In Birmingham, trams make the city much more connected than buses do, because they’re more reliable. CC-licensed photo by Mac McCreery on Flickr.

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

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about outrage (and how to avoid it).

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

Microsoft accused of damaging Guardian’s reputation with AI-generated poll • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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The Guardian has accused Microsoft of damaging its journalistic reputation by publishing an AI-generated poll speculating on the cause of a woman’s death next to an article by the news publisher.

Microsoft’s news aggregation service published the automated poll next to a Guardian story about the death of Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach who was found dead with serious head injuries at a school in Sydney last week.

The poll, created by an AI program, asked: “What do you think is the reason behind the woman’s death?” Readers were then asked to choose from three options: murder, accident or suicide.

Readers reacted angrily to the poll, which has subsequently been taken down – although highly critical reader comments on the deleted survey were still online as of Tuesday morning. A reader said one of the Guardian reporters bylined on the adjacent story, who had nothing to do with the poll, should be sacked. Another wrote: “This has to be the most pathetic, disgusting poll I’ve ever seen.”

The chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, Anna Bateson, outlined her concerns about the AI-generated poll in a letter to Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith. She said the incident was potentially distressing for James’s family and had caused “significant reputational damage” to the organisation as well as damaging the reputation of the journalists who wrote the story.

“This is clearly an inappropriate use of genAI [generative AI] by Microsoft on a potentially distressing public interest story, originally written and published by Guardian journalists,” she wrote. Bateson added that it had demonstrated “the important role that a strong copyright framework plays in enabling publishers to be able to negotiate the terms on which our journalism is used”.

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The poll is just terrible, and is a perfect example of how the AI Summit (linked below) misses the point. It’s mistakes like this which really show AI undermining the normal operation of things.
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Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty on all seven counts • TechCrunch

Jacquelyn Melinek:

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Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, has been found guilty on all seven counts related to fraud and money laundering.

The defendant is “charged with a wide-ranging scheme to misappropriate billions of dollars of customer funds deposited with FTX and mislead investors and lenders to FTX and to Alameda Research,” a release from the US attorney’s office at the Southern District of New York stated.

The decision was handed down on Thursday, following a five-week trial that dug deep into how one of the biggest crypto exchanges and its sister trading company, collapsed about a year ago. The US Department of Justice charged 31-year-old Bankman-Fried about 11 months ago.

The jury took about four hours to come to a verdict on six counts relating to fraud and one count relating to money laundering.

Bankman-Fried fell quickly from the top of the crypto totem pole after a faulty Alameda balance sheet was unveiled by CoinDesk in November 2022, which resulted in industry-wide panic and concern around FTX and its liquidity.

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That’s remarkably quick – both the verdict, and the case coming to trial. Some people will think it was easy, but for the prosecutor, making the case would be tough. However, it certainly helps when the prosecution can persuade various insiders to turn state’s evidence.
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Sunak plays eager chatshow host as Musk discusses AI and politics • The Guardian

Kiran Stacey:

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For 25 minutes, the prime minister quizzed Musk on his views on the summit and AI in general.

“What do we need to do to make sure we do enough [to regulate AI]?” asked Sunak. Later he suggested that technology was now developing even faster than “Moore’s law”, which suggests that computing power roughly doubles every two years, before checking himself. “Is that fair?” he asked Musk.

At one point Sunak even appeared to ask the controversial technology entrepreneur his views on international diplomacy. “Some people said I was wrong to invite China [to the summit],” he said. “Should we be engaging with them? Can we trust them? Was that the right thing to have done?”

In case Musk took objection to any of the questions, Sunak made sure to frame them with flattery. “You are known for being such a brilliant innovator and technologist,” he said at one point.

Downing Street had been worried that the famously unpredictable Musk might say something off-colour or undiplomatic. Earlier this week he told Rogan he was worried that environmentalists might harness AI deliberately to eliminate all of mankind. He regularly rails against the “woke mind virus” and has said he bought X to prevent a “zombie apocalypse”.

Officials were so concerned that they changed what had been billed as a live broadcast on X into a recorded conversation, to be edited and put online after the pair had finished speaking.

They need not have worried, however. The blunt and often abrasive Musk familiar to millions of users of his social media platform was replaced by a softly-spoken personification of charm.

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There’s also five takeaways (not the food kind) from the UK AI summit.
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AI summit: education will blunt AI risk to jobs, says Rishi Sunak • BBC News

Paul Seddon and Becky Morton:

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At the summit, hosted at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, several leading technology companies agreed to allow governments to safety-test their next generation of AI models before they are deployed.

The voluntary document was signed by 10 countries and the EU, including the UK, US, Singapore and Canada. China was not a signatory.

In a statement, the UK government said it would work with the Alan Turing Institute, a research body, to assess possible risks such as the potential for bias and misinformation. Mr Sunak said the testing regime would provide some “independent assurance” – adding that the firms developing new models cannot be expected to “make their own homework”.

His government has so far declined to announce legislation to regulate AI, arguing that existing regulators are best placed to mitigate the risks whilst the technology evolves. Mr Sunak told reporters that binding rules would “likely be necessary,” but stressed that the technology was still evolving and it was necessary to ensure it is done in “the right way”.

Before the summit, various unions and campaign groups warned the event would prove a “missed opportunity”. In an open letter, they argued the event should have focused more on topics such as the impact of AI on employment law and smaller businesses, as well as policing and identity profiling.

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Predictably blah, though some of the people on steering groups are pleased about the “safety tests”. Except China isn’t going to participate. And it’s voluntary. Apart from that, solid job, people.
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How is Israel using military AI in Gaza strikes? And why won’t it tell us? • Los Angeles Times

Brian Merchant:

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In response to a request for comment, an IDF spokesperson declined to discuss the country’s military use of AI.

In a year when AI has dominated the headlines around the globe, this element of the conflict has gone curiously under-examined. Given the myriad practical and ethical questions that continue to surround the technology, Israel should be pressed on how it’s deploying AI.

“AI systems are notoriously unreliable and brittle, particularly when placed in situations that are different from their training data,” said Paul Scharre, the vice president of the Center for a New American Security and author of “Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” Scharre said he was not familiar with the details of the specific system the IDF may be using, but that AI and automation that assisted in targeting cycles probably would be used in scenarios like Israel’s hunt for Hamas personnel and materiel in Gaza. The use of AI on the battlefield is advancing quickly, he said, but carries significant risks.

“Any AI that’s involved in targeting decisions, a major risk is that you strike the wrong target,” Scharre said. ”It could be causing civilian casualties or striking friendly targets and causing fratricide.”

One reason it’s somewhat surprising that we haven’t seen more discussion of Israel’s use of military AI is that the IDF has been touting its investment in and embrace of AI for years.

In 2017, the IDF’s editorial arm proclaimed that “The IDF Sees Artificial Intelligence as the Key to Modern-Day Survival.” In 2018, the IDF boasted that its “machines are outsmarting humans.” In that article, the then-head of Sigma, the branch of the IDF dedicated to researching, developing, and implementing AI, Lt. Col. Nurit Cohen Inger wrote that “Every camera, every tank, and every soldier produces information on a regular basis, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”

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One has to love the optimism of asking the IDF how it’s using AI in the midst of its latest conflict. Though one would also point out that it sure didn’t spot Hamas planning its incursion on October 7.
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Transport Open Data in 2023 • Tom Forth

Tom Forth has been analysing bus and tram open data for various cities since 2019 :

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On 6 December 2022 I tracked every bus in Great Britain for three hours. This produced a large but manageable 2GB of data. For the same day I downloaded the Great Britain bus timetable in GTFS format.

Focusing just on Leeds and Bristol I matched every bus that ran to its timetable and produced a version of the Great Britain bus timetable in GTFS format reflecting only those buses that ran and their recorded positions every minute.

I loaded the GTFS files representing the real bus movements and timetabled bus movements into Open Trip Planner 2.2 and using the Isochrone feature I calculated the reachable area of Leeds from the Corn Exchange within 45 minutes with only walking and taking the bus as allowed methods of travel.
[Diagram omitted for Overspill inclusion, but really worth looking at.]

We see clearly that in reality the accessibility of Leeds by bus is nowhere near that suggested by the timetable.

As part of this work, we’ve been developing tools for comparing population and public transport networks internationally. I have made a web version of those tools that works just for circles.

Behind the scenes, and not available via that website, we can calculate comparable population estimates for any polygon, including the two accessibility polygons for Leeds. Using this tool we show that the population within 45 minutes of central Leeds by bus on a typical December late afternoon is 445,000 according to the bus timetable – but 165,000 according to the buses that ran and the speed that they ran at.

This is an even larger reduction in effective size than our previous work has shown in Birmingham. We suspect that this is because Leeds has no tram, our work does not currently consider trains, and because congestion was particularly bad on this day due to Christmas shopping and ongoing roadworks.

We found similar results in Bristol though without local knowledge we have chosen not to do any further analysis of what we found.

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Apparently this work has had some effect inside government – hooray! – though it’s faintly depressing how badly buses serve such major cities. There’s much more in the post, including maps showing the dramatic difference between theory and practice for getting around the cities. His 2019 post on Birmingham will make you think we should put trams everywhere.
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Scientists create artificial protein capable of degrading microplastics in bottles • Phys.org

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Every year, around 400 million tons of plastics are produced worldwide, a number that increases by around 4% annually. The emissions resulting from their manufacture are one of the elements contributing to climate change, and their ubiquitous presence in ecosystems leads to serious ecological problems.

One of the most used is PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is found in many packaging and beverage bottles. Over time, this material wears down into smaller and smaller particles—so-called microplastics—which aggravates environmental problems. PET already accounts for more than 10% of global plastic production and recycling is scarce and inefficient.

Now, scientists from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center—Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), together with research groups from the Institute of Catalysis and Petrochemistry of the CSIC (ICP-CSIC) and the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), have developed artificial proteins capable of degrading PET microplastics and nanoplastics and reducing them to their essential components, which would allow them to be broken down or recycled.

They have used a defense protein from the strawberry anemone (Actinia fragacea), to which they have added the new function after design using computational methods. The results are published in the journal Nature Catalysis.

“What we are doing is something like adding arms to a person,” explains Víctor Guallar, ICREA professor at the BSC and one of the authors of the work. These arms consist of just three amino acids that function as scissors capable of cutting small PET particles. In this case, they have been added to a protein from the anemone Actinia fragacea, which in principle lacks this function and which in nature “functions as a cellular drill, opening pores and acting as a defense mechanism,” explains the researcher.

Machine learning and supercomputers such as the BSC’s MareNostrum 4 used in this protein engineering allow “predicting where the particles are going to join and where we must place the new amino acids so that they can exert their action,” says Guallar. The resulting geometry is quite similar to that of the PETase enzyme from the bacterium Idionella sakaiensis, which is capable of degrading this type of plastic and was discovered in 2016 in a packaging recycling plant in Japan.

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Avid readers will recall the August 2022 piece on that Japanese bacterium.
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Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase finally helped these obsessives quit • Slate

Luke Winkie:

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on the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk’s acquisition and transformation of the company, a broader group of users is clearly feeling a loss. Twitter was a home for everyone: inveterate gamers, breathless BTS stans, transcendent trolls, and—yes—a whole lot of political reporters. Complaints about its usability, functionality, and overall impact on one’s mental well-being long predate the Elon era, and yet, I’ve surprised myself by my ability to be wistful about what we’re all now calling the good old days.

That’s why I reached out to eight people—some archetypal Twitter addicts, others who don’t fit the mold—who’ve left the site in the past year to ask them why they made the decision to board up shop. (I’ve withheld some of their last names at their request.) The reasons for their departures vary. Some find the proximity to someone with Musk’s vindictive, charmless tweets (and they’re hard to escape) to be viscerally unpleasant; others simply dislike how shoddy, gouging, and feature-poor the platform has become in his wake. Some deleted their accounts; others just ignore them now. Their stories, in loose order of departure, present a kind of alternative history of the Musk takeover and a broad view of his digital carnage. It isn’t just bleeding-heart liberals who are disgusted by the state of Twitter. Some users just miss when the site worked.

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Yes, I’m sure you’ve read a gazillion of these sorts of things, but what’s neat about this roundup is that Winkie finds people who quit at different times, for different reasons: two days after Musk bought it, a few days later when all the banned accounts were let back on, when “verification” started being sold, and so on. The last one is “When the For You Feed Suddenly Felt Like It Was for Someone Else”, which is neat. But the For You feed has always been for someone else – the person who wants to be outraged and infuriated.
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Apple in 2013: “Android is a massive tracking device” • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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‘Android is a massive tracking device.’That was the message from Apple in an internal strategy document from 2013. It has been revealed as part of the ongoing US v. Google antitrust trial. The document details Apple’s approach to privacy to differentiate from competitors like Google and Microsoft. Apple later went on to make privacy an even bigger part of its marketing pitch in iPhone commercials in 2019, with the “privacy matters” slogan.

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The slideshow is no great shakes, to be honest (definitely made in Keynote – good dogfooding, Apple!) but does show how clearly how Apple decided to double down on its strategy credit (the opposite of a strategy tax; something which is boosted by the way you run your business) of not collecting user data if it can avoid it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There are now fewer than 70,000 mature giraffes in the wild. What they need to thrive is, strangely, more police. CC-licensed photo by Jon Mountjoy 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. How’s the weather up there? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Years of incarcerated journalist’s reporting deleted by notorious prison telecom ‘inadvertently’ • Vice

Jules Roscoe:

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Securus Technologies, a prison telecommunications company previously reported on for its predatory business practices, deleted incarcerated users’ draft emails in a system reboot on Monday. One incarcerated journalist says they use the draft box to do critical reporting and lost years of work as a result of the wipe, and that the company silenced important reporting. The company says it was an accident.

Christopher Blackwell, an incarcerated journalist at the Washington Corrections Center in Washington State, posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday that Securus had wiped his draft email box. Blackwell has written for numerous outlets about the conditions he faces while incarcerated—he’s active on X by dictating posts over the phone. 

“I’m an incarcerated journalist,” Blackwell wrote in the post. “Today Securus, a predatory prison communication co, silenced journalists. With no warning they deleted all drafts of writing. Years of work. Manuscripts. Articles. Everything gone. We’re no longer able to save drafts. Now near impossible to write.” 

Securus provides inmates with tablets that allow them to access their emails, as well as direct messaging and video-chats on the platform. Blackwell told Motherboard in a phone call that Securus charges inmates 24 cents per email, either coming in or going out. He said it was a “common occurrence” for Securus to reboot its system, and that this was the fourth time it had happened this year. This time, however, Securus also changed its settings so that no draft email could be saved for longer than 24 hours, which he said had never been the case previously. 

“For anybody who’s an inside journalist, this is a really big deal,” Blackwell said. “I do a lot of investigative pieces—5,000 or 6,000 words. If I can’t save anything, how can I do anything? It’s basically a full-out attack for them to block us from doing these kinds of pieces, and it’s an under-handed way of doing it. This is just one of the many things that they do.”

Both the Washington Department of Corrections and Securus told Motherboard in statements that the draft box deletion and saving settings change had been a mistake. As compensation, the company gave inmates two “stamps” each—an internal system currency for making communications. 

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Giraffes could go extinct; these are the five biggest threats they face • The Conversation

Derek Lee is an associate research professor of biology at Penn State University:

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Giraffe populations have declined by 40% in the last 30 years, and there are now fewer than 70,000 mature individuals left in the wild. What are the causes of this alarming decline, and what can be done to protect these gentle giants?

The five biggest threats to giraffes are habitat loss, insufficient law enforcement, ecological changes, climate change, and lack of awareness. Below, I will tell you about these threats and what is being done to save them.

I will also explain a study I was a part of that ranked these threats in terms of each one’s danger of causing giraffe extinction, and whether human actions can alleviate that danger. The study used data from more than 3,100 giraffes identified over eight years in an unfenced 4,500km² area of the Tarangire ecosystem in Tanzania. We used the data to simulate how environmental and land use changes could affect the giraffe population over 50 years.

…Given their vast historical Africa-wide range and individual home ranges of thousands of hectares, giraffes will not likely survive only within the boundaries of small, fragmented protected areas. I propose as part of our evidence-based recommendations that rangelands used by wildlife and pastoralists as movement pathways be permanently protected from farming, mining and infrastructure. This will give people as well as wide-ranging animals like giraffes freedom to roam.

It will also require the expansion of wildlife law enforcement in village lands outside formal protected areas.

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The biggest problem turns out to be lack of law enforcement: that leads to the fastest declines. Giraffes are definitely the strangest of the land megafauna.
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‘It’s not clear we can control it’: what they said at the Bletchley Park AI summit • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Kiran Stacey:

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The global AI safety summit opened at Bletchley Park on Wednesday with a landmark declaration from countries including the UK, US, EU and China that the technology poses a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity.

The so-called Bletchley declaration said: “There is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models.”

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For all their efforts, to me this stuff is a great big yawn: a collection of Canutes jostling to be the one who says with more conviction than the previous speaker that the incoming tide is extremely important and fundamental to our future, but also a potentially destructive force that must be resisted at all costs. Hyperbole rules the day. Meanwhile, their socks are already soaking wet and the water keeps rising everywhere.
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Air pollution raises risk of type 2 diabetes, says landmark Indian study • The Guardian

Swagata Yadavar:

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Inhaling polluted air increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, the first study of its kind in India has found. Research conducted in Delhi and the southern city of Chennai found that inhaling air with high amounts of PM2.5 particles led to high blood sugar levels and increased type 2 diabetes incidence.

