a problem with PCs and phones because we only replace them every few years, and they have screens and keyboards, so going through the setup process is comparatively straightforward. By comparison, your fridge or toaster probably doesn’t have a full-featured user interface, and so you’re expected to download a phone app, and then use that to indirectly set up your appliance.

This adds multiple extra steps, and anyone who’s ever worked on a customer funnel means that every additional stage means losing some people along the way. If you also factor in that a household might have dozens of different devices that all want you to go through the same process, with different applications, accounts, and quirks, it’s clear why people suffer from setup fatigue and often don’t even try.

Uselessness: Last year I talked to an engineer who had spent six months working on a smart dishwasher that could be connected to the internet. He confessed that none of the team had been able to figure out a compelling user benefit for the system. You could start the dishwasher remotely, but how did that help if you had to be there in person to load it? Knowing when it was done was mildly useful, but most people would know that from when they started it. With phones and PCs adding an internet connection unlocked immediately compelling use cases, thanks to all the human-readable content on web pages, and once the network was widely available more applications like Salesforce or Uber added to the appeal.

We’ve never seen anything like this for IoT in the consumer space. Getting an alert that your fridge door has been left open is nice, but isn’t much better than having an audible alarm go off. Amazon, Apple, and Google have tried to use voice interfaces as a selling point for devices to connect through their ecosystem, but almost nobody uses them for anything other than setting alarms and playing songs.

There’s also no inherent reason to send audio data to the cloud to have a voice interface, one of the reasons we founded Useful was to bring local speech interfaces to everyday objects. People need a motivation to connect their devices, especially with the time cost involved in setup, and nobody has given them one.

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As he points out, less than 50% of internet-capable appliances actually get connected.
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TSMC will stop making 7 nm chips for Chinese customers • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Kathrin Hille and Ryan McMorrow:

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has notified Chinese chip design companies that it will suspend production of their most advanced artificial intelligence chips, as Washington continues to impede Beijing’s AI ambitions.

TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, told Chinese customers it would no longer manufacture AI chips at advanced process nodes of 7 nanometers or smaller as of this coming Monday, three people familiar with the matter said.

Two of the people said any future supplies of such semiconductors by TSMC to Chinese customers would be subject to an approval process likely to involve Washington.

TSMC’s tighter rules could reset the ambitions of Chinese technology giants such as Alibaba and Baidu, which have invested heavily in designing semiconductors for their AI clouds, as well as a growing number of AI chip design start-ups that have turned to the Taiwanese group for manufacturing.

The US has barred American companies like Nvidia from shipping cutting-edge processors to China and also created an extensive export control system to stop chipmakers worldwide that are using US technology from shipping advanced AI processors to China. There have been reports that a new US rule would ban foundries from making advanced AI chips designed by Chinese firms, according to analysts at investment bank Jefferies.

TSMC is rolling out its new policy as the US Commerce Department investigates how cutting-edge chips the group made for a Chinese customer ended up in a Huawei AI device. The Chinese national tech champion is subject to multiple US sanctions and export controls.

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The Huawei restrictions, in case you’d forgotten, date back to Trump’s first term.
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How It Went • Daring Fireball

John Gruber:

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My mom died at the end of June this year.

I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize right up front: my mom’s death was OK. It really was. She was 78, which isn’t that old, but her health had not been great. She was hospitalized for several days in May, just a month prior, after she had collapsed at home, too weak to stand, and for days it wasn’t clear what was wrong. Then some more test results came back and we had the answer. She had ovarian cancer, bad. It had already metastasized. The prognosis was grim: months to live, at best. And those months, toward the end, would inexorably grow ever more painful and profoundly sad.

Her mental acuity had begun to slip in recent years, too. Not a lot, but if you knew her you’d notice. But she faced this prognosis with remarkable dignity, courage, and clarity. She knew the score. It was what it was, and she’d make the best of the time she had left. She was tired but still felt pretty good most days. There were flashes of her younger self, the Mom I remember growing up with. It was wonderful to see those flashes. The bad times were coming, but they laid ahead. On the last Monday night in June she and my dad went out to eat at their favorite restaurant. They had a good meal and a good time. It was a great day. Tuesday morning she played Wordle and reported her score to our family group chat. Then around noon, she just fell over, dead. My dad found her unresponsive, called 911, and they arrived in minutes, but she was gone. No suffering.

