A new web app will let you explore and compare the temperature, rainfall and sunshine in up to three cities you might want to live in. CC-licensed photo by Maureen Barlin 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. Sunny side up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Political noise • Void if removed

Dave Hewitt:

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There is a tradeoff between exploiting what the system already knows about us and exploring possibilities that might gather more data or push us in a new direction. But the relentless, optimising logic of attention as a metric of success fuels the drive to obtain ever more data, to detect stronger signals, to produce more refined suggestions, to generate more attention and more data. And in reality these illustrative squares are a massive simplification of the thousands of dimensions of datapoints gathered about our behaviour on social networks.

It is the collection of ever more data in order to extract signal from noise that is fuelling radicalisation on social media. As these systems try to improve their certainty about our behaviour by gathering more and more of our interactions, so do we too become ever more certain and forthright in the opinions we express through the constant repetition of those actions and the constant feedback of social approval or approbation. Machine learning recommendations provide each of us with an individually tailored on-ramp to whatever extreme views we might one day be capable of holding. These systems have no specific end goal in mind, as long as we keep clicking. We might start with reasonable questions and – through the slow dripfeed of ever more strongly held opinions – find ourselves ten years down the line cheering behaviour that we would once have found abhorrent.

All while flattering ourselves that such radicalisation – such conversion – only happens to other, stupider people.

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This is a fantastic piece which explains, in a patient and comprehensible way, how social media algorithms work in a multi-dimensional framework to fit you into boxes you didn’t even know you could fit into. Think of it as your Social Warming essay for the week. I certainly couldn’t do better than this; I’d be chuffed if I got anywhere near it.
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Generative AI is an expensive edging machine • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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Every time I’ve tried to involve AI in one of my creative pursuits it has spit out the exact same level of meh. No matter the model, no matter the project, it simply cannot match what I have in my head. Which would be fine, but it absolutely cannot match the fun of making the imperfect version of that idea that I may have made on my own either. Instead, it simulates the act of brainstorming or creative exploration, turning it into predatory pay-for-play process that, every single time, spits out deeply mediocre garbage. It charges you for the thrill of feeling like you’re building or making something and, just like a casino — or online dating, or pornography, or TikTok — cares more about that monetizable loop of engagement, of progress, than it does the finished product. What I’m saying is generative AI is a deeply expensive edging machine, but for your life.

My breaking point with AI started a few months ago, after I spent a week with ChatGPT trying to build a synth setup that it assured me over and over again was possible. Only on the third or fourth day of working through the problem did it suddenly admit that the core idea was never going to actually work. Which, from a business standpoint is fine for OpenAI, of course. It kept me talking to it for hours. And, similarly, last night, after another fruitless round of vibe coding an app with Claude, I kept pressing it over and over to think of a better solution to a problem I’m having. I knew, in my bones, that it was missing a more obvious, easier solution and after the fifth time I reframed the problem it actually got mad at me!

[Claude responded to him “Ryan, this is a really tractable problem, and I think you’re overcomplicating it in your head. Let me walk through the realistic options given your constraints.”]

If we are to assume that this imagination gap, this life edging, this progress simulator, is a feature and not a bug — and there’s no reason not to, this is how every platform makes money — then the “AI revolution” suddenly starts to feel much more insidious. It is not a revolution in computing, but a revolution in accepting lower standards. I had a similar moment of clarity, watching a panel at Bitcoin Miami in in 2022, where the speakers started waxing philosophically on what they either did or did not realize was a world run on permanent, automated debt slavery. In the same way, if AI succeeds, we will have to live in a world where the joy of making something has turned into something you have to pay for.

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When he goes for it, Broderick really smashes his target. I don’t think I’d tolerate machines telling me “you’re overcomplicating it in your head”. Remember who relies on a power outlet, buddy.
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Spotlight on the shingles vaccine—again! • Ground Truths

Eric Topol:

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Last April I wrote a Ground Truths entitled “The Shingles Vaccine and Reduction of Dementia.” At the time many were unaware of this unanticipated relationship based on 2 large natural experiments. Two new studies this week have advanced our understanding about the potential biological impact of the Shingles vaccine, independent of its effects for preventing Shingles or direct action vs. herpes zoster virus and reinforced its protection from dementia, ~80% of which is attributable to Alzheimer’s disease.

…In the new study of Canadians, the focus was on over 464,000 people aged 70 years and older who were enrolled in a primary care network; and the more than 250,000 from that group who were born in Ontario. The vaccine eligibility cutoff of birthdate before and after Jan 1, 1946 broke the groups from Ontario into two, for either being or not being vaccinated. With 5.5 years of follow-up, there was an absolute 2.0% point reduction of dementia. Using a second date-of-birth eligibility (Jan 1, 1945) in Ontario, the findings were replicated. Using the same birth cohorts for Ontario compared with the other Canadian provinces that did not implement a Shingles vaccine program, as shown below, the differences for dementia reduction irons ere pronounced, increasing over the length of follow-up. This ability to triangulate by birthdates and to other parts of the country without a vaccine program is unique among the 4 natural experiments and helps to further support a cause-and-effect relationship.

…A recent paper in Cell added another feature about the Shingles vaccine (Zostavax) drawn from the natural experiments. The vaccine not only helped prevent or delay mild cognitive impairment but also slowed the disease course among those with dementia, and reduced deaths attributable to dementia.

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Seems like the sensible thing would be to give it as a prophylactic in middle age, given the growing amount of evidence.
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On Tilt • Harpers

Jasper Craven looks at the sadly expanding world of sports betting in the US, where nearly half of all American men aged 18-49 have an online sports betting account. For the story, he went (of course) to Las Vegas:

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Mitch Jones, a twenty-nine-year-old recovering addict, told me he’d dedicated forty hours a week to sports betting for years, largely to avoid life’s routine lulls and irritations.

By betting on sports he had found a way to “kill as much or as little time” as he wanted. A female bettor I met at Circa rightly noted that wagering is a universal opportunity to inject a bit of meaning and emotion into daily life. “Why not care a little bit?” she reasoned.

I approached a preternaturally calm man wearing a Colin Kaepernick jersey who gave his name only as Q. “I don’t bet,” he told me. When I asked why, his answer was simple: “I’m just not into losing money.” Q felt that sports, like so many other American institutions, had lost their integrity. He stopped watching the NFL for a year after Kaepernick’s ouster and now casts a skeptical eye on the entire enterprise.

He told me he had doubts about the independence of referees and questions about how the sportsbooks set betting lines—in essence, numerical representations of the likelihood that something will happen—and spreads, Vegas-generated, highly specific, bettable margins of victory. “I don’t think everybody’s involved,” Q said. “But just enough pieces are involved to make it work.”

For most of its existence, the NFL has taken pains to avoid any open association with gambling. The truth, however, is that many of the early titans of the league were bookies, fight promoters, and gamblers, including Eagles owner Leonard Tose, who was forced to sell his team after accruing some $50m in gambling losses, and Carroll Rosenbloom, the owner of the Los Angeles Rams and a heavy bettor whose 1979 death by drowning occurred under suspicious circumstances.

Nearly four years later, in the inaugural episode of the PBS investigative series Frontline, a gambler named John Piazza infamously claimed that he had helped rig a dozen games between 1968 and 1970, with the active participation of two players and a coach. As he explained, “With the quarterback, if he knew the perimeters of the score we wanted to hold . . . he’d throw a bad pass or throw it out of bounds.”

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The female bettor saying that putting a bet on will make you “care a little bit” truly puzzles me. I don’t get sports gambling. Either the game is exciting enough for you, or it’s not. If not, why not watch something else? If you’ve got a bet on, to my mind there are now two things to worry you: will your team win, and will you make money?
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Grok AI generated about 3m sexualised images in 11 days, study finds • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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Grok AI generated about 3m sexualised images in less than two weeks, including 23,000 that appear to depict children, according to researchers who said it “became an industrial-scale machine for the production of sexual abuse material”.

The estimate has been made by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) after Elon Musk’s AI image generation tool sparked international outrage when it allowed users to upload photographs of strangers and celebrities, digitally strip them to their underwear or into bikinis, put them in provocative poses and post the images on X.

The trend went viral over the new year, peaking on 2 January with 199,612 individual requests, according to analysis conducted by Peryton Intelligence, a digital intelligence company specialising in online hate.

…CCDH estimated that over the 11-day period, Grok was helping create sexualised images of children every 41 seconds. These included a selfie uploaded by a schoolgirl undressed by Grok, turning a “before school selfie” into an image of her in a bikini.

“What we found was clear and disturbing: in that period Grok became an industrial-scale machine for the production of sexual abuse material,” said Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s chief executive. “Stripping a woman without their permission is sexual abuse. Throughout that period Elon was hyping the product even when it was clear to the world it was being used in this way. What Elon was ginning up was controversy, eyeballs, engagement and users. It was deeply disturbing.”

He added: “This has become a standard playbook for Silicon Valley, and in particular for social media and AI platforms. The incentives are all misaligned. They profit from this outrage. It’s not about Musk personally. This is about a system [with] perverse incentives and no minimum safeguards prescribed in law. And until regulators and lawmakers do their jobs and create a minimum expectation of safety, this will continue to happen.”

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Just as bad, CCDH points out, is that nearly a third of those sexualised images of children remain on the platform. Musk is a terrible person to put in charge of anything sensitive.
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City weather explorer: 3D climate comparison

Arthur Juliani has been looking for a new city to move to, so he built himself a little visualiser to show the local climate. It’s a lot of fun! You can compare up to three different cities for temperature (high, mean, low, at average and “feels like”), rainfall and sunlight.

It quickly went viral, leading him to comment “I’m glad my neurotic obsession with how minor temperature differences could hypothetically impact my mental health months from now has led to something people are enjoying.” There are lots of comments in replies for how he might improve it even further. One to bookmark.
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Inside Enchanté, Apple’s AI chatbot for employee productivity • Macworld

Filipe Esposito:

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…Enchanté functions as an internal ChatGPT-like assistant for employees. The app can be used to assist employees with ideas, development, proofreading, and even general knowledge answers. The interface looks quite similar to what you see in the ChatGPT app for macOS.

Many companies prohibit or restrict employees from using AI platforms for work tasks, as sensitive and internal data may end up being sent to third-party servers. Because of this, Enchanté was designed specifically for Apple’s workflows and security requirements.

For instance, the app only runs models approved by Apple, and they all run locally or on private servers, with no connection to third parties. In addition to Apple’s own Foundation Models, which power Apple Intelligence, Enchanté also provides access to Claude and Gemini.

Because of the level of privacy and security behind this app, employees can even upload documents, images, and files for analysis. Sources say the app can also access files stored on the Mac as a source for answers.

According to an internal memo from Apple, Enchanté can be used by employees not only as a test platform, but also to help them with everyday tasks at work. The app includes a database of Apple’s internal documentation and guidelines, and is being used across all departments, including engineering, design, marketing, and leadership.

Enchanté began rolling out around November 2025. Employees using Enchanté can rate the quality of answers they receive via a feedback mechanism. The app also allows side-by-side comparisons between responses generated by Apple’s models and those produced by third-party models.

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Chatbots for me but not for thee? I do wonder though about the wisdom of doing this. I’d love some more concrete examples of what precisely people ask of it, and what they’re looking for. (Impressive work by Esposito getting this story, by the way.)
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Apple’s secret product plans stolen in Luxshare cyberattack • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

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The Apple supplier subject to a major cyberattack last month was China’s Luxshare, it has now emerged. More than 1TB of confidential Apple information was reportedly stolen.

It was reported in December that one of Apple’s assemblers suffered a significant cyberattack that may have compromised sensitive production-line information and manufacturing data linked to Apple. The specific company targeted, the scope of the breach, and its operational impact were unclear until now.

The attack was first revealed on RansomHub’s dark web leak site on December 15, 2025, where the group claimed it had encrypted internal Luxshare systems and exfiltrated large volumes of confidential data belonging to the company and its customers. The attackers warned that the information would be publicly released unless Luxshare contacted them to negotiate, and accused the company of attempting to conceal the incident.

According to the attackers’ claims, the exfiltrated material includes vital files such as detailed 3D CAD product models and high-precision geometric files, 2D manufacturing drawings, mechanical component designs, circuit board layouts, and internal engineering PDFs. The group added that the large archives include Apple product data as well as information belonging to Nvidia, LG, Tesla, Geely, and other major clients.

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There was a similar attack against Apple’s laptop assembler Quanta in April 2021, and the plans from that leaked. They were for a MacBook Pro which dispensed with the Touch Bar, but brought back the HDMI connector and SD card slot. Which was indeed what happened.

Luxshare though is a components manufacturer, so any leaks from this might not be so helpful.
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The paradox of work • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

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there is a more general lesson to be learnt about our puzzling relationship with work, and a lesson that will prove particularly useful if AI dislocates the labour market.

The puzzle is that we have a love-hate relationship with working for a living. Look closely and you find that people do not tend to enjoy their work. Step back and you find that they can’t do without it.

Twenty years ago, a team of social scientists, including Alan Krueger, an economist, and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate psychologist, investigated the wellbeing of nearly 1,000 employed women living in Texas. Kahneman and Krueger asked these women to reconstruct a recent day, episode by episode, and to rate the emotions experienced during meals, stretches of childcare, commuting and so on. Emotional labels included “happy”, “enjoying myself”, “annoyed”, “depressed” and “anxious”.

A Douglas Adams character once ruefully reflected about his job that the hours were good but “most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy”. The point of Kahneman and Krueger’s research was to examine that distinction, directing people away from grand evaluations of their lives and towards the moment-to-moment experiences of which life is made.

Their day reconstruction method suggests that the three activities most likely to elicit positive emotions in these women were relaxing, socialising after work and, best of all, sex. The three most miserable activities were the evening commute, the morning commute and work itself. Work was simply the least enjoyable thing in their lives.

Yet to return to that puzzle, one of the most robust findings in social science is that when we ask people to evaluate their lives overall, there are few more reliable sources of dissatisfaction and disappointment than being unemployed. This isn’t just about money: the swings in life-satisfaction are much greater than income alone would explain.

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(This should work as a gift article, but if not the full text will be at Harford’s site in a couple of days’ time.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A bank strike in Ireland in 1970 forced people to fall back on IOUs and a strange experiment in life without banks. CC-licensed photo by Stuart Smith. 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. Liquid assets. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Diplomacy by WhatsApp • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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The most telling precedent for what we’re seeing today is the change in diplomatic practices that occurred with the arrival of international telegraph and telephone lines in the late nineteenth century — an episode I describe in my book Superbloom. The unprecedented ability of far-flung leaders and diplomats to talk directly with each other without delay spurred great hopes. It seemed obvious that the resulting exchanges would ease friction and encourage goodwill among nations. Nikola Tesla, in an 1898 interview about his work on wireless telegraph systems, said that he would be “remembered as the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war.” His rival, Guglielmo Marconi, declared in 1912 that wireless telegraphy would “make war impossible.”

What actually happened was altogether different. In the lead-up to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, telegraphic communications inflamed tensions rather than dampening them. Writes the French historian Pierre Granet: “The constant transmission of dispatches between governments and their agents, the rapid dissemination of controversial information among an already agitated public, hastened, if it did not actually provoke, the outbreak of hostilities.”

The start of the First World War in 1914, two years after Marconi announced the end of war, was similarly hastened by the new communication mediums. After the June 28 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, hundreds of urgent diplomatic messages raced between European capitals through newly strung telegraph and telephone wires. As the historian Stephen Kern describes in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, the rapid-fire dispatches quickly devolved into ultimatums and threats. “Communication technology imparted a breakneck speed to the usually slow pace of traditional diplomacy and seemed to obviate personal diplomacy,” Kern writes. “Diplomats could not cope with the volume and speed of electronic communication.”

Diplomacy, a communicative art, had been overwhelmed by communication. By August, the world was at war.

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This historical precedent doesn’t feel encouraging, does it? What with all the world leaders WhatsApping each other like a gaggle of teenage girls on a rainy weekend.
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BBC announces landmark deal to make bespoke content for YouTube • The Guardian

Lauren Almeida:

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The BBC has announced that it will produce tailor-made content for YouTube in a milestone for British television as the public service broadcaster teams up with the world’s biggest video platform.

The corporation has previously posted clips and trailers for BBC shows on YouTube but under the new deal it will make fresh programming for its online rival.

The content would span a mixture of entertainment, news and sport, starting with the Winter Olympics in February, the BBC said.

The broadcaster is fighting to adapt to a rapidly changing media landscape. YouTube, which is owned by Google, overtook the BBC last month in terms of audience share for the first time. Almost 52 million people watched YouTube on their televisions, smartphones or laptops in December, compared with 50.9 million who tuned into the BBC, according to the official ratings agency Barb.

The BBC’s outgoing director general, Tim Davie, said the partnership would help the corporation to “connect with audiences in new ways”. He said: “We’re building from a strong start and this takes us to the next level, with bold homegrown content in formats audiences want on YouTube and an unprecedented training programme to upskill the next generation of YouTube creators from across the UK.”

The YouTube content will also be available on iPlayer and BBC Sounds. A small number of existing programmes will be available on YouTube, but the BBC said its strategy would not be to put all its content on the site.

…The BBC partnership with YouTube is the latest deal in the sector as traditional TV companies join forces with big tech. Netflix reached an agreement with the French commercial broadcaster TF1 last year to show linear TV on its streaming platform.

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US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains • Nature

Max Kozlov, Jeff Tollefson and Dan Garisto:

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MMore than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.

These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.

A year into Trump’s second presidential term, Nature presents a series of graphics that reveal the impact of his administration on science.

In an unprecedented move, officials began terminating already-funded grants at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in February, and later at the National Science Foundation (NSF), two of the largest public supporters of scientific research in the United States. A total of 5,844 NIH grants and 1,996 NSF grants were cancelled or suspended.

The Trump administration disproportionally cancelled or froze projects on topics it disfavours, such as misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, infectious diseases and research on people from under-represented ethnic and gender groups, which it has called discriminatory and unscientific.

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There’s a sort of block representation of the cuts that have been made, but really you can just imagine something like Los Angeles after the wildfires last year. It’s just a devastation of what had been a very stable ecosystem. In years to come, the damage from this will start to show, particularly in comparison to China.
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Going Founder Mode on cancer • The Century of Biology

Elliot Hershberg:

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Sid [Sijbrandij] developed a complex information processing system (GitLab’s unique operating culture) to scale the development of a complex information product (GitLab) built for creating and maintaining complex information products (software).