When inhaled, PM2.5 particles – which are 30 times thinner than a strand of hair – can enter the bloodstream and cause several respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

The study is part of ongoing research into chronic diseases in India that began in 2010. It is the first to focus on the link between exposure to ambient PM2.5 and type 2 diabetes in India, one of the worst countries in the world for air pollution.

The average annual PM2.5 levels in Delhi was 82-100μg/m3 and in Chennai was 30-40μg/m3, according to the study, many times the WHO limits of 5μg/m3. India’s national air quality standards are 40μg/m3.

There is also a high burden of non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease in India; 11.4% of the population – 101 million people – are living with diabetes, and about 136 million are pre-diabetic, according to a paper published in the Lancet in June.

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A strange finding – one has to wonder what the etiology is. And, as a side note, this article is sponsored content, “supported by the Leona M and Harry B Helmsley Charitable Trust”. Leona Helmsley? Yes, that Leona Helmsley. Only the little particles follow praxis, or something.
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EU squeezes Meta on personal data use for targeting ads • AFP via Yahoo

Julien Girault:

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The European Data Protection Board said Wednesday it had adopted a binding decision that will ban Facebook and Instagram owner Meta from using the personal data of users for targeted ads without their explicit consent.

The order closes off the legal basis used by Meta to freely process the personal data of its users in Europe to target ads, a practice that has made the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg one of the world’s most profitable companies.

Instead, Meta will now need clear consent by the user to keep harvesting their data, a new protocol which will also face intense legal scrutiny among privacy activists and European regulators.

The latest order will “impose a ban on the processing of personal data for behavioural advertising on the legal bases of contract and legitimate interest across the entire European Economic Area,” the EDPB said.

Firms like Meta use user data to serve highly targeted ads, and they have struggled to comply with the strict rules of the EU’s 2018 data privacy regulation (GDPR).

In anticipation of the order, Meta said on Monday that Facebook and Instagram users in Europe will be able to buy subscriptions to use the social networks without any advertising from this month.

Meta believes that taking this move to offer subscriptions will assuage EU regulators’ concerns over its data collection and how ads are targeted.

“Meta has already announced that we will give people in the EU and EEA the opportunity to consent and, in November, will offer a subscriptions model to comply with regulatory requirements,” a Meta spokesperson said.

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Scarlett Johansson takes legal action against use of image for AI • The Guardian

Adrian Horton:

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Scarlett Johansson has taken legal action against an AI app that used her name and likeness in an AI-generated advertisement without her permission.

The 22-second ad, posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, by an image generating app called Lisa AI: 90’s Yearbook & Avatar, used real footage of Johansson to generate a fake image and dialogue for her.

Representatives for the 38-year-old actor confirmed to Variety that she is not a spokesperson for the company and that appropriate legal actions were taken since it was spotted on 28 October. “We do not take these things lightly. Per our usual course of action in these circumstances, we will deal with it with all legal remedies that we will have,” her lawyer, Kevin Yorn told Variety. The ad has since been taken down.

The video, reviewed by Variety, opened with a behind the scenes clip of Johansson from the set of the Marvel film Black Widow. “What’s up guys? It’s Scarlett and I want you to come with me … ” she says, before the screen transitions into AI-generated photos that resemble her. A voice imitating the actor continues speaking to promote the app: “It’s not limited to avatars only. You can also create images with texts and even your AI videos. I think you shouldn’t miss it,” the fake narration says.

The fine print under the advertisement says: “Images produced by Lisa AI. It has nothing to do with this person.” Multiple apps by Lisa AI remain on the App Store and Google Play.

Johansson is not the only actor to speak out publicly against the use of their name and likenesses for AI. Last month, Tom Hanks took to Instagram to warn fans about a dental plan that used an AI-generated image of him for their promotional video. “Beware! … I have nothing to do with it,” he wrote on his Instagram story.

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This is going to get more and more common.
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South Korean Christians turn to AI for prayer • FT

Song Jung-a and Christian Davies:

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Online church services using artificial intelligence are rapidly becoming an essential part of worship in Korea, where Christianity is the biggest religion, as tens of thousands turn to chatbots and audio bibles for spiritual sustenance.

This year, local startups have launched generative AI bible study and prayer service apps, which in particular pull in young Protestants.

Pastors have welcomed the time the technology frees up for them to take care of their flock, who account for about a fifth of South Korea’s 52mn population. But they are also conscious of the need to maintain the human touch and have cautioned against relying too much on the latest technology for religious activities.

Awake Corp, the developer of ChatGPT-based bible chatbot service Ask Jesus — now rebranded as Meadow — has since its launch in March attracted about 50,000 users, including 10,000 from outside Korea. The app has drawn Christians in Muslim countries such as Pakistan as well as in the US and other western countries.

The service responds to inquiries on spiritual matters and day-to-day issues with bible verses, interpretations and prayers.

The app has generated interest from churches and pastors, who use Awake’s AI-driven WeBible web service to write sermons. When a pastor asks about a certain section of the Bible, the service can offer detailed explanations, identify main messages and points of reflection, and suggest a title for the sermon.

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I suppose that ChatGPT, being prone to hallucinations, has as much idea about God as any of us, really.
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iPoddery • On my Om

Om Malik:

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Tony Fadell, one of the creators of Apple’s defining product, the iPod, recently reminded us that the music player was launched on October 23, 2001. As I was in the process of moving back to New York, I bought one from a local Apple dealer. Soon, I observed an interesting social behavior upon my arrival: people with white headphones nodded at each other in public, as if acknowledging a shared coolness. We were all part of a tribe — smaller than most realized. It was weird kind of a snobbery. Today, while Apple seems ubiquitous, back then, it was distinctly the underdog.

I quickly penned a short, back-of-the-book piece titled “iPoddery” for Red Herring magazine. Over the following decades, I faithfully bought and upgraded every model of the iPod. I still have several lying around in my apartment. Yet, it was the iPod Shuffle that truly captured my heart.

It inspired me to develop a life philosophy I call “the iShuffle Principle”, long before Marie Kondo introduced her Live Better strategy. To summarize the principle for those who might skip the piece: “More is just more! Often, small and mostly predictable things are the most fun. That’s the iShuffle principle.” Adhering to this philosophy isn’t easy — consumerism is a curse. Living by the iShuffle principle requires constant effort and is an ongoing journey.

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Reducing the amount of stuff in your life is quite difficult, yet also very pleasing when you’re successful. I recently worked my paper shredder so hard it overheated. Now considering getting a bigger shredder. Though I guess I’d need a shredder shredder to stop them accumulating. (Via John Naughton.)

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Strange ways AI disrupts business models • Implications

Scott Belsky is Adobe’s CPO:

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We talk a lot about how AI will transform products, industries, and everyday work and life, but what about particular business models?

• Increasing perversion of certain business models that are liable to be gamed or constrained by AI: …will Tinder or Bumble constrain the efficiency of AI so the product doesn’t become too “unsustainably effective”? Or in the world of music streaming: Since Spotify pays artists per song, will Spotify automatically optimize its algorithms to favor longer songs, taking into account the number of minutes each customer listens per day?

• Time-based business models are liable for disruption via a value-based overhaul of compensation: …most designers, lawyers, and many trades in between continue to charge by the hour, the AL-powered step-function improvements in workflows are liable to shake things up. Let’s first tackle this by considering the ultimate SOURCE of the differentiating value delivered to a client: It is less “time” and it is more “experience.”

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And he has plenty more. I think it’s definitely the right approach to ask which business models will be disrupted, and perhaps how, rather than looking at specific industries and imagining how to squash AI into them. (Also, CPO? I hadn’t come across it. Looked it up. Chief Product Officer.)
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The death of BeReal • Dazed

Amelia Stout:

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While to start with, the app’s existence largely went under the radar, downloads of BeReal eventually skyrocketed, leaping from 1.1 million in February 2022 to an estimated 53 million by October in the same year. Its growth was largely driven by Gen Z, with under-25s making up almost 80% of users in some markets.

But analysis by various market intelligence firms this year has suggested that both monthly downloads and daily users are now in decline. According to analytics firm Apptopia, the number of people who use the app daily has dropped 61% from its peak, from about 15 million in October 2022 to less than six million in March 2023. The conversation around BeReal has become more jaded too. “BeReal going off at 10.30pm is it,” one X user wrote. “Suppose I better obediently take a picture of myself barely awake whilst laying down on the sofa watching TV alone so that the only three friends I have left who are using it can see.” But why have young people turned their backs on the app that was once the hot new thing?

For one, there’s a bossiness to the way in which BeReal operates. It demands that you post within two minutes of the notification, or else it snitches on you to your friends. It also locks your feed until you have posted your own BeReal, like a parent bribing a child. But young people don’t want to be parented by their social media. As Aisha Attah, 20, says, “I’m busy and like to use social media on my terms and in my own time.” Amid a wealth of other apps that you can engage with however you want, BeReal can feel too much like hard work. 

Dr Harry Dyer, digital sociologist and lecturer in education at the University of East Anglia, notes that by rushing people to post, BeReal may actually stress out some of its users, particularly Gen Z. “There’s a tonne of research on Gen Z hating phone calls” because they find “the idea of having to respond in that moment […] stressful”. BeReal, he says, may trigger a similar response by calling for that same kind of in-the-moment communication. He also believes that in “gatekeeping” the experience of browsing until users have themselves posted, the app disregards “a really important part of why we use social media” – the desire to ‘lurk’ and observe others while going unobserved ourselves.

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For a while it looked like BeReal was going to break through and last as Snapchat has managed to. Fickle thing, popularity.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The ubiquitous Microsoft Word has changed the use of the English language, and subtly changed our use of grammar and spelling. CC-licensed photo by Quinn Dombrowski 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. Begone, wiggly red lines. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The patent fight that could take Apple Watches off the market • The New York Times

Peter Coy, on a US International Trade Commission ruling which agrees that the Series 6 (and on) Apple Watch infringes patents owned by Masimo and Cercacor :

»

It’s agreed by both sides that Apple sought a meeting with Masimo when it was exploring adding pulse oximetry to the Apple Watch. Apple signed a confidentiality agreement. A meeting was held in 2013. At this point, stories differ. Joe Kiani, the electrical engineer who founded Masimo in 1989 and remains its chief executive officer, told me on Friday that Apple decided that rather than pay for licenses to use the technology, do a joint venture, or buy Masimo, Cercacor or both, it decided to do “strategic hiring” of key employees. Apple says it concluded that Masimo’s technology wasn’t suited for a consumer device, so it went in a different direction. (Although of course it did hire those key Masimo employees.)

Apple finally introduced its first watch with pulse oximetry, the Series 6, in 2020. It has incorporated pulse oximetry into all of its smart watches since then, with the exception of the cheaper Apple Watch SE. That means Apple will have to stop selling all its watches except the SE model starting on Christmas Day unless something happens before then: Either the companies cut a deal, the U.S. trade representative’s office recommends to Biden that he reverse the ruling, or Apple persuades the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the injunction while it considers an appeal.

The I.T.C. case is only one front in the battle between Masimo and Apple. In 2020, Masimo sued Apple in Federal District Court in California, alleging theft of trade secrets. The suit ended in a mistrial in May when the jury deadlocked. The case is being retried. Last year, Apple sued Masimo in federal court in Delaware, charging that Masimo was the one doing the illegal copying and was trying to knock Apple out of the market to make way for its own watch.

«

My guess is that Biden won’t overrule, and so Apple will cough up, and the Watch will continue to be on sale. Let’s see how it goes! (Thanks G for the link.)
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WeWork plans to file for bankruptcy as early as next week • WSJ

Alexander Gladstone, Akiko Matsuda and Andrew Scurria:

»

WeWork is planning to file for bankruptcy as early as next week, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would mark a stunning reversal for the flexible-office-space venture that was once valued at $47bn. 

New York-based WeWork is considering filing a chapter 11 petition in New Jersey, the people said. 

WeWork missed interest payments owed to its bondholders on Oct. 2, kicking off a 30-day grace period in which it needs to make the payments. Failing to do so would be considered an event of default. On Tuesday, the company said it has struck an agreement with the bondholders to allow it another seven days to negotiate with the stakeholders before a default is triggered. 

WeWork declined to comment on what a spokesperson called “speculation.” The spokesperson also pointed to a securities filing early Tuesday that “the forbearance agreement provides time to continue in the positive conversations with our key financial stakeholders and engage with them to implement our ongoing strategic efforts to enhance our capital structure.”

In August, the company shook up its board after three directors resigned due to a material disagreement regarding board governance and the company’s strategic direction, according to a securities filing. WeWork appointed four new directors with expertise in large, complex financial restructurings. Those directors have been negotiating with WeWork’s creditors over the past several months about a restructuring plan as they prepare for the bankruptcy.

«

Icarus, fireworks, balloons: all the usual metaphors apply. But it was also a ridiculous valuation for a company with no moat. Softbank’s predilection for splashing cash around would make drunken sailors pause.
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Google disables live traffic conditions on Maps in Israel and Gaza • CNBC

Melina Khan:

»

Google is disabling live traffic conditions in Israel and Gaza on its Maps and Waze apps, a spokesperson said Tuesday. The move comes as Israel is widely anticipated to embark on a ground invasion into Gaza.

“As we have done previously in conflict situations and in response to the evolving situation in the region, we have temporarily disabled the ability to see live traffic conditions and busyness information out of consideration for the safety of local communities,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “Anyone navigating to a specific place will still get routes and ETAs that take current traffic conditions into account.”

The spokesperson said Google is working with local authorities as part of the ongoing Israel-Hamas War.

The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately respond to comment about whether it requested the restriction.

Google similarly disabled Maps live traffic data in Ukraine last year at the start of the Russia-Ukraine War, according to Reuters.

«

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What happens when Amazon and Meta ads generate themselves? • NY Mag Intelligencer

John Herrman:

»

If you step an inch outside the weird and specific context of the relationship between Amazon and its millions of sellers, the company’s pitch for automated product photos sounds sort of insane. It’s a tool for faking product photos! It’s the sort of thing an e-commerce site might make a rule against using, and with good reason. Take the product photos in Amazon’s video, for example.

At first glance — which, for a thumbnail in an ad on Amazon, might be what matters most — things look good. We see a toaster in the middle of a sunlit kitchen, another on the edge of a stone table, another on some planks, and then on a counter again, except, hold on, this counter appears to extend all the way back to some drawers and might also be … the floor? I can see how such photos might result in better click-through rates for an ad, since they mimic certain popular aesthetics and imply a level of polish and care. What I can’t see is how big this toaster is. These photos somehow offer less information than the customary floating-in-white-space Amazon product shot. They don’t add context. They subtract it. This toaster has been banished to four different locations in the uncanny valley, none of which are anywhere near an electrical outlet.

Next, we see images created with the prompt “product in a kitchen, used in meal preparation.” Once more, regarding probably the main question that real-world product shots can help answer: how large is this appliance? On the top left, staged in a pizza-oven crematorium, the device sits next to a bowl of the statistical average of all slow-cooked meals, a few inches (or feet?) away from a rare leafy bell pepper, in front of some towering greens in a utensil holder, and looks like a miniature; on the bottom right, in the middle of a butcher block, it looks fairly large, except for some confoundingly scaled [robot voice] STARCH and MEAT on the plate.

«

These are very good points. And very well spotted. Unrelated grammar/style note: Americans capitalise the word that comes after a colon (I edit them to lowercase), but not a semi-colon. Why not? Or, why?
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Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t ask where the $8bn went • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

Let’s say I am the owner of a hedge fund, and one fine June day, my employees come to me and say, “Hey, Liz, we have an accounting problem. We are missing several billion dollars.” How would I react?

I have been wondering this since Danielle Sassoon walked Sam Bankman-Fried through his reaction to the FTX software bug fixed by Adam Yedidia. In my case, there would probably be shouting? Like, a lot of shouting. I would also probably have my assistant figure out which law enforcement agency to call immediately. Misplacing $900m is a five-alarm fire even for Citibank; misplacing several billion is kicking over a lantern in Chicago in 1871.

Obviously, this is not how Bankman-Fried reacted to the software bug that overestimated the amount Alameda owed to FTX by about $8bn. Nor is it how he reacted to finding out that even after fixing the bug, Alameda still owed FTX about $8bn. Instead, Bankman-Fried directed alleged co-conspirator Caroline Ellison to repay third-party loans and went on making investments. 

Bankman-Fried said that he found out about the fiat@ftx account — that’s the one that tracked how much Alameda owed FTX — in June 2022 while his senior staff was focused on fixing the software bug. He did not, however, discover what the account was for until October. I know this sounds unbelievable, but this is his actual testimony. 

«

Lopatto is reporting on the FTX trial, at which SBF is testifying – a word one uses loosely, because keeping him focused on answering the question seems to be a Sisyphean task.
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OpenAI debates when to release its AI-generated image detector • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

»

OpenAI has “discussed and debated quite extensively” when to release a tool that can determine whether an image was made with DALL-E 3, OpenAI’s generative AI art model, or not. But the startup isn’t close to making a decision anytime soon.

That’s according to Sandhini Agarwal, an OpenAI researcher who focuses on safety and policy, who spoke with TechCrunch in a phone interview this week. She said that, while the classifier tool’s accuracy is “really good” — at least by her estimation — it hasn’t met OpenAI’s threshold for quality.

“There’s this question of putting out a tool that’s somewhat unreliable, given that decisions it could make could significantly affect photos, like whether a work is viewed as painted by an artist or inauthentic and misleading,” Agarwal said.

OpenAI’s targeted accuracy for the tool appears to be extraordinarily high. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, said this week at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference that the classifier is “99%” reliable at determining if an unmodified photo was generated using DALL-E 3. Perhaps the goal is 100%; Agarwal wouldn’t say.

A draft OpenAI blog post shared with TechCrunch revealed this interesting tidbit:

“[The classifier] remains over 95% accurate when [an] image has been subject to common types of modifications, such as cropping, resizing, JPEG compression, or when text or cutouts from real images are superimposed onto small portions of the generated image.”

«

That’s pretty accurate! Except it has been scared off by the the fact that its AI-text-generated detector wasn’t very good, but which they did release.
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The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language • BBC Future

Victoria Woollaston:

»

“Word templates led people to use the same formatting in communications, and eventually, this has become instantiated as a norm,” says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where she studies human-computer interaction. If you work in finance, there’s a specific way reports are expected to be laid out. Letters follow a set pattern, memos are largely formatted in the same way. “Users know where to find information in these standardised documents; they don’t need to spend time trying to find what they need.”

If you take this idea of professional conformity a step further, Word has also been significant in helping establish English as the global language of business. While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft’s mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance.

“Word primarily operates in English,” says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. “As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Word in professional and technical fields has led to the borrowing of English terms and structures, which contribute to the trend of linguistic homogenisation.”

Word’s spell-checker and grammar features have become subtle arbiters of language, too. Although seemingly trivial, these tools “promote a sense of consistency and correctness”, says Wolf, and this uniformity comes at the cost of writing diversity.  “Writers, when prompted by the software’s automated norms, might unintentionally forsake their unique voices and expressions.”

This becomes even more invasive when you look at the role and impact of autocorrect and predictive text. Today, when typing on Word, the software can automatically correct your spelling, and make suggestions for what to write next. These suggestions aren’t (yet) based on your personal writing style and tone – they’re rule-based. The suggestions you see will be the same as millions of others. Again, this may feel innocuous but it’s another example of how Word standardises language by loosely guiding everyone down the same path. 

«

As with the AirPod-wearing social interaction yesterday: we shape our tools, then they shape us. Word’s ubiquity really has given its defaults the opportunity to shape everything written we do on a screen.
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Hertz is scaling back its EV ambitions because its Teslas keep getting damaged • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

Rental car company Hertz once envisioned itself as the ultimate EV broker, doling out battery-powered vehicles to business travelers, ridehail drivers, and tech newbies in an ambitious plan to grease the wheels for the EV revolution. The company inked agreements with Tesla and Polestar to buy nearly 200,000 EVs. Tesla’s valuation topped $1 trillion on the news.

But like many other aspects of the EV switch, that plan is running into some headwinds. This week, Hertz said it was tapping the brakes on its EV rollout, citing the plummeting resale value of its EVs and the high cost of repair.

Tesla has been slashing prices to spark sales as it finds itself wrestling with softening demand and more competition. And repair costs are about double what the company spends on gas car fixes, Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr told Bloomberg.

Part of the problem is linked to Hertz’s plans to rent EVs to ridehail drivers. Of the 100,000 Tesla acquired by Hertz, half were to be allocated to Uber drivers as part of a deal with the ridehail company. And drivers said they loved the Teslas! But Uber drivers also tend to drive their vehicles into the ground. This higher rate of utilization can lead to a lot of damage — certainly more than Hertz was anticipating.

Hertz said it tried to mitigate “higher incidents of damage among EV rideshare drivers” by siphoning some of its fleet into its leisure segment. But that didn’t work out as well as the company hoped.

…Bloomberg says that factoring out its EV costs, Hertz probably would have met Wall Street’s expectations for the quarter. The company’s stock dropped about 15% in the past five days.

«

Things aren’t quite going right for Tesla.
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Apple admits to BMW wireless charging issue with iPhone 15 lineup, promises fix later this year • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

In an internal memo shared with Apple Authorized Service Providers, Apple said charging an iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, or iPhone 15 Pro Max with a “small number” of wireless phone chargers built into certain recent BMW and Toyota Supra models may temporarily disable the NFC capabilities of the device. The memo does not provide a specific reason for the issue, which we first reported earlier this month.

In an iPhone, the NFC chip powers features like Apple Pay and digital car keys. Users affected by this issue may receive a “Could Not Set Up Apple Pay” error message in the Wallet app, even if they have already set up Apple Pay.

Apple said the issue will be addressed in a software update coming later this year. Given the memo was put out hours after iOS 17.1 was released today, it appears the update will require a subsequent update, such as iOS 17.1.1 or iOS 17.2. In the meantime, Apple advises affected customers to stop using in-car wireless charging.

There are some complaints about this issue across the MacRumors Forums and X, formerly known as Twitter, but it is unclear how widespread the problem is. Affected customers said the iPhone goes into a data recovery mode with a white screen, and the NFC chip is no longer functional after the device reboots. There is no way for customers to fix the problem, so a trip to an Apple Store or an Apple Authorized Service Provider is required.

«

That’s quite the gotcha: you get your phone at the Apple Shop, set it up, go off on a drive and stick it into the wireless charger in your BMW. You’re living the high life! But wait, something is badly wrong. It’s quite puzzling what it can be, though: how is wireless charging screwing up the NFC chip?
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Google Brain founder says big tech is lying about AI extinction danger • Australian Financial Review

John Davidson:

»

Andrew Ng, a professor at Stanford University who taught machine learning to the likes of OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, and who himself co-founded Google Brain and was chief scientist at Baidu’s Artificial Intelligence Group, said that the “bad idea that AI could make us go extinct” was merging with the “bad idea that a good way to make AI safer is to impose burdensome licensing requirements” on the AI industry.

“When you put those two bad ideas together, you get the massively, colossally dumb idea [of] policy proposals that try to require licensing of AI,” Professor Ng told The Australian Financial Review in an interview. “It would crush innovation,” he said.

“There are definitely large tech companies that would rather not have to try to compete with open source [AI], so they’re creating fear of AI leading to human extinction. It’s been a weapon for lobbyists to argue for legislation that would be very damaging to the open-source community,” he said.

In May, OpenAI CEO and co-founder Altman co-signed a letter saying that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority”, and in March, more than 1100 industry leaders including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak called for a six-month moratorium on training powerful AI models.

“Sam [Altman] was one of my students at Stanford. He interned with me. I don’t want to talk about him specifically because I can’t read his mind, but …I feel like there are many large companies that would find it convenient to not have to compete with open-sourced large language models,” he said.

«

Getting regulation put in place is certainly a great way to embed the existing leadership and make entry far more difficult. Though how exactly do you regulate open source AI, which could be loaded onto people’s phones or PCs without oversight.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The tiny island of Anguilla accidentally snagged one of the internet’s most valuable domain names. How much is that worth? CC-licensed photo by Pete Markham 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. Sunlit. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘It’s quite soul-destroying’: how we fell out of love with dating apps • The Guardian

Robyn Vinter:

»

Dating apps, often referred to as simply “the apps”, have become such a ubiquitous part of the modern dating scene that it can be difficult to remember how connections were made before they popped up in the early 2010s. Having evolved out of desktop dating sites like eHarmony and Match.com, which were perhaps unfairly characterised as lonely hearts services for people struggling to make acquaintances in real life, the likes of Tinder, Grindr, Bumble and Hinge have become, for some, the only way to meet people.

But the sand appears to be shifting once again. More than a decade on, users are abandoning their profiles in search of a better way of meeting like‑minded people. The most up-to-date figures show the world’s most popular dating app, Tinder, saw its users drop by 5% in 2021, while shares in both Bumble and Match Group, which owns Tinder, have declined steadily over the last couple of years.

It is a problem that seems likely to get worse for those companies, as more than 90% of gen Z feel frustrated with dating apps, according to youth research agency Savanta.

“The apps are algorithmic doom barrels,” says Dylan Freeman-Grist, a 29-year-old living in Toronto, Canada. He recently split from a long-term partner and even what he describes as a sense of forboding, “that I’m fated to end up alone”, was not enough to drive him back to dating apps. The spam, bots and fake accounts are tough enough to contend with, he says, and that’s before all the issues with being assessed for attractiveness based on six pictures and a few lines of text.

“It does not matter how handsome or beautiful or charming you are, there is this underlying tension that you are 10 swipes away from a person that outranks you on the conventional beauty and charisma scale. It’s enough to make you feel all the insecurities that you haven’t needed to swallow since you were a teenager and a whole ream of new adult ones,” he says.

But with the apps being so embedded in the culture of modern dating, where else can single people turn to meet the love of their life, or even have a quick fling?

«

“Doom barrel” is perfect.
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A tiny supercritical carbon dioxide turbine for 10,000 homes • Clean Technica

Tina Casey:

»

The familiar steam turbines in wide use at power plants today are based on 19th-century technology. They typically range in size from less than 100 kilowatts to more than 250 megawatts, depending on the use case. When used to generate electricity in a central power plant they are massive beasts, the size of a bus or larger.

Supercritical carbon dioxide turbines are different. They don’t deploy steam as a working fluid. Instead, they use a concentrated form of carbon dioxide — sCO2 for short — that hovers somewhere between a gas and a liquid.

The Energy Department anticipates that new supercritical carbon dioxide turbines can shave energy consumption at power plants by 10%, but that’s just for starters. They have a much smaller footprint than their steam-driven cousins, resulting in manufacturing efficiencies all along the supply chain.

By way of comparison, the Energy Department calculates that a 20-meter steam turbine would shrink down to one meter if replaced with an sCO2 turbine.

“Above the critical point, CO2 does not change phases [that is, change from gas to liquid]. Instead, it undergoes a change in density in even small shifts in temperature and pressure,” the Energy Department explains. “This property allows a large amount of energy to be extracted at a high temperature, using equipment that is relatively compact.”

“The sCO2 turbines may be an order of magnitude smaller than today’s utility-scale combustion or steam turbines,” they emphasize.

Like steam turbines, supercritical carbon dioxide turbines are fuel agnostic. The Energy Department anticipates deploying them in coal and gas power plants as energy efficiency upgrades.

«

sCO2 turbine thermal efficiency can be around 45%, which compares with about 32% for steam turbines; that makes the sCO2 turbines about 40% more efficient. Good numbers.
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I can hear you fine. Is it rude that i’m still wearing AirPods? • WSJ

Nicole Nguyen tried out the new “Conversational Awareness” setting on the latest AirPods Pro – for an entire day:

»

I’m sensitive to sound and easily distracted. Living in a metropolis and working in an open office don’t help. Noise-cancelling earbuds have been a saviour.

There are concerns, however, that constantly blocking out the world limits connection and serendipity. I think this speech-detection feature, which dips you in and out of your environment, is a good compromise. 

Still, there remains a larger question about the etiquette of wearing AirPods in the real world. At a bakery about a week ago, I got nervous about ordering with AirPods still in my ears, until I saw another person with earbuds doing it. It felt OK because it was such a brief interaction.

It felt more rude to wander around my office, chatting people up with my AirPods in. Maybe even worse: engaging with a server while ordering a sit-down solo lunch. When my editor saw a colleague on the walk to his train station, he could barely say hi before taking his own AirPods out. For anyone over the age of 25, it just feels weird to talk to people while wearing them.

When you wear AirPods, there’s still ambiguity for the other person. Are you giving that person undivided attention? Are you listening to something? Nothing signals to them that you can even hear what they say.

“Earbuds are a way to let someone know you are not interested in talking to them on a flight, subway, train or anywhere in public,” said Diane Gottsman, who runs the Protocol School of Texas, a corporate-etiquette training company. So while it’s fine to wear them in the office to avoid unnecessary chitchat, you need to “take them off when walking through the hallways,” Gottsman added.

More people with hearing loss use AirPods and other earbuds as aids. For them, there should be an exception. Explain to colleagues or loved ones that the buds are helping you understand the conversation.

«

First we shape our tools, and then they shape us. And they shape our social norms and etiquette.
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Sundar Pichai acknowledges Google search default deals were ‘very valuable’ • FT

Stefania Palma:

»

Sundar Pichai conceded that agreements making Google’s search engine the default on smartphones and browsers can be “very valuable”, as the Alphabet chief executive took the witness stand in the most significant monopoly trial in 25 years. 

Pichai told the court on Monday that deals the company has struck with technology groups, smartphone makers and mobile telecoms companies — worth billions of dollars annually — when “done correctly . . . can make a difference”.

He added: “There are scenarios where defaults are very valuable,” and that users also stand to benefit. The US government has accused Google of illegally maintaining a monopoly by paying for agreements that ensure its search engine appears prominently on smartphones and browsers. The group has denied wrongdoing, arguing it is facing tough competition and that its market share is the result of the strength of its product, which consumers choose to use.

The Department of Justice had previously said that Google spends upwards of $10bn a year on default agreements, but a top executive revealed in testimony Friday that the group paid $26.3bn on such deals in 2021.

Pichai is the most high-profile witness to take the stand in the landmark trial, which has entered its seventh week, since Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella’s testimony earlier this month.

Prosecutors claimed Google was using the same practices that it had criticised when Microsoft used them in the early 2000s. DoJ lawyer Meagan Bellshaw on Monday cited a letter from Google sent as Microsoft was gearing up to launch a new version of its Internet Explorer browser in the 2000s. Google threatened legal action because Microsoft’s search engine would become the default in the new browser, and users would not be prompted to make a choice.

Under other agreements to make Google’s search engine the default in which it shares revenue from those queries, Google prohibits its partners from prompting users to select their own default search engine.

«

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What’s in a domain name: The meaning of URL suffixes • Rest of World

Amy Thorpe:

»

Take Anguilla, for instance. A British territory in the Caribbean, there are fewer than 20,000 people on the tiny island. It doesn’t seem like the sort of place that would benefit from the artificial intelligence wave sweeping the tech world — except Anguilla’s country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is .ai, an irresistible address for AI startups.

“I knew way back that [.ai] could end up being used for artificial intelligence, that it could be valuable someday. But it was a question of when, right?” Vincent Cate, president at DataHaven.Net Ltd, which handles sales of the .ai domain for the Anguillan government, told Rest of World. “It really, really took off November [30, 2022], when ChatGPT came out. The sales have gone up a lot since then.”

The rewards from selling web addresses are considerable: Cate estimates the revenue generated by Anguilla’s .ai domain — around $3m per month — currently accounts for around a third of the government’s monthly budget. Following a deal with GoDaddy in 2022, some reports said Tuvalu could make $10m per year from the .tv domain — one-sixth of its GDP. That revenue has allowed Tuvalu to pave its roads, expand electricity access for its residents, and even pay its first annual United Nations membership in 2000.

Landing the rights to .tv and .ai has proved a gold mine for Tuvalu and Anguilla — but how did they get these specific addresses to begin with?

«

The answer is: historical accident. But it’s a worthwhile read.
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X says it is worth $19bn, down from $44bn last year • The New York Times

Ryan Mac:

»

X, the company formerly known as Twitter, handed out stock grants to employees on Monday that showed it was worth about $19bn, down about 55% from the $44bn that Elon Musk paid to buy the firm a year ago, according to internal documents seen by The New York Times.

Mr. Musk paid $54.20 a share to buy Twitter just over a year ago. The tech billionaire has since said he overpaid for the social network. In March, he wrote in an email to workers that he believed the company was worth $20bn, calling it “an inverse start-up.”

In the paperwork for the new stock grants, X said the equity would be offered at $45 a share in the form of restricted stock units, which employees can earn over time. Employees will still be paid in cash in the amount of $54.20 for any outstanding shares that were granted to them under previous management, the company said.

It’s unclear why the share price has not dropped by the same percentage as the company’s valuation, though X could have altered the amount of shares outstanding. Fortune earlier reported on the valuation. A spokesman for X did not return a request for comment.

In his year of owning Twitter, Mr. Musk has overhauled the company and the social media platform. More than 80% of its 7,500 employees have either quit or been laid off. He has changed the service’s verification process, as well as content-moderation rules. Advertising, the company’s main source of revenue, was down in the United States by almost 60% this summer. Mr. Musk also loaded the company with billions of dollars in debt to help pay for the acquisition.

In November, he famously made a joke about spending to buy a social media company, asking, “How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one.”

«

They laughed when he said he’d get into comedy. They’re not laughing now. Anyway, for those shares to vest, Twitter would have to be worth over $36.5bn, or nearly double what it is now. There’s also a good thread on, er, Threads by Zoe Schiffer about other things in the document.
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Reddit is killing blockchain-based Community Points • TechCrunch

Morgan Sung:

»

Reddit is winding down Community Points — the blockchain-based “internet points” program designed to reward creators and developers — in favor of prioritizing rewards programs that are less difficult to scale.

“Though we saw some future opportunities for Community Points, the resourcing needed was unfortunately too high to justify,” Reddit’s director of consumer and product communications Tim Rathschmidt told TechCrunch. “The regulatory environment has since added to that effort. Though the moderators and communities that supported Community Points have been incredible partners — as it’s evolved, the product is no longer set up to scale.”

«

Who would have guessed that a blockchain-based system wouldn’t scale, eh.
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Inside a $30m cash-for-Bitcoin laundering ring in the heart of New York • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

For years, a gang operating in New York allegedly offered a cash-for-Bitcoin service that generated at least $30 million, with men standing on street corners with plastic shopping bags full of money, drive-by pickups, and hundreds of thousands of dollars laid out on tables, according to court records.
 