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This is only the opening of a long, beautiful, elegiac piece, which is your day’s must-read. It will uplift you. But you have to read through to the end. I think I’ve read everything Gruber has written on his site, which goes back 22 years, and this is without a doubt the best thing he has ever written.
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Apple Mac Mini M4 review: a tiny wonder • The Verge

Chris Welch:

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As I said earlier, the $599 Mini is the best value around if you haven’t yet joined the Mac side of Apple’s ecosystem. Even the $799 configuration I tested, with 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD, seems reasonable. But once you go beyond that in RAM or storage, Apple’s pricing smacks of greed and padding the company’s bottom line. That’s true across the line, but it’s felt more acutely on a machine that starts at only $599. Stepping up to 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM brings the price to $1,399. Yikes.

For most, the Mini will be a stationary computer, and the presence of three Thunderbolt ports means you can attach a speedy external SSD without caving to Apple’s farcical rates. Given that, the other $799 config, with 24GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, could be more worthwhile. Neither can be upgraded later, so it’s important to get the specs right when buying.

You can use Apple’s display and accessories… or get as creative as you want with third-party options.
Every time I glance over at the new Mac Mini on my desk, it feels like the Mini’s ideal form. The redesigned enclosure makes the most of Apple Silicon’s small footprint, and with Apple’s M4 chip and an ample selection of ports, the 2024 Mini should remain a zippy, reliable computer for years to come. It’s never been more mighty. Well, except for the much pricier M4 Pro version. Stay tuned for more on that soon.

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A calculation on the ATP podcast suggested that Apple’s RAM and SSD upgrades are priced at 6.5x above retail level. Given Apple would buy at wholesale, ie 40% of retail at most, that’s about 16x the wholesale price, or more. It’s insane, but Apple has been doing it for years. At least for SSDs you can plug in an external drive.
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Deleted tweets, missed warnings and calls for the ‘hangman’: the bitter political fallout from Spain’s floods • The Guardian

Sam Jones:

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The sun still hadn’t risen on Tuesday 29 October when the mayor of Utiel, Ricardo Gabaldón, took another look at the warnings from Spain’s state meteorological office and ordered all the schools in the small Valencian town to close.

“The warning early that morning – at 5am or 6am – was orange,” he said. “That’s when I was weighing up whether to close the schools here. In the end, I ordered them to close at six or seven that morning. Soon after, the alert went red.”

Although the rain brought floods that have so far claimed at least 223 lives in Spain – six of them in Utiel – Gabaldón knows the death toll could have been far higher in his town had the schools been open. Children and their parents would have died on flooded roads during the drive in from surrounding villages, and students could have been drowned in their school corridors. “Thank goodness that the children weren’t here,” he said. “Otherwise we’d be talking about something else entirely.”

The foresight and initiative Gabaldón showed in the first moments of the worst natural disaster in Spain’s modern history were far from ubiquitous. The alerts that are pinged to people’s mobile phones in times of civil emergency were not sent out by the Valencian regional government until after 8pm on Tuesday. By then, a year’s worth of rain had fallen in some areas in a matter of hours and the flood waters in Utiel were three metres high.

Even as emergency teams search for the 78 people still listed as missing, questions are being asked about the authorities’ handling of the crisis, one that has brought out the very worst, and the very best, in people.

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Climate change is going to affect governments around the Mediterranean because warmer water evaporates more easily and is dumped on the land. This sort of crisis will become more, not less, common.
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The media’s identity crisis • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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“You are the media now.” That’s the message that began to cohere among right-wing influencers shortly after Donald Trump won the election this week. Elon Musk first posted the phrase, and others followed. “The legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth telling is in. No more complaining about the media,” the right-wing activist James O’Keefe posted shortly after. “You are the media.”