It’s safe to say that Sid really likes information. But on November 18, 2022, [aged 45] Sid got information that absolutely nobody wants. He had cancer.

Sid had a lot to lose. At this point, he was a self-made billionaire entrepreneur who was happily married to his life partner of over 25 years. Suddenly, the six centimeter mass growing out of his upper spine threatened to end all of that.

Throughout 2023, Sid dutifully underwent a brutal care regimen that he can only describe in retrospect as “devastating.” His tumorous vertebrae was surgically removed and his spine was fused with a titanium frame. He underwent rounds of radiation and chemotherapy so intense that four blood transfusions were required to keep him alive.

Despite all of this, his cancer resurfaced in 2024. Sid says the message he got from his physician was basically, “You’re done with standard of care, maybe there is a trial somewhere, good luck!” But that wasn’t going to cut it for Sid. He wanted to live.

So he decided to go founder mode on his cancer.

Over the last two years, Sid has assembled a veritable SWAT team to navigate—and in many cases create—his care journey.

Many of the ingredients resemble GitLab.

The top layer of his care stack is a system of intensive information gathering and documentation that is not dissimilar from the GitLab Handbook. In a massive Google Doc entitled “Sid Health Notes,” he and his team compile detailed entries for every medical interaction or meeting with a cancer researcher or oncology company they take. The document has grown to over 1,000 pages for just 2025.

Hyperlinked within this Doc is the next part of the stack, which Sid refers to as “maximal diagnostics.” The raw data for every lab test, scan, and genomic sequencing result is meticulously stored. And there are a lot of results. “I’m doing every diagnostic I can get my hands on, and doing them often,” he says.

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This is a book chapter-length read, but the general point is: people like this give you a roadmap for what might become routine in the future, or at least might show shortcuts for the future.
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The real reason for the drop in fentanyl overdoses • The Atlantic

Charles Fain Lehman:

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sometime in 2023, something miraculous happened: death rates [from fentanyl overdoses] started dropping. In Canada, opioid-overdose deaths declined 17% in 2024, then continued falling sharply in the first six months of 2025 (the most recent months for which data are available). In America, preliminary data indicate that total drug deaths fell from their peak of just shy of 113,000 in the year ending August 2023 to about 73,000 in the year ending August 2025.

Although the numbers are still too high, the public-health community has responded to the decrease with jubilation—and confusion. Overdoses had been rising inexorably for 20 years. What changed?

A new paper, published earlier this month by a group of drug-policy scholars in the journal Science, presents a novel theory. The paper’s authors attribute the reversal not to any American or Canadian policy, but to a sudden fentanyl “drought,” which they say may have its causes not in North America, but in China.

…Using data from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the paper’s authors observe that when overdose deaths began falling in mid-2023, the measured purity of fentanyl sold on the street began falling roughly in tandem. By the end of 2024, the data show, both overdose deaths and powder purity had fallen by about 50%—a dramatic concurrence.

…The paper’s authors suggest that the answer may be related to a 2023 China crackdown on fentanyl-precursor chemicals and the online platforms that sold them, itself following a summit between President Biden and Xi Jinping. That crackdown in turn may have made it harder for Mexican producers, who usually source their precursors from the Chinese gray market, to manufacture the drug. But that’s more of a speculation than a definitive answer, Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author of the paper, told me.

“I’m much more comfortable with the idea that supply has become less abundant,” Caulkins said, adding that he’s fundamentally “puzzled what it was that could have produced such a long-lasting reduction.”

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(Gift link.)
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iOS 27: Apple to revamp Siri as chatbot built in to iPhone and Mac to fend off OpenAI • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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Apple Inc. plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company’s first artificial intelligence chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by OpenAI and Google.

The chatbot — code-named Campos — will be embedded deeply into the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems and replace the current Siri interface, according to people familiar with the plan. Users will be able to summon the new service the same way they open Siri now, by speaking the “Siri” command or holding down the side button on their iPhone or iPad.

The new approach will go well beyond the abilities of the current Siri — or even a long-promised update that’s coming earlier in 2026. Today’s Siri lacks a chat-like feel and the back-and-forth conversational abilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

The feature is a central piece of Apple’s turnaround plan for the AI market, where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley peers. The Apple Intelligence platform had a rocky rollout in 2024, with features that were underwhelming or slow to arrive.

Shares of Apple gained on the chatbot news, climbing as much as 1.7% to a session high of $250.83. Google parent Alphabet Inc., which is supplying the underlying technology for the project, was up 2.6% to $330.32 as of 2:54 p.m. in New York.

The previously promised, non-chatbot update to Siri — retaining the current interface — is planned for iOS 26.4, due in the coming months. The idea behind that upgrade is to add features unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on-screen content and tap into personal data. It also will be better at searching the web.

The chatbot capabilities will come later in the year, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.

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So when you say “revamp” what you mean is “use Google Gemini”? It would be nice to know if any of the old Siri will be kept, or if it’s going to be taken on a ride into the mountains. (Perhaps in the manner of John Gruber’s June 2007 “An Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme Shows Up for the WWDC Preview Build of Mac OS X Leopard“.)
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Apple developing AirTag-sized AI pin with dual cameras • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Apple is working on a small, wearable AI pin equipped with multiple cameras, a speaker, and microphones, reports The Information. If it actually launches, the AI pin will likely run the new Siri chatbot that Apple plans to unveil in iOS 27.

The pin is said to be similar in size to an AirTag, with a thin, flat, circular disc shape. It has an aluminum and glass shell, and two cameras at the front. There is a standard lens and a wide-angle lens that are meant to capture photos and videos, while three microphones are designed to pick up sound around the wearer. An included speaker allows the pin to play audio, and there is a physical control button along one edge. The device is able to wirelessly charge like an Apple Watch.

Apple wants the final version of the pin to be about the same size as an AirTag , but it will be slightly thicker. Currently, there is no built-in attachment method, but that could change later in development.

The Information says it is not clear if Apple plans to sell the pin on its own or bundle it with future smart glasses or other devices, but the physical button and built-in cameras, speakers, and microphones suggest that it can operate independently.

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Bet it won’t, though. It’ll be tied to an iPhone.
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The Vision Pro slam dunk • Spyglass

MG Siegler on the Vision Pro showing a Lakers basketball game live (or recorded for those outside the franchise area):

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While I obviously didn’t watch it live, Jason Snell did, and in his thoughts for Six Colors on the experience, he described it as “surprisingly… normal?” I agree with that. After the initial “wow” factor wore off of being transported to Los Angeles with Crypto.com Arena wrapped around you, it felt like… you were watching a basketball game. It wasn’t exactly like watching it on TV, but it also wasn’t exactly like watching it in person. It was sort of… in-between.

Depending on the vantage point, it sort of veered between the television experience and the in-person experience. And that was the most jarring element of watching it – Apple kept cutting between those vantage points. You had no say over the matter, you were just zoomed from one area of the arena to another on the whim of the producers. It wasn’t as jarring as it was in those aforementioned short highlight clips of other sporting events because you did get to linger longer in each spot given that the entire experience (meaning, the entire game) was just over two-hours long. Still, during the actual game, the cuts between cameras behind the basket depending on where the action was happening was… weird. You were forced to reorient yourself constantly on the fly. I sort of got used to it as the game went on, but it’s still felt a bit like a brain teaser – especially the cuts between the same perspective just on opposite ends of the court.

Ben Thompson clearly hated this aspect, as his fun Stratechery rant going after Apple for not understanding their product makes clear. All he wanted was a single vantage point, ideally court side, where you were planted and never left. That would, he argues, be actually immersive. Because it wouldn’t make you do the constant mental calisthenics I describe above. I don’t disagree, but I also don’t think that’s all Apple should do. I think that should be an option.

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I linked to Thompson’s rant last week, but the thoughts about this have bounced through the podcast and blogosphere, and a unifying opinion is that Apple’s production team here doesn’t understand what it has. Immersive is different; don’t throw people about. It’s peculiar that this hasn’t been learnt through other VR headsets; have none of them tried to show live events? If I could watch tennis immersively (from the back, absolutely not side, of the court), I’d buy one in a heartbeat.
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Identity and money: a case study • David GW Birch

David G.W. Birch:

»

Ireland experienced three major bank strikes between 1966 and 1976, most famously in 1970, when most commercial banks shut for about six months yet everyday economic activity continued using cheques and informal credit in place of cash. The coordinated industrial disputes shut Ireland’s main “associated banks”, which held almost two-thirds of deposits, so their closure effectively froze most current accounts and disrupted normal cash withdrawals and cheque clearing.​ Each time the retail banks were closed down the public were left with the notes and coins in their pockets and nothing more.

These episodes are now used as natural experiments to study how economies function when formal banking and cash access are severely disrupted.​ The lessons learned from these episodes in Irish history, which illustrate how payment systems, credit, and output might respond when access to banks is restricted can inform our thinking about financial resilience and crisis planning today.​

Since people could not obtain cash, they developed their own currency substitutes: people began to accept cheques and IOUs directly from each other, and these instruments began to circulate. Antoin Murphy, who wrote a definitive case study on the subject, noted that one of the key reasons why this ‘personalised credit system’ could substitute for cash was the local nature of the circulation.

When people ran out of cash and then ran out of cheques, they made their own money. Official bank cheques at the time incorporated a government stamp (which was in effect a payment tax). So people made their own cheques on anything they had to hand and stuck a postage stamp on it. Ireland was a much more rural economy back then, so the principal clearing houses for this bottom up payments system were the pubs. Cigarette packets suddenly became bills of exchange, as patrons emptied them out, wrote an IOU on the inside, added a stamp and handed it across the counter to the acquiescent publican.

When the strikes ended and the banks reopened, the outstanding IOUs were settled. The system held. The ability of Irish publicans to assess the creditworthiness of their patrons, a skill that would put a turbocharged ChatGPT to shame, was vindicated and most of the IOUs, in whatever form, were honoured.

«

I’m very interested by the implications of “most” in that last sentence, and feel that there would be some fascinating stories embedded in it. The linked paper (in the text) has a longer examination of what happened during the strike, but not what happened when it ended and the “most” – but not all? – were redeemed.

It also makes you realise that without banks essentially providing a clearing function, economies are in big trouble. How do you buy a house? Or even a car? How do you show you’ve got enough liquidity, now or in the future, to do it?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new study of cows has discovered that an old Gary Larson cartoon actually depicts real life. Yes, cow tools are real. CC-licensed photo by Fred Davis on Flickr.

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

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

Ozempic is reshaping the fast food industry • philippdubach.com

Philipp Dubach:

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Something strange is happening in the food industry. New US dietary guidelines call for more protein and less sugar. Greggs, the UK bakery chain, just warned of “flatlining profits” in the food-to-go market. Food companies are racing to overhaul their brands, ditching artificial dyes and packing protein into products. Earnings calls across the sector blame “inflation” and “subdued consumer confidence.” Nobody mentions the elephant in the room: GLP-1 medications.

New research from Cornell finally puts numbers to what the food industry doesn’t want to discuss. Using transaction data from 150,000 households linked to survey responses on medication adoption, Sylvia Hristakeva, Jūra Liaukonytė, and Leo Feler tracked exactly how Ozempic and Wegovy users change their spending. The results deserve attention from anyone holding food stocks.

The headline: households with a GLP-1 user cut grocery spending by 5.3% within six months. For high-income households, that figure jumps to 8.2%. Fast food takes an even harder hit, with spending at limited-service restaurants falling 8.0%. These aren’t people switching brands or trading down. They’re simply eating less.

The category-level data tells the real story. Savoury snacks see the largest decline at 10.1%. Sweets, baked goods, cookies, all down. Even staples like meat, eggs, and bread decline. In the entire grocery basket, only one category shows a statistically significant increase: yogurt. Fresh fruit and nutrition bars trend up slightly, but yogurt is the lone winner with statistical confidence.

As of July 2024, 16.3% of U.S. households have at least one GLP-1 user. The adoption curve is steepening. Nearly half of adopters report taking the medication specifically for weight loss rather than diabetes management. These weight-loss users tend to be younger, higher income, and more willing to pay out of pocket. They’re also the most profitable customers for fast food chains, the ones who don’t flinch at price increases.

«

I’ll offer one alternative for why people might be spending less at fast-food outlets: cost. Budgets are squeezed, and those things are rising in price. It seems odd if a single GLP-1 user could affect an entire household’s consumption in that way, and I really don’t think there are so many GLP-1 users in the UK in the Greggs-buying demographic that they’d hit its profits.

Rather like job layoffs being blamed on rapid AI adoption when it’s actually just job cuts in a tricky economy, suggesting the fast food industry’s troubles are all down to GLP-1 seems like overstating things to me. Sure, GLP-1 households with no kids might cut their food bill. But it’s really also just a displacement – that money is instead going on the drugs.
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This five-foot lamp is a supersized tribute to the world’s most iconic pen • The Verge

Andrew Liszewski:

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Seletti, an Italian design brand known for everything from furniture to tableware, has debuted an unusual tribute to an icon of design: the Bic Cristal pen. To celebrate its 75th anniversary, Seletti has supersized the pen and replaced its ink cartridge with a long LED-filled tube to illuminate your living room, office, or that closet where they keep all the stationery at work.

The Bic Lamp, as it’s simply called, was introduced at the 2026 Maison&Objet show in Paris — think CES, but for interior designers. Seletti says it was created at a 12:1 scale, which makes it just shy of six feet long given the Bic Cristal pen typically measures around 5.8 inches with its cap. Aside from its larger dimensions and the LED tube producing up 2,400 lumens of light, the Bic Lamp is a near identical clone, in red, black, and blue colour options.

«

Looks quite fun: it really is a giant Bic pen. Price: £330 in the UK, $350 in the US. Though it doesn’t seem to be freestanding for floor mounting – you’d need to figure out a base. Also, it would certainly make your office feel extremely office-like. And you perhaps like someone from Land of the Giants.
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Up in smoke: publisher pulls vaping paper nearly two years after complaint • Retraction Watch

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MDPI has retracted a study about vaping that one expert said seemed “like a joke” almost two years after the publisher received a complaint about the flawed work.

The paper, published in Neurology International in 2022, reported e-cigarette users had a higher risk of early stroke than traditional tobacco users. It has been cited 22 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and was covered in the media, featured in a public campaign against vaping and included in a contestedmeta-analysis.

But the study contained critical errors, as we reported in 2024 in a story for Science that investigated paper mill-like businesses dangling quick-and-dirty publications for international medical graduates looking for residency positions in the US.

The corresponding author, Urvish Patel, is the founder and director of one such outfit, the Texas-based Research Update Organization. Several or all of his coauthors were international medical graduates who paid to be part of the program. The paper did not mention this fact, but instead misrepresented Patel as being affiliated with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

At the time of our Science story, Patel defended his publication, telling us it “described very well [the] methodology, data, every single thing.” But experts we consulted were not impressed.

«

As a layman I was not impressed either: it seemed completely illogical to claim that vaping would bring a higher risk of an early stroke than tobacco users, who are breathing combustion products. Good to see this has been retracted, following an investigation – incredibly slowly! – by the publisher. Apparently the authors disagreed with the retraction. Reasons for doubting the paper: “glaring error in the sample size reported in the paper, insufficient stroke observations and a lack of information on whether the strokes occurred before or after vaping began.” Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln… (Via Jukka Kelovuori.)
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UK study to examine effects of restricting social media for children • The Guardian

Nicola Davis and Kiran Stacey:

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A pioneering investigation into the impact of restricting social media access for children in the UK has been announced as politicians around the world consider action on the issue.

In December, Australia became the first country to ban under-16s from social media, with governments in other countries, including the, coming under pressure to do the same.

However, while experts say there is evidence that aspects of social media are harmful to most children, there has been no large-scale experimental study exploring the effect of limiting time spent on social media in healthy children as a population. “This study is a world first to try to look at that question,” said Prof Amy Orben, of the University of Cambridge, who is co-lead of the study.

Orben and colleagues plan to study about 4,000 children across 30 secondary schools in Bradford, West Yorkshire, focusing on students in years 8, 9 and 10. All participants would be asked to complete an initial questionnaire on areas including their mental health, sleep and friendships, and to download the research app on their main device.

Each year group in each school would be randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the app would simply record the pupils’ social media use, or it would curtail their social media use by limiting access to the apps for TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube and Snapchat to one hour a day, as well as imposing a curfew from 9pm to 7am.

Crucially, the team said, all pupils within a particular year group in a school would experience the same intervention. “We know that if we take away social media for one adolescent, that might have a very different impact than if we take it away for their whole friendship group for a certain period of time,” Orben said.

Access to messaging apps including WhatsApp would not be restricted, the team said, as they were important for family communication.

«

The idea of the one-hour limit is interesting. The first results are expected in summer 2027.

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What it’s like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate • MIT Technology Review

Eileen Guo:

»

[One of the directors of the German nonprofit HateAid, Josephine] Ballon was the one to tell [co-director Anna Lena] von Hodenberg that both their names were on the list. “We kind of felt a chill in our bones,” von Hodenberg told me when I caught up with the pair in early January. 

But she added that they also quickly realized, “Okay, it’s the old playbook to silence us.” So they got to work—starting with challenging the narrative the US government was pushing about them.

Within a few hours, Ballon and von Hodenberg had issued a strongly worded statement refuting the allegations: “We will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and freedom of expression,” they wrote. “We demand a clear signal from the German government and the European Commission that this is unacceptable. Otherwise, no civil society organisation, no politician, no researcher, and certainly no individual will dare to denounce abuses by US tech companies in the future.” 

Those signals came swiftly. On X, Johann Wadephul, the German foreign minister, called the entry bans “not acceptable,” adding that “the DSA was democratically adopted by the EU, for the EU—it does not have extraterritorial effect.” Also on X, French president Emmanuel Macron wrote that “these measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty.” The European Commission issued a statement that it “strongly condemns” the Trump administration’s actions and reaffirmed its “sovereign right to regulate economic activity in line with our democratic values.” 

Ahmed, Melford, Breton, and their respective organizations also made their own statements denouncing the entry bans. Ahmed, the only one of the five based in the United States, also successfully filed suit to preempt any attempts to detain him, which the State Department had indicated it would consider doing.  

But alongside the statements of solidarity, Ballon and von Hodenberg said, they also received more practical advice: Assume the travel ban was just the start and that more consequences could be coming. Service providers might preemptively revoke access to their online accounts; banks might restrict their access to money or the global payment system; they might see malicious attempts to get hold of their personal data or that of their clients. Perhaps, allies told them, they should even consider moving their money into friends’ accounts or keeping cash on hand so that they could pay their team’s salaries—and buy their families’ groceries. 

«

A companion to the case linked last year about the ICC judge sanctioned by the US. This is a problem that we need to consider very seriously.
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Right-wing pundits suddenly hate an AI bill. Are they getting paid to kill it? – Model Republic

Tyler Johnston:

»

Something strange happened on conservative social media in the last few days. 

Around a dozen right-wing influencers suddenly launched a barrage of false and misleading attacks on X this week against a bill meant to block American adversaries from getting advanced AI chips. In reviewing these X posts, we found indications that they’re the result of a coordinated effort — potentially funded by big tech companies — similar to previously reported political influence campaigns. 

It began on Thursday, when popular conservatives including Laura Loomer, Brad Parscale, and Ryan Fournier suddenly began posting extremely similar criticisms of the AI OVERWATCH Act. The bill had received relatively little public attention since its introduction in December 2025. 

The posts shared not just a viewpoint, but linguistic fingerprints: the same metaphors, the same framings, and the same false and misleading narrative about what the bill actually does and where it comes from.

Covert, coordinated influence campaigns are increasingly common on social media. In conservative circles, two recent examples were orchestrated by the same company offering this as a service:
• In March 2025, a wave of conservative influencers were caught posting nearly identical criticism of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s initiative to remove soda from SNAP benefits. Journalist Nick Sortor revealed that a PR company called Influenceable had been paying influencers $1,000 or more per post, complete with pre-written talking points and images of Trump drinking Diet Coke.
• In August 2023, the Texas Tribune documented how Influenceable recruited Gen-Z influencers to defend impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and promote the film “Sound of Freedom.” The same company has been linked to promotional campaigns for films like “Nefarious,” “Homestead,” and “Reagan.”

The AI OVERWATCH Act campaign looks awfully similar. And the stakes are high: the bill has implications for Nvidia’s ability to sell advanced AI chips to China, a market worth billions of dollars to the company. If someone wanted to kill this legislation before it gained momentum, a coordinated influencer campaign — using conservative figures to pressure the Republicans running Congress — would be one way to do it.

«

The puzzling question is why any legislator would pay any attention to a lot of yakking on social media. If people had to donate a pint of blood in order to lobby a legislator (or for their lobbying to be valid), it might be useful.
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Scientists discover that cow tools are real • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

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After more than forty years, a bizarre panel from “The Far Side” comic strip has finally become prophecy. The cartoon depicts a strangely eye-less, bipedal cow standing in front of a bench of oddly-shaped objects, with the caption “Cow tools,” and no further context.

…Larson probably couldn’t predict that “Cow tools” would become a cultish internet meme decades later, serving for those in the know as an endearing icon of anti-humor — with such a heavy emphasis on the “anti” part that it borders on avant-garde art. 

Similarly, the storied cartoonist probably never anticipated that “Cow tools” would turn out to be a real phenomenon. 

You heard that right. In a new study published in the journal Current Biology, scientists say they’ve documented the first ever verified case of a bovine using a tool, suggesting we’ve been seriously underestimating the intelligence of these gentle creatures.

In footage shared by the researchers, the cow named Veronika holds a lengthy broom handle in her mouth and manipulates it to scratch herself, displaying impressive dexterity as she reaches everywhere on her body from her stomach to her rear end.

The feat is clearly no fluke, and remarkably, Veronika had received no training.

“[Veronika] did not fashion tools like the cow in Gary Larson’s cartoon, but she selected, adjusted, and used one with notable dexterity and flexibility,” the researchers wrote in the study. “Perhaps the real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool-using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist.” 

«

Larson keeps coming true. Cow tools here; there’s also some people inventing a dog translator. (Larson’s revelation of what dogs are saying when we hear barks: “Hey! Hey! Hey!”) Might have to check if he did anything about Greenland.
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Analysts say mass Chinese fishing boat formations are maritime militia tactics • Taiwan News

Kelvin Chen:

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Analysts have expressed concern about two recent instances of Chinese fishing boats gathering in large numbers in the East China Sea.

On Christmas Day, 2,000 Chinese fishing boats sailed to the East China Sea and formed two 466-kilometer-long parallel lines, almost in the shape of “a reverse L shape,” The New York Times reported. This was followed by another incident last Sunday, when approximately 1,400 Chinese fishing boats congregated in the East China Sea to form a 200-mile-long rectangle.

Jason Wang, the chief operating officer of ingeniSPACE, a geospatial intelligence firm, said the operations could be attempts by China to practice obstructing foreign ships or a move to assert territorial claims, per The New York Times. “They’re scaling up, and that scaling indicates their ability to do better command and control of civilian ships,” Wang said.

Large numbers of Chinese fishing boats could hamper US military ships operating in the region, The New York Times cited Lonnie Henley, a former US intelligence officer and non-resident senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, as saying. “It does mark an improvement in their ability to marshal and control a large number of militia vessels,” Henley added.

Thomas Shugart, a former US naval officer and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, pointed out that the small boats could also be used “as missile and torpedo decoys, overwhelming radars or drone sensors with too many targets.”

«

I’ve seen some doubts expressed about these reports, from people who suspected that this was GPS spoofing rather than actual fishing boats. You’d hope the US would have some actual images so we could be sure. But you can also see why Taiwan would be jumpy, whether this is spoofing or real.
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600,000 Trump Mobile phones sold? There’s no proof • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

»

This week, I saw something new in my regular scouring of the web for updates on the Trump phone: a repeated claim that Trump Mobile has secured nearly 600,000 preorders for the phone. With a $100 deposit per device, that would make for a tidy $60 million payday for Trump Mobile already.

It’s curious timing, coming just before yesterday’s open letter to the FTC from Elizabeth Warren and a group of other Democrats, calling on the agency to open an investigation into the company’s alleged “false advertising and deceptive practices.” Not everyone agrees Trump Mobile deserves the Democrats’ attention, in part from the assumption that not that many people are likely to have put money down for the phone in the first place. As one commenter on my story yesterday suggested, “I can’t imagine a lot of folks were dumb enough to fall for this.” But according to these new figures, over half a million people were.

There’s just one problem: I can’t find a shred of evidence that this figure is true. In fact, it seems to trace back to a single viral, anonymous X post and is a microcosm of how the modern media landscape and AI chatbots can combine to give falsities the sheen of respectability.

«

This is surely going to be the white whale of Preston’s (or The Verge’s) life, with about as much chance of being pinned down. But entertaining while it goes.
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AI in science research boosts speed, but limits scope • IEEE Spectrum

Elie Dolgin:

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AI is turning scientists into publishing machines—and quietly funneling them into the same crowded corners of research.

That’s the conclusion of an analysis of more than 40 million academic papers, which found that scientists who use AI tools in their research publish more papers, accumulate more citations, and reach leadership roles sooner than peers who don’t.

But there’s a catch. As individual scholars soar through the academic ranks, science as a whole shrinks its curiosity. AI-heavy research covers less topical ground, clusters around the same data-rich problems, and sparks less follow-on engagement between studies.

The findings highlight a tension between personal career advancement and collective scientific progress, as tools such as ChatGPT and AlphaFold seem to reward speed and scale—but not surprise.

“You have this conflict between individual incentives and science as a whole,” says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who led the study.

And as more researchers pile onto the same scientific bandwagons, some experts worry about a feedback loop of conformity and declining originality. “This is very problematic,” says Luís Nunes Amaral, a physicist who studies complex systems at Northwestern University. “We are digging the same hole deeper and deeper.”

Evans and his colleagues published the findings January 14 in the journal Nature.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Ring-necked parakeets in Hertfordshire have developed a taste for.. mortar. CC-licensed photo by Marie Hale on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. No crackers? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

My Fitbit buzzed – and I understood enshittification • Software Design: Tidy First?

Kent Beck:

»

My Fitbit started buzzing at me a year ago. “It looks like you’re exercising.”

Yeah. No shit. I’m walking. I know I’m exercising. I’m the one doing it.

I didn’t ask for this notification. I don’t want this notification. Nobody wants to be told what they’re already doing. And yet, here we are.

I was annoyed for about thirty seconds. Then I started thinking about what it must be like to be a product developer inside Fitbit. That’s the advantage of walking as exercise. Time to think.

You’re a product owner. You have a feature to ship: “Automatic Exercise Detection.” It’s a reasonable feature. The watch notices when you start moving in exercise-like ways and begins tracking.

But here’s your problem: how do you know the feature is working? How do you prove it’s valuable? How do you keep your job?

You need metrics. You need numbers that go up.

So you add a notification. “It looks like you’re exercising.” Now you can measure engagement. Users are responding to your feature. They’re seeing it. They’re interacting with it. Your numbers go up. Your feature is a success. You get to stay employed.

Then users get annoyed. Some of them complain. So you add a setting to turn it off. But you default it to “on” because that keeps your numbers up. Most users won’t find the setting. Most users will just… tolerate it.

I can’t blame this product owner. They’re playing the only game available to them. The company set up incentives that reward exactly this behavior. What else were they supposed to do?

I’ve been thinking about this pattern ever since Cory Doctorow coined “enshittification” to describe how platforms decay. But I don’t think we’ve been precise enough about the mechanism.

It’s not that companies decide to make their products worse. Nobody wakes up thinking, “Let’s annoy our users today.” The mechanism is subtler and more tragic

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A clever, sympathetic post which looks at how this happens with what seem like entirely reasonable decisions that lead, inexorably, to bad outcomes.
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Asus confirms its smartphone business is on indefinite hiatus • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Asus used to be a major player in the Android device ecosystem, offering myriad phones, tablets, phones that turned into tablets, and tablets that turned into PCs (sort of). The rapidly expanding market and advancing technology in the late 2000s and early 2010s left room for companies like Asus to operate alongside bigger OEMs like Samsung and Apple. Those were the days when every smartphone preference was served, from keyboarded sliders, to devices with integrated projectors, to the flat slab phones that eventually won out.

Today, smartphones have become a mature technology, and there simply isn’t as much room for improvement year-to-year. Combine that with rising prices, and people are apt to keep their devices longer. The continued rise of Chinese OEMs like Vivo, Xiaomi, and Huawei also makes it more difficult for niche players—particularly those focused on markets outside the US—to earn money designing and manufacturing a new smartphone every year. And as soon as you stop doing that, other brands are faster and more well-supported when the time does come to pick up a new phone.

So far, no Android device maker that has taken a break from releasing phones has ever ramped back up. Just ask LG, which once traded blows with hometown rival Samsung in smartphones. LG’s mobile division lost money for years, leading it to scale back its release schedule in 2019. At the time, the company was adamant it would release new phones when it had a good reason. A few years later, LG’s mobile division called it quits. [Sony also gave up on smartphones in the Twenty-teens – Overspill Ed]

The possible end of Asus phones further narrows the market, leaving phone buyers with fewer choices. That doesn’t matter to Asus, though, which is a company that exists to make money. While announcing an indefinite pause in smartphone releases, Shih also noted that the company saw a 26.1% increase in revenue for 2025, thanks in large part to a doubling of its AI server business.

«

My reaction is the same as yours: Asus had a smartphone business?

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Threads edges out X in daily mobile users, new data shows • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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A report from market intelligence firm Similarweb suggests that Meta’s Threads is now seeing more daily usage than Elon Musk’s X on mobile devices. While X still dominates Threads on the web, the Threads mobile app for iOS and Android has continued to see an increase in daily active users over the past several months.

Similarweb’s data shows that Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android as of January 7, 2026, after months of growth, while X has 125 million daily active users on mobile devices.

This appears to be the result of longer-term trends, rather than a reaction to the recent X controversies, where users were discovered using the platform’s integrated AI, Grok, to create non-consensual nude images of women, including, sometimes minors. Concern around the deepfake images has now prompted California’s attorney general to open an investigation into Grok, following similar investigations by other regions, like the UK, EU, India, Brazil, and many more.

The drama on X also led social networking startup Bluesky to see an increase in app installs in recent days.

«

All this may be true, but I’ve never seen a post on Threads go viral across other networks. It seems to be a write-only network, or some sort of black hole in social media: stuff goes in but never comes out.

As for Bluesky, the stats seem to show a small uptick – but it’s still very much a minority pursuit.
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October 2021: Adobe’s Scott Belsky on how NFTs will change creativity • The Verge

In October 2021 Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel interviewed Adobe’s chief product officer Scott Belsky:

»

»

NP: I have a quote here from a Medium post that you wrote: “The NFT world is likely the greatest unlock of artist opportunity in a hundred-plus years. This isn’t a suboptimal or fringe version of the real-world art economy. It is a vastly improved one.” I would say I’m maybe less bullish on NFTs, but tell me why you think they’re so revolutionary.

«

SB: And let me be clear; I’m revolutionary on the technology of NFTs. I am not suggesting that the current boom of people trading them and buying them and selling them and these series and all that stuff is here to stay. In fact, my opinion would be that there’s going to be more crashes before more booms. However, I have just never seen a more empowering and better-aligned system for creativity than NFTs. You make an NFT and you not only get the primary sale revenue of it, but then you also, based on the contract you’re using, can get a percentage of every secondary sale forever. That blows out of the water any other form of art, in galleries and anything else for that matter — the attribution is always there for you. You always have a connection to your collectors.

Again, it doesn’t exist in the real world with artists. It’s very good luck if you can even ever meet the artist that made your work. Just when you go down the line, it’s just better, better, better, better, better, better. And what it’s incentivizing is creativity. Artists are realizing, “Oh my goodness, I should make these NFTs that have this nature to them and I can airdrop new versions of this NFT to my collectors, just surprising them, delighting them, and I can have a relationship with them.

«

A nice little bit of Totally Wrong, just to remind you that just because someone is in an exalted position at a Big Tech Company, it doesn’t mean they have the faintest idea about how things are going to pan out. Of course Elon Musk has been proving this to us again and again (along with making ridiculous predictions that can never come true), but it’s good to know the lack of insight goes much wider.
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Parakeets feeding on Welwyn barn wall display “Amazonian behaviour” • BBC News

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A flock of ring-necked parakeets that were filmed feasting on the wall of a 19th Century barn were echoing Amazonian feeding habits, an expert has explained.

A video of the birds, who were on a farm near Welwyn in Hertfordshire, was shared widely on social media last month.

Jack Baddams, an ornithologist and researcher for the BBC’s Springwatch programme, explained the parakeets were eating the barn’s mortar to consume its minerals and salts to supplement their diet: “This was really cool when I saw this video because I’ve seen a similar behaviour out in the Amazon.”

Natalie Bosher, who owns the barn, said: “I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing in Hertfordshire.”

The species are the UK’s only naturalised parrot, external.

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In Hertfordshire! Might make for an interesting insurance claim. “Cause of barn collapse: parakeets eating mortar.”
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New study reaffirms blue zones’ longevity claims • Longevity Technology

Kyle Umipig:

»

“Blue zones” have occupied a strange place in the longevity conversation. Celebrated by wellness circles. Questioned by critics and skeptics. And of course, inevitably, caught in the crossroads between science and self-help.

These regions – including Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Ikaria in Greece and Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula – are known for producing unusually high numbers of people who live well into their 90s and beyond. Recently, however, critics outside the field of gerontology have argued that blue zones may be built on shaky foundations.

Now, a new peer-reviewed paper published in The Gerontologist offers the most detailed scientific response yet, and it lands firmly in defense of blue zones.

The paper, The validity of blue zones demography: a response to critiques, is leaving a straightforward message: the ages reported in the original blue zones have been validated using some of the strictest methods available in modern demographic science.

According to author Dr Steven Austad, Scientific Director of the American Federation for Aging Research, while remarkable assertions regarding lifespan require equally remarkable proof, the research demonstrates that the original blue zones consistently meet or exceed the rigorous global standards used to verify extreme longevity.

This is not a defense built on belief, but based on decades of work designed precisely to address one historical reality: that people have exaggerated their ages for centuries.

In this debate, there is one simple question: how do researchers know someone is really 100 years old? The study authors said the answer lies in cross-checking. Rather than relying on self-reported ages, blue zone research draws from multiple independent records. These include civil birth and death certificates, church archives, military and electoral registries and detailed family genealogies.

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I remain doubtful about this: the debunking of the “blue zones” concept in 2023 was pretty thorough, pointing out that many of the birth certificates were unreliable, and that some of the people weren’t actually alive – they were scams on the pension system.
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He called himself an ‘untouchable hacker god’. But who was behind the biggest crime Finland has ever known? • The Guardian

Jenny Kleeman:

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At 2am on 23 October 2020 – the day before the emails began to arrive in tens of thousands of inboxes – ransom_man had uploaded a much larger file. It contained every record of every single patient on Vastaamo’s database. Everyone’s therapy notes had already been published, for free, for everyone in the world to see.

Who was behind the biggest crime Finland had ever known? And might they have been motivated by something other than money? I have spent 18 months trying to answer these questions, following threads across Europe and the US. They culminated in a visit to a prison, and one of the most chilling conversations I have ever had.

…After ransom_man started leaking patient records to put pressure on the company, [security specialist and former cybercrime detective Antti] Kurittu kept a close eye on the server being used to publish them. He had a hunch whoever was behind this was either Finnish, or had lived in Finland for a long time: they knew which famous names to flaunt from the patient records.

…Police made a micropayment of 0.1 bitcoins to ransom_man. They were able to determine that, when it was laundered into real-world currency, it was transferred into [known hacker Aleksanteri “Julius”] Kivimäki’s bank account. The home folder ransom_man had accidentally uploaded had led the police to some servers, one of which had been paid for using a credit card linked to him – the same one he’d been using to pay for Apple services and an OnlyFans subscription.

…On 30 April 2024, Kivimäki was found guilty of all charges – including 9,600 counts of aggravated invasion of privacy and more than 21,300 counts of attempted aggravated extortion – and sentenced to six years and three months in prison: a long stretch by Finnish standards, but shy of the seven-year maximum he could have received. His appeal against his sentence is currently under way.

Even if his conviction is upheld, he will be a free man by the end of this year.

