New cars sold in Europe (and the UK) now have automatic speed limiters, but they can be turned off – for now. CC-licensed photo by John Briody on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Scream if you want to go faster. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Big Tech feels the heat over AI concerns • FT

Darren Dodd:

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Microsoft has given up its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, following noises from regulators about Big Tech’s plans. Apple, which plans to integrate ChatGPT into its devices, has done likewise.

Jonathan Kanter, the top US antitrust enforcer, told the Financial Times last month that he was examining “monopoly choke points and the competitive landscape” on concerns that the already dominant tech giants would take control of the market. The biggest example to date has been Microsoft’s $13bn investment in OpenAI, which came with rights to the start-up’s intellectual property and a share of its profits, although stopped short of an outright acquisition.

Chipmakers are also being hit by US export controls on selling AI processors to Chinese customers. Such is the demand however, that even if companies such as Nvidia are not allowed to sell their high-end chips, huge amounts of sales can still be made from products that fall outside of the restrictions.

Big Tech is also turning its attention to the problems caused by the huge power demands of AI as the industry struggles to keep its climate promises. Microsoft yesterday announced a carbon credit deal with Occidental Petroleum that would allow it to offset emissions by paying Occidental to have the carbon removed from the atmosphere and stored underground. 

Microsoft said in May that its emissions had risen by almost a third since 2020, mainly from the construction of data centres, while Google last week admitted that its emissions had increased by almost half since 2019 from the building of power-intensive infrastructure to support AI.

In the meantime, the flurry of AI deal activity continues. AMD today announced the $665m acquisition of Finnish startup Silo AI as the US chipmaker tries to keep up with market leader Nvidia.

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Both Apple and Microsoft giving up board seats as observers at OpenAI is a quite the move: there’s a quiet implication that OpenAI may be toxic. Of course Microsoft says, in its letter giving up its seat, that it’s because OpenAI is fine and stable and doesn’t need looking after. Somehow that’s not persuasive.
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AI finds that AI is great in new garbage research from Tony Blair Institute • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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A new paper from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, presented yesterday by the former Prime Minister himself, predicts that more than 40% of tasks performed by public-sector workers could be partly automated, saving a fifth of their time in aggregate, and potentially leading to a huge reduction in workforce and costs for the government.

The problem with this prediction, which was picked up by Politico, Techradar, Forbes, and others, is that it was made by ChatGPT after the authors of the paper admitted that making a prediction based on interviews with experts would be too hard. Basically, the finding that AI could replace humans at their jobs and radically change how the government works was itself largely made by AI.

“This is absurd—they might as well be shaking at Magic 8 ball and writing down the answers it displays,” Emily Bender, a professor and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at University of Washington, told me.

To make their assessment, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) researchers pulled data on 20,000 tasks performed by workers from O*NET, a database developed by the U.S Department of Labor which contains hundreds of standardized and occupation-specific descriptors on almost 1,000 occupations in the U.S. economy. The database includes “a rich set of variables that describe work and worker characteristics, including skill requirements,” according to its official site.

The researchers then wanted to assess which of these tasks, which are also performed by public sector workers in the UK, could be performed by AI, given the technology’s current capabilities.

Amazingly, the researchers concede that answering that question by talking to actual human experts across different fields would be hard, so they just asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 to answer the question instead. 

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This is my extremely pained face that someone would think untrammeled generative AI gives answers to important questions.
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Conspiracy theory and nationalist groups embraced Reform UK at general election • Sky News

Tom Cheshire:

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Nigel Farage and Reform UK attracted a surge of election interest among conspiracy theory and nationalist groups, which have more than 15 million followers between them, on messaging app Telegram.

Some groups looked to sow the seeds of a “stolen election” narrative, similar to events in the US after Donald Trump’s defeat, and also attempted to recruit Reform UK voters to their cause.

And after the election, prominent accounts have continued to state there was “election interference” and that “Labour cheated”. Sky News asked Reform UK for a response but did not receive a reply before publication.

Sky News worked with Prose, an open source intelligence company, which analysed data from 10,000 Telegram accounts that regularly post conspiracist and extremist content, to identify accounts posting about the UK general election.

Compared to Labour and the Conservatives, Mr Farage’s return as leader of Reform UK appears to have attracted conspiracist groups, leading to a sharp and sustained surge of interest – with Mr Farage and Reform UK dominating the conversation.

In total, Prose found 938 unique Telegram chats, with 15.6 million followers between them, which posted 14,758 messages related to the UK election up until 25 June, of which 542 chats posted 5,239 messages about Mr Farage/Reform UK – more than any other party.

However, the true figure of actual users will be fewer, as this does not account for people who are members of multiple chats (if an account is a member of two chat groups it will be counted twice); some accounts will also be bots and some will also be based abroad.

Those groups were broadly supportive of Mr Farage and Reform UK.

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The difficulty is proving that these are voters, rather than just random people around the world – or Russian bots.
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Did Rishi Sunak’s green U-turn cost the Tories seats in Middle England? • Daily Mail Online

David Wilcock:

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The Tories leaked election votes to the left because of Rishi Sunak’s watering down of green measures introduced by Boris Johnson, a new poll suggested today.

Climate change was one of the top three reasons Labour and Lib Dem voters gave for supporting the parties on July 4, above housing and crime. And the analysis by More in Common found that even those who viewed it as less important also linked increasing generation of renewable energy to reducing the cost of living, the biggest factor driving voting at the election.

And in a sign of how green the country is, more than 70% of those polled backed Labour’s plans for GB Energy, a state-run company designed to fund the move to green power.

A majority of Tory and Reform voters (56% and 59% respectively) also said the state-run firm would be good for the country. It came as green Tories urged whoever replaces Mr Sunak as permanent Conservative leader later this year tacks back towards leading on environmental measures.

The Tories lost more than 30 seats to the Liberal Democrats in the so-called Blue Wall heartlands in the south, and also came second in Waveney Valley in Cambridgeshire behind the Greens.

Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network, said the election result had been “devastating and painful” and the party needed to work out where it had gone wrong.

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It’s very hard to imagine that touting green policies would have worked for the Tories: they had been screwing things up (rivers, energy) for so long that people would surely have seen through any lip service paid to more green policies. Labour was able to change the policy restricting onshore wind farms (which are popular with people, when asked) by changing one footnote on its first morning in power. What kept the Tories from doing that? Nothing.
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PC recovery continues as the market grows 3% in the second quarter • IDC

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The PC market delivered its second quarter of growth following seven consecutive quarters of decline. According to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, worldwide shipments reached 64.9m units in the second quarter of 2024 (2Q24), representing year-over-year growth of 3.0%. While the overall market benefited from favorable comparisons to 2023, weak results in China continued to hold the market back. Excluding China, worldwide shipments grew more than 5% year over year.

“Make no mistake, the PC market just like other technology markets faces challenges in the near term due to maturity and headwinds,” said Ryan Reith, group vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Device Trackers. “However, two consecutive quarters of growth, combined with plenty of market hype around AI PCs and a less sexy but arguably more important commercial refresh cycle, seems to be what the PC market needed. The buzz is clearly around AI, but a lot is happening with non-AI PC purchasing to make this mature market show signs of positivity.”

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Intrigued by this splitting of the market into the “traditional” and “AI” PCs. Trouble is, the market is still down, and it’s hard to think that “AI PCs” are going to make a big difference. It’s still the same names on top: Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple and either Acer or Asus in fifth place.
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Inside the ‘nightmare’ health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town • TIME

Andrew Chow:

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On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. “It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,” she says. “That pain was worse than childbirth.”

Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s five-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a “red beam behind her eardrums.”

It didn’t occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. A mother said her eight-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit.

None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area—and was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis.

Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least ten people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms.

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Speed limiters are now mandatory, but you can turn them off • evo

Sam Jenkins:

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Arriving alongside a range of new safety features destined for all new cars, mandatory speed limiters have come as part of the General Safety Regulation proposed by the European Commission, approved in 2019 by the European Parliament and all EU member states. While the UK is no longer in the EU, it is very likely that all UK cars will now receive the technology regardless, and it comes into force this month. 

Dubbed Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA), the limiters will use GPS data and/or traffic sign recognition cameras to determine the speed limit of the road a vehicle is travelling on. Engine power will then be limited to match this following an audible warning, preventing the car from exceeding the speed limit. It will be possible to override the system for the current journey by pushing hard on the throttle, however the system will be re-engaged every time a car is started.

If you think you can simply keep pressing a little harder on the throttle to break through the system, think again. ETSC also states that: ‘If the driver continues to drive above the speed limit for several seconds, the system should sound a warning for a few seconds and display a visual warning until the vehicle is operating at or below the speed limit again.’ 

A feature already seen on all new Volvos and models such as the Ford Focus, the speed limiters are also set to come alongside data loggers, autonomous emergency braking systems, lane keep assist, driver fatigue detection systems and other safety measures. It’s not all quite as bad as you may think, though, as the European Transport and Safety Council admits the system will come with an on/off switch initially. This is only ‘to aid public acceptance at introduction’ however, and so it’s likely that it intends to push for even stricter rules in the future, meaning a permanent system may come into force.

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Wonder how long that “public acceptance” phase will last. Five years? Ten? Forever? Less?
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You can track any flight directly from your iPhone’s text messages • CNET

Nelson Aguilar and Blake Stimac:

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The summer travel season here, and even if you’re not hopping on a plane, you probably know someone who is. And if they’re visiting you, it’s really important for you to keep track of their flight.

You need to know if the flight is expected to arrive early, or if it’s canceled entirely, especially if you’re picking someone up at the airport. You can obviously check out this information from an airline’s app or website, but there’s another way to track a flight without even having to leave the Messages app on your iPhone.

That’s right. There’s a hidden flight tracker built right into iMessage that you probably would have never noticed unless you threw in the right combination of details within a message. 

It’s easy to check the status of the flight, and you can easily share the info with anyone else that needs to know.

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This is due to something that’s been in iOS since 2015, called Data Detectors. John Gruber has a good expansion of what this is about and, importantly, how it works (or doesn’t).

But then again, there are apps which will do this reliably. So it’s a nice quirk, but no more.
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Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra hands-on: ultra déjà vu • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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Look, it’s that Apple Watch Ultra but in an Android-friendly font.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing! There hasn’t really been a 1-to-1 equivalent for the Apple Watch Ultra in the Android space. Garmins are great, but they’re lacking in the smart features and third-party app department. Samsung is just filling a niche. Also, it’s $150 cheaper. Can’t argue with that.

It’s also not totally fair to call this an Apple Watch Ultra knockoff. Samsung does bring its own flavor. The 47mm titanium case is a squircle shape. Next to the Apple Watch Ultra 2, the squircle shape was chonkier overall. I had mixed feelings as to the style — I miss the rotating bezel! Yet it does look distinct and is wearable even on my smaller wrist. Furthermore, while there’s no physical rotating bezel, Samsung did include its signature digital touch bezel. That’s a good thing, as while the Quick Button looks and rotates like a digital crown, it doesn’t actually scroll. That threw me for a loop, but I imagine it’s simply something to get used to.

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The principal difference seems to be that the Samsung model has a round rather than rounded square face. And works on Android. But really, it is shameless to use the “Ultra” name and take the orange highlighting. One or the other might be admissible, but to use both is just shameless; it suggests you’ve got no marketing heft of your own.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Air conditioning is great, until the power is knocked out by excessive heat. CC-licensed photo by Schezar on Flickr.

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

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

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

The UK politician accused of being AI is actually a real person • The Verge

Mia Sato:

»

Mark Matlock, a political candidate for the right-wing Reform UK party, clarified in The Independent that he is a real person, not an AI bot, as some suspected.

Perhaps it was the glossy, hyper-smooth skin in a campaign image or the fact that Matlock had apparently missed events like the election count — but earlier this week, a thread on X questioned whether Matlock existed at all. “We might be on the verge of a HUGE SCANDAL,” the post read.

An AI-generated political candidate isn’t totally out of the realm of possibility: during this election, an executive at an AI company used an AI persona to run for Parliament in the UK. He lost, obviously, getting just 179 votes.

Matlock, however, is a human candidate who apparently was very ill during the election.

“I got pneumonia three days before election night I was exercising taking vitamins so I could attend but it was just not viable. On election night I couldn’t even stand,” he told The Independent. Matlock also provided the outlet with the original photo that drew attention, saying the background was removed and the color of his tie was changed. The photo does have that rubbery, uncanny look to it that’s come to be associated with AI, though —particularly Matlock’s hair and skin. This seems like a good lesson for all elected officials: don’t edit your pictures in a way that looks like a Midjourney result for the prompt “youthful, nonthreatening-looking politician.”

The 2024 elections in the US and abroad are already feeling the effects of the proliferation of AI tools, though, for now, we still haven’t seen an AI bot replace a human politician. (To be fair, some people would probably prefer that.)

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Touchscreen-ready interface hidden in tvOS amid HomePod rumours • 9 to 5 Mac

Filipe Espósito:

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We’ve seen a lot of evidence pointing to a new Apple home accessory (like a HomePod with a display) in recent months. And to corroborate all these rumors, the latest beta version of tvOS 18 available to developers has a new hidden interface that is touchscreen-ready.

The new tvOS interface, or system shell, is internally called “PlasterBoard.” Similar to SpringBoard (the iOS system shell), it provides some core interface elements for the system. 9to5Mac was able to confirm the existence of the new interface through the tvOS 18 beta 3 code.

Of course, this interface wasn’t meant to be seen by the public, but we found a way to access it. For instance, the new tvOS PlasterBoard interface has a Lock Screen with a passcode keypad very similar to the one on the iPhone and iPad. The PlasterBoard interface seems to be at an early stage of development, so there’s not much to see beyond basic Lock Screen controls.

Code and how the interface behaves strongly suggest that it was made for touchscreens and not for regular TVs. It’s also worth noting that there’s no option to lock Apple TV with a passcode, which only makes sense for more personal devices.

Last week, backend code revealed the existence of an unreleased “HomeAccessory17,1” device. There are currently no Apple products under this identifier category, but it’s very similar to the “AudioAccessory” identifier used for HomePods. Just like HomePods, this device also runs tvOS – but is based on the yet-to-be-announced A18 chip.

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Nobody has any idea what this will look like (the mockups are bizarre, like the first iPhone guesses which stuck an iPod click wheel on a phone). Might sell more than the Vision Pro though.
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China outspends the US on fusion in the race for energy’s holy grail • WSJ

Jennifer Hiller and Sha Hua:

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A high-tech race is under way between the US and China as both countries chase an elusive energy source: fusion. 

China is outspending the US, completing a massive fusion technology campus and launching a national fusion consortium that includes some of its largest industrial companies.

Crews in China work in three shifts, essentially around the clock, to complete fusion projects. And the Asian superpower has ten times as many Ph.D.s in fusion science and engineering as the US. 

The result is an increasing worry among American officials and scientists that an early US lead is slipping away.

JP Allain, who heads the Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, said China is spending around $1.5bn a year on fusion, nearly twice the U.S. government’s fusion budget. What’s more, China appears to be following a program similar to the road map that hundreds of US fusion scientists and engineers first published in 2020 in hopes of making commercial fusion energy.

“They’re building our long-range plan,” Allain said. “That’s very frustrating, as you can imagine.”

Scientists familiar with China’s fusion facilities said that if the country continues its current pace of spending and development, it will surpass the U.S. and Europe’s magnetic fusion capabilities in three or four years.

Fusion has long been a clean-energy dream. The process of combining atoms is the same process that powers the sun, and scientists hope to harness it to deliver almost-limitless energy. The technology faces daunting scientific and engineering hurdles, and some experts consider it a mirage that will remain out of reach.

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The USSR economy was wrecked by trying to keep up with the imagined spending on the US’s (impossible) Star Wars defence programme. I wonder if fusion will do something similar for China’s.
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Growth stalls at Elon Musk’s X • FT

Clara Murray and Cristina Criddle:

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X has been hit by stalling user growth, as the social media platform’s owner Elon Musk divides audiences and it faces new competition from the rise of Meta’s rival platform Threads.

In previously unreleased figures, X said its number of global daily active users in the second quarter of this year was 251mn, a rise of 1.6% from the same period the year before.

This contrasts with the double-digit growth experienced in the years leading up to the acquisition by Musk, who took the listed company private for $44bn in October 2022.

Musk has proved a divisive leader of X, which he rebranded shortly after the takeover. The group has shed advertisers since Musk’s takeover partly due to his stance as a “free speech absolutist”, and his decision to remove most of the platform’s content moderators.

Critics argue this has led to a more toxic experience, but Musk claimed “drastic action” was needed to stem mounting financial losses.

His social media platform is also facing new competition for attention. Facebook owner Meta launched rival platform Threads a year ago in an effort to challenge X. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed it had grown to 175m monthly active users. This compares with 600m monthly users claimed by X.

However, analytics company Sensor Tower estimates Threads has only 38m daily users — people who open the app at least once a day — suggesting users are using it less frequently than other social media platforms.

…A recent Ofcom survey found 17% of UK adults use X as a news source. However, engagement on the platform has been sliding during national election campaigns in the US, UK and France, Similarweb data showed.

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I know: eX-Twitter had growth? But that Threads number is interesting. It isn’t that sticky.
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The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct · Chris Said

Said is a data scientist at Propel:

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In 2006, Sylvain Lesné published an influential Nature paper showing how amyloid oligomers could cause Alzheimer’s disease. With over 2,300 citations, the study was the 4th most cited paper in Alzheimer’s basic research since 2006, helping spur up to $287 million of research into the oligomer hypothesis, according to the NIH.

Sixteen years later, Science reported that key images of the paper were faked, almost certainly by Lesné himself, and all co-authors except him have agreed to retract the paper. The oligomer hypothesis has failed every clinical trial.

Lesné’s alleged misconduct misled a field for over a decade. We don’t know how much it has delayed an eventual treatment for Alzheimer’s, and it was not the only paper supporting the oligomer hypothesis. But if it delayed a successful treatment by just 1 year, I estimate that it would have caused the loss of 36 million QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years), which is more than the QALYs lost by Americans in World War II. (See my notebook for an explanation.)

Lesné is not alone. This year we learned of rampant image manipulation at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, including in multiple papers published by the institute’s CEO and COO. So far 6 papers have been retracted and 31 corrected. The 6 retracted papers alone have 1,400 citations and have surely polluted the field and slowed down progress. If they delayed a successful cancer drug by just 1 year, I estimate they would have caused the loss of 15 million QALYs, or twice the number of QALYs lost by Americans in World War I.

To put it bluntly, scientists who commit research misconduct extract money from a trusting public so that they may enrich themselves and gain prestige. Along the way they knowingly pollute future research, undermine the credibility of science, and may cause the deaths of millions of people.

And yet, researchers who commit misconduct rarely face any consequences. The vast majority are never caught. Sylvain Lesné, the lead author on the Alzheimer’s paper, remains a professor at the University of Minnesota and still receives NIH funding. Despite clear evidence of image manipulation and all co-authors agreeing to a retraction, the university “has closed this review with no findings of research misconduct pertaining to these figures.”

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Heat waves are why your AC can’t save you anymore • CNN

Laura Paddison:

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When Hurricane Ida battered Louisiana with catastrophic flooding and powerful winds in August 2021, more than 1 million people lost power. Then came the heat wave. Temperatures rose above 90ºF — a sucker punch to those sweltering in their homes, unable to turn on air conditioning as power outages stretched on for days.

It was the heat that proved deadliest in New Orleans, responsible for at least nine of the city’s 14 hurricane-related deaths.

The combination of a hurricane, heat wave and a multi-day power outage is a nightmare scenario, but it’s one set to become more common as humans continue to warm the planet, fueling devastating extreme weather. And it reveals an uncomfortable truth about the vulnerability of humanity’s ultimate protection against heat: air conditioning (AC).

Air conditioning is far from perfect. It gobbles up energy, most of which still comes from planet-heating fossil fuels, meaning it exacerbates the very problem it’s used to mitigate. Plus, it’s only available to those who can afford it, further widening social inequality.

But it is also a lifeline against increasingly brutal heat, the deadliest type of extreme weather. It allows people to live in places where temperatures push close to the limits of survivability and where extreme heat persists even at night.

Demand for AC is exploding, expected to triple worldwide by 2050, as global temperatures soar and incomes grow. The problem is that without electricity, access to air conditioning is lost. And many electrical grids are being pushed to a breaking point due to increasingly frequent extreme weather and soaring demand for cooling.

Weather accounted for 80% of major power outages across the US between 2000 and 2023, according to a report from Climate Central, a nonprofit research group.

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New study sparks debate about whether H5N1 virus in cows is adapted to better infect humans • STAT

Megan Molteni:

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A study published Monday provides new evidence that the H5N1 virus currently causing an outbreak of bird flu in U.S. dairy cattle may be adapted to better infecting humans than other circulating strains of the virus, a result that is already courting controversy among the world’s leading flu researchers.

Across the globe, different influenza viruses are constantly circulating in many different kinds of animals. One of the things that determines what kind of animal a given flu virus can infect is the type of receptors present on the outside of tissues that virus comes in contact with. Flu viruses that typically infect birds have an affinity for latching on to the particular shape of a receptor commonly found in the guts of avian species. Human influenza viruses, on the other hand, prefer the shape of a receptor that lines our upper respiratory tracts.

The new work, published in Nature, showed that the bovine H5N1 virus could bind to both receptors.

“There is an ability to bind to human-type receptors,” the study’s lead author, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, told STAT in an interview. But he cautioned that it’s too soon to say whether this ability means the recently emerged bovine branch of the H5N1 evolutionary tree has increased potential to become a significant human pathogen. “Binding to human-type receptors is not the only factor that is required for an avian flu virus to replicate well in humans,” said Kawaoka, a leading influenza virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied H5N1 for decades.

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Just a watching brief, don’t worry, nothing to see here.
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Lucy Letby: killer or coincidence? Why some experts question the evidence • The Guardian

Felicity Lawrence:

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Throughout the trial period, and much of the preceding six years when Cheshire police were investigating a cluster of baby deaths at the Countess of Chester (CoC) hospital and had arrested Letby, laws intended to ensure juries are not influenced by stories in the press meant British journalists reported only what was said in court.

Outside court, however, there has been a growing chorus of voices raising questions about some of the key evidence presented in the trial.

There was no forensic evidence to prove her guilt and no one saw Letby – who continues to maintain her innocence – causing harm.

That also applied to the retrial that reached a guilty verdict last week. Although one of the doctors concluded that she must have tampered with the breathing tube of a baby on three occasions, he did not actually see her doing it.

The prosecution’s case instead drew on accounts from doctors and nurses on the hospital’s neonatal unit and relied heavily on statistical evidence and expert opinion on complex medical points, some of which took days to explain to the lay jury. It is these opinions that some clinicians claim do not stand up to scrutiny.

The case was high-profile and emotionally charged. Successive juries and the families of the babies who died are convinced Letby was responsible. While few of the experts the Guardian spoke to went as far as to say they believed Letby was innocent, the questions about the evidence called into doubt, they said, the safety of the convictions.

A Guardian investigation has interviewed dozens of these experts and seen further evidence from emails and documents. Those raising concerns include several leading consultant neonatologists, some with current or recent leadership roles, and several senior neonatal nurses. Others are public health professionals, GPs, biochemists, a leading government microbiologist, and lawyers. Several of those still working in the NHS have asked to remain anonymous, fearing the impact if they are named.

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I honestly cannot decide on the Letby case. The alternatives are: an apparently nondescript nurse killed or tried to kill more than a dozen babies. Or a colossal coincidence of failure. Both are incredibly unlikely. But only one is true.
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A Pigouvian pollution tax on ChatGPT • ratpie

The eponymous, anonymous “ratpie” back in January 2023:

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If one had to characterise the state of mind among knowledge and creative workers, musicians included, in 2022, worries about meeting demand for quantity or variety of content would not figure high. Misinformation, provenance, and the difficulties of making a living, yes. Being short a few million blog posts, product reviews, or new music tracks, no.

So it was perhaps a bit surprising when the appearance of a flock of AI engines, and their ubermensch ChatGPT, an easy to use interface to a new text AI, generated (pun intended) wild enthusiasm, along with some doomsterism, and of course digital reams of new content as the commentariat contemplated their own industry’s potential demise.

…Some activities create costs that are borne by people who don’t share in the gains of those undertaking them. Congested roads, smoke from factory chimneys, and unusual demands on publicly funded health services are examples. Economists think of these as costs external to the economic activity associated with producing things, driving somewhere, or smoking tobacco. There are rare cases of external gains too; think of how good state-funded schools inflate property prices in their catchment areas.

The external costs from ChatGPT are the teachers’ time and effort, and pupils’ lack of learning caused by cheating at school, incorrect Stack Overflow advice followed, as well as revenue extracted from copyright markets and the extra efforts human creators need to put in to compete. Arthur Pigou himself, Cambridge Professor of Economics in the first half of the C20th, was deeply interested in welfare. He argued that tax was the simplest and most effective way to deal with gains and losses that fell to those outside of a transaction.

As well as being a redress for harmful activity, Pigouvian taxes can provide funding for more of what we do want. This is important – interventions need to have broad popular understanding and support. In this case the harms fall on education and the arts, two  significant absorbers of taxpayers money which could be supplemented or offset.

I asked ChatGPT if it thought it should be taxed; it denied any knowledge of itself. It might not yet write a decent poem, but AI has clearly got its head around tax evasion.

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Neat. Reminds me of the line from Veep, when the fictional vice-president goes to Silicon Valley to pump some tech companies for money, only to be told: “we like to think of ourselves as post-tax.”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Hackers have figured out how to create tickets that can be transferred – even when Ticketmaster doesn’t want them to outside its resale sites. CC-licensed photo by nerdy girl on Flickr.

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

Scalpers work with hackers to liberate Ticketmaster’s ‘non-transferable’ tickets • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

A lawsuit filed in California by concert giant AXS has revealed a legal and technological battle between ticket scalpers and platforms like Ticketmaster and AXS, in which scalpers have figured out how to extract “untransferable” tickets from their accounts by generating entry barcodes on parallel infrastructure that the scalpers control and which can then be sold and transferred to customers.

By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS. 

In the lawsuit, AXS said brokers are delivering “counterfeit” tickets to “unsuspecting consumers,” and that they are “created, in whole or in part by one or more of the Defendants illicitly accessing and then mimicking, emulating, or copying tickets from the AXS Platform.” The lawsuit accuses these services of hacking and states that AXS does not know how they are doing it. But the tickets themselves are often not counterfeit at all, and in the vast majority of cases, they scan as genuine.

Two security researchers we spoke to reverse engineered how Ticketmaster generates ticket barcodes and showed how scalpers can generate genuine tickets for concerts themselves. The system that works for Ticketmaster is also likely to work for AXS tickets, which use similar “rotating barcodes” that change every few seconds. After one of the researchers published their findings in February, brokers tried to hire the researcher to build ticket transfer services for them. 

«

On this one, I’m all for the hackers: Ticketmaster (and AXS) are evil monopolies which rip off their customers in every and each way that they can. (Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, which had an operating income of $367m on revenue of $3.8bn in the most recent reporter quarter. Concerts are barely profitable; ticketing has 40% operating income margins.
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French elections: political cyber attacks and Internet traffic shifts • Cloudflare

João Tomé:

»

As we highlighted last week, the first round of the French elections saw specific DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks targeting French political party websites. While online attacks are common and not always election-related, recent activities in France, the Netherlands, and the UK confirm that DDoS attacks frequently target political parties during election periods.

Two French political parties were attacked shortly before the first round of elections, and a third party was targeted on June 30. This third party, indicated in green on the chart below, faced attacks on the evening of June 29. Several attempts were thwarted by Cloudflare throughout election day, from 10:00 to 23:00 UTC (12:00 to 01:00 local time). The most intense attack occurred at 19:00 UTC (21:00 local time), reaching nearly 40,000 requests per second, with a total of 620 million DDoS requests recorded on that day (June 29).

Our data indicates that the most significant attack Cloudflare intercepted targeted a party shown in yellow on the chart above. The party had already been attacked on June 23, 2024, and this subsequent attack happened on July 3 at 21:36 UTC (23:36 local time), lasting four minutes and peaking at 151,000 requests per second (rps), making it the second-largest attack we’ve observed on political parties recently. This was comparable in intensity and duration to another attack on a UK political party right after their election.

On the runoff election day, July 7, the party represented by the blue line was again a target, having been attacked previously on June 24, 27, and 29. The most severe of these occurred on June 27, with attacks reaching 118,000 rps during a day that totaled 610 million daily DDoS requests. On July 7, the attacks resumed, with the first starting at 09:55 UTC (11:55 local time) and continuing sporadically until 23:18 UTC (01:18 local time on July 8). The peak of these attacks came at 11:40 UTC (13:40 local time), reaching 96,000 rps.

«

Here’s what I find puzzling: what’s the point? Why DDOS a party’s website? Who the hell goes there to find out anything at all?
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Google Maps tests new pop-up ads that give you an unnecessary detour

Pranab Mehrotra:

»

Google Maps is testing a new ad format that could cause distractions while driving. It brings up a pop-up notification during navigation that covers the bottom half of the screen with an unnecessary detour suggestion.

Anthony Higman on X (formerly Twitter) recently spotted the new ad format during their commute. According to Higman, the ad popped up while passing a Royal Farms gas station, even though they did not search for a gas station or convenience store while setting their destination.

The ad has a Sponsored tag at the top of the card, followed by the name of the location, its review rating, and the estimated arrival time. It also includes two buttons to add it as a stop or cancel the suggestion.

Google appears to have borrowed this ad format from Waze, which has delivered similar ads for quite some time. User reports dating back to 2018 reveal that the banner ads in Waze popped up at the top of the screen while driving, but some say the ads only appeared while they were stationary.

«

This is just bonkers. Given how easy it is to distract drivers, and how they often have their phone in sight if they’re using it for navigation, this is dangerous.
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Earth surpasses 1.5ºC of warming for twelve consecutive months • Los Angeles Times

Hayley Smith:

»

In a troubling milestone, June marked Earth’s 12th consecutive month of global warming at or above 1.5º Celsius — the internationally accepted threshold for avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

A stifling month marked by heat waves and heat deaths, June was also about a quarter of a degree warmer than the previous hottest June on record in 2023, according to a report from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. It is the 13th straight month to break its own monthly heat record.

The planet’s persistent soaring temperature is “more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a large and continuing shift in our climate,” Copernicus’ director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.

“Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm,” he said. “This is inevitable, unless we stop adding [greenhouse gases] into the atmosphere and the oceans.”

The 1.5ºC threshold, about 2.7º Fahrenheit, was established under the 2015 Paris agreement. Under that accord, the United States and nearly 200 other nations agreed to limit the global average temperature increase to a maximum of 2ºC over pre-industrial levels — and preferably below 1.5ºC — in order to reduce the worst effects of climate change.

…The unprecedented year-long stretch is “very noteworthy and disturbing,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national nonprofit organization.

«

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In India, buyers want refunds for 2016 Tesla car deposits • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

»

When Tesla allowed Indians to get their hands on its wildly popular electric cars for the first time, Vishal Gondal was among the first to grab the opportunity.

Within hours after the company opened its pre-booking portal for India in April 2016, Gondal, a fan of Elon Musk and Tesla, paid $1,000 (then 66,237 rupees) to pre-book the Tesla Model 3. At the time, there was no clarity on what the car would eventually cost in India or when the company would start delivering the vehicle to the country. But Gondal, who had driven a Tesla in the U.S. earlier, was swept with excitement.

For almost seven years after that, Gondal, founder and CEO of health-tech startup GoQii, patiently waited for his Model 3. By 2023, when there was still no sign of the car, he decided to cancel his booking — and that was the start of another ordeal.