It’s a particularly effective message for Musk, who spent $44 billion to purchase a communications platform that he has harnessed to undermine existing media institutions and directly support Trump’s campaign. QAnon devotees also know the phrase as a rallying cry, an invitation to participate in a particular kind of citizen “journalism” that involves just asking questions and making stuff up altogether.

“You are the media now” is also a good message because, well, it might be true.

A defining quality of this election cycle has been that few people seem to be able to agree on who constitutes “the media,” what their role ought to be, or even how much influence they have in 2024. Based on Trump and Kamala Harris’s appearances on various shows—and especially Trump and J. D. Vance’s late-race interviews with Joe Rogan, which culminated in the popular host’s endorsement—some have argued that this was the “podcast election.” But there’s broad confusion over what actually moves the needle.

Is the press the bulwark against fascism, or is it ignored by a meaningful percentage of the country? It is certainly beleaguered by a conservative effort to undermine media institutions, with Trump as its champion and the fracturing caused by algorithmic social media. It can feel existential at times competing for attention and reckoning with the truth that many Americans don’t read, trust, or really care all that much about what papers, magazines, or cable news have to say.

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People have been “cable-cutting” – dropping their cable contracts – for years in favour of YouTube and the internet. Megyn Kelly was on the Today programme last week boasting about how CNN had had 4 million viewers on election night – and she had had 4 million on her YouTube stream at the same time. Plus the median age of these channels is zooming up: MTV’s median age is 50; for CNN, it’s 70. Those channels are not coming back from that cliff edge.
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Questionmarks of the Mysterians • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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what if our faith in nature’s knowability is just an illusion, a trick of the overconfident human mind? That’s the working assumption behind a school of thought known as Mysterianism. Situated at the fruitful if sometimes fraught intersection of scientific and philosophic inquiry, the Mysterianist view has been promulgated, in different ways, by many prominent thinkers, from the philosopher Colin McGinn to the linguist Noam Chomsky to the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The Mysterians propose that human intellect has boundaries and that many of the mysteries of the cosmos will forever lie beyond our comprehension.

Mysterianism is most closely associated with the so-called hard problem of consciousness: How can the inanimate matter of the brain produce subjective feelings? The Mysterians suggest that the human mind is incapable of understanding itself, that we will never know how consciousness works. But if Mysterianism applies to the workings of the mind, there’s no reason it shouldn’t also apply to the workings of nature in general. As McGinn has suggested, “It may be that nothing in nature is fully intelligible to us.”

The simplest and best argument for Mysterianism is founded on evolutionary evidence. When we examine any other living creature, we understand immediately that its intellect is limited. Even the brightest, most curious dog is not going to master arithmetic. Even the wisest of owls knows nothing of the physiology of the field mouse it devours. If all the minds that evolution has produced have bounded comprehension, then it’s only logical that our own minds, also products of evolution, would have limits as well. As Pinker has put it, “The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours.” To assume that there are no limits to human understanding is to believe in a level of human exceptionalism that seems miraculous, if not mystical.

…What’s truly disconcerting about Mysterianism is that, if our intellect is bounded, we can never know how much of existence lies beyond our grasp. What we know or may in the future know may be trifling compared with the unknowable unknowns.

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This has always seemed an obvious point to me: there must be aliens whose cognitive abilities are beyond ours, just as ours are beyond dogs. What happens if we meet them?
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The sinking of the Bayesian and the Mohawk • Churbuck

David Churbuck:

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In the department of history-repeating-itself, here is a strange historical coincidence from the realm of current events, maritime history and 19th century American yachting: two superyachts capsize and sink at anchor, only a few hundred yards from shore, killing their wealthy owners, guests, and crew when a summer squall overwhelmed them. The story of the two catastrophes dominated the news for weeks.

This is the story of the Mohawk and the Bayesian: two superyacht tragedies that killed their wealthy owners a century and a half apart.

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Bizarre how these things happen. Then happen again.
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