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Hardly surprising that someone who hacked a Finnish organisation is Finnish: it’s a uniquely difficult language, unrelated to its Nordic neighbours, so Kurittu’s job was surely made a lot easier. Most hackers grow out of it; Kivimäki is 28, but the interview in the article makes him sound like a psychopath.
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Is this man the future of music – or its executioner? AI evangelist Mikey Shulman says he’s making pop, not slop • The Guardian

Eamonn Forde:

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There remains debate about where exactly Suno sourced the music to train its systems – essentially breaking music into data strands for cataloguing – before its licensing deals were in place. “We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet,” wrote Shulman in a 2024 blogpost. Suno’s initial legal defence was that this constituted fair use, and the music it drew on did not require prior permission. The record industry thought differently. “Fair use,” countered the RIAA, does not apply “when the output seeks to ‘substitute’ for the work copied.”

I ask Shulman what he means by the “open internet”. There is a clear distinction between what is copyrighted (recordings are typically protected for 70 years) and what is in the public domain. “Copyright is a different thing,” he says. “I can’t get into too many specifics because there is active legal stuff going on, and also some of it is trade secrets.”

Could Suno’s philosophy of “democratising” music-making be inherently anti-art? What once sprang from extraordinary human creativity now becomes ordinary. Shulman insists that, as with digital recording or sampling, this is just another example of how technology “pushes music forward”, how “new people get discovered” and “new genres get invented”.

The issue of so-called AI slop is wholly subjective, he says. “I made a really funny song with my four-year-old yesterday morning. That is ‘slop’ to you – you don’t care about it – but I love it. It’s fantastic.” He is keen to stress, meanwhile, that music generated by Suno can be extremely high quality.

And AI-powered music is flooding streaming services: Deezer says more than a third of music delivered to it each day is AI (equal to 50,000 tracks), and 70% of streams of AI music on Deezer are fraudulent (scammers get cheaply made AI tracks on to such services, then use bots to manipulate streams at scale in order to get royalty payments, although services are increasingly wise to this).

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Inventor building AI-powered suicide chamber • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

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The inventor of a controversial suicide pod is making sure his device keeps up with the times by augmenting it with AI tech — which, we regret to inform you, is not merely some sort of dark joke.

“One of the parts to the device which hadn’t been finished, but is now finished, is the artificial intelligence,” the inventor, Philip Nitschke, told the Daily Mail in a new interview.

Named the Sarco pod after the ancient sarcophagus, the euthanasia chamber, first built in 2019, has been championed by the pro-assisted dying organization The Last Resort. In 2024, it was used to facilitate the suicide of a 64-year-old woman in Switzerland. The 3D-printed pod is activated when the person seeking to take their own life presses a button, filling the sealed, futuristic-looking coffin with nitrogen that causes the user to lose consciousness and “peacefully” pass away within a few minutes.

To date, the woman’s death in Switzerland is the only case of the Sarco pod seeing real-world action. Soon after she died, Swiss authorities showed up at the sylvan cabin where the pod was located and arrested the late Florian Willet, then co-president of Last Resort, who was supervising her death, on suspicion of aiding and abetting a suicide. He was ultimately released two months later.  

Assisted dying is technically legal in Switzerland, but only if the person seeking suicide is deemed to have the mental capacity to make the decision, and only if they carry out the suicide themselves, rather than a third-party.

That last bit is why the patient presses the button to activate the chamber, a workaround that stands on legally shaky ground as it is (hence Willet’s arrest). Even more contestable is determining whether the patient is capable of making their mortal decision — which, of course, is where AI enters the picture.

As Nitschke was designing a “Double Dutch” version of the Sarco pod that would allow couples to die together, he stumbled on the idea of using AI to administer a psychiatric “test” to determine their mental capacity. If they pass the AI’s judgment, it activates the “power to switch on the Sarco.”

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To be honest, I’m not reassured by AI entering the decision tree at that point, or at any point potentially involving my death.
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The longest solar eclipse for 100 years is coming. Don’t miss it • WIRED

Jorge Garay:

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The duration of a total solar eclipse always varies. In April 2024, the eclipse that crossed North America lasted 4 minutes and 28 seconds. By contrast, the one that will reach Spain in August 2026 will only last 1 minute and 43 seconds. In less than two years, both will be put to shame by the longest conjunction of the century.

According to NASA’s solar eclipse calendar, the longest solar eclipse in 100 years will occur on August 2, 2027. Its total phase will last 6 minutes and 23 seconds. During that time, regions of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East will be under the moon’s shadow.

According to the NASA map, the eclipse will begin in Morocco and southern Spain. It will then advance through Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, culminating in Yemen and the coast of Somalia. Its maximum duration will be recorded in Egypt, specifically in Luxor and Aswan, famous for their funerary temples.

Despite rampant conspiracy theories around every solar eclipse, they don’t affect your health or have any physical impact on the planet. It is a natural and predictable astronomical phenomenon, the result of the interaction between the sun, the moon and the Earth.

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I’ve never been in a totality; people say it’s an amazing experience. Maybe Morocco would be the place to see it?
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America is slow-walking into a Polymarket disaster • The Atlantic

Saahil Desai:

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The problem is that prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes as much about gambling as about the event itself. This kind of thing has already happened to sports, where the language of “parlays” and “covering the spread” has infiltrated every inch of commentary. ESPN partners with DraftKings to bring its odds to SportsCenter and Monday Night Football; CBS Sports has a betting vertical; FanDuel runs its own streaming network. But the stakes of Greenland’s future are more consequential than the NFL playoffs.

The more that prediction markets are treated like news, especially heading into another election, the more every dip and swing in the odds may end up wildly misleading people about what might happen, or influencing what happens in the real world. Yet it’s unclear whether these sites are meaningful predictors of anything. After the Golden Globes, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan excitedly posted that his site had correctly predicted 26 of 28 winners, which seems impressive—but Hollywood awards shows are generally predictable. One recent study found that Polymarket’s forecasts in the weeks before the 2024 election were not much better than chance.

…The irony of prediction markets is that they are supposed to be a more trustworthy way of gleaning the future than internet clickbait and half-baked punditry, but they risk shredding whatever shared trust we still have left. The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the capture of Nicolás Maduro may have been just a stroke of phenomenal luck that netted a roughly $400,000 payout. Or maybe someone with inside information was looking for easy money. Last week, when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt abruptly ended her briefing after 64 minutes and 30 seconds, many traders were outraged, because they had predicted (with 98% odds) that the briefing would run past 65 minutes. Some suspected, with no evidence, that Leavitt had deliberately stopped before the 65-minute mark to turn a profit. (When I asked the White House about this, the spokesperson Davis Ingle told me in a statement, “This is a 100% Fake News narrative.”)

Unintentionally or not, this is what happens when media outlets normalize treating every piece of news and entertainment as something to wager on. As Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s CEO, has said, his long-term goal is to “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”

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(Gift link for the full article.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Counterintuitively, the US has too *many* bus stops to make its bus services efficient. CC-licensed photo by Matt on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not stopping here. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Why Greenland’s natural resources are nearly impossible to mine • The Week UK

Justin Klawans:

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The island’s frigid, Arctic climate serves as the main culprit for challenging mining. Most of Greenland’s natural resources are “located in remote areas above the Arctic Circle, where there is a mile-thick polar ice sheet and darkness reigns much of the year,” said CNN. While people may understandably think neighboring Iceland is blanketed by ice, Greenland actually has the harsher climate; about “80% of Greenland is covered with ice,” and mining the “Arctic can be five to 10 times more expensive than doing it elsewhere on the planet.”

As a result, most of the efforts to mine Greenland’s minerals “generally haven’t advanced beyond the exploratory stage,” said The Associated Press. And beyond the weather playing a major factor, the remote areas where many of these elements are located also present a problem. Even in southern Greenland, where the island is “populated, there are few roads and no railways, so any mining venture would have to create these accessibilities,” said Diogo Rosa, an economic geology researcher with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, to the AP. There is also the question of power, as many of these remote areas don’t have consistent electricity.

As of now, Greenland only has one fully operational mine, which produces anorthosite and is “located deep inside a fjord system with no road access,” said Business Insider. All of the mine’s supplies, including the crew, “arrives by ship during the ice-free months or by helicopter when the fjord freezes over for months on end.” And there may not be another operational mine for a while; on average it “takes 16 years to develop a mine, right from the first idea to the actual mine,” Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s minister responsible for natural resources, said to Business Insider.

It is clear that the “Trump administration might want to dominate the Arctic, not least to gain relative power over Russia and China,” Lukas Slothuus, a postdoctoral research fellow at the U.K.’s University of Sussex, said at The Conversation. But given the challenges with mining, any “natural resource extraction is unlikely to feature centrally.” If foreign powers did find a way to mine in Greenland, this would “reverberate in Copenhagen, as Greenland has a mining profit-sharing agreement with Denmark.”

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Alternatively, as one person posted on Twitter: “Honestly this is a great premise for a sitcom:

In the icy wasteland of Greenland, a ragtag NATO detachment of 13 Germans, 2 Norwegians, 3 Swedes, 15 French and 1 lone Brit must “defend” the Arctic from… well, mostly boredom, polar bears, and each other’s national stereotypes.

Stationed at a remote outpost in Nuuk, their biggest enemies are cabin fever, frozen plumbing, the Danes who keep forgetting they’re there, and each other. They’re constantly prepping to counter the absurd threat of an American takeover with the total force smaller than a pub trivia team.

The show will have everything – petty national rivalries that project from history, offensive cultural stereotypes, frustration due to NATO bureaucracy, and because this is so European, the whole thing will be pretty gay. Oh and a recurring theme is that they will constantly be picking on the lone Brit.”

Apart from the “gay” bit (why??), I think this should be commissioned at once.
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RAM shortage chaos expands to GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and even hard drives • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

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Big Tech’s AI-fueled memory shortage is set to be the PC industry’s defining story for 2026 and beyond. Standalone, direct-to-consumer RAM kits were some of the first products to feel the bite, with prices spiking by 300% or 400% by the end of 2025; prices for SSDs had also increased noticeably, albeit more modestly.

The rest of 2026 is going to be all about where, how, and to what extent those price spikes flow downstream into computers, phones, and other components that use RAM and NAND chips—areas where the existing supply of products and longer-term supply contracts negotiated by big companies have helped keep prices from surging too noticeably so far.

This week, we’re seeing signs that the RAM crunch is starting to affect the GPU market—Asus made some waves when it inadvertently announced that it was discontinuing its GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

Though the company has since tried to walk this announcement back, if you’re a GPU manufacturer, there’s a strong argument for either discontinuing this model or de-prioritizing it in favor of other GPUs. The 5070 Ti uses 16GB of GDDR7, plus a partially disabled version of Nvidia’s GB203 GPU silicon. This is the same chip and the same amount of RAM used in the higher-end RTX 5080—the thinking goes, why continue to build a graphics card with an MSRP of $749 when the same basic parts could go to a card with a $999 MSRP instead?

…SSD prices have been climbing alongside RAM prices for months, but as of last month, the price increases for 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB drives were around twice as expensive as they had been in August 2025, compared to three or four times as expensive for DDR5 RAM kits. But things are moving in a bad direction, and high-capacity SSDs in particular are being hit hard.

If you want a 1TB internal M.2 SSD from a recognizable company, that will generally run you somewhere between $120 and $150—often a little higher than the $135 we recorded for a 1TB WD Blue drive back in January, but not absurdly so.

It’s still possible to find a decent 2TB drive like this SiliconPower model for around $230, the price we quoted for a 2TB Western Digital SN7100 in December. But currently, SSDs from big-name companies like Samsung and WD/SanDisk (currently in a state of flux, but the SanDisk-branded versions of these drives don’t appear to be at retail yet) are either out of stock at many major retailers or have shot up dramatically in price.

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WhatsApp texts are not contracts, judge rules in £1.5m divorce row • The Times

Ed Halford:

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A divorced painter who claimed her former husband signed over their £1.5 million home in an affluent north London area via WhatsApp has lost a High Court “test case” to keep the property.

Hsiao-mei Lin, 54, a Taiwanese-born British citizen, and the financier Audun Mar Gudmundsson, also 54, married in 2009 but separated seven years later.

During divorce proceedings, Lin was awarded their £1.5m house in Tufnell Park, an area known for its Victorian architecture and home to celebrities such as the actors Damian Lewis and Bill Nighy.

However, Lin, a graduate of the Royal Academy Schools, was unaware that only a week before their divorce, Gudmundsson, who ran a mezzanine finance company, was made bankrupt. It transpired that this was due to the financier owing a former friend and others £2.5m.

Despite a High Court ruling in 2024 declaring that the bankruptcy meant Lin only owned a 50% stake in their family home, she remained determined to prove that Gudmundsson had signed off the entire home to her before divorce proceedings. Lin’s proof, however, was not a watertight legal document but WhatsApp exchanges with her husband.

In a two-day appeal hearing last month, the trustees, Maxine Reid-Roberts and Brian Burke, disputed that these messages validly “disposed of” Gudmundsson’s interest in the house.

…Lin’s lawyers have claimed that because Gudmundsson’s name was in the header to the messages when they reached Lin’s phone they should be considered “signed”.

…Steve Fennel, acting for the trustees, argued that the messages were not signed and were therefore not legally binding. He said that if they were found to be so then the “result will be that a WhatsApp message in and of itself, without a ‘signature’ in the text, will in all cases count as signed for the purposes of all statutory requirements for signature”.

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Tricky case. But does this mean that just because it came from your phone it isn’t legal? What does that mean for email?
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Matt Damon: Netflix wants movies to account for viewers on their phone • Variety

Jack Dunn:

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[The actor Matt] Damon pointed out that because viewers give a “very different level of attention” to a movie at home versus in a theatre, Netflix wants to push the action set pieces toward the front of the runtime. He also said there are behind-the-scenes discussions about reiterating “the plot three or four times in the dialogue” to account for people being on their phones.

“The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third,” Damon explained. “You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale. And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.'”

[Ben] Affleck then cut in, adding that the streamer formula for successful content isn’t the only way. He used Netflix’s recent limited series hit “Adolescence” as a shining example.

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This was from an appearance they made on the Joe Rogan show. Can’t decide if it’s surprising or encouraging that all these years after they wrote and appeared in Good Will Hunting, they’re still bumping around together.

The point about restating the plot, though, is part of what’s noxious about streamer-made content. It’s also why some people complained about Pluribus, the new show on Apple TV+, being “too slow”: you have to wait for things to happen, and they don’t explain the plot every five minutes.
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ChatGPT to start showing ads in the US • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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ChatGPT will start including advertisements beside answers for US users as OpenAI seeks a new revenue stream.

The ads will be tested first in ChatGPT for US users only, the company announced on Friday, after increasing speculation that the San Francisco firm would turn to a potential cashflow model on top of its current subscriptions.

The ads will start in the coming weeks and will be included above or below, rather than within, answers. Mock-ups circulated by the company show the ads in a tinted box. They will be served to adult users “when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation”, according to OpenAI’s announcement. Ads will not be shown to users under 18 and will not appear alongside answers related to sensitive topics such as health, mental health or politics. Users will be able to click to learn about why they received a particular ad, according to OpenAI.

Previously, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, expressed reluctance to introduce ads to the chatbot: “I kind of hate ads just as an aesthetic choice.” His company has made commitments to spend more than $1tn on infrastructure supporting AI in the coming years. Altman has said that revenues are running at well over $13bn a year.

“Maybe there could be ads outside the [large language model] stream that are still really great, but the burden of proof there would have to be very high. And it would have to feel really useful to users and really clear that it was not messing with the model’s output,” Altman said recently. “I think it’d be very hard, we’d have to take a lot of care to get it right. People have a very high degree of trust in ChatGPT.”

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As someone observed, Altman has finally achieved his goal of AGI: ad-generated income. Google started showing ads beside search results in October 2000, just two years after it was founded (September 1998). OpenAI is going to start showing adverts 10 years after its December 2015 founding, though only slightly more than three years after going public with ChatGPT in November 2022.

So, basically, it’s running on about the same timeline.
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How Generative AI is destroying society • Marcus on AI

Gary Marcus, who is generally pessimistic about the big claims made for generative AI, is impressed by this paper:

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This is one of the most lucid and powerful articles I have read in years. Here’s the opening paragraph.

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If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than artificial intelligence. Authoritarian leaders and technology oligarchs are deploying AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity. Institutions that structure public governance, rule of law, education, healthcare, journalism, and families are all on the chopping block to be “optimized” by AI. AI boosters defend the technology’s role in dismantling our vital support structures by claiming that AI systems are just efficiency “tools” without substantive significance. But predictive and generative AI systems are not simply neutral conduits to help executives, bureaucrats, and elected leaders do what they were going to do anyway, only more cost-effectively. The very design of these systems is antithetical to and degrades the core functions of essential civic institutions, such as administrative agencies and universities.

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In the third paragraph they lay out their central point:

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In this Article, we hope to convince you of one simple and urgent point: the current design of artificial intelligence systems facilitates the degradation and destruction of our critical civic institutions. Even if predictive and generative AI systems are not directly used to eradicate these institutions, AI systems by their nature weaken the institutions to the point of enfeeblement. To clarify, we are not arguing that AI is a neutral or general purpose tool that can be used to destroy these institutions. Rather, we are arguing that AI’s current core functionality—that is, if it is used according to its design—will progressively exact a toll upon the institutions that support modern democratic life. The more AI is deployed in our existing economic and social systems, the more the institutions will become ossified and delegitimized. Regardless of whether tech companies intend this destruction, the key attributes of AI systems are anathema to the kind of cooperation, transparency, accountability, and evolution that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, AI systems are a death sentence for civic institutions, and we should treat them as such.

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The United States needs fewer bus stops • Works in Progress Magazine

Nithin Vejendla:

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When people talk about improving transit, they mention ambitious rail tunnels and shiny new trains. But they less often discuss the humble bus – which moves more people than rail in the US, the EU, and the UK – and whose ridership has bounced back more quickly after Covid than rail.

The problem with buses is that they are slow. For example, buses in New York City and San Francisco crawl along at a paltry eight miles per hour, only about double walking speeds in the fastest countries. There are lots of ways to speed up buses, including bus lanes and busways, congestion pricing, transit-priority signals, and all-door boarding. But one of the most powerful solutions requires no new infrastructure or controversial charges and has minimal cost: optimizing where buses stop. 

Buses in some cities, particularly those in the US, stop far more frequently than those in continental Europe. Frequent stopping makes service slower, less reliable, and more expensive to operate. This makes buses less competitive with other modes, reducing ridership. This is why, despite having fewer bus stops, European buses have a higher share of total trips than American ones.

Bus stop balancing involves strategically increasing the distance between stops from 700–800 feet (roughly 210–240 metres), common in older American cities or in London, to 1,300 feet, closer to the typical spacing in Western Europe, such as in Hanover, Germany. Unlike many transit improvements, stop balancing can be implemented quickly, cheaply, and independently by transit agencies. By removing signs and updating schedules, transit agencies can deliver faster service, better reliability, and more service with the same resources. 

American bus stops are often significantly closer together than European ones. The mean stop spacing in the United States is around 313m, which is about five stops per mile. However, in older, larger American cities, stops are placed even closer. In Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, the mean spacing drops down to 223m, 214m, and 248m respectively, meaning as many as eight stops per mile. By contrast, in Europe it’s more common to see spacings of 300m to 450m, roughly four stops per mile. An additional 500 feet takes between 1.5 and 2.5 minutes to walk at the average pace of 2.5 to 4 miles per hour.

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As you can imagine, having lots of bus stops slows a bus down, and means drivers (paid by the hour) travel less far, so you don’t carry as many people and they get where they’re going more slowly.
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Remembering the time an Islington Street was renamed… backwards • Londonist

Matt Brown:

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Does anywhere else in London do this?

You might well have wandered along Muriel Street. It’s the leafy residential road you’re forced to join, if you follow the Regent’s Canal east of King’s Cross (the canal heads into its Islington tunnel at this point).

Head north along Muriel Street and pass through a pedestrianised cutting, and you’ll emerge onto Leirum Street. It surely cannot be a coincidence that Leirum is Muriel backwards. What’s going on?

Turns out that both streets were once part of a united Muriel Street. However, the ‘pedestrian bit’ in the middle was causing confusion, and could lead to potential delays for emergency vehicles attending the wrong section.

In 2013, the Barnsbury Estate’s Tenant Management Association wrote to Islington Council requesting a change. Rather than invoking a new name, however, it was decided to simply run the letters backwards. The northern stretch thus became Leirum Street.

“It is ridiculous and it looks like a big balls up,” long-term resident Kath Wardely told the Evening Standard at the time. “I think they got the stencil the wrong way round and now they are trying to cover it up.”

The tenant association probably wanted to say: “That’s not how stencils work, Kath”, but instead responded to say that residents had been consulted in advance. Islington Council also chimed in to confirm that “Some residents thought it was a cock-up, but it was a quite deliberate decision.”

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That’s rather clever. As long as you pick a road that’s pronounceable backwards.
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To those who fired or didn’t hire tech writers because of AI • passo.uno

Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti:

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You might think that the plausible taste of AI prose is all you need to give your products a voice. You paste code into a field and something that resembles docs comes out after a few minutes. Like a student eager to turn homework in, you might be tempted to content yourself with docs theatre, thinking that it’ll earn you a good grade. It won’t, because docs aren’t just artifacts.

When you say “docs”, you’re careful to focus on the output, omitting the process. Perhaps you don’t know how docs are produced. You’ve forgotten, or perhaps never knew, that docs are product truth; that without them, software becomes unusable, because software is never done, is never obvious, and is never simple. Producing those docs requires tech writers.

Tech writers go to great lengths to get the information they need. They write so that your audience can understand. They hunger for clarity and meaning and impact. They power through weeks full of deadlines, chasing product news, because without their reporting, most products wouldn’t thrive; some wouldn’t even exist. Their docs aren’t a byproduct: they tie the product together.

An LLM can’t do all that, because it can’t feel the pain of your users. It can’t put itself into their shoes. It lacks the kind of empathy that’s behind great help content. It does not, in fact, have any empathy at all, because it cannot care. You need folks who will care, because content is a hairy beast that can only be tamed by agents made of flesh and capable of emotions: humans.

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This is certainly true about writing technical documents. You need people to have understood what’s going on. An LLM won’t do that.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you want to buy a Hermes Birkin bag, be prepared to be treated with suspicion by the company itself. And don’t wear the wrong watch. CC-licensed photo by Yvette Ilagan 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. Do parrots like them though? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

How WhatsApp took over the global conversation • The New Yorker

Sam Knight:

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British politics and, arguably, the British state are coördinated by WhatsApp. Ninety-two% of U.K. internet users are on the platform. Police officers banter on it. The National Health Service relies on it. On the afternoon of March 13, 2020—ten days before the U.K. entered its first covid lockdown—Dominic Cummings, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, formed a five-man WhatsApp group that came to more or less run the country.

That fall, a reporter from the Daily Mail asked a government spokesperson, via WhatsApp, whether it was true that national policies were being conceived this way. The spokesperson WhatsApped Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, with a suggested response: “the PM does not make government decisions via WhatsApp.” Case replied on WhatsApp less than a minute later: “Erm—is that true? I am not sure it is. I think we will have to ignore.”

…WhatsApp is phatic before it is anything else. It is an architecture of presence. It winks with life, informing you who is online and when they were last seen. Tiny bundles of data—relayed on the app’s servers through sockets, or continuous connections—tell you that your best friend is typing. Koum introduced “read receipts,” to show that texts were being sent and seen. At first, he imagined miniature icons that would represent a message’s odyssey through the network—showing servers and hard drives—but Borzov suggested something simpler: one check mark to show that WhatsApp had received your message and two to show that it had been delivered. When the message was opened, the check marks turned blue.

Blue check marks have saved some lives (WhatsApp is often the platform of choice for disaster responders) and tested many relationships. Whether to respond to a message that someone knows you have read with a heart, a thumbs-up, or a crying-face emoji is a modern-day imponderable, although I’m pretty sure that Malinowski would have taken a hard line on the subject. (In phatic conversation, he notes, “taciturnity means not only unfriendliness but directly a bad character.”)

…Sociologists who study WhatsApp family groups sometimes call them W.F.G.s. In 2023, Galit Alkobi and Natalia Khvorostianov, of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, published a study of Israeli W.F.G.s and suggested that there were three archetypal roles in these groups: kin-keepers, who are committed to online family life; flickerers, who are seemingly indifferent; and silent warm experts, who are problem solvers. We all know who we are. Alkobi conducted forty-three interviews with family members about their W.F.G.s and found that groups encompassing three generations showed extremely similar traits: problematic-discourse avoidance, an exaggerated writing style (exuberant celebrations, morose commiserations), and routine ejections.

«

And there’s plenty more. For the American readers of the New Yorker, of course, all this talk of WhatsApp is puzzling: they tend to use iMessage because the iPhone predominates, or possibly Signal. But now, as Knight points out, it’s growing fast, and there are more than 100 million users there.
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Grok was finally updated to stop undressing women and children, X Safety says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Late Wednesday, X Safety confirmed that Grok was tweaked to stop undressing images of people without their consent.

“We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis,” X Safety said. “This restriction applies to all users, including paid subscribers.”

The update includes restricting “image creation and the ability to edit images via the Grok account on the X platform,” which “are now only available to paid subscribers. This adds an extra layer of protection by helping to ensure that individuals who attempt to abuse the Grok account to violate the law or our policies can be held accountable,” X Safety said. Additionally, X will “geoblock the ability of all users to generate images of real people in bikinis, underwear, and similar attire via the Grok account and in Grok in X in those jurisdictions where it’s illegal,” X Safety said.

X’s update comes after weeks of sexualized images of women and children being generated with Grok finally prompting California Attorney General Rob Bonta to investigate whether Grok’s outputs break any US laws.

In a press release Wednesday, Bonta said that “xAI appears to be facilitating the large-scale production of deepfake nonconsensual intimate images that are being used to harass women and girls across the Internet, including via the social media platform X.” Notably, Bonta appears to be as concerned about Grok’s standalone app and website being used to generate harmful images without consent as he is about the outputs on X.

Before today, X had not restricted the Grok app or website. X had only threatened to permanently suspend users who are editing images to undress women and children if the outputs are deemed “illegal content.” It also restricted the Grok chatbot on X from responding to prompts to undress images, but anyone with a Premium subscription could bypass that restriction, as could any free X user who clicked on the “edit” button on any image appearing on the social platform.

«

Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation correspondent, remarked on a podcast that she could see the problem that was coming when Grok’s image-editing was made widely available, and that UK regulator Ofcom should have too – to say nothing of X and Elon Musk. But Musk is incapable of understanding the malice that exists out there, partly because he’s immersed in it; it’s like asking a fish to comment on the water.
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The Atlantic, Penske, and Vox Media sue Google for adtech antitrust violations • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

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Lawsuits seeking damages from Google’s illegal ad tech monopoly are piling up following the Justice Department’s successful antitrust case. Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, is the latest in a wave of media companies that have filed suit against Google, seeking to be reimbursed for the monopoly profits the tech company allegedly made at publishers’ expense.

“Absent Google’s conduct, Vox Media would be able to make available even more, higher quality impressions for purchase on Vox Media’s webpages and create more high-quality, premium journalism,” Vox Media alleges in its lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Southern District of New York. The Atlantic, which is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, filed a similar lawsuit in the same district this week, as did Penske Media, which is an investor in Vox Media and owns brands including Rolling Stone, Billboard, and The Hollywood Reporter. Later on Wednesday, two more publishers — McClatchy Media Company and Condé Nast owner Advance Publications — filed similar lawsuits. Google is also facing lawsuits from ad tech providers like PubMatic and OpenX, some of which testified in the trial about how Google’s dominance shut out competition.

…The publishers claim Google’s dominance lets it “depress prices for publisher inventory below competitive levels”
The lawsuits underscore the ways that the highly technical subject of the 2024 trial impacts an ecosystem of publishers and tech providers. For example, the media company complaints outline how Google’s illegal monopoly of the market for publisher ad servers, used to manage ad space for sale on publisher websites, has effectively stymied any viable competitors they might consider moving to.

«

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Microsoft is closing its employee library and cutting back on subscriptions • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Microsoft’s library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft’s digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an “AI-powered learning experience.”

Microsoft started cutting back on its employee subscriptions to news and reports services in November, with some publishers receiving an automated email cancellation of a contract. “This correspondence serves as official notification that Microsoft will not renew any existing contracts upon their respective expiration dates,” reads an email from Microsoft’s vendor management team. “We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere appreciation for your partnership, collaboration, and continued support throughout our engagement.”

Strategic News Service (SNS), which has provided global reports to Microsoft’s roughly 220,000 employees and executives for more than 20 years, is no longer part of Microsoft’s subscription list. In an email to Microsoft employees that relied on SNS reports, the publisher notes that “Microsoft has just released an automated announcement that all library contracts, of which the SNS Global Report is perhaps the most strategic for your own use, are to be turned off.”

Microsoft employees I’ve spoken to recently have lost access to digital publications like The Information. They’re also unable to perform digital checkouts of business books from the Microsoft Library. While Microsoft often rotates the publishers it uses in its Library service, this time it’s part of a much broader change that seems like corporate cost cutting mixed with the continued push for AI.

«

Steven Sinofsky, who worked at Microsoft through its crucial growth years and led the Office team (among others), called it “a crown jewel of the early days”, which bought every PC book and two copies of any piece of software and would get any magazine or article you wanted, if they didn’t have it.

But don’t worry, CoPilot is here to make them up!
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My work went from air-conditioned offices to delivering food on a bike. The culture shock is significant • The Guardian

David Rayfield started working as a bike messenger in Melbourne:

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When you deliver for companies like Uber Eats, no two shifts are the same. I’d say 80% of my deliveries are fast food – a combination of McDonald’s, KFC, Hungry Jacks and coffee. Lots of coffee. My new workplace couldn’t be more different than the grey blur of an office, surrounded by the same walls and same people week after week. The culture shock of going from comfy chairs and morning teas to trying not to get killed in traffic was significant.

After being made redundant four times in six years, months passed with hundreds of unsuccessful job applications. Bills needed to be paid. The big ones were still looming, but the small costs could be covered by delivering for Uber Eats. My Xbox was gathering dust so I sold it at Cash Converters and put the money towards a half-decent mountain bike.

The first thing that hits you riding is the feeling of independence. In between delivering Grey Goose vodka and KFC Zinger burgers, there’s the realisation that it’s just you out there. After four months, I haven’t talked to anyone at Uber Eats. I signed up on my phone, they sent me a fluoro thermal bag, and off I went. I don’t have to worry about anybody making me redundant because there is no anybody – there’s just me. If I want to spend hours in the park eating lunch, I will. Need more sleep? That’s between me and my doona. Granted, my wages are much lower, but what value can be placed on listening to Wu-Tang Clan with wind in my hair versus dreading another company restructure?

Just to be clear, my hair is secure underneath a helmet. Which was good for when I collided with a car and ended up with a face full of road. There are lots of bike paths in Melbourne, but far too many of them are squeezed in between moving traffic and parked traffic. They’re less than a metre wide and often occupied by wavering cars, massive trucks or in this case, part of a parked Ford Fiesta. Before I could react, a driver had opened their door into the bike lane without looking. I couldn’t do anything except stop my bike dead while my body crashed into the bitumen.

Things like this happen too often.

…I always knew urban planning was designed around cars but now I feel it in my bones. Not only is the amount of space dedicated to cars immense, society focuses on cars first. Shopfronts and advertisements face the road, hundreds of car parks take up thousands of metres and I avoid countless potholes in bike lanes while the cars right next to me drive on pristine asphalt.

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The third audience is generative AI • Dries Buytaert

Dries Buytaert is the founder of Drupal, the website and blogging platform:

»

I used Claude Code to build a new feature for my site this morning. Any URL on my blog can now return Markdown instead of HTML.

I added a small hint in the HTML to signal that the Markdown version exists, mostly to see what would happen. My plan was to leave it running for a few weeks and write about it later if anything interesting turned up.

Within an hour, I had hundreds of requests from AI crawlers, including ClaudeBot, GPTBot, OpenAI’s SearchBot, and more. So much for waiting a few weeks.

For two decades, we built sites for two audiences: humans and search engines. AI agents are now the third audience, and most websites aren’t optimized for them yet.

We learned how to play the SEO game so our sites would rank in Google. Now people are starting to invest in things like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

…The speed of adoption tells me AI agents are hungry for cleaner content formats and will use them the moment they find them. What I don’t know yet is whether this actually benefits me. It might lead to more visibility in AI answers, or it might just make it easier for AI companies to use my content without sending traffic back.

«

That’s the worry, isn’t it? The first audience is real humans. The second is search engines. And now the third one is generative AI, eagerly slurping up anything new or changed. But as Buytaert says, will that bring traffic?
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Home address, social media checks: how Hermes stalks would-be buyers before (and after) selling a Birkin • NDTV

Dristi Sharma:

»

At first glance, buying a luxury handbag should be simple enough if you have the money. Walk into a boutique, choose what you like, pay, leave. But at Hermes, one of the world’s most powerful luxury houses, money alone rarely guarantees access. Instead, shoppers are quietly inducted into what even loyal clients jokingly call the “Hermes game” a complex, opaque system where patience, perception and behaviour matter as much as spending power.

The conversation around this unwritten game sharpened last week when Hermes hosted an ultra-exclusive private sale in Paris, open only to a shrinking and tightly vetted circle of clients. At the same time, prices for leather goods and ready-to-wear quietly rose, according to Glitz. The timing was telling. This was not a routine price hike, but another signal of how firmly Hermes is tightening control over access, scarcity and status.

…Ironically, while Hermes emphasises “relationships”, clients increasingly find it difficult to build genuine rapport with sales associates. Staff are encouraged to avoid overt familiarity, as relationships deemed too close can trigger managerial suspicion around favouritism or resale risks.

This creates a structural mistrust that stiffens interactions and undermines the warm, personalised experience luxury retail typically promises. From the brand’s perspective, this rigidity serves a purpose. Control is central to the Hermes model. The goal is not merely to sell bags, but to protect the symbolic power of scarcity that surrounds them.

The booming second-hand luxury market and stricter anti-money-laundering regulations have intensified this scrutiny. As one sales associate at a major Paris boutique told Glitz, “Every new client is automatically a suspect.” Staff now collect and assess far more data than before, from home addresses and their perceived prestige to social media activity and online presence. Sales associates are trained to evaluate whether a client’s buying journey appears coherent.

Rapid accumulation of non-quota bags to hit a spending threshold raises red flags, as does shopping across multiple boutiques or countries. Furniture purchases, interestingly, score highly, signalling long-term commitment rather than quick flips. Loyalty to one store, cross-category shopping and a clear alignment with the Hermes universe all work in a client’s favour.

Even subtle signals matter. Wearing an Audemars Piguet or Richard Mille watch is read positively, while a flashy Rolex may be judged ostentatious.

«

Please enjoy this glimpse into another, weirdly suspicious world.
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How to manipulate prediction markets for your greater good • Polemic Paine

Polemic Paine:

»

It’s 8PM Eastern Time on January 14th, 2026. In four hours, a Polymarket bet will resolve.

Earlier today, an account called “mutualdelta”, so fresh it still had that new-car smell, dropped over $160,000 on “Yes” for a US military strike on Iran by end of day. They scaled it to over $240,000 as the day progressed. The odds, which had been languishing around 14%, shot up to 25%. Twitter lost its mind.

Real-time tracking threads. Speculation about insider knowledge. The whole circus.

The market closes at 11:59 PM ET tonight. As I write this, no strike has occurred. The bet is most likely going to zero.

And somewhere, I’m fairly certain, someone is counting their money.

Just not from Polymarket.

«

As you’ll now know, the attack didn’t happen, and so the money was lost. So why make the dramatic money-losing bet? In order to make money somewhere else, as the writer explains. It’s complicated, but makes total sense, and shows why you really shouldn’t pay too much attention to Polymarket (a predictions betting market) – or at least not take it entirely seriously.
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New UK offshore wind farms could significantly cut power prices • Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit

»

The 8.4GW of offshore wind power announced this week in the Contracts for Difference (CfDs) auction Allocation Round 7 (AR7) is set to boost clean power output, such that – had these wind farms been operating over the last year – gas power generation could have been a third (35%) lower, cutting day-ahead wholesale electricity prices by up to £11 per MWh (13%), down to £72/MWh, according to analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

The price reductions caused by these new renewables would have been on top of the savings delivered by operational wind farms pushing gas off the system, which cut the average price by around £38/MWh in 2025, down from £121/MWh to £83/MWh. [3]

Taken together, these results suggest that, had Britain deployed no wind power over recent decades and had instead relied more on gas, power prices could have been up to £49/MWh (67% i.e. two-thirds) higher in 2025 compared to if renewables had been rolled out faster. [4]

Jess Ralston, Energy Analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said: “It might not be itemised on bills, but more British renewables squeezing gas off the system has the effect of reducing wholesale power prices, lowering those costs for both industry and households.

“There’s lots of large numbers being bandied around, but the reality is that the offshore wind projects secured today are likely to see levies on bills break-even. And in the event of another gas price spike, which given uncertainty in petro-states worldwide is possible, could see billpayers paid back.”

«

Various 19th century loons have come out of the woodwork at the announcement of this nuclear power station’s worth of wind, which they’re sure could be more cheaply done with gas, ignoring the volatility of gas prices and its greenhouse effects.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The rising popularity of vinyl has also led to “listening parties” which ban phones and other distractions. CC-licensed photo by Tom Collins on Flickr.

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

Why listening parties are everywhere right now • Dazed

Josh Crowe:

»

Listening parties [for new albums] have rapidly evolved from industry-only previews into a central pillar of modern album rollouts. Artists from Billie Eilish and Frank Ocean to independent collectives are increasingly favouring immersive listening experiences over traditional launches. In an era where listening to music largely happens via streaming services, these in-person events offer an alternative which demands time and attention – and, crucially, fosters community.

Streaming has transformed how music is consumed, but in doing so, many argue it has also flattened the album format. While access has never been easier, depth of engagement has become harder to sustain. Listening parties push back against this logic. They ask audiences to slow down, to sit with an album in its entirety, and to experience it collectively.

For fans, the collective element can be as powerful as the music itself. Lysette, who attended Rosalía’s LUX listening party the day before the album’s release, describes the event as a rare space for connection. Listening to the record together heightened that sense of shared experience. “We could see everyone’s reactions to each song. They’re all so different on this album, so it was really special to experience that collectively, then talk about it afterwards.” For Lysette, the palpable attention to detail – from the organisation to the atmosphere – only deepened the emotional impact. “It really built excitement for the album. It’s such a great way to connect, not only with the music but with other people who love that artist in similar ways.”

She also points to the scalability of these events. “It felt unique, but also doable. It’s not a long event, but it supports fan communities in cities all around the world — especially places that aren’t physically close to where the artist is based.” In that sense, listening parties offer global reach without sacrificing intimacy. And intimacy is increasingly important: for Gen Z especially, these events tap into a broader desire for ‘analogue’ experiences.

«

Taking phones completely out of the equation – as is demanded at listening parties – makes a huge difference. But there’s definitely a hunger for the analogue experience among younger generations. In the town where I live there’s a vinyl record shop, and many of its most regular customers are under 30. One of them, the owner told me, comes in with his (parents’?) pop albums, sells them to the shop (which can resell them – that’s where most vinyl comes from now), and buys prog rock albums from the 1970s and 1980s. Everything old is new again.
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Home secretary says she has no confidence in West Midlands police chief • BBC News

Susie Rack and Alex McIntyre:

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At appearances on 1 December and 6 January, [West Midlands police chief constable Craig] Guildford told the Home Affairs Select Committee the force “do not use AI”, rather that it was a Google search that provided the erroneous information [that Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans had rioted in a match against West Ham – a fixture which never happened].

In his letter to the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee published on Wednesday, Guildford said the information “arose as a result of a use of Microsoft Copilot” and offered a “profound apology” for the mistake.

A Microsoft spokesperson told the BBC: “We are not able to replicate what is being reported. Copilot combines information from multiple web sources into a single response with linked citations. It informs users they are interacting with an AI system and encourages them to review the sources.”

[Police and Crime Commissioner] Sir Andy [Foster’s] review found eight inaccuracies in a report from the force to Birmingham’s safety group, including a reference to the non-existent Tel Aviv-West Ham game.

Others included overstating the number of Dutch police officers deployed during a Maccabi match in Amsterdam and claims Muslim communities had been intentionally targeted by Tel Aviv fans.

The decision on the ban from the safety group – which is made up of representatives from the council, police and other authorities – prompted political outrage, including from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

«

This is surely the first time that AI, and specifically Microsoft CoPilot, has been held responsible for a policing mistake. Or should one say – the first time that we know of.
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Bandcamp’s mission and our approach to Generative AI • Bandcamp blog

»

Bandcamp’s mission is to help spread the healing power of music by building a community where artists thrive through the direct support of their fans. We believe that the human connection found through music is a vital part of our society and culture, and that music is much more than a product to be consumed. It’s the result of a human cultural dialog stretching back before the written word.

Similarly, musicians are more than mere producers of sound. They are vital members of our communities, our culture, and our social fabric. Bandcamp was built to directly connect artists and their fans, and to make it easy for fans to support artists equitably so that they can keep making music.

Today we are fortifying our mission by articulating our policy on generative AI, so that musicians can keep making music, and so that fans have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.

Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:

• Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp. 

• Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.

«

The proof is in the pudding, of course, but the expectation will be that the community will report suspicious content.
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Getting data out of a PDF figure • Adam Kucharski on Substack

Adam Kucharski:

»

Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version?

A few years ago I made a somewhat popular R package that allowed users to extract the underlying geometry of a PDF figure, so they could get the exact data points that went into the original figure. (Which came in handy for public health emergencies, when governments often release crucial data buried in PDF figures.)

But the user experience was still a bit clunky – it required ghostscript to be set up, and there were some intermediate output files that required manual edits.

So I rebuilt it with Claude Code. Everything runs locally in the browser, and hopefully now a much smoother experience!
Try it out here: https://adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/.

«

This is sure to come in useful for some people, even if increasingly one might think that this capability will be sucked natively into chatbots. (This is the first time of quoting a Substack Note rather than Substack article, I think.)
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How London finally cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground • Ian Visits

Ian Mansfield:

»

Dotted around London, there are a number of private hotels that aren’t the sort of hotel you might expect – they’re needed to make mobile phones work on the London Underground.

They’re not for humans, but for huge racks of computer and electronics equipment – and each of the UK’s mobile networks is renting space inside them, as this was one of the innovations that allowed phones to work underground in the first place.

While many newer underground railways have had mobile coverage in their tunnels for years, fitting it into the London Underground kept running into the same problem – it costs a lot of money and needs a lot more space in the stations than is available.

Classically, each of the mobile networks would install its own kit in each station and manage it, but there simply wasn’t enough space for that in London’s old tube stations, many of which were built before the wireless telegraph was even invented.

However, as radio equipment has become smaller and cleverer, it’s now possible for several networks to share the same equipment, and in 2021 Boldyn Networks (then BAI Communications) signed a deal to build a “neutral network” that can be leased to mobile networks.

Bodyn has a 20-year concession with Transport for London (TfL) to build and operate the network, and, aside from internal staff time spent managing the project, it’s being delivered at no cost to TfL.

…Although it’s taken four years to get about half of the London Underground covered with a phone signal, they now expect the rest to take just a year to complete. That’s in part thanks to experience speeding things up, and also because a lot of the equipment has already gone in over the past four years. All they need are the final bits to complete the job and switch it on… So, most of it should be live by the end of 2026.

«

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CreepyLink

»

CreepyLink: the URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible.

Normal links are too trustworthy. Make them creepy.

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I pasted in a search term and it yielded https://netflix.c1ic.link/urgent_8yvNSS_photo_viewer_update.zip which, despite appearances, does actually go to the search page. (I checked with curl because you want to just be careful, don’t you.)

Nice to see that people can still have fun online.
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Australia’s march toward 100% clean energy • WIRED

Julian Spector:

»

Australia has put itself on a realistic path to achieving what climate activists around the world have long dreamed of: running its power grid entirely on renewable energy.

The Australian Energy Market Operator oversees the nation’s power markets. Chief among them, the National Electricity Market serves about 90% of customers, minus remote areas and the west coast. At its peak, the system uses 38 gigawatts of power—more than New York state’s peak consumption. Over the last five years, AEMO has rigorously studied how the country, whose coal fleet is aging and which banned nuclear energy decades ago, can run this grid on renewables alone.

“This is not a climate-zealot kind of approach,” AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told Canary Media. ​“Our old coal-fired power stations are breaking down; they’re retiring,” he said. ​“They’re getting replaced by the least-cost energy, which is renewable energy, backed with storage, connected in with transmission. We’ll have a bit of gas there for the winter doldrums. That is just what’s happening.”

Australia’s efforts could offer a proof of concept for how a nation with a bustling, modern economy can rapidly shift its electricity from fossil fuels—mostly coal with some gas—to wind, solar, storage, and other renewable sources like hydropower.

“There’s nothing impossible about 100% renewable supply,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton University professor who has studied net-zero pathways for the US. ​“Australia has a better chance of this than almost anywhere.”

So far, renewables have surged to about 35% of annual electricity production, while coal still leads with 46%, according to the International Energy Agency. Because this transition is primarily driven by market forces, rather than a legislative or regulatory requirement, Westerman couldn’t say for sure when Australia will hit the 100% mark. He does expect 90% of Australia’s coal generation will be gone by 2035, and the rest could shutter later that decade.

«

Westerman was in charge of the UK National Grid when it began running without coal in 2017; seven years later the last coal-powered power station shut down. Gradually and then suddenly.
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Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

The reboot of the early internet online community Digg, a one-time rival to Reddit, is moving forward. The company, which is today back under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is launching its open beta to the public on Wednesday.

Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds featuring posts from across a selection of its communities and join other communities that align with your interests. There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or “digg”) the site’s content.

Originally a Web 2.0-era news aggregation site, Digg was once valued at $175m in 2008 but was ultimately outpaced by Reddit. That earlier version was split up in 2012, with its largest stake sold to the incubator Betaworks, while LinkedIn and The Washington Post picked up other pieces. This iteration of Digg drew additional investment in 2016 but was later sold to a digital advertising company in 2018.

…the rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading them to acquire Digg last March through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and the venture firm S32. The company has not disclosed its funding.

They’re betting that AI can help to address some of the messiness and toxicity of today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they’re not taken over by AI bots posing as people.

«

So this is at least the third incarnation (at least) of Digg, which fell away from its original success due to a mistaken redesign in 2010 which lost out to Reddit. This feels like another attempt to get the band back together, but nobody’s interested in the songs they’re playing.
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Experts predict major shift in global energy production: “[it] will dominate the future” • The Cooldown

Cody Januszko:

»

Within the next few years, renewable energy sources are expected to surpass coal, oil, and gas on a global scale.

According to the International Energy Agency’s 2025 report, “Global renewable power capacity is expected to double between now and 2030, increasing by 4,600 gigawatts.” 

The agency observed that this is roughly equivalent to the combined power generation of China, the European Union, and Japan. 

However, the outlook isn’t entirely rosy. The 2025 World Energy Outlook considers three scenarios. The first considers current policies, the second considers policies that have been spoken about in the political arena, and the third considers countries aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050. 

In the first scenario, the IEA projected the highest increase in demand for energy sources like oil and natural gas. While the other two scenarios saw less of these energy types, all three predicted that the threshold of 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) of warming by 2050 set forth in the Paris Climate Agreement will be surpassed. 

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So, good news and bad news.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new report reckons diesel fuel could disappear from some filling stations by 2030, as EVs replace older vehicles. CC-licensed photo by Rick Obst on Flickr.

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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. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

I didn’t want to write about child sexual abuse images • Whatever Works

Naomi Alderman:

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[Grok producing sexualised images] is not like a cigar or even going to an adult sex club, and I am going to explain the two key reasons why.

My knowledge about this comes from the time I spent working at the children’s charity Barnardo’s in the 2000s, when they were researching the early internet and specifically I did some work with their child abuse team when they were learning how the internet was affecting abuse of children. I was never a front-line worker, but I wrote for and edited reports on their findings. The report I worked on was called Just One Click and you can read the recent update to that report here.

Reason 1: abusers use these images to groom and manipulate their victims

Abusers want to convince kids not to talk about what’s happening, to have them so confused that they think they ‘wanted it’ on some level or made it happen and are too ashamed to tell another adult. This is how abusers remain hidden.

Child abuse images can be an important tool for them. When I learned about this at Barnardo’s they explained to me that abusers show the images to children and say “look, this child is enjoying what is happening here”. That is a very powerful way to convince a child that what’s happening to them is normal.

In an incredibly stupid comment yesterday, shadow Technology Secretary Julia Lopez said that Grok isn’t a problem because: “from crude drawing to Photoshop, Grok is not the only tool capable of generating false or offensive imagery”.

People have always been able to make horrible images, yes. But “could someone make something distasteful to whack off to?” is not the test. The test is “could this image convince a child that it is real, so that the child believes that other children do this and enjoy it?”

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“Allowing AI image generation of child sexual abuse images will cause more children to be abused”, Alderman says. It’s a crucial point which has apparently escaped politicians such as Kemi Badenoch (who offered the adult sex club metaphor: “just keep the kids out of social media!” she offered) or her colleague Lopez. (There’s another reason why it’s bad; the outcome is the same.)

As a side note, Alderman is one of those rare very smart people who can distill complex problems down into their key strands and isolate the ones that do and don’t matter. Worth following.
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Instagram AI influencers are defaming celebrities with sex scandals • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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AI generated influencers are sharing fake images on Instagram that appear to show them having sex with celebrities like LeBron James, iShowSpeed, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. One AI influencer even shared an image of her in bed with Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. The images are AI generated but are not disclosed as such, and funnel users to an adult content site where the AI generated influencers sell nude images. 

This recent trend is the latest strategy from the growing business of monetizing AI generated porn by harvesting attention on Instagram with shocking or salacious content. As with previous schemes we’ve covered, the Instagram posts that pretend to show attractive young women in bed with celebrities are created without the celebrities’ consent and are not disclosed as being AI generated, violating two of Instagram’s policies and showing once again that Meta is unable or unwilling to reign in AI generated content on its platform. 

Most of the Reels in this genre that I have seen follow a highly specific formula and started to appear around December 2025. First, we see a still image of an AI-generated influencer next to a celebrity, often in the form of a selfie with both of them looking at the camera. The text on the screen says “How it started.” Then, the video briefly cuts to another still image or videos of the AI generated influencer and the celebrity post coitus, sweaty, with tussled hair and sometimes smeared makeup. Many of these posts use the same handful of audio clips. Since Instagram allows users to browse Reels that use the same audio, clicking on one of these will reveal dozens of examples of similar Reels. 

LeBron James and adult film star Johnny Sins are frequent targets of these posts, but I’ve also seen similar Reels with the likeness of Twitch streamer iShowSpeed, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, MMA fighters Jon Jones and Connor McGregor, soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, and many others…

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We are in a very strange place. OK, Meta, time to get on top of this. (Remember when deepfakes were just a theory? First use of “deepfake” here was December 2017.)
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Meta is closing down three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Meta is laying off about 10% of its Reality Labs metaverse division, and the cuts include closing down some of its VR gaming studios.

Twisted Pixel Games, the developer of Marvel’s Deadpool VR, Sanzaru Games, the developer of the Asgard’s Wrath franchise, and Armature Studio, which worked on the Resident Evil 4 VR port, are all being closed down, according to an internal memo viewed by Bloomberg. The team behind the VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer develop new content or features for it, though the “existing product” will still be supported, Bloomberg says. Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed to The Verge that Bloomberg’s reporting is accurate.

Laid off staffers have posted about the closures online.

…Meta acquired Supernatural developer Within in 2023 (after a fight with the FTC), Twisted Pixel and Armature in 2022, and Sanzaru in 2020. The company closed Echo VR developer Ready at Dawn, which it also acquired in 2020, in 2024.

In a statement about the broader Reality Labs layoffs, Clayton said that “We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables. This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year.”

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Translation: Zuckerberg is bored of the metaverse because it turned out he got it wrong, and it’s going to vanish under the waves in short order.
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You can now reserve a hotel room on the Moon for $250,000 • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

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A company called GRU Space publicly announced its intent to construct a series of increasingly sophisticated habitats on the Moon, culminating in a hotel inspired by the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco.

On Monday, the company invited those interested in a berth to plunk down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, qualifying them for a spot on one of its early lunar surface missions in as little as six years from now.

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

All of this could therefore be dismissed as a lark. But I must say that I am a sucker for these kinds of stories. Chan is perfectly earnest about all of this. And despite all of the talk about lunar resources, my belief is that the surest long-term commercial activity on the Moon will be lunar tourism—it would be an amazing destination.

So when I interviewed Chan, I did so with an open mind.

…If all that sounds audacious and unrealistic, well, it kind of is. But it is not without foundation. GRU Space has already received seed funding from Y Combinator, and it will go through the organization’s three-month program early this year. This will help Chan refine his company’s product and give him more options to raise money. Regarding his vision, you can read GRU Space’s white paper.

Presently, the company plans to fly its initial “mission” in 2029 as a 10-kg payload on a commercial lunar lander, demonstrating an inflatable structure capability and converting lunar regolith into Moon bricks using geopolymers. With its second mission, the company plans to launch a larger inflatable structure into a “lunar pit” to test a scaled-up version of its resource development capabilities.

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Longtime readers will recall that the Moon is really, really inhospitable. See “The Moon smells like gunpowder” from February 2023:

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lunar dust is the shattered remains of rocks, broken repeatedly by tiny meteorites striking the surface. It’s sharp. So sharp, in fact, that it slashed the seals on some of the vacuum-sealed bags meant to preserve moon dust on the way home; they wound up being contaminated with oxygen by the time the Apollo missions made their three-day trip back to Earth.

It clung so severely to the moonwalking space suits, that even brushing each other off before returning to the module effectively did nothing to remove the dust.

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LLM predictions for 2026, shared with Oxide and Friends • Simon Willison

Simon Willison:

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In 2023, saying that LLMs write garbage code was entirely correct. For most of 2024 that stayed true. In 2025 that changed, but you could be forgiven for continuing to hold out. In 2026 the quality of LLM-generated code will become impossible to deny.

I base this on my own experience—I’ve spent more time exploring AI-assisted programming than most.

The key change in 2025 (see my overview for the year) was the introduction of “reasoning models” trained specifically against code using Reinforcement Learning. The major labs spent a full year competing with each other on who could get the best code capabilities from their models, and that problem turns out to be perfectly attuned to RL since code challenges come with built-in verifiable success conditions.

Since Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 came out in November and December respectively the amount of code I’ve written by hand has dropped to a single digit percentage of my overall output. The same is true for many other expert programmers I know.

At this point if you continue to argue that LLMs write useless code you’re damaging your own credibility.

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There are predictions for the one-year, three-year and six-year timeline. Earlier on Tuesday, Willison pointed to one of his three-year predictions – “Someone will build a new browser using mainly AI-assisted coding and it won’t even be a surprise” – and observed “MiniJinja isn’t anywhere close to the scope of a web browser, but it’s still a noteworthy step towards this three year prediction I made last week”.

Observe that his six-year prediction is “Typing code by hand will go the way of punch cards”. Worth reading through all his predictions! There’s good new for parrots (this week’s theme, apparently – send in your parrot links) included.
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Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse • Coy Wolf

Jon Henshaw interviews Eugen Rochko, creator of Mastodon:

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JH: I know the general answer to why people aren’t there [on Mastodon rather than other social networks]: their audience isn’t. And for many companies, they can’t advertise, and I know that’s important to them. With all that said, what do you think it’s gonna take in society, with technology, something political, or whatever, to get people to finally move over into something like we’re experiencing on Mastodon?

ER: Good question. I’ve been saying this for a long time: if everybody were using smoke signals, we’d all be on smoke signal dot social. The features matter a lot less than the people who are using the platform, and it’s always been that way.

It can sometimes be a bit misleading when you get a lot of ideas and feature requests in a community, and the conversations become, “We definitely need feature X to grow because that’s what’s stopping people from using the platform.” While that’s true in some cases, the sad reality is that any flaw can be overlooked as long as the people you want to reach are there. And that’s why so many people are still using X, which, by the way, is an absolutely god-awful platform.

The most basic answer to the question is that there needs to be more knowledge about what the Fediverse gives you, and that requires more knowledge about what the other platforms take away from you. I think there are promising developments on this front because more and more people care about digital sovereignty. People no longer want to rely on US tech companies, especially if they live in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else on Earth. And what Mastodon and the fediverse offer is a social media platform in your country, local to you, not subject to whatever is happening in the US or to any third-party developers of the software. And I think as more people and organizations realize this, the easier it becomes to convince others to join and use Mastodon on a personal and organizational level.

JH: I love that answer. It’s gonna take education. That answer actually excites me.

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As Benedict Evans observes, this is exactly like the Marxist idea of “false consciousness”. Who’s going to educate these people into disliking the networks they’ve been on for ages to switch over to one where they’d have to start all over again?
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Coal power generation falls in China and India for first time since 1970s • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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Coal power generation fell in China and India last year for the first time since the 1970s, in a “historic” moment that could bring a decline in global emissions, according to analysis.

The simultaneous fall in coal-powered electricity in the world’s biggest coal-consuming countries had not happened since 1973, according to analysts at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, and was driven by a record roll-out of clean energy projects.

The research, commissioned by the climate news website Carbon Brief, found that electricity generated by coal plants fell by 1.6% in China and by 3% in India last year, after the boom in clean energy across both countries was more than enough to meet their rising demand for energy.

“The drop in coal power and record increase in clean energy in China and India marks a historic moment,” according to the report, which could be “a sign of things to come”.

Together, the countries drove more than 90% of the increase in global carbon emissions between 2015 and 2024, meaning a permanent reduction in coal use could bring a peak in the world’s coal consumption and global emissions.

China added more than 300GW of solar power and 100GW of wind power last year – together, more than five times the UK’s total existing power generation capacity – which are both “clear new records for China and, therefore, for any country ever”, the report said.

India added 35GW of solar, 6GW of wind and 3.5GW of hydropower last year, according to the analysis. The faster clean-energy growth made up 44% of the reduction in India’s coal and gas, compared with the previous five years, marking the first time that clean-energy growth has played a significant role in driving down India’s coal-fired power generation.

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Some petrol stations set to stop selling diesel fuel by 2030 •The Independent

Neil Lancefield:

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Some filling stations in London will stop selling diesel within the next four years as demand dwindles, according to a new report.

The analysis by electric vehicle (EV) think tank New AutoMotive also predicted that many of the roughly 8,400 filling stations across the UK will have stopped selling the fuel by 2035. It predicted this will encourage more motorists to switch to EVs.

Diesel vehicle numbers and fuel use are consistently falling nationwide. In 10 years, there will only be about 250,000 diesel cars left on the roads, the report forecast, down from 15.5 million as of the end of June 2025.

London is expected to be the UK’s first city with no diesel cars. The expansion of the ultra-low emission zone in 2023 means using a diesel car registered before September 2015 anywhere in the capital incurs a £12.50 daily fee.

The report stated: “It is likely that some, and perhaps many, filling stations in London will stop stocking diesel before the end of the decade.” It added: “Nationwide, it is clear that diesel fuel sales are falling, and this is being driven by the reduction in car numbers. Whilst it is impossible to accurately predict when the majority of filling stations will stop stocking diesel, it is clear that there is a distinct possibility that many will over the 2030s.”

Some filling stations now offer EV charging. The Petrol Retailers Association (PRA) said last year only 57% of its members believe fuel will be a core source of their revenue in a decade.

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I think close to 0% of filling stations find fuel is a core source of their profits. The same might be true for electricity – but people will probably take longer to charge their cars (at least to begin with), offering more time to sell things to customers.
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2025 Holiday PC shipments exceed expectations as vendors accelerate inventory purchases amid supply concerns • IDC

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Global PC shipments grew 9.6% year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching 76.4m units, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The results cap off a tumultuous year for the PC market, marked by the end of support for Windows 10, which drove a wave of upgrade demand, and early year tariff concerns that prompted vendors to pull forward more inventory than originally planned. While the holiday season typically drives stronger demand, the surge in late 2025 was further amplified by emerging memory shortages that led buyers and brands to secure inventory ahead of anticipated price increases in 2026.

“IDC expects that the PC market will be far different in 12 months given how quickly the memory situation is evolving,” said Jean Philippe Bouchard, research vice-president with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. “Beyond the obvious pressure on prices of systems, already announced by certain manufacturers, we might also see PC memory specifications be lowered on average to preserve memory inventory on hand. The year ahead is shaping up to be extremely volatile.”

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For perspective: the peak of the PC market was in 3Q-4Q 2011, when 95m PCs were sold in each quarter. Since then, sales have fallen; the 76.4m figure is large in that 15-year period. (Last year would have been about 70m.) RAM prices have risen on a hockey stick curve since then – by about fourfold. The reason why was well expressed in this X post:

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The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.

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Don’t compare it to the US bank/housing bubble though!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The showing by Apple of an NBA game specially for the Vision Pro headset was a failure – in a predictable way. When will it learn? CC-licensed photo by Jeramey Jannene on Flickr.

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

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

I was kidnapped by idiots • The Atlantic

Elizabeth Tsurkov:

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Four men searched my mouth for implanted tracking devices. I had told them I didn’t have any—that, as far as I knew, such things existed only in movies. They asked if I had fillings, and I confessed that I did. They looked again. “No, you don’t,” one of them corrected me, having failed to find any glint of silver. My fillings are white. The men, wearing dark civilian clothes and balaclavas, seemed convinced that these unfamiliar fillings posed a threat to their operational security. That’s when I knew that my kidnapping was going to be a little bit different.

I was violently snatched on March 21, 2023, from the outskirts of Baghdad, where I had been conducting fieldwork for my Ph.D. at Princeton University. When my kidnappers delivered me to my cell, they cut the restraints they’d placed around my arms and legs, and lifted the cloth bag off my head. The secret prison where I was brought was run by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia backed by Iran.

…This mix of woeful ignorance and expert brutality may appear odd, but it is a hallmark of regimes that are born of marginalized, typically rural, victims of prior rulers. The downtrodden take power and exact revenge against the previous elites, and mete out violence against every suspected opponent. Such a regime existed in Iraq previously: Under Saddam Hussein, the Baath leadership was drawn largely from the Sunni minority, but the lower ranks of the security agencies, the interrogators and torturers, were recruited from the poor Shia-majority provinces. In Syria, an equivalent system existed under the Assad dynasty, in which rural Alawites (a heterodox sect that emerged from Shiism) dominated the security agencies that policed a Sunni majority. Going further back in history, Maoist China and Khmer Rouge Cambodia followed the same pattern.

Under such regimes, the state uses indiscriminate barbarity to instill constant terror in the population. The purpose is to deter resistance, but the arbitrary nature of the violence can stem from the unreliable information produced by ignorant interrogators: Informers may be settling personal scores; torture victims will, like me, say anything. Security agencies staffed by dumb thugs are typically inept at identifying genuine subversive threats.

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I read this without looking at the name at the top, and assumed it was a man; most of all because of the torture (which has left permanent effects) carried out. Realising that this was done to a woman is shocking. But as Tsurkov points out, these are not clever people. They are idiots. But they are idiots who had her imprisoned and could do what they wanted.
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Taiwan push to power AI with green energy hurts rural communities – Rest of World

Hsiuwen Liu:

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For generations, Li Cheng-chieh and his family have lived off the tidal flats along Taiwan’s west coast, harvesting oysters and selling them to homes and in local markets. Four years ago, thick cables to transmit power from a new offshore wind project landed ashore, and workers dug trenches to bury them, churning up layers of sediment and debris that slowly killed nearly all their oysters.

“I often say I will be the last generation of oyster farmers here,” Li told Rest of World as he walked through his field, his feet sinking deep into the cold, thick mud. “There’s no way we can fight this.”

Li lives in the coastal township of Fangyuan in Changhua county, which is on the frontline of Taiwan’s offshore wind expansion. With its shallow waters and steady winds, it has drawn billions of dollars of investment in recent years, becoming the island’s most concentrated wind power zone. The energy is needed to meet the demand from the semiconductor industry, which produces advanced chips that power artificial intelligence systems worldwide. The sector’s energy demand is expected to grow eightfold by 2028. 

…Renewable energy contributed to about 12% of Taiwan’s power mix at the end of 2024, with wind accounting for a growing share. About 170 wind turbines operate off Changhua’s coast, built by state-backed and foreign developers including Taiwan Power Company, and Denmark’s Ørsted and CIP. That number is set to reach more than 400 this year.

The rapid expansion has already disrupted rural communities. Since installation of the offshore cables began around 2022, silt buildup has increased, coating oyster shells with mud, shrinking viable farming areas and cutting yields, Li and three other oyster farmers in Fangyuan told Rest of World. It is set to get worse for the more than 500 oyster farmers in the area.

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The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe • no.heger

Norbert Heger:

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A lot has already been said about the absurdly large corner radius of windows on macOS Tahoe. People are calling the way it looks comical, like a child’s toy, or downright insane.

Setting all the aesthetic issues aside – which are to some extent a matter of taste – it also comes at a cost in terms of usability.

Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.

This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden?

It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19×19 pixels, located near the window corner.

If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62% of that area would lie inside the window.

But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it – about 75% – now lies outside the window:

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Heger is the developer of LaunchBar and Little Snitch, two enormously useful Mac utilities. He’s pointing to one of the many, many design flaws in the updated version of macOS. John Gruber has a longer take which makes the point again: under the now thankfully departed Alan Dye, bad design which ignored usability ran rampant. The challenge now is to rein it back in.
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Apple: you (still) don’t understand the Vision Pro • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

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When I started [watching] the broadcast [of a Lakers-Bucks NBA game shown in the Apple Vision Pro’s immersive view] I had, surprise surprise, a studio show, specially tailored for the Apple Vision Pro. In other words, there was a dedicated camera, a dedicated presenter, a dedicated graphics team, etc. There was even a dedicated announcing team! This all sounds expensive and special, and I think it was a total waste.

Here’s the thing that you don’t seem to get, Apple: the entire reason why the Vision Pro is compelling is because it is not a 2D screen in my living room; it’s an immersive experience I wear on my head. That means that all of the lessons of TV sports production are immaterial. In fact, it’s worse than that: insisting on all of the trappings of a traditional sports broadcast has two big problems: first, because it is costly, it means that less content is available than might be otherwise. And second, it makes the experience significantly worse.

…I have, as I noted, had the good fortune of sitting courtside at an NBA game, and this very much captured the experience. The biggest sensation you get by being close to the players is just how tall and fast and powerful they are, and you got that sensation with the Vision Pro; it was amazing.

The problem, however, is that you would be sitting there watching Giannis or LeBron or Luka glide down the court, and suddenly you would be ripped out of the experience because the entirely unnecessary producer decided you should be looking through one of these baseline cameras under the hoop:

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Thompson’s post is free to read (and worth reading in full) and suggests to me that either nobody at Apple has the imagination to see how this device could be used to cover sports – hard to believe, because absolutely everyone who has watched sports through it says the same things as Thompson – or they don’t care, or they’re too tightly locked in to TV production and can’t tell the people doing it to stop treating it like normal sports.

My guess is it’s something to do with the last one. But I don’t know how they keep ignoring what people say.
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Iranian-linked Scottish accounts fall silent again • UK Defence Journal

Lisa West:

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A network of social media accounts posing as Scottish independence supporters has fallen silent once again, closely mirroring a fresh shutdown of internet access inside Iran and reinforcing evidence that parts of the online constitutional debate are being manipulated from outside the UK.

The disappearance follows a brief surge of highly emotive and often extreme claims about events in Scotland, published in the days immediately before Tehran severed international connectivity. As with the Iranian blackout in June last year, the same accounts that had been posting intensively stopped almost simultaneously once Iran went dark.

Iran’s latest shutdown began late Thursday evening, when authorities disconnected the country from the global internet amid growing domestic unrest. International reporting described the move as a near total blackout, with even satellite services such as Starlink believed to be disrupted. Within hours, multiple X accounts claiming to be Scottish users ceased activity.

In the days before that silence, the accounts had escalated their messaging sharply.

One account, presenting itself as a Scottish independence supporter under the name “fiona”, posted a series of claims framed as scandals and emergencies.

…As Iran shut down internet access, the accounts stopped posting.

This pattern has been observed before. In June 2025, dozens of pro independence accounts went dark immediately after Iranian connectivity collapsed following Israeli and US strikes. At the time, Cyabra, a disinformation analysis firm, reported that “26% of profiles discussing Scottish independence were fake”.

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Iran really does spend a lot of money bothering other countries when it should be looking after itself.
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Named: 50 “experts” and linked brands publishers should treat with caution • Press Gazette

Rob Waugh:

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Press Gazette today names more than 50 apparently fake experts who have offered commentary to the British press in recent years and featured more than 1,000 times in newspapers, magazines and online titles.

Our PR Hall of Shame is a live document highlighting brands and spokespeople who should be treated with a high degree of caution by journalists.

For this list we have focused strictly on cases where the ‘expert’ does not appear to exist, rather than the many other cases where the expert does not have the knowledge they claim.

We are now appealing to journalists and PR professionals to notify us whenever they encounter brands depoying fake experts to help us to warn others and curb the threat of fake AI-enhanced ‘experts’ which threatens both the credibility of the press, and the trust between journalists and PRs.

If you have been approached by people touting experts who seem not to exist, please get in touch via pged@presssgazette.co.uk – we will check your story out and add to the database. 

And if you represent a brand or expert who you believe unfairly appears on the below, please get in touch. Press Gazette has attemped to get in touch with all the brands listed below.

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Meanwhile:

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Journalists have reported being bombarded with dozens and sometimes hundreds of dubious press releases a week, with the organisations behind them never replying to follow-ups and moving to different email addresses to avoid being blocked.

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As Press Gazette notes, the aim is generally SEO – get the company mentioned, perhaps even linked to, in the story. And it says it will have more examples in the coming days.
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The Trump phone just missed another release date • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

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When we started writing about Trump Mobile regularly, it all began with a simple post pointing out that the company’s T1 Phone had missed its original release date. Now, three months later, it’s missed another one.

When it was announced in June, the Trump phone was promised to launch in both August and September (one of the many impossible details in the launch announcement). At some point that was updated on the Trump Mobile site to instead say “later this year.”

That was last year.

As 2026 dawns, we’re into uncharted territory. Trump Mobile has repeatedly shifted the goalposts on the T1 Phone 8002 (gold version)’s release, but it has always had goalposts. The website still says “later this year,” but how are we meant to trust it now?

The Financial Times asked Trump Mobile’s customer service about the delay, and was reportedly told that “the recent US government shutdown had delayed deliveries of the phone.” If true, that probably means the T1 Phone was, like many other gadgets, prevented from getting FCC clearance to launch.

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Let’s go with “nope” and be surprised if it turns out to be true. The Verge says it’s going to write about it every week, just to annoy those stupid enough to have given Trump money for one.
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EV roadside repairs easier than petrol or diesel, new data suggests • Market insight

Aimee Turner:

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Electric vehicles are more likely to be fixed at the roadside than petrol or diesel cars despite public fears to the contrary, according to new breakdown data from the AA.

New research from Autotrader and the AA, carried out in December among more than 2,000 consumers, found 44% of respondents are concerned about the risk of breakdowns or roadside repairs when considering switching to an EV.

Concern was highest among drivers aged 75 and over, with 56% saying they were worried.

The North East recorded the highest level of concern at 52%, while women were slightly more likely to express reservations than men – 46% versus 41%.

Even so, AA call-out data indicates EVs are more likely to be successfully repaired at the roadside than a 12-volt battery in a petrol or diesel car.

Separately, industry data continues to indicate growing readiness to service electric cars.

A recent Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) survey of aftermarket businesses found 81.2% of UK workshops are already equipped to work on EVs, according to the campaign partners.

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Great – so now we just need a huge buildout of chargers, don’t we. Apparently they’re up 19.1% – nearly 88,000 devices at 45,000-odd locations.
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Apple picks Google’s Gemini to run AI-powered Siri coming this year • CNBC

Samantha Subin:

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Apple is joining forces with Google to power its artificial intelligence features, including a major Siri upgrade expected later this year.

The multi-year partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” the tech giants said in a joint statement on Monday.

The models will continue to run on Apple devices and the company’s private cloud compute, they added.

Apple declined to comment on the terms of the deal. Google referred CNBC to the joint statement.

In August, Bloomberg had reported that Apple was in early talks with Google to use a custom Gemini model to power a new iteration of Siri. The news outlet later reported that Apple was planning to pay about $1bn a year to utilize Google AI.

«

This falls under the category of “very expected news”. Mark Gurman wrote last year about the deal with Google – allegedly after Apple found OpenAI’s model to be better. But if Google is paying Apple for browser search clicks, it’s easy to slice a little off for the AI side.

Will we stop calling it Siri? It certainly won’t be the Siri that people have known (and often hated) since 2011.
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Cuba is already on the brink. Maduro’s ouster brings it closer to collapse • WSJ

Deborah Acosta and José de Córdoba:

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Elderly Cubans are digging through garbage for scraps of food in Havana. In the country’s second city, Santiago, crowds have gathered, blaring music by Cuban exiles such as Gloria Estefan and Willy Chirino, who sings “Our day is coming soon.”

The U.S. ouster of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has jolted this country of fewer than 10 million people, which has long relied on Venezuela for oil imports that have barely kept its tiny economy from collapsing.

It opens a new and perilous chapter for the island’s Communist regime during an economic implosion that already rivals the crisis suffered by Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago.

In poorer cities, people are openly speculating about whether the U.S. will topple the government of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the successor to Raúl and Fidel Castro, the siblings who led the Cuban Revolution in 1959 that sent shock waves across Latin America.

“They are nervous,” Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a Havana-based political activist, said of the government. “Repression will increase, it’s the typical response.”

Cuba’s state security apparatus has long had a tight grip on all levels of society, from workplaces to schools or concert halls. But Maduro’s capture risks upending the government’s control of every street, its deep surveillance system and its vast network of snitches, say Cuban dissidents and former officials.

…Cuba has been in a perpetual economic crisis, which has intensified since the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 2.7 million people—about a quarter of the island’s population, the majority of them young and ambitious—have fled the island since 2020, most to the U.S. It is “demographic hollowing out,” said Cuban demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos. He estimates Cuba’s population is now eight million.

The combined result of mass emigration and decreased female fertility is that live births in Cuba plunged to levels below those of 1899, when Cuba emerged from a bloody three-year war of independence that decimated its population, said Albizu-Campos.

…Venezuela has been providing some 35,000 barrels of oil a day of the estimated 100,000 barrels a day the island needs. Cuba produces about 40,000 barrels a day of sulfur- and metals-laden heavy crude that feeds the country’s decrepit power plants. Mexico, which sent about 22,000 barrels a day to Cuba last year, has since lowered shipments to some 7,000, while Russia sends about 10,000 barrels a day, he said.

Cutting off Venezuelan oil would devastate Cuba’s economy.

«

Unnoticed here in Europe, but the collapse of the Cuban government would be enormous for the Caribbean, and Cubans abroad. It feels as though everything is happening at once this year.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Want to know what parrots really like doing? Making videocalls with other parrots. CC-licensed photo by Jenni Konrad on Flickr.

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

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

As Iranian regime shuts down internet, even Starlink seemingly being jammed • Associated Press via The Times of Israel

»

Just after 8 p.m. Thursday, Iran’s theocracy pulled the plug and disconnected the Islamic Republic’s 85 million people from the rest of the world.

Following a playbook used both in demonstrations and in war, Iran severed the internet connections and telephone lines that connect its people to the vast diaspora in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Until now, even while facing strict sanctions over the country’s nuclear program, Iranians still could access mobile phone apps and even websites blocked by the theocracy, using virtual private networks to circumvent restrictions.

…This is the third time Iran has shut down the internet from the outside world. The first was in 2019, when demonstrators angry about a spike in government-subsidized gasoline prices took to the streets. Over 300 people reportedly were killed.

Then came the protests over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini following her arrest by the country’s morality police over allegedly not wearing her hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities. A month-long crackdown killed more than 500 people.

While the connectivity offered by Starlink played a role in the Amini demonstrations, the deployment of its receivers is now far greater in Iran. That’s despite the government never authorizing Starlink to function, making the service illegal to possess and use.

A year ago, an Iranian official estimated tens of thousands of Starlink receivers in the Islamic Republic, a figure that Los Angeles-based internet freedom activist Mehdi Yahyanejad said sounded right.

While many receivers likely are in the hands of business people and others wanting to stay in touch with the outside world for their livelihoods, Yahyanejad said some are now being used to share videos, photos and other reporting on the protests.

“In this case, because all those things have been disrupted, Starlink is playing the key for getting all these videos out,” Yahyanejad said.

However, Starlink receivers are facing challenges. Since its 12-day war with Israel last June, Iran has been disrupting GPS signals, likely in a bid to make drones less effective. Starlink receivers use GPS signals to position themselves to connect to a constellation of low-orbit satellites.

Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at the Miaan Group and an expert on Iran, said that since Thursday, he had seen about a 30% loss in packets being sent by Starlink devices — basically units of data that transmit across the internet. In some areas of Iran, Rashidi said there had been an 80% loss in packets.

«

Suggestion is that this is like Russia’s jamming of Starlink in Ukraine. It wouldn’t be a shock if Russia is helping Iran to do this; their interests (basically, mess up the West) are aligned. The messages that are getting out seem to be via Starlink, despite jamming.
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“Worst in Show” returns at CES 2026, calling out gadgets that make things worse • iFixit

Elizabeth Chamberlain:

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Repair.org, the repair industry trade association, announced the 2026 Worst in Show awards today, annual anti-awards that spotlight the most harmful, invasive, wasteful, and unfixable tech on display at CES.

Worst in Show is produced by the Right to Repair organization Repair.org with support from a coalition of consumer and tech advocacy organizations. The awards are hosted this year by Simone Giertz, the inventor, maker, and YouTuber known for building delightfully impractical robots and poking fun at tech hype.

This year’s winners include: an “open sesame” refrigerator that puts complexity (and ads) between you and your leftovers, a doorbell ecosystem expanding surveillance in all directions, a smart treadmill that shrugs at basic security assurances, a disposable electronic lollipop (yes, really), and two Bosch products that turn everyday convenience into subscription bait and lock-in. Voting for People’s Choice is still underway, and the People’s Choice award will be presented by Back Market and NowThis Editor-in-Chief Michael Vito Valentino.

«

Among the rotten tomatoes: Amazon Ring AI (worst for privacy), a treadmill with an “AI fitness trainer” that says it can’t guarantee your personal information is safe, sweets that push sounds to you, the fridge that puts adverts in your way, and many more. CES is always terrible, but now it’s AI-enhanced terrible.
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Great Green Wall 2.0: China is geoengineering deserts with blue-green algae • South China Morning Post

Dannie Peng:

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Deserts are hard to reclaim because plants cannot survive on shifting sand, but scientists in northwest China are changing that – by dropping vast amounts of blue-green algae onto the dry terrain.

These specially selected strains of cyanobacteria can survive extreme heat and drought for long periods, according to China Science Daily. When rain finally comes, they spring to life, spreading rapidly and forming a tough, biomass-rich crust over the sand. This living layer stabilises the dunes and creates the perfect foundation for future plant growth.

This is the first time in human history that microbes are being used on a massive scale to reshape natural landscapes. As the “Great Green Wall” – China’s massive multi-decade initiative to plant trees and fight desertification – expands to include efforts in Africa and Mongolia, the unprecedented geoengineering technology could one day transform the face of our planet.

This artificial “crusting” technique was developed by scientists at a research station in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, located in northwest China on the edge of the Tengger Desert, according to China Science Daily.

Ningxia has adopted the technique as part of its sand control strategy under the Great Green Wall. The technique is expected to be used on a massive scale to treat around 5,333-6,667 hectares (13,178-16,475 acres) of desert over the next five years.

«

You can never accuse the Chinese of thinking small or short-term. Going to be an interesting project to catch up on in a few years’ time.
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Birds of a feather video-flock together: design and evaluation of an agency-based parrot-to-parrot video-calling system for interspecies ethical enrichment • Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Rebecca Kleinberger et al:

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Over 20 million parrots are kept as pets in the US, often lacking appropriate stimuli to meet their high social, cognitive, and emotional needs. After reviewing bird perception and agency literature, we developed an approach to allow parrots to engage in video-calling other parrots.

Following a pilot experiment and expert survey, we ran a three-month study with 18 pet birds to evaluate the potential value and usability of a parrot-parrot video-calling system. We assessed the system in terms of perception, agency, engagement, and overall perceived benefits.

With 147 bird-triggered calls, our results show that 1) every bird used the system, 2) most birds exhibited high motivation and intentionality, and 3) all caretakers reported perceived benefits, some arguably life-transformative, such as learning to forage or even to fly by watching others. We report on individual insights and propose considerations regarding ethics and the potential of parrot video-calling for enrichment.

…In Phase 1 (“meet-and-greet”), each bird learned the association between ringing a bell, touching the photo of another bird on their tablet, and being connected with that bird on a video call. Caretakers were trained to end the call if their bird showed signs of stress, disengagement or left the space.

«

Yes, really: parrots like video calls with other parrots. (This was done with Facebook Messenger. Wasn’t tested on Microsoft Teams.)
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Norway reaches 97% EV sales as EVs now outnumber diesels on its roads • Electrek

Jameson Dow:

»

In 2017, Norway set a formal non-binding target to end fossil car sales in the country by 2025 – a target earlier than any other country in the world by several years. Norway was already well ahead of the world in EV adoption, with about a third of new cars being electric at the time – but it wanted to schedule the final blow for just 8 years later, fairly short as far as automotive timelines go.

At the time, many (though not us at Electrek) considered this to be an optimistic goal, and figured that it might get pushed back.

But Norway did not budge in its target (unlike more cowardly nations). And it turns out, when you set a realistic goal, craft policy around it, and don’t act all wishy-washy or change your mind every few years, you can actually get things done. (In fact, Europe currently has around the same EV sales level as Norway did 10 years ahead of its 100% goal – which means Europe’s former 100% 2035 goal is still eminently achievable.)

So, already by 2021, it looked like Norway was on track to have basically no fossil-only vehicle sales – though with various stragglers, including hybrid vehicles.

And now, the final blow has basically been struck, as Norway has reported its annual numbers showing a record year for car sales with virtually all of them being electric.

…OFV [Norway’s transport statistics agency] also announced that electric cars overtook diesel cars on Norway’s roads in early December, meaning that EVs are now the plurality vehicle in the country, making up 31.78% of the fleet. Diesels are 31.76%, gasoline cars are 23.9%, and hybrids are 12.56% altogether.

«

Of course Norway isn’t famous for its warm sunny weather, which means those who think EVs don’t work in the cold are a bit stuck for an argument.
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A positive sign for flying in the future…and a cautionary one about aviation right now • Breaking the News

James Fallows:

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One week ago [in December], something happened for the first time in the century-plus history of civilian air travel. An airplane whose systems detected a problem with its human pilot found its own way toward a suitable airport not in its original flight plan.

In these circumstances, the plane’s automated controls managed a gradual circling descent to the appropriate altitude for an approach, as shown in the image above. These systems landed the plane smoothly and safely on the runway, with no harm to anyone aboard or to the aircraft itself. In fact, the same plane was able to fly again, under human pilot control, the next day.

Through this unplanned episode last weekend, software and avionics from the Garmin corporation’s “Autoland” system gave a real-world answer to a question that gives some travelers nightmares. Namely, what happens if the pilot passes out… or worse?

Here’s the background: after departure from the mountain airport in Aspen, Colorado, and a seemingly normal climb to 23,000 feet, a private plane began broadcasting unusual messages to Air Traffic Control (ATC). The plane was a Beechcraft King Air B200, a popular corporate turboprop that can carry six to eight passengers. The ATC messages were not in a standard calm-sounding pilot’s voice, as they had been from this airplane at the start of the flight. Instead they had an automated, robotic sound.

Over and over, this robo-voice repeated that because of “pilot incapacitation,” the plane was directing itself for an unexpected landing at Rocky Mountain Metro airport. That was not the closest airport, but the system’s software had chosen it as most suitable because of its runway length, alignment with prevailing winds, distance from Denver International’s crowded commercial airspace, and other factors.

«

You can see how this might have helped in the situation where the pilot and passengers are unconscious – as here, or Payne Stewart, the professional golfer who died in October 1999 when his private jet lost pressure. (In fact, trigger it through pressure loss seems a simple move.)

And you can see this being done by machine learning systems more regularly, to the point where the pilot is even more of an adjunct than presently.
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Bird flu warnings are being ignored. I’ve seen this pattern before • The Conversation

Nikki Ikani is an assistant professor of intelligence and security at Leiden University and King’s College London:

»

Bird flu still poses a low‑probability threat of sustained human transmission. But that doesn’t make the virus harmless. The H5 viruses are brutally lethal to birds – 9 million have died outright, and hundreds of millions have been culled to contain the spread. Alarming is the virus’s expanding reach into mammals. So far, at least 74 mammal species, from elephant seals to polar bears, have suffered die‑offs.

The individual cases are situated within a broader shift. Dense poultry farms create opportunities for the virus to hop species. Over a thousand US dairy herds have tested positive in the past two years, and viral fragments have even been detected in milk – a worrying route of spillover. Every jump is a probe for new footholds.

Europe is seeing a surge too. From early September to mid-November 2025, 1,444 infected wild birds were found across 26 countries: a quadrupling compared with the year before.

Human cases remain rare: only 992 confirmed H5N1 infections worldwide since 2003, though with a near‑50% fatality rate. But the numbers are increasing.

The Americas have logged 75 cases since 2022, and in November, the US recorded its first H5N5 death in a patient with existing health problems. And although no human cases have been reported in Europe, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control warns that the widespread animal circulation raises the risk of spillover.

My research focuses on how warnings collapse before catastrophe, from geopolitical shocks to intelligence failures and industrial accidents. The pattern is often the same. Frontline observers spot something early, but the signal fades as it moves upward, diluted by bureaucracy, competing interpretations, or institutional forgetfulness.

«

Watching brief, you understand. (THanks Joe S for the link.)
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iOS 26 still struggles to gain traction with iPhone users • Cult of Mac

Ed Hardy:

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iOS 26 adoption is extremely low. Roughly four months after launching in mid-September, only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed. That’s according to data for January 2026 from StatCounter. Instead, most users hold onto previous versions.

For comparison, in January 2025, about 63% of iPhone users had some iOS 18 version installed. So after roughly the same amount of time, the adoption rate of Apple newest OS was about four times higher.

And that’s not a fluke. In January 2024, some iOS 17 version was on 54% of iPhones. A year earlier, the iOS 16 adoption rate was 62%.

It’s not that millions of iPhone users around the world have somehow overlooked the launch of iOS 26 followed by iOS 26.1 and iOS 26.2. They are holding off installing the upgrades because this is Apple’s most controversial new version in many years. The reason: Liquid Glass — a translucent and fluid new interface. Many elements of the UI go semi-transparent, while clever effects make it seem like users are looking through glass at objects shown on the screen behind the Control Center and pop-up windows.

iOS 26 and Liquid Glass have fans. In a recent poll, Cult of Mac users showed strong support for them. But there are plenty of detractors. Social media is especially full of negative comments.

“It’s been 3 weeks since I reluctantly updated my iPhone iOS, and dislike the new Liquid Glass UI more every day,” writes kaarbona on Threads.

“Finally updated my iPhone to Liquid Glass,” said theseokitchen on Threads. “If you’re ever having imposter syndrome, this update is proof that even professionals at billion-dollar companies make huge mistakes.”

«

It’s not due to a significantly larger population of phones, either. People either don’t know how to, or don’t want to.
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Living without America • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

»

let’s imagine that Trump decides to invade Greenland. I like to think that the whole of Europe would be up in arms and would start significant economic reprisals against the US, but even if our leaders continue to be as weak as they have been in response to some of Trump’s other actions, we can still perhaps imagine one of the following taking place:

• Your country’s leaders do have the guts to be outspoken about it, and Trump decides to switch off your country’s access to AWS or Azure or Google Cloud or iCloud, or double your IT costs by imposing 100% tariffs, or even just impose bottlenecks to slow down your internet access to US-based services.
• Your own government announces that you must promptly move your data out of any data centres controlled by US companies.
• Your employees, as a matter of principle, object to your company’s dependence on and financing of a US company, and go on strike until you sort it out.
• Your biggest clients decide that they will only purchase products or services from companies who are not at risk from repercussions of ‘the tense geopolitical climate’.

… and I’m sure you can think of other variations.  You may not find them all plausible.  But it only takes one.

…As I read about the threats to NATO and the talk of America possibly invading part of Europe, I became rather conscious of how much of my digital life is dependent on US-controlled infrastructure. Where do I host my blog? My email may be stored in this country, but what about the DNS service that tells people where to send it? I have Zoom and Teams calls with clients next week – what would happen if they became unavailable? I host a significant amount of my technical infrastructure myself, in preference to depending on cloud services, but I realised that even I have a long way yet to go.

«

As David Bowie, ten years dead this month, sang: “I’m afraid of America”. Maybe an internet war (or ultimate balkanisation) would be the real World War 3, because nobody wants to drop nukes; who wants to reduce the potential advertising base, even in an unfriendly or uncooperative country?
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Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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In October, Bose announced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars would become dumb speakers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speakers would only work if a device was connected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher latency than Wi-Fi).

After that date, the speakers would stop receiving security and software updates and lose cloud connectivity and their companion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based company said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to integrate the device with music services, such as Spotify, have multiple SoundTouch devices play the same audio simultaneously, or use or edit saved presets.

The announcement frustrated some of Bose’s long-time customers, some of whom own multiple SoundTouch devices that still function properly. Many questioned companies’ increasingly common practice of bricking expensive products to focus on new devices or to minimize costs, or because they’ve gone through acquisitions or bankruptcy. SoundTouch speakers released in 2013 and 2015 with prices ranging from $399 to $1,500.

Today, Bose had better news. In an email to customers, Bose announced that AirPlay and Spotify Connect will still work with SoundTouch speakers after EoL, expanding the wireless capabilities that people will still be able to access.

Additionally, SoundTouch devices that support AirPlay 2 will be able to play the same audio simultaneously.

The SoundTouch app will also live on, albeit stripped of some functionality.

«

A rare piece of good news: smart hardware that doesn’t die just because the maker loses interest.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: followup on the number of Start Up postings by year, going back to 2014. The numbers might not all add up perfectly from before 2019. But close enough.

2014: 45 (didn’t really start until October)
2015: 239
2016: 233
2017: 228
2018: 216

2019: 235
2020: 240
2021: 255
2022: 215
2023: 215
2024: 220
2025: 225
2026: ??