Gondal had to chase Tesla’s India executive over emails for six months before he received his refund in June 2023. “There was no communication, no emails. And even years later, there was no apology [from the company],” he told Rest of World.

Tesla still does not sell its cars in India — the third-largest auto market in the world.

«

Seven years? That’s a lot of patience. But surely that’s tanked Tesla’s reputation in the country.
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The climate is falling apart. Prepare for the push alerts • The Atlantic

Zoë Schlanger:

»

Last July, I was living in Montreal when an emergency push alert from Canada’s environmental agency popped up on my phone, accompanied by a loud alarm. It had been raining ferociously that afternoon, and the wind was picking up. The alert warned of something worse—a marine tornado, which “are often wrapped in rain and may not be visible”—and ordered, “Take cover immediately if threatening weather approaches.”

I looked outside. The wind was howling louder now, and the sky was a strange gray. Radio signal was dipping in and out. I knocked on the ground-floor neighbor’s door to shelter there. This particular tornado spared Montreal, touching down about 30 miles northwest of the city. But the alert worked: We took measures to protect ourselves.

I took a screenshot of that push alert—a memento from this moment in which extreme weather is increasing. Climate change is here; these are the emergencies that come with it. Each push alert marks the distance we’re closing between the previous range of normal activity and the future that scientists warned us of.

I got another push alert this June, now living in a different city: “New York City USA Heat Wave: Please Take Precautions.” This one came from an air-quality-monitoring app I’d downloaded—not from any governmental agency. A colleague got a similar alert from the National Weather Service through his Alexa app warning about degraded air quality, the result of ground-level ozone, which commonly forms in overheated cities. We both took a screenshot of the message we received. They still feel novel, for now.

But as climate change progresses and extreme events mount, these alerts will keep coming. Eventually, certain climate-related extreme weather events may become so repetitive that their danger—though no less threatening—might cease to feel exceptional. Some call this human quirk “shifting baseline syndrome.” Emergency managers call it “alert fatigue.” It may be one of the biggest problems facing their field as climate disasters mount.

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Apple reverses course to approve Epic Games Store in EU • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

Apple performed an abrupt U-turn over the weekend to approve the Epic Games Store in the European Union.

The volte-face came after a lengthy tirade from Epic at the end of last week. The company stated that its Epic Games Store notarization had been twice rejected by Apple amid claims that the company’s “Install” button looked a bit too much like Apple’s “Get” button and the in-app purchases label was too close to Apple’s own.

Epic Games said: “Apple’s rejection is arbitrary, obstructive, and in violation of the DMA, and we’ve shared our concerns with the European Commission.”

The European Commission recently launched a fresh probe into the fees and terms that Apple imposes on developers as part of its efforts to comply with the European Digital Markets Act (DMA).

If Apple fails to comply with the DMA, it could face fines of up to 10% of its global annual revenue.

However, the situation is murky. While Epic Games was quick to boast that its store notarization submission had now been accepted, it took issue with claims that Apple still wanted it to change its user interface in a future version, presumably to deal with those pesky buttons.

«

They’re just never going to be on each other’s Christmas card list, are they.
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Why are US city housing costs so high? The elevator can explain why • The New York Times

Stephen Smith:

»

My mission to understand the American elevator began in 2021 when I came down with a crippling post-viral illness. The stairs to my third-floor Brooklyn walk-up apartment would leave me dizzy and winded, my ears ringing, heart beating out of my chest. At 32, I’d joined the 12% of Americans who report “serious difficulty” with stairs. On bad days, I became a prisoner in my own home.

A few months later, visiting Bucharest, I rode the elevator in my mother’s five-story building. A developer in a much poorer Eastern European country could afford to include an elevator, but the developer of my luxury five-story building in Brooklyn, built 25 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, could not? I quit my job in real estate and started a nonprofit focused on building codes and construction policy.

Through my research on elevators, I got a glimpse into why so little new housing is built in America, and why what is built is often of such low quality and at high cost. The problem with elevators is a microcosm of the challenges of the broader construction industry — from labor to building codes to a sheer lack of political will. These challenges are at the root of a mounting housing crisis that has spread to nearly every part of the country and is damaging our economic productivity and our environment.

Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labour that the construction industry desperately needs.

«

It’s a fascinating rant about how regulation and NIH (not invented here) has strangled the life out of the business.
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Voter ID rule may have stopped 400,000 taking part in UK election, poll suggests • The Guardian

Peter Walker:

»

More than 400,000 people may have been prevented from voting in the general election because they lacked the necessary ID, with those from minority ethnic communities more than twice as likely to have experienced this, polling has suggested.

Of those surveyed by More In Common, 3.2% said they were turned away at least once last Thursday, which if reflected across the UK would equate to more than 850,000 people. Of these, more than half said they either did not return or came back and were still unable to vote.

Among people turned away at least once, about a third had ID that was not on the relatively narrow list of permitted documents; about a quarter said the name on their ID was different to that on the electoral register; and 12% said they were told the picture on the ID did not match their appearance.

The poll of more than 2,000 people across Great Britain, coordinated by the campaign group Hope Not Hate, also indicated that the voter ID rules, used last week for the first time at a general election, disproportionately affected minority ethnic people.

It found that 6.5% of voters of colour were turned away from a polling booth at least once, compared with 2.5% of white voters.

The rule that voters must show photo ID was introduced by the Conservative government as part of its 2022 Elections Act, despite minimal evidence that in-person voter fraud was a significant problem.

…The polling found that 6% of people said the ID requirements had affected their decision on whether or not to vote and that they then did not vote, which if reflected nationally could mean up to 2.8 million people not voting when they might otherwise have done.

«

Turnout was down at just under 60%; a total of 28.8m votes, from a registered population of 48.2m.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The podcaster who was sued by Craig Wright over the invention of bitcoin has won an order to recover millions in libel costs. CC-licensed photo by Elliott Brown 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. Let it go. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A top Tory donor’s tangled web presence • Financial Times

Cynthia O’Murchu:

»

Search engines results are the frontline in the battle for reputations. And most Google users don’t look further than the first page, so what’s on top matters.

Herrera Velutini has had a friendly web presence for many years — notably the low-key JulioMHerreravelutini.com, which for a time was registered to a reputation management company and his London-based business Britannia Financial Group. But since the indictment, there has been an apparent surge in transparently supportive content across an array of new websites.

As a result, these contrasting narratives have for months battled for the top slots in search engine results — the grandiose articles extolling Herrera Velutini’s status as a financial titan sometimes crowding out less flattering ones. An ordinary person seeking information about Herrera Velutini would have found themselves thrown into a digital hall of mirrors.

In all, FT Alphaville reviewed multiple dozen websites that had published gushing content about Herrera Velutini, with names such as arizona-republic (not to be confused with the legitimate, Gannett-owned Arizona Republic), Washington News (where “every article is a brushstroke in the canvas of truth and information”), or Philadaphia [sic] Inquirer, which, rather incongruently, mostly published stories about London.

The “Street Journal Tribune”, for example, dubbed Herrera Velutini the ‘Prince of Latam’. That site informed readers that: 

»

His impeccable fashion sense and his persona as a fashionable banker harmonize with his reputation as an art enthusiast, champion of animal rights, and notably, as the financial mogul who altruistically aided the British Government throughout the Coronavirus pandemic.

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Not convinced? How about “The London Outlook”, which said:

»

Julio’s profound commitment to the British monarchy and longstanding relationship with the Royal Family was evident as worked [sic] tirelessly alongside Buckingham Palace officials to craft an extravagant spectacle in commemoration of the Queen’s platinum jubilee.

«

Asked about the reported aid to the British government during the Covid pandemic, Schillings referred us to the donations to the Tory party by London-based financial services company Britannia Financial Group, which was then still owned by Herrera Velutini. No word on the “aid” to the British government. And when FTAV asked Buckingham Palace which individuals the palace worked closely with on the Jubilee, Mr Herrera Velutini was not on the list.

«

I did not come out of this story thinking that Velutini was being described accurately by the websites that nobody has ever heard of. As the article also points out, “The vast mesh of fake news outlets masquerading as legitimate journalism, often funded by partisan interests, has been given a suitably icky moniker: ‘pink slime’.”
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ITER fusion reactor to see further delays, with operations pushed to 2034 • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

On Tuesday, the people managing the ITER experimental fusion reactor announced that a combination of delays and altered priorities meant that its first-of-its-kind hardware wouldn’t see plasma until 2036, with the full-energy deuterium-tritium fusion pushed back to 2039. The latter represents a four-year delay relative to the previous roadmap. While the former is also a delay, it’s due in part to changing priorities.

…The latest delays are due to more prosaic reasons. One of them is the product of the international nature of the collaboration, which sees individual components built by different partner organizations before assembly at the reactor site in France. The pandemic, unsurprisingly, severely disrupted the production of a lot of these components, and the project’s structure meant that alternate suppliers couldn’t be used (assuming alternate suppliers of one-of-a-kind hardware existed in the first place).

The second problem relates to the location of the reactor in France. The country’s nuclear safety regulator had concerns about the assembly of some of the components and halted construction on the reactor.

«

Ah, fusion – always reliably late. The regulator’s concerns were more about the potential for the structure to collapse than anything about its radiation.
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The rooftop solution to keeping streets cool: white paint • The Times

Adam Vaughan:

»

Painting roofs white to reflect the sun’s energy would be more effective at cooling London’s streets than covering them with plants, new research suggests.

The overheating of cities as a result of climate change has become a growing concern. Heathrow hit an unprecedented 40.2ºC amid a heatwave two years ago, and London authorities have even created “cool spaces” in the capital for people to escape high temperatures and overheating buildings

To find out the best way to cool temperatures at street level, researchers used a computer model to estimate the effect of nine different measures on two very hot days in London in July 2018.

They found that white roofs were the most effective method, lowering the surrounding temperature by 1.2ºC. Solar panels came next, with a 0.5ºC reduction, while street-level trees and other vegetation had a 0.3ºC cooling effect.

By contrast, “green roofs” with grass, moss and wildflowers on average had no cooling or warming effect. While they did decrease maximum temperatures, the effect was partly cancelled out because they also increase minimum temperature due to evapotranspiration — where heated water evaporates from from plants and re-enters the atmosphere.

Air conditioning would raise temperatures for pedestrians and cyclists by about 0.15ºC, as units pump out warm air, the modelling suggested.

“The main message for any of us living in London or at similar latitudes to England, is ‘why don’t we put that up [white roofs] and see?’ It’s cheap. You don’t have the problems of structural load. You can always put a green roof on afterwards,” said Dr Oscar Brousse at University College London, an author of the study.

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Indeed, why not? I think that many British town planners would have a fit if you want to them and said you intended to paint your roof white. Yet it is effective. Really it should be mandated. Though it’s odd that solar panels are effective at reducing temperatures. The full research is at Geophysical Research Letters.
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A historic heat wave is making much of the country feel like Death Valley • Frequent Business Traveler

Paul Riegler:

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The weather outside is frightening as an historic and dangerous heat wave spreads across a large swatch of the United States.

“Extremely dangerous heat continues in the Western US into next week, with heat persisting today from New York to the Gulf before gradually subsiding with time into next week,” the National Weather Service said in a midday statement on Saturday, adding that “[E]xcessive heat may bring heat-related illness.”

In California, high temperatures are predicted to reach at least 100°F (37.7°C)  to 120° F (49°C)  throughout the state, except right along the coast.

Meteorologists expect record high temperatures to be broken in multiple cities..

Las Vegas could hit or even break its all-time hottest temperature of 117°F (47°C) on Sunday and Death Valley could hit 129°F (54°C), just 5ºF shy of the all-time hottest temperature recorded on Earth.

«

Though this is dry heat – survivable, even if incredibly uncomfortable. The dangerous form is “wet bulb heat”, when the air is so humid that you can’t dissipate body heat by sweat evaporation. That kills.
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Scientists claim crypto owners are likely to be narcissistic, psychopathic or sadists • The Independent

Andrew Griffin:

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Investors in digital currencies are also more likely to be men, rely on fringe social media sources, believe in conspiracy theories and feel victimised.

That is according to new research that polled 2,001 American adults on whether they owned or had owned cryptocurrency. Around 30% of them said that they had.

It then asked about important demographic information, as well as other questions aimed at revealing their political, psychological and social traits.

The researchers then took that data and attempted to work out what characteristics were the best predictors of whether someone had bought cryptocurrency.

They found that among other important characteristics, those who had bought them were more likely to report that they had personality traits aligned with the “dark tetrad”. That is made up of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism.

The dark tetrad is a psychological theory that builds on the more famous dark triad, and adds sadism. The triad was first proposed at the beginning of the century, and researchers have said that those with the behaviour are more likely to be disruptive employees, commit crimes or cause other issues.

But the most strong predictor of whether someone had owned cryptocurrency was whether they relied on fringe social media sources for news, the researchers said.

They also pointed to other important characteristics: maleness, argumentativeness, higher income, and feelings of victimhood.

«

This is the research – which was actually carried out in 2022. Though it probably still holds true. Speaking of cryptocurrency…
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Worldwide freezing order granted over Craig Wright libel claim ‘founded on a lie’ • Law Gazette

Michael Cross:

»

A podcaster who had faced a costs bill running into millions of pounds over a libel claim brought by the fraudster posing as the inventor of bitcoin today secured the court’s help to recover his own costs in the case. Mr Justice Mellor, who earlier this year declared Dr Craig Wright’s ‘Satoshi’ claim to be based on forgeries and lies granted a worldwide freezing order (WFO) against Wright, who is understood to be in East Asia. 

The order is the latest fallout from the ruling in COPA v Wright, an action brought by a group of software developers over Wright’s claims, which he enforced with litigation in at least three jurisdictions. In one case, Wright successfully sued podcaster Peter McCormack over social media posts and videos claiming Wright was a fraudster. While the damages were reduced to £1 because of Wright’s conduct, which included putting forward deliberately false evidence, McCormack was ordered to pay part of Wright’s costs. 

Ruling today in Craig Wright v Peter McCormack, Mr Justice Mellor stated that the defamation claim had been part of a ‘mendacious overall campaign’ to lay a false claim to bitcoin assets ‘worth many billions’. Wright was using the law of defamation to silence anyone who questioned his claim. ‘The power of the cause of action in defamation is exponentially increased in the hands of someone like Dr Wright… who signals his intent to spend disproportionate sums in litigation,’ the judge said. The costs budgets approved in the case added up to £3.92m, plus VAT. [About £4.7m, or $6m.]

The judge found that McCormack, who was represented by international firm Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, ‘has a good arguable case (indeed a very strong case) for recovery of costs in the sum of £1.548m’.

…Granting the freezing order – the latest of several applying to Wright – Mellor said: ‘The defamation claim should never have been threatened, commenced or pursued. In these circumstances, our law would be in a sorry and sad state if a litigant in the position of Mr McCormack is not able to recover his costs of having to fight that type of litigation.’

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If it should never have been threatened, commenced or pursued, was there no judge or similar who could have called a halt much earlier? I wonder if Wright will be labelled a vexatious litigant in future.
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Dog accidentally turns on stove and sets fire to home • BBC News

»

Colorado Springs Fire Department has released video footage [included in the story] of the moment a curious dog started a house fire by accidentally switching on a stovetop.

The fire was extinguished by the homeowner before crews arrived after being alerted by their HomePod device which sent them a “High Heat” notice.

The homeowner was treated for smoke inhalation, but no other injuries to people or pets were reported.

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Naughty doggo, though the HomePod certainly earned its keep there. Though I can’t find any description of whether a “high heat” notice is automatic; all I can find is one that will send an alert to your phone if it hears a smoke or carbon monoxide alarm going off.
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For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta’s electricity is coal free • The Globe and Mail

Chris Severson-Baker:

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The Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based clean-energy think tank [of which Severson-Baker is the executive director], first intervened in a coal plant regulatory process in the late 1990s and, in 2009, published the first major proposal that showed the province could move to an unabated coal-free grid by 2030. Our research was ahead of its time and criticized as idealistic.

Coal accounted for 80% of Alberta’s electricity grid in the early 2000s and it still amounted to 60% just 10 years ago. When phasing out coal was just an idea being batted around, many said it couldn’t be done. This is not dissimilar to the rhetoric today around decarbonizing the grid. But Alberta’s experience phasing out coal shows environmental progress of this magnitude is possible.

In 2012, then-prime minister Stephen Harper mandated a nationwide phase-out of coal by 2061. A far-off target date that, nonetheless, provided certainty to the provinces and got the ball rolling. In Alberta, the Wildrose Party, then led by now United Conservative Party Premier Danielle Smith, included a coal phase-out commitment in its 2012 election platform.

When the New Democratic Party came to power after the 2015 provincial election, they got to work delivering on a plan to accelerate the elimination of coal. This included strengthening Alberta’s industrial carbon pricing system, a commitment to 30%o renewables by 2030 and a target date for phasing out coal by 2030 – a target built through consultation with experts and industry. The current federal government made a similar national commitment in 2016.

At the time, there were concerns about the impact this would have on jobs. We learned that workers benefit from new investments in cleaner electricity – if included in strategic planning from the start. Federal and provincial programs to support workers during this transition were made available, while community economic diversification and growth in jobs in other sectors have helped to offset some of this change. Research also shows there are opportunities in clean energy, such as from increased land revenues and municipal taxes.

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Really interesting long read about how Alberta has got rid of coal. Echoes of the wailing about oil licences in Scotland.
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Pentagon says it’s impossible to ditch Huawei telecom gear — officials beg Congress for waiver from Chinese sanctions • Tom’s Hardware

Jeff Butts:

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Since 2019, the US Department of Defense has been asking for a waiver from legislation barring it from doing business with companies reliant on telecommunications equipment manufactured by Huawei. With increased tensions between the US and China and an ongoing chip war, that waiver may be harder to obtain. Still, Pentagon officials insist it would be impossible to lock Huawei out of all of the department’s operations.

The prohibition was signed into law as part of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. Under Section 889 of that act, government agencies are barred from entering into or renewing contracts with any country or company that uses Huawei telecommunications equipment.

The problem is that Huawei is the largest telecom provider in the world. According to Fortune, the Chinese company accounts for nearly one-third of all telecommunications equipment revenue globally. Many nations cannot shy away from the Chinese firm. Huawei’s products are often much less expensive than competing ones, and gutting an entire telecoms network to switch manufacturers would be a costly undertaking.

Former Defense Department official and founder of 5M Strategies Brennan Grignon said, “There are certain parts of the world where you literally cannot get away from Huawei.” She said that while the original legislation had good intentions, she doesn’t believe it was thought through very well.

…Pentagon officials insist that granting the waiver authority is essential. They say it would enable important resupply missions in various parts of the world and maintain national security. US military personnel often depend on Huawei networks, whether they are special operators on missions in the Indo-Pacific region or senior officers representing the US at international air shows.

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The DoD has a pretty good point here: how do you avoid every company reliant on Huawei? It’s almost a physical impossibility unless you get those companies to rip out their systems. But if you suspect Huawei of Evil Deeds no matter where its kit is, then you’ll be paranoid all the way.
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Wi-Fi scam: Perth man charged over evil twin fake Wi-Fi scam • escape.com.au

Hannah Moore:

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A man has been charged over an “evil twin” scam that used fake free wi-fi networks to steal the personal data of unsuspecting users.
Police allege the man, 42, used a device in a number of locations, including airports in Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide, and on domestic flights, to create “evil twin” copies of legitimate wi-fi networks.

When users tried to connect their devices to the networks, they were allegedly taken to a fake web page and required to sign in using their email or social media logins.

Those details were then allegedly saved to the man’s devices, and could be used to access more personal information, including a victim’s online communications, stored images and videos or bank details, police said.

The alleged scam was reported to police by an airline in April, after its employees identified a suspicious wi-fi network during a domestic flight.

AFP investigators searched the man’s baggage when he returned to Perth Airport on an interstate flight on April 19, and seized a portable wireless access device, a laptop and a mobile phone from his hand luggage.

Officers also raided his home in Palmyra, near Fremantle.

«

And to those saying “this is why you want a VPN!”, haveibeenpwned expert Troy Hunt points out that that wouldn’t have helped, because this gets your credentials while you’re still operating en clair. This is why I keep well clear of public Wi-Fi spots that require any ID, to be honest: this scam still works.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The old fossils are on the way out. No, not just them, but also the coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar. CC-licensed photo by Molesworth II on Flickr.

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

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

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

Google: AI potentially breaking reality is a feature not a bug • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Generative AI could “distort collective understanding of socio-political reality or scientific consensus,” and in many cases is already doing that, according to a new research paper from Google, one of the biggest companies in the world building, deploying, and promoting generative AI.

The paper, “Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data,” was co-authored by researchers at Google’s artificial intelligence research laboratory DeepMind, its security think tank Jigsaw, and its charitable arm Google.org, and aims to classify the different ways generative AI tools are being misused by analyzing about 200 incidents of misuse as reported in the media and research papers between January 2023 and March 2024.

Unlike self-serving warnings from Open AI CEO Sam Altman or Elon Musk about the “existential risk” artificial general intelligence poses to humanity, Google’s research focuses on real harm that generative AI is currently causing and could get worse in the future. Namely, that generative AI makes it very easy for anyone to flood the internet with generated text, audio, images, and videos.  

Much like another Google research paper about the dangers of generative AI I covered recently, Google’s methodology here likely undercounts instances of AI-generated harm. But the most interesting observation in the paper is that the vast majority of these harms and how they “undermine public trust,” as the researchers say, are often “neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools’ content policies or terms of service.” In other words, that type of content is a feature, not a bug. 

…This observation lines up with the reporting we’ve done at 404 Media for the past year and prior. People who are using AI to impersonate others, sockpuppet, scale and amplify bad content, or create nonconsensual intimate images (NCII), are mostly not hacking or manipulating the generative AI tools they’re using. They’re using them as intended.

«

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Kenya protesters us AI in anti-government battle • Semafor

Martin Siele:

»

Kenya’s government has raised concerns about risks associated with use of artificial intelligence (AI) as youth-led, anti-government protests continue across the nation. Protesters have deployed creative uses of AI and digital tools to take on the political establishment over the past few weeks as part of the nationwide demonstrations, which were triggered by the now-scrapped Finance Bill 2024 containing a raft of unpopular tax hikes.

Among widely shared AI tools created in support of the protests include the Corrupt Politicians GPT, a chatbot which reveals corruption cases involving Kenyan politicians. Another is the Finance Bill GPT, which helps break down the controversial bill and its potential impact on prices The chatbot also shares lawmakers’ phone numbers for their constituents to share their concerns.

Protesters also contributed to and shared databases of businesses owned by politicians, which have faced boycotts and attacks, and created another chatbot featuring their contributions to parliamentary debates.

The mostly Gen Z and millennial protesters, who are now pushing for the president’s resignation, began organizing against the Finance Bill on TikTok and X before taking to the streets. They continue to use the social media apps’ features, including spaces and live-streams, to coordinate protests and mobilize.

The protesters have also used these platforms to crowdfund medical bill payments and funeral costs for injured and killed protesters. At least 39 people have been killed in the protests since mid-June, according to a government-funded human rights organization. An online fundraiser managed by activist and journalist Hanifa Farsafi, one of the protest’s key figures, had raised 29.8 million Kenyan shillings ($231,906) from over 34,000 people as of Wednesday evening.

«

So it’s actually a very modern and targeted use of ChatGPT to create something trained on a very specific set of data to give accurate answers: when chatbots work on a small knowledge set (but not language set) they are very informative.

Though one has to wonder how much time people are spending quizzing chatbots about this sort of thing. I suspect a small group of people will, and then screenshots will get shared far and wide.
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Leak confirms Apple’s work on ‘home accessory’ • MacRumors

Aaron Perris:

»

Code discovered on Apple’s backend by MacRumors confirms Apple is indeed working on a long-rumored home accessory in addition to the HomePod and Apple TV.

The code references a device with the identifier “HomeAccessory17,1,” which is a new identifier category. The name is similar to the HomePod ‘s “AudioAccessory” identifier.

Interestingly, the 17,1 in the identifier name suggests that this device may receive Apple’s upcoming A18 chip, which will be used in all four iPhone 16 models later this year. With the A18 chip, the HomeAccessory device would have the power for Apple Intelligence.

The code also indicates that this “home accessory” will be running a software variant of tvOS, much like the HomePod . Earlier this year, MacRumors found evidence of Apple’s work on homeOS, which could be the firmware running on this device.

«

One has to wonder about how much backing this will actually get. Apple, weirdly, just can’t imagine the home beyond computers; the Apple TV has never had much pizazz, and the HomePod line came too late compared to other home “assistants” and didn’t get much support either. Arguably, nobody has figured out “what do you need in the home?” For me, it’s smart (programmable) lights and a programmable thermostat, but beyond that, not much else.
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The conspiracy of silence to protect Joe Biden • NY Mag

Olivia Nuzzi:

»

Under vines of white moonflowers on the governor’s patio, I watched as the president neared the end of his ten-minute speech [to reassure donors after his calamitous debate performance]. If a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth, he was still making them. The truth he told now was this: “I’ve got a helluva lot of plans for the next four years — God willing, as my father used to say.”

In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?

Uniformly, these people were of a similar social strata. They lived and socialized in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. They did not wish to come forward with their stories. They did not want to blow a whistle. They wished that they could whistle past what they knew and emerge in November victorious and relieved, having helped avoid another four years of Trump. What would happen after that? They couldn’t think that far ahead. Their worries were more immediate.

When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.

«

Of course Nuzzi is being monstered for this piece, by people asking both “why didn’t you write this in January?” and “why are you writing this now?” The former, she explains, is because she needed to firm up the findings; the latter, well, it’s like comedy. All about the timing.
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So it’s bye bye to the ERG, Spud-u-hate, five families and the 1922 Committee • The Times

Matt Chorley:

»

After the humiliation will come something much worse: irrelevance. It is impossible to overstate just how totally irrelevant the Conservatives are about to become. There is no easy way to say this, but nobody will be filling in their wall charts with the runners and riders for the Tory leadership. The tight timetabling for elections to the 1922 Committee matters not. Senior Tory sources will be left to scream into the void.

The alphabet spaghetti leftovers will be scraped into the bin: ERG, CCHQ, IEA, IDS. Bye bye to the banging of tables. Farewell to the star chambers. Arrivederci to the Five Families [of right-wing Tories] — they will struggle to muster one.

Nobody will care who Penny Mordaunt has unfollowed on Twitter. Or about the sandwiches at Tom Tugendhat’s launch. Or what Latin phrase Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has had mowed into his front lawn. Or anything that is said in all those WhatsApp groups. Step away from Nadine Dorries’s column, Lee Anderson’s GB News show, Dominic Cummings’s Substack. Think how much free time you’ll now have.

We will all have to adjust. Just at the moment when someone (not me) has added Andrew Bridgen to my Wikipedia page in a section marked “feuds”, it’s all over. Spud-u-hate, like the rest of them, has had his chips.

«

Ah, the Five Families, more accurately described by James O’Brien as “the Gammonbinos”. These will all be lost, like tears in the rain, and we won’t care any more.
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British Airways owner IAG warns airfares must rise to fund carbon cuts • FT

Philip Georgiadis:

»

Airlines in Europe will be forced to raise prices to fund the cost of cutting carbon emissions, the boss of British Airways owner IAG said.

Luis Gallego told the Financial Times that switching to cleaner, more expensive sustainable fuel would “have a big impact” on the industry and put some people off flying.

“Flying is going to be more expensive. That is an issue, we are trying to improve efficiency to mitigate that, but it will have an impact on demand,” he said.

He added that European airlines could become less competitive because of the bloc’s tough net zero targets, which include a requirement for 6% of jet fuel to be from sustainable sources by 2030.

“We agree with decarbonisation . . . but I think we need to do it in a consistent way worldwide not to jeopardise European aviation,” Gallego said.

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is made from a range of non-fossil fuel sources, from waste cooking oil to crops, and can emit 70% less carbon dioxide than traditional jet fuel.

But very little of it is being produced — less than 1% of total aviation fuel consumption last year was from sustainable sources — meaning it is far more expensive than jet fuel.

IAG itself used 12% of the world’s SAF last year across its five airlines, which include British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus.

«

So IAG used 12% of 1%? It’s not a lot, is it. This feels like something that’s more of an ambition than a target, but it’s a great way to push up airline prices and blame someone else.
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The EU got more than 50% of its electricity from renewables in first half of 2024 • The Progress Playbook

Nick Hedley:

»

Renewables accounted for 50.4% of the European Union’s electricity generation in the first six months of 2024, data from industry association Eurelectric shows.

That’s a sharp increase from calendar year 2023, when renewables comprised 44.7% of the bloc’s mix, according to Eurostat.

“The pace of change is impressive,” Eurelectric secretary general Kristian Ruby said in a statement.

When including nuclear, 74% of the EU’s power came from low-carbon sources in the first half — up from 68% in 2023.

Yes, but: The association said demand continues to decline, reflecting sluggish economic growth, warmer temperatures, energy savings, and industry relocating abroad.

This trend must be reversed “to provide the necessary investment signals for clean generation,” Ruby said.

With this in mind, Eurelectric wants the new European Commission to propose an Electrification Action Plan that seeks to boost the share of electricity in final energy consumption to 35% by 2030. This would entail a faster shift to electric vehicles, heat pumps, and industrial decarbonisation technologies, among other things.

«

Impressive.
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The UK’s last coal fired power plant takes final delivery of old fossils • RenewEconomy

Joshua Hill:

»

The last coal-fired power station in the UK, the 2GW Ratcliffe-on-Soar facility in the East Midlands, is entering its final days and has received its last load of coal ahead of its planned closure on September 30.

The Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station is operated by German multinational energy company Uniper began operations in 1967 and claims to produce enough electricity to make more than one billion cups of tea a day, or more then 21 trillion overall – a truly British analogy.

“The last coal delivery will be a significant moment and one that heralds the end of the story for the power station,” said Mike Lockett, Uniper UK country chair.

“However, it’s not the end for the site, as we look towards a future where it could become a zero-carbon technology and energy hub for the East Midlands.”

Uniper is looking at various options for the Ratcliffe site, including green hydrogen production and green manufacturing. Uniper aims to be completely carbon-neutral by 2040.

In May, just 0.4% of the UK’s power supply came from coal, with wind and solar providing 27% and nuclear 17%. Fossil gas and imports accounted for most of the rest. A decade ago, it provided 40% of the power supply, according to Ember.

«

They’re burning Tory party members? Oh, a different sort of old fossil. Amazing transformation of energy supply, though. The Labour Party’s 2008 Climate Change Act actually worked.
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Fourth US dairy worker tests positive for H5N1 bird flu • Daily Telegraph via MSN News

Maeve Cullinan:

»

A fourth dairy worker has tested positive for H5N1 bird flu in the US, as the virus continues to infect herds of cattle across the country.

The unnamed farm worker from Colorado had close contact with sick cows and suffered a mild illness reporting only conjunctivitis-like symptoms, according to state health officials.

H5N1 – which has killed millions of animals since it began re-circulating in 2020 – has so far spread to 139 cattle herds in 12 US states, 27 of which are in Colorado. 

Just this week the U.S. government announced a $176 million investment in Moderna to advance the development of its mRNA bird flu vaccine in a bid to prepare for an H5N1 pandemic as scientists become increasingly concerned that the virus will mutate and gain the ability to spread among people.

H5N1 can be lethal, with a death rate of around 50% since it was first detected in humans in the late 1990s – although all four of the recent human cases in the US have been extremely mild. 

«

Just a watching brief! Though I’m sure Sir Keir Starmer will sort this out.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s not unseemly haste, but the removals van will be in Downing Street by Friday. CC-licensed photo by Andy Thornley on Flickr.

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

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

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

Japan wins two-year “war on floppy disks,” kills regulations requiring old tech • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

About two years after the country’s digital minister publicly declared a “war on floppy discs,” Japan reportedly stopped using floppy disks in governmental systems as of June 28.

Per a Reuters report on Wednesday, Japan’s government “eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems.” The report notes that by mid-June, Japan’s Digital Agency (a body set up during the COVID-19 pandemic and aimed at updating government technology) had “scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling.” That suggests that there’s up to one government use that could still turn to floppy disks, though more details weren’t available.

Digital Minister Taro Kono, the politician behind the modernization of the Japanese government’s tech, has made his distaste for floppy disks and other old office tech, like fax machines, quite public. Kono, who’s reportedly considering a second presidential run, told Reuters in a statement today: We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!

Although Kono only announced plans to eradicate floppy disks from the government two years ago, it’s been 20 years since floppy disks were in their prime and 53 years since they debuted. It was only in January 2024 that the Japanese government stopped requiring physical media, like floppy disks and CD-ROMs, for 1,900 types of submissions to the government, such as business filings and submission forms for citizens.

The timeline may be surprising, considering that the last company to make floppy disks, Sony, stopped doing so in 2011. As a storage medium, of course, floppies can’t compete with today’s options since most floppies max out at 1.44MB (2.88MB floppies were also available). And you’ll be hard-pressed to find a modern system that can still read the disks. There are also basic concerns around the old storage format, such as Tokyo police reportedly losing a pair of floppy disks with information on dozens of public housing applicants in 2021.

«

At last their long national nightmare is over. Wonder how it will affect “the last person standing” in the floppy disk business (last seen September 2022).
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China is building a mammoth 8GW solar farm • Electrek

Michelle Lewis:

»

State-owned power company China Three Gorges Renewables Group will build an 8 GW solar farm as part of a nearly $11bn integrated energy project.

To put the sheer size of the 8 GW solar farm in perspective, the three largest solar farms in the world by capacity are China’s Ningxia Tenggeli and Golmud Wutumeiren solar farms, with a capacity of 3MW each, and a 3.5GW solar farm outside Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. 

In addition to the massive solar farm, the $10.99bn project will also consist of 4GW of wind, 5GWh of energy storage capacity, 200 MW of solar thermal, and (disappointingly) 4 GW of coal-fired power. It will be sited in Ordos, in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region, the Shanghai-listed company said in a stock filing.

China Three Gorges says that the enormous integrated energy site’s power will be dispatched to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei cluster in northern China via an ultra-high voltage power transmission line.

The project will break ground in September and is expected to come online by June 2027.

«

Three and a half years for that amount of capacity. Not feasible with nuclear, of course; only with renewables that can be built in parallel. (Though the coal-fire station is big for such rapid deployment.) One can only hope that the coal capacity will not be needed once the rest comes online.
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US approves new offshore wind project bringing total to 13GW • Energy Watch

»

The US Department of the Interior approved another offshore wind project on Tuesday, bringing the total approved offshore wind capacity to over 13 gigawatts (GW).

On Tuesday, the ninth project was given the green light by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the Department of the Interior.

”The Biden-Harris Administration is building momentum every day for a clean energy future. Today’s milestone is another step toward our ambitious goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore energy by 2030,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.

The new offshore wind farm is the Atlantic Shores South Wind project, which consists of two offshore wind farms – 1 and 2 – and associated export cables that are expected to generate up to 2,800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power close to one million homes with renewable energy.

«

Impressive, very nice. For comparison, the UK’s installed wind capacity in 2023 was 30GW: 15GW onshore, 15GW offshore. The aim is to get to 50GW offshore by 2030.
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AI trains on kids’ photos even when parents use strict privacy settings • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked in LAION-5B, a popular AI dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. Now, she has released a second report, flagging 190 photos of children from all of Australia’s states and territories, including indigenous children who may be particularly vulnerable to harms.

These photos are linked in the dataset “without the knowledge or consent of the children or their families.” They span the entirety of childhood, making it possible for AI image generators to generate realistic deepfakes of real Australian children, Han’s report said. Perhaps even more concerning, the URLs in the dataset sometimes reveal identifying information about children, including their names and locations where photos were shot, making it easy to track down children whose images might not otherwise be discoverable online.

That puts children in danger of privacy and safety risks, Han said, and some parents thinking they’ve protected their kids’ privacy online may not realize that these risks exist.

From a single link to one photo that showed “two boys, ages 3 and 4, grinning from ear to ear as they hold paintbrushes in front of a colorful mural,” Han could trace “both children’s full names and ages, and the name of the preschool they attend in Perth, in Western Australia.” And perhaps most disturbingly, “information about these children does not appear to exist anywhere else on the Internet”—suggesting that families were particularly cautious in shielding these boys’ identities online.

«

Worrying that those photos are held in the database. Though that’s very impressive detective work in its own right to figure out where they came from originally.
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Meta’s Threads hits 175 million users one year after launch • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

A year and a half ago, Threads was but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

Now, the rival to Elon Musk’s X has reached more than 175 million monthly active users, the Meta CEO announced on Wednesday.

His announcement comes as Threads is about to hit its one-year anniversary. Back when it arrived in the App Store on July 5th, 2023, Musk was taking a wrecking ball to the service formerly called Twitter and goading Zuckerberg into a literal cage match that never happened. A year later, Threads is still growing at a steady clip — albeit not as quickly as its huge launch — while Musk hasn’t shared comparable metrics for X since he took over.

…It’s telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn’t shared daily user numbers yet. That omission suggests Threads is still getting a lot of flyby traffic from people who have yet to become regular users.

I’ve heard from Meta employees in recent months that much of the app’s growth is still coming from it being promoted inside Instagram. Both apps share the same account system, which isn’t expected to change.

Even still, 175 million monthly users for a one-year app is nothing to turn your nose up at, especially given Meta’s spotty track record of launching standalone app experiments over the years. Zuckerberg has been open to me and others that he thinks Threads has a real shot at being the company’s next billion-user app.

«

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Cloudflare offers 1-click block against web-scraping AI bots • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Cloudflare on Wednesday offered web hosting customers a way to block AI bots from scraping website content and using the data without permission to train machine learning models.

It did so based on customer loathing of AI bots and, “to help preserve a safe internet for content creators,” it said in a statement.

“We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots.”

There’s already a somewhat effective method to block bots that’s widely available to website owners, the robots.txt file. When placed in a website’s root directory, automated web crawlers are expected to notice and comply with directives in the file that tell them to stay out.

Given the widespread belief that generative AI is based on theft, and the many lawsuits attempting to hold AI companies accountable, firms trafficking in laundered content have graciously allowed web publishers to opt-out of the pilfering.

…The internet is “now flooded with these AI bots,” Cloudflare said, which visit about 39% of the top one million web properties served by Cloudflare.

The problem is that robots.txt, like the Do Not Track header implemented in browsers fifteen years ago to declare a preference for privacy, can be ignored, generally without consequences.

And recent reports suggest AI bots do just that. Amazon last week said it was looking into evidence that bots working on behalf of AI search outfit Perplexity, an AWS client, had crawled websites, including news sites, and reproduced their content without suitable credit or permission.

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How handovers work: John Major’s final hours in No.10 • The House Magazine

Robert Hutton:

»

For the first time since 1997, Britain is approaching an election where no one doubts that power is about to change hands. And by happy coincidence, last Christmas saw the release of a memo spelling out how Downing Street prepared for the moment last time around.

A feature of our democracy is the brutal swiftness with which a defeated leader is removed: John Major was on his way to resign to the Queen within hours of losing the election. But he wasn’t just leaving his office: he was leaving his home. Few of us could pack for a holiday in the time in which he and his wife Norma were supposed to empty their Downing Street flat.

“This was obviously delicate,” Major’s principal private secretary Alex Allan recalled in a 2000 note to Jeremy Heywood explaining how the couple had made sure they were ready, now available at the National Archives in Kew. He said he had sat down with them to discuss what would happen, after which Norma “discreetly moved quite a lot of clothes etc out of Downing Street during the weeks running up to the election”. She took the view, he said, that “if they had won, bringing clothes and other possessions back would have been a pleasure!”

He also secured a room in the Cabinet Office for them to store larger items so that they could be moved after the election: “They were (understandably) keen to avoid having a removal van seen in or near Downing Street.” This plan was thwarted on polling day “when I got a panicked call from the press office to say that there was a removal van in Downing Street.” It turned out that another group of civil servants had decided it would be a nice quiet day to shift furniture in Whitehall.

«

Best-laid plans, and all that. Friday morning should be fun.
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US pays Moderna $176m to develop bird-flu vaccine • BBC News

Michelle Roberts:

»

The US government has given Moderna $176m (£139m) to develop a messenger-ribonucleic-acid-based (mRNA) pandemic influenza vaccine that would work against bird flu.

It says it wants to be “better prepared” for public-health crises, having learned lessons from Covid.

Bird flu is not a big threat to people, despite outbreaks in poultry and cattle. But experts want a working vaccine that could be quickly rolled out, in case the virus mutates and becomes a problem.

Vaccines using mRNA technology – which the Moderna’s Covid jab is also based on – can be produced more quickly. And the US government says adding this technology to its pandemic-flu toolkit enhances its ability to be “nimble and quick” against bird flu.

The $176m, from the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, will be used to complete late-stage development and testing of Moderna’s vaccine against H5N1 avian influenza.

This strain has been around for years in birds – but some other animals, including cattle, have become infected in recent outbreaks. Some believe the virus might one day change and start spreading easily among humans, with potentially serious consequences.

So far, there is no sign of this.

«

Watching brief, totally just a watching brief. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Election 2024 Results and Predictions: Introduction • Jon Skeet

»

This site is intended to be interesting during election night (July 4th-5th 2024) and potentially shortly afterwards, for those wishing to get an at-a-glance view of the state of play as the night goes on, and also to compare reality with the various predictions over the course of the campaign. The “2019 notional results” are the 2019 election results, redistributed to the new constituency boundaries for 2024 as calculated by Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings, as listed on Wikipedia. A very few aspects of the site are down to the judgement of the author (Jon Skeet) – I’m not a political analyst by any stretch of the imagination:

Which candidates are “notable” (i.e. ones where I believe many people are likely to be interested in the result) – mostly cabinet and shadow cabinet members, and party leaders.

How to rank “contentious” constituencies and “surprising” results.

How to bucket predictions with only majorities or probabilities into “tossup / lean / likely / safe”.

«

Multiple views including a live view which will auto-refresh through the night and into the morning. Enjoy!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Does the relative scarcity of lefthanded people stem from a sort of social pressure? New research offers clues. CC-licensed photo by Alex Lewis on Flickr.

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

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

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

TechScape: here’s four ways a new Labour government could use tech to boost Britain • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

In March 2006, back when the Guardian technology section was a physical supplement in Thursday’s newspaper, we ran a campaign to “free our data”. We wrote about government-owned and approved agencies such as the Ordnance Survey, the UK Hydrographic Office and the Highways Agency collecting data on our behalf. We asked: “Why can’t we get at that data as easily as we can Google Maps?”

The campaign was, over the years that followed, a mixed success. Across the public sector, a new norm was created that government data should generally be made available to the public when possible. It almost certainly influenced the direction of the gov.uk project, putting open data at the heart of the state’s digital footprint, and a glance at the top-level data.gov.uk website shows how much work has been done to that end.

Someone born on the day of that campaign’s launch will be voting for the first time on Thursday. Yet some of the most valuable pieces of our digital infrastructure are still locked up, behind restrictive terms or expensive paywalls.

The Postcode Address File (PAF) is one example. It holds 1.8m postcodes and almost 30m postal addresses, and is the ground truth for how we navigate the country. It was privatised along with Royal Mail, but remains tightly controlled by the state, with access charges regulated by Ofcom and a unique license for the public sector to use it at a flat cost.

Freeing our data is the right thing to do, but successive governments have viewed it as expensive: giving up a valuable revenue stream, in the name of abstract concepts. But a Labour party looking for growth and state renewal over the next few years should recognise that if a government dataset is valuable enough to be worth charging for, it’s even more valuable if it can be built on, improved and reused.

«

The sale of the PAF was a disgrace – but as the article points out, there are lots of big potential wins which can spark growth through making more data available on non-restrictive licences. Free Our Data lives! And it’s old enough to buy drinks!
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Google Search ranks AI spam above original reporting in news results • WIRED

Reece Rogers:

»

As reported by 404 Media in January, AI-powered articles appeared multiple times for basic queries at the beginning of the year in Google News results. Two months later, Google announced significant changes to its algorithm and new spam policies, as an attempt to improve the search results. And by the end of April, Google shared that the major adjustments to remove unhelpful results from its search engine ranking system were finished. “As of April 19, we’ve completed the rollout of these changes. You’ll now see 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results versus the 40% improvement we expected across this work,” wrote Elizabeth Tucker, a director of product management at Google, in a blog post.

Despite the changes, spammy content created with the help of AI remains an ongoing, prevalent issue for Google News.

“This is a really rampant problem on Google right now, and it’s hard to answer specifically why it’s happening,” says Lily Ray, senior director of search engine optimization at the marketing agency Amsive. “We’ve had some clients say, ‘Hey, they took our article and rehashed it with AI. It looks exactly like what we wrote in our original content but just kind of like a mumbo-jumbo, AI-rewritten version of it.’”

At first glance, it was clear to me that some of the images for Syrus’ blogs were AI generated based on the illustrations’ droopy eyes and other deformed physical features—telltale signs of AI trying to represent the human body.

Now, was the text of our article rewritten using AI? I reached out to the person behind the blog to learn more about how they made it and received confirmation via email that an Italian marketing agency created the blog. They claim to have used an AI tool as part of the writing process. “Regarding your concerns about plagiarism, we can assure you that our content creation process involves AI tools that analyze and synthesize information from various sources while always respecting intellectual property,” writes someone using the name Daniele Syrus over email.

«

Google News has had a longstanding problem with recency bias: a more recent but purely rewritten article will rank higher than the original, despite adding nothing to it. Now AI is making it worse.
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Cleanview: see the energy transition in real time

Michael Thomas built this site, which tracks energy installs across the US and provides lots of interesting data:

»

Cleanview crunches millions of data points and tracks thousands of projects each month so you don’t have to.

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Wind, solar, battery, plus all the other energy installations. It’s a fascinating resource for tracking how things are changing – because they are changing: just look, for example, at battery installation in California.
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AI Overview study for 8,000 keywords in Google Search • Advanced Web Ranking

Philip Petrescu with the TL;DR on the new AI stuff when you do a Google query:

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• The average AI Overview is 169 words and 912 pixels long
• Only 12.4% of the analyzed keywords display an AI Overview
• A Featured Snippet is showing on 17.6% of the analyzed keywords
• On average, AI Overviews appear alongside Featured Snippets in 7.4% of cases. For the Health niche, they show up together the most often (34.9% of queries)
• AI Overviews contain 7.2 links on average when expanded
• 33.4% of AI Overview links rank in that query’s top 10 organic results
• 46.5% of the URLs included in AI Overviews rank outside the top 50 organic results
• Five-word queries trigger an AI Overview most frequently
• Keywords from the Health and Safety niches are more likely to trigger AI Overviews
• No AI Overviews show up for brand related queries
• Navigational intent keywords are less likely to display AI Overviews
• Google Ads are displayed in 28.3% keywords that trigger AI Overviews
• From all the keywords that trigger AI Overviews, Ads at the top of the SERP appear for 8.7% of keywords. Ads at the bottom are displayed for 19.5% of these keywords
• Shopping Ads are almost never seen together with AI Overviews and when they are, they always appear below the AI Overview.

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There’s much more if you want the in-depth version. One other point from lower down: “Do AI Overviews impact the visibility of the first organic result?”

And the answer is: yes, they do. Significantly.
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Google emissions jump nearly 50% over five years as AI use surges • FT

Camilla Hodgson and Stephen Morris:

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Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48% in the past five years due to the expansion of its data centres that underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to “net zero” by 2030 in doubt.

The Silicon Valley company’s pollution amounted to 14.3mn tonnes of carbon equivalent in 2023, a 48% increase from its 2019 baseline and a 13% rise since last year, Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday.

Google said the jump highlighted “the challenge of reducing emissions” at the same time as it invests in the build-out of large language models and their associated applications and infrastructure, admitting that “the future environmental impact of AI” was “complex and difficult to predict”.

Chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt said the company remained committed to the 2030 target but stressed the “extremely ambitious” nature of the goal.

“We do still expect our emissions to continue to rise before dropping towards our goal,” said Brandt.

She added that Google was “working very hard” on reducing its emissions, including by signing deals for clean energy. There was also a “tremendous opportunity for climate solutions that are enabled by AI”, said Brandt.

«

Wait, though – Google didn’t start introducing its AI search until earlier this year, surely? If this is what happens when it’s just gearing up for wide use of AI, which we know consumes far more energy than normal search, it’s a really troubling sign.
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Northvolt: the battery company seeking to make batteries with salt • Climate Home News

Martin Gelin and Meli Petersson Ellafi:

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In recent years, concerns have grown over the social and environmental harms of extracting and refining battery minerals. Reserves of lithium, nickel and cobalt are concentrated in a handful of countries, making them prone to geopolitical and trade disruptions, and subject to intense competition. Meanwhile, China dominates the lithium-ion battery supply chain, controlling 70% of global lithium refining capacity.

Sodium-based batteries offer a solution to the electric battery supply chain challenges, particularly for Western countries seeking to reduce their dependence on China for cleantech.

According to 2023 analysis by BloombergNEF, sodium batteries could displace 272,000 tonnes of lithium demand by 2035, equivalent to about 7% of the overall market projected for that year.

“The real value of sodium-ion batteries is the potential to build a European supply chain,” said Iola Hughes, research manager at London-based battery consultancy Rho Motion. “In the US and the EU, there is growing pressure to decouple from China and to build domestic supply, and sodium-ion batteries could have strong potential in that transition.”

In January, the European Investment Bank backed the company with over $1bn in financing, citing Northvolt’s ability to create the first fully integrated circular lithium-ion battery production facility outside Asia.
At the time, EU Commission Vice President Maroš Šefčovič, in charge of the European Green Deal, said the battery industry was of “strategic importance and a key battleground for global competitiveness”.

“Northvolt, our battery pioneer, showcases that the EU has what it takes to build an innovative, sustainable and globally competitive battery ecosystem,” he said.

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Sodium is plentiful (available at a sea near you), which makes it very attractive for batteries where size isn’t an issue.
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Figma disables AI app design tool after it copied Apple’s Weather app • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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The design tool Figma has disabled a newly launched AI-powered app design tool after a user showed that it was clearly copying Apple’s weather app. 

Figma disabled the feature, named Make Design, after CEO and cofounder of Not Boring Software Andy Allen tweeted images showing that asking it to make a “weather app” produced several variations of apps that looked almost identical to Apple’s default weather app. 

“Within hours of seeing this tweet, we identified the issue, which was related to the underlying design systems that were created. Ultimately it is my fault for not insisting on a better QA process for this work and pushing our team hard to hit a deadline for Config,” Figma CEO Dylan Field said on Twitter. Config is Figma’s annual conference where it showcased Make Design. “I have asked our team to temporarily disable the Make Design feature until we are confident we can stand behind its output. The feature will be disabled when our US based team wakes up in a few hours, and we will re-enable it when we have completed a full QA pass on the underlying design system.”

«

Wonder how that “QA pass” is going to work, exactly. The AI is, one presumes, a generative AI system, which means you have to tear up its entire learning matrix in order to take even one app out. And you’d want to take a fair number of apps out. Which would probably only leave the bad ones. Which you don’t want to have in.

One hopes this is a free upgrade.
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Why most of us are right-handed, and prefer to view faces on the left • Science Museum Blog

Roger Highfield:

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Once upon a time, scientists thought biases in behaviour were unique to humans and reflected differences in the dominance of the left and right brain hemispheres, each of which controls the opposite side of the body.   

But, as has so often been the case, research in recent decades has shown plenty of handedness in other creatures and the way that they behave. 

Studies conducted on animals suggests that brain hemisphere biases evolved because they allow the two sides of the brain to simultaneously do different things without the animals becoming muddled, or the two hemispheres conflicting.   

So being right- or left-handed free up some brain power to make animals more efficient at finding food and, in general, surviving, for instance turning the right way to stay in a shoal or a flock to cut the risk of being picked off by predators, so they can pass their genes on. 

The museum’s Live Science residency allowed the team to use museum visitors to study associations between the degree of hand bias and performance as well as direction of biases and social ability that had already been studied in animal research. 

The team measured handedness using a timed colour-matching pegboard task, along with images of faces expressing different emotion (such as surprise or anger) presented on the right- or left-hand side of a screen. 

People with mild to moderate strength hand bias (left or right) placed more colour-matched pegs correctly than those with a strong or weak bias, showing that, in humans, extremes of handedness may limit our flexibility, unlike wild animals. 

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The full study, based on 1,600 experiments on live humans (visitors to the Science Museum) is published in Nature.
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Apple rumoured to be working on camera-powered AirPods • Gizmodo

Harri Weber:

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Apple is reportedly bringing cameras to AirPods, ear hairs be damned.

The $3 trillion company intends to mass-produce revamped earbuds with built-in infrared cameras by 2026, according to a new report from analyst and longtime Apple insider Ming-Chi Kuo. The cameras could help Apple shore up its current and future augmented-reality headsets with enhanced spatial audio features, the analyst wrote.

Citing a supply-chain survey, Kuo indicated that pairing these enhanced buds with Vision Pro goggles could make Apple’s spatial-computing experience more lifelike. For example, “if users turn their heads to look in a specific direction, the sound source in that direction can be emphasized,” said the analyst.

For folks not interested in dropping thousands on an Apple headset, the IR cameras could offer other perks, including bringing “in-air” gestures to AirPods, per Kuo. The IR module could be similar to the receiver that powers Apple’s facial recognition feature, FaceID.

The analyst’s report follows an earlier story from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, which noted that Apple was looking into the idea of camera-powered AirPods.

«

Seems a pretty weird idea. The Ming-Chi Kuo piece contains a paragraph saying “The IR camera can detect environmental image changes, potentially enabling in-air gesture control to enhance human-device interaction. It is worth noting that Apple has filed related patents in this area”. Still seems weird. But also a long way off.
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Three million iOS and macOS apps were exposed to potent supply-chain attacks • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Vulnerabilities that went undetected for a decade left thousands of macOS and iOS apps susceptible to supply-chain attacks. Hackers could have added malicious code compromising the security of millions or billions of people who installed them, researchers said Monday.

The vulnerabilities, which were fixed last October, resided in a “trunk” server used to manage CocoaPods, a repository for open source Swift and Objective-C projects that roughly 3 million macOS and iOS apps depend on. When developers make changes to one of their “pods”—CocoaPods lingo for individual code packages—dependent apps typically incorporate them automatically through app updates, typically with no interaction required by end users.

“Many applications can access a user’s most sensitive information: credit card details, medical records, private materials, and more,” wrote researchers from EVA Information Security, the firm that discovered the vulnerability. “Injecting code into these applications could enable attackers to access this information for almost any malicious purpose imaginable—ransomware, fraud, blackmail, corporate espionage… In the process, it could expose companies to major legal liabilities and reputational risk.”

The three vulnerabilities EVA discovered stem from an insecure verification email mechanism used to authenticate developers of individual pods. The developer entered the email address associated with their pod. The trunk server responded by sending a link to the address. When a person clicked on the link, they gained access to the account.

In one case, an attacker could manipulate the URL in the link to make it point to a server under the attacker’s control. The server accepted a spoofed XFH, an HTTP header for identifying the target host specified in an HTTP request. The EVA researchers found that they could use a forged XFH to construct URLs of their choice.

…CocoaPods maintainers disclosed and patched the vulnerabilities last October. At the time, they said they weren’t aware of any active attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities. They did, however, confirm that the scenarios described by the researchers were plausible.

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The food chain of code packages really does mirror the complexity of life. But with code, of course.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new scheme is injecting radioactive substances into rhinos’ horns so poaching can be detected at Customs. CC-licensed photo by .waldec on Flickr.

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

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

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

Brussels follows up Apple charges with Meta ‘pay or consent’ case • FT

Javier Espinoza:

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The EU has charged Facebook’s parent Meta with breaking the bloc’s landmark digital rules, only a week after it pressed a similar case against Apple.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, is exercising new powers granted by the Digital Markets Act — legislation aimed at improving consumer choice and opening up markets for European start-ups to flourish. The tech giants had to comply from March this year. 

In preliminary findings issued on Monday, Brussels regulators said they were worried about Meta’s “pay or consent” model. Facebook and Instagram users can currently opt to use the social networks for free while consenting to data collection, or pay not to have their data shared.

The regulators said that the choice presented by Meta’s model risks giving consumers a false alternative, with the financial barrier potentially forcing them to consent to their personal data being tracked for advertising purposes.

The Financial Times was first to reveal the commission’s move earlier on Monday.

Under the bloc’s new digital rules, tech giants must gain consent from users “when they intend to combine or cross-use their personal data across different core platform services”, the EU said in March, when it opened compliance investigations against Meta and other Big Tech groups.

The EU executive said that Meta “users who do not consent should still get access to an equivalent service which uses less of their personal data, in this case for the personalisation of advertising”.

«

In October last year I wrote about how Meta’s proposed charges were about four times higher than was justified by their advertising revenue in the EU. However, that doesn’t seem to be the basis of the EU’s complaint; it simply wants a free service but with less data collection. Basically, challenging Meta to accept lower profits (if we presume that profits are directly dependent on amount of personal data collected).
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Laid-off tech workers advised to sell plasma and personal belongings • SF Gate

Ariana Bindman:

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Nina McCollum has been laid off so many times that the 55-year-old is basically an unofficial expert. That’s how she describes herself, at least. 

The marketing writer, who went viral in 2019 for documenting how she submitted over 200 applications during her two-year unemployment period, eventually landed her dream job at a major human resources tech company in the Bay Area. But then, in March 2023, she was let go — and suddenly back at square one. 

McCollum is not alone. Over the past two years, major tech companies in the Bay Area have haemorrhaged high-salaried workers, sending a chill throughout an industry that once seemed untouchable. Meta has let go of at least 21,000 workers, while Google has handed pink slips to hundreds of employees across San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Mountain View. Though the state government boasts about California’s growing economy and low unemployment rate, multiple people who spoke with SFGATE painted a bleak picture.

…When tech recruiter Irene Nexica was laid off in March 2023, she was “immediately transported to the world of being poor,” she told SFGATE. Since then, she’s worked a variety of “survival jobs,” ranging from catering to online retail. She also works as a career coach at a federally funded program that helps people train for employment. Anyone who makes under $35 an hour qualifies, she said. “We’re seeing a flood of tech people come in because they are super desperate now,” she continued.

Companies, sensing their desperation, are now taking advantage of it. When Nexica applied for a nonprofit recruiting job, she found that 1,400 people had applied already — and for significantly less money than the role usually pays. Instead of a salary of around $125,000, this one was offering between $80,000 and $90,000. She also found that the people in charge of hiring for roles would message her about so-called opportunities, only to ghost her without explanation.

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Alzheimer’s scientist indicted for allegedly falsifying data in $16m scheme • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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A federal grand jury has indicted an embattled Alzheimer’s researcher for allegedly falsifying data to fraudulently obtain $16m in federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health for the development of a controversial Alzheimer’s drug and diagnostic test.

Hoau-Yan Wang, 67, a medical professor at the City University of New York, was a paid collaborator with the Austin, Texas-based pharmaceutical company Cassava Sciences. Wang’s research and publications provided scientific underpinnings for Cassava’s Alzheimer’s treatment, Simufilam, which is now in Phase III trials.

Simufilam is a small-molecule drug that Cassava claims can restore the structure and function of a scaffolding protein in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s, leading to slowed cognitive decline. But outside researchers have long expressed doubts and concerns about the research.

In 2023, Science magazine obtained a 50-page report from an internal investigation at CUNY that looked into 31 misconduct allegations made against Wang in 2021. According to the report, the investigating committee “found evidence highly suggestive of deliberate scientific misconduct by Wang for 14 of the 31 allegations,” the report states.

The allegations largely centered around doctored and fabricated images from Western blotting, an analytical technique used to separate and detect proteins. However, the committee couldn’t conclusively prove the images were falsified “due to the failure of Dr. Wang to provide underlying, original data or research records and the low quality of the published images that had to be examined in their place.”

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At least with this sort of (alleged) fraud you can see the motivation: all that funding. Though if it’s faked research, won’t the failure of the therapy become clear in the trials? Perhaps in that inevitability one just says “oh well, didn’t work” and drives back to the laboratory in the Ferrari.
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Supreme Court protects the future of content moderation • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

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On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, two consequential cases about the future of speech on the internet. The court explicitly extended First Amendment protections to how social media platforms organize, curate, and moderate their feeds, drawing a comparison between internet content moderation and “traditional publishers and editors.”

The decision elaborates that the compilation and curation of “others’ speech into an expressive product of its own” is entitled to First Amendment protection and that “the government cannot get its way just by asserting an interest in better balancing the marketplace of ideas.” 

The NetChoice cases concern a pair of similar laws in Florida and Texas that aimed to limit how large social media companies could moderate content on their sites. The legislation took shape after conservative politicians in both states criticized major tech companies for allegedly exerting bias against conservative viewpoints. Tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association sued to block both laws. Appeals courts in each state came to different conclusions about whether the statutes could be upheld, setting up the Supreme Court to make the final call.

The Supreme Court vacated both of the appeals court decisions, ruling that neither court adequately analyzed “the facial First Amendment challenges” to the laws — that is, whether the social media content moderation laws in Florida and Texas would always be unconstitutional in all applications. The court sent the cases back down to the lower courts to reconsider.

Under the new Supreme Court decision, content moderation is generally protected by the First Amendment.

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Hurrah, democracy is save–oh, really?
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Florida man charged after shooting at Walmart delivery drone • USA Today

Saleen Martin:

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A Florida man is facing multiple charges after authorities say he shot at a Walmart delivery drone.

The shooting happened in Clermont, about 26 miles west of Orlando. The Lake County Sheriff’s Office received a complaint about the ordeal Wednesday, the office said in a Facebook post. According to the caller, a bullet hole was found in the payload the drone was carrying. 

Witnesses pointed authorities to 72-year-old Dennis Winn, who interviewed with officials and later admitted to shooting at the drone one time with a 9mm pistol, the sheriff’s office said.

In police bodycam footage, Winn told police he tried to shoo the drone off and it didn’t go away, so he shot at it. “I fired one round at it,” he said in the footage. “They say I hit it so I must be a good shot, or else it’s not that far away … I’m going to wind up having to find a real good defense lawyer.”

He was taken into custody and charged with shooting at an aircraft, criminal mischief damage over $1,000 and discharging a firearm in public or residential property, according to the sheriff’s office.

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He tried to “shoo off the drone”? And he’s younger than both the contenders for the US presidency. What a country.
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Do be a quitter! How I broke my exercise streak – and smashed my fitness goals • The Guardian

Phil Daoust:

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that is nothing compared with my boneheadedness 13 or 14 years ago, when I lived in the mountains and used to swim in a long, chilly lake. It was usually just two lengths, and I took them slowly, but it added up to about 3-4km – say 150 lengths of a typical leisure-centre pool. The season was short, and I usually stopped once the temperature began to drop. But this time I got in the water well into autumn. I didn’t own a wetsuit, and this was not the kind of place that had lifeguards. Even in summer, I was sometimes the only person in the water.

After 2-3km, breaststroking my way back to where I had left the car, I began to shiver. I know now that this is one of the first signs of hypothermia. The sensible thing would have been to get out of the lake and walk, but that didn’t even occur to me. It wasn’t in the plan, and perhaps the cold was getting to my brain too. So I swam on for another 40 or 50 minutes, trembling all the way. I survived (obviously), but the more I think about it, the more I see how lucky I was. If I had got into trouble, no one would have seen me, let alone saved me.

Now that I have realised that sometimes the best thing to do with a plan is to ignore it, I have been delighted to discover a lot of experts feel the same. They just don’t make a fuss about it. Take Michael Ulloa, an Edinburgh-based performance nutritionist and personal trainer. “We’re constantly told that if we can’t stick to a plan 100%, then we have somehow failed,” he says. “This couldn’t be further from the truth. It is messing people up. When we deviate from a plan, we shouldn’t overthink it. We should ask why this deviation happened and what we can do to limit the chances of it happening again. Did we try to take on more than we can chew? Are we not enjoying our current training programme? Or maybe we were just tired and we needed to give ourselves a day or two.”

“It’s easy to overanalyse and be over self-critical, but there really is no need,” he says. “Most of us are not professional athletes, we are simply everyday people doing our best – and sometimes we need to take a day when it feels too much.”

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Giving yourself “permission to quit” turns out to be very wise. Quite possibly there’s survivor bias in it. Which means it’s a good thing, not a bad one.
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Generative AI is not going to build your [software] engineering team for you • Stack Overflow

Charity Majors:

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It is really, really tough to get your first role as an engineer. I didn’t realize how hard it was until I watched my little sister (new grad, terrific grades, some hands on experience, fiendishly hard worker) struggle for nearly two years to land a real job in her field. That was a few years ago; anecdotally, it seems to have gotten even harder since then.

This past year, I have read a steady drip of articles about entry-level jobs in various industries being replaced by AI. Some of which absolutely have merit. Any job that consists of drudgery such as converting a document from one format to another, reading and summarizing a bunch of text, or replacing one set of icons with another, seems pretty obviously vulnerable. This doesn’t feel all that revolutionary to me, it’s just extending the existing boom in automation to cover textual material as well as mathy stuff.

…People act like writing code is the hard part of software. It is not. It never has been, it never will be. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it, understanding it, extending it, and governing it over its entire lifecycle.

A junior engineer begins by learning how to write and debug lines, functions, and snippets of code. As you practice and progress towards being a senior engineer, you learn to compose systems out of software, and guide systems through waves of change and transformation.

Sociotechnical systems consist of software, tools, and people; understanding them requires familiarity with the interplay between software, users, production, infrastructure, and continuous changes over time. These systems are fantastically complex and subject to chaos, nondeterminism and emergent behaviors. If anyone claims to understand the system they are developing and operating, the system is either exceptionally small or (more likely) they don’t know enough to know what they don’t know. Code is easy, in other words, but systems are hard.

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First radioactive rhino horns to curb poaching in South Africa • Phys.org

Zama Luthuli:

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South African scientists on Tuesday injected radioactive material into live rhino horns to make them easier to detect at border posts in a pioneering project aimed at curbing poaching.

The country is home to a large majority of the world’s rhinos and as such is a hotspot for poaching driven by demand from Asia, where horns are used in traditional medicine for their supposed therapeutic effect.

At the Limpopo rhino orphanage in the Waterberg area, in the country’s northeast, a few of the thick-skinned herbivores grazed in the low savannah.

James Larkin, director of the University of the Witwatersrand’s radiation and health physics unit who spearheaded the initiative, told AFP he had put “two tiny little radioactive chips in the horn” as he administered the radioisotopes on one of the large animals’ horns.

The radioactive material would “render the horn useless… essentially poisonous for human consumption” added Nithaya Chetty, professor and dean of science at the same university.

The dusty rhino, put to sleep and crouched on the ground, did not feel any pain, Larkin said.

The radioactive material’s dose was so low it would not impact the animal’s health or the environment in any way, he said.

In February the environment ministry said that, despite government efforts to tackle the illicit trade, 499 of the giant mammals were killed in 2023, mostly in state-run parks. This represents an 11% increase over the 2022 figures.

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What a brilliant idea. Especially if you could persuade the poachers that the radioactivity is dangerous.
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Influencers aren’t getting famous like they used to • Glamour

Stephanie McNeal:

»

It used to go like this: An influencer or content creator would spend anywhere from a very short to a respectably decent amount of time building up their content and fan base. Maybe they were family vloggers, or prank YouTubers like the Paul brothers, or makeup artists or fashionistas. Then, there’d be a tipping point. Suddenly, these people were being written about in mainstream media like People and Us Weekly, landing roles in movies and on television shows, and attending high-class events.

Remember in 2021, when influencers like Chamberlain and Rae attended the Met Gala and everyone freaked out? This year, Chamberlain attended the Met again (she’s actually become somewhat of a fixture and works the red carpet for Vogue), but the rest of them have dried up. And even if Anna Wintour wanted to invite a fresh crop of internet talent, who would she choose? Can you name anyone in the past year who has ascended in a major way?

The last true influencer to truly “make it” in this way was Alix Earle, who became a household name seemingly overnight in early 2023 and has done quite well for herself. That’s not just my opinion. Sophie, who runs a business consulting on social media called Pretty Little Marketer, identified Earle as the most recent to “blow up” as well.

“I’d say she’s exceeded well past the title of influencer to global celebrity status,” she says.

This doesn’t mean that people aren’t doing well on social media. The problem is that too many people are doing well on social media. It’s not unique these days to have hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of followers, to have an agent, or to get lucrative brand deals. But with a huge pool of creators who are hard to differentiate from each other, the hard part seems to be standing out at all.

“There are many influencers who still make it ‘big’ in terms of opportunity and following, but we’ve seen fewer boom into mainstream media as we have in the past,” Sophie says.

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Influencing’s too popular? It’s a weird world.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Move over, human beauty pageant contestants: your AI replacements are arriving. CC-licensed photo by Paul Chin 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. Please don’t cry. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘Miss AI’ beauty pageant and the complicated quest for the ‘perfect’ woman • CNN

Issy Ronald:

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Ten women participating in a beauty pageant is nothing new. Some pose candidly, some play to the camera, their beauty forever frozen in this moment in time. Like many other pageants held in countries around the world, the contestants are young, thin and embody many of the standards defining traditional “beauty.”

But that is where the similarities to a traditional beauty pageant end. None of these women are real — everything about them, even the emotion that flickers across their faces, is generated by artificial intelligence (AI), for the world’s first ever AI beauty pageant. Each has a creator or team of creators, who use programmes like Open AI’s DALL·E 3, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion to generate images of the women from text prompts.

These ten contestants have been selected from a pool of more than 1,500 entrants to make the final of “Miss AI,” scheduled to be held at the end of June and broadcast online by its organizers “The World AI Creator Awards.”

For those involved, the event is an opportunity to showcase and demystify the technology’s extraordinary abilities. But for others, it represents a further proliferation of unrealistic beauty standards often linked to racial and gender stereotypes and fueled by the ever-increasing number of digitally enhanced images online.

“I think we’re starting to increasingly lose touch with what an unedited face looks like,” Dr Kerry McInerney, a research associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, told CNN in a video interview.

Each of the contestants has a unique and distinctive personality, as well as face. One red-haired, green-eyed avatar named Seren Ay poses for Instagram photos as she travels around the world and through time, appearing next to Turkey’s first president Kemal Ataturk, on the Oscars red carpet or wandering through the neon-lit streets of Kyoto, Japan at night.

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The “contestants” all have the correct number of fingers, at least in the still pictures. I guess we’d need to wait for the video round.
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Making sense of the EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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If you’ve been online in the past week, you’ve probably seen one or two headlines about the European Union voting in favor of easy-to-replace batteries in smartphones by around 2027. That’s based on a June 14th vote in which the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of an agreement that would overhaul the rules around batteries in the bloc. 

The good news is that those headlines are fundamentally accurate; the EU is moving forward with regulation designed to require smartphones to have batteries that are easier to replace, to the benefit of the environment and end users. But this being the European Union, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes. And it’s these details that could have a significant impact on how and when manufacturers will actually have to comply.

For starters, the widely cited 2027 deadline for offering smartphones with more easily replaceable batteries isn’t quite the whole story, according to Cristina Ganapini, coordinator of Right to Repair Europe. That’s because there’s another piece of legislation currently working its way through the EU’s lawmaking process called the Ecodesign for Smartphones and Tablets. It contains similar rules about making smartphone batteries easier to replace and is expected to come into effect earlier in June or July 2025. So by the time 2027 rolls around, some smartphone manufacturers may have already been selling devices with user-replaceable batteries in the EU for over a year.

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Will Apple claim that its repair kits, which people can hire to do various kinds of work on their own phones, fulfil this “user-replaceable” description, I wonder?
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Revealed: the tech entrepreneur behind a pro-Israel hate network • The Guardian

Jason Wilson:

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A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.

Shirion has harassed pro-Palestinian activists, including many Jews, offered bounties for the identity of pro-Palestinian protesters, spread conspiracy narratives centered on figures like George Soros, and boasted of an AI-surveillance platform but offered few concrete details of how the technology functions.

The Guardian investigation used public records and open source materials to corroborate information originally provided by the White Rose Society, an Australian anti-fascist research collective.

Linden set up Shirion’s crowdfunding efforts, appears to play a central role in operating the network’s social media accounts, and coordinates the group’s efforts on a Telegram channel. Public records and online materials indicate he lives in Gainesville, Florida, but he has also had recent stints in Durango, Colorado, and Medellin, Colombia.

The Guardian emailed Linden at several addresses associated with him and his business ventures, and attempted to contact him via phone, text, a direct message on Reddit and a post tagging an X account associated with one of his ventures seeking comment on this reporting, but received no response.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said of Linden’s Shirion campaigning that his apparent “grifting” is common among extremists, “but his ideology seems very confused”.

“Regardless,” she added, “he is spreading hateful messages.”

The revelations shed light on the nature of Shirion, which has been criticized in the US congress and attracted media attention around the world, and its role in pushing back against criticisms of Israel’s conduct in its invasion of Gaza.

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Notable that this is categorised under news article about the “far right”.
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Biden aides plotted debate strategy for months. Then it all collapsed • The Washington Post

Tyler Pager:

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President Biden’s debate prep went fine.

In the sessions, the president still spoke haltingly. He sometimes confused facts and figures. He tripped over words and meandered. Debate prep would not fix his stutter or make him appear any younger, aides knew.

But as Biden boarded Marine One to leave the rustic Camp David presidential retreat for Atlanta, they sought to reassure anxious allies. The president, they said, was prepared and would perform well. Some said the debate might even be boring.

This story is based on conversations with eight individuals involved in or briefed on the president’s debate preparation, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private meetings. The Biden campaign declined to comment.

For a full week, the president sequestered himself at Camp David with more than a dozen aides to prepare for Thursday’s presidential debate with former president Donald Trump. He rehearsed answers, met with policy aides and participated in mock debates, with his personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, playing the part of Trump.

Every topic he was asked about Thursday, he had practiced answers for — including the final one about his age.

So aides were bewildered by his performance. Many felt they had never seen him collapse so dramatically. After all, Biden was a veteran of numerous debates — as a senator, vice-presidential nominee and presidential candidate. And they did not understand why he gave an entirely different answer on the age question than the one they spent more than a week perfecting.

The president did not just stumble over words. He appeared to lose his focus and often was unable to finish sentences. His voice was raspy and thin, and when the debate concluded, first lady Jill Biden appeared to help her husband down the stairs.

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The debate was at 9pm. Up past his bedtime, basically. CNN had an article ahead of the debate about how each contender was preparing. Trump’s went better on the night, you could say.
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Tories ‘highly alarmed’ by network of pro-Russian Facebook pages interfering in UK election • ABC News

Michael Workman and Kevin Nguyen:

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Revelations of foreign interference in the UK election, uncovered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC(, have been described as “highly alarming” by the Conservative Party, which will be writing to the Cabinet Office seeking urgent advice about how to combat it.

Ahead of the UK elections, the ABC has been monitoring five coordinated Facebook pages which have been spreading Kremlin talking points, with some posting in support of Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party — a key challenger to the Conservatives in the July 4 poll.

The five pages identified by ABC Investigations as being part of a coordinated network appear to have little in common. One page presents itself as a pro-refugee left-wing group, while others reference white supremacist conspiracy theories and use AI-generated images of asylum seekers to stoke anti-immigration fears.

The ABC has been able to link these seemingly disparate pages by examining the location data attached to the pages’ administrators, tracking paid ads, and by analysing the pages’ similar or shared content.

The ABC shared its findings with disinformation experts, who said the network’s activity had the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation.

“For me, it’s Russian,” said AI Forensics head of research Salvatore Romano.

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You may be surprised to hear that Nigel Farage has rejected this as “cobblers”. Makes a change from actors, though still a form of worker.
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What time will we know who won? Hour-by-hour guide to election night • The Guardian

Jamie Grierson, Jim Waterson and Ashley Kirk:

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After months of speculation on when the election might be held, six weeks of actual campaigning, D-day blunders, gambling scandals, smashing the gangs, stopping the boats, surrendering finances, triple-lock-pluses, national service, VAT on private schools, taxes up and taxes down, the election night will soon be upon us. Here’s how it may unfold.

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Basically: exit polls 10pm, nothing much until 3am, and then mayhem; all over bar the shouting (and weeping) by 7am.
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What happened when British GQ stopped trying to ‘feed the algorithm’ • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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GQ‘s European director of audience development, analytics and social, Neha-Tamara Patel, joined in July 2022 and told Press Gazette about a strategy shift that has seen the legacy men’s lifestyle brand move away from quick wins towards more considered content with the aim of a more engaged core audience.

She said: “It was apparent to me that we were doing a lot of what I call ‘feeding the algorithm content’: lots of short-form news, a lot of quick fashion news, all of which was still within GQ’s world but from an audience perspective wasn’t really serving us long term.

“It meant that we had a lot of churn, a lot of people coming in for that quickfire content and then leaving again without really accessing the broader spectrum of what we do as a brand.

“So we really made a conscious decision to slow things down, not necessarily feed the news cycle. We are a lifestyle magazine brand at the end of the day, not business of fashion or anything like that. So we obviously do touch on fashion news, but we try and think about where we can add to the conversation rather than it being like pure reportage. We’re not just about headlines. It’s like, how are we moving the story on and what else are we bringing to the table?”

…Ipsos iris data shared with Press Gazette shows gq-magazine.co.uk had a UK audience reach of 888,117 in May, down 25% in two years. But its total minutes were down by a lesser 12% to 2.2 million, with recovery of 19% in the past year after a slump in May 2023.

Across last year British GQ saw a 47% year-on-year increase in engagement among British users with 71 million engaged minutes in total, according to figures shared by the publisher.

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What are “engaged minutes”? Though it’s evident that for a monthly magazine to not attempt to keep up with the relentless hour-by-hour news cycle is a far more sensible approach.
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Einstein and his peers were ‘irrationally resistant’ to black holes. This illustrated story explores why • BBC Future

Ben Platts-Mills wrote the piece, and illustrated it too:

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Einstein showed that space and time were continually stretched and distorted by masses such as stars and planets, and that this accounted for gravity. The way bodies are drawn together is not due to a “force” attracting them, he argued, but to the “curvature” of the Universe caused by mass. The greater the mass, the more curvature it causes and so the greater the gravitational effect.

When Einstein first published his theory, he hadn’t pinned down the solutions to his own equations, which would have revealed to him the full implications of his discovery. It was another scientist who made this step.

In November 1915, Karl Schwarzschild was an artillery lieutenant in the German army, on the Eastern Front. He read Einstein’s new theory while working at a weather station close to the front line and wrote a letter in response.

His letter supplied the missing solutions and showed how they could be used to model a star’s gravity. One feature of the model, Schwarzschild noted later, was a radius of compression below which a star – or any other spherical mass – would begin to implode indefinitely under its own gravity. If applied to the physics of the real world, this had horrifying implications. It meant that a star would continue collapsing forever, its mass being crushed ever smaller. Its gravitation would become ever more powerful as it insatiably devoured surrounding masses until, finally, it reached the point of “singularity”, a moment where the laws of physics break down, and time and space cease to exist.

Decades later, the Schwarzschild singularity would be recognised as a turning point in theoretical physics – the first time black holes had been hinted at. Schwarzschild himself, however, dismissed the idea as a mathematical artefact.

The critical radius was, Schwarzschild concluded, simply the limit for a star’s compression – the point it would stop collapsing. Instead of discovering black holes, then, he became the first person to reject the evidence for them on principle. We will never know if he might have revised his ideas because he died of an autoimmune disease in 1916. 

Einstein’s reaction to Schwarzschild’s solutions was mixed.

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Which goes to show: even the greatest minds will dismiss real possibilities as quirks and artefacts because they’re too difficult to contemplate. And even in the midst of a war, people find ideas too tantalising to ignore.
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The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in history • Casey Handmer’s blog

Handmer is a scientist and entrepreneur who founded Terraform Industries (which aims to generate fuel from air, using solar energy:

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To a good approximation, even as global population climbs towards 10 billion, the number of humans enduring extreme poverty has fallen in both absolute and relative terms, from nearly universal just 200 years ago to rapidly vanishing today. We are living in the first time in the history of any life form where we can put a finite upper bound on the number of poverty-stricken human years left to be endured by the human race: Almost certainly fewer than 10 billion. This is a lot but it’s a lot fewer than infinity.

This unprecedented improvement in the human condition has been unlocked by social and political innovation, and underwritten by the consumption of copious quantities of cheap energy, almost all of it from fossil coal, oil, and gas.

To a good approximation, oil is the antidote to poverty.

But oil is finite. The good stuff is gone. Fracking is expensive. Most places don’t have oil. Climate and scarcity will force us to use other forms of energy, most of them not as useful as oil. Are we headed for economic difficulties as a result of this? A handful of nations have endured severe energy shortages due to political instability, and it has never gone well for them. North Korea. Cuba. Venezuela. Are we doomed?

No.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) power got cheap, then big, then cheaper, then bigger. Last year, we installed about 460 GW globally. Check out the knee in the curve in 2009! A learning rate of 44% means that the cost falls by 44% for every doubling of production, and production is currently doubling roughly every 18 months.

Here’s a free heretical viewpoint, or at least an early prediction: solar PV is not just a partial substitute for oil, it’s a cheaper and better energy source in every way that matters.

Corollary: Our techno-capital machine is a thermodynamic mechanism that systematically hunts for and then maximally exploits the cheapest energy it can find. When it unlocks cheaper energy, first coal, then oil, then gas, and now solar, it drives up the rate of economic growth, due to an expanded spread between energy cost and application value.

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I think he’s right about the benefits of solar PV, at least.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Being good enough to qualify to play even on the outside courts of Wimbledon is much, much harder that people think. CC-licensed photo by Nic Gould on Flickr.

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

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

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

ID verification service for TikTok, Uber, X exposed driver licences • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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A company that verifies the identities of TikTok, Uber, and X users, sometimes by processing photographs of their faces and pictures of their drivers’ licenses, exposed a set of administrative credentials online for more than a year potentially allowing hackers to access that sensitive data, according to screenshots and data obtained by 404 Media.

The Israel-based company, called AU10TIX, offers what it describes on its website as “full-service identity verification solutions.” This includes verifying peoples’ identity documents, conducting “liveness detection” in a real-time video stream with the user, and performing age verification, where a service will predict how old someone is based on their uploaded photo. AU10TIX also includes the logos of other companies on its site, such as Fiverr, PayPal, Coinbase, LinkedIn, and Upwork, some of which confirmed to 404 Media they are active or former AU10TIX clients.

The news comes as more social networks and pornography sites move towards an identity or age verification model, in which users are required to upload their real identity documents in order to access certain services. The breach highlights that identity services could themselves become a target for hackers. The cybersecurity researcher did not distribute the data beyond providing screenshots and some data to 404 Media for verification purposes.

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On the basis that there are only two classes of companies – those which have been hacked, and those which are going to be hacked – this was absolutely certain to happen, and will happen again. It’s totally the problem with age verification systems that rely on centralised repositories.
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ISS astronauts forced to take shelter after Russian satellite mysteriously disintegrates • Gizmodo

Passant Rabie:

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On Wednesday, space-tracking firm LeoLabs detected a debris cloud forming after a non-operational satellite broke apart in low Earth orbit. The Russian-owned decommissioned satellite, called RESURS-P1, broke apart around 12 p.m. ET on June 26, resulting in more than 100 pieces of trackable debris, according to U.S. Space Command.

The satellite weighs, or rather it used to weigh, around 13,200 pounds (6,000 kilograms) and was in a nearly circular orbit at an altitude of 220 miles (355 kilometers) above Earth when it fell apart, according to LeoLabs. The ISS orbits Earth at an altitude of approximately 250 miles (400 kilometers); accordingly, astronauts on board the space station were ordered to shelter in place as a precautionary measure, NASA wrote on X.

“Mission Control continued to monitor the path of the debris, and after about an hour, the crew was cleared to exit their spacecraft and the station resumed normal operations,” the space agency added. The U.S. Space Command also confirmed that it “observed no immediate threats and is continuing to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain.”

In 2021, Russia drew widespread criticism when it purposely destroyed a defunct Soviet-era satellite in low Earth orbit in an anti-satellite test, producing thousands of pieces of debris. At the time, fragments from the satellite also forced astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the ISS to seek shelter. NASA condemned Russia’s ASAT missile test, calling it “reckless and dangerous,” and the United Nations adopted a resolution against tests of anti-satellite (ASAT) missile systems, with Russia and China voting against it.

The most recent breakup of the defunct Russian satellite raises suspicion that this may have been the result of yet another anti-missile test. Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell took to X to speculate on the reason behind the satellite falling apart, suggesting it may have been the result of a small impact or the explosion of an onboard battery. He also did not rule out that it may have been an anti-missile test.

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‘I’m good, I promise’: the loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player • The Guardian

Conor Niland was a professional tennis player, reaching a career high ranking of 127:

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I spent all of September 2005 – including my 24th birthday – alone in Switzerland, playing four week-long tournaments back to back. After 20 matches and with two trophies under my belt, I was ready for a rest. But I had already entered a tournament in Edinburgh – not knowing Switzerland would be quite so intense – for my ninth tournament in 10 weeks.

I phoned Mum from the airport in Geneva, telling her I was tired and would skip Edinburgh and fly home instead. She wasn’t having that. “This is your job now, Conor,” she said. “You can’t just not turn up because you’re tired.” I remembered my friend and one-time tennis partner Pat Briaud’s words: “Your parents don’t mess around.” I turned up and made the semi-final, losing a feisty two-and-a-half-hour match to Britain’s Jamie Baker. It was my 24th match in five weeks. Exhausted, I collected my prize money: $480, before 20% tax.

This is your job now, Conor.

There are three tiers in the hierarchy of men’s professional tennis. The ATP Tour is the sport’s top division, the preserve of the top 100 male tennis players in the world. The Challenger Tour is populated mainly by players ranked between 100 and 300 in the world. Below that is the Futures tour, tennis’s vast netherworld of more than 2,000 true prospects and hopeless dreamers.

I wasn’t schlepping my way through the lower ranks of the professional tour for the money or the prestige, both of which were in short supply. I, like everyone else, was there to remove myself from the clutches of the lower tiers. The Futures tour sometimes felt like a circle of hell, but in practical terms it’s better understood as purgatory: a liminal space that exists only to be got out of as quickly as possible.

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This is an excellent introduction to life amid the grind for those who may only just scrape into Wimbledon next week. The book from which this is an extract, called The Racket: One Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation – and the other 99%, is excellent. Fun fact: only the top 150 (or so) players in the world make a living playing tournaments.
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Executive summary: batteries and secure energy transitions – analysis • International Energy Agency

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Batteries are key to the transition away from fossil fuels and accelerate the pace of energy efficiency through electrification and greater use of renewables in power. In transport, a growing fleet of EVs on the road displaces the need for 8 million barrels of oil per day by 2030 in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario, more than the entire oil consumption for road transport in Europe today. In the power sector, battery storage supports transitions away from unabated coal and natural gas, while increasing the efficiency of power systems by reducing losses and congestion in electricity grids. In other sectors, clean electrification enabled by batteries is critical to reduce the use of oil, natural gas and coal.

…Solar PV plus batteries is competitive today with new coal-fired power in India and, in the next couple years, become competitive with new coal in China and new natural gas-fired power in the United States. Even in the Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), which is based on today’s policy settings, the total upfront costs of utility-scale battery storage projects – including the battery plus installation, other components and developer costs – are projected to decline by 40% by 2030. This makes stand-alone battery storage more competitive with natural gas peaker plants, and battery storage paired with solar PV one of the most competitive new sources of electricity.

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That’s an amazing stat: solar plus batteries can compete with coal in India. Technology outdoes commodities.
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Most of Gen Z describe themselves as video content creators • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz:

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For the first two decades of the social internet, lurkers ruled. Among Gen Z, they’re in the minority, according to survey data from YouTube.

Tech industry insiders used to cite a rule of thumb stating that only one in ten of an online community’s users generally post new content, with the masses logging on only to consume images, video or other updates. Now younger generations are flipping that divide, a survey by the video platform said.

YouTube found that 65% of Gen Z, which it defined as people between the ages of 14 and 24, describe themselves as video content creators — making lurkers a minority. The finding came from responses from 350 members of Gen Z in the US, out of a wider survey that asked thousands of people about how they spend time online [emphasis added – Overspill Ed], including whether they consider themselves video creators. YouTube did the survey in partnership with research firm SmithGeiger, as part of its annual report on trends on the platform.

YouTube’s report says that after watching videos online, many members of Gen Z respond with videos of their own, uploading their own commentary, reaction videos, deep dives into content posted by others and more. This kind of interaction often develops in response to videos on pop culture topics such as “RuPaul’s Drag Race” or the Fallout video game series. Fan-created content can win more watch time than the original source material, the report says.

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When I worked on one daily newspaper I was once asked, in all seriousness, how to calculate a percentage, given two numbers. Here we now get the example of the self-selected and misrepresentative survey. Gen Z are video content creators in that they all have a video camera in their pocket – but so, for that matter, do millennials, Gen Y and boomers.

But it still remains the case that almost everyone consumes more content than they create. It’s why mass media exists.
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Recipe bloggers want Congress to scrutinize Google’s “AI Overviews” • The Washington Post

Will Oremus:

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If you Google “guacamole,” there’s a good chance your top result will be Lisa Bryan’s recipe. Titled “Best Ever Guacamole (Fresh, Easy & Authentic),” it calls for a classic mélange of avocados, Roma tomatoes, cilantro, garlic, onion, lime, jalapeño and sea salt.

That prime placement on a popular search query is Bryan’s meal ticket. But she fears artificial intelligence will soon snatch it away.

A former health-care executive from Southern California, Bryan burned out in her career a decade ago and started posting recipes online for family and friends. Now she runs a food and lifestyle blog called Downshiftology, where she advocates “taking life down a notch” and savoring simple pleasures. She employs a full-time social media manager, has 2.5 million YouTube followers and says her website reaches 130 million people a year.

Hers is a success story made possible in large part by Google Search, which directs millions of people to her blog — with noticeable boosts ahead of the Super Bowl and Cinco de Mayo, when searches for guacamole peak. But as Google shifts from traditional search results toward answering users’ questions directly with AI, independent web publishers like Bryan fear for their livelihoods.

Now the bloggers are taking their case to Congress. On Wednesday, they staged an “Independents’ Day” lobbying push on Capitol Hill. The push is being organized by a company called Raptive, which handles advertising and marketing for online publishers and helps them rank highly in search results — giving it a vested interest in beating back AI.

Bryan is among thousands who signed onto an open letter to Congress from Raptive CEO Michael Sanchez urging scrutiny of Google’s “AI Overviews.” Several of those creators will also meet with staffers and lawmakers from their home states.

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AI-generated Al Michaels to deliver Paris Olympics highlights on NBC • The New York Times

John Koblin:

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This year, highlights from the Summer Olympics will be brought to you by artificial intelligence — and more specifically, the A.I.-generated narration of Al Michaels.

Executives at NBCUniversal and the streaming service Peacock said on Wednesday that a customized, daily highlight reel for the Olympics would be available to streaming subscribers. The reel will feature the voice of Mr. Michaels, the 79-year-old American broadcaster, who first covered the Olympics decades ago.

Mr. Michaels, however, will not be holing up in a broadcast booth each night to briefly summarize the dozens of Olympic events that took place. Instead, Peacock’s program has been trained from Mr. Michaels’s NBC clips — he joined the network in 2006 and was its longtime “Sunday Night Football” announcer — to formulate coherent, realistic-sounding sentences, which “will provide his signature expertise and elocution,” the company said.

Mr. Michaels granted approval for the use of his voice. “When I was approached about this, I was skeptical but obviously curious,” Mr. Michaels said in a statement issued by the company. “Then I saw a demonstration detailing what they had in mind. I said, ‘I’m in.’”

It does raise a key question, one that recalls Mr. Michaels’s most famous Olympic call: do NBCUniversal executives believe in miracles?

NBC has been exclusively broadcasting the Olympics in the United States since 1996, and the network frequently finds itself subject to intense public scrutiny for its coverage of the Games.

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No idea why the line about “miracles” is stuck in there: it isn’t referenced further. But obviously it’s a lot easier on commentators if they don’t have to be involved. How the script emerges isn’t specified – one presumes a human writes it, rather than the AI “watching” the video.
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A Supreme Court justice is why you can’t buy a car right now • The Big Newsletter

Matt Stoller:

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Last Wednesday, Americans trying to buy a car were greeted with a troubling message. The system was down. Not everywhere, but at 15,000 of the roughly 18,000 auto dealers in the country, at giant dealers like AutoNation, Sonic Automotive, Penske Automotive Group, Group 1 Automotive, and Lithia Motors. A corporation named CDK Global, which had been taken over by private equity titan Brookfield in 2021, operated a software platform that serves as the nervous system for the car sales industry, what is known as dealer management software. And its DMS was down. [Hacked by a Russian hacker group called Blacksuit.]

DMS helps dealers manage servicing, parts and inventory, vehicle financing, accounting, payroll, insurance information, customer information, completed and pending sales, etc. With that software down, auto dealers are paralyzed. And the system won’t be back up until the end of the month, at the earliest.

…CDK Global is indeed a rudderless organization, as are many private equity backed shops. It is what Americans in the 19th century used to refer to as an absentee owner, supposedly owning property, but unable to do caretaking of it. My guess is that BlackSuit hackers used some rudimentary technique, like cracking a password of 1-2-3-4-5, which is essentially how our nuclear weapons facilities were hacked through a private equity owned software company named Solar Winds in 2021.

It’s easy to get why CDK Global got hacked. What’s harder to understand is why CDK Global is still running the nervous system of most of America’s car sales industry. To get there, we have to go to an antitrust ruling by one of the most important Supreme Court justices of the 20th and early 21st century, Antonin Scalia. Because it was a ruling that allowed CDK Global to maintain its dominant position in the dealer management software industry, even as customers were primed to revolt.

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I’d noted the ransomware attack on the company, but the fact that it’s completely paralysed this system because it’s been allowed to monopolise the market – and allowed is the operative word – is a classic example of business gone wrong.
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Aggregating poll predictions for the UK General Election • Github

Peter Inglesby:

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This summary shows, for each model and each party, the number of seats where that party is predicted to get the most votes.

Note that these totals are indicative of how the parties’ level of support from each model’s prediction, but won’t match the number of seats predicted by each model.

To understand why, imagine two parties and ten constituencies, where a model predicts that party X will get more votes than party Y, and assigns party X a 90% chance of winning. In this case, the model may predict that X will win nine seats and Y one. However, in this summary, we will instead show X with ten and Y with none.

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This is a lot of fun! There have been tons of polls in this election runup and keeping track of them has been difficult, to say the least. This lets you scan across and see where they agree, or disagree.

All it needs is a printable version that you can use on election night, if you’re sober enough for long enough.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified