There’s more bad news for Peloton, which is recalling 2.2m of its exercise bikes in the US over a seat fault. (But not outside the US?) CC-licensed photo by Dana L. Brown on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. What’s missing? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Musicians are already using AI more often than we think • Pitchfork

Marc Hogan:

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Shawn Everett, the Grammy-winning engineer and producer behind albums by Kacey Musgraves, the War on Drugs, and Alvvays, compares the advent of AI in music to the advent of the electric guitar or sampling. “As far as songwriting and production goes, we’re on the cusp of a wave of something that I don’t think we’ve really seen, maybe ever,” he says.

Everett paid attention in 2020 when OpenAI put out a tool for creating songs in various artists’ styles, complete with vocals. He even experimented with that tool while working on a song by the Killers that has never been released. Everett recalls inputting a chord progression that frontman Brandon Flowers had written and instructing the AI to continue it in the style of Pink Floyd, with a certain emotional tenor, only to have the AI spit out unexpected melodies. “What was happening was so different, and was landing in locations that no human being would normally think of, but it still felt rooted in something familiar,” he says. “I thought it was such a cool song.”

What’s coming next, Everett predicts, will be AI tools that can quickly combine ideas for melody, chords, and rhythm, similar to how programs like Midjourney and Dall-E, which generate images from natural language prompts, have shaken up visual art. Within a year or two, he speculates, the thousands of plugins in digital audio workstations like Pro Tools could merge into a single plugin that seamlessly carries out the user’s verbal requests. As an engineer, he wonders if he will ask the AI to set the EQ for a particular drum style—say, Metallica’s—or if the tech will eventually be able to spit out a replicated Lars Ulrich drum performance that sounds better than any drums he (or anyone else, for that matter) could have mic’d. “Obviously that’s a horrifying scenario for a lot of people, but it’s probably gonna happen,” Everett says. 

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Musicians can be the quickest to embrace new technology, and it definitely sounds like this has tickled their fancy.
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Wind is main source of UK electricity for first time • BBC News

Esme Stallard:

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Wind turbines have generated more electricity than gas for the first time in the UK.

In the first three months of this year a third of the country’s electricity came from wind farms, research from Imperial College London has shown. National Grid has also confirmed that April saw a record period of solar energy generation.

By 2035 the UK aims for all of its electricity to have net zero emissions.

“There are still many hurdles to reaching a completely fossil fuel-free grid, but wind out-supplying gas for the first time is a genuine milestone event,” said Iain Staffell, energy researcher at Imperial College and lead author of the report.

The majority of the UK’s wind power has come from offshore wind farms. Installing new onshore wind turbines has effectively been banned since 2015 in England.

Under current planning rules, companies can only apply to build onshore wind turbines on land specifically identified for development in the land-use plans drawn up by local councils. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak agreed in December to relax these planning restrictions to speed up development.

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Onshore wind isn’t going to happen until we have a different administration, let’s admit.
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Peloton shares slide after it recalls two million exercise bikes • The New York Times

Lora Kelley:

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Peloton, the maker of home exercise equipment, said on Thursday that it was recalling 2.2m exercise bikes, an announcement that sent its stock lower.

The company’s shares tumbled nearly 9% by the market close and have plunged more than 20% this month.

The company had received 35 reports of seat posts breaking and detaching from the original model of its bike during use, according to a recall notice from the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Peloton is voluntarily recalling Model PL-01 bikes that were sold from January 2018 to May 2023 in the United States, and is offering customers replacements for the bike’s seat posts that can be installed at home, the company said in a statement on its website Thursday morning.

“For Peloton, it was important to proactively engage the C.P.S.C. to address this issue,” the company wrote. “We worked cooperatively with them to identify today’s approved remedy.”

The decision to recall the bikes is a turnabout for Peloton, which in the past has resisted recalling its equipment.

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I was wondering: so how many bikes has Peloton sold in the US? And the answer: 2.2m. It’s recalling all of the ones sold in the US. But this, in turn, raises the question of why the ones sold outside the US, which one presumes largely have the same design and parts (especially when it comes to seat posts) aren’t being recalled too. Or is that the next step?

Either way, this could be the killer blow for a company that’s been struggling for a while.

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Twitter has a new mystery CEO • The Verge

Mitchell Clark, Emma Roth and Jay Peters:

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Elon Musk has announced plans for a new Twitter CEO but hasn’t said who it is. In a tweet on Thursday, Musk says that he has “hired a new CEO for X/Twitter” and that “she will be starting in ~6 weeks.” Musk will instead assume the role of executive chair and chief technology officer, “overseeing product, software & sysops” of Twitter.

While Musk may soon no longer be CEO, he still owns the company, which he has renamed “X.” It seems unlikely that giving someone else one specific title will make Twitter any less of a wild ride. Musk became “Chief Twit” last October, when he closed his acquisition of the company, followed by the immediate firing of large portions of its executive staff and thousands of other employees.

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Follows the poll back in December asking if he should step down, which got a huge number of people saying damn yes.

The replacement isn’t Sheryl Sandberg (of Facebook), she’s told journalists. Who would be mad enough to take a job where Musk is both your boss (as exec chair) and underling (as CTO)? The news may be out by the time you read this, but wasn’t on Thursday evening. Kara Swisher’s suggestion was Linda Yaccarino of NBC.
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Elon Musk broke Twitter’s Ratio—the yardstick off all-out ideological insult warfare • Slate

Alex Kirshner:

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It might look like a certain kind of victory for Musk that Twitter is now this way: the site is a bit more ideologically attuned to what seems to be his liking, and it’s harder to use the wisdom of the crowd, rather than of those who pay $8 a month, to puncture ridiculous talking points in a visible forum.

But this dynamic ultimately breaks bad for Musk and his buddies, too. It gets harder to warn someone’s followers about the Woke Cancel Culture Mob on the internet, and to position oneself as the last big defender of free speech standing up against the vile left, if a person needs to read through 500 replies to a terrible Ben Shapiro tweet to see someone making a confrontational point in response.

The Twitter experience also just gets a bit less fun, for everyone. Someone on the left who doesn’t pay for Twitter has less incentive to look at tweets they think are terrible, and then craft a reply they think is cutting, if they think there’s a slim chance anyone will read it. And conservatives, who seem more likely to pay for Twitter Blue, will eventually get bored. Twitter’s benefit to them is not that it’s an echo chamber where any right-wing line is met with hugs and kisses.

There are numerous conservative social media websites, and none has gotten anywhere near Twitter’s popularity. There is no Fox News of conservative social media, because much of the fun for right-wing internet users is having an allegedly woke mob to argue with. It may not have happened yet, but it will eventually get stultifying for a huge mass of Twitter Blue subscribers to gather in the replies to talk-show hosts’ tweets to agree that socialism is bad. This kind of poster needs someone to fight with, and by tilting the playing field, Musk has cut down on fighting.

That seems like a good thing for people in two groups: those who would like to spend less time getting their blood pressure up while looking at the internet, and those who would like to see Musk’s Twitter investment degraded until the point of a wipeout.

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Some people are in both groups. Just sayin’.
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Into Thin AirPods • Defector

Casey Johnston lost her AirPods. But not to worry! They were findable with the Find My… app, weren’t they? Well:

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when I did open the [Find My] app, there the AirPods were—well, there they weren’t, but also there they were—pinging from a town about 30 minutes away in decent traffic. I zoomed in on the map until it resolved into individual residences. The AirPods appeared to be posted up on a dead end street, squarely in someone’s house. Find My wouldn’t commit to an address, but by cross-referencing Google Maps and a nearby BMW dealership, I was able to triangulate a building number.

The AirPods weren’t in the wind, as lost or stolen objects had been my entire life. They were right there. They were close. They were obtainable. I’d known going into this relationship that I would lose them; until this moment, I hadn’t thought about the possibility that I’d be able to redeem myself by finding them again.

This is the part where I say I’m aware that everyone—Apple, law enforcement, any friends with good judgment within earshot—strenuously discourages ever, under any circumstances, trying to do vigilante justice with the Find My app. If you so much as mention the possibility, like four people will jump out of the woodwork with stories about someone they knew who was shot or assaulted trying to confront a thief in the act. I’d like to emphasize that I’m firmly on the side of reason, and a steadfast believer that having crime done to me is not an occasion to show off how brave I am.

But! I have watched Veronica Mars so many times. I dream idly of mysterious cases falling into my lap, and solving them through the careful piecing together of data, clues, and information, plus the judicious application of wiles and streetwise know-how. And, honestly, I did want my ridiculously expensive AirPods back.

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Thus begins a terrific story of pursuit.
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Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common • Science

Jeffrey Brainard:

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When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.

“It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”

His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills—secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship. “Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff,” says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were “heavily compromised” by articles from paper mills.

Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators—authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and those who list an affiliation with a hospital. It isn’t a perfect solution, because of a high false-positive rate. Other developers of fake-paper detectors, who often reveal little about how their tools work, contend with similar issues.

…Sabel’s tool correctly flagged nearly 90% of fraudulent or retracted papers in a test sample. However, it marked up to 44% of genuine papers as fake, so results still need to be confirmed by skilled reviewers.

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Those seem like rather broad brush strokes with which to paint things as fake.
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Finding geolocation leads with Bellingcat’s OpenStreetMap search tool • bellingcat

Logan Williams:

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Sometimes, the trickiest part of geolocating a photo can be knowing where to start looking.

In previous Bellingcat investigations, starting points have involved reverse image search, searching Google Earth for soil that is the right colour, looking for minarets and even identification of plants.

Bellingcat has built a new tool for searching OpenStreetMap data to help geolocate images and identify starting points for geolocation investigations, based on objects and structures you can identify in an image. You can think of it as a dramatically simplified version of the Overpass query language tool that some open source researchers may already be familiar with using via Overpass-Turbo. 

Users can sign up for the tool and check it out here.

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It’s really clever, using tagged items (“railway” “convenience store” “fountain”) and finding locations where those tags are in close proximity. You’d need to figure out which country your picture is in, and hope that OSM has been updated. (It often has.)
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AI has potential to be ‘destructive’ to journalism, media tycoon Barry Diller warns • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas, Anna Nicolaou and Laura Pitel:

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US media billionaire Barry Diller warned that the use of artificial intelligence would prove “destructive” to journalism unless publishers were able to use copyright law to exert control.

Speaking at the Sir Harry Evans Global Summit in Investigative Journalism in London, Diller said that freely allowing AI access to media content would prove to be a mistake, and that the notion of “fair use” — which can be used to cover copyrighted material in data sets for machine learning — needed to be redefined.

“You can’t have fair use when there is an unfair machine that knows no bounds,” said Diller, who chairs media and internet group IAC.

Media groups have grown concerned about the use of their publications as the basis for creating generative AI. News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson said this year that the group was already seeking financial compensation from an AI company for use of its “proprietary” content.

Diller said on Wednesday that he would work alongside News Corp and German publishing house Axel Springer in trying to protect their journalism from the threat.

“We are leading a group that is going to say we are going to change copyright law if necessary, to work to say that you cannot take our materials or we will litigate. What you publish you have the right to control,” he said.

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Yes, driving the price paid for journalism down to the ground is a job for Diller and Murdoch, not the damn machines.
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Google’s new Magic Editor uses AI to totally transform your photos • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Google’s latest Photos trick is a feature it’s calling Magic Editor, which uses generative AI to let you make major edits to a photo without professional tools. The company revealed the feature at Google I/O 2023.

Google shared a couple examples of Magic Editor in action that are both pretty cool. In one, a photo of a person in front of a waterfall, Google entirely moves the person further to the side of the photo, erases people in the background, and makes the sky a prettier blue. Watch this GIF to see it all happen:

GIF: Google

In another photo, Magic Editor scoots a child on a bench closer to the middle of the photo, which generates “new” parts of the bench and balloons to the left to fill in the space. In this example, Google again makes the sky more vibrant.

It’s impressive stuff — and a logical next step from photo features like Photo Unblur and Magic Eraser. It’s also not quite perfect given leftover artifacts like creases from the bag strap in the waterfall photo and a misplaced shadow under the bench in the second. But perhaps most importantly, it’s just the latest opportunity to think about what a “photo” even is anymore — a question that’s become ever more common given things like the iPhone 14 Pro’s ramped-up sharpening and Samsung’s faked Moon photos.

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You’d hope that the photo would reflect where items were when you took them, though, wouldn’t you? That seems like a basic element. Over-sharpened? Sure but it’s the same thing. Detail that isn’t there in the original? Sure, but it’s the same thing, in the same place. To me this is just a tweak too far.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: I forgot to include a link from 2004. Thus endeth the links from the past, I guess, because otherwise we’d quickly be including links from the future, and those are much harder to find.

Digital speedometers in cars don’t update in real time – but there’s a good user interface reason for that. CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. How fast, exactly? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI is coming to Google search through Search Generative Experience • The Verge

David Pierce:

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The future of Google Search is AI. But not in the way you think. The company synonymous with web search isn’t all in on chatbots (even though it’s building one, called Bard), and it’s not redesigning its homepage to look more like a ChatGPT-style messaging system. Instead, Google is putting AI front and center in the most valuable real estate on the internet: its existing search results. 

To demonstrate, Liz Reid, Google’s VP of Search, flips open her laptop and starts typing into the Google search box. “Why is sourdough bread still so popular?” she writes and hits enter. Google’s normal search results load almost immediately. Above them, a rectangular orange section pulses and glows and shows the phrase “Generative AI is experimental.” A few seconds later, the glowing is replaced by an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs detailing how good sourdough tastes, the upsides of its prebiotic abilities, and more. To the right, there are three links to sites with information that Reid says “corroborates” what’s in the summary.

Google calls this the “AI snapshot.” All of it is by Google’s large language models, all of it sourced from the open web. Reid then mouses up to the top right of the box and clicks an icon Google’s designers call “the bear claw,” which looks like a hamburger menu with a vertical line to the left. The bear claw opens a new view: the AI snapshot is now split sentence by sentence, with links underneath to the sources of the information for that specific sentence. This, Reid points out again, is corroboration. And she says it’s key to the way Google’s AI implementation is different. “We want [the LLM], when it says something, to tell us as part of its goal: what are some sources to read more about that?”

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Those links to those “some sources” are not going to be clicked on at all, are they. Google relies on other sources to provide the information it boils down. If nobody clicks on the links, there’s no business model for those sources, so they’ll have to rely on cheaper ways to source it.. such as AI-generated content. Which Google’s AI will index. Or else it’ll be Wikipedia.
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Will AI become the new McKinsey? • The New Yorker

Ted Chiang (the noted SF writer):

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I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about AI as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and AI systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with 90% of the Fortune 100—and AI are also clear. Social media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as AI promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalise the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, AI has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

The question we should be asking is: as AI becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey?

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Put like this, absolutely not. ChatGPT is going to be the cousin Greg of the corporate world (for those who are keeping up with Succession.)
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Wendy’s, Google train next-generation order taker: an AI chatbot • WSJ

Angus Loten:

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Wendy’s is automating its drive-through service using an artificial-intelligence chatbot powered by natural-language software developed by Google and trained to understand the myriad ways customers order off the menu.

With the move, Wendy’s is joining an expanding group of companies that are leaning on generative AI for growth. 

The Dublin, Ohio-based fast-food chain’s chatbot will be officially rolled out in June at a company-owned restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, Wendy’s said. The goal is to streamline the ordering process and prevent long lines in the drive-through lanes from turning customers away, said Wendy’s Chief Executive Todd Penegor. 

Wendy’s didn’t disclose the cost of the initiative beyond saying the company has been working with Google in areas like data analytics, machine learning and cloud tools since 2021. 

“It will be very conversational,” Mr. Penegor said about the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbots. “You won’t know you’re talking to anybody but an employee,” he said.

To do that, Wendy’s software engineers have been working with Google to build and fine-tune a generative AI application on top of Google’s own large language model, or LLM—a vast algorithmic software tool loaded with words, phrases and popular expressions in different dialects and accents and designed to recognize and mimic the syntax and semantics of human speech.

…Wendy’s customized language model includes unique terms, phrases and acronyms customers have come to use when ordering its burgers, fries and other items—such as “JBC” for junior bacon cheeseburger, or “biggie bags” for various combinations of burgers, chicken nuggets and soft drinks. Adding to the complexity, Wendy’s milkshakes are called Frosties, though customers may not always use the branded term.

“You may think driving by and speaking into a drive-through is an easy problem for AI, but it’s actually one of the hardest,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, the company’s cloud-computing division.

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So it is coming for the low-paid jobs first. Huh.
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Heather Armstrong, mommy blogger, dies at 47 • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz:

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Heather Armstrong, a pioneering blogger who transformed women’s media and altered the public perception of motherhood, has died at the age of 47.

Armstrong, who also went by her maiden name, Heather Hamilton, died by suicide, according to her boyfriend, Pete Ashdown, who told the Associated Press that he found her Tuesday night at their Salt Lake City home. Ashdown said that Armstrong had recently relapsed into alcoholism after remaining sober for more than 18 months.

…She founded the blog Dooce in 2001. It quickly amassed a dedicated following of young mothers who found Armstrong’s candid and deeply personal posts about the realities of motherhood captivating.

“She was a transformative figure not just in the parenting and family space, but in what we now take for granted in terms of the digital ecosystem,” said Catherine Connors, the senior vice president of creator experiences at the marketing firm Raptive and a former blogger. “She was one of the first well known bloggers in any category and had an absolutely radical impact when she began writing honestly about motherhood and her mental health issues.”

Armstrong detailed her struggles with postpartum depression, her conflicted emotions about parenting, her battles with alcoholism, her marriage, and eventual divorce. She broke taboos about religion, detailing her choice to leave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her death was announced on her Instagram page Wednesday.

Armstrong is credited by many with upending a women’s media world that until the early 2000s largely portrayed an idealized version of motherhood, a time when home life was considered private, and issues related to family and children were deemed too personal to discuss publicly.

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I wonder to what extent living her life online amplified or intensified her struggles. British media had women with imperfect lives turning it into well-paid fare long before Dooce. (Hello, Liz Jones, still going strong.)
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The 50 worst album covers by rock and metal bands • Louder

Simon Young:

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Before the days of streaming, rock and metal fans would flip through the racks at their local vinyl dealers and often buy an album based on its cover art. How many musicians have enthusiastically revealed that they got into Iron Maiden primarily based on Derek Riggs’ paintings of Eddie? 

But sometimes, bands get it wrong. This examination of the worst rock and metal album covers is not a comment on the music contained within, but more of a dry heave, a wince or a toe-curling cringe at some creative misfires which were designed, printed and placed in shops before anyone stopped for a moment to realise how awful the art was. 

Brace yourselves for what could be considered a crime in the art world.

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The amazing thing about so many of these album covers is how cheap the artwork is. A lot of it literally looks as though someone in the band drew the short straw. The Black Sabbath one is actually close to tolerable. (It’s the second on the list.) But then things really get bad. You have been warned.
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Why digital speedometers appear to update slowly • TomTom Blog

Matthew Beedham:

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A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a tweet criticizing the fact that digital speedometers don’t update faster than every half a second. In this era of high-power processors and high-refresh rate, high-resolution screens, the fact that modern car speedos take a perceptible amount of time to update is, on the surface, puzzling. It’s enough to drive some people “nuts”. Clearly, carmakers could make digital speedometers that update ultra-fast, so why don’t they?

…To put it bluntly, speedometers that update very fast, are constantly changing speed and update with a very high refresh rate are distracting and hard to use. Sure, they look cool in drag strip videos, but using them in the real world is quite different.

“I expect this has to do with reducing distraction and cognitive load in a glanceable display”, [TomTom UX designer Drew] Meehan tells me. “If you’re staring at this speed [in the BMW], it looks like it’s refreshing slowly, but in real-world driving conditions, a glance will simply catch a single number, which is easier for our eyes and brains to process.”
In a world of congestion and traffic, drivers must keep their eyes on the road as much as possible. Because they’re hard to read, fast-updating displays could become an unnecessary distraction and lure drivers into taking their eyes off the road for too long.

What’s more, a speedo that refreshes constantly, like a video game, makes it more difficult to settle on a given speed in the blink of an eye. There’s a chance your brain would see multiple numbers simultaneously rather than catching a single number.

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Pure Storage says no more spinning hard drives will be sold after 2028 • Blocks and Files

Chris Mellor:

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In the latest blast of the HDD vs SSD culture wars, a Pure Storage exec is predicting that no more hard disk drives will be sold after 2028 because of electricity costs and availability, as well as NAND $/TB declines.

Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&F: “The ultimate trigger here is power. It’s just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity.” Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure’s DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part.

[Rosemarin says: “…if I can eliminate the spinning disk, and I can move to flash, and I can in essence reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90% while moving density by orders of magnitude in an environment where NAND pricing continues to fall, it’s all becoming evident that hard drives go away.”

Are high electricity prices set to continue?

“I think the UK’s power has gone up almost 5x recently. And here’s the thing … when they go up, they very seldom if ever come down … I’ve been asked many times do I think the cost of electricity will drop over time. And, frankly, while I wish it would and I do think there are technologies like nuclear that could help us over time. I think it’ll take us several years to get there.”

“We’re already seeing countries putting quotas on electricity, and this is a really important one… we’ve already seen major hyperscalers such as one last summer who tried to enter Ireland [and] was told you can’t come here, we don’t have enough power for you.” 

“The next logical step from that is OK, so now if you’re a company and I start to say, well, we only have so much power, so I’m gonna give you X amount of kilowatts per X amount of employees, or I’m gonna give you X amount of kilowatts for X amount of revenue that you contribute to the GDP of the country or whatever metric is acceptable.”

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Apple’s first app subscription is here and now we’ll be paying for our devices forever • Macworld

Michael Simon:

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For the first time, Apple is introducing a subscription model for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, which will run $4.99 a month or $49 a year apiece after a one-month free trial. You can’t buy it outright even if you wanted to and it’s doubtful Apple will ever offer a “lite” version for a flat fee. As the Mandalorian would say, “This is the way.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time Apple has offered a subscription to one of its products. It sells a variety of services (TV , Music, iCloud , etc.) as well as the Apple One bundles. But it has long been rumored to be exploring hardware and software subscriptions to boost recurring sales. A Final Cut Pro subscription was referenced in a trademark filing years ago, and a hardware subscription service for the iPhone and other devices has been reportedly in the works for more than a year. So this was inevitable if not obvious.

While the Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro subscriptions make perfect sense on the iPad Pro, where people are less willing to spend hundreds of dollars upfront on a single app, it’s hard not to see the move as a sign of things to come. 

For the time being, the Mac version will stay as a one-time payment. As it stands, the Mac version of Final Cut Pro is still available for $299.99 while Logic Pro costs $199.99, but those prices seem unlikely to last. The last major update to Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro came in October 2021, so they’re due for updates, very possibly to version 11 later this year or early next. And I don’t think anyone would be surprised if Apple switches to a subscription model.

…Let’s face it: Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are trial balloons. If people balk at the costs, it’s a relatively low-risk endeavor, especially since users have been making do without these apps on their tablets for years. But if they subscribe in droves—and I’m pretty certain they will—it won’t be long before everything Apple sells, from the iPhone to the apps that run on it, will be a service.

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“If you want to imagine the future, Winston, think of a standing order paying for ever and ever.”
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October 2003: End of an era for Concorde • BBC On This Day

October 2003:

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The legendary supersonic aircraft, Concorde, has landed at the end of its last commercial passenger flight, amid emotional scenes at Heathrow airport.

The final transatlantic flight, ending 27 years of supersonic history, carried 100 celebrities from New York and touched down at 1605 BST.

As it did so, a huge cheer went up from the thousands of people gathered by the runway on a specially-built grandstand.

Two other Concorde flights had already landed a few minutes earlier, one carrying competition winners on a flight from Edinburgh, and the other completing a trip for invited guests around the Bay of Biscay.

All three aircraft taxied to the BA engineering base, the crews hanging out of the cockpit windows and waving Union Jacks to the crowds.

Actress Joan Collins, who has flown Concorde about 10 times and was on board the flight from New York, said the end of the era was “tragic”.

“The first time I ever flew Concorde was a bit of a white knuckle ride. I am more used to it now, it’s so wonderful to make the journey in three and a half hours,” she said.

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Concorde was taken out of service because it became even less profitable following a crash in July 2000 just after takeoff when one of its fuel tanks was ruptured by debris on the runway at Charles de Gaulle airport. Strengthening the fuel tanks and guarding against the problem happening again made it (even )heavier. In retrospect, the principle of supersonic passenger jets seems even more crazy given the environmental damage we know they cause.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new Tesla scheme aims to tempt early buyers who were given free Supercharger use for life away – presumably because it’s a money drain. CC-licensed photo by Jakob Härter 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.

Wait for Friday, when there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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

Tucker Carlson to revive show on Twitter after Fox News dismissal • The Guardian

Kari Paul:

»

Tucker Carlson will be reviving his show on Twitter, after being abruptly dismissed from Fox News last month.

In a tweet captioned “We’re back,” Carlson on Tuesday shared a video discussing his next moves. The former host said he would be taking his show to Twitter, which he described as “the last remaining platform in the world” to allow free speech.

Carlson offered few details but promised a “new version of the show we’ve been doing for the last six and a half years”. He did not mention when the show may air. But he did echo many of the same points he has often asserted: that the so-called mainstream media is full of propaganda and lies.

“Twitter is not a partisan site, everybody’s allowed here and we think that’s a good thing,” he said. “And yet, for the most part, the news that you see analyzed on Twitter comes from media organizations that are themselves thinly disguised propaganda outlets.”

Carlson’s pivot to Twitter comes after the site has become more welcoming to mostly-conservative accounts previously banned for spreading hate speech and disinformation under Elon Musk’s new direction. The billionaire took over the site in October 2022 and promptly allowed previously banished accounts to return, including that of Donald Trump.

Carlson did not make any mention of Musk in his video. Twitter responded to a request for comment with a poop emoji.

«

Comes just as Fox News reports a $54m loss for its first quarter, mostly due to its legal settlement (nearly $800m) to Dominion for lying about the 2020 election.

The key question is: will Carlson’s audience (older, right-wing) really come to Twitter (younger, left-wing)? If it’s a revenue share for ads shown in the “show”, who gets more – Twitter, or Carlson? Can it be profitable for Carlson? Will advertisers withdraw even further in the face of this right-wing lurch? The pivot to video either kills or cures. Let’s see how this one goes.
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Almost half of YouTube viewership happens on TV screens • Insider Intelligence

Daniel Konstantinovic:

»

Nearly half (45%) of all YouTube viewership takes place on TVs, according to internal figures, up from below 30% in 2020. The fast growth has propelled YouTube from a digital-only platform often left out of the conversation of broader entertainment and TV advertising to a direct, major competitor with the world’s largest streaming services.

Time spent watching YouTube on TVs now exceeds any other individual network or streaming service, according to Nielsen data cited by The Information.

YouTube’s viewership on TV screens likely increased as a result of pandemic lockdowns, but it’s far from a fad. The company has been making moves to capture a greater share of connected TV (CTV) audiences, and even before the pandemic, viewership was on the rise.

In March 2020, YouTube viewership on TV screens was up 80% from March 2019, and ad spend was similarly rising. Since then, YouTube has launched a number of quality-of-life features to make the viewing and search experience on TV screens easy, such as allowing the YouTube mobile app to be used as a remote.

Growth isn’t just being driven by YouTube TV, the company’s pay TV offering. In fact, the majority of TV user growth is coming from YouTube’s free, standard service.

«

Quite astonishing. Not absolutely clear whether that’s viewing inside the US or around the world. Means that YouTube Premium becomes just another streaming subscription for many families. Does the same radicalisation process that happens for other YouTube viewers happen with them too?
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US says it has disabled major Russian cyberespionage operation • The Washington Post

Perry Stein:

»

Federal law enforcement officials said Tuesday that they have hacked and disabled a complex Russian cyberespionage operation that allegedly was used for about 20 years to steal sensitive government materials from the United States and its allies.

Justice Department and FBI officials described the Russian operation as one of the country’s most powerful cyberespionage tools. They said the agency has been secretly investigating the network for nearly as long it was in operation but executed a court-authorized search warrant only this week to remotely hamper the Russian malware.

Law enforcement personnel had to surreptitiously develop their own cyberinfrastructure to interact with and disrupt the malware, which the Russians were constantly updating and changing, the officials said.
The U.S. government, which coordinated its investigative activities with foreign governments, also had to time the execution of the search warrant to access the compromised computers simultaneously to keep the Russians from reacting and thwarting the operation.

The law enforcement officials said they believe their actions this week will make it difficult for Russia to continuing operating this spying network.

…FBI officials said the malware, known as “Snake,” was developed and operated by the Federal Security Service, the Russian government’s main security agency, which uses the acronym FSB.

The Russians allegedly used the malware to steal sensitive information from computer systems in at least 50 countries, including members of the NATO alliance, and to spy on journalists and other Russian “targets of interest,” the officials said.

«

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TikTok tracked users who watched gay content, prompting employee complaints • WSJ

Georgia Wells and Byron Tau:

»

For at least a year, some employees at TikTok were able to find what they described internally as a list of users who watch gay content on the popular app, a collection of information that sparked worker complaints, according to former TikTok employees.

TikTok doesn’t ask users to disclose their sexual orientation, but it cataloged videos users watched under topics such as LGBT, short for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, the former employees said. The collection of information, which could be viewed by some employees through a dashboard, included a set of affiliated users who watched those videos, and their ID numbers, they said.

Other topics in TikTok’s data set also included lists of users, but the former employees didn’t consider those topics to be sensitive. TikTok workers in the US, UK and Australia in 2020 and 2021 raised concerns about this practice to higher-level executives, saying they feared employees might share the data with outside parties, or that it could be used to blackmail users, according to some of the former TikTok employees.

Many social-media and ad-tech companies infer traits about their users based on online behavior. They use it to select which content or ads to serve to users.

Social-media and ad-tech industry practices, however, discourage tracking potentially sensitive traits such as sexuality, according to people who work with digital information. This data can essentially create a list of vulnerable users in parts of the world where some LGBT people face harassment and violence.

«

These stories come out, like bankruptcy, slowly and then all at once. But the behaviour is always something constant. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. This is company culture.
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Tesla tries to get owners to give up ‘unlimited free Supercharging for life’ • Electrek

Fred Lambert:

»

For the first few years of selling Model S and Model X, Tesla was offering free Supercharging for the vehicle’s life.

It was a really enticing offer since you could technically not have to pay to power your vehicle ever. Of course, that’s if you don’t charge at home and only use the Supercharger network, which is not ideal for most people, but it is an extremely valuable perk for some power users.

In 2018, Tesla ended the perk after claiming that it was unsustainable – though it did temporarily bring it back as a sale incentive at times.

There are still today a few hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles with unlimited free Supercharging around the world.

Earlier this year, Tesla made a first effort to try to get those vehicles off the perk by offering owners an extra $5,000 discount if they trade in a Model S and Model X with unlimited free Supercharging.

Now Tesla is doubling down on this effort by launching what it calls a new “Ownership Loyalty Benefit.”
The automaker is offering those owners six years of unlimited Supercharging when buying a new Model S or Model X by the end of the quarter.

The offer makes it clear that the goal is to remove unlimited Supercharging:

»

Current Tesla Model S or Model X owners with active unlimited free Supercharging are eligible for 6 years of unlimited Supercharging. To qualify, owners must trade in or remove unlimited Supercharging from their vehicle and take delivery of a new Model S or Model X by June 30, 2023.

«

«

Always a problem when you offer a “free for life” product early on: what if it’s too popular? It’s much like the problem that some airlines had with “free for life” flights.
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Nearly 50 news websites are ‘AI-generated’, a study says. Would I be able to tell? • The Guardian

Matthew Cantor:

»

Breaking news from celebritiesdeaths.com: the president is dead.

At least that’s what the highly reliable website informed its readers last month, under the no-nonsense headline “Biden dead. Harris acting president, address 9am ET”. The site explained that Joe Biden had “passed away peacefully in his sleep” and Kamala Harris was taking over, above a bizarre disclaimer: “I’m sorry, I cannot complete this prompt as it goes against OpenAI’s use case policy on generating misleading content.”

Celebritiesdeaths.com is among 49 supposed news sites that NewsGuard, an organization tracking misinformation, has identified as “almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software”. The sites publish up to hundreds of articles daily, according to the report, much of that material containing signs of AI-generated content, including “bland language and repetitive phrases”. Some of the articles contain false information and many of the sites are packed with ads, suggesting they’re intended to make money via programmatic, or algorithmically generated, advertising. The sources of the stories aren’t clear: many lack bylines or use fake profile photos. In other words, NewsGuard says, experts’ fears that entire news organizations could be generated by AI have already become reality.

It’s hard to imagine who would believe this stuff – if Biden had died, the New York Times would probably cover it – and all 49 sites contain at least one instance of AI error messaging containing phrases such as “I cannot complete this prompt” or “as an AI language model”. But, as Futurism points out, a big concern here is that false information on the sites could serve as the basis for future AI content, creating a vicious cycle of fake news.

What do these sites look like – and would AI articles always be as easy to spot as the report of Biden’s death? I spent an afternoon in the brave new world of digital nonsense to find out.

«

It is quite scary how junk these sites are, and yet they’ll also benefit by siphoning off colossal amounts of advertising revenue.
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People are arguing in court that real images are deepfakes • NPR

Shannon Bond:

»

In 2016, Elon Musk went on stage at a tech conference outside Los Angeles and made a bold statement about the self-driving capability of Teslas.

“A Model S and Model X at this point can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person. Right now,” the CEO told the Code Conference audience during a Q&A session following his interview with tech journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

Video of the session has been up on YouTube for nearly seven years. But it recently came back into the spotlight as part of a lawsuit brought by the family of a man who died when his Tesla crashed while using the self-driving feature. The family’s lawyers cited that 2016 claim, along with others Musk has made about Tesla’s self-driving software.

But the carmaker’s lawyers pushed back.

Musk, “like many public figures, is the subject of many ‘deepfake’ videos and audio recordings that purport to show him saying and doing things he never actually said or did,” they wrote in a court filing, going on to describe several fake videos of the billionaire

…In Musk’s case, the judge did not buy his lawyers’ claims.

“What Tesla is contending is deeply troubling to the Court,” Judge Evette Pennypacker wrote in a ruling ordering Musk to testify under oath.

“Their position is that because Mr. Musk is famous and might be more of a target for deepfakes, his public statements are immune,” she wrote. “In other words, Mr. Musk, and others in his position, can simply say whatever they like in the public domain, then hide behind the potential for their recorded statements being a deepfake to avoid taking ownership of what they did actually say and do. The Court is unwilling to set such a precedent by condoning Tesla’s approach here.”.

«

Totally predictable, in its way.
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Spotify ejects thousands of AI-made songs in purge of fake streams • FT via Ars Technica

Anna Nicolaou:

»

Spotify has removed tens of thousands of songs from artificial intelligence music startup Boomy, ramping up policing of its platform amid complaints of fraud and clutter across streaming services.

In recent months the music industry has been confronting the rise of AI-generated songs and, more broadly, the growing number of tracks inundating streaming platforms daily.

Spotify, the largest audio streaming business, recently took down about 7% of the tracks that had been uploaded by Boomy, the equivalent of “tens of thousands” of songs, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Recording giant Universal Music had flagged to all the main streaming platforms that it saw suspicious streaming activity on Boomy tracks, according to another person close to the situation.

The Boomy songs were removed because of suspected “artificial streaming”—online bots posing as human listeners to inflate the audience numbers for certain songs.

AI has made this type of activity easier because it allows someone to instantly generate many music tracks, which can then be uploaded online and streamed.

Boomy, which was launched two years ago, allows users to choose various styles or descriptors, such as “rap beats” or “rainy nights,” to create a machine-generated track. Users can then release the music to streaming services, where they will generate royalty payments. California-based Boomy says its users have created more than 14 million songs.

«

And so the arms race enters a new stage.
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March 2002: Woman granted ‘right to die’ • BBC On This Day

March 2002:

»

A woman paralysed from the neck down has won the legal right to die by having her treatment withdrawn.

The judge in the case then urged her to reconsider her decision.

The 43-year-old woman, known as Miss B after she was granted anonymity, watched via a video-link from her hospital bed as Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss delivered the landmark ruling.

Miss B, who was born in Jamaica but moved to Britain aged eight, said afterwards: “I am very pleased with the outcome.”

It means doctors at the hospital where she is being treated, which cannot be identified, will have to switch off the ventilator keeping her alive whenever she chooses.

Dame Elizabeth said the former social care professional had the “necessary mental capacity” to make the decision to reject treatment. But she added: “She is a splendid person and it is tragic that someone of her ability has been struck down so cruelly.

«

This seemed to some as though the door to assisted suicide was being opened, but in fact it was just the normal adult right to refuse treatment. More than 20 years later, assisted suicide still isn’t legal in the UK, despite numerous test cases.

(If you’re wondering why I’m including stories from years past, it’s because they match the number of today’s edition! Don’t worry, ends this week. Otherwise I’d be bringing you news from the future, which would be quite a feat.
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The UK’s Online Safety Bill, explained • The Verge

Jon Porter:

»

The UK government’s elevator pitch is that the bill is fundamentally an attempt to make the internet safer, particularly for children. It attempts to crack down on illegal content like child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and to minimize the possibility that kids might encounter harmful and age-inappropriate content, including online harassment as well as content that glorifies suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders.

But it’s difficult to TL;DR the Online Safety Bill at this point, precisely because it’s become so big and sprawling. On top of these broad strokes, the bill has a host of other rules. It requires online platforms to let people filter out objectionable content. It introduces age verification for porn sites. It criminalizes fraudulent ads. It requires sites to consistently enforce their terms of service. And if companies don’t comply, they could be fined up to £18m (around $22.5m) or 10% of global revenue, see their services blocked, and even their executives jailed.

In short, the Online Safety Bill has become a catchall for UK internet regulation, mutating every time a new prime minister or digital minister has taken up the cause.

«

This is a good writeup, though there’s still disagreement about what the encryption element entails. A Tory MP (Damian Collins, who sits on the relevant committee) insisted on Tuesday that what’s required is not decryption of messages, but to reveal (if required) any metadata collected about encrypted messaging. I wouldn’t be absolutely sure that he’s right and all the companies are wrong, however.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There are signs that Mark Zuckerberg’s excitement about the metaverse is waning in favour of AI. Well, who can blame him? It’s what people want. CC-licensed photo by Steve Jurvetson 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.

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

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

Google IO to feature AI updates, showing off PaLM 2 LLM • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

Artificial intelligence is going to be a central theme at Google’s annual developer conference on Wednesday, as the company is planning to announce a number of generative AI updates, including launching a general-use large language model (LLM), CNBC has learned.

According to internal documents about Google I/O viewed by CNBC, the company will unveil PaLM 2, its most recent and advanced LLM. PaLM 2 includes more than 100 languages and has been operating under the internal codename “Unified Language Model.” It’s also performed a broad range of coding and math tests as well as creative writing tests and analysis.

At the event, Google will make announcements on the theme of how AI is “helping people reach their full potential,” including “generative experiences” to Bard and Search, the documents show. Pichai will be speaking to a live crowd of developers as he pitches his company’s AI advancements.

The updates come as competition ramps up in the AI arm’s race, with Google and Microsoft racing to incorporate chat AI technology into their products. Microsoft is using its investment in ChatGPT creator OpenAI to bolster its Bing search engine, while Google has quickly mobilized to try and incorporate its Bard technology and its own LLM across various teams.

Google first announced the PaLM language model in April of 2022. In March of this year, the company launched an API for PaLM alongside a number of AI enterprise tools it says will help businesses “generate text, images, code, videos, audio, and more from simple natural language prompts.” 

Last month, Google said its medical LLM called “Med-PaLM 2” can answer medical exam questions at an “expert doctor level” and is accurate 85% of the time.

«

Remember that sorta-AI doodad which was going to phone your hairdresser and make an appointment for you? Whatever happened to that? Google has a bad habit of announcing things at I/O which don’t appear. Maybe these will be different?
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May 2001: Scientists warn of more CJD cases • BBC On This Day

May 2001:

»

Leading experts on new variant CJD, the human form of BSE or “mad cow” disease, have warned the current outbreak could get much worse.

So far, 99 people have had the disease and nearly all of them have died.

New evidence gathered from experiments on mice suggests this first batch of cases could be followed in a few years’ time by a much larger “second wave”.

Professor John Collinge is one of the government’s top advisors on vCJD and director of the Medical Research Council Prion Unit in London.

He has found that a small number of the mice he observed got vCJD fairly quickly while the rest had a longer incubation period before contracting the disease.

“I don’t want to be alarmist about this,” he said “but it’s entirely possible and we have to consider that what we are looking at, at the moment is, thankfully, a very small incidence of the disease amongst a small sub-section of the population. It may be five or ten years before the rest of the population of those at risk develop the disease.”

«

The government had admitted the existence of vCJD back in 1996, but there was still uncertainty about how many people might develop the disease – an awful descent into helplessness as holes developed in the brain. I discovered a study, which wasn’t published, by the official vCJD unit, which estimated the final death toll would be in the hundreds, perhaps peaking in 2003.

The most recent figures show 178 deaths since the first ones were recorded in 1995, with none from 2017. The peak, of 28 deaths, was in 2000.
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The Metaverse, Zuckerberg’s tech obession, is officially dead. ChatGPT killed it • Business Insider

Ed Zitron:

»

The Metaverse fell seriously ill as the economy slowed and the hype around generative AI grew. Microsoft shuttered its virtual-workspace platform AltSpaceVR in January 2023, laid off the 100 members of its “industrial metaverse team,” and made a series of cuts to its HoloLens team. Disney shuttered its Metaverse division in March, and Walmart followed suit by ending its Roblox-based Metaverse projects. The billions of dollars invested and the breathless hype around a half-baked concept led to thousands — if not tens of thousands — of people losing their jobs.

But the Metaverse was officially pulled off life support when it became clear that Zuckerberg and the company that launched the craze had moved on to greener financial pastures. Zuckerberg declared in a March update that Meta’s “single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products.” Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, told CNBC in April that he, along with Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, were now spending most of their time on AI. The company has even stopped pitching the Metaverse to advertisers, despite spending more than $100 billion in research and development on its mission to be “Metaverse first.” While Zuckerberg may suggest that developing games for the Quest headsets is some sort of investment, the writing is on the wall: Meta is done with the Metaverse.

«

Zitron is (when he’s not being a PR guy) a polemicist, rather than a journalist. However it’s hard to disagree: everyone’s talking about ChatGPT, nobody’s talking about the metaverse. Got to feel Apple’s going to be facing some serious headwinds if it does release a VR headset. (I’m still sceptical.)
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I know the motive behind every mass shooting • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Kimberly Harrington:

»

“The shooting came barely a week after a man fatally shot five people in Cleveland, Texas, after a neighbor asked him to stop firing his weapon while a baby slept. It also follows other rampages in recent days, including the fatal shootings of six victims in a home in Oklahoma City on Monday, and gunfire that killed one and injured four in a medical facility in Atlanta on Wednesday.” — NBC News

CLEVELAND, TEXAS: The shooter’s motive was to kill people using a gun.

OKLAHOMA CITY: The shooter’s motive was to kill people using a gun.

ATLANTA: The shooter’s motive was to kill people using a gun.

I’m not a cop, a star witness, an FBI agent, or a forensic psychologist. I’m not a clairvoyant, I’m bad at math, and I lie to my doctor about doing regular breast exams. But even I—an ordinary American citizen with soft morals and the ability to take in basic information and discern simple patterns—know what the motive was behind every mass shooting. Every single one.

«

Put like this, it is pretty obvious. All the chin-scratching around whether the latest mass shooting was by someone who was an extreme right-winger or just a bit right-wing or what tends to overlook this simple, basic fact: such people exist in other countries too, including the UK. And yet: the mass shootings are a thing you only find in the US. Because…

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Florida tosses climate lifeline to swamped ‘Keybillies’ • E&E News

Daniel Cusick:

»

A steady outflow of low- and middle-income residents — beginning after Hurricane Wilma in 2005 and again after 2017’s Hurricane Irma — has demographically reshaped Big Pine Key. Longtime residents who work the service and labour jobs undergirding the Keys’ multibillion-dollar tourism economy are being squeezed out. New people with deeper pockets and greater mobility are moving in, often with cash in hand.

In the years after Wilma, Big Pine Key lost a fourth of its population, bottoming out at 3,777 people in 2012, according to Census Bureau data. It rebounded over the next decade — a relatively quiet period for Florida hurricanes — peaking at 5,339 in 2017. Then came Irma, the Keys’ second-strongest storm in a century. It whittled Big Pine Key’s population back down to 4,521 in three years, a 15% drop.

After each hurricane, Big Pine Key’s low-income residents had little to return to, and those who did found themselves packed into substandard houses or mobile home parks. Some sprawling trailer communities with reputations for colorful tenants and rough-and-ready living shuttered after Irma, drawing complaints of no-notice evictions and money-grubbing landlords.

What a difference five years makes. Big Pine Key is rebuilding again, and real estate values have nearly doubled since Irma, from $390,000 in 2018 to $777,000 in 2022, according to the real estate site Redfin. Cleared lots are going for six figures, and even unbuildable lots bound by state-imposed growth restrictions can fetch $80,000 or more. Those prices are putting added pressure on long-term Keys residents.

[Saima] Kawzinsky and her fiancé of 10 years currently pay $1,650 per month in rent for a 2-bedroom elevated home built by an affordable housing land trust created by a local philanthropist.

“We want to buy a house, but it’s getting harder and harder,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s either going to be me and my family living an underwater lifestyle or leaving and getting our heads just above water.”

«

“Her fiancé of 10 years” is a phrase that tells its own story. Of course climate change is affecting the low-paid in America first; that’s how it’s going to go everywhere.
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TikTok spied on me. Why? • FT via Ars Technica

Cirstina Criddle:

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One evening in late December last year, I received a cryptic phone call from a PR director at TikTok, the popular social media app. I’d written extensively about the company for the Financial Times, so we’d spoken before. But it was puzzling to hear from her just before the holidays, especially since I wasn’t working on anything related to the company at the time.

The call lasted less than a minute. She wanted me to know, “as a courtesy,” that The New York Times had just published a story I ought to read. Confused by this unusual bespoke news alert, I asked why. But all she said was that it concerned an inquiry at ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, and that I should call her back once I’d read it.

The story claimed ByteDance employees accessed two reporters’ data through their TikTok accounts. Personal information, including their physical locations, had been used as part of an attempt to find the writers’ sources, after a series of damaging stories about ByteDance. According to the report, two employees in China and two in the US left the company following an internal investigation. In a staff memo, ByteDance’s chief executive lamented the incident as the “misconduct of a few individuals.”

When I phoned the PR director back, she confirmed I was one of the journalists who had been surveilled. I put down my phone and wondered what it meant that a company I reported on had gone to such lengths to restrict my ability to do so. Over the following months, the episode became just one in a long series of scandals and crises that call into question what TikTok really is, and whether the company has the world-dominating future that once seemed inevitable.

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Even the FT’s security team couldn’t stop TikTok trying to invade her privacy.
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The new Microsoft Bing AI wants to be the future of everything • Fast Company

Ryan Broderick:

»

The new version of Bing runs on OpenAI’s newest language model, GPT-4. It integrates it further into the Bing search engine and the Edge web browser and centralizes all of its various processes into one interface—including the ability to generate images right in the same window, using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image tool. But Bing AI doesn’t just pull all of this into one window, it offers some significant upgrades on how these services work.

The big addition to Bing is chat history. If you’ve never used OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the AI creates a thread for every query you ask. If you come back to that thread, the AI just picks up where you left off. Bing now has that feature, as well, but it also allows you to name your chat threads, organize them, and export them to a PDF or Microsoft Word document.

Bing also has real-time access to Bing search results, a feature that, in its early stages, led to critics describing it as “psychotic.” The chatbot seems a lot more mild-mannered these days, and as a guard against fake results (aka hallucinations), when it returns summaries, it does so with citations pulled in from Bing search. Even more impressive, when running Bing’s AI inside the Edge browser, it can summarize long articles and will include in-page citations, allowing you to find the exact text it’s referencing.

I asked Bing for advice about where to go while I’m on a trip in Milan next week, and it spit out five decent-enough suggestions. It also allowed me to click on the links it was summarizing and then, via an AI chatbot sidebar in the Edge browser, it was able to answer specific questions about the web page I was viewing.

Sarah Mody, Microsoft’s director of global search and AI product marketing, tells Fast Company that they’re hoping to inspire “magic moments,” where the AI suddenly surprises you with what it’s capable of. For her, it was a realization that Bing AI could not only generate a recipe, but also organize the ingredients based on where they would likely be found in the supermarket (an admittedly impressive feat).

«

OK, it’s impressive – for about ten seconds. But you have to go around the supermarket. Sure, vegetables will be by the entrance and drinks nearer the exit, but don’t you know, Bing, that this stuff gets shuffled around all the time?

Anyhow, the tsunami continues.
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Your Twitter feed sucks now. These free add-ons can help • WIRED

Justin Pot:

»

I’m not here to judge anyone who pays for Twitter Blue. However, I’m not a fan of pay-to-win mechanics. At this point, Twitter is a game where players compete for the most attention; Twitter Blue is overpowered DLC [downloadable content]. If you buy a subscription, your tweets are shown at the top of comment threads and prioritized in other contexts, including the “For You” page. This makes Blue the social media equivalent of paying for unlimited ammo or improved body armour, regardless of who you are or whether what you have to say is worth promoting.

It also makes Twitter really annoying to use. No one wants to play with the people who are paying to win. That’s why there’s so much mockery of, and desire to avoid, Twitter Blue users.

Granted, there are plenty of reasons why longtime Twitter power users—in particular, public figures or people who historically have trouble with impersonators—might pay for Twitter Blue. No one wants to lose an audience they worked hard to build, and Twitter has the right to monetize itself however it likes. You also have the right to consume (or not consume) the social media you choose.

All the same, it can’t be denied that a lot of really annoying posts from Twitter Blue users with low follower counts show up in all kinds of contexts. If you don’t want to see those posts, I don’t blame you, and here’s how you can filter them all out.

«

Basically, use a Chrome extension. Or just look at the people you’re Following. (Though I suspect that some of the people who you follow are shifted to the For You tab, meaning you miss them. Can’t prove it, though.)
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Marissa Mayer on AI, tech fears, and Yahoo regrets • Morning Brew

Patrick Kulp speaks to the ex-CEO of Yahoo, ex-veep of Google, who is now running an AI startup that wants to organise your contacts list:

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PK: If there is one thing that you could have done differently in your time at Yahoo, what would it be?

MM: My perspective on Yahoo is there are probably three things I would have done differently. One is obvious—I hired the wrong COO; I would have hired a different COO. I would have hired [current Integral Ad Science CEO] Lisa Utzschneider, who became my chief revenue officer. And that would have been great.

We looked at a transformative acquisition, and we bought Tumblr [for $1.1bn]. At the same time, we were also considering whether it was possible to buy Hulu or, ironically, Netflix. And I think Netflix was $4bn and Hulu was at $1.3bn at the time. And either of those, with hindsight being 20/20, would have been a better acquisition.

And probably the biggest one—if you made me name just one—is that we should have done the tax-free Alibaba spinoff to separate the assets of the company. Because one, if we had done that, it would have saved $10bn for our shareholders or made them that money, whichever way you look at it, in taxes that were paid. And two, it would have allowed Yahoo to continue as an independent company, and it would have potentially had more success. Now it is an independent company and privately held by private equity. But I’m not sure that the foray through Verizon was as helpful to some of the technologies and what they had to offer as it could have been.

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Of course you’re wondering who the “wrong COO” was. It was Henrique de Castro, who she hired over from Google but binned after a year (to January 2014)

Wonder if Netflix would have been for sale. It would have been a brutal takeover fight, and probably would have flamed out over the huge cashflow problem: Mayer would have wanted to data it to death, but Netflix is a content company, not a data company. So, bullet dodged.
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The Millennium Bridge opened in London in 2000 – and almost immediately closed because pedestrians made it sway. And sway. CC-licensed photo by pablocanenpablocanen 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 was another post on Friday at the Social Warming Substack – about the challenge of moderating Twitter. Free signup.

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

AI is tearing Wikipedia apart • Vice

Claire Woodcock:

»

It didn’t take long for researchers to figure out that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a terrible fabricator, which is what tends to doom students who rely solely on the chatbot to write their essays. Sometimes it will invent articles and their authors. Other times it will name-splice lesser known scholars with more prolific ones, but will do so with the utmost confidence. OpenAI has even said that the model “hallucinates” when it makes up facts—a term that has been criticized by some AI experts as a way for AI companies to avoid accountability for their tools spreading misinformation. 

“The risk for Wikipedia is people could be lowering the quality by throwing in stuff that they haven’t checked,” Bruckman added. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using it as a first draft, but every point has to be verified.” 

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the website, is looking into building tools to make it easier for volunteers to identify bot-generated content. Meanwhile, Wikipedia is working to draft a policy that lays out the limits to how volunteers can use large language models to create content.

The current draft policy notes that anyone unfamiliar with the risks of large language models should avoid using them to create Wikipedia content, because it can open the Wikimedia Foundation up to libel suits and copyright violations—both of which the nonprofit gets protections from but the Wikipedia volunteers do not.

…The community is also divided on whether large language models should be allowed to train on Wikipedia content. While open access is a cornerstone of Wikipedia’s design principles, some worry the unrestricted scraping of internet data allows AI companies like OpenAI to exploit the open web to create closed commercial datasets for their models. This is especially a problem if the Wikipedia content itself is AI-generated, creating a feedback loop of potentially biased information, if left unchecked.

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June 2000: Swaying Millennium Bridge closed • BBC On This Day

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Huge crowds of people have been blamed for forcing the temporary closure of London’s new bridge on the day of its opening.

The city’s first new river crossing for decades began swaying violently in the wind under the weight of hundreds of pedestrians on Saturday morning.

Police became concerned and the bridge was closed briefly while engineers made safety checks to the structure.

A limit was subsequently imposed on the number of pedestrians allowed to cross the bridge, which spans the Thames from St Paul’s Cathedral to the Tate Modern gallery on the South Bank.

A spokesman for architects Foster and Partners who designed the bridge with engineers Ove Arup and Partners said: “Because there was such a huge number walking all at once across the bridge, which is very unusual, there was a certain amount of swaying.

“The bridge is intended to have some movement. It’s a suspension bridge – if there isn’t movement there can be a problem.”

Pedestrians had to wait for half an hour before they were able to continue crossing the bridge.

The project cost more than £18m and was designed by architect Sir Norman Foster and the British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro.

«

This was a fascinating story: the problem was that people walking really did cause it to sway unpleasantly. Arup were properly surprised. It required £5m worth of 91 dampers to stop the movement. I wrote about it for The Independent; it was a sort of British Tacoma Narrows, except stopping well short of the self-destruction.
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Which jobs will be most impacted by ChatGPT? • Visual Capitalist

»

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI heralded a new era of artificial intelligence (AI) by introducing ChatGPT to the world.

The AI chatbot stunned users with its human-like and thorough responses. ChatGPT could comprehend and answer a variety of different questions, make suggestions, research and write essays and briefs, and even tell jokes (amongst other tasks).

Many of these skills are used by workers in their jobs across the world, which begs the question: which jobs will be transformed, or even replaced, by generative AI in the coming future?

This infographic from Harrison Schell visualizes the March 2023 findings of OpenAI on the potential labor market impact of large language models (LLMs) and various applications of generative AI, including ChatGPT.

«

“High exposure” to the change, apparently, will be jobs which fit in these categories: interpreters + translators; survey researchers; writers and authors; public relations specialists; tax preparers; mathematicians; blockchain engineers; proofreaders and copy markers; accountants and auditors.

“Low exposure”: athletes, automotive repairers, cement masons, cooks, piledriver operators, stonemasons, tire repairers and changers, dishwashers, carpenter helpers.

To which I have a few queries: “blockchain engineers”?? And what’s the difference between a “tax preparer” and an accountant/auditor? Doesn’t one subsume the other? Also, presumably crane operators are there with piledriver operators. Though “athlete” sounds more fun. (Not listed on either side: “Wikipedia contributor”.)
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Ex-Googlers blast Geoffrey Hinton’s past silence on fired AI experts • Fast Company

Wilfred Chan:

»

women who for years have been speaking out about AI’s problems—even at the expense of their jobs—say Hinton’s alarmism isn’t just opportunistic but also overshadows specific warnings about AI’s actual impacts on marginalized people.

“It’s disappointing to see this autumn-years redemption tour from someone who didn’t really show up” for other Google dissenters, says Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation and an AI researcher who says she was pushed out of Google in 2019 in part over her activism against the company’s contract to build machine vision technology for U.S. military drones. (Google has maintained that Whittaker chose to resign.)

“I didn’t see any solidarity or any action when there were people really trying to organize and do something about the harms that are happening now,” she says.

Another prominent ex-Googler, Margaret Mitchell, who co-led the company’s ethical AI team, criticized Hinton for not denouncing Google’s 2020 firing of her coleader Timnit Gebru, a leading researcher who had spoken up about AI’s risks for women and people of color. 

“This would’ve been a moment for Dr. Hinton to denormalize the firing of [Gebru],” Mitchell tweeted on Monday. “He did not. This is how systemic discrimination works.”

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Do colonoscopies really save lives? • The Science Writer

John Horgan:

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NordICC, for Nordic-European Initiative on Colorectal Cancer, is the first large-scale, randomized trial of colonoscopy. The study focused on 84,585 men and women 55-64 years old in Sweden, Norway, Poland and the Netherlands. The researchers randomly divided subjects into two groups: one invited to get a colonoscopy, the other not. 

NordICC measured rates of death from colon cancer and from any cause in these two groups after 10 years. Some researchers favor “all-cause” mortality, because tests and treatments for a specific cancer can result in deaths unattributed to that cancer.

Colonoscopy can cause perforation of the colon, bleeding and infection; patients may also have adverse reactions to purging of the bowels and sedation. A 2016 study of 331,880 people who underwent colonoscopies found that 1.6% had complications serious enough to require “unplanned hospital visits” within one week. 

NordICC found that the risk of death from colon cancer after 10 years was 0.28% in the invited group and 0.31% in the control group. The difference in risk of death from any cause was even smaller: 11.03% in the invited group and 11.04% in the uninvited group. These are not statistically significant differences.

Defenders of colonoscopy seize on the fact that only 42% of the NordICC subjects invited to get a colonoscopy actually got it; this group’s mortality rate from colon cancer was 0.15, significantly less than the control rate of 0.31. The Colon Cancer Coalition says this finding confirms that “colonoscopy saves lives.” But this lower mortality rate might reflect self-selection bias, precisely what NordICC was designed to overcome.

«

Horgan also suggests following the money (which, in the US, would certainly make sense), which takes you to companies which benefit a lot from carrying out colonoscopies.
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IPCC’s conservative nature masks true scale of action needed to avert catastrophic climate change • The Conversation

Kevin Anderson is professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester:

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If we step outside the rarefied realm of IAM [climate modelling] scenarios that leading climate scientist Johan Rockström describes as “academic gymnastics that have nothing to do with reality”, it’s clear that not exceeding 1.5°C or 2°C [of excess warming] will require fundamental changes to most facets of modern life.

Starting now, to not exceed 1.5°C of warming requires 11% year-on-year cuts in emissions, falling to nearer 5% for 2°C. However, these global average rates ignore the core concept of equity, central to all UN climate negotiations, which gives “developing country parties” a little longer to decarbonise.

Include equity and most “developed” nations need to reach zero CO₂ emissions between 2030 and 2035, with developing nations following suit up to a decade later. Any delay will shrink these timelines still further.

Most IAM models ignore and often even exacerbate the obscene inequality in energy use and emissions, both within nations and between individuals. As the International Energy Agency recently reported, the top 10% of emitters accounted for nearly half of global CO₂ emissions from energy use in 2021, compared with 0.2% for the bottom 10%. More disturbingly, the greenhouse gas emissions of the top 1% are 1.5 times those of the bottom half of the world’s population.

So where does this leave us? In wealthier nations, any hope of arresting global heating at 1.5ºC or 2°C demands a technical revolution on the scale of the post-war Marshall Plan. Rather than relying on technologies such as direct air capture of CO₂ to mature in the near future, countries like the UK must rapidly deploy tried-and-tested technologies.

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I don’t like what I believe the narrator’s voice is going to say in a couple of decades’ time.
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The coronation was an act of magic for a country scared the spell might break • POLITICO

Tanya Gold on cracking form:

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That lack of confidence in the magic spell was obvious at breakfast time. As the congregation spooled into Westminster Abbey, with actors at the front — kings tend to like actors, as they have the same job — the head of the anti-monarchist pressure group Republic, Graham Smith, was arrested near Trafalgar Square with five other republican leaders. The peaceful protest, he told me last week, was organized with the approval of the Metropolitan Police. They arrested him anyway, confiscated the placards, and blamed the string which tied the placards together for breaking the rules. (Apparently they might have used it to “lock” onto buildings.) A few hours later the king swore to serve us, which means serving our democracy. So he has already failed.

The protest went on in Trafalgar Square, but the BBC cut away as the cavalcade passed. Screens were erected in front of the protest, as if our eyes — and the king’s — were too delicate to be allowed to see it. We were told the police operation passed off without incident. The Duke of York was booed as he left Buckingham Palace, but that too was not reported on. The BBC was in the hagiography business at this coronation, and it was fervent and vapid. This is possibly tactical — they fear what an unpopular nativist government will do to their funding model — but it also indicates a nation afraid of itself. A deputy chairman of the Conservative Party suggested all republicans emigrate. They were all afraid the spell might break.

Then came the pomp: the fantastical costumes, the militarism, the uneasy horses, one of which panicked and backed into the crowd. Another marched sideways. It was lovely to look at, but it is the fumes of Empire, which of course is why the Mall was full.

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Editors quit top neuroscience journal to protest against open-access charges • Nature

Katharine Sanderson:

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More than 40 editors have resigned from two leading neuroscience journals in protest against what the editors say are excessively high article-processing charges (APCs) set by the publisher. They say that the fees, which publishers use to cover publishing services and in some cases make money, are unethical. The publisher, Dutch company Elsevier, says that its fees provide researchers with publishing services that are above average quality for below average price. The editors plan to start a new journal hosted by the non-profit publisher MIT Press.

The decision to resign came about after many discussions among the editors, says Stephen Smith, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and editor-in-chief of one of the journals, NeuroImage. “Everyone agreed that the APC was unethical and unsustainable,” says Smith, who will lead the editorial team of the new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, when it launches.

The 42 academics who made up the editorial teams at NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports announced their resignations on 17 April. The journals are open access and require authors to pay a fee for publishing services. The APC for NeuroImage is US$3,450; NeuroImage: Reports charges $900, which will double to $1,800 from 31 May.

Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, says that the APCs cover the costs associated with publishing an article in an open-access journal, including editorial and peer-review services, copyediting, typesetting, archiving, indexing, marketing and administrative costs

«

This is the challenge that the open access model faces. The alternative to getting lots of institutions to pay a regular subscription to get paywalled access to scientific research is: get smaller numbers of individuals (or institutions) to pay occasional large amounts to make their scientific research available for free. The former is the usual Nature/Science/etc model, the latter is “open access”. But what’s the right price for the latter?

Or does it need a third, alternative model?
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A $15.8m mistake: why San Francisco can’t pay its teachers on time • SF Chronicle

Bilal Mahmood:

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In 2019, the [San Francisco] school district approved a $9.5m contract with the consulting company Infosys to replace the payroll system that had been used for 17 years. The new system was originally set to go live in 2021 but wasn’t rolled out until 2022, delays that raised costs by about $7m.

When the EMPowerSF system finally did go live, problems immediately emerged. Hundreds of teachers didn’t get their paychecks.

Months went by with no resolution. By the end of the summer of 2022, the district finally hired a consulting firm named Alvarez & Marsel to diagnose and audit the issue. Over the course of the year, the firm’s initial contract of $2.8m was extended so it could stabilize the problem, costing the district another $8m. In 2023, an additional $5m was spent to finally fix the problem.

What Alvarez & Marsel’s audit found was shocking: 64 software bugs had gone undetected in the EMPowerSF system for nearly a year, with 18 of the bugs affecting pay rules management, 12 bugs affecting the user interface, 7 affecting leave management, 7 affecting time management, 5 affecting benefits management and 15 bugs affecting other system protocols.

These bugs resulted in employees being paid even after they were terminated, incorrect daily rates being set for paid leave during pregnancy disability and annual salary fields for certificated bi-weekly employees being incorrectly pro-rated.

To add insult to injury, the same software underlying the EMPowerSF system had been used once before in a California school district. In 2007, Los Angeles Unified School District also launched a payroll system powered by the same software, and it also failed to pay teachers on time.

Compounding matters, the San Francisco school district lacked personnel with the technical experience to support the implementation of the new system. To successfully implement a payroll transition, you need experienced financial operators, technical administrators and, perhaps most important, software engineers to transfer hundreds of thousands of records between systems.

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“Turnkey” systems never are. And I’ve never seen a company merger get its payroll to run smoothly. Unsurprising if a school district can’t either.
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Over half of Twitter Blue’s earliest subscribers are no longer subscribed • Mashable

Matt Binder:

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Twitter Blue’s struggles since its launch nearly six months ago are more severe than previously revealed, new data suggests.

Since Musk’s version of the subscription service launched last November, Twitter has only been able to convert around 640,000 Twitter users into paying Twitter Blue subscribers as of the end of April, as Mashable reported earlier this week.

While those numbers are lacklustre, an even more telling detail about Twitter Blue is just how many of its earliest subscribers have canceled their subscriptions.

Out of about 150,000 early subscribers to Twitter Blue, just around 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription as of April 30. Subscriptions are $8 per month – $11 on mobile.

The total early subscriber numbers are linked directly to internal leaks published by the Washington Post last year showing that a total of 150,000 users originally signed up for Twitter Blue within just a few days of its launch in November. Twitter temporarily disabled new signups for about a month shortly after those users subscribed as a result of accounts signing up for Blue with the intent to impersonate major brands on the platform.

That means around 81,843 users, or 54.5%, of Twitter users who subscribed to Twitter Blue when it first launched in November are no longer subscribed to the service. That’s an abnormally high churn rate for an online subscription service. Churn rate is the percentage of users that unsubscribe from a service.

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Perhaps all those original ones were troll accounts that got shut down? That would be the optimistic reading. Otherwise it means that they didn’t think Twitter Blue was worth it. Say it ain’t so, Elon!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Remarkably, Apple and Google are working together to prevent AirTags being used for stalking. But what about for tracking your car? CC-licensed photo by Tatsuo Yamashita on Flickr.

There’s another post at the Social Warming Substack, due about 0845. It’s about the puzzle of correcting things on social networks.

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. Nearly around again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

EU warns Apple about limiting speeds of uncertified USB-C cables for iPhones • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

It was rumoured in February that Apple may be planning to limit charging speeds and other functionality of USB-C cables that are not certified under its “Made for iPhone” (MFi) program. Like the Lightning port on existing iPhones, a small chip inside the USB-C port on iPhone 15 models would confirm the authenticity of the USB-C cable connected.

“I believe Apple will optimize the fast charging performance of MFi-certified chargers for the iPhone 15,” Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in March.

In response to this rumour, European Commissioner Thierry Breton has sent Apple a letter warning the company that limiting the functionality of USB-C cables would not be permitted and would prevent iPhones from being sold in the EU when the law goes into effect, according to German newspaper Die Zeit. The letter was obtained by German press agency DPA, and the report says the EU also warned Apple during a meeting in mid-March.

Given that it has until the end of 2024 to adhere to the law, Apple could still move forward with including an authentication chip in the USB-C port on iPhone 15 models later this year. And with iPhone 16 models expected to launch in September 2024, even those devices would be on the market before the law goes into effect.

The report says the EU intends to publish a guide to ensure a “uniform interpretation” of the legislation by the third quarter of this year.

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Does Apple have to “limit” the functionality of the cables? It could just put up a warning when you plug in an uncertified one, saying “this is not a certified Apple cable, speeds cannot be guaranteed” (but more briefly). Because USB-C cables really are a lottery. You might find the speeds of charging or data is variable anyway without Apple lifting a finger, or a chip.
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October 1999: Super-cyclone wreaks havoc in India • BBC On This Day

October 1999:

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A massive cyclone has swept through the state of Orissa in eastern India, killing an unknown number of people and leaving thousands more homeless.

The extent of the damage is difficult to determine. The area is almost impossible to reach, as the cyclone has torn down bridges and made roads and railways impassable. All communications have been cut, and the rescue effort is being hampered by the continuing bad weather.

Officials in the state capital, Bhubaneshwar, say nine deaths have been confirmed, but that number is expected to rise rapidly. Many towns and villages have not been able to report casualty figures or damage assessments because telephone lines have been brought down.

The winds are believed to have reached over 160 mph (250 km/h) – some of the highest ever recorded in the region.

A devastating tidal wave has also driven in across the low-lying plains along the coast, wiping out entire villages.

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Perhaps the first of the serious, climate-change driven, extreme weather events. Though of course picking out one or the other and saying that’s the one is impossible.
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Vice Media reportedly headed for bankruptcy • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

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Vice, the global news publisher and TV company that was once valued at nearly $6bn (£5bn), is reportedly close to filing for bankruptcy.

The company, whose assets include Vice News, Motherboard, Refinery29 and Vice TV, has been involved in sale talks with at least five companies in an attempt to avoid filing for bankruptcy, according to the New York Times.

Vice, which hit a valuation of $5.7bn in 2017 as media giants including Rupert Murdoch, WPP and Disney clamoured for a slice of its youth appeal, has been seeking a sale at a price tag of about $1.5bn.

Last week, the company – which has been evaluating its future since plans to float using a special purpose acquisition vehicle (Spac) collapsed two years ago – announced it was cancelling its popular Vice News Tonight as part of a restructuring that could result in more than 100 staff being made redundant.

In February, Fortress Investment Group, the company’s debt holder, extended a $30m funding line to enable Vice to pay overdue bills to vendors. The same month, Nancy Dubuc, who took over as chief executive from controversial co-founder Shane Smith in 2018, announced her surprise departure.

If a sale cannot be agreed – suitors are said to be seeking a sub-$1bn deal – a bankruptcy process would result in Vice continuing to operate normally while an auction process is run.

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This would be a pity: the Motherboard part of Vice, which writes about the technology world, has consistently been a terrific outlet. It’s hard to think it would continue quite so brightly under a different owner.
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Google internal memo: “we have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” • Semi Analysis

Dylan Patel, quoting a note that apparently was posted internally by a researcher at Google:

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the uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.

I’m talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today. Just to name a few:

• LLMs on a phone: People are running foundation models on a Pixel 6 at 5 tokens / sec
• Scalable Personal AI: You can finetune a personalized AI on your laptop in an evening
• Responsible Release: This one isn’t “solved” so much as “obviated”. There are entire websites full of art models with no restrictions whatsoever, and text is not far behind
• Multimodality: The current multimodal ScienceQA SOTA was trained in an hour.

While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13bn params that we struggle with at $10m and 540bn. And they are doing so in weeks, not months. This has profound implications for us:

We have no secret sauce. Our best hope is to learn from and collaborate with what others are doing outside Google. We should prioritize enabling 3P integrations.

People will not pay for a restricted model when free, unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality. We should consider where our value add really is.

Giant models are slowing us down. In the long run, the best models are the ones which can be iterated upon quickly. We should make small variants more than an afterthought, now that we know what is possible in the <20bn parameter regime.

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Google’s moat (the business element that protects its profits) always used to be its search index and the data gathered from it. But in AI, that doesn’t count for much.
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Google shared AI knowledge with the world – until ChatGPT caught up • The Washington Post

Nitasha Tiku and Gerrit De Vynck:

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In February, Jeff Dean, Google’s longtime head of artificial intelligence, announced a stunning policy shift to his staff: they had to hold off sharing their work with the outside world.

For years Dean had run his department like a university, encouraging researchers to publish academic papers prolifically; they pushed out nearly 500 studies since 2019, according to Google Research’s website.

But the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT three months earlier had changed things. The San Francisco start-up kept up with Google by reading the team’s scientific papers, Dean said at the quarterly meeting for the company’s research division. Indeed, transformers — a foundational part of the latest AI tech and the T in ChatGPT — originated in a Google study.
Things had to change. Google would take advantage of its own AI discoveries, sharing papers only after the lab work had been turned into products, Dean said, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private information.

The policy change is part of a larger shift inside Google. Long considered the leader in AI, the tech giant has lurched into defensive mode — first to fend off a fleet of nimble AI competitors, and now to protect its core search business, stock price, and, potentially, its future, which executives have said is intertwined with AI.

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Best time to build a moat: right about now.
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How eating ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) can affect your mental health • The New York Times

Sally Wadyka:

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Recent research has demonstrated a link between highly processed foods and low mood. In one 2022 study of over 10,000 adults in the United States, the more UPFs participants ate, the more likely they were to report mild depression or feelings of anxiety. “There was a significant increase in mentally unhealthy days for those eating 60% or more of their calories from UPFs,” Dr. Hecht, the study’s author, said. “This is not proof of causation, but we can say that there seems to be an association.”

New research has also found a connection between high UPF consumption and cognitive decline. A 2022 study that followed nearly 11,000 Brazilian adults over a decade found a correlation between eating ultraprocessed foods and worse cognitive function (the ability to learn, remember, reason and solve problems). “While we have a natural decline in these abilities with age, we saw that this decline accelerated by 28% in people who consume more than 20% of their calories from UPFs,” said Natalia Gomes Goncalves, a professor at the University of São Paulo Medical School and the lead author of the study.

It’s possible that eating a healthy diet may offset the detrimental effects of eating ultraprocessed foods. The Brazilian researchers found that following a healthy eating regimen, like the MIND diet — which is rich in whole grains, green leafy vegetables, legumes, nuts, berries, fish, chicken and olive oil — greatly reduced the dementia risk associated with consuming ultraprocessed foods. Those who followed the MIND diet but still ate UPFs “had no association between UPF consumption and cognitive decline,” Dr. Goncalves said, adding that researchers still don’t know what a safe quantity of UPFs is.

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The 2022 study does adjust for poverty level – that’s the most obvious thing you’d expect to predict both consumption of UPFs and depression/anxiety. So America, and the rest of us, are eating ourselves into gloom?
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Traders grow wary of ‘unloved’ bitcoin rally • Financial Times

Scott Chipolina:

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The degree to which a market can absorb large orders without major changes to the price of bitcoin has declined since the start of the year, according to data provider CCData.

In January it would have required the purchase of more than 1,400 bitcoins, roughly equivalent to $23m at the time, to move the price of the token by more than 1% of its prevailing market value, CCData said.

Towards the end of last month it would have taken only 462 bitcoins, worth about $13m, to move market prices by 1%, the lowest point of market depth for the bitcoin-tether trading pair since May 2022, when the industry plunged into crisis.

“Prices are recovering, but liquidity has yet to return. No exchange or market maker has yet to fill the space that FTX and [its sister trading arm] Alameda once encompassed,” said Michael Safai, managing partner at crypto trading firm Dexterity Capital.

Investors who have bought into bitcoin in recent months are now holding on to their investments.

Glassnode, a crypto data provider, said “there has been remarkably little expenditure” by investors who bought bitcoin when it hit a two-year low after FTX’s failure last November.

“The ‘FOMO’ that drove a lot of first time institutional and retail investors last year is obviously not happening now, despite the fact the crypto markets have rallied significantly this year,” said one crypto fund manager based in Dubai, referring to a fear of missing out.

Moreover, there have been outflows of $72mn over the last two weeks in digital asset investments, ending a six-week run of consecutive inflows, according to CoinShares.

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Wonder when we declare it all a zombie that no longer merits our attention.
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Apple and Google join forces to combat AirTag stalking • Bitdefender

Graham Cluley:

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Apple and Google have announced that they are teaming up in order to combat the safety risks associated with AirTags and other tracking devices.

In a joint press release, the tech giants revealed that they had teamed up in an effort to thwart the growing problem of Bluetooth tracking devices being used to stalk individuals without their knowledge.

Although such gadgets were invented to help people locate their lost luggage or mislaid car keys, they have also been used to secretly track individuals’ location.

Although the phenomenon is often labelled “Airtag stalking” after the popular device Apple released in 2021, the problem of unwanted location-tracking can also be present with other gadgets, such as those from manufacturers such as Tile, Chipolo, and Pebblebee.

“Bluetooth trackers have created tremendous user benefits, but they also bring the potential of unwanted tracking, which requires industrywide action to solve,” said Dave Burke, who heads up Android engineering at Google.

Burke isn’t wrong. There are countless media reports of AirTags and their like being used by jealous partners and stalkers to monitor the movements of individuals without their knowledge.  It has even been alleged that one Indiana woman used an AirTag to track her boyfriend, and then – after an argument – murder him.

No major tech company wants to be associated with a technology that is making it easier to stalk people.

So it’s not a huge surprise that in a draft specification lodged with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Google and Apple describe how they aim to protect the privacy of individuals who do not want to either themselves or their belongings unwittingly tracked, by people misusing location-tracking accessories.

«

Not sure how this squares with the NYPD encouraging people to stick AirTags in their Hondas so they can track them when they’re nicked. A skim through the specification suggests that if you’re not the owner and the AirTag is “in range” (10 metres for Bluetooth LE?) then you should get an alert that it’s travelling with you.

Side note: think the last time I saw a joint Apple-Google press release was for Covid tracking.
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The Reverse-Scooby-Doo Theory of Tech Innovation • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

»

There’s a standard trope that tech evangelists deploy when they talk about the latest fad. It goes something like this:

(1) Technology XYZ is arriving. It will be incredible for everyone. It is basically inevitable.

(2) The only thing that can stop it is regulators and/or incumbent industries. If they are so foolish as to stand in its way, then we won’t be rewarded with the glorious future that I am promising.

We can think of this as a “reverse-Scooby-Doo.” It’s as though Silicon Valley has assumed the role of a Scooby Doo villain, but decided in this case that he’s actually the hero. (“We would’ve gotten away with it, if not for those meddling regulators!”)

…My main hope from the years of “techlash” tech coverage is that we collectively might start to take the power of these tech companies seriously and stop treating them like a bunch of scrappy inventors, toiling away at their visions of the future they might one day build. Silicon Valley in the ‘90s was not the power center that it is today. The largest, most profitable, most powerful companies in the world ought to be judged based on how they are impacting the present, not based on their pitch decks for what the future might someday look like.

What I like about the study of digital futures’ past is the sense of perspective it provides. There’s something almost endearing in the old claims that “the technological future is inevitable, so long as those meddling regulators don’t get in the way!”, applied to technologies that had so very many fundamental flaws. Those were simpler times, offering object lessons that we might learn from today.

It’s much less endearing from the present-day tech billionaire class. Balaji Srinivasan either doesn’t understand the existing limits of AI or doesn’t care about the existing limits of AI. He’s rehashing an old set of rhetorical tropes that place Silicon Valley’s inventors, engineers, and investors as the motive force of history, and regards all existing social, economic, and political institutions as interfering villains or obstacles to be overcome.

«

This is a fabulous piece, from February, but newly relevant. Srinivasan is the guy who “bet” $1m that the US would go into hyperinflation within 90 days, then said “kidding!” after 45 days. Karpf has views on that too. I’m very much enjoying his Substack.
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Andreessen Horowitz saw the future — but did the future leave it behind? • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

One of the ways that [VC firm] Andreessen Horowitz marketed itself as distinct from its competitors was its founder-centric approach, which, during the go-go era of the 2010s, was in high style. It’s probably part of the reason that [co-founder Marc] Andreessen in 2015 defended [Theranos founder and subsequently convicted criminal Elizabeth] Holmes — he wanted to make it clear to founders that he was on their side no matter what. “We tend to be pro-megalomania,” Andreessen said in 2009.

More aggressive reporting on tech jeopardized the model of hyping a business and then selling after an inflated valuation. It’s no surprise, then, that Andreessen turned on the media. It probably didn’t help that The Wall Street Journal suggested in 2016 that a16z was all hat and no cattle — not really an elite firm if you looked at its returns, which had merely doubled its investment capital. The article contrasted a16z’s performance with that of Bill Gurley’s Benchmark, which “has multiplied investors’ money 11 times net of fees in its 2011 fund, according to a person familiar with its performance.”

Still, a 2014 Andreessen article about the news media is perceptive. Unlike most techies, Andreessen’s aware that the “view from nowhere” is a recent artifact, born from media consolidation. He knew how important distribution was. His list of possible business models was among those many publications experimented with. Andreessen and a16z even made a few media investments. They largely failed.

…The other vibe shift that would seriously affect a16z’s strategy, of course, was the Fed.

When a16z was founded in 2009, the Fed’s interest rate was near zero, where it mostly remained until 2022. A series of rate hikes beginning last year means that borrowing money is now more expensive than it has been at any point in the history of Andreessen Horowitz.

«

Wonderful piece, which shows that the questioning about tech has now moved on to the questioning about tech funding.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The proliferating buttons on the car dashboards of a decade or so ago went away.. and now they’re coming back. CC-licensed photo by Elizabeth 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.

When it’s Friday, there’ll be another post at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. Not even looking! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The glorious return of a humble car feature • Slate

David Zipper:

»

As I explained in a 2021 Slate article, the trend toward car touch screens has been a dangerous one for road safety. Those who drove in the 1990s will remember using buttons and knobs to change the radio or adjust the air conditioning without looking down from the steering wheel. Despite their name, touch screens rely on a driver’s eyes as much as her fingers to navigate—and every second that she is looking at a screen is a second that she isn’t looking at the road ahead. Navigating through various levels of menus to reach a desired control can be particularly dangerous; one study by the AAA Foundation concluded that infotainment touch screens can distract a driver for up to 40 seconds, long enough to cover half a mile at 50 mph.

“The irony is that everyone basically accepts that it’s dangerous to use your phone while driving,” said Farah. “Yet no one complains about what we’re doing instead, which is fundamentally using an iPad while driving. If you’re paying between $40,000 and $300,000 for a car, you’re getting an iPad built onto the dashboard.”

Seeking to address these risks, NHTSA published voluntary guidance in 2013 recommending that a driver be able to complete any infotainment task with glances of under two seconds, totaling a maximum of 12 seconds. But NHTSA’s guidance had no enforcement mechanism, and carmakers have violated it with impunity.

In the last two years further evidence has suggested that touch screens represent a step backward for auto design. Drexel researchers found that infotainment systems posed a statistically significant crash risk even in the early 2010s, before carmakers added many of today’s bells and whistles. A widely publicized Swedish study found that completing tasks with screens takes longer than with physical buttons.

Meanwhile, a revolt has been brewing. A recent J.D. Power consumer survey on vehicle dependability concluded that “infotainment remains a significant issue for new vehicles.” It wasn’t hard to understand why. In a 2022 New York Times opinion piece titled “Touch Screens in Cars Solve a Problem We Didn’t Have,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote, “I can think of no better way of describing the frustration of the modern consumer than buying a car with a feature that makes you less safe, doesn’t improve your driving experience in any meaningful way, saves the manufacturer money and gets sold to you as some necessary advance in connectivity.”

«

Wonder if the NHTSA will mandate something to do with touchscreens, and how the carmakers – addicted to cheap screens – will cope with it.
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Why are TV writers so miserable? • The New Yorker

Michael Schulman:

»

For people outside the industry, the woes of TV writers can elicit a boo-hoo response: it is, after all, a more lucrative form of writing than most, right? But the economics of streaming have chipped away at what was previously a route to a middle-class life, as the cost of living in Los Angeles has crept upward. “It feels like the studios have gone through our contracts and figured out how to Frankenstein every loophole into every deal, which means that, at the very best, you can keep your head above water,” [Laura] Jacqmin said. “You can maybe maintain the amount of money you made the year before, but more than likely you will be asked to cut your quote. It just feels really grim.” She added, “I’m on Twitter every other day, and I’m seeing writers who are, like, ‘Please Venmo me some grocery money. I am desperate, and I have not worked in three months. Help!’ ”

Aly Monroe, a 30-year-old writer who’d worked up from production assistant to story editor on Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” told me that she makes about $10,000 a year in residuals, “and that’s certainly not reflective of what the studio is making.” In the long breaks between seasons, she relies on her wife’s more regular income while stretching out the money from “Handmaid.” Some of her friends are getting copywriting jobs or moving back in with their parents. “Before the strike demands came out, a lot of my friends were feeling really hopeless and essentially ready to give up, because it had just been such a hard road,” she said. “And they think that what the W.G.A. is asking for makes us all feel really good and like we’re working toward something that can make it back into a livable career for all of us. That’s certainly how I feel.”

At the same time that the money has tightened, original ideas have become harder to sell. The prestige-cable days of “Mad Men” and “Nurse Jackie” became the prestige-streaming era of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Stranger Things,” which has given way to the algorithm-and-I.P.-fuelled hellscape of superheroes, mergers, and HBO Max becoming plain old Max.

«

They’re also extremely worried about AI being used to generate ideas or content or to “punch up” content they’ve written. And given how studios will use absolutely any excuse to screw over those who work for them, it’s a legitimate concern.
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Web3’s fake version of Web history • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

»

Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most influential Venture Capital firms in the world. He is Web3’s single biggest investor, and its most prominent evangelist.

And he is just atrocious at explaining the history of the Web.

Dixon made his money in the internet of the ‘00s and ‘10s. He works with Marc Andreessen, the iconic “golden geek” of the ‘90s internet. The guy has been around long enough to know better. When he gets the history of the Web completely wrong, he is doing so with intent. And he has been prominently, boldly getting this wrong for YEARS. No one seems to call him on it. I don’t understand why.

(Yes I do. It’s because he’s rich and well-connected. Picking fights with him over something like “the history of the web” has little upside. It’s one of those things that only a tenured professor who isn’t looking for much research funding would bother with.)

…Broad historical narratives are a bit like statistical models — “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” Of course history is more messy and complicated than that. But if the general outline makes sense, and if it helps us make sense of the present, then the effort is justifiable.

But let me offer a corollary: “all models are wrong, but some are wronger than others.” And the problem with Dixon’s model is that it extremely, ceaselessly, aggressively wrong. It’s the type of wrong that might be useful for hawking unregistered Web3 security products (err, sorry, I mean, play-to-earn games), but is not at all useful for actually understanding the development of the internet.

«

Karpf offers a neat history of the internet – and it is correct, especially about the Web2 phase.
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Report describes Apple’s “organizational dysfunction” and “lack of ambition” in AI • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

»

The Information’s sources [in an article about Apple’s struggles or otherwise with AI] offer up numerous examples of senior Apple leadership putting the brakes on (or at least reining in) aggressive efforts within the company’s AI group for fear of seeing products like Siri present the same kinds of embarrassing factual errors or unhinged behavior that ChatGPT and its ilk have done. In other words, Apple isn’t keen on tolerating what many working in AI research and product development call “hallucinations.”

For example, Siri’s responses are not generative—they’re human-written and human-curated. Apple leadership has been hesitant to allow Siri developers to push the voice assistant toward detailed back-and-forth conversations like you see in the latest LLM-driven chatbots. Those are seen as more attention-grabbing than usefulness, and Apple is worried about being responsible for bad answers.

Some engineers within the company have argued that Apple should be more tolerant of bizarre edge cases and factual errors, saying that a certain scale and comfort for wonkiness is needed to truly improve them. Notably, several senior people within the company have abandoned ship for Google or startups out of frustrations with Apple’s conservative mindset.

Further, Apple has increasingly focused on running AI and machine learning features on users’ local devices—both because that enabled faster response times and because of the company’s public commitment to user privacy. For some features, that is an advantage (as Giannandrea explained to Ars Technica in 2020). But to date, LLMs typically run in the cloud, and some have questioned whether they’ll ultimately work as well on local devices.

«

Counting down to LLMs on-device.. what do we think, a year?
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The long demise of the stretch limousine • The New York Times

Jesus Jiménez:

»

Over a few days in early March, carmakers and limousine company operators gathered at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for an annual convention, where they went to panels and parties and admired shiny new party buses, vans and black sport utility vehicles.

But something was missing.

“There wasn’t one stretch limousine on the show floor,” said Robert Alexander, president of the National Limousine Association, a trade group. “Not one.”

Decades ago, stretch limos were a symbol of affluence, used almost exclusively by the rich and famous. Over time, they became more of a common luxury, booked for children’s birthday parties or by teenagers heading to the prom.

These days, it seems as if hardly anyone is riding in a stretch limo. While the limousine name has stuck, the limo industry has shifted to chauffeur services in almost anything but actual stretch limos, which have largely been supplanted by black S.U.V.s, buses and vans.
“The limo business isn’t your father’s limo business anymore,” Mr. Alexander said.

Today, the stretch limo represents less than 1% of services offered by limo companies, down from about 10% a decade ago, according to the association.

“The stretch limo is — what’s the expression? — gone like the dodo bird,” Mr. Alexander said. “Extinct.”

«

What happened? Mostly, Uber and Lyft. The Great Recession. Also not looking like a jerk.
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Netflix Spain lost 1 million users last quarter, Kantar says • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Clara Hernanz Lizarraga and Thomas Seal:

»

In early February, Netflix introduced a €5.99 ($6.57) monthly fee for users in Spain who shared their log-in details with another household and technical measures to detect such sharing. The move was linked to a fall in users of more than a million, two thirds of whom were using someone else’s password, according to Kantar’s research, which is based on surveys of household streaming habits.

“It’s clear this steep drop is due to the crackdown,” said Dominic Sunnebo, global insight director at Kantar’s Worldpanel Division, adding that the loss of a million users, even if most weren’t paid subscribers, would be a blow to Netflix in terms of word of mouth recommendation for its shows and service.

Subscription cancellations in the first quarter tripled compared to the previous period, according to Kantar’s research. Of all remaining Netflix subscribers in Spain, one-tenth said they planned to unsubscribe in the second quarter.

A similar fee was introduced in Portugal, Canada and New Zealand after a roll-out in several Latin American countries.

“We see a cancel reaction in each market when we announce the news,” Netflix said in its first quarter earnings release on April 18, expecting the dip to be momentary before users that didn’t pay start signing up for their own accounts.

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Netflix says that Canada, where it tried this first, dipped and then came back above the previous point. Keep those fingers crossed!
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Who Can I Vote For?

»

Find out about candidates in your area.

WhoCanIVoteFor is a simple tool which allows UK voters to see lists of candidates in upcoming elections using only their postcode.

All the candidate data ued in this site is collected by volunteers from council websites and other sources. If you wish to contribute, please visit Democracy Club Candidates.

«

OK, so this is a little late (today is the day for local elections in many, though not all, parts of the UK) but it’s a good site to bookmark – and also available in Welsh. Hats tipped to Sym Roe, Joe Mitchell, Tim Green, Andy Lulham and David Miller, with a little help from mySociety – the latter being one of those Web2 ideas that keeps on giving.
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Amnesty International criticised for using AI-generated images • The Guardian

Luke Taylor:

»

While the systemic brutality used by Colombian police to quell national protests in 2021 was real and is well documented, photos recently used by Amnesty International to highlight the issue were not.

The international human rights advocacy group has come under fire for posting images generated by artificial intelligence in order to promote their reports on social media – and has since removed them.

The images, including one of a woman being dragged away by police officers, depict the scenes during protests that swept across Colombia in 2021.

But any more than a momentary glance at the images reveals that something is off.

The faces of the protesters and police are smoothed-off and warped, giving the image a dystopian aura.

The tricolour carried by the protester has the right colours – red, yellow and blue – but in the wrong order, and the police uniform is outdated.

…Amnesty International said it had used photographs in previous reports but chose to use the AI-generated images to protect protesters from possible state retribution.

To avoid misleading the public, the images included text stating that they were produced by AI.

“We have removed the images from social media posts, as we don’t want the criticism for the use of AI-generated images to distract from the core message in support of the victims and their calls for justice in Colombia,” Erika Guevara Rosas, director for Americas at Amnesty, said.

“But we do take the criticism seriously and want to continue the engagement to ensure we understand better the implications and our role to address the ethical dilemmas posed by the use of such technology.”

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As Ryan Broderick pointed out in his Garbage Day email/Substack, Amnesty could completely have used real photos, and just blurred the faces of the people. But they thought to themselves it would be cool and edgy to use AI.
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August 7 1998: US embassies in Africa bombed • BBC On This Day

»

At least 200 people have been killed and more than 1,000 injured following explosions at United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The bombings took place within minutes of each other at around 1030 local time.

The first blast happened in the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam and the second, just five minutes later, in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city.

The Nairobi explosion demolished a five-story office block sending it crashing onto the embassy next door.

The US Ambassador Prudence Bushnell was meeting Kenyan Trade Minister Joseph Kamotho at the nearby Ufundi Cooperative Bank at the time but was only slightly injured.

The blast could be heard 10 miles (16km) away and caused total chaos in the city centre.

No-one has claimed responsibility but US officials suspect the attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist.

«

A cloud the size of a man’s fist on the horizon. Earlier in the year, India and then Pakistan had carried out a series of underground nuclear tests, which “provoked worldwide condemnation and fears of a nuclear conflict in one of the world’s most volatile regions.”

Which just goes to show how wrongly placed fears can be.
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Former Coinbase official Balaji Srinivasan closes out $1m bitcoin bet early • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Olga Kharif:

»

Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase Global Inc., said he closed out what appeared to be a losing bet that Bitcoin would rise to $1m within 90 days.

Srinivasan said he gave $1m to two organizations, including the Bitcoin Core development team at researcher Chaincode Labs, as well as paying $500,000 to someone who goes by James Medlock on Twitter, and who won the wager.

The goal of the bet, Srinivasan reiterated in a Twitter post and a short video Tuesday, was to show that fiat currencies such as the dollar are in trouble, and that those troubles will push Bitcoin’s price up. At $28,710, Bitcoin is about 10% up from when Srinivasan accepted the bet on March 17.

The terms of the wager weren’t immediately clear. Medlock and Srinivasan didn’t return requests for comment.

“The reason that I did that is I wanted to tell you in a provable way that there’s something wrong in the economy and the state isn’t telling you about it,” Srinivasan said in the video, recounting troubles with US banks, sovereign debt and other potential issues. “That is what I am doing at my own expense, I am raising public alarm.”

Back on March 16, Medlock posted a tweet, “I’ll bet anyone $1m dollars that the US does not enter hyperinflation.”

On March 17, Srinivasan responded with, “I will take that bet.”

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Honestly, how did someone with so little comprehension of the world get so rich that he can afford to throw a million dollars away?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You can now tour every Star Trek bridge via a web portal – you won’t even need to wear the clothes to fit in. But shouldn’t it be VR instead? CC-licensed photo by WarvanWarvan 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation • The Economist

Yuval Noah Harari:

»

What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about ChatGPT and other new AI tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using AI to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of AI tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults.

In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around anonymous online messages, known as “q drops”. Followers collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first cults in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality.

On a more prosaic level, we might soon find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions about abortion, climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine with entities that we think are humans—but are actually AI. The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend time trying to change the declared opinions of an AI bot, while the AI could hone its messages so precisely that it stands a good chance of influencing us.

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There’s also a (released in a rush) interview with Geoffrey Hinton, ex-Google, at MIT Tech Review:

»

“These things are totally different from us,” he says. “Sometimes I think it’s as if aliens had landed and people haven’t realized because they speak very good English.”

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(YNH piece via John Naughton.)
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Scientists use GPT AI to passively read people’s thoughts in breakthrough • Vice

Becky Ferreira:

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The breakthrough marks the first time that continuous language has been non-invasively reconstructed from human brain activities, which are read through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. 

The decoder was able to interpret the gist of stories that human subjects watched or listened to—or even simply imagined—using fMRI brain patterns, an achievement that essentially allows it to read peoples’ minds with unprecedented efficacy. While this technology is still in its early stages, scientists hope it might one day help people with neurological conditions that affect speech to clearly communicate with the outside world.

However, the team that made the decoder also warned that brain-reading platforms could eventually have nefarious applications, including as a means of surveillance for governments and employers. Though the researchers emphasized that their decoder requires the cooperation of human subjects to work, they argued that “brain–computer interfaces should respect mental privacy,” according to a study published on Monday in Nature Neuroscience.

“Currently, language-decoding is done using implanted devices that require neurosurgery, and our study is the first to decode continuous language, meaning more than full words or sentences, from non-invasive brain recordings, which we collect using functional MRI,” said Jerry Tang, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Texas at Austin who led the study, in a press briefing held last Thursday.

“The goal of language-decoding is to take recordings of a user’s brain activity and predict the words that the user was hearing or saying or imagining,” he noted. “Eventually, we hope that this technology can help people who have lost the ability to speak due to injuries like strokes, or diseases like ALS.”

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It’s very dramatic, though fMRI is one of those Tinkerbell technologies – the more you believe in it, the better it works. But if you don’t…
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May 2 1997: Labour routs Tories in historic election • BBC On This Day

May 1997:

»

The Labour Party has won the general election in a landslide victory, leaving the Conservatives in tatters after 18 years in power, with Scotland and Wales left devoid of Tory representation.

Labour now has a formidable 419 seats (including the speaker) – the largest the party has ever taken. The Conservatives took just 165, their worst performance since 1906.

Tony Blair – at 43 the youngest British prime minister this century – promised he would deliver “unity and purpose for the future”.

John Major has resigned as Conservative leader, saying “When the curtain falls it’s time to get off the stage and that is what I propose to do.”

«

Major went to spend the May afternoon watching a cricket match, and stayed mostly quiet for more than a decade until the Brexit vote hove into view.

The next election is due some time before the end of 2024. Let’s see how that goes.
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Surviving (just about) the digital media carnage • The Fence

An anonymous insider (who I think worked at Buzzfeed) on the highs and lows:

»

Even when I arrived, there was a sense that the glory days were over. Staff complained loudly that there was no free swag bag at the Christmas party. (A few years back, everyone had been gifted wraps of coke.) Our company had recently secured mega-bucks investment from corporate investors, and over the coming years the pressure to make good on that investment became increasingly strained.

Redundancies crashed over the editorial team in waves. First our news division was laid off. Then the parts of the site that were trafficking badly were excised, then a wider round of lay-offs that seemed to cherry-pick people at random. One time, they forgot to lay off a colleague for the simple reason that they forgot he existed. Someone eventually remembered him, and got in touch to let him know his services would no longer be required – after he’d enjoyed the sweet relief of thinking he’d escaped.

So many talented people were laid off, and so many mediocre employees survived. There was no way the lay-offs could be performance-related. Executives crashed through strategies. We were pivoting to video, pivoting away from video, pivoting to a digital-first strategy, pivoting to a multi-platform strategy, consolidating our brands under one brand, unconsolidating them again.
I came to understand the vagaries of my employer in the same way that a child learns to study the rhythms and temper of an abusive parent. Typically, there would be an eight to twelve-month period of calm, before the sudden, stuttering shock of a round of Friday afternoon lay-offs. Colleagues were mourned on Twitter. We would mutter about unionising.

…But even the best managers would have been powerless to face down the Facebook and Google duopoly. It was like a suicide attempt, where the person realises too late that they don’t actually want to die and scrambles for a foothold – their toe hooked on an overturned chair – before succumbing to a slow, asphyxiating death.

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To be honest, sounds like working on The Independent from 1995-2000, which was a constant round of layoffs and dwindling numbers. Except we were already unionised. Still, had an upside: met my future wife at one of the leaving dos.

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NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

The New York Police Department (NYPD) and New York City’s self-proclaimed computer geek of a mayor are urging resident car owners to equip their vehicles with an Apple AirTag. During a press conference on Sunday, Mayor Eric Adams announced the distribution of 500 free AirTags to New Yorkers, saying the technology would aid in reducing the city’s surging car theft numbers.

Adams held the press conference at the 43rd precinct in the Bronx, where he said there had been 200 instances of grand larceny of autos. An NYPD official said that in New York City, 966 Hyundais and Kias have been stolen this year thus far, already surpassing 2022’s 819 total. The NYPD’s public crime statistics tracker says there have been 4,492 vehicle thefts this year, a 13.3% increase compared to the same period last year and the largest increase among NYC’s seven major crime categories.

Adams, as the city did when announcing litigation against Kia and Hyundai on April 7, largely blamed the rise in car thefts on Kia and Hyundai, which he said are “leading the way” in stolen car brands.

Hyundais and Kias were the subjects of the Kia Challenge TikTok trend that encouraged people to jack said vehicles with a mere USB-A cable. The topic has graduated way beyond a social media fad and into a serious concern. Adams, for example, pointed to stolen cars as a gateway to other crimes, like hit-and-runs. It can also be dangerous; four teenagers in upstate New York died during a joyride with a stolen Kia last year. And some insurance companies even stopped taking new insurance policies for some Hyundais and Kias. In February, Kia and Hyundai issued updates to make the cars harder to lift.

Adams was adamant grand larceny auto numbers were dragging the city’s overall crime numbers up and urged New Yorkers to “participate” in the fight against car theft by using an AirTag.

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I thought the UK had cut down on car theft through immobilisers, but London in 2022 had more than 26,000 thefts – though it seems a large proportion of the targeted cars are high-end, keyless models stolen by complex methods (as we’ve discussed here recently). Those have trackers built in. Still get nicked.
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Brazil pushes back on big tech firms’ campaign against ‘fake news law’ • Reuters

Anthony Boadle:

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Brazil’s government and judiciary objected on Tuesday to big tech firms campaigning against an internet regulation bill aimed at cracking down on fake news, alleging undue interference in the debate in Congress.

Bill 2630, also known as the Fake News Law, puts the onus on the internet companies, search engines and social messaging services to find and report illegal material, instead of leaving it to the courts, charging hefty fines for failures to do so.

Tech firms have been campaigning against the bill, including Google which had added a link on its search engine in Brazil connecting to blogs against the bill and asking users to lobby their representatives.

Justice Minister Flavio Dino ordered Google to change the link on Tuesday, saying the company had two hours after notification or would face fines of one million reais ($198,000) per hour if it did not.

“What is this? An editorial? This is not a media or an advertising company,” the minister told a news conference, calling Google’s link disguised and misleading advertising for the company’s stance against the law.

The US company promptly pulled the link, though Google defended its right to communicate its concerns through “marketing campaigns” on its platforms and denied altering search results to favor material contrary to the bill.

“We support discussions on measures to combat the phenomenon of misinformation. All Brazilians have the right to be part of this conversation, and as such, we are committed to communicating our concerns about Bill 2630 publicly and transparently,” it said in a statement.

«

On its face, this law is like the XKCD cartoon “Someone is wrong on the internet”, except Google and other tech firms have to correct it all the time. What does that mean for YouTube – do all the flat earth videos vanish in Brazil? Or all of the videos?
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‘Star Trek’ fans can now virtually tour every Starship Enterprise bridge • Smithsonian Magazine

Sarah Kuta:

»

For decades, many “Star Trek” fans have imagined what it would be like to work from the bridge of the starship Enterprise, the long-running franchise’s high-tech space-exploring vessel. Through various iterations and seasons of the series, created by Gene Roddenberry in the ’60s, the bridge has remained a constant, serving as the backdrop for many important moments in the show’s 800-plus episodes.

Now, die-hard Trekkies and casual watchers alike can virtually roam around the Enterprise’s bridge to their heart’s content, thanks to a sophisticated and highly detailed new web portal that brings the space to life.

The site features 360-degree, 3D models of the various versions of the Enterprise, as well as a timeline of the ship’s evolution throughout the franchise’s history. Fans of the show can also read detailed information about each version of the ship’s design, its significance to the “Star Trek” storyline and its production backstory.

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This seems like it would be the ideal thing for virtual reality. Though, OK, you might need some sort of thing where you’re not walking, but floating around. So VR with no legs so you’re not tempted to walk?
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About us • Fakespot

»

Fakespot’s mission is to bring trust and transparency to the Internet by eliminating misinformation and fraud, starting with eCommerce. Fakespot protects consumers while saving them both time and money by using AI to detect fraudulent product reviews and third-party sellers in real-time. Our proprietary technology analyzes billions of consumer reviews to quickly identify suspicious activity and then recommend better alternatives to consumers. We got tired of getting ripped off online, so we made it our mission to never let it happen to anyone else.

«

Mozilla has just bought this company:

»

In Mozilla, we have found a partner that shares a similar mission as to what the future of the internet should look like, where the convergence of trust, privacy and security play an imperative part of our digital experiences.

In a time where it’s simpler than ever before to generate fake content, the browser is the first entry point to consuming that content. As such, browsers have the most potential for true innovations where actions, like shopping, become better than ever before.

«

Mozilla, clinging to life through Google’s generous sponsorship of its search box (renews this year!), and still looking for that new USP.
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Intel: Just You Wait. Again.• Monday Note

Jean-Louis Gassée looks at how Intel has promised – or threatened – to catch up with the ARM-based world ever since Apple stuck a Qualcomm chip in the first iPhone:

»

the company’s revenue for its new IFS foundry business decreased by 24% to an insignificant $118m, with a $140m operating loss gingerly explained as “increased spending to support strategic growth”. Other Intel businesses such as Networking (NEX) products and Mobileye — yet another Autonomous Driving Technology — add nothing promising to the company’s picture.

This doesn’t prevent Gelsinger from once again intoning the Just You Wait refrain. This time, the promise is to “regain transistor performance and power performance leadership by 2025”.

Is it credible?

We all agree that the US tech industry would be better served by Intel providing a better alternative to TSMC’s and Samsung’s advanced foundries. Indeed, We The Taxpayers are funding efforts to stimulate our country’s semiconductor sector at the tune of $52B. I won’t comment other than to reminisce about a difficult late 80s conversation with an industry CEO when, as an Apple exec, I naively opposed an attempt to combat the loss of semiconductor memory business to foreign competitors by subsidizing something tentatively called US Memories. But, in this really complicated 2023 world, what choices do we actually have?

For years I’ve watched Intel’s repeated mistakes, the misplaced self-regard, the ineffective leadership changes for this Silicon Valley icon, for the inventor of the first commercial microprocessor, only to be disappointed time and again as the company failed to shake the Wintel yoke — while Microsoft successfully diversified.

I fervently hope Pat Gelsinger succeeds.

«

Chances aren’t looking that good that he will, though. Maybe Intel will become an also-ran in the category it invented.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if – just imagine – queries to doctors were answered by ChatGPT? It turns out people like that. CC-licensed photo by Camilo Rueda Lõpez 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

‘The godfather of AI’ quits Google and warns of danger ahead • The New York Times

Cade Metz interviewed Dr Geoffrey Hinton, the British scientist who first built a neural network, and in 2012 built a neural net that could identify common objects in photos:

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Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of AI. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.

…As companies improve their AI systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of AI technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”

Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.

His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

He is also worried that AI technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow AI systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

«

This interview implies lots of questions. He was worried while inside Google? He’s worried now he’s outside, but Google is saying everything’s peachy? They’re all rushing too quickly towards putting this stuff out, even while denying that’s the case? It’s not encouraging.
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ChatGPT will see you now: doctors using AI to answer patient questions • WSJ

Nidhi Subbaraman:

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In California and Wisconsin, OpenAI’s “GPT” generative artificial intelligence is reading patient messages and drafting responses from their doctors. The operation is part of a pilot program in which three health systems test if the AI will cut the time that medical staff spend replying to patients’ online inquiries.

UC San Diego Health and UW Health began testing the tool in April. Stanford Health Care aims to join the rollout early next week. Altogether, about two dozen healthcare staff are piloting this tool. 

Marlene Millen, a primary care physician at UC San Diego Health who is helping lead the AI test, has been testing GPT in her inbox for about a week. Early AI-generated responses needed heavy editing, she said, and her team has been working to improve the replies. They are also adding a kind of bedside manner: If a patient mentioned returning from a trip, the draft could include a line that asked if their travels went well. “It gives the human touch that we would,” Dr. Millen said.

There is preliminary data that suggests AI could add value. ChatGPT scored better than real doctors at responding to patient queries posted online, according to a study published Friday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, in which a panel of doctors did blind evaluations of posts.

As many industries test ChatGPT as a business tool, hospital administrators and doctors are hopeful that the AI-assist will ease burnout among their staff, a problem that skyrocketed during the pandemic. The crush of messages and health-records management is a contributor, among administrative tasks, according to the American Medical Association. 

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I guess it’s sort of equal: the patients are using search engines (usually Dr Google), and now the doctors are entering the arms race (a little late). The advantage is that ChatGPT is polite and you can narrow (or train) its expertise.
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Missing Links: A comparison of search censorship in China • The Citizen Lab

Jeffrey Knockel, Ken Kato, and Emile Dirks:

»

Key findings:
• Across eight China-accessible search platforms analyzed — Baidu, Baidu Zhidao, Bilibili, Microsoft Bing, Douyin, Jingdong, Sogou, and Weibo — we discovered over 60,000 unique censorship rules used to partially or totally censor search results returned on these platforms.

• We investigated different levels of censorship affecting each platform, which might either totally block all results or selectively allow some through, and we applied novel methods to unambiguously and exactly determine the rules triggering each of these types of censorship across all platforms.

• Among web search engines Microsoft Bing and Baidu, Bing’s chief competitor in China, we found that, although Baidu has more censorship rules than Bing, Bing’s political censorship rules were broader and affected more search results than Baidu. Bing on average also restricted displaying search results from a greater number of website domains.

• These findings call into question the ability of non-Chinese technology companies to better resist censorship demands than their Chinese counterparts and serve as a dismal forecast concerning the ability of other non-Chinese technology companies to introduce search products or other services in China without integrating at least as many restrictions on political and religious expression as their Chinese competitors.

«

One has to wonder if the people of China are aware of this, and there’s a sort of silent consensus that it’s OK, or if there’s some growing unhappiness with it.
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How China’s Huawei spooked Germany into launching a probe • POLITICO

Louis Westendarp:

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While much of the fear around Huawei in the West has focused on espionage and the risk of data leaking to Beijing, Germany’s latest investigation — and the intelligence that triggered it — point to another risk: the potential of sabotage through critical components that could collapse telecoms networks.

In March, the interior ministry announced it was checking all components with security implications from two Chinese telecoms suppliers, Huawei and ZTE. The review was launched to identify technology “that could enable a state to exercise political power,” a high-ranking official from the interior ministry said at the time.

German lawmakers were briefed on the probe by security authorities in a classified parliamentary hearing at the German Bundestag’s digital committee in early April. The session was held by the German interior ministry and the federal intelligence service, the two lawmakers said. Germany’s cybersecurity agency was also present, one lawmaker added.

In the briefing, security officials told lawmakers that one tech component in particular triggered the ministry’s investigation, namely an energy management component from Huawei, two lawmakers present at the briefing who spoke under the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the information told POLITICO.

The revelations suggest security officials feared such a component could be used to disrupt telecoms operations or — in a worst case scenario — be exploited to bring down a network.

…In its review, the German interior ministry is asking network operators to submit a list of all Chinese “security-relevant” components. The checks are expected to conclude in the coming months.

The review could lead to operators having to “rip and replace” components provided by Chinese suppliers in past years if they’re deemed too risky.

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The paranoid style of politics is returning.

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April 19 1995: Many feared dead in Oklahoma bombing • BBC On This Day

April 1995:

»

A huge car bomb has exploded at a government building in Oklahoma City killing at least 80 people including 17 children at a nursery.

At least 100 people have been injured and the number of dead is expected to rise.

In an emotional speech, President Bill Clinton vowed “swift, certain and severe” punishment for those behind the atrocity.

“The United States will not tolerate and I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated by evil cowards,” he told a White House news conference this evening.

The blast happened just after 0900 local time when most workers were in their offices. It destroyed the facade of the ten-storey Alfred Murrah Building.

One survivor said he thought there was an earthquake: “I never heard anything that loud. It was a horrible noise…the roar of the whole building crumbling,”

There were scenes of chaos as paramedics treated the wounded on the pavement and rescue workers battled to dig out those still trapped in the rubble.

«

The work of Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran, as retaliation – he said – for the government siege of Waco, Texas in which 82 of the Branch Davidian sect died. McVeigh’s actions led an entire right-wing conspiracist militia to surface over the next 30 years.

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15 June 1996: Huge explosion rocks central Manchester • BBC On This Day

June 1996:

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A massive bomb has devastated a busy shopping area in central Manchester.

Two hundred people were injured in the attack, mostly by flying glass, and seven are said to be in a serious condition. Police believe the IRA planted the device.

The bomb exploded at about 1120 BST on Corporation Street outside the Arndale shopping centre.

It is the seventh attack by the Irish Republican group since it broke its ceasefire in February and is the second largest on the British mainland.

A local television station received a telephone warning at 1000 BST – just as the city centre was filling up with Saturday shoppers.

The caller used a recognised IRA codeword.

One hour and 20 minutes after the warning, police were still clearing hundreds of people from a huge area of central Manchester.

Army bomb disposal experts were using a remote-controlled device to examine a suspect van parked outside Marks & Spencer when it blew up in an uncontrolled explosion.

«

Less than two years later, the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, signed the Good Friday Agreement which ended the terrorism campaign, and brought peace to Northern Ireland. It’s the only successful political negotiation to end a conflict in the past 25 years.
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Jack Dorsey says Elon Musk shouldn’t have bought Twitter after all • The Washington Post

Faiz Siddiqui and Will Oremus:

»

[Former Twitter CEO Jack] Dorsey said he thought Musk, the Tesla CEO who serves in the same role at Twitter today, should have paid $1bn to back out of the deal to acquire the social media platform. The comments are a stark reversal from Dorsey’s strong endorsement of Musk’s takeover, when he wrote a year ago that if Twitter had to be a company at all, “Elon is the singular solution I trust.”

“I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness,” Dorsey tweeted at the time.

In his remarks on Bluesky on Friday, Dorsey struck a far different tone. Dorsey said he didn’t think Musk “acted right” after pursuing the site and realizing his potential mistake, adding that he did not believe the company’s board should have forced the sale.

“It all went south,” Dorsey added.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment on Dorsey’s remarks. Musk appeared on Friday night’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” on HBO, and spoke on topics including his time in charge of the company, a recent meeting with U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), and his concerns about rhetoric coming from the political left.

“It was on a fast track to bankruptcy,” Musk said of Twitter. “So I had to take drastic action. There wasn’t any choice.”

«

Pity Musk didn’t come to the same realisation a lot earlier. Possibly he did and thought that actually, he could make it all happen.
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Scientists in India protest move to drop Darwinian evolution from textbooks • Science

Athar Parvaiz:

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Scientists in India are protesting a decision to remove discussion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from textbooks used by millions of students in ninth and 10th grades. More than 4000 researchers and others have so far signed an open letter asking officials to restore the material.

The removal makes “a travesty of the notion of a well-rounded secondary education,” says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Other researchers fear it signals a growing embrace of pseudoscience by Indian officials.

The Breakthrough Science Society, a nonprofit group, launched the open letter on 20 April after learning that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous government organization that sets curricula and publishes textbooks for India’s 256 million primary and secondary students, had made the move as part of a “content rationalization” process. NCERT first removed discussion of Darwinian evolution from the textbooks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes, the society says. (Last year, NCERT issued a document that said it wanted to avoid content that was “irrelevant” in the “present context.”)

…One major concern, Joshi says, is that most Indian students will get no exposure to the concept of evolution if it is dropped from the ninth and 10th grade curriculum, because they do not go on to study biology in later grades. “Evolution is perhaps the most important part of biology that all educated citizens should be aware of,” Joshi says. “It speaks directly to who we are, as humans, and our position within the living world.”

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No word on whether they’re replacing it with something else, or just hoping children absorb the idea by osmosis.
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Rise of the Newsbots: AI-generated news websites are proliferating • NewsGuard

McKenzie Sadeghi and Lorenzo Arvanitis:

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In April 2023, NewsGuard identified 49 websites spanning seven languages — Chinese, Czech, English, French, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Thai — that appear to be entirely or mostly generated by artificial intelligence language models designed to mimic human communication — here in the form of what appear to be typical news websites. 

The websites, which often fail to disclose ownership or control, produce a high volume of content related to a variety of topics, including politics, health, entertainment, finance, and technology. Some publish hundreds of articles a day. Some of the content advances false narratives. Nearly all of the content features bland language and repetitive phrases, hallmarks of artificial intelligence.

Many of the sites are saturated with advertisements, indicating that they were likely designed to generate revenue from programmatic ads — ads that are placed algorithmically across the web and that finance much of the world’s media — just as the internet’s first generation of content farms, operated by humans, were built to do.

In short, as numerous and more powerful AI tools have been unveiled and made available to the public in recent months, concerns that they could be used to conjure up entire news organizations  — once the subject of speculation by media scholars — have now become a reality.

In April 2023, NewsGuard sent emails to the 29 sites in the analysis that listed contact information, and two confirmed that they have used AI. Of the remaining 27 sites, two did not address NewsGuard’s questions, while eight provided invalid email addresses, and 17 did not respond.

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Used to be you’d just feed a normal site through a thesaurus to produce a junk news site, but now we have machines to generate it from scratch. Hurrah?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Buzzfeed offices in New York were a microcosm of the company – but the tech industry only wanted to chew it up and spit it out, a former staffer says. CC-licensed photo by Anthony Quintano on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Got a spare ribbon? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Unions representing Hollywood writers and actors seek limits on AI and chatbots • The New York Times

Noam Scheiber and John Koblin:

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When the union representing Hollywood writers laid out its list of objectives for contract negotiations with studios this spring, it included familiar language on compensation, which the writers say has either stagnated or dropped amid an explosion of new shows.

But far down, the document added a distinctly 2023 twist. Under a section titled “Professional Standards and Protection in the Employment of Writers,” the union wrote that it aimed to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies.”

To the mix of computer programmers, marketing copywriters, travel advisers, lawyers and comic illustrators suddenly alarmed by the rising prowess of generative AI, one can now add screenwriters.

“It is not out of the realm of possibility that before 2026, which is the next time we will negotiate with these companies, they might just go, ‘you know what, we’re good,’” said Mike Schur, the creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation.”

“We don’t need you,” he imagines hearing from the other side. “We have a bunch of A.I.s that are creating a bunch of entertainment that people are kind of OK with.”

In their attempts to push back, the writers have what a lot of other white-collar workers don’t: a labour union.

Mr. Schur, who serves on the bargaining committee of the Writers Guild of America as it seeks to avert a strike before its contract expires on Monday, said the union hopes to “draw a line in the sand right now and say, ‘Writers are human beings.’”

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The point about the WGA (as it’s known) being an unusual beast, by being a union for white-collar workers, is very salient. Being pessimistic – or optimistic – about the potential for AI to evolve and develop is a sensible defensive position. Of course it isn’t close now. And it probably won’t be close to being able to write a scene for years. But you wouldn’t want your forebears to have sold your future for a mess of pottage, would you.

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We interviewed the engineer Google fired for saying its AI had come to life • Futurism

Maggie Harrison spoke to Blake Lemoine, who Told You It Was Bad:

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BL: In mid-2021 — before ChatGPT was an app — during that safety effort I mentioned, Bard was already in the works. It wasn’t called Bard then, but they were working on it, and they were trying to figure out whether or not it was safe to release it. They were on the verge of releasing something in the fall of 2022. So it would have come out right around the same time as ChatGPT, or right before it. Then, in part because of some of the safety concerns I raised, they deleted it.

So I don’t think they’re being pushed around by OpenAI. I think that’s just a media narrative. I think Google is going about doing things in what they believe is a safe and responsible manner, and OpenAI just happened to release something.

MH: So, as you say, Google could have released something a bit sooner, but you very specifically said maybe we should slow down, and they — 

BL: They still have far more advanced technology that they haven’t made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They’ve had that technology for over two years. What they’ve spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it — making sure that it doesn’t make things up too often, making sure that it doesn’t have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That’s what they spent those two years doing. But the basic existence of that technology is years old, at this point.

And in those two years, it wasn’t like they weren’t inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google’s AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal — not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it.

That’s the one that I was like, “you know this thing, this thing’s awake.” And they haven’t let the public play with that one yet. But Bard is kind of a simplified version of that, so it still has a lot of the kind of liveliness of that model.

«

I still don’t believe Lemoine’s correct about the consciousness part, but the inside info about Google is fascinating.
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Black holes resolve paradoxes by destroying quantum states • Science News

Lisa Grossman:

»

Don’t try to do a quantum experiment near a black hole — its mere presence ruins all quantum states in its vicinity, researchers say.

The finding comes from a thought experiment that pits the rules of quantum mechanics and black holes against each other, physicists reported April 17 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. Any quantum experiment done near a black hole could set up a paradox, the researchers find, in which the black hole reveals information about its interior — something physics says is forbidden. The way around the paradox, the team reports, is if the black hole simply destroys any quantum states that come close.

That destruction could have implications for future theories of quantum gravity. These sought-after theories aim to unite quantum mechanics, the set of rules governing subatomic particles, and general relativity, which describes how mass moves on cosmic scales.

“The idea is to use properties of the [theories] that you understand, which [are] quantum mechanics and gravity, to probe aspects of the fundamental theory,” which is quantum gravity, says theoretical physicist Gautam Satishchandran of Princeton University.

Here’s how Satishchandran, along with theoretical physicists Daine Danielson and Robert Wald, both of the University of Chicago, did just that.

«

This is a really quite puzzling – as in non-obvious, but logical – outcome, but it seems to ascribe a bizarre power to black holes that’s hard to square with something that’s just a big mass. The next, obvious, question is, well, how close exactly can you be to the black hole before it starts messing around with your quantum experiments? (And, presumably, your quantum computers on your gleaming new starship?)
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How Buzzfeed News went bust • NY Mag

John Herrman:

»

Even back when I worked at Buzzfeed, it was clear enough that one of two things was likely to happen. Scenario one, which [Buzzfeed founder] Jonah [Peretti] embraced and preached, was a world where “social news” made sense, and running alongside the tech giants was the profitable and righteous way of the future. Publishers’ adjacency to social media wasn’t a temporary and inherently doomed state of affairs — it was bankable, and major investments in pre-profit digital media were rational. Scenario two was less appealing to contemplate. In this world, all ad-supported news — not just BuzzFeed — really was as fucked as it otherwise seemed to be when Google showed up, even before Facebook made its brazen bid to capture and monetize the online commons. From the vantage point of 2023, the history described in [Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith’s forthcoming book] Traffic sounds less like a story of entrepreneurial experimentation than an account of a recurring industry delusion. But it’s a delusion worth studying today as it threatens to manifest again. The tech industry will not ever save the media. It will sooner eat it alive.

There are many more books’ worth of material to write about the last ten years in online journalism, but I’d like to take a moment to emphasize the straightforwardness of the overall story. Just over a decade ago, a small group of social-media services became very large. Facebook, which had started as a place to keep up with friends, evolved into a tool for consuming media. This created a massive and sudden demand for fresh content, including, at the margins, news. Publishers old and new rushed to address the need, epitomized by BuzzFeed, which raised huge sums of VC money on the promise it could do so profitably, with maximally sharable and engaging content, some of which was sponsored. The newsroom portion of the proposition was straightforward, if incomplete. The platforms were hungry for stories, and what is a newsroom if not a machine for producing fresh and authoritative links, ready to share, comment on, or get mad about? And so this era, whatever it was, began.

What came next wasn’t much more complicated. Social media kept growing, ingesting and digesting the web around it, and sending some of its users back as readers in exchange. Its business model was an improvement, in nearly every way, on that of the news sites that were now supplying them with free content: bigger audiences, better targeting, and endless user-generated media. In the early days — let’s say 2011 to 2012 — there was a lot of windfall traffic for media companies. Random stories from years ago would suddenly have hundreds of thousands of readers, having been stripped of their original context and reshared by Facebook users. These new readers arrived in large numbers but didn’t really stick around. Their arrival was interpreted as an invitation. In hindsight, it was a warning.

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So true. The tech industry doesn’t want to share. It wants to take. Everything.
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UK readers may lose access to Wikipedia amid online safety bill requirements • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia site, has said it will not carry out age checks on users, which it fears will be required by the [online safety bill when it becomes an] act.

[Wikimedia UK chief executive Lucy] Crompton-Reid said some content on the site could trigger age verification measures under the terms of the bill.

“For example, educational text and images about sexuality could be misinterpreted as pornography,” she said.

She added: “The increased bureaucracy imposed by this bill will have the effect that only the really big players with significant compliance budgets will be able to operate in the UK market. This could have dire consequences on the information ecosystem here and is, in my view, quite the opposite of what the legislation originally set out to achieve.”

Rebecca MacKinnon, vice-president of global advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation, has said carrying out age verification would “violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors”.

The online safety bill requires commercial pornography sites to carry out age checks. It will also require sites such as Wikipedia to proactively prevent children from encountering pornographic material, with the bill in its current form referring to age verification as one of the possible tools for this. However, there is also a question mark over whether any of Wikipedia’s content would meet the definition of pornographic material in the bill.

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This was presented on social media as OMG GUVMINT IS SHUTTING DOWN WIKIPEDIA. Except as the story here notes, there’s a questionmark – rather a big one, I’d suggest – over how you’d describe Wikipedia as pornography. It’s self-evidently an education and information site. The government’s description is that “all sites that publish pornography” will have to put in checks. You’d need to add a lot of pornography to Wikipedia to really make it fit that description, which would be a perverse way to prove that you don’t like that requirement of the OSB.
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Language experience predicts music processing in a half-million speakers of 54 languages • Current Biology

Jingxuan Liu et al:

»

we used web-based citizen science to assess music perception skill on a global scale in 34,034 native speakers of 19 tonal languages (e.g., Mandarin, Yoruba). We compared their performance to 459,066 native speakers of other languages, including 6 pitch-accented (e.g., Japanese) and 29 non-tonal languages (e.g., Hungarian).

Whether or not participants had taken music lessons, native speakers of all 19 tonal languages had an improved ability to discriminate musical melodies on average, relative to speakers of non-tonal languages. But this improvement came with a trade-off: tonal language speakers were also worse at processing the musical beat.

The results, which held across native speakers of many diverse languages and were robust to geographic and demographic variation, demonstrate that linguistic experience shapes music perception, with implications for relations between music, language, and culture in the human mind.

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They got people to respond at The Music Lab. The implication seems to be that tonal language speakers are less good at keeping rhythm. Don’t ask them to judge that scene in Whiplash, then. Rushing! Dragging! WHICH IS IT!

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Prompt engineering techniques with Azure OpenAI • Microsoft Learn

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This guide will walk you through some advanced techniques in prompt design and prompt engineering. If you’re new to prompt engineering, we recommend starting with our introduction to prompt engineering guide.

While the principles of prompt engineering can be generalized across many different model types, certain models expect a specialized prompt structure. For Azure OpenAI GPT models, there are currently two distinct APIs where prompt engineering comes into play:
•Chat Completion API
•Completion API.

Each API requires input data to be formatted differently, which in turn impacts overall prompt design. The Chat Completion API supports the ChatGPT (preview) and GPT-4 (preview) models. These models are designed to take input formatted in a specific chat-like transcript stored inside an array of dictionaries.

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If you need an introduction – and let’s face it, this is probably going to be in the sixth forum curriculum in a few years (or should be) – then this is as good a place as any to start.
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Web3 funding continues to crater — drops 82% year to year • Crunchbase

Chris Metinko:

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In the first quarter of the year, funding to VC-backed Web3 startups hit its lowest point since the very early days of the space as deal flow continues to slow.

Venture funding plummeted 82% year to year, dropping from $9.1bn in Q1 of 2022 to only $1.7bn, per Crunchbase data.

The funding number is also a 30% decline from the final quarter of last year, and the lowest total since the fourth quarter of 2020 — which saw only $1.1bn — when many people had never heard of Web3. [Many people still haven’t – Overspill Ed.]

Deal flow also continued its pronounced drop, as only 333 deals were completed in the first quarter — down from 369 in the previous quarter and a sharp drop from the  more than 500 announced in Q1 2022. The total number of deals is the lowest since Q4 2020.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the differences between the first quarter of last year and the first quarter of the current one in terms of funding to Web3 startups more than the dramatic fall of big rounds.

In Q1 2022, VC-backed startups raised 29 rounds of more than $100m. That included massive raises of $400m or more by ConsenSys and Polygon Technology, as well as — of course —  FTX and its US affiliate FTX US.

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FTX? Gosh I wonder what happened to them. Bet all the VCs took a lot of guidance from them.
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Elizabeth Holmes delays start of prison sentence with last-minute appeal • CNN Business

Jennifer Korn and Catherine Thorbecke:

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Elizabeth Holmes won’t be starting her 11-year prison sentence just yet.

The disgraced Theranos founder was previously expected to report to prison on Thursday, but she will remain free a little longer while the court considers a last-minute appeal, according to a filing Tuesday night.

Holmes was sentenced last November after she was convicted months earlier on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the now-defunct blood testing startup. Earlier this month, her request to remain free while she appeals her conviction was denied by a judge, setting her up to report to prison on April 27.

On Tuesday, however, Holmes’ legal team filed an appeal of the judge’s decision. As a result, Holmes can remain free on bail while the latest appeal is considered by the court, as per the court’s rules.

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Gnnnnnngggh. However:

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Holmes’ ex-boyfriend and former COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was indicted alongside Holmes and convicted of fraud in a separate trial. Like Holmes, Balwani’s legal team delayed the start of his prison sentence by roughly a month with an appeal.

Balwani reported to prison last week to serve out his nearly 13-year sentence.

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Oh well, the wheels of justice grind slow, but they do at least grind.
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AI journalism is getting harder to tell from the old-fashioned, human-generated kind • The Guardian

Ian Tucker:

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A couple of weeks ago I tweeted a call-out for freelance journalists to pitch me feature ideas for the science and technology section of the Observer’s New Review. Unsurprisingly, given headlines, fears and interest in LLM (large language model) chatbots such as ChatGPT, many of the suggestions that flooded in focused on artificial intelligence – including a pitch about how it is being employed to predict deforestation in the Amazon.

One submission however, from an engineering student who had posted a couple of articles on Medium, seemed to be riding the artificial intelligence wave with more chutzpah. He offered three feature ideas – pitches on innovative agriculture, data storage and the therapeutic potential of VR. While coherent, the pitches had a bland authority about them, repetitive paragraph structure, and featured upbeat endings, which if you’ve been toying with ChatGPT or reading about Google chatbot Bard’s latest mishaps, are hints of chatbot-generated content.

I showed them to a colleague. “They feel synthetic,” he said. Another described them as having the tone of a “life insurance policy document”. Were our suspicions correct? I decided to ask ChatGPT. The bot wasn’t so sure: “The texts could have been written by a human, as they demonstrate a high level of domain knowledge and expertise, and do not contain any obvious errors or inconsistencies,” it responded.

…If the chatbot were a bit more intelligent it might have suggested that I put the suspect content through OpenAI’s text classifier. When I did, two of the pitches were rated “possibly” AI generated. Of the two Medium blog posts with the student’s name on, one was rated “possibly” and the other “likely”.

I decided to email him and ask him if his pitches were written by a chatbot. His response was honest: “I must confess that you are correct in your assumption that my writing was indeed generated with the assistance of AI technology.”

But he was unashamed: “My goal is to leverage the power of AI to produce high-quality content that meets the needs of my clients and readers. I believe that by combining the best of both worlds – human creativity and AI technology – we can achieve great things.” Even this email, according to OpenAI’s detector, was “likely” AI generated.

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Requiem for the newsroom • The New York Times

Maureen Dowd:

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“What would a newspaper movie look like today?” wondered my New York Times colleague Jim Rutenberg. “A bunch of individuals at their apartments, surrounded by sad houseplants, using Slack?”

Mike Isikoff, an investigative reporter at Yahoo who worked with me at The Washington Star back in the ’70s, agreed: “Newsrooms were a crackling gaggle of gossip, jokes, anxiety and oddball hilarious characters. Now we sit at home alone staring at our computers. What a drag.”

As my friend Mark Leibovich, a writer at The Atlantic, noted: “I can’t think of a profession that relies more on osmosis, and just being around other people, than journalism. There’s a reason they made all those newspaper movies, ‘All the President’s Men,’ ‘Spotlight,’ ‘The Paper.’
“There’s a reason people get tours of newsrooms. You don’t want a tour of your local H&R Block office.”

Now, Leibovich said, he does most meetings from home. “At the end of a Zoom call, nobody says, ‘Hey, do you want to get a drink?’ There’s just a click at the end of the meetings. Nothing dribbles out afterward, and you can really learn things from the little meetings after the meetings.”

When Leibovich got his first newspaper job answering phones and sorting mail at The Boston Phoenix, he soon learned that “the best journalism school is overhearing journalists doing their jobs.”

Isikoff still recalls how excited he was when he heard his seatmate at The Star, Robert Pear, the late, great reporter who later worked at The Times, track down the fugitive financier Robert Vesco in Cuba. “Hello, Mr. Vesco,” Pear said in his whispery voice. “This is Robert Pear of The Washington Star.”

With journalists swarming around Washington for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner and cascade of parties, it seems like a good time to write the final obituary for the American newspaper newsroom.

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I haven’t been inside a newsroom for a long time, but they did seem to be getting quieter. The biggest trend was away from boozy lunches and towards sandwiches at a desk.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Apologies: I forgot to include a link to a news story from 1995. Tomorrow we’ll have two years to cover!