The records provide rare insight into an often unseen part of the criminal underworld: how hackers and drug traffickers convert their Bitcoin into cash outside of the online Bitcoin exchanges that ordinary people use. Rather than turning to sites like Coinbase, which often collaborate with and provide records to law enforcement if required, some criminals use underground, IRL Bitcoin exchanges like this gang which are allegedly criminal entities in their own right.

In a long investigation by the FBI involving a confidential source and undercover agents, one member of the crew said “that at least some of his clients made money by selling drugs, that his wealthiest clients were hackers, and that he had made approximately $30 million over the prior three years through the exchange of cash for virtual currency,” the court records read.

The investigation started in around April 2021 when the FBI identified a vendor on multiple dark web marketplaces who offered a service to ship cash via the US Postal Service in exchange for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. Fast forward to this February, and law enforcement arrested an individual who had been mailing packages of cash from a post office in Westchester County, New York, on behalf of the gang, the court records say. This person became a confidential source, known as CS-1 in the documents, with the hope of consideration of their cooperation come the time of sentencing.

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The story includes photos from the court records, which show that yup, it’s like The Wire, but with money instead of drugs.
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Meta will charge up to €12.99 for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram in Europe • The New York Times

Adam Satariano and Christine Hauser:

»

To protect people’s privacy, the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the EU, effectively barred Meta in July from combining data collected about users across its platforms — including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — as well as from outside websites and apps, unless it received explicit consent from users. That came after a January decision by EU regulators to fine Meta 390 million euros for forcing users to accept personalized ads as a condition of using Facebook.

In its July decision, the European Court of Justice indicated that offering a subscription service in Europe may be a way to comply with the judgment, Meta said. A subscription can allow users to access the platforms without having their personal data used to sell ads.

“We respect the spirit and purpose of these evolving European regulations, and are committed to complying with them,” the company said in a statement announcing the new paid tier on its website.

Meta added that while it was committed to keeping people’s information private and secure, it believed in an “ad-supported internet” that provides people with personalized products and services, while also allowing small businesses to reach potential customers.

Max Schrems, a privacy activist in Austria whose legal challenges targeting Meta helped lead to the product changes, said the subscription offerings do not comply with the EU data privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation. He vowed to challenge it in court.

“If we move to a pay-for-your-rights system, it will depend on how deep your pockets are if you have a right to privacy,” Mr. Schrems said. “We are very skeptical if this is compliant with the law.”

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I wrote about this on the Social Warming Substack a couple of weeks ago: the price Meta is asking is miles more than it actually makes from you via ads. (Plus Meta’s financials contain terrible chart crime.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What makes some runners faster than all the rest, and can we calculate how the factors interact? CC-licensed photo by Helgi Halldórsson 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. Faster, pussycat! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Analysis: global CO2 emissions could peak as soon as this year, IEA data reveals • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

»

Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy use and industry could peak as soon as this year, according to Carbon Brief analysis of figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2023 says it now expects CO2 emissions to peak “in the mid-2020s” and an accompanying press release says this will happen “by 2025”.

Yet the IEA’s own data shows the peak in global CO2 coming as early as this year, partly due to what the outlook describes as the “legacy” of the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Other highlights from Carbon Brief’s in-depth examination of the outlook include:

• Global fossil fuel use peaking in 2025, two years earlier than expected last year
• For the first time, coal, oil and gas each peaking before 2030 under current policies
• Fossil fuel peaks being driven by the “unstoppable” growth of low-carbon technologies
• The IEA boosting its outlook for global solar capacity in 2050 by 69% since last year
• The IEA expecting 20% more electric vehicles on the road in 2030 than it did last year
• A key focus on slowing economic growth and faster low-carbon uptake in China, where fossil fuel demand is now expected to peak in 2024.

Yet climate policies remain far from sufficient to limit warming to 1.5C, the IEA warns.

«

Good news! Apart from the last bit. Crouching ovation?
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People are speaking with ChatGPT for hours, bringing 2013’s Her closer to reality • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

Last week, we related a story in which AI researcher Simon Willison spent a long time talking to ChatGPT verbally. “I had an hourlong conversation while walking my dog the other day,” he told Ars for that report. “At one point, I thought I’d turned it off, and I saw a pelican, and I said to my dog, ‘Oh, wow, a pelican!’ And my AirPod went, ‘A pelican, huh? That’s so exciting for you! What’s it doing?’ I’ve never felt so deeply like I’m living out the first ten minutes of some dystopian sci-fi movie.”

When we asked Willison if he had seen Her, he replied, “I actually watched that movie for the first time the other day because people kept talking about that,” Willison said. “And yeah, the AirPod plus ChatGPT voice mode thing really is straight out of that movie.”

It turns out that Willison’s experience is far from unique. Others have been spending hours talking to ChatGPT using its voice recognition and voice synthesis features, sometimes through car connections. The realistic nature of the voice interaction feels largely effortless, but it’s not flawless. Sometimes, it has trouble in noisy environments, and there can be a pause between statements. But the way the ChatGPT voices simulate vocal ticks and noises feels very human. “I’ve been using the voice function since yesterday and noticed that it makes breathing sounds when it speaks,” said one Reddit user. “It takes a deep breath before starting a sentence. And today, actually a minute ago, it coughed between words while answering my questions.”

ChatGPT is also apparently useful as a brainstorming partner. Speaking things out with other people has long been recognized as a helpful way to re-frame ideas in your mind, and ChatGPT can serve a similar role when other humans aren’t around.

On Sunday, an X user named “stoop kid” posted advice for having a creative development session with ChatGPT on the go. After prompting about helping with world-building and plotlines, he wrote, “turn on speaking mode, put in headphones, and go for a walk.” In a reply, he described going on a one hour walk in which he “fully thought out an idea for a novel” with the help of ChatGPT. “It flowed out so naturally from the questioning, and walking and talking is sooooo easy.”

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Maybe we should all rewatch Her, because it seems to be coming true at quite a rate.
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Why Apple’s weather app isn’t accurate • Vox

Alex Abad-Santos:

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My needs are simple: I want to know if it’s going to rain, how much it’s going to rain, when the rain will start and when it’ll stop. Ideally, I would like to not have to go outside to check if it’s raining, because why else would I have a powerful computer in my hand if it couldn’t tell me things that were happening around me?

“The Apple weather app is not good for specifics,” says John Homenuk, the meteorologist behind NY Metro Weather. Homenuk has gained a loyal New York City following for his accurate and jaunty daily weather forecasts. “And, unfortunately, specifics is what we need if we’re planning our life. ‘Do I need a jacket tonight? Is it gonna rain when I go to sit on the rooftop later?’ It struggles with that type of stuff.”

Homenuk explained to me that Apple’s weather app, and weather apps in general, work by using algorithms to interpret data — weather models, location, current observations — culled from various sources. Other experts I spoke to said apps don’t disclose what data they’re using nor how frequently they source the data, which can lead to imprecise readings.

These algorithms also have limits. In weather forecasting, these limits show up because those equations are based on models that meteorologists understand to be imperfect.

“There’s one big model that is used not only in apps, but weather data around the United States. It’s called the GFS, the Global Forecast System,” Homenuk said, adding that the GFS tends to err on the side of speed, sometimes projecting storms going out to sea and out of the area faster than anticipated. Meteorologists who understand the GFS know its faults, and use those faults and what the GFS is predicting to provide a more accurate forecast.

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They cracked the code to a locked USB drive worth $235m in bitcoin. Then it got weird • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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IronKeys are designed to permanently erase their contents if someone tries just 10 incorrect password guesses. But Unciphered’s hackers had developed a secret IronKey password-cracking technique—one that they’ve still declined to fully describe to me or anyone else outside their company—that gave them essentially infinite tries. My USB stick had reached Unciphered’s lab on Tuesday, and I was somewhat surprised to see my three-word passphrase texted back to me the very next morning. With the help of a high-performance computer, Smith told me, the process had taken only 200 trillion tries.

Smith’s demonstration was not merely a hacker party trick. He and Unciphered’s team have spent close to eight months developing a capability to crack this specific, decade-old model of IronKey for a very particular reason: They believe that in a vault in a Swiss bank 5,000 miles to the east of their Seattle lab, an IronKey that’s just as vulnerable to this cracking technique holds the keys to 7,002 bitcoins, worth close to $235 million at current exchange rates.

For years, Unciphered’s hackers and many others in the crypto community have followed the story of a Swiss crypto entrepreneur living in San Francisco named Stefan Thomas, who owns this 2011-era IronKey, and who has lost the password to unlock it and access the nine-figure fortune it contains. Thomas has said in interviews that he’s already tried eight incorrect guesses, leaving only two more tries before the IronKey erases the keys stored on it and he loses access to his bitcoins forever.

Now, after months of work, Unciphered’s hackers believe they can open Thomas’ locked treasure chest, and they’re ready to use their secret cracking technique to do it. “We were hesitant to reach out to him until we had a full, provable, reliable attack,” says Smith, who asked WIRED not to reveal his real name due to the sensitivities of working with secret hacking techniques and very large sums of cryptocurrency. “Now we’re in that place.”

The only problem: Thomas doesn’t seem to want their help.

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Thomas has other people helping him. You wouldn’t know them, they go to a different cryptography school.
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The race to destroy PFAS, the forever chemicals • MIT Technology Review

John Wiegand:

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PFAS stands for “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances,” a family of upwards of 15,000 or more human-made and incredibly durable chemical compounds that have been used in countless industrial and consumer applications for decades. Firefighting foams, waterproof hiking boots, raincoats, nonstick frying pans, dental floss, lipstick, and even the ink used to label packaging—all can contain PFAS. The compounds are ubiquitous in drinking water and soil, even migrating to Arctic sea ice. PFAS are called forever chemicals because once present in the environment, they do not degrade or break down. They accumulate, are transferred throughout the watershed, and ultimately persist. 

The quest to reduce the amount of PFAS in the environment is what led me to an industrial park in a southern suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The jar of PFAS concentrate in my hand is part of a demonstration arranged by my hosts, Revive Environmental, during a tour of the company’s PFAS destruction site, one of the first in the country to operate commercially and at scale. A few yards in front of me sits the company’s PFAS “Annihilator” in a white shipping container. 

The Annihilator represents just one of several technologies now vying to break down and destroy PFAS. These span the gamut from established processes like electrochemical oxidation and supercritical water oxidation to emerging techniques relying on ultraviolet light, plasma, ultrasound, or catalyst-driven thermal processes. Some are deployed in field tests. Other companies are actively running pilot programs, many with various divisions of the US Department of Defense and other government agencies. And many other technologies are still undergoing laboratory research.

There’s good reason for this. Not only are PFAS everywhere around us; they’re also in us. Humans can’t break down PFAS, and our bodies struggle to clear them from our systems. Studies suggest they’re in my blood and yours—the majority of Americans’, in fact—and they have been linked to increased risks of kidney and testicular cancer, decreased infant birthweights, and high blood pressure. And that’s only what we know about now: researchers continue to grapple with the full impacts of PFAS on human and environmental health.

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Norway EV sales data • Robbie Andrew

Andrew compiles and graphs data from Norway about EV sales. The latest shows that ICE (petrol and diesel) vehicles can been just 4% of sales so far in 2023. A perhaps more interesting statistic is that “the average EV is driven further each year than the average car with an internal combustion engine.”

In fact his graph shows that distance travelled by ICE passenger cars in Norway peaked in 2014; total distance has remained about the same, but more than a third is now covered by electrics and hybrids.

It’s a fascinating page, worth musing over, and wondering if someone would be able to do anything comparable for the UK and/or other countries.
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Self-checkout is a failed experiment • The Atlantic

Amanda Mull:

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All is not rosy in the world of self-checkout, and some companies seem to realize it. Walmart has removed the kiosks entirely from a handful of stores, and is redesigning others to involve more employee help. Costco is stationing more staffers in its self-checkout areas. ShopRite is adding cashiers back into stores where it had trialed a self-checkout-only model, citing customer backlash. None of this is an indication that self-checkout is over, exactly. But several decades in, the kiosks as Americans have long known them are beginning to look like a failure.

Before self-checkout’s grand promise could be sold to the general public, it had to be sold to retailers. Third-party firms introduced the kiosks starting in the 1980s, but they didn’t take off at first. In 2001, when the machines were finally winning over major retailers in masse, K-Mart was frank about its motivations for adopting them: Kiosks would cut wait times and allow the company to hire fewer clerks. Self-checkout is expensive to install—the average four-kiosk setup runs around $125,000, and large stores can have 10 or more kiosks apiece. But write one big check up front, the logic goes, and that investment eventually pays off. Human employees get sick, ask for raises, want things. Computerized kiosks always show up for work, and customers do the job of cashiers for free.

Except, as the journalist Nathaniel Meyersohn wrote for CNN last year , most of this theory hasn’t exactly panned out. The widespread introduction of self-checkout kiosks did enable shoestring staffing inside many stores, but it created plenty of other expenses too. Self-checkout machines might always be at work, but, on any given day, lots of them aren’t actually working. The technology tends to be buggy and unreliable, and the machines’ maintenance requires a lot of expensive IT workers.

«

This is pretty amazing to me, in the UK. Self-checkout (and “unexpected item in bagging area”) is an absolute staple of every* large supermarket and many lesser convenience stores – partly because it works, and also because people aren’t paying with cash, but with cards. When I went to America I was consistently amazed by the presence of people who put your shopping into bags at the checkout, which strikes me as possibly the most unproductive job it’s possible to have: literally moving items a few centimetres into containers, which almost any customer can do.

* except where petty crime is a serious problem, but then you have bigger problems than self-checkout not working.
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One year on, Twitter continues to burn a hole through bank balance sheets • WSJ

Alexander Saeedy and Cara Lombardo:

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Seven banks including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Barclays lent Musk around $13bn to buy Twitter a year ago this coming Friday. Under normal circumstances, they would have unloaded the debt to Wall Street investment firms soon thereafter. But investor appetite for Twitter, which Musk has since renamed X, has cooled since the billionaire took over, forcing the banks to hold the debt on their own balance sheets at a discounted value.

The banks currently expect to take a hit of at least 15%, or roughly $2bn, when they sell the debt, people familiar with the matter said. That would mean hundreds of millions in losses for those holding the largest pieces, which include Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays and MUFG. BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Mizuho were also involved.

After holding the debt for a year—an eternity in the corporate-finance world—the banks, which had hoped they could sell it by Labor Day, have recently begun preparations to try to unload at least some of it, the people said. 

First they must secure a rating from the likes of Moody’s and S&P, a quality seal investors such as mutual funds and loan managers typically require. If X receives a low credit rating, it would be hard for the banks to sell the debt to a broad investor base without taking an even bigger loss than what they are already anticipating. Bankers close to the deal say that Musk’s capricious management and a weakening advertising market could point to a junk-bond rating, a designation reserved for companies at higher risk of defaulting.

«

There’s also the story from the user (or perhaps management) side, told in charts, which all basically go to the right and down, which is not the direction usually desired.

One has to wonder if anyone is going to get fired at those banks. Equally, junk bonds attract high coupon rates, though that might just mean the same interest payments (so nothing changes for better or worse at Twitter) but a lower bond price.
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Why are you so slow? • Probably Overthinking It

Allen Downey:

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If you are a fan of the Atlanta Braves, a Major League Baseball team, or if you watch enough videos on the internet, you have probably seen one of the most popular forms of between-inning entertainment: a foot race between one of the fans and a spandex-suit-wearing mascot called the Freeze.

The route of the race is the dirt track that runs across the outfield, a distance of about 160 meters, which the Freeze runs in less than 20 seconds. To keep things interesting, the fan gets a head start of about 5 seconds. That might not seem like a lot, but if you watch one of these races, this lead seems insurmountable. However, when the Freeze starts running, you immediately see the difference between a pretty good runner and a very good runner. With few exceptions, the Freeze runs down the fan, overtakes them, and coasts to the finish line with seconds to spare.

But as fast as he is, the Freeze is not even a professional runner; he is a member of the Braves’ ground crew named Nigel Talton. In college, he ran 200 meters in 21.66 seconds, which is very good. But the 200 meter collegiate record is 20.1 seconds, set by Wallace Spearmon in 2005, and the current world record is 19.19 seconds, set by Usain Bolt in 2009.

[After showing a graph of how racers’ speeds tends towards a Gaussian distribution]: I have a theory, based on the following assumptions:

• First, everyone has a maximum speed they are capable of running, assuming that they train effectively
• Second, these speed limits can depend on many factors, including height and weight, fast- and slow-twitch muscle mass, cardiovascular conditioning, flexibility and elasticity, and probably more
• Finally, the way these factors interact tends to be multiplicative; that is, each person’s speed limit depends on the product of multiple factors.

Here’s why I think speed depends on a product rather than a sum of factors. If all of your factors are good, you are fast; if any of them are bad, you are slow. Mathematically, the operation that has this property is multiplication.

«

Multiplicativity is obvious once explained, but not before. The video in the post of the Freeze running people down is remarkable, and really shows how big the gap between “good” and “very good” is. And yet there’s a far bigger gap to “great”.
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How to catch iMessage impersonators with Contact Key Verification in iOS 17.2 • 9to5Mac

Michael Potuck:

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Apple has delivered the first iOS 17.2 beta and with it comes a brand new security feature for iMessage. Called Contact Key Verification (CKV), the capability gives users more certainty they’re messaging with the people they think they are.

When enabled, the opt-in Contact Key Verification gives automatic alerts if the iMessage key distribution services return device keys that have not been verified (e.g. if an unrecognized device has been added to an iMessage account).

And even more security is available by using CKV in person, on FaceTime, or via another secure method. You can read more on the details of how CKV works in our full coverage here.

Apple has not seen an attack like this – which would be quite advanced – but CKV arriving with iOS 17.2 means Apple is staying a step ahead of hackers and giving users more peace of mind.

Even though a very small percentage of iPhone users may need security of this level, the neat part is turning it on doesn’t reduce the functionality of your iPhone or iMessage – so it could end up being more widely used than something like Lockdown Mode.

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This seems like it would require a very advanced attack – someone who has your login details so they can just add a device to your account – but might work for those potentially being attacked by state actors.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

People who have “tuned out” of news are less likely to vote, new research has found. CC-licensed photo by Cory Doctorow on Flickr.

The Overspill is going on a break for a week. Next back on Monday October 30.

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

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s on the topic of LLMs and writing.

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

Google’s 21-year deal with Apple is the “heart” of monopoly case, judge says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Testimony introduced by the DOJ revealed that Apple was initially hesitant to set a default search engine, and at one point considered creating its own search engine, but only if an appealing revenue-sharing deal couldn’t be struck with Google. The DOJ argued that Apple’s deal with Google prevented one of its biggest rivals in the mobile phone industry from competing against Google in search.

Blocking a major rival from entering the market would seemingly easily be considered an anticompetitive effect of Google’s default contracts, and [the judge, Amit] Mehta has proclaimed that “the heart” of the DOJ’s case rests on whether Google’s 21-year partnership with Apple gave Google monopoly powers over search, Bloomberg reported.

Testimony from Google’s rivals that claimed that Google’s default contracts made it impossible to compete also bolstered the DOJ’s case.

…Raising its defense this week, Google called its first witness to help the search giant rebut the DOJ’s case.

The New York Times dubbed Pandu Nayak, a Google vice president of search, “the face” of Google’s defense, which is that it’s not Google’s access to more data that keeps Google leagues ahead of competitors in search, it’s “brilliant people, working tirelessly to improve its products.”

Nayak joined Google after seven years as a NASA research scientist working on artificial intelligence projects, The Times reported. The AI researcher-turned-Google-search-VP told Mehta that Google “really values” his skills, because at Google “clever software” is allegedly more critical to search innovation than massive quantities of data.

“Bigger is not necessarily better,” Nayak testified, explaining that Google has been improving its search quality by investing in developments in machine learning, deep learning, transformers, and large language models.

«

From the sidelines, the obvious question does seem to be “if Google’s so amazing, why pay anything at all to be the default? Why isn’t Apple paying you for the privilege?”
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Threads’ latest growth hack is showing posts on Facebook • TechCrunch

Ivan Mehta:

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While Meta is continuously introducing new features to Threads, the company is also deploying new tricks to ramp up engagement on the platform. In its latest move, the social media giant is showing posts from Threads on Facebook.

In the last 24 hours, multiple users noted that they have been seeing a new “For You on Threads” carousel on the Blue app.

Meta began to show a similar carousel to Instagram users in August. But the company hasn’t mentioned until now if the move has made any difference to Threads’ engagement.

We have asked Meta for a comment and will update the story if we hear back. [They never heard back – Overspill Ed.]

In the last 30 days, Threads has introduced a free edit button and the ability to easily switch between accounts, and is also prepping to launch a “Trending topics” feature. Last month, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Michel Protti, Meta’s chief privacy officer for product, said that the company is aiming to launch separate account deletion for Threads by December. Currently, you can only deactivate your Threads account.

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Makes perfect sense to me: you’ve got a colossal existing social network, and you want to tell people that you’ve got another one (without ads, for now!) that you’re trying to expand? And you can effectively advertise for free? Why wouldn’t you?
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Doctor pleads guilty in dark web murder-for-hire plot • United States Department of Justice

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James Wan, M.D., has pleaded guilty to paying a hitman he found on the dark web to murder his girlfriend.

“Wan used the dark web to conceal his deadly plan,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan. “Fortunately, his plot was discovered before anyone was killed or injured.”

“Despite his cowardly concealment on the dark web, Wan’s cold hearted murderous plot was averted due to the exceptional work of our team. He will now face the full consequences of the criminal justice system,” said Keri Farley, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta. “This case shows that the FBI will not tolerate heinous acts of violence and will go to great lengths to protect our citizens.” 

According to U.S. Attorney Buchanan, the charges and other information presented in court: On April 18, 2022, while in the Northern District of Georgia, Wan accessed a dark web marketplace from his cellular telephone and submitted an order to have a hitman murder his girlfriend. The order included the victim’s name, address, Facebook account, license plate, and car description. In the order, Wan stated: “Can take wallet phone and car. Shoot and go. Or take car.” Wan then electronically transferred a 50% downpayment of approximately $8,000 worth of Bitcoin to the dark web marketplace.

Two days later, Wan messaged the marketplace’s administrator, stating that the transferred Bitcoin did not show up in his escrow account on the site. The next day, the marketplace administrator asked Wan for the Bitcoin address to which Wan had sent the payment. In response, Wan identified the Bitcoin wallet address and provided a screenshot of the transaction. When the administrator said that the address Wan provided was not in their system, Wan replied, “Damn. I guess I lost $8k. I’m sending $8k to escrow now.” Wan then electronically transferred an additional Bitcoin payment worth approximately $8,000 to the marketplace.

«

First, what sort of psychopath are you to want your girlfriend murdered? Second, at least one of such people is a qualified doctor? (Then again, if you want to feel bad about the American medical profession, read Medpage Today’s weekly roundup.)

When the Coen brothers made Fargo, they called it a true tale (it isn’t), but this is absolutely a modern Fargo, crypto and all. (Via Matt Levine’s Bloomberg newsletter.)
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The secret life of Jimmy Zhong, who stole – and lost – more than $3bn in bitcoin • CNBC

Eamon Javers and Paige Tortorelli:

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Athens, Georgia, is home to the University of Georgia, and the police there are used to college town-type crimes: break-ins, bar fights and assorted rowdiness. That kind of thing.

But the 911 call that came in on the night of March 13, 2019, was unlike anything the Athens-Clarke County Police Department had ever encountered.

On the phone was 28-year-old Jimmy Zhong, a local party boy and Georgia alum who frequented Athens’ drinking establishments. He wasn’t like the other town rowdies – Zhong was also a computer expert who had an unusually robust digital home surveillance system.

Now, he was calling to report a crime: hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto currency that he said had been stolen from his home. Thinking of all that lost money, Zhong was distressed.

“I’m having a panic attack,” Zhong told the dispatcher, according to a recording obtained by CNBC.

Zhong turned down the dispatcher’s offer of an ambulance, and began trying to explain the situation. “I’m an investor in bitcoin, which is like an online thing,” he said.

What happened next would bring an end to a nearly decade long manhunt and solve one of the biggest crimes of the crypto era. And it also would lead to the largest seizure of cryptocurrency from an individual in the history of the Department of Justice.

Zhong’s emergency call that winter evening sent investigators down a long digital trail that led back to the earliest days of bitcoin and revealed a dark truth about the universe of hackers and coders responsible for the creation of cryptocurrencies. It’s a world where heroes and villains traded places and could even be the same people.

None of it would go at all the way Zhong wanted.

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Not ashamed to say I got this from Matt Levine too.
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The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, as edited/redacted by Ben Grosser • Bengrosser

It’s a PDF, so you’ll have to read it. It won’t take you as long as it might have done in the original. Grosser describes himself as an “artist [who] focusses on the cultural, social and political effects of software.” (I spoke to him for parts of Social Warming.)

I guarantee you that an AI would not be able to create this content.
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New York attorney general hits Gemini, Genesis, and Digital Currency Group with lawsuit for defrauding investors of more than $1bn • Fortune Crypto

Leo Schwartz:

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New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing the Winklevoss twin–led exchange Gemini along with the crypto lending firm Genesis and its parent company, Digital Currency Group. The complaint, filed Thursday, alleges that the crypto firms defrauded more than 230,000 investors, including at least 29,000 New Yorkers, of more than $1bn.

Gemini and Genesis have been locked in a cycle of lawsuits over an investment product called Gemini Earn, with litigation also levied by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The accusations from New York’s attorney general are just the latest in a series of legal woes for the crypto empires belonging to the Winklevoss twins and DCG head Barry Silbert.

“These cryptocurrency companies lied to investors and tried to hide more than a billion dollars in losses, and it was middle-class investors who suffered as a result,” James said in a statement shared with Fortune. “This fraud is yet another example of bad actors causing harm throughout the under-regulated cryptocurrency industry.”

…As the lawsuit details, Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda was at one time the borrower of nearly 60% of all outstanding loans from Genesis to outside parties. Bankman-Fried is currently in the middle of a criminal trial at a federal court in New York related to the collapse of FTX and Alameda.

While Gemini revised its estimate of Genesis’s credit rating from investment grade to junk in February 2022, it did not publicly reveal the update to investors, the lawsuit alleges. In July 2022, Gemini’s board of managers discussed ending Gemini Earn because of risks associated with Genesis, with some of Gemini’s risk personnel allegedly withdrawing their own investments from the program.

As crypto prices soared in 2021 and early 2022, Gemini Earn drew over 230,000 investors, with enough hailing from New York to catch the attorney general’s attention. The lawsuit details one victim, a retired 73-year-old grandmother who invested her life savings of $199,000 in Gemini Earn, allegedly spurred by its “marketing statements.”

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I don’t know how to feel about someone who reached the age of 73 and had $199,000 saved up who would believe the hype around crypto. By that time haven’t you seen enough naked emperors?
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FBI: thousands of remote IT workers sent wages to North Korea • AP News

Jim Salter:

»

Thousands of information technology workers contracting with US companies have for years secretly sent millions of dollars of their wages to North Korea for use in its ballistic missile program, FBI and Department of Justice officials said.

The Justice Department said Wednesday that IT workers dispatched and contracted by North Korea to work remotely with companies in St. Louis and elsewhere in the U.S. have been using false identities to get the jobs. The money they earned was funneled to the North Korean weapons program, FBI leaders said at a news conference in St. Louis.

Federal authorities announced the seizure of $1.5m and 17 domain names as part of the investigation, which is ongoing.

Jay Greenberg, special agent in charge of the St. Louis FBI office, said any company that hired freelance IT workers “more than likely” hired someone participating in the scheme.

…Officials didn’t name the companies that unknowingly hired North Korean workers, or say when the practice began.

Court documents allege that the government of North Korea dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the US and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees.

The IT workers generated millions of dollars a year in their wages to benefit North Korea’s weapons programs. In some instances, the North Korean workers also infiltrated computer networks and stole information from the companies that hired them, the Justice Department said.

…Greenberg said the workers used various techniques to make it look like they were working in the US, including paying Americans to use their home Wi-Fi connections.

«

I’m going to guess cryptocurrency is involved somewhere? That last detail, about the home Wi-Fi, is pretty remarkable, though. How are people recruited for that? Do they do so knowingly, or are they fooled into it somehow?
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Default “No” to AI training on your stories • The Medium Blog

Tony Stubblebine is the CEO at Medium:

»

To give a blunt summary of the status quo: AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam Internet readers.

In response, we’ve already made clear that Medium is a home for human writing. Then, we built a human-led recommendation system to protect our readers from purely AI-generated text (human curators spot it easily).

Now, we’re adding one more dimension to our response. Medium is changing our policy on AI training. The default answer is now: No.

We are doing what we can to block AI companies from training on stories that you publish on Medium and we won’t change that stance until AI companies can address this issue of fairness. If you are such an AI company, and we aren’t already talking, contact us.

This is such a deep issue. That’s why I want to explain it. In particular, our end game is to get concessions in terms of credit, compensation, and consent from AI companies on behalf of Medium writers. But the question of how much of each is unclear, so it’s crucial that we hear from some of our writers. When we surveyed our authors, 92.2% of you said that you want us to take active measures against AI companies until these issues of fairness can be sorted out.

«

Medium is also offering two questions: what if you get a 10% boost on your earnings from Medium if you opt in to letting AI spider your work? And: would you let a search engine be trained on your writing in order to generate AI-summarised answers that credit you – and would your answer be the same if that halved the traffic from the search engine?

I’ve written stuff on Medium and get a coffee’s worth of money from it each month, but don’t recall seeing the survey. Anyway, my answers would be 1) absolutely! 2) trickier, but probably yes on the basis that reputation has value, and someone else will take the opportunity if you don’t, and getting your name in lights increases the chance someone will seek out the rest of your writing.

Weirdly, this was published on September 28, but I’ve only just received the email from Medium pointing to it.
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People experiencing news fatigue are less likely to be voters • The Conversation

Paul Whiteley is a professor at the University of Essex’s department of government:

»

The percentage of survey respondents who said that they were “extremely” or “very” interested in news in Britain fell from 70% in 2015 to 43% in 2023. A similar problem has occurred in the US, although it is not as bad as Britain. In the US 67% of respondents were “extremely” or “very” interested in the news in 2015, but this had fallen to 49% by 2023. Both represent huge changes in media consumption of news over this eight-year period.

As a result, large numbers of people are simply disassociating themselves from news about politics and current affairs. They have become disconnected citizens.

…There is a strong relationship between voting turnout and media usage. Only 49% of people who spent no time at all on news gathering turned out to vote while 33% of them did not vote. In fairness, 19% of this group were not eligible to vote, since the survey picked up people who are not on the electoral register. Even so, if we look at the group who spent one to two hours looking for news about politics, 91% of them voted and only 6% failed to do so. It is clear that media usage and participating in elections are closely related.

Further analysis shows that a similar pattern is evident in relation to other forms of democratic participation. It is people who are engaging with the news that are turning up to exercise their right to protest, for example.

Media malaise damages political participation in general and given the massive changes highlighted in the Reuter’s report it could indicate that a lower turnout should be expected in the next general election. If we examine all 21 general elections in Britain since 1945, there is a strong correlation between turnout and the Conservative vote. The more people vote, the better the Conservative party does in the election.

«

That last sentence surprised me. I thought the Conservatives (in the UK) would have a bedrock of older voters, who would get swamped by younger left-leaning voters who are less likely to vote, so higher turnout would favour Labour.
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Airlines hit out over Dutch plan to phase out EU fossil fuel subsidies • FT

Alice Hancock and Philip Georgiadis:

»

Airline bosses have criticised a Dutch plan for an EU-wide phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies, saying such a move will be fanciful until there are affordable greener travel alternatives.

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary and Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr were among European airline executives who said at a briefing last week that train fares remained too expensive to replace air travel, and policymakers’ plans to make aviation more sustainable by cutting support would backfire.

The Dutch government announced last month that it spent up to €46.4bn in 2023 supporting the use of fossil fuels, either through direct subsidies or tax schemes that indirectly led to more polluting energies being used. More than €3.6bn went to airlines, as fuel supplied for use in aviation is currently fully exempt from taxation in the EU.

Rob Jetten, the Dutch climate minister, told the Financial Times that reforming the tax system and cutting subsidies was “crucial” to delivering the clean transition, and that governments should “redesign the rules of the market”.

He added, however, that fossil fuel subsidies, particularly ones that resulted from international agreements such as for airlines and shipping, “need to be tackled from the EU level”.

But O’Leary, the Ryanair boss, said: “Until you have some affordable alternative that you can offer to voters and to consumers across Europe, it’s all just pie in the sky.”

…Fuel is one of the single biggest expenses for airlines, and accounts for about 25% of their operating costs. Aviation is also among the toughest sectors to decarbonise, with alternatives to jet fuels still at an embryonic stage.

«

What we don’t know – and the story doesn’t say – is what proportion of airlines’ fuel bills that €3.6bn subsidy is. But it seems like an absolutely obvious move, if the EU is serious about climate change, to stop subsidising airlines. I’m sure Mr O’Leary would let us know if train operators were getting help with their energy bills. Yet he thinks the subsidies he gets are part of the natural order of things.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The idea that people will happily return to the office post-pandemic isn’t borne out by the data, an economist points out. CC-licensed photo by Mark Hillary 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. Actually, it is an email rather than a meeting. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Rapper Pras’ lawyer used AI to defend him in criminal case. It did not go well • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

After being convicted of federal crimes related to a foreign influence campaign, rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel says he should get a new trial because his lawyer “used an experimental AI program to write his closing argument.” In a motion for a new trial filed Monday, the Fugees rapper’s new lawyers say Michel’s previous representation used “an experimental AI program in which they had a financial stake to write the closing argument, resulting in a frivolous and ineffectual closing argument.”

Michel was represented at trial by defense counsel David Kenner, who is accused of failing to provide a cogent defense and misattributing two songs to the Fugees. The allegations about Kenner’s use of AI are reminiscent of a previous incident in which a lawyer admitted using ChatGPT to help write court filings that cited six nonexistent cases invented by the artificial intelligence tool.

According to the motion for a new trial, “Kenner failed to familiarize himself with the charged statutes, causing him to overlook critical weaknesses in the Government’s case,” and he “did not understand the facts or allegations.”

Kenner “outsourced trial preparations to inexperienced contract attorneys who worked for an e-discovery vendor, Business Intelligence Associates, Inc. (BIA),” the motion said. His trial team included BIA co-founder Alon Israely, “a non-practicing attorney with no white collar or even litigation experience.” The motion said that Kenner generated his closing argument “using a proprietary prototype AI program in which he and Alon Israely appear to have had an undisclosed financial stake.”

“Far from hiding this fact, Kenner boasted about it after Michel was convicted, stating; ‘The system turned hours or days of legal work into seconds,'” the motion said.

«

It is amazing that we now have two cases of American lawyers thinking that a chatbot is better at researching and writing legal topics than humans who have trained for years.
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Who’s responsible for the Gaza hospital blast? Here’s why it’s hard to know what’s real • WIRED

David Gilbert:

»

For experts in the OSINT [open source intelligence] community who have spent years working on incidents just like this, the confusion and misinformation were frustrating. Figuring out what happened takes time, and the deluge of misinformation only made that work more difficult.

“It’s because we are trying to track a rocket, at night, via a couple of livestreams, a security camera, and a phone camera,” an OSINT researcher, who posts anonymously on social media using the handle OSINTtechnical, tells WIRED. “Oh, and there are bad actors purposely trying to muddy the waters. I would say we still have an acceptable number of resources to see into Gaza, but it takes some time to parse everything to a complete degree.”

The researcher adds that their job was made infinitely more difficult by media outlets running with the claim that Israel was responsible. “That blows everything out of the water,” OSINTtechnical says.

[Bellingcat senior researcher Kolina] Koltai says she began trying to figure out what had happened within hours of the incident, before her colleagues in Europe took over today. Despite being among the first to begin investigating the incident, as of Wednesday afternoon Bellingcat had still not confirmed how the attack happened or who was responsible.

Similarly, the BBC Verify team published its analysis of the explosion based on the available information but has been unable to conclude what exactly happened. A number of videos captured with mobile phones and circulated on social media appear to show the moment of the explosion from different angles. A livestream operated by Al Jazeera shows two flashes, one further away from the camera and one much closer, which some claim shows the rocket launching, followed by the explosion. Footage captured this morning shows the hospital’s parking lot, and what appears to be a small impact crater. Footage shows damage to a number of cars, but only minor damage to the exterior of the hospital building.

«

Ironically despite everything, Twitter is still the place where if you’re judicious, you can find the best early information. In this case, a thread before 0800 on Wednesday by Nathan Ruser pretty comprehensively, but carefully, dismantled the idea that this was an Israeli airstrike. (Read the thread on a single page.)

The volume of misinformation is, indeed, colossal. But when you’re panning for gold, you don’t put everything in your sample jar.
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EPA finds small planes’ lead pollution threatens human health • The Washington Post

Timothy Puko and Lori Aratani:

»

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced it has determined that lead emitted from airplanes is a danger to public health, opening the door for the agency’s first limits on lead fuel in aviation.

The move puts the Biden administration in the middle of a brewing fight over how long airports — particularly smaller ones — can continue selling leaded gasoline, despite the health hazards from this powerful neurotoxin. More than 170,000 smaller planes, known as piston-engine aircraft, still use leaded gasoline, according to the EPA, and there is an ongoing dispute about how quickly this form of fuel can be phased out at thousands of airports nationwide.

The agency first proposed the move last year. It is a formal step known as an “endangerment finding,” and it now obligates the agency under the Clean Air Act to set new rules on what aircraft engines can emit.

“The science is clear: exposure to lead can cause irreversible and lifelong health effects in children,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement. “Aircraft that use leaded fuel are the dominant source of lead emissions in our air.”

Now that the EPA has made its determination, the Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday that it will move forward with rulemaking aimed at controlling or eliminating aviation lead emissions from piston-engine aircraft.

«

Gee, FAA, took you long enough. I linked to a Politico piece back in February that pointed out this absurd exception, which allows planes to “cropdust with a neurotoxin”, as the article put it. (A search reveals that the topic of lead poisoning comes up surprisingly often. Thanks Adrian M for the pointer.)
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Trust & Safety Tycoon

»

Trust & Safety Tycoon is a game exploring the difficult choices and tradeoffs involved in managing a trust and safety team.

Created in association with the Atlantic Council’s Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web.

Built by Copia Gaming and Leveraged Play. Written & developed by Mike Masnick, Randy Lubin, and Leigh Beadon with generous support from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Try our other game, Moderator Mayhem.

If you’re interested in creating and commissioning games that explore the intersection of tech and policy, please contact us at gaming@copia.is

«

Rather like SimCity, these games don’t have to be completely realistic to make a persuasive case that this takes a lot of juggling.
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X will begin charging new users $1 a year • Fortune

Kyle Robison:

»

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features including the ability to tweet, reply, and quote, according to a source familiar with the matter and later confirmed by the company.

The company will begin charging the fee on Tuesday for new users in New Zealand and the Philippines, marking one of the most significant changes to the social media platform since Elon Musk acquired the company nearly a year ago.

In a statement published shortly after Fortune reported the news of the $1 plan, X ‘s support account confirmed the details and described the move as a way to curb the prevalence of bots and spam on the platform, rather than a money-making endeavor. “This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform, and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver,” the company said.

The $1 annual charge is only for new users, and does not apply to existing users. It’s unclear if, or when, the payment plan will be expanded to users in other countries. The program is also different from X Premium, which offers extra features like “undo” and “edit” for posts for $8 a month.

«

The choice of the Philippines is telling (though is New Zealand really a hotbed of spammers?). This will lose money on the payment processing, and make Twitter a target for credit card hacking if anyone does actually sign up. I think the spammers/hackers will simply focus on old dormant accounts and try to crack their passwords (I already see this being done), or hacking more active ones.
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One year post-acquisition, X traffic and monthly active users are in decline, report claims • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Despite proclamations from X CEO Linda Yaccarino that usage of the social network was at an all-time high this summer, a new report is throwing cold water on those claims, saying that X usage has actually declined on all fronts, across both web and mobile. According to data from market intelligence firm Similarweb, X’s global website traffic was down 14% year-over-year in September, and US traffic was down by 19%. On mobile devices in the US, performance had also declined 17.8% year-over-year, based on monthly active users on iOS and Android.

Although the US accounts for roughly a quarter of X’s web traffic, other countries also saw declines in web traffic, including the UK (-11.6%), France (-13.4%), Germany (-17.9%) and Australia (-17.5%).

The report notes that September was not just a fluke, either, as declines in usage were visible in long-term trends as well. When comparing the first nine months of 2023 with the same period in 2022, Simiarweb found X’s website traffic was down 11.6% year-over-year in the US and down by 7% worldwide. Mobile app usage in the U.S. was also down by 12.8% during that same period of time.

«

Astonishing, I know. Other sources (on Threads) say that you can look at external data, such as DNS resolution, and also figure that Twitter’s traffic has dropped.
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The return-to-office movement is dead • The New York Times

Nicholas Bloom is a professor of economics at Stanford University:

»

Working from home is here to stay. I can prove it with data — lots and lots of data showing that returning to the office (R.T.O.) is D.O.A.

A telling data point is the number tracking how many Americans swiped and tapped electronic cards to gain entry into their offices. This month, occupancy rates were at 50% of February 2020 levels. That is shocking — only half as many days are spent in the office compared with prepandemic times.

That number has flatlined not only in office buildings in San Francisco and New York but also in workplaces in Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; Dallas; Denver; and Philadelphia. Blue and red, inland and coastal, Northern and Southern workers who might have disagreed on pandemic-related behaviours like mask wearing and vaccine boosters have quietly united behind work-from-home habits throughout 2023.

Work-from-home levels aren’t as high as they were during the pandemic’s first peak in early 2020, when 62% of full-day paid work happened at home. People did begin filtering back to the office as the pandemic waned. But they did so only to a point: By December 2022, 29% of workdays were happening from home. There was a slight dip after the winter holidays to 27% in January 2023. But as of July, we’re back up at 31%.

…Hybrid work arrangements have killed the return-to-office hype. Employees equate a mix of working in the office and working from home to an 8% raise. They don’t have to deal with the daily hassle and costs of a commute. In fact, the process of getting to work is more despised by employees than the need to actually work.

«

I was in London’s legal district the other day and was surprised by the number of “To Let” signs on offices.
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Apple developing ‘pad-like device’ that can update iPhone firmware while still sealed in the box • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple has a fix for this problem. The company has reportedly “developed a proprietary pad-like device” that can turn on and update an iPhone while it’s still in the box:

»

Apple is planning a new system for its retail stores that will update the software on iPhones prior to sale. The company has developed a proprietary pad-like device that the store can place boxes of iPhones on top of. That system can then wirelessly turn on the iPhone, update its software and then power it back down — all without the phone’s packaging ever being opened. The company aims to begin rolling this out to its stores before the end of the year.

«

As it stands now, iPhones are shipped from the factory with whatever build of iOS was available at that time. This means millions of iPhones out there ship with iOS versions that are multiple updates old by the time that phone arrives to the customer.

«

There was a discussion about this on the latest Accidental Tech Podcast, where they were dubious about this, on the basis that even if the pad could wake the iPhone up, how would you be sure it was sufficiently charged to be able to install the software update? Trying to install on a low-power device could leave it bricked. However, the new phones do ship with the back near the top, theoretically in range of a powerful MagSafe/Qi charging connector, which would then (???) let it connect to an update server.

Though also see the next link…
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I’m charging my toothbrush with wireless power over distance—and it’s a trip • WIRED

Simon Hill:

»

There are several good reasons why wireless power over distance has yet to take off, and why, even with proven examples, enough obstacles remain to encourage healthy skepticism. To simplify massively and pick just two: It is inefficient (much of the power transmitted is lost), and only relatively small amounts of energy are realistic with current limitations and safety in mind. Wi-Charge may be ahead of the competition on these points, but it is still not as efficient, as capable, nor as safe as a wired connection.

You can argue that inductive coupling is common, and we accept inefficiency where it brings convenience. The wireless chargers we use with our phones are not as efficient as cables, for example, and we connect to Wi-Fi rather than use Ethernet. But it’s hard to paint that as a good thing given the current climate crisis. If our power came from renewables, it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but we are not there yet. (For the record, I am lucky enough to have solar panels, and my energy pro, Octopus, delivers 100% renewable electricity, but I’m in the minority.)

There are scenarios where this technology can be an eco-friendly alternative. One of the few places wireless power over distance is already working is for electronic price tags (e-ink that shows pricing) in retail stores. It is far more environmentally friendly than disposable lithium coin batteries. Ditching the batteries in small devices could also reduce lithium demand and problematic e-waste. Even cables require mined resources and have an energy production cost.

«

Safety is already dealt with, apparently. Wonder if anyone is doing the cost comparison of “energy saved by not mining a cable” with “energy lost over lifetime of wireless charging”. This, by the way, could be how Apple is charging those in-store iPhones while waking them up to install new OS versions.
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Free solar? Alex Honnold’s other mission • FT

Natalie Berry (who is a pretty good climber herself):

»

Since the Oscar-winning success of Free Solo [which showed Alex Honnold climbing ropeless up Yosemite], Honnold’s profile has boomed, and with it, the impact of his foundation [which tackles energy poverty and climate change via solar technology projects].

Over the past three years, it has supported 48 partners in more than 20 countries and territories. In 2022, its grantmaking doubled thanks to a global community of corporate and individual supporters. Last October, it launched the Levine Impact Lab, an organisation that invests in grassroots social-impact and environmental organisations including Southside Blooms, which repurposes land in Chicago as solar flower farms, and employs disadvantaged youth in sustainable agriculture. The foundation is “using its platform to build a bridge between the wealthier philanthropic class and gritty grassroots leaders”, says Quilen Blackwell, founder of Southside Blooms.

This March, the foundation’s largest project launched in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico: the island’s first cooperatively managed solar microgrid, powering 14 small businesses with 10 days of outage back-up. Hurricanes frequently devastate the existing “super-unreliable, super-expensive” grid powered by US-imported diesel. Says Honnold: “It just feels good to help demonstrate that these other ways can work.”

Honnold donates around 33% of his income to the foundation. “Being a climber, I always have relatively clear goals and priorities, and I don’t need material things to do those things,” he says. Fellow professional climber and The Dawn Wall star Tommy Caldwell says of Honnold: “Despite, or possibly because of his pragmatic approach to life, Alex is the most charitable person I know.” 

«

A lot of climbers make their money doing the tricky building installations requiring “roped access work” because, of course, they’re familiar with ropes and safety. And they’re often big on the environment – unsurprisingly, one hopes.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Petrol leaf blowers are really noisy and polluting – so their electric siblings are increasingly popular. CC-licensed photo by Dean Hochman 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 11 links for you. Pardon? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Ozempic is obviously good for business • Very Serious

Josh Barro has been taking Ozempic for three weeks, and has already lost 2kg:

»

Back in June, I tweeted that “10 years from now, it’ll be obvious GLP-1 drugs were a way bigger deal than AI.” Some people wrote to me asking me to elaborate on that, but I didn’t really want to say more until I had actually gone on one of the drugs — and at the time, I was still working on the frustrating process of obtaining them.

But my basic view is that more than half the population ought to be on these drugs and probably will be within a decade or two. Those people will generally lose 15% or more of their body weight — probably more, given that similar drugs in development appear to be even more effective than the ones already on the market — and will keep it off so long as they stay on the drugs, which may well need to be indefinitely.

All that weight loss will improve health outcomes in obvious ways, like reducing cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and in less obvious ways like fewer people needing knee replacements or kidney dialysis. Lower disease burden will mean fewer sick days and higher labor productivity. And there will be huge gains in personal happiness: well over a hundred million Americans who have been struggling all their lives to control their weight will be finally succeeding at it, and in a way that does not involve a great deal of mental effort or perceived sacrifice. People will gain self-esteem, they’ll be relieved of negative feelings about their weight, and they’ll be able to redirect (often substantial) energy they once devoted to dieting to other endeavors.

And that’s just considering the drugs’ intended effects on weight (and diabetes). There’s also the matter of other improvements in impulse control — how these drugs seem to have the positive side effect of helping at least some people control substance use, gambling, compulsive shopping, and other problem behaviors. We may have stumbled upon a drug class that broadly improves people’s judgment and decision-making. Isn’t that amazing?

«

I’m inclined to agree with him. Obesity is a huge problem in the US, and increasingly in the UK and elsewhere. The idea of taking a pill forever might not be attractive at first, but it’s effectively a health supplement.
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The great cash-for-carbon hustle • The New Yorker

Heidi Blake:

»

To register the Kariba project with Verra, South Pole had to predict how much of the forest would be lost without any intervention, and thus determine how much carbon the scheme would conserve over a thirty-year life span. Credits would be issued every year against that total, and the prediction would be checked once a decade, by comparing Kariba with an unguarded reference area nearby.

South Pole’s data analysts initially estimated that the program could save around fifty-two million tons of carbon. But Verra required them to rerun these calculations using one of its approved methodologies. The scientists used one named VM9, which generated a startlingly different projection: if the Kariba site was left undefended, deforestation would explode, resulting in the eventual loss of 96% of the forest. On that basis, the project would be eligible for almost two hundred million credits—four times the initial estimate.

«

This is not a short article, but it’s stuffed full of insight into the scams around carbon offsets, which is an insane business. The précis is written by financial seer Matt Levine, whose daily newsletter on this one is absolutely spot on: “you can’t sell trees no one cuts down“. You have to subscribe to the newsletter (free!), or Bloomberg, to read it. Though I think this paragraph of his sums it up well:

»

If you came to carbon credits as a financial engineer, and you find out that you are getting paid for some pure accounting abstraction rather than for saving the world, you will be like “yes, exactly.”

«

Which is why I’m dubious about Apple’s claims of carbon neutrality based on offsets.
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Strange form of ice found that only melts at extremely hot temperatures • ScienceAlert

Clare Watson:

»

From our earthly surrounds, you’d be forgiven for thinking water is a simple, elbow-shaped molecule made up of one oxygen atom linked to two hydrogens that settle into a fixed position when water freezes.

Superionic ice is strangely different, and yet it may be among the most abundant forms of water in the Universe – presumed to fill not only the interiors of Uranus, Neptune, but also similar exoplanets.

These planets have extreme pressures of 2 million times the Earth’s atmosphere, and interiors as hot as the surface of the Sun – which is where water gets weird.

Scientists confirmed in 2019 what physicists had predicted back in 1988: a structure where the oxygen atoms in superionic ice are locked in a solid cubic lattice, while the ionized hydrogen atoms are let loose, flowing through that lattice like electrons through metals.

This gives superionic ice its conductive properties. It also raises its melting point such that the frozen water remains solid at blistering temperatures.

In this latest study, physicist Arianna Gleason of Stanford University and colleagues bombarded thin slivers of water, sandwiched between two diamond layers, with some ridiculously powerful lasers.

Successive shockwaves raised the pressure to 200 GPa (2 million atmospheres) and temperatures up to about 5,000 K (8,500 °F) – hotter than the temperatures of the 2019 experiments, but at lower pressures.

“Recent discoveries of water-rich Neptune-like exoplanets require a more detailed understanding of the phase diagram of [water] at pressure–temperature conditions relevant to their planetary interiors,” Gleason and colleagues explain in their paper, from January 2022.

«

I know, you’re thinking: ice-nine. But not really, fortunately.
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Here’s why electric lawn mowers are cutting down the petrol-fuelled competition • Canary Media

Alison Takemura:

»

Several local governments are pushing a transition to electric tools, in pursuit of cleaner air and quieter neighborhoods. California has set a zero-emissions (i.e., electric) standard for manufacturers of leaf blowers, lawn mowers and other machines with small off-road engines, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2024. And Denver, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are all considering their own bans on gas landscaping equipment.

…Even Home Depot is encouraging the uptake of electric lawn equipment. In June, the big-box retailer announced a goal to have battery-powered products drive more than 85% of its outdoor lawn equipment sales by 2028.

Gas-powered landscaping equipment spews smelly, black fumes that dump colossal amounts of pollutants into the local environment. The tools lack catalytic converters, so they perform much worse than most vehicles.

In just one hour, a commercial lawn mower emits as much smog-forming pollution as a car driving for four hours — equivalent to a trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, or about 300 miles, according to the California Air Resources Board. A backpack leaf blower is even worse; running one for an hour emits as much pollution as a 1,100-mile journey.

As you’ve likely experienced firsthand, these machines are also obnoxiously loud. Many people who worked from home during the pandemic found it was a sound they couldn’t escape. For operators, a leaf blower’s roar can cause hearing damage in just a couple of hours.

And gas-powered machines aren’t performing as well as electric ones, according to professional reviewers. Electric yard tools have knocked gas models out of the top spots in many of the ​“best-of” lists that consider both — including Wirecutter, The Spruce and USA Today.

«

The issue is always the upfront cost. Nobody ever factors in fuel costs (or pollution, and its externalities.)
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These houses are at risk of falling into the sea. The US government bought them • The Washington Post

Brady Dennis:

»

The two houses at the end of East Beacon Road in Rodanthe, N.C., sit precariously at the edge of the pounding surf.

Fierce storms and rising tides have clawed away the sand beneath them, pummeled nearby dunes and undermined septic systems. The pair of homes seem destined to one day topple into the Atlantic Ocean, the way a growing number have in recent years along this stretch of the Outer Banks, where the rates of erosion and sea level rise are among the most rapid on the East Coast.

Given that reality, it might seem surprising that 23298 E. Beacon Rd. and 23292 E. Beacon Rd. sold on the same day recently. Perhaps even more surprising was the buyer: the National Park Service.

After spending more than $700,000 for the salt-sprayed vacation homes, the federal government plans to promptly tear them down and turn the area into a public beach access.

The move marks a unique and possibly groundbreaking chapter in the deepening dilemma of what to do with imperiled coastal homes, which are becoming only more vulnerable amid rising seas, more intense storms and unceasing erosion.

Often, states and localities have little money for buyouts of such places and little political will to pursue the controversial topic of retreating from threatened shorelines. Homeowners face unenviable options of letting their homes become inundated or spending large sums to try to move them, both of which have happened in Rodanthe.

«

Well, I guess that makes Ben Shapiro’s suggestion correct.
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People are using Quest 3’s passthrough in daily life • UploadVR

David Heaney:

»

Some people are already using Quest 3’s passthrough in some surprising ways, and posting recordings on social media.

Quest 3 isn’t the first headset to ship with color real world passthrough. But unlike Quest Pro the camera resolution is good enough to see details, and unlike Pico 4 and Vive XR Elite it’s depth-correct so won’t make you feel queasy.

While we criticized the issues with Quest 3’s passthrough in our review, it nonetheless is still arguably the first passthrough you’d want to spend more than a few minutes in. For a few people it even seems to have crossed the threshold where they now want to use it in their daily lives, while others are already using it for attention-grabbing stunts.

Developer Tassilo von Gerlach cooked chicken soup in Quest 3 passthrough. He used an iPad and ChatGPT’s new image analysis features to get a custom recipe based on the ingredients he had, and then kept that recipe open in a Quest virtual browser window while watching a YouTube video in another.

Puzzling Places technical artist Shahriar Shahrabi used the passthrough to simply watch YouTube videos in the browser while vacuuming, doing the dishes, and dusting.

Having a YouTube video follow you around while doing chores seems like an ideal use case for XR, and may even become a mainstream activity as mixed reality headsets get better and cheaper.

«

Correction: slightly odd people are using it in daily life. I can just about imagine doing this around the house, if you really have to have visual stimulation while doing routine stuff.
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Why ending childhood lead poisoning is a top-tier global development challenge • Center For Global Development

Rory Todd and Rachel Silverman Bonnifield:

»

The scale of harm from lead exposure is extraordinarily large and wide-ranging. Through its impact on childhood cognitive development, our recent paper found that lead exposure is responsible for over a fifth of the learning gap between high-income countries and LMICs [low- and middle-income countries].

As a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, it is estimated to be responsible for between 1.6 and 5.5 million deaths globally each year. Accounting for both of these effects, the World Bank estimates the burden from lead exposure to be worth US$5 trillion annually, equivalent to 6.9% of global GDP.

Those are the largest and most robustly established effects, but they’re not the only ones: lead also has a likely role in encouraging antisocial behaviour, and in turn a possible role in aggressive and criminal behaviour; it is a risk factor for kidney disease and a range of other conditions; it may contribute to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and antimicrobial resistance; and it can pose a major threat to wildlife and ecosystems, with particularly nasty impacts on birds, mammals, and reptiles.

So to summarise, lead has a larger mortality burden than HIV/AIDS and malaria; a (negative) education impact roughly equivalent to our best available (positive) school-based interventions; and an economic impact equivalent to several GDP points, plus a whole lot more.

«

They estimate it could almost be removed for $350m by 2040. Incredibly cheap!
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Stack Overflow lays off over 100 people as the AI coding boom continues • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

Coding help forum Stack Overflow is laying off 28% of its staff as it struggles toward profitability. CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar announced today that the company is “significantly reducing the size of our go-to-market organization,” as well as “supporting teams” and other groups.

After the team doubled its employee base last year, Chandrasekar told The Verge’s Nilay Patel in an interview that about 45% of those hires were for its go-to-market sales team, which he said was “obviously the largest team.” We’ve reached out to Stack Overflow to find out what other teams may have been affected.

Word of the layoffs comes over a year after the company made a big hiring push, doubling its size to over 500 people. Stack Overflow did not elaborate on the reasons for the layoff, but its hiring push began near the start of a generative AI boom that has stuffed chatbots into every corner of the tech industry, including coding. That presents clear challenges for a personal coding help forum, as developers get comfortable with AI coding assistance and the very tools that do that are blended into products they use.

«

Certainly looks like a poor decision to have doubled the workforce with AI coming up the motorway. Also “Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a big company that also owns a large stake in the huge Chinese company Tencent.” Podcast/transcript of interview with the SO CEO from a year ago.
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Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for October 17, 2023 • GoComics

This one is the perfect four-panel comic for the computer age. In the words of Truffaut, about films: they should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.
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InDrive wanted to make ride-hailing fairer. Drivers say it has made them poorer • Rest of World

Zuha Siddiqui:

»

In September, when Lahore-based bike-taxi driver Muhammad Zain started his day, his first booking request on the inDrive app was for a drop-off around 11 kilometers away. He made a quick mental calculation and estimated a rate of 300 Pakistani rupees ($1). But inDrive, which works on a bid-based model that allows drivers and passengers to negotiate fares, restricted him from putting in the bid. It nudged him to offer half the price, which was “close to what the customer was offering.” Zain eventually got the ride for 165 rupees (around 50 cents).

This has been an everyday drill for Zain since he switched to inDrive from Careem in late 2022. He spends several minutes per ride bidding for the lowest price he can possibly afford. It has “made things worse for us riders because we have to do the additional work of bidding for rides,” Zain told Rest of World.

A comparison between three-ride hailing apps in Pakistan shows inDrive (left) with the cheapest fare of 1,194 rupees, followed by Uber (center), and then Careem (right) with the highest estimate of 1,416 rupees.
InDrive launched in Pakistan in early 2021 and quickly became the most downloaded ride-hailing app in the country, thanks to its bid-based model. But Pakistani gig drivers told Rest of World that for the most part, they only began using the app because their customers switched to it, and that they were overworked and underpaid. Though the inDrive model — with its absence of surge pricing — has been widely praised, workers who previously drove for apps like Uber and Careem said they now make less money.

InDrive workers also said they experience increased anxiety as they have to constantly look at their phones to engage in bidding wars — only to end up with the lowest possible fare for every ride. “It is stressful and exhausting,” Sarmad Zaran, a Lahore-based inDrive worker, told Rest of World.

«

Isn’t the next step an app for taxi drivers which ups the bidding for them? Seems like the InDrive algorithm really isn’t interested (to anthropomorphise) in the marginal benefit to taxi drivers, only in moving lots of people around. The flawed assumption behind that is that there’s a limitless supply of drivers to replace those forced out by low prices which make driving uneconomic.
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Twexit.nl

»

Blue Sky Statistics

Registered Bluesky Accounts: 1,586,321

«

Interesting little site which simply exists to register the growth of Bluesky. There’s a pretty steady growth, with a jump in mid-September (no doubt due to something dim Elon Musk did). What’s equally interesting here is the statistic showing “daily posting accounts”, which is presently about 150,000, ie 10% of the total registrations. You can also see how US-centric it is by following the number of posting accounts through the day. My rough guess is that one-third of posting accounts are on the US west coast.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche seem to have inspired, at least in part, the latest output from Marc Andreessen. CC-licensed photo by jwyg 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google, DOJ still blocking public access to monopoly trial docs, NYT says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Dozens of exhibits from the Google antitrust trial are still being hidden from the public, The New York Times Company alleged in a court filing on Monday.

According to The Times, there are several issues with access to public trial exhibits on both sides. The Department of Justice has failed to post at least 68 exhibits on its website that were shared in the trial, The Times alleged, and states have not provided access to 18 records despite reporters’ requests.

Google’s responses to document requests have also been spotty, The Times alleged. Sometimes Google “has not responded at all” to requests to review public exhibits. Other times, Google responds, but “often does not provide the exhibit in its entirety,” The Times claimed, including limiting public access to “particular page(s) of the exhibit shown to a given witness.”

The Times has asked the court to intervene and expand public access to key evidence weighed in what’s “arguably the most important antitrust trial in decades, with far-reaching consequences for the future of the tech industry.”

This is just the latest attempt to stop the Google antitrust trial from being shrouded in secrecy. Just before the trial, advocates lost a fight to get the court to provide a public access audio stream of the whole trial. Then shortly after the trial began, Google tried and failed to reduce public access to trial exhibits by requesting an opportunity to review every trial document before the DOJ posted anything online.

The drama over Google’s request to control how trial documents are shared concluded with an agreement between the DOJ and Google that either party would have an opportunity to object to the release of certain trial exhibits within three hours—a matter that both parties would have to prepare to argue the following trial day. Otherwise, either side “may” post the trial exhibit the next day.

…The public has a “weighty” constitutional right to access the Google trial exhibits to fully consider the government’s case against Google, The NYT argued.

«

Former patent lawyer Nilay Patel, now editor-in-chief at The Verge, writes on this too; multiple outlets have joined the NYT’s complaint, and he’s getting the Verge/Vox ensemble to do so too.
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Netflix may hike prices after success of password-sharing crackdown • Reuters

Samrhitha A:

»

Netflix’s crackdown on password-sharing likely boosted subscribers by about 6 million in the third quarter and the streaming pioneer is expected to set the stage for price increases when it reports earnings on Wednesday.

The only profitable major streamer, Netflix has resisted joining rivals like Walt Disney in hiking ad-free prices this year and instead curbed password-sharing outside households to tap the more than 100 million viewers who use its service without subscribing.

“Netflix now closely resembles a utility in many markets,” analysts at Bernstein said. “The challenge of being labeled a utility is how a maturing company continues finding growth.”

It could hike prices after the end of the Hollywood actors strike, a media report said earlier in October.

Five months after calling a strike that plunged Hollywood into turmoil, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) last week approved a new contract with major studios.

Netflix, however, has weathered the strike well thanks to its larger international presence and strong content slate.

After a slow start for the ad plan launched last year, analysts said they expect Netflix will raise prices of its ad-free options in the coming months to nudge more subscribers to the other tier, where commercials help bring in more revenue per user.

«

This is the surprising thing: raising prices so that people drop down to the “cheaper” tier with adverts, which generates more money. Streaming is recapitulating the evolution of TV, though regressing backwards towards adverts.
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Microsoft and Adobe push new symbol to label AI images • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

»

you can use Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA)’s Content Credentials metadata for any picture – it doesn’t have to be AI generated. The examples given on the Content Credentials’ website were made using Adobe’s Photoshop and Firefly AI tools, and can be identified as such through their metadata. What Microsoft, Adobe and others have promised to do is ensure their AI generators will at some point in the future include this cryptographically signed metadata in their machine-crafted pictures. The goal being to provide a way for people to see if a picture was model or human-made and how.

For instance, Microsoft said artwork produced by its text-to-picture Bing Image Creator and Bing AI chatbot will feature that metadata at some point.

Now here’s the tricky part, assuming the specification is secure and robust. It’s one thing to store that metadata in a picture. How does the user find out, without digging into the file contents?

Well, you will need a compatible application, one that understands the Content Credentials metadata. If an app recognizes that data in a file, it should superimpose the “cr” symbol over the image in a top corner. When you click on that symbol, a widget should appear describing the source of the pic and other details from the Content Credentials metadata – for example, if it was made via Bing or Photoshop.

That’s how people can easily inspect the origin of the snap. But of course if the file is opened in an application that doesn’t support Content Credentials, no symbol is shown: the app won’t understand the data and won’t show a symbol.

«

This is definitely the problem. Even if this comes into force at once, it would take decades for all the image-using apps to incorporate it, and there will be an incentive for those who want to create undetectable fakes to use or create apps that don’t follow this protocol. Not a tragedy of the commons, but a version of it.
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The Techno-Optimist Manifesto • Andreessen Horowitz

Marc Andreessen:

»

We are being lied to.

We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.

We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.

We are told to be pessimistic.

The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares.

We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.

We are told to be miserable about the future.

«

There’s 5,000 words of this, presented in short, sharp sentences full of aspiration and not much actual roadmapping. It reads a bit like a 17-year-old who has just read The Fountainhead and some Nietzsche and had a joint. (He recommends the work of, among others, “John Galt”.) Andreessen has a habit of writing stuff like this every few months: who remembers “It’s Time To Build” from April 2020, which complained that there weren’t any vaccines for Covid because “we chose not to ‘build'”.

O ye of little faith, Mr Andreessen.
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Twitter is throttling Patreon links: creators say it undermines their livelihood • The Markup

Jon Keegan and Dan Phiffer:

»

Twitter is now slowing down traffic on links to the crowdfunding site Patreon, WhatsApp, and at times, Meta’s Messenger app, a Markup analysis confirms. 

Using a tool launched by The Markup last month, readers discovered that links to these sites were delayed by an average of 2.5 seconds—findings we confirmed. 

Patreon users told The Markup that the throttling undermines their ability to reach new supporters on Twitter, which has historically been a key platform for building donations. “It’s dirty pool,” said Matt Carlin, the producer of a popular call-in show, Office Hours Live, which takes in nearly $30,000 per month from Patreon and is being throttled. “It’s another big tech company trying to squash little guys—or, in their attempts to squash bigger guys, squashing little guys like us.”

In September, The Markup reported that Twitter, now officially named X, was slowing down links to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack, also by an average of 2.5 seconds, which can feel extremely slow for users. We simultaneously launched a tool that lets readers test any link posted on X (which the platform automatically shortens using the t.co domain), and measured the time it took for X to redirect the link to its original destination. The Markup also built a bot that would let us know if any links readers were testing appeared to be throttled.

«

Every link posted on Twitter goes through its t.co shortener, which guards against spam and malware and so on. Is it possible that the system is just running slower? Sure, 2.5 seconds is a long time in computer terms, but I struggle to believe that people stop short of going to Patreon because they have to wait one thousand, two thousand, three thou, for the link to work.
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Fearing AI, fan fiction writers lock their accounts • TechCrunch

Morgan Sung:

»

Kinktober. Whumptober. Kisstober. Flufftober. Goretober. October is a bacchanal of fan fiction, from romantic one-shots about unconventional character pairings to delicious smut that’ll make you reconsider your own sense of morality — all inspired by the month’s countless themed writing challenges. It’s an especially busy time for the fan fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3). 

But this year’s monthlong prompt festival may seem quieter to the casual AO3 reader, with popular writers’ work seemingly wiped from the site altogether. In most cases, the stories still exist, but they aren’t publicly viewable anymore. 

In an effort to prevent their writing from being scraped and used to train AI models, many AO3 writers are locking their work, restricting it to readers who have registered AO3 accounts. Though it may curb bot commenters, it also limits traffic from guest users, which can be a blow for newer and less popular writers. Whether it’s effective is questionable, but in the AI paranoia, AO3 writers are taking any measures they can to protect their work. 

At the time of reporting, over 966,000 of the roughly 11.7 million works on AO3 were accessible only for registered users. It’s just a fraction of AO3’s vast library of content, but it’s worth noting that many authors are only locking new work, since existing fics were likely already scraped. 

«

They were happy for anyone to read them and share them and learn from them as long as the “anyone” was human. But if the “anyone” who learns from their work is a machine, they don’t like it? There’s an immense lack of logic in this.
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The monthly “AI or real” quiz • BBC Bitesize

»

A deepfake video is a computer-generated copy that aims to perfectly replicate the voice, look, expressions and even gestures of another person. They can look very realistic, as you’ll see from this month’s quiz!

See if you can get full marks – and remember, always double check where an image or video has orginally come from. Who posted it and what are the intentions behind it? Verify sources and check whether any trustworthy news sites have published the content.

«

I got 6/8, so tolerable? It’s generally the fingers, isn’t it. Though not always.
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About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off • The Verge

Ash Parrish:

»

One of the worst tech labor years ever continues with the news that roughly half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off. Bandcamp employees are reporting the news via social media.

Epic Games bought the indie music platform back in 2022 for an undisclosed amount before selling it barely a year later.

Late last month, Epic Games laid off 16% of its workforce, or 830 employees, due to what CEO Tim Sweeney described as overspending. Epic also revealed that it would sell the Bandcamp business to California-based music licensing company Songtradr. In that announcement, Epic disclosed that an additional 250 people would be leaving Epic either through receiving offers from Songtradr or Epic’s divesture from its SuperAwesome ad business. Employees who did not receive offers from Songtradr were notified today and will be eligible for severance.

In an email to The Verge, Songtradr confirmed that 50% of Bandcamp employees have been extended offers to join Songtradr and reaffirmed from a previous statement the company’s commitment to keeping the Bandcamp experience the same.

«

Totally puzzling why Epic bought Bandcamp at all. Not an obvious or even unobvious fit. And Epic has form: in 2019 it bought group video chat app Houseparty, then shut it down in 2021.
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The negative impact of mobile-first web design on desktop • Nielsen Norman Group

Kim Salazar, Tim Neusesser and Nishi Chitale:

»

Over 55% of worldwide web traffic comes from mobile devices. As the use of mobile devices continues to grow, so does the importance of mobile designs. This is why the mobile-first design approach, where designers first design for mobile and then adjust the design for tablets and desktop, has become very popular.

A minimalist style eliminates any design elements that are not required for the core functionality or message of the website. To avoid a cluttered appearance and achieve a minimalist aesthetic, designers make heavy use of negative space and simplify the amount of content displayed in one screen viewport. The result is content dispersion: a long page with low information density.

In the past, slow internet speeds limited the use of high-resolution imagery on websites. Today, however, improved bandwidth has eliminated this design constraint. Many modern web pages use large, high-resolution imagery. Image-focused designs are eye-catching, but they result in overly dispersed text content. 

A few large images on a desktop page can work well. However, if the page has too many big images, the text-based content that is displayed inline or in between images becomes dispersed and fragmented across the page.

«

NN/G is certainly right that designs which don’t really adjust for the desktop can be annoying as hell. But there’s the alternative where desktops become cluttered as hell. Mobile has generally been a good influence on web design. It just needs to swing back a bit.
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AI and The Bible: seraphim, cherubim and thrones • MLearning.ai

Samuele:

»

The angelic tradition has always intrigued me. Both because my family has a strong spiritual connotation, and because the traditional representation of angels is very different from their textual description. What better argument to test how biblical angels look to an Artificial Intelligence?
Today I focus on the first hierarchy of angels, the most important and closest to divinity. It consists of 3 orders:
• Seraphim — שרף
• Cherubim — כְּרוּב
• Thrones — θρόνος

So I start with the Seraphim, the angels closest to God, the ones most important in their closeness to the creator. But how are they described in the Bible? In these words of Isaiah:

»

each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly

«

If I pass this description to my AI, I get…

«

…well, he gets something that looks to me like a Dementor in the Harry Potter films, and then refines it a bit to get something a lot more scary. This was a couple of years ago, when AI weren’t so good at drawing. They’re still pretty impressive, though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new Google project uses machine learning to try to optimise traffic light timings to improve vehicle flow in a growing number of cities. CC-licensed photo by Ian Sane 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. Go, go, go! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Did you miss the post on the Social Warming Substack last Friday? It looked at what sort of difference the alterations to news item display on Twitter might make to clickthroughs – and what engagement is about.

Why the internet isn’t fun anymore • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over. The precipitous decline of X is the bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be. Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser. These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago. In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems. When those platforms decay, as Twitter has under Elon Musk, there is no other comparable platform in the ecosystem to replace them. A few alternative sites, including Bluesky and Discord, have sought to absorb disaffected Twitter users. But like sproutlings on the rain-forest floor, blocked by the canopy, online spaces that offer fresh experiences lack much room to grow.

…The Internet today feels emptier, like an echoing hallway, even as it is filled with more content than ever. It also feels less casually informative. Twitter in its heyday was a source of real-time information, the first place to catch wind of developments that only later were reported in the press. Blog posts and TV news channels aggregated tweets to demonstrate prevailing cultural trends or debates. Today, they do the same with TikTok posts—see the many local-news reports of dangerous and possibly fake “TikTok trends”—but the TikTok feed actively dampens news and political content, in part because its parent company is beholden to the Chinese government’s censorship policies. Instead, the app pushes us to scroll through another dozen videos of cooking demonstrations or funny animals. In the guise of fostering social community and user-generated creativity, it impedes direct interaction and discovery.

«

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The Israel-Hamas war shows just how broken social media has become • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote last year, the history of war is a history of media. The Gulf War demonstrated the power of CNN and the 24/7 cable-news format, foreshadowing the way infotainment would permeate politics and culture for the next 20 years. A series of contentious election cycles from 2008 to 2020, as well as the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, and the rise of the Islamic State, showed how social-media platforms democratized punditry and journalism, for better and worse. Commentators were quick to dub Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the “first TikTok war,” as the internet filled with videos from Ukrainians documenting the horrors of war in profoundly personal, often surreal ways.

If such conflicts are lenses through which we can understand an information environment, then one must surmise that, at present, our information environment is broken. It relies on badly maintained social-media infrastructure and is presided over by billionaires who have given up on the premise that their platforms should inform users. During the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, X owner Elon Musk himself has interacted with doctored videos published to his platform. He has also explicitly endorsed accounts that are known to share false information and express vile anti-Semitism.

In an interview with The New York Times, a Hamas official said that the organization has been using the lack of moderation on X to post violent, graphic videos on the platform to terrorize Israeli citizens.

Meanwhile, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and the unofficial lead on the company’s Twitter clone, Threads, has received requests from journalists, academics, and news junkies to make his product more useful for following the war. He has responded by saying that his team won’t “amplify” news media on the platform

«

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Tesla owner in Israel escapes terrorists in Model 3 despite blown tires, dozens of bullet holes • Teslarati

Simon Alvarez:

»

During the beginning of Hamas’ attack, a Tesla owner from Mefalsim, a kibbutz in Southern Israel near the Gaza Strip, was called in with the community’s alert squad. As he was driving to the assembly point, he encountered a vehicle loaded with Hamas terrorists. Photos and videos of the Model 3 Performance after its run-in with the terrorists hinted at the shocking events that transpired. 

Speaking from Sheba Hospital, where he is recovering from a series of surgeries due to the attack, the Tesla owner told Israeli publication Walla about his encounter. According to the Model 3 owner, the terrorists proceeded to spray the Model 3 with bullets, shooting at the front in an attempt to hit the engine. The terrorists also shot at the Model 3’s rear, seemingly in an attempt to ignite the fuel tank. Fortunately, the Model 3 Performance had neither an engine nor a fuel tank. 

“The terrorists recognized me from a distance of 10 meters. In addition to their Kalashnikovs, they had a machine gun in the battle that fired bullets of a larger diameter. They didn’t realize it was an electric car, so they shot at the front, hoping to hit the engine that wasn’t there, and at the back, attempting to ignite the non-existent fuel. They shot my tires. I pressed the gas, and they started chasing me,” the Tesla owner noted. 

At this point, it was a matter of survival. Thankfully, the Model 3 Performance is a very quick car, and the Tesla owner was able to gain some distance from his attackers. The Model 3 owner noted that his car’s acceleration ultimately allowed him to get away, and the Tesla’s safety systems allowed him to drive to a hospital at speed, even with blown-out tires. 

«

The photos are dramatic (and the driver was badly wounded) but it certainly shows one benefit of EVs. He escaped his would-be killers by driving at up to 180km/h (110mph) with the tyres disintegrating.
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X fined $610,500 in Australia first for failing to crack down on child sexual abuse material • The Guardian

Josh Taylor:

»

X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has become the first online platform to be issued with a $610,500 fine under Australia’s Online Safety Act for its failure to meet basic online safety expectations.

X has 28 days to either pay the fine, issued by the e-safety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, or provide responses to questions X ignored from the commissioner on its work to crack down on child sexual abuse material on the platform.

The legal notices were issued to X, Google, TikTok, Twitch and Discord in February following the first round of notices sent to Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Snap and Omegle last year.

In a report on the tech companies’ responses to the notices, released on Monday, the commissioner found many of the largest services were failing to adequately detect, remove and prevent child abuse material.

“Frankly, I was surprised at how hard it was to extract precise and accurate information, and frankly, surprised that some companies that should have much more sophisticated and mature systems and resources didn’t seem willing or able to be able to provide that information that had been provided by other companies,” Inman Grant told Guardian Australia. “Or in the case of Twitter, to leave things totally blank, to obfuscate [from providing] inaccurate information.”

The commissioner also found that X and Google did not comply with the notices, with Google giving generic responses to some specific questions, while some questions to X went entirely unanswered.

Google has been given a formal warning, while X was given an infringement notice.

«

This is just the beginning. Twitter is in line for many more, repeated fines all over the place. The EU and the US’s FTC in particular.
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The same lab that cloned Dolly the sheep has used gene editing to create chickens resistant to avian flu • EL PAÍS English

Daniel Mediavilla:

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The University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute — the animal research center where Dolly the sheep was created — used gene editing to breed chickens that resist infection by the avian flu. A deadly virus for birds that causes great economic losses around the world and can, in some cases, infect and kill humans, the disease has proved difficult for vaccines because the proteins on its surface that are recognized by the immune system change rapidly. A group of British researchers has tested the potential of modifying small sections of chicken DNA to prevent influenza infection, albeit only partially. They published their results today in the journal Nature Communications.

Influenza A needs a protein in chicken cells, ANP32A, to replicate. The team of scientists, led by Mike McGrew, a University of Edinburgh researcher, used the CRISPR editing technique to modify the gene that produces the protein in the chickens’ germ cells, which would enable the birds to pass down the change to their offspring. In this way, animals were created that hardly became infected with influenza when exposed to other infected birds (“9 out of 10 remained uninfected,” according to the study), and they did not subsequently infect other chickens. In a later test, when inoculated with a dose a thousand times higher, five out of ten became infected.

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This is quite a feat. Avian flu has had a dramatic effect on farming in Europe.
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Young people turn to social media for financial guidance • Deloitte UK

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More young people are turning to social media rather than their bank for financial guidance, according to new research from Deloitte.

A survey of over 2,500 UK consumers, conducted in August 2023, found that 25% of 18-24 year olds use social media when searching for financial guidance and advice. It also found that 20% of this age group have invested money based on social media recommendations, with almost half of these (48%) having invested between £100-£500 and 16% invested over £1000, in their lifetime. 21% invested specifically in cryptocurrency based on social media guidance. Yet, 33% of the same age group are not confident enough in their financial knowledge to take out investment products at all.

The survey – which aims to understand the impact of the rise in the cost of living on banking and insurance customers – reveals that the majority of consumers across all age groups are turning to alternative sources for financial guidance and advice. Only 16% of respondents in the banking survey said they would seek guidance from their bank, with respondents preferring to seek it elsewhere, such as from their friends and family (34%) and the MoneySavingExpert (25%). The main reasons cited for this was that they were either unsure of what supportive services their bank has to offer, or too embarrassed to seek out support.

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Perhaps this, rather than avocado toast, is the explanation for a generation’s inability to buy a house. Well, for why so many were scammed by crypto.
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Control Panel for Twitter • Chrome Web Store

Jonathan Buchanan:

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Control Panel for Twitter is a [Chrome] browser extension for Twitter – its main goals are to reduce the amount of algorithmic content you see, give you more control over your timeline and make the UI less distracting.

By default,
• your Home timeline will be the reverse-chronological “Following” timeline, which will only contain tweets and quote tweets from the people you follow.

• The algorithmic “For you” timeline will be hidden, and Control Panel for Twitter will keep you on “Following” if Twitter tries to automatically take you off it.

• Everything is configurable, so start by opening the options popup and customizing to your liking. Changes you make in the options will be applied immediately.

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Also gets rid of ALL of the paid-for Twitter Blue accounts. Great for Chrome users.
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Google’s AI stoplight program is now calming traffic in a dozen cities worldwide • Engadget

Andrew Tarantola:

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It’s been two years since Google first debuted Project Green Light, a novel means of addressing the street-level pollution caused by vehicles idling at stop lights. At its Sustainability ‘23 event on Tuesday, the company discussed some of the early findings from that program and announced another wave of expansions for it.

Green Light uses machine learning systems to comb through Maps data to calculate the amount of traffic congestion present at a given light, as well as the average wait times of vehicles stopped there. That information is then used to train AI models that can autonomously optimize the traffic timing at that intersection, reducing idle times as well as the amount of braking and accelerating vehicles have to do there. It’s all part of Google’s goal to help its partners collectively reduce their carbon emissions by a gigaton by 2030.

When the program was first announced in 2021, it had only been pilot tested in four intersections in Israel in partnership with the Israel National Roads Company but Google had reportedly observed a “10 to 20% reduction in fuel and intersection delay time” during those tests. The pilot program has grown since then, spreading to a dozen partner cities around the world, including Rio de Janeiro in Brazil; Manchester in England and Jakarta in Indonesia.

“Today we’re happy to share that… we plan to scale to more cities in 2024,” Yael Maguire, Google VP of Geo Sustainability, told reporters during a pre-brief event last week. “Early numbers indicate a potential for us to see a 30% reduction in stops. We believe green light is unique because it is more scalable and cost effective for cities than alternative options.”

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A new tool helps artists thwart AI—with a middle finger • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

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It’s helpful to know how image generators are trained to understand exactly how Kudurru works. Most of these generators find their training data by “scraping” the internet. Scrapers use software that collects data in bulk from across the web, from platforms like DeviantArt and professional libraries like Getty Images to individual artists’ websites. One of the most popular and most commonly used roadmaps to decide what to scrape is the dataset LAION-5B, which lists the URLs to billions of images. When an AI company uses a dataset like LAION-5B to scrape images, it has to download those images from the URL links. That’s where Kudurru finds its opening.

According to Spawning cofounder Jordan Meyer, during internal testing, Kudurru was able to briefly stymie a substantial amount of scraping activity. “For about two hours in July, we stopped everyone who was in the process of downloading the LAION-5B dataset,” Meyer says.

To identify the scrapers, Spawning operates a honeypot-like “defense network” of more than 1,000 websites, each hosting images that groups using LAION-5B would scrape to train a generative AI model. These websites collect data on the IP addresses attempting to scrape images; Spawning can often identify the groups doing the scraping and the regions with the most overall scraping activity. (China is currently in the lead.)

“We’re developing what is basically a blacklist,” Spawning cofounder Patrick Hoepner says. Spawning, also the company behind Have I Been Trained?, a site that lets creators see if AI has scraped their work, updates this blacklist in real time, based on the behavior of the IP addresses it tracks.

Kudurru gives artists two options to disrupt scraping. First, they can simply block the blacklisted IP addresses. Second, to take things a step further, they can also choose to sabotage or “poison” the scrapers’ efforts by sending back a different image than the one requested. Spawning gives users the option to choose what images they send back, although it does have some suggestions. “It could just be a middle finger over and over again,” Meyer says.

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Inside the deadly instant loan app scam that blackmails with nudes • BBC News

Poonam Agarwal:

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The business model is brutal but simple.

There are many apps that promise hassle-free loans in minutes. Not all of them are predatory. But many – once downloaded – harvest your contacts, photos and ID cards, and use that information later to extort you. When customers don’t repay on time – and sometimes even when they do – they share this information with a call centre where young agents of the gig economy, armed with laptops and phones are trained to harass and humiliate people into repayment.

At the end of 2021, Bhoomi had borrowed about 47,000 rupees ($565; £463) from several loan apps while she waited for some work expenses to come through. The money arrived almost immediately but with a big chunk deducted in charges. Seven days later she was due to repay but her expenses still hadn’t been paid, so she borrowed from another app and then another. The debt and interest spiralled until she owed about two million rupees ($24,000; £19,655).

Soon the recovery agents started calling. They quickly turned nasty, slamming Bhoomi with insults and abuse. Even when she had paid, they claimed she was lying. They called up to 200 times a day. They knew where she lived, they said, and sent her pictures of a dead body as a warning.

As the abuse escalated they threatened to message all of the 486 contacts in her phone telling them she was a thief and a whore. When they threatened to tarnish her daughter’s reputation too, Bhoomi could no longer sleep.
She borrowed from friends, family and more and more apps – 69 in total. At night, she prayed the morning would never come. But without fail at 07:00, her phone would start pinging and buzzing incessantly.
Eventually, Bhoomi had managed to pay back all of the money, but one app in particular – Asan Loan – wouldn’t stop calling. Exhausted, she couldn’t concentrate at work and started having panic attacks.
One day a colleague called her over to his desk and showed her something on his phone – a naked, pornographic picture of her.

The photo had been crudely photoshopped, Bhoomi’s head stuck on someone else’s body, but it filled her with disgust and shame. She collapsed by her colleague’s desk. It had been sent by Asan Loan to every contact in her phone book. That was when Bhoomi thought of killing herself.

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At least 60 people in India have killed themselves after being targeted in this scam.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified