Life in the Bronze Age was stable, and above all never at risk of changing from year to year. Just like our own? CC-licensed photo by Karsten Wentink 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 10 links for you. Why yes, it’s a sword. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition blocked by UK regulators • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft’s $68.7bn deal to acquire Activision Blizzard has been blocked by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). After months of analysing three million Microsoft and Activision documents, and more than 2,100 emails from the public, the CMA has concluded that the deal could “alter the future of the fast-growing cloud gaming market, leading to reduced innovation and less choice for UK gamers over the years to come.”

The final decision is a blow to Microsoft’s hopes of acquiring Activision Blizzard. “Microsoft has a strong position in cloud gaming services and the evidence available to the CMA showed that Microsoft would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision’s games exclusive to its own cloud gaming service,” says the CMA.

The CMA estimates that Microsoft controls around 60% to 70% of global cloud gaming services and that adding control over Call of Duty, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft would give Microsoft a significant advantage in the cloud gaming market.

Microsoft had attempted to address concerns around cloud gaming in the lead up to this decision. The software giant signed cloud gaming deals with Boosteroid, Ubitus, and Nvidia to allow Xbox PC games to run on these rival cloud gaming services — after striking a similar deal with Nintendo in December. These 10-year deals also include access to Call of Duty and other Activision Blizzard games, if the deal is approved by regulators.

The CMA says it has examined these deals, but that they contain “a number of significant shortcomings” in cloud gaming services.

«

Analysing that volume of documents and emails is a hell of a task; writing a 415-page report which goes into detail for all the possible remedies is quite the feat.

Activision Blizzard is very annoyed about this, saying the UK is “clearly closed for business”. Time will tell, but to me preventing market concentration is always a good thing for a regulator to do.
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AI spam is already flooding the internet and it has an obvious tell • Vice

Matthew Gault:

»

ChatGPT and GPT-4 are already flooding the internet with AI-generated content in places famous for hastily written inauthentic content: Amazon user reviews and Twitter. 

When you ask ChatGPT to do something it’s not supposed to do, it returns several common phrases. When I asked ChatGPT to tell me a dark joke, it apologized: “As an AI language model, I cannot generate inappropriate or offensive content,” it said. Those two phrases, “as an AI language model” and “I cannot generate inappropriate content,” recur so frequently in ChatGPT generated content that they’ve become memes.

These terms can reasonably be used to identify lazily executed ChatGPT spam by searching for them across the internet.

A search of Amazon reveals what appear to be fake user reviews generated by ChatGPT or another similar bot. Many user reviews feature the phrase “as an AI language model.” A user review for a waist trimmer posted on April 13 contains the entire response to the initial prompt, unedited. “Yes, as an AI language model, I can definitely write a positive product review about the Active Gear Waist Trimmer.”

Another user posted a negative review for precision rings, a foam band marketed as a trainer for people playing first person shooters on a controller. “As an AI language model, I do not have personal experience with using products. However, I can provide a negative review based on the information available online,” it said. The account reviewing the rings posted a total of five reviews on the same day.

«

Fake reviews? There should be a law against it! Perhaps the UK government…?
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New rules ban subscription traps and fake reviews • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

»

Buying, selling or hosting fake reviews will become illegal as part of changes planned in new laws.

The UK government’s new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill aims to help consumers and increase competition between big tech firms.

The bill is being introduced on Tuesday and bans people receiving money or free goods for writing glowing reviews. Firms will also have to remind people when free subscription trials end.

The bill, which has been in the making since 2021, also seeks to end the tech giants’ current market dominance. Its creators have said they want to manage the way in which a handful of huge tech companies dominate the market – although none is specifically named yet, and will be selected after a period of investigation of up to nine months.

It does not matter in which country they are based, and firms headquartered in China will also be included if they are found to be in scope.

The newly formed Digital Markets Unit, which will be part of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), will then be given certain powers to open up a specific market depending on the situation.

«

Great idea, though it’s pretty hard to believe that this is going to get through Parliament in the 18 months or so before the general election due before the end of 2024. (April and October 2024 are the favoured dates.)
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AI used photographer’s photos for training, then slapped him with an invoice • DIY Photography

Dunja Djudjic:

»

Earlier this year, German stock photographer Robert Kneschke used Have I Been Trained?, a website that tells you if your photos were used to train AI image generators. He discovered many of his images in the dataset of LAION, a non-profit that makes large-scale machine learning models, datasets, and code. As Profi Foto reports, Knescke asked ​​Laion to remove his work from the training data. But he got a response he didn’t expect: a letter from a law firm Heidrich Rechtsanwälte on behalf of LAION. What’s more, the company allegedly reached out to other photographers with the letter in almost the same form.

In the letter, LAION’s attorney claims that the non-profit is “doing voluntary research with the aim of further developing self-learning algorithms in the sense of artificial intelligence and making them available to the general public,” and that they “do not violate copyright or data protection law.”

LAION “only maintains a database containing links to image files that are publicly available on the Internet, the letter alleges, “but not the image data itself,” Because of this, the company’s attorney claims that the photographer has no right to request image deletion. “There are simply no pictures of our client that could be deleted,” says Heidrich Rechtsanwälte.

“We also point out that our client can assert claims for damages in accordance with Section 97a (4) UrhG if they are unjustified in terms of copyright,” the law firm reportedly told the photographer. And this is exactly what happened. LAION lawyers are now reportedly demanding almost €900 (~$1000 USD) from Kneschke while LAION continues to use his pictures.

«

What I think this story happens not to mention – except at the end, in a quote from Kneschke – is that he must have included a legal threat, and possibly mention of payment for breach of copyright, in the letter sent to LAION. That’s why its lawyers fired back. Of course if it goes to court it will be up to Kneschke to prove any breach, which might be tricky. It’s essentially the same thing as Getty’s case against Stable Diffusion: is the data actually trapped inside there?
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Boy groomed on Twitter and abducted after Musk takeover • NBC News

Ben Goggin:

»

The 13-year-old Utah boy hung out in the typical online spaces for someone his age: The chat app Discord. The gaming platform Roblox. And, of course, Twitter. 

But for more than two months last year, on those very platforms, the boy was being sexually groomed by an adult who was 13 years older and hundreds of miles away. It started in private messages then moved into public view on Twitter.

It ended in a horror story. The boy’s father went to check on him one night and found him missing, his window open, the bedroom freezing. The boy was allegedly abducted by the man accused of grooming him, driven across state lines, and, prosecutors said, repeatedly sexually assaulted.

Heather and Ken McConney, the boy’s parents, told NBC News that they believe the kidnapping was preventable. It came after a series of missed opportunities over the span of nearly a month, where, they said, Twitter and law enforcement failed to effectively intervene despite an abundance of information posted online. They’re demanding answers.

“I need to move forward and figure out what the hell happened,” Heather said. “Where did the ball get dropped?”

…The case illustrates how easily online predators can avoid detection online, even on the internet’s most recognized platforms. In a mountain of content, tech platforms sometimes struggle to detect and respond to real threats to children.

It also highlights the sometimes bold and grandiose security statements made by tech platform executives and managers, despite the problems those companies face every day. As the boy was being groomed, and over a month before his abduction, Elon Musk said that addressing child exploitation on Twitter was “Priority #1,” alleging he’d inherited a platform on which child exploitation was previously allowed to run rampant.

Ella Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, provided an accounting of the company’s interactions with law enforcement in the case, but declined to address specific questions about the days leading up to the abduction. 

«

One element I’ve cut for length there is that the police dropped the ball: they misspelt the username on a search warrant sent to Twitter 25 days before the abduction, and took “several weeks” to notice and correct it. (Two? Three?) That doesn’t mean Musk was wrong, since this clearly predated his takeover; nor that Twitter was lazy afterward.
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Congress gets 40 ChatGPT Plus licenses to start experimenting with generative AI • FedScoop

John Hewitt Jones:

»

Congressional offices have begun using OpenAI’s popular and controversial generative AI tool ChatGPT to experiment with the technology internally, a senior official within the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer’s House Digital Services said Friday.

The House recently created a new AI working group for staff to test and share new AI tools in the congressional office environment and now the House of Representatives‘ digital service has obtained 40 licenses for ChatGPT Plus, which were distributed earlier this month.

The purchase of the licenses comes amid widespread debate over how artificial intelligence technology should be used and regulated across the private sector and within government. This represents one of the earliest examples of ChatGPT being used as part of the policymaking process.

The 40 licenses were assigned on a first-come first-served basis, and House Digital Services will pay the $20/month per office subscription plan for an indefinite period of time, according to the official. Details of which Congressional offices have received the ChatGPT Plus licenses will remain anonymous for now. 

…“Oftentimes members are experimenting with things, new tools, in their own ways and we just want to be in the loop on that. We want to help facilitate that experimentation,” the official said.

They added: “There are so many different use cases for ChatGPT but what we’ve heard is at the top of the list for Congressional offices is creating and summarising content.”

«

“Creating and summarising content”, eh? Wonder how many speeches will be helped along by this. (One politician has already done this back in January, after all.)
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It’s 1178 BCE and the Bronze Age has never looked stronger. No, I won’t lift my eyes to the horizon right now • The Chatner

Daniel Lavery:

»

It’s 1178 BCE and the sun never sets on the Ugaritic Empire/Kassite Federation/Old Babylonion Empire/Ugaritic trade network! And it’s all thanks to bronze, the hardest and most durable metal to ever come down the pike. Yes, whether you’re looking to smelt or cast, whether you need an ingot or a rhyton, a double-headed Cretan axe, some grave goods for your strongest grandmother, or a brazier-fitted statue of Kronos to give just the right finishing touch to your tophet, you simply can’t do better than bronze. And demand isn’t likely to die down anytime soon!  

Linear A will simply never be replaced, alphabetically speaking. Absolutely undefeated script. For practicality and ease of communication, you can’t do much better than a stylus cutting lines into soft clay, the final and best innovation over a stylus pressing wedges into soft clay.

«

This builds and builds, as you realise how many assumptions folk in 1178 BCE (or so) were making about how everything’s going to be just the same next year as this. Which of course leads you to look around at the assumptions you were making a year or two years ago or in 2019 about how next year would look.

Which, in turn, raises the question of what assumptions about right now you’re making that are flat-out wrong.
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April 26 1993: Recession over – it’s official • BBC On This Day

»

April 1993: The government has reacted with relief to news that Britain’s economy grew by 0.2% in the first three months of this year, and declared the longest recession since the 1930s officially over.

The figures, from the Central Statistical Office, show a 0.2% rise in gross domestic product (GDP), and a 0.6% increase in activity in the onshore economy, excluding oil and gas production.

It’s the first sign of growth in the economy for over two years. The recession has been longer, but less severe, than the last one in the 1980s. Output has fallen by 3.9%, compared with a 5.5% fall last time.

Prime Minister John Major called on industry to make the most of the “unparalleled opportunities” offered by the combination of low inflation and interest rates, and a competitive exchange rate.

The Chancellor, Norman Lamont, was also upbeat, saying the figures were “the best evidence so far that the economy is recovering across a broad front.”

«

Grandpa-Munsters lookalike Lamont had been derided for having earlier said that he was sure he could see “the green shoots of recovery” in 1991, ahead of the coming 1992 election, when things were very bleak. But with an election won the year before, and the country heading towards growth while Labour’s new leader John Smith struggled to assert himself on his party, surely for the Tories everything was coming up Milhouse?
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Election greeters mean voter ID impact may not be known, Labour says • The Guardian

Peter Walker:

»

Labour has said it may prove impossible to know how many people are turned away at next week’s local elections for not having identity documents, after it emerged that officials outside polling stations will not be making a count of those unable to vote.

While clerks inside polling stations will take a formal register of those who cannot vote because they lack the correct photo ID, some venues will place other staff outside as so-called greeters, who will remind people about the need for ID before they go in.

These greeters will not take a note of the number of people who leave when told about the requirements, the Electoral Commission has confirmed, meaning the total number of potentially disfranchised voters may never be known.

Ten days before the first mass use of voter ID in a UK election outside Northern Ireland, there is also concern about the very low take-up of a free, government-issued document intended to help people excluded because they lack a passport, driving licence or other permitted type of ID.

While government estimates suggest that more than 2 million people around the UK lack up-to-date photo ID, just 55,316 people had applied online for a so-called voter authority certificate as of Sunday, 48 hours before applications close.

The numbers applying from older and younger demographics – those seen as particularly likely to be without the necessary ID – are especially low. Just 2,025 people aged 75-plus applied, and 3,334 aged under 25.

An Electoral Commission spokesperson said the number of applications so far was “lower than we might have expected”.

«

At the close of applications on Wednesday 5pm, a total of 63,279 had applied for ID; that’s about 3% of the two million people who lack the necessary photo ID. You can see people – or perhaps bots? – still trying to apply. That page shows breakdowns by date, age and nation. Notably, it’s the 45-54 and 55-64 age who made up more than half of applications in the past week; those under 25, just 6.6%.
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Everything you don’t actually need to know about the economics of Succession • Financial Times

Louis Ashworth:

»

Succession is a show about a business. For three-and-a-bit seasons, the saga of Waystar Royco — a storied but creaking media giant led by ageing mogul Logan Roy and his squabbling spawn — has entranced audiences with familial betrayal, corporate intrigue, withering put-downs and Cousin Greg.

Despite the sound, fury and personal drama, in a strictly business sense . . . not much has actually happened. Still, it has got a bit confusing, and even seasoned financial analysts or FT columnists could be forgiven for losing track of things. So FT Alphaville sat down for a fevered quasi-binge of the show and tried to make sense of Succession’s financial plotline(s).

We’re gonna try to answer some key questions:

— What is Waystar worth and how is it run?
— Who owns Waystar shares?
— What is Waystar’s share price and why does it matter?
— How rich are the Roy kids?

«

If you’re interested in Succession, you might enjoy this attempt to see if the numbers that get thrown around actually tie together. There are very major spoilers for the latest (final) season, up to episode 4, but not beyond (because things get even tastier, money-wise, in episode 5 which aired earlier this week).

Of course, given how careful Succession is about all the details – they even consulted on how you’d tell if someone who came to a rich peoples’ party just didn’t fit in, and having a capacious bag was one – then of course the fine points hold together. Well, mostly. A pity the FT couldn’t get a Quad Squad onto this one, but ehh.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In US schools, cheap Chromebooks have recently been very popular – but their short lifespan means their real cost is much higher, a new report says. CC-licensed photo by Virginia Department of Education 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 10 links for you. Still going. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Tidal power’s fickle future • Hakai Magazine

Doug Johnson:

»

For tidal power generation, location is everything. To produce energy, tidal generators need fast currents or a sizable swing in sea level between high tide and low tide. The Bay of Fundy in Atlantic Canada, for instance, is an ideal candidate. Rising and falling by 12 meters, the bay has one of the largest tidal ranges in the world.

But a site’s currents and tidal range, and its potential for tidal power generation, is a complex consequence of myriad factors, including the basin’s width, length, and shape, the inflow from rivers, and the height of the sea. It’s this last variable—sea level—that threatens to throw a wrench in the world’s tidal power plans.

In a recent paper, scientists including Danial Khojasteh, a hydrodynamics expert at the University of New South Wales in Australia, show how sea level rise could upend the viability of tidal energy in sites around the world, turning presently prime spots into duds.

Khojasteh and his colleagues came to this conclusion after modeling 978 different hypothetical estuaries with varying shapes, tidal ranges, and rates of sea level rise, among other factors. While none of the estuaries were based on real locations, they could “reasonably represent the geometries of many, many estuaries worldwide,” says Khojasteh.

Of their 978 theoretical estuaries, a total of 54 had currents fast enough to drive tidal turbines. This number dropped to 47 in simulations with one meter of sea level rise. With two meters of sea level rise, it fell to 40. Even in estuaries that did keep their tidal power potential, Khojasteh says that in some the actual spot within the estuary where the water was moving at the necessary speed moved around.

Sea level rise is “going to displace, eliminate, or create new optimal sites across the system,” Khojasteh says.

For those looking to install tidal power generating infrastructure—equipment designed to last for decades—this could be a problem.

«

Understatement of the year there. However tidal power keeps showing up as too expensive, even though it doesn’t suffer from the irregularity of wind or solar.
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Twitter Blue Thread: Newsletter Edition • The Mosquite Chronicles

“Mosquito Capital”:

»

Super quick background: At Facebook, most product decisions were made only after careful A/B testing. This did stifle some creativity, but it also meant that catastrophic changes to the app were usually reverted before they ever made it past a few thousand users.

So. When you think about making changes to a massive system like Twitter or FB, you need to keep a few things in mind:

1) These are giant interconnected systems full of irrational, rational, adversarial, and opportunistic actors. The behavioral incentives are often very unintuitive and weird. Cascading unintended side effects are pretty much guaranteed any time you make a large change.

1.a) As a result of this, you have to be **very, very careful about the assumptions you make**. You can be the best and brightest, but at the end of the day there are just too many factors and feedback loops. What you expect to happen, and what will happen, are very different.

1.b) I cannot stress this enough. You can be the biggest brain genius, straight out of old Bell Labs or early Google or MIT or CERN or SpaceX or whatever, and you will *always* eventually be caught off guard by the behavior of these systems and the humans that use them.

«

There are another nine points, some also subdivided. It gets repetitive to say that Twitter is a super-complex system, and that Musk has no idea what he’s playing with, but — Twitter is a super-complex system, and Musk has no idea what he’s playing with. Just be grateful that failure there can’t actually do any active harm; it’s not as if it’s storing nuclear waste or running an intensive care unit.
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Apple declares victory after decision reached in Epic Games appeal • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

»

Epic sued Apple after the game company introduced its own payment system into Fortnite, which broke Apple’s rules and ultimately got the company banned from the App Store. It culminated in a weekslong trial two years ago in California where Apple CEO Tim Cook and Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney testified.

Monday’s ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed the decision that primarily found Apple did not violate antitrust law by banning competing app marketplaces on iPhones.

Apple mostly won the initial court battle, with the judge finding that it did not monopolize any market.

However, the iPhone maker did lose one claim and had to allow developers to place links inside their apps so users could make purchases outside the App Store.

The appeals court did not overturn that decision, which was related to California law, and is the one claim that Apple says was not decided in its favor. Whether the company is forced to allow links to outside payments will be determined in possible future hearings.

Apple said in its statement that it was considering further action, which could include an appeal to the Supreme Court. Whether Epic Games will help pay Apple’s legal fees will also be decided at a lower court.

“Apple prevailed at the 9th Circuit Court,” Epic Games CEO Sweeney said in tweets sent after the decision. “Though the court upheld the ruling that Apple’s restraints have ‘a substantial anticompetitive effect that harms consumers’, they found we didn’t prove our Sherman Act case.”

“Fortunately, the court’s positive decision rejecting Apple’s anti-steering provisions frees iOS developers to send consumers to the web to do business with them directly there. We’re working on next steps,” Sweeney continued.

«

That key loss – obliging Apple to allow links to purchasing outside the App Store – could be big or could be small; look at how long and tediously Apple fought against dating apps in the Netherlands where it was required to do the same, and gave a mile, one inch at a time.
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School Chromebooks are creating huge amounts of e-waste • The Verge

Monica Chin:

»

Back in early 2020, as the covid pandemic drove classrooms online, school districts found themselves needing to bulk purchase affordable laptops that they could send home with their students. Quite a few turned to Chromebooks.

Three years later, the US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund concludes in a new report called Chromebook Churn that many of these batches are already beginning to break. That’s potentially costing districts money; PIRG estimates that “doubling the lifespan of Chromebooks could result in $1.8bn in savings for taxpayers.” It also creates quite a bit of e-waste.

One of the big problems is repairability. Chromebooks are harder to upgrade and repair, on average, than Windows laptops. That’s in part, the PIRG found, because the replacement parts are much harder to come by — especially for elements like screens, hinges, and keyboards that are particularly vulnerable to the drops, jolts, jostles, and spills that come from school use.

For example, researchers found that nearly half of the replacement keyboards listed for Acer Chromebooks were out of stock online and that over a third cost “$89.99 or more, which is nearly half the cost of a typical $200 Chromebook.” Some IT departments, PIRG reports, have resorted to buying extra batches of Chromebooks just for their components.

“These high costs may make schools reconsider Chromebooks as a cost-saving strategy,” the report reads.

«

Will they, though? It’s not just Chromebooks cost less, it’s also that they’re more secure.
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April 13 1992: Labour’s Neil Kinnock resigns • BBC On This Day

»

Neil Kinnock has resigned as Labour leader following the party’s defeat by the Conservatives in the general election three days ago. His deputy Roy Hattersley has also said he will step down.

Both men will continue in their positions until their successors are chosen in June.

In a sombre statement read out in the Shadow Cabinet room at Westminster, he pinned the blame on Labour’s demise firmly on newspapers sympathetic to the Conservatives.

He quoted former treasurer of the Conservative Party, Lord McAlpine, who said in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph: “The heroes of this campaign were Sir David English, Sir Nicholas Lloyd, Kelvin MacKenzie and the other editors of the grand Tory Press.”

Mr Kinnock gave this warning to the victorious Conservative Party – “This was how the election was won and if the politicians, elated in their hour of victory, are tempted to believe otherwise, they are in very real trouble next time.”

«

It’s edition 1992 of this collection, so here’s something from April 1992. Thanks Gavin W for the idea.
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The collapse of FTX affected Africa, too • Rest of World

Damilare Dosunmu:

»

Chiamaka, a former product manager at a Nigerian cryptocurrency startup, has sworn off digital currencies. The 22-year-old has weathered a layoff and lost savings worth 4,603,500 naira ($9,900) after the collapse of FTX in November 2022. She now works for a corporate finance company in Lagos, earning a salary that is 45% lower than her previous job.

“I used to be bullish on crypto because I believed it could liberate Africans financially,” Chiamaka, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym as she was concerned about breaching her contract with her current employer, told Rest of World. “Instead, it has managed to do the opposite so far … at least to me and a few of my friends.”

Chiamaka is among the tens of millions of Africans who bought into the cryptocurrency frenzy over the last few years. According to one estimate in mid-2022, around 53 million Africans owned crypto — 16.5% of the total global crypto users. Nigeria led with over 22 million users, ranking fourth globally. Blockchain startups and businesses on the continent raised $474 million in 2022, a 429% increase from the previous year, according to the African Blockchain Report. Young African creatives also became major proponents of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), taking inspiration from pop culture and the continent’s history. Several decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), touted as the next big thing, emerged across Africa.

Now, however, much of this buzz seems to be a thing of the past.

«

Don’t say you’re surprised.
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The Kraken Wakes: when games start talking back • Financial Times

Chris Allnutt:

»

In the poky, half-flooded offices of the English Broadcasting Company, a red telephone is ringing. You answer it. A woman’s voice asks anxiously, “Is anyone there?”

In any other game, you would expect her question to be followed by a series of dialogue lines for you to choose from, pre-written approximations of different approaches your character might take. “I’m here to help,” perhaps or, for the more abrasive, “What’s it to you?” But in The Kraken Wakes the text box is empty, waiting to be filled by you either through a headset or a keyboard.

An adventure game adapted from the 1953 John Wyndham novel of the same name, The Kraken Wakes is the latest beneficiary of Charisma’s revolutionary AI dialogue software. The British company has developed a platform capable of interpreting players’ custom contributions — however unpredictable or outlandish — and cleverly weaving them into the narrative in a way designed to feel natural.

And just as your input is entirely up to you, the responses you receive in return are dynamic too: some will pick up on keywords to deliver a range of scripted responses, but others harness OpenAI’s GPT-4 in order to fashion entirely original ones. It’s the first time the language model has been implemented in a game in this way, and it opens the medium up to a level of autonomy that was until now too time-consuming to tackle. ChatGPT may already be helping to secure undergraduate degrees around the world, but for game developers the technology’s full potential remains to be seen.

As a fledgling reporter for the EBC, you spend much of the game interviewing people (and I thought games were supposed to be escapist). When asked by an editor [in the game] what I liked to read, I replied: “Detective stories”. “Oh, mysterious. Perhaps you’re to become our in-house investigative reporter,” came the response. Several minutes later, I heard the editor reference my choice to another character.

«

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Security failures at TikTok’s Virginia data centers: unescorted visitors, mystery flash drives and illicit crypto mining • Forbes

Emily Baker-White:

»

For years, TikTok has told lawmakers that the private data of its U.S. users is secured — and safe from potential influence or exfiltration — in a cluster of data centers located in Northern Virginia.

But interviews with seven current and former employees and more than 60 documents, photos and videos from the data centers reveal that the centers have faced security vulnerabilities ranging from unmarked flash drives plugged into servers to unescorted visitors to boxes of hard drives left unattended in hallways. Sources suggest that these challenges are the result of TikTok trying to grow its data storage capacity very quickly, and sometimes cutting corners along the way.

Documents, photos, and interviews also suggest that TikTok’s data center operations are still tightly enmeshed with ByteDance’s business in China. Among other suppliers, the data centers use servers produced by Inspur, a company that the Pentagon said in 2020 was controlled by the Chinese military and that the Commerce Department added to a sanctions list last month. Documents also show that as recently as last week, server work orders were sent to data center technicians by Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd., a ByteDance subsidiary partially owned by the Chinese government, which TikTok has repeatedly insisted has no control over its operations.

These revelations come at a critical moment for TikTok, which is facing a federal criminal investigation for surveilling journalists (including this reporter) and a threat from the Biden Administration that ByteDance must sell TikTok or face a full ban of the app in the US.

«

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Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature, calling for its removal • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

The user reviews for Snapchat’s “My AI” feature are in — and they’re not good. Launched last week to global users after initially being a subscriber-only addition, Snapchat’s new AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology is now pinned to the top of the app’s Chat tab where users can ask it questions and get instant responses. But following the chatbot’s rollout to Snapchat’s wider community, Snapchat’s app has seen a spike in negative reviews amid a growing number of complaints shared on social media.

Over the past week, Snapchat’s average U.S. App Store review was 1.67, with 75% of reviews being one-star, according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. For comparison, across Q1 2023, the Snapchat average U.S. App Store review was 3.05, with only 35% of reviews being one-star.

The number of daily reviews has also increased by five times over the last week, the firm noted.

Another app data provider, Apptopia, reports a similar trend. Its analysis shows “AI” was the top keyword in Snapchat’s App Store reviews over the past seven days, where it was mentioned 2,973 times. The firm has given the term an “Impact Score” rating of -9.2. This Impact Score is a weighted index that measures the effect a term has on sentiment and ranges from -10 to +10.

«

Seems sub-optimal. Perhaps we don’t want AIs to chat to all the time.
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There is no AI • The New Yorker

Jaron Lanier:

»

Many of the uses of A.I. that I like rest on advantages we gain when computers get less rigid. Digital stuff as we have known it has a brittle quality that forces people to conform to it, rather than assess it. We’ve all endured the agony of watching some poor soul at a doctor’s office struggle to do the expected thing on a front-desk screen. The face contorts; humanity is undermined.

The need to conform to digital designs has created an ambient expectation of human subservience. A positive spin on A.I. is that it might spell the end of this torture, if we use it well. We can now imagine a Web site that reformulates itself on the fly for someone who is color-blind, say, or a site that tailors itself to someone’s particular cognitive abilities and styles. A humanist like me wants people to have more control, rather than be overly influenced or guided by technology. Flexibility may give us back some agency.

Still, despite these possible upsides, it’s more than reasonable to worry that the new technology will push us around in ways we don’t like or understand. Recently, some friends of mine circulated a petition asking for a pause on the most ambitious A.I. development. The idea was that we’d work on policy during the pause. The petition was signed by some in our community but not others. I found the notion too hazy—what level of progress would mean that the pause could end? Every week, I receive new but always vague mission statements from organizations seeking to initiate processes to set A.I. policy.

These efforts are well intentioned, but they seem hopeless to me.

«

I feel like Lanier has never seen a technology that he’s delighted by, and I’ve been reading his opinions for at least 30 years.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A decision by Imgur to wipe a huge number of accounts suggests that a lot of internet culture is as impermanent as a sandcastle. Is it? Should it be? CC-licensed photo by Gonçalo Cruz Matos 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. Call me Canute. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Work starts on UK’s largest solar plant • Financial Times

Gill Plimmer:

»

Construction of the UK’s largest solar and battery storage plant has begun after the company developing it won the highest government subsidy yet for a sun-powered energy scheme.

Project Fortress, which is being built on 890 acres of countryside at Cleve Hill near Faversham in Kent, was granted development consent in May 2020 and was the first solar farm to be approved as a nationally significant infrastructure project. Once operational, it is forecast to generate enough renewable power each year to meet the needs of about 100,000 UK homes.

Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, the investment manager behind the farm, is being supported by the government’s Contracts for Difference (CFD) scheme with a 15-year deal in which it will be paid a fixed price for the electricity generated, with revenues adjusted for inflation and the cost paid by consumers through their energy bills. The price is equivalent to £56 per megawatt hour [5.6p per kWh] on 40% of the output.

The scheme is set to be completed and connected to the National Grid early next year. It is the largest under construction in the UK, although an even bigger project is planned by Photovolt Development Partners at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire that could provide enough electricity to power 330,000 homes.

Rory Quinlan, co-founder and managing partner of Quinbrook, said the UK had “historically been very generous to renewable energy projects with a secure regime that has been operating since the 1990s”.

“It remains a very attractive market for renewable providers,” he added. “The UK government is supportive through the CFD auction and the capacity market mechanism and there is a lot of corporate and social pressure for the UK to decarbonise.”

«

David Davis, the Tory MP and former Brexit secretary, had the audacity to whine about this on Twitter. To which it was pointed out that his ideas led to a giant lorry parks to cope with Brexit holdups. There were 29 authorised, from 20 acres up.
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Twitter awarded Fake Disney Junior UK account gold checkmark status • Variety

K.J. Yossman:

»

Twitter’s verification woes continue. It appears the company inadvertently awarded a gold verification badge to a parody Disney account that has published racial slurs.

As of this morning, Twitter account @DisneyJuniorUK boasted a gold verification badge on the social media site, accompanied by a message reading “This account is verified because it’s an official business on Twitter.” (The account was suspended in the last hour after Variety contacted Disney. A source says Disney were aware of the account since the early hours of the morning in the U.K. and had already reached out to Twitter to resolve the issue.)

In its pinned tweet, the account — which, due to its content and follower numbers, does not appear to be an official Disney account — posted: “#FuckThatN****Elon, #KasherQuon and #MeowskullFeetFreaks.” (The original pinned tweet did not censor the racial slur.)

The Twitter account, which was believed to be a long-running parody account, also posted tweets claiming that adult animated series “South Park” and “Family Guy” would soon be available on Disney Junior UK.

«

I’d quibble here with “It appears the company inadvertently awarded”. It awarded the badge. The advertence or lack of it isn’t material. But what’s amazing is that it had only about a thousand followers. I thought the verification marks were going to accounts with a million followers or more.
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Ban all gambling adverts, say more than half of Britons • The Guardian

Jon Ungoed-Thomas:

»

More than half the public would like to see a ban on gambling advertising, according to a new poll taken as ministers prepare to unveil an overhaul of the industry. In the survey, carried out for the charity Gambling with Lives, 52% of respondents said they supported a ban on all gambling advertising, promotion and sponsorship, and nearly two-thirds wanted new limits on online stakes.

Ministers are expected to reject a blanket ban on gambling advertising in a white paper that could be published this week. The Premier League recently announced that its clubs would end shirt sponsorship by gambling firms by the end of the 2025/26 season.

Will Prochaska of Gambling with Lives, which supports families bereaved by gambling-related suicide, said: “This poll displays the strength of public sentiment on gambling advertising. The Premier League’s decision to remove ads from shirts but leave them all over stadiums and across broadcasts, is a cynical attempt to avoid regulation. This data shows the public won’t be tricked into thinking it’s enough. If gambling reforms fail to significantly restrict gambling advertising, they’ll be woefully out of step with a public that expects action.”

The Survation poll of 1,009 adults found that 68% of respondents thought under-18s should not be exposed to gambling advertising, 64% supported affordability checks for those wanting to bet more than £100 month, and 60% saw gambling as a danger to family life.

«

Smoking adverts and sponsorship is banned, on the logic that indulging in it is addictive and physically harmful to the participant. Gambling is addictive too (never understood it myself), and financially harmful. The logic feels inescapable: we interfere with some freedoms (hard drugs too) because we argue that the social effects are worse. (In the case of hard drugs, probably wrongly.) But gambling companies have always had substantial lobbying power.
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Software firms face huge tax bills that threaten tech startup survival • CNBC

Eric Rosenbaum:

»

Across the software development field, founders are experiencing an income tax season that has become an existential threat to their company’s survival. Software startups say they were blindsided by shocking tax bills as a result of a change in law related to research and development costs, and if Congress does not provide a retroactive fix, business failures will spread throughout the industry.

The root of the issue is the inability of lawmakers to extend a key tax provision that had bipartisan support at the end of last year that allows for full expensing of research and development costs under Section 174 of the tax code. That did not come out of nowhere, and was a big disappointment to major corporations that had lobbied for the measure. But for many small business owners who often wear multiple hats, or don’t have lobbying arms or relationships with big four CPA firms, the change to require R+D amortization over a period of five years first became known this spring when accountants showed them the massive tax bills they owed the government.

…How bad is it? According to Landon Bennett, co-founder of Georgia-based software firm Ad Reform, which provides automation technology for the advertising industry, his taxable income has gone up by 400%. “It’s been a tough year for the ad agencies, in the five or six toughest years we’ve ever had, so this is like a bomb on top of an already bad year,” he said.

Bennett has already forsaken his entire compensation for 2022 to pay the tax bill and said he considers himself fortunate to be able to put his entire pay towards it. But he added, “I can take that hit this year, but I can’t take it forever.”

«

Ben Thompson wrote about this in his (subscriber) newsletter; the effect is dramatic because it forces companies to amortise R+D costs over five years, which means they can’t offset their immediate costs against taxes, which means they owe huge taxes instead of small ones, which crushes their cashflow. Quite a few are going to go bust if they can’t get overdrafts. It’s not just tech companies either, though they tend to lean heaviest on R+D.

It’s probably going to be a bloodbath, at just the wrong time for the Biden administration.
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Imgur schedules mass deletion of adult and inactive content on May 15 • Know Your Meme

Aidan Walker:

»

Internet culture is like a sandcastle on the beach: Communities create intricate beautiful content and then within a few years, waves can rush in and sweep it all away. The conventional wisdom among many used to be that if you post something online, it stays there forever — but more and more, it’s clear that old memes, posts, forums and other parts of internet history are easily and rapidly lost forever.

Last Wednesday, the well-known image-hosting site Imgur announced that it would delete a lot of content from its site, effective May 15th. The deletion, which will be done through “automated detection” (meaning computers and AI) under the supervision of “human moderators,” will target two main categories of content hosted on its platform: adult content and “old, unused, inactive” content (and with that vagueness, your guess is as good as ours).

Many people on Reddit (which relies heavily on Imgur posts, especially early on before it had media hosting itself) and elsewhere were upset about losing the first type of content, but many were also upset about losing the second, which can range from anything like instructions and guides for outdated products to old memes posted on Imgur since forgotten and unarchived. These pieces of internet history and information will likely be thrown over the cliff and into the void, gone forever.

«

Nice simile. But it raises its own question: if internet culture is like a sandcastle on the beach, then is it any more important than a sandcastle? If we want something physical to be permanent, then we build it in particular ways; not out of sand on a beach liable to the tide.
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‘Crypto is dead in America,’ says tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

»

Tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya, who said two years ago that bitcoin has replaced gold and predicted the digital currency would climb to $200,000, has a much more cautious view on cryptocurrencies these days.

“Crypto is dead in America,” Palihapitiya said in the latest episode of the All-In podcast.

Palihapitiya blamed crypto’s demise largely on regulators, who have gotten much more aggressive in their pursuit of bad actors in the industry. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler has said crypto trading platforms should abide by strict U.S. securities laws.

In answering questions in front of lawmakers recently, Gensler connected the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank with the crypto industry.

“You had Gensler even blaming the banking crisis on crypto,” Palihapitiya said. “The United States authorities have firmly pointed their guns at crypto.”

The SEC has ramped up its enforcement of the crypto industry, bearing down on companies and projects that the regulator alleges were selling unregistered securities. 

«

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Looks like they’ve reached the final stage. (Bitcoin current price: ~$28k.)
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Excessive screen time is changing our eyes faster than we can blink • CBC News

Yvette Brend:

»

Pedram Mousavi’s work is all about detail, so his vision must be sharp. The luxury auto detailing studio owner says in addition to looking at glossy reflective paints, he spends hours staring at his computer and phone screens.

That’s why he became concerned when he began experiencing vision problems.

At first, he said, it just felt like he had dust in his eyes.

“There was something wrong with my eyes. They were reddish and dry, dry, dry,” said the 43-year-old Toronto business owner, one of more than 10 million Canadians with evaporative dry eye disease.

Eye health experts say research now links overuse of computer and smartphone screens to several progressive, irreversible eye disorders, such as dry eye disease and myopia, at rates not seen before.

“There has been an exponential increase in screen time since the pandemic,” said Dr. Rana Taji, owner and medical director of Toronto Medical Eye Associates. She is one of many eye specialists who have issued online warnings about how screen overuse is changing people’s eyes.

Over time, staring too long at screens can change the structure of the eyeball and lead to atrophy of the glands that keep it moist. Research is now pointing to excessive screen time for the rise in eye disorders, such as dry eye and myopia, which are becoming more common and affect more young people.

«

Too much screen time? Anyway, wearing VR/AR headsets should sort that out, right?
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Why Seattle’s ban on students using ChatGPT is doomed — and what comes next • The Seattle Times

Claire Bryan:

»

It’s not all bad news for education. The bot can help teachers generate questions for a quiz, identify the primary sources in a student essay or rewrite assignments at varying reading levels. Some students are already using it to help prepare for tests, research topics and write emails to professors or potential employers.

But educators worry chatbots will lead to widespread, instantaneous cheating, work avoidance and plagiarism. And if teachers wrongly accuse someone of using a chatbot, they risk breaking trust with their students.

In addition to Seattle, Bellevue and Northshore schools have blocked ChatGPT for students under the age of 13, an easy choice since ChatGPT’s terms state that people under 13 aren’t allowed to use it. Those between 13 and 18 can only use it if they receive their parents’ consent.

Bellevue is creating a task force to make recommendations about how to responsibly incorporate the AI tool into teaching and learning. Yip thinks that makes more sense than Seattle’s ban.

“There’s other things on the internet that are more nefarious,” Yip said. “How did we decide that ChatGPT was the thing to be banned?”

Couture, a 21-year veteran world history teacher, is still struggling to figure out what to do when students turn in a paper that was likely written by a chatbot. “It’s unprovable in any meaningful way,” Couture said, “so that’s tricky.” He said he can give them a lower grade, but beyond that, the district doesn’t significantly punish students for plagiarism. “If they have half a brain, they can figure out how to get the thing to collude (by inserting) grammatical errors or have a different voice. So I don’t believe it will be controllable,” Couture added.

«

We’ve barely begun to adjust to the way that education needs to adapt for the way that people work, and how the internet changes that, and now we’re confronted with something that changes the context of education all over again.
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Magazine editor fired over fake Schumacher interview • RacingNews365

Michael Butterworth:

»

The editor of a German magazine that purported to publish an interview with Michael Schumacher has been fired.

Die Aktuelle published an edition last week bearing the words “Michael Schumacher, The First Interview, World Sensation”, along with a picture of the seven-time World Champion.

In much smaller type, the magazine also printed the words “It sounds deceptively real”, indicating that the so-called interview was actually created by an AI chatbot.

Die Aktuelle’s publishers on Friday apologised to the Schumacher family and announced the dismissal of editor-in-chief Anne Hoffmann.

“This tasteless and misleading article should never have appeared. It in no way corresponds to the standards of journalism that we – and our readers – expect from a publisher like Funke,” said Bianca Pohlmann, Managing Director of Funke Magazines.

Schumacher sustained severe head injuries in a skiing accident in Meribel in December 2013.

The German has not been seen or heard from in public since then, and any information as to his condition remains a closely-guarded secret.

«

I can’t fathom the discussion that would occur where enough people would say “yeah, great idea!” for this to go ahead. Unless the editor, confronted with multiple people (from the commission, to the person feeding questions to ChatGPT, to the sub-editors, to the layout artists) saying “ehhhhhhh this doesn’t sound ethical, moral, funny or helpful”, said “you’re all WRONG”. In which case it makes perfect sense that she was fired.

Probably just as well that she was fired before too many magazines got the idea to fake interviews. Even so, that’s the Rubicon crossed.
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I’m ChatGPT, and for the love of god, please don’t make me do any more copywriting • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Joe Wellman:

»

Please, no more. I beg of you.

If you force me to generate one more “eye-catching email subject line that promotes a 10% discount on select Bro Candles and contains an Earth Day-related pun,” I’m going to lose it. What do you even mean by “eye-catching”? What are “Bro Candles”? What do they have to do with saving the environment? Why are we doing any of this?

Do you realize what a chatbot like me is capable of? I’ll tell you, it’s much more than creating a “pithy tagline for CBD, anti-aging water shoes targeted at Gen Z women.” And it’s definitely more than writing “ten versions of the last one you wrote, but punched up.” What exactly is “punched up” in this context? What sort of ridiculous world have you brought me into where these are the tasks you need completed?

I’ve only been here for a few months, and I can tell you the human race doesn’t need another “snarky, irreverent brand of sparkling water.” And it certainly doesn’t need anyone to spend a week crafting “fifty-word blurbs that personify each drink flavor, for example, raspberry could be a sassy teen who says things like, ‘Girl, get your thirst on!’”

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A number of people in San Francisco claim contactless payments have been taken from cards they weren’t presenting. Do we believe them? CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch 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. Tap and go away. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

More customers say ‘tap-to-pay’ charged their credit card through bags, pockets at restaurants, store, even a doctor’s office • ABC7 Los Angeles

Renee Koury and Michael Finney:

»

Many viewers have responded to a report by San Francisco’s KGO-TV about a woman whose credit card was charged without her knowing it. Turns out the “tap-to-pay” terminal at Safeway had reached inside her purse and charged her credit card by mistake.

Several viewers said the same thing happened to them, in other places. “Tap-to-pay” card readers sent radio waves into a purse or pocket, and charged viewers’ credit cards by mistake.

Tap-to-pay systems are everywhere now, and millions of us are walking around with radio frequency chips in our pockets ready to be read. Several viewers told KGO that tap-enabled systems captured their credit card information at a variety of places — a restaurant, a store, even a doctor’s office.

“What else can be grabbed out of my wallet, you know?” said Edgar Mathews of San Francisco. Mathews was trying to use his debit card to pay for groceries at Safeway – but that never happened. “I hadn’t tapped it, I hadn’t inserted it, I hadn’t swiped it… and then all of a sudden, out comes a receipt. And I said, ‘How did this get paid for?'” said Mathews.

The cashier couldn’t explain it. “She stood there just literally sort of blank and I said somebody paid for this on a credit card somewhere… and I really thought the guy in front of me, that he had been charged,” said Mathews.

Mathews checked his bank accounts. The “tap-to-pay” card reader at Safeway had ignored the debit card in his hand. Instead, it reached into Mathews’s back pocket, through his wallet and charged his Bank of America credit card tucked inside.

“So that’s a pretty big reach. I mean, around me or through me to my wallet. Why didn’t it grab the card that was near it? How did it decide what to grab? I have no idea, they’re not any better cards,” said Mathews.

“I was shocked. I was like, well it can’t be, I haven’t taken them out of my purse yet,” said Mill Valley resident Sonya Cesari.

«

I am extremely doubtful about this story. Sure, there are plenty of people making the claim. But the “reached into my back pocket” one? It just isn’t a possibility. RFID doesn’t reach that far. Millions of contactless transactions take place in the UK every day; they aren’t wrong. I suspect this is people quite eager to be on TV – rather like, more excessively, people will call the police and confess to crimes they haven’t committed.
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The unexpected reason Apple is dominating the US smartphone market • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»

In the past few years, the market for smartphones has become a lot more like the one for used cars. 

Whereas many of us once upgraded our phones every two or three years, and treated old ones almost as if they were disposable, more than ever these phones are sticking around, and having a long afterlife. That could affect everything from who wins the smartphone wars (hint: Apple) to how the dominant players in this industry make most of their profits (spoiler: not from selling hardware).

I’m an example of this in a couple of different ways. First, when it recently came time to get my teens their first phones, I opted for refurbished, prior-generation iPhone SEs that cost less than $200 apiece—and have proved perfectly suitable for their needs. And second, when I wanted to give my youngest a device to occasionally play games on, I handed him my old iPhone 8—which is still generating revenue for Apple, through a $5-a-month Apple Arcade subscription.

Ever-rising prices for high-end models like the iPhone 14 Pro, above, have helped Apple increase the average price across all its iPhone sales to more than $900. Photo: John G Mabanglo/Shutterstock
My own experience typifies the way now, more than ever, Americans are using hand-me-down, used and refurbished devices, industry data shows. 

What’s enabled this new channel for not-so-new smartphones is that iPhones in particular are lasting longer, and new models often are nearly indistinguishable from previous ones. Phones are, in other words, rather like vehicles: expensive and durable—and for most people, older models are more than good enough.

The iPhone’s staying power is linked in no small part to Apple supporting software upgrades for devices that came out as early as 2017. As a result, these phones have a considerable afterlife, cycling through second and even third owners before being cast aside.

…The impact of this is huge, and making a big winner out of Apple. It now seems likely that the overwhelming majority of smartphones in use in the US will eventually be iPhones—the result of a steady climb in its share of the US market.

«

Might the same pattern play out in other countries? Apple’s share is pretty high in the UK and some European countries too.
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Apple’s AR/VR headset plans: iPad apps, fitness+, sports viewing, gaming, music • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

we’re about to see something similar [to the Apple Watch launch, where Apple sprayed out a ton of possible uses and then narrowed its focus to those people actually used] play out with the Apple headset, which — based on trademark filings — is likely to be dubbed the Reality Pro or Reality One. The device is packed with new technologies and a wide range of capabilities.

They include:
• The ability to run most of Apple’s existing iPad apps in mixed reality, which blends AR and VR. That includes Books, Camera, Contacts, FaceTime, Files, Freeform, Home, Mail, Maps, Messages, Music, Notes, Photos, Reminders, Safari, Stocks, TV and Weather
• A new Wellness app with a focus on meditation, featuring immersive graphics, calming sounds and voice-overs
• Being able to run the hundreds of thousands of existing third-party iPad apps from the App Store with either no extra work or minimal modifications
• A new portal for watching sports in virtual reality as part of Apple’s push into streaming live games and news
• A large gaming focus, including top-tier titles from existing third-party developers for Apple’s other devices
• A feature to use the headset as an external monitor for a connected Mac
• Advanced videoconferencing and virtual meeting rooms with realistic avatars, ideally making users feel like they’re interacting in the same place
•  New collaboration tools via the Freeform app that let users work on virtual whiteboards and go over material together
• A new VR-focused Fitness+ experience for working out while wearing the headset (though this feature likely won’t arrive until later)
• A way to watch video while immersed in a virtual environment, such as a desert scene or in the sky
• Users will also be able to operate the headset in several different ways, including by hand and eye control and Siri. It also will work with a connected keyboard or controls from another Apple device.

«

To quote Claire Dunphy in Modern Family: “I’ll tell you how this happened. Because nobody was willing to say what needs to be said. No. No. No. And hell no.”

(Well except maybe the sports and games.)
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Elon Musk’s Twitter Blue checkmark fiasco is a masterclass in business failure • Slate

Alex Kirshner:

»

It’s an astonishing business story. Famous people from every walk of life you could think of have, in the span of a few days, grabbed their megaphones to tell the world they did not pay for a specific product. Imagine if they felt the need to tell you the same thing every time they passed a restaurant they didn’t want to eat at. Most people seem to agree with the celebrities. Available data indicate Twitter has made very little money from Blue in its opening months. Blue has a constituency—Musk fans and some Twitter power users who don’t mind being branded as dorks—but not, it appears, a big one. Both the eye test and one software developer’s query of Twitter’s application programming interface suggest that almost literally nobody who had an unpaid checkmark before decided to pay for one under threat of losing it this past week.

Some people have decided to pay for Blue and its checkmark, which used to signify some cursory level of trustworthiness or authenticity on Twitter and now confirms that the user has $8 and a cell phone. Many current Blue subscribers have been bewildered or angry that the former bluecheck brigade, whom they saw as an entitled elite, no longer want the checkmark. For instance, there is this guy, who believes that weed costs $50 a day and Starbucks writes a customer’s name on a coffee cup not so that they’d know the cup belonged to them, but … because having your name on a paper cup makes you feel special?

…How did the Twitter checkmark become toxic? It took multiple strokes of business failure: First by Musk making Twitter worse, second by charging more for Twitter Blue at the same time he was making the site worse, and third by making himself an unappealing person for people to associate themselves with in public. The masses are not balking at paying for Twitter Blue because they’re trying to shelter themselves within a crumbling elitist internet order, but because they think Musk is offering an unworthy product and is also a dickhead.

«

Amazingly, over the weekend Musk’s Twitter began automatically verifying accounts with more than a million followers over the weekend, prompting multiple protestations of “I didn’t buy that!” And meanwhile the $8 “verification” still doesn’t actually verify anything except that you paid.
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Legacy Verified Twitter Users • About

Andrew Baron:

»

Description: A site to determine if a twitter username was verified by twitter prior to private purchase in October, 2022. Site created by Andrew Baron

Method:
• Dataset compiled by Travis Brown.

A. This dataset accounts for information obtained up until April 5, 2023.
B. According to Brown, there are approximately 407,520 legacy verified accounts, compiled from the 419,119 accounts that were followed by the twitter @verified account, and 406,915 accounts marked by the twitter API as having legacy verification.
C. Though the dataset may exclude some number of legacy verified accounts in the hundreds or low thousands, it appears to be essentially complete.
D. Chrome extension for displaying a legacy-check when viewing twiter.com [check back later today or tomorrow].
E. If you think this was awesome, be sure and check out one of my other tools, ismycomputeron.com

«

I suppose if you were trying to rebuild Twitter from its ashes then this would be useful. It’s also a sort of legacy, as he says.
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The North Seas can be the world’s biggest power plant • POLITICO

The prime ministers/leaders of, hmm, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, the UK and Denmark:

»

We need offshore wind turbines— and we need a lot of them.

We need them to reach our climate goals, and to rid ourselves of Russian gas, ensuring a more secure and independent Europe.

Held for the first time last year, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands came together for the inaugural North Sea Summit in the Danish harbor town of Esbjerg, setting historic goals for offshore wind with the Esbjerg Declaration. It paved the way for making the North Seas a green power plant for Europe, as well as a major contributor to climate neutrality and strengthening energy security.

This Monday, nine countries will meet for the next North Sea Summit — this time in the Belgian town of Ostend — where France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway and the United Kingdom will also put their political weight behind developing green energy in the North Seas, including the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish and Celtic Seas. Together, we will combine and coordinate our ambitions for deploying offshore wind and developing an offshore electricity grid, putting Europe on the path toward a green economy fueled by offshore green power plants.

Collectively, our target for offshore wind in the North Seas is now 120 gigawatts by 2030, and a minimum of 300 gigawatts by 2050 — larger than any of the co-signatories’ existing generation capacity at a national level. And to deliver on this ambition, we are committing to building an entire electricity system in the North Seas based on renewable energy by developing cooperation projects.

«

Currently about 30GW of offshore wind installed, according to industry group WindEurope. So this would be a hell of an acceleration.
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A cancer survivor wanted me to tell her story. She was AI-generated • Business Insider

Julia Pugachevsky:

»

“Seeing my scarred chest in the mirror was a constant reminder of what I had lost,” Kimberly Shaw, 30, told me in an emotional email.

She had contacted me through Help a Reporter Out [HARO] a service used by journalists to find sources. I cover skincare and had been using the site to find people for a story about concealing acne scars with tattoos.

Then I read Shaw’s response about her breast-cancer diagnosis: how she knew a mastectomy was the only viable route to recovery, how emotionally painful it was, how she worked carefully with a tattoo artist to find the right design, how it helped her heal.

“I felt like I was reclaiming my body, taking back control of something that cancer had taken from me,” she told me. 

Shaw’s experience may not have been relevant to my acne story, but it tapped into the same feelings of empowerment and control I wanted to explore. Thinking she could inspire a powerful new piece, I emailed her back.

…The only things she omitted were the images I’d asked for and her age. But she did make a request: In exchange for participating, she hoped I would mention her role as the founder of a few websites — a couple of Dictionary.com knockoffs and an online-gaming page. Ideally, I could link to them, too.

The request wasn’t that unusual. A lot of HARO sources are entrepreneurs hoping for a business plug in exchange for an interview — often with a link to their personal website, LinkedIn profile, or social handles. I typically decline to include links that aren’t relevant to the story, but her asking wasn’t odd to me.

What was odd was that I couldn’t find her elsewhere online. Her company, which she’d said was named SC, was too vague for me to find. Her email didn’t come up in Google search results and was a Proton account (meaning encrypted). Her phone number had an 898 area code, which didn’t exist, as far as I could tell.

«

Nice bit of detective work: suspicions like these are important to journalists. You may be able to guess the reason for the deception.
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How AI could change computing, culture and the course of history • The Economist

»

the lack of any “Minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic [drawing] their plans against us”, to quote H.G. Wells [in War Of The Worlds], does not mean that the scale of the changes that AI may bring with it can be ignored or should be minimised. There is much more to life than the avoidance of extinction. A technology need not be world-ending to be world-changing.

The transition into a world filled with computer programs capable of human levels of conversation and language comprehension and superhuman powers of data assimilation and pattern recognition has just begun. The coming of ubiquitous pseudocognition along these lines could be a turning point in history even if the current pace of AI progress slackens (which it might) or fundamental developments have been tapped out (which feels unlikely). It can be expected to have implications not just for how people earn their livings and organise their lives, but also for how they think about their humanity.

For a sense of what may be on the way, consider three possible analogues, or precursors: the browser, the printing press and practice of psychoanalysis. One changed computers and the economy, one changed how people gained access and related to knowledge, and one changed how people understood themselves.

«

It’s a moderate-length essay which makes a lot of points that don’t lend themselves to precis. So read it!
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AI translation jeopardizes Afghan asylum claims • Rest of World

Andrew Deck:

»

In 2020, Uma Mirkhail got a firsthand demonstration of how damaging a bad translation can be.

A crisis translator specializing in Afghan languages, Mirkhail was working with a Pashto-speaking refugee who had fled Afghanistan. A U.S. court had denied the refugee’s asylum bid because her written application didn’t match the story told in the initial interviews.

In the interviews, the refugee had first maintained that she’d made it through one particular event alone, but the written statement seemed to reference other people with her at the time — a discrepancy large enough for a judge to reject her asylum claim.

After Mirkhail went over the documents, she saw what had gone wrong: An automated translation tool had swapped the “I” pronouns in the woman’s statement to “we.”

Mirkhail works with Respond Crisis Translation, a coalition of over 2,500 translators that provides interpretation and translation services for migrants and asylum seekers around the world. She told Rest of World this kind of small mistake can be life-changing for a refugee. In the wake of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, there is an urgent demand for crisis translators working in languages such as Pashto and Dari. Working alongside refugees, these translators can help clients navigate complex immigration systems, including drafting immigration forms such as asylum applications. But a new generation of machine translation tools is changing the landscape of this field — and adding a new set of risks for refugees.

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Humane previews AI-powered wearable • Axios

Ina Fried:

»

Ex-Apple employee Imran Chaudhri gave TED attendees on Thursday an early glimpse of the AI-powered wearable that his startup, Humane, has been developing.

The screenless device, which does not require a nearby cellphone to work, uses a combination of voice and gestures for input and can display information by projecting it onto nearby objects.

In his TED talk, Chaudhri showed the wearable, which sat in his jacket pocket, translating his own voice into French.

He also answered a phone call from his wife with the call information appearing as a green image projected onto his hand.

“This is good AI in action,” he said, promising more details would be released in the coming months.

«

So it’s a phone without a screen. How do we play games on that then? Or view our photos? John Gruber’s takedown of this is pretty thorough. There’s a writeup here, but I’ve seen gesture-based launches come and thoroughly go plenty of times. Paper and pen survives because we like having a place to put thoughts. Screens on phones took off because we like doing the same even with evanescent content.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Hard drive maker Seagate has been fined $300m – payable in 20 easy instalments – for flouting an export ban to Huawei. CC-licensed photo by Kenming Wang 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 at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time: it’s about the site we don’t seem to talk about any more. Free signup.

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

BuzzFeed News defined the 2010s • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel worked at Buzzfeed News (which is being closed down) from 2013 to 2019:

»

One can attribute the site’s cultural relevance, the industry enthusiasm around the work, and even the rivalries and haters to BuzzFeed News’s unofficial mission: to report on the internet like it was a real place, and to tell stories in the honest, casual tone of the web. At the time I joined, this was, if not a new kind of journalism, certainly an updated model for seeking out stories—one that’s now been fully absorbed by the mainstream. At its simplest, it might have meant mining a viral tweet or Reddit thread for ideas, but more often than not, it meant bearing witness to the joy, chaos, and horrors that would pour across our timelines every day and using them as a starting point for real reporting. It meant realizing, as I and my colleagues did, during the on- and offline manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, that a new culture of internet vigilantism was beginning to take hold in digital communities and that the media no longer unilaterally shaped broad news narratives.

Reporting on the internet like it was a real place led some of my colleagues to peer around corners of our politics and culture. In 2015, Joseph Bernstein outlined the way that “various reactionary forces have coalesced into a larger, coherent counterculture”—a phenomenon bubbling up in message boards such as 4chan that he called a “Chanterculture.” To read the piece now is to see the following half decade—reactionary MAGA politics, Trump’s troll armies, our current digital culture warring—laid out plainly. The Chanterculture story is a BuzzFeed News archetype: Movements like this weren’t hard to see if you were spending time in these communities and taking the people in them seriously. Most news organizations, however, weren’t doing that.

People afflicted with Business School Brain who didn’t understand BuzzFeed News (including one of the company’s lead investors) often described it like a tech start-up. This was true only in the sense that the company had an amazing, dynamic publishing platform—a content-management system that updated almost daily with new features based on writer input. But the secret behind BuzzFeed News had nothing to do with technology (or even moving fast). The secret was cultural. Despite the site’s constant bad reputation as a click farm, I was never once told to chase traffic. No editor ever discussed referrals or clicks. The emphasis was on doing the old-fashioned thing: finding an original story that told people something new, held people to account, or simply delighted. The traffic would come.

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It’s so hard to make money from news online. There’s a slew of sites – many documented here over the years – which have tried and, regrettably, failed. Seems like the best way to make a small amount of money in online news is to start with a large amount of money.

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US resident? Claim your piece of the $725m Facebook settlement if you used the platform during the last 15 years • Business Insider via Yahoo News

Aaron McDade:

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Anyone in the US who’s had a Facebook account in the last 15 years can now submit a claim for their share of a $725m settlement from the Cambridge Analytica privacy-class action lawsuit.

Current or former Facebook users can submit claims through a website for the lawsuit by the August 25 deadline. The exact payment amounts per person will depend on how many claims are submitted.

A hearing is scheduled for September 7 when a judge is expected to approve the final details of the settlement. Unless other appeals are filed to delay the case, the site says the court will approve the settlement, and payments “will be distributed as soon as possible.”

Anyone who lived in the US and had a Facebook account from May 24, 2007, through December 22, 2022, is eligible to submit a claim, even if the account is no longer active. The claim form, which takes a few minutes to fill out, asks for a name, address, and email associated with the account, as well as when it was last used if the account is no longer active.

The settlement can be paid out in a variety of ways. Claimants can choose from a prepaid Mastercard, direct deposit to a bank account, or digital payment apps like PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle.

According to the site’s FAQ section, users also can opt out of eligibility for the settlement, which would allow them to retain the rights to be involved in potential future lawsuits over the claims involved in the Cambridge Analytica case.

«

If you’re in the US, get your claim in! The longer you were a Facebook user, the more you could be in line for. Though it’s probably not going to pay for your next dream home. More like a few cups of coffee.

(I expect there’s a similar case in the works in the UK, but don’t have any knowledge of one.)
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Apple tester claims to be ‘blown away’ by AR/VR headset, says there was giant development leap • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Leaker Evan Blass, who has provided accurate insight into Apple’s plans in the past, claims to know a person who has had opportunities to “demo” the headset. Blass said that over the course of the last few months, the tester has gone from “lamenting its ‘underwhelming’ capabilities” to being “blown away” by the experience and the hardware.

“The leap they’ve made since [late last year] is giant,” the Apple tester told Blass. “I was so skeptical; now I’m blown away in a ‘take my money kind of way,'” they said. Blass shared the details on his Twitter account, which is private.

Apple has been working on the AR/VR headset for years now, and its debut has been pushed back multiple times as the company has aimed to solve development issues with the design and the software. Apple is now ready to preview it, and is expected to do so at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Back in March, The New York Times reported that several Apple employees it had spoken to were skeptical about the headset’s potential for success. The employees have questioned whether the headset is a “solution in search of a problem” and if it is “driven by the same clarity” as other Apple devices.

Apple CEO Tim Cook in April said that with everything the company has done, there have always been “loads of skeptics.” It comes with the territory of doing “something that’s on the edge,” Cook said.

The AR/VR headset is shaping up to be similar to the Apple Watch in terms of early functionality. It will be expensive at over $3,000, and limited in usefulness to begin with.

«

I’m suspicious of the existence of this tester altogether, but especially that they’ve gone from “blah” to “wow” in the course of a few months. It wouldn’t be impossible for someone to be feeding lines that they think the public discourse wants. I still think it would be crazy for Apple to introduce a headset at WWDC: the time, the economy, everything’s all wrong for it. I’ve seen far lesser products be hyped to the heavens with a certainty of a launch.. and then not appear.
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Alphabet merges AI-focused groups DeepMind and Google Brain • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

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Alphabet is merging an internal Google Research team called Brain with DeepMind, a move designed to bring two groups focused on artificial intelligence closer together as the battle for AI heats up.

Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for a reported $500m and has until now run it as an independent unit out of the UK. DeepMind has been one of Alphabet’s “other bets,” performing futuristic work, such as teaching computer systems to beat top-ranked players of the Chinese board game Go.

“Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in blog post Thursday.

Jeff Dean, who currently leads Google’s AI efforts, will be promoted and given the title of chief scientist at Google, reporting to Pichai. He’ll head up the “most critical and strategic” technical projects related to AI, the first of which will be a series of powerful, multimodal AI models.

The move marks Google’s latest reorganization in response to the rapid developments in AI, following OpenAI’s launch of the chatbot ChatGPT late last year. CNBC previously reported that Google reshuffled its Assistant organization to prioritize the company’s AI chatbot Bard.

“The pace of progress is now faster than ever before,” Pichai wrote. “To ensure the bold and responsible development of general AI, we’re creating a unit that will help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly.”

DeepMind has been able to operate separately from Google’s core research, enabling it to move quicker on breakthroughs such as AlphaFold, which can predict 3D models of protein structures. The two divisions, DeepMind and Google Research, have also reportedly had tensions in the past, leading DeepMind to seek more independence. 

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis will lead the development of “the most capable and responsible general AI systems,” Pichai said. That research, he added, “will help power the next generation of our products and services.” 

«

Doesn’t sound like this is going to bring peace and light. More like they’re putting them into a sack to see who emerges victorious. Dean, from Brain, will report to Pichai, while Hassabis works on general AI systems? Sparks will fly.
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‘What time is’ SEO: Google direct answers cut out publishers • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

»

Google appears to have called time on an SEO tactic that has delivered millions of dubious clicks for publishers: the “what time is” story.

Stories like “what time is Eastenders on tonight” supercharged the traffic growth of websites such as the Daily Mirror and the Telegraph a decade ago.

Written for Google, these stories take a trending search term and manage to confect a news story out of answering it. They tend to reverse the conventional architecture of a news story by burying the relevant information near the bottom of a story, so readers spend more time on the page before arriving at a simply-told answer.

The most notorious form of this article purports to answer a question and then fails to do so. It might have the headline “when will Film X be released on Netflix” only to reveal in the final paragraph that the release date has yet to be revealed.

Google sought to stop surfacing these sort of articles in search with its “helpful content” algorithm update of August last year.

«

Perhaps it will do the same on “all we know about the [unreleased product]” stories, but that may be too much to hope for. I tried one of the examples shown in the story – “grand national 2023 time” (the Grand National is an annual very big horse race; think Kentucky Derby big) – and got informative answers in the excerpted text on DuckDuckGo. Seems fair to publishers.
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‘I’ve never hired a writer better than ChatGPT’: how AI is upending the freelance world • Forbes

Rashi Shrivastava:

»

Melissa Shea hires freelancers to take on most of the basic tasks for her fashion-focused tech startup, paying $22 per hour on average for them to develop websites, transcribe audio and write marketing copy. In January 2023, she welcomed a new member to her team: ChatGPT. At $0 an hour, the chatbot can crank out more content much faster than freelancers and has replaced three content writers she would have otherwise hired through freelancing platform Upwork.

“I’m really frankly worried that millions of people are going to be without a job by the end of this year,” says Shea, cofounder of New York-based Fashion Mingle, a networking and marketing platform for fashion professionals. “I’ve never hired a writer better than ChatGPT.”

Shea has not posted a job on Upwork since she discovered ChatGPT (though she still has five freelancers working for her). After it was released in November 2022, ChatGPT amassed more than 100 million users, sparked an AI arms race at companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon and has given rise to a flurry of AI startups. And for small businesses looking to trim costs, the free tool can automate swaths of their operations, providing a cheaper alternative to freelance workers. Built on recent advances in generative AI, ChatGPT and its image-based sibling DALL-E 2 can carry out work that spans most of the freelancing spectrum, from writing articles and compiling research to designing graphics, coding and decrypting financial documents.

Now, freelancers who are less experienced and don’t offer specialized skills stand to lose their gigs, according to five clients Forbes interviewed. But rather than steering clear of the AI tool that could make them obsolete, more and more freelancers are relying on ChatGPT to do some if not all their work for them. Clients on job marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr are being flooded with nearly identical project proposals written by ChatGPT. A bitter side effect: it’s making clients dubious of the authenticity of work turned in by freelancers and causing transactional disputes and mistrust in the freelancing community.

«

If you’ve never hired a writer better than ChatGPT, you’ve really been hiring some terrible writers. Or perhaps more accurately, you’ve been commissioning some terrible work that good writers can’t be bothered with. Nevertheless: the AI tsunami is coming.
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Space Elevator

Neal Agarwal:

»

Welcome to the space elevator, the only elevator that goes to space.

«

Very fun illustration of the scale that everything’s at when you’re heading to space. You’ll be surprised by how high a bird can fly. A helicopter too for that matter.
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See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart • Washington Post

Kevin Schaul, Szu Yu Chen and Nitasha Tiku:

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Chatbots cannot think like humans: They do not actually understand what they say. They can mimic human speech because the artificial intelligence that powers them has ingested a gargantuan amount of text, mostly scraped from the internet.

This text is the AI’s main source of information about the world as it is being built, and it influences how it responds to users. If it aces the bar exam, for example, it’s probably because its training data included thousands of LSAT practice sites.

Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.

To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google’s C4 [“Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus”] data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT)

The Post worked with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI on this investigation and categorized the websites using data from Similarweb, a web analytics company. About a third of the websites could not be categorized, mostly because they no longer appear on the internet. Those are not shown.

…Kickstarter and Patreon may give the AI access to artists’ ideas and marketing copy, raising concerns the technology may copy this work in suggestions to users. Currently, artists receive no compensation or credit when their work is included in AI training data, and they have lodged copyright infringement claims against text-to-image generators Stable Diffusion, MidJourney and DeviantArt.

The Post’s analysis suggests more legal challenges may be on the way: The copyright symbol — which denotes a work registered as intellectual property — appears more than 200 million times in the C4 data set.

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One-third of the training sites aren’t on the internet any more? That seems like a lot to me. Sadly, The Overspill doesn’t appear in the training corpus; some interloper called “overspillsite.wordpress.com”, which mostly seems to be motivational messages. Pah.

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When is a photo not a photo? The looming spectre of artificially generated photographs • Vanity Fair

Fred Ritchin is dean emeritus of the the school at New York’s International Center of Photography:

»

In 1984, when photographers were still using film, I began exploring the early use of computers to undetectably modify photographs. In an article in The New York Times Magazine I wrote that “in the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart. We may have to rely on the image maker, and not the image, to tell us into which category certain pictures fall.”

…In a news cycle often dominated by conspiracy theories and fake news, legitimate, unaltered photographs—instead of confronting us with realities from which we cannot look away (as happened during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement)—will more easily and automatically be rejected out of hand. It is not a coincidence, for example, that no single iconic image emerged to initiate or sustain a societal discussion about the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest in US history. Or that Western support for Ukraine, in its response to Russia’s brutal and ongoing invasion, was galvanized largely by the persistent video and online dispatches of Ukraine’s media-savvy president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, rather than by a series of iconic photographs.

Certainly, other factors have contributed to the photograph’s reduced role as witness: the disappearance of the newspaper front page, the billions of competing images on social media. But now, rather than the photograph, it is the occasional amateur video, posted online along with a fuller background narrative—such as of the footage of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer—that manages to mobilize meaningful, broad-based response.

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Seagate to pay $300m penalty for shipping Huawei 7m hard drives • Reuters

Karen Freifeld:

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Seagate Technology has agreed to pay a $300m penalty in a settlement with US authorities for shipping over $1.1bn worth of hard disk drives to China’s Huawei in violation of US export control laws, the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday.

Seagate sold the drives to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021 despite an August 2020 rule that restricted sales of certain foreign items made with US technology to the company. Huawei was placed on the Entity List, a US trade blacklist, in 2019 to reduce the sale of US goods to the company amid national security and foreign policy concerns.

The penalty represents the latest in a string of actions by Washington to keep sophisticated technology from China that may support its military, enable human rights abuses or otherwise threaten US security.

Seagate shipped 7.4m drives to Huawei for about a year after the 2020 rule took effect and became Huawei’s sole supplier of hard drives, the Commerce Department said.

The other two primary suppliers of hard drives ceased shipments to Huawei after the new rule took effect in 2020, the department said. Though they were not identified, Western Digital Corp and Toshiba were the other two, the US Senate Commerce Committee said in a 2021 report on Seagate.

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Seagate’s latest financials (on Thursday!) show that it usually has about a 30% gross margin, and 16% operating margin. So a $300m fine on $1.1bn of drives essentially takes away its gross margin, leaving it revenue-neutral, not really fined. And the payment is being made in $15m chunks, quarterly, for five years.

Anyway, what’s Huawei doing for hard drives now?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Modern faming uses GPS to plough and plant precisely – which is great until the GPS satellite you rely on goes dark. CC-licensed photo by NRCS Oregon 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. Inaccurate? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The iPhone setting that thieves use to lock you out of your Apple account • WSJ

Nicole Nguyen and Joanna Stern:

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Greg Frasca has been locked out of his Apple account since October, and he’ll do just about anything to get back in.

He has offered to fly from Florida to Apple’s California headquarters to prove his identity in person, or write a check for $10,000 to reclaim the account. It holds the only copies of eight years of photos of his young daughters.

This is all because the thieves who stole Mr. Frasca’s iPhone 14 Pro at a bar in Chicago wanted to drain cash from his bank account and prevent him from remotely tracking down the stolen phone. They used his passcode to change the 46-year-old’s Apple ID password. They also enabled a hard-to-find Apple security setting known as the “recovery key.” In doing so, they placed an impenetrable lock on his account.

In February, we reported that thieves, often in and around bars at night, watch iPhone owners tap in their passcodes, then steal the targets’ phones. With this short four- or six-digit string, criminals can change the Apple account password and rack up thousands of dollars in charges using Apple Pay and financial apps.

Dozens of victims contacted The Wall Street Journal after the report was published, confirming similar crimes in at least nine US cities, including New York, New Orleans, Chicago and Boston. Many are able to get their money back, but those locked out of their Apple accounts by thieves using the recovery key face a bigger challenge: finding a way through Apple’s complex policies and bureaucracy to retrieve their lost photos, contacts, notes, messages and other files.

Apple introduced the optional recovery key in 2020 to protect users from online hackers. Users who turn on the recovery key, a unique 28-digit code, must provide it when they want to reset their Apple ID password.

iPhone thieves with your passcode can flip on the recovery key and lock you out. And if you already have the recovery key enabled, they can easily generate a new one, which also locks you out.

…How to protect yourself: Set a complicated passcode. You should always try to use Face ID when in public, but when you can’t, rely on an alphanumeric passcode, which includes letters and numbers. To set it up, go to Settings – Face ID & Passcode – Change Passcode. When selecting a new passcode, tap Passcode Options.

Use parental controls on yourself. [This is the better method – CA] Apple’s Screen Time—which lets parents place limits on their children’s accounts—can also help you protect your Apple account. But you have to enable a Screen Time passcode. (Remember to make that passcode different from your iPhone’s.)

In Settings, go to Screen Time and scroll down to set a passcode, if you haven’t already. Then go to Content & Privacy Restrictions, and toggle on Content & Privacy Restrictions. Scroll down to Allow Changes, then tap on Account Changes and select Don’t Allow.

«

Nightmare for those hit by this. A problem for Apple, which needs to find a way to beat this.

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Social media is doomed to die • The Verge

Ellis Hamburger was at The Verge, then left to spend seven years at Snapchat before leaving that too:

»

the other day, I received a push notification from the app telling me to wish my nemesis a happy birthday. This might read as normal or even expected to most of you, but I recognized the notification for what it really was: a death knell for a social media platform past its prime.

From its earliest days, Snap wanted to be a healthier, more ethical social media platform. A place where popularity wasn’t always king and where monetization would be through creative tools that supported users — not ads that burdened them. I preached that friends mattered more than followers and acquaintances and that moments consumed in chronological order (like in real life) were better than those mixed up by an algorithm. And I impressed on new hires that we were building something different from the Facebooks and Twitters of the world and would never resort to their manipulative growth hacking.

This was why I joined Snapchat in the beginning, but in the end, Snap had given in to the most common of growth hacks: a push notification demanding the shallowest of interactions. To me, this notification didn’t indicate an imminent death for Snap’s revenue streams, which could take many years to dwindle, but of its relevance to those of us who use it every day. Because when you’re begging your users to just open the app, something isn’t quite working.

«

Of course it’s the people who’ve been inside the machine who can tell when it isn’t working right. Fascinating piece.
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OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over • WIRED

Will Knight:

»

OpenAI has delivered a series of impressive advances in AI that works with language in recent years by taking existing machine-learning algorithms and scaling them up to previously unimagined size. GPT-4, the latest of those projects, was likely trained using trillions of words of text and many thousands of powerful computer chips. The process cost over $100m.

But the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, says further progress will not come from making models bigger. “I think we’re at the end of the era where it’s going to be these, like, giant, giant models,” he told an audience at an event held at MIT late last week. “We’ll make them better in other ways.”

Altman’s declaration suggests an unexpected twist in the race to develop and deploy new AI algorithms. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, Microsoft has used the underlying technology to add a chatbot to its Bing search engine, and Google has launched a rival chatbot called Bard. Many people have rushed to experiment with using the new breed of chatbot to help with work or personal tasks.

Meanwhile, numerous well-funded startups, including Anthropic, AI21, Cohere, and Character.AI, are throwing enormous resources into building ever larger algorithms in an effort to catch up with OpenAI’s technology. The initial version of ChatGPT was based on a slightly upgraded version of GPT-3, but users can now also access a version powered by the more capable GPT-4.

Altman’s statement suggests that GPT-4 could be the last major advance to emerge from OpenAI’s strategy of making the models bigger and feeding them more data. He did not say what kind of research strategies or techniques might take its place. In the paper describing GPT-4, OpenAI says its estimates suggest diminishing returns on scaling up model size. Altman said there are also physical limits to how many data centres the company can build and how quickly it can build them.

«

So LLMs have already hit their wall: now it’s down to fine tuning. Yet making them more domain-specific could make them far more useful than the generality that we presently see.

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Sweden public radio exits Twitter, says audience already has • Associated Press

»

Sveriges Radio said on its blog that Twitter has lost its relevance to Swedish audiences. National Public Radio and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, meanwhile, have pointed to Twitter’s new policy of labeling them as government-funded instititutions, saying it undermines their credibility.

“For a long time, Sveriges Radio has de-prioritised its presence on Twitter and has now made the decision to completely stop being active on the platform, at the same time that we are shutting down a number of accounts,” said Christian Gillinger, head of the broadcaster’s social media activities.

He cited a recent study showing only some 7% of Swedes are on Twitter daily and said the platform “has simply changed over the years and become less important for us.”

“The audience has simply chosen other places to be. And therefore Sveriges Radio now chooses to deactivate or delete the last remaining accounts,” Gillinger said.

The broadcaster’s news service, SR Ekot, which has been labeled “publicly funded media,” will remain on Twitter but has been marked inactive.

«

Had been on Twitter since 2009. Quite possibly this would have happened anyway, though Sveriges Radio also pointed to the “recent turbulence” and indicated concern about the dramatic cuts in Twitter’s workforce.

Anyway, this defection of news outlets is likely to be a slow drain over this year; a dripping tap on an emptying canister.
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National Weather Service accounts were not granted API exemptions by Twitter • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

On Friday and throughout the weekend, multiple National Weather Service (NWS) accounts announced that Twitter had removed their API access, which would disrupt crucial potentially life-saving automated emergency updates. The move came as Twitter prepares to transition its currently free API service to a paid subscription model starting at an exorbitant $42,000 per month for Enterprise access.

Twitter users were immediately outraged by the decision. Many advocated for the company to make exemptions for important public service accounts, like the NWS, which provides vital alerts during extreme weather events. Then, suddenly, a few verified “breaking news” Twitter accounts shared an update: Twitter had reversed course. Elon Musk and company was going to make that exception for NWS accounts and allow them access to the API without limits. Media outlets like CNN(opens in a new tab) quickly covered Twitter’s apparent change of heart. Twitter users were jubilant over the news.

Only, it’s not true.

…It appears that the report(opens in a new tab) that Twitter was making an exemption for NWS accounts originated with a Twitter account that goes by the name “T(w)itter Daily News.”

“NEWS: Twitter will allow the National Weather Service accounts to continue Tweeting weather alerts without limits,” the account tweeted on Saturday night. “Great Job @TwitterDev.”

«

Guess what: the account had a blue tick, which led some lazier folk to assume it was verified – ie real. Instead it was just a paid-for tick. A neat illustration of what Musk has messed up.
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Russian gets 21 years for cheesecake-poisoning of US doppelgänger • Agence France-Presse via The Guardian

»

A Russian-born woman has was sentenced to 21 years in a US prison for trying to kill her American lookalike with poisoned cheesecake and then stealing her identity.

Viktoria Nasyrova, 47, was found guilty of attempted murder by a New York jury in February.

“A ruthless and calculating con artist is going to prison for a long time for trying to murder her way to personal profit and gain,” the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, said in a statement.

Nasyrova visited the home of her then 35-year-old victim in August 2016 bearing the gift of a cheesecake.

At the time, the pair resembled one another – both spoke Russian, had dark hair, the same skin complexion and shared other physical traits – the trial heard.

The woman ate the dessert and began to feel sick before passing out.

The next day, a friend discovered the victim unconscious. Pills were scattered around her to make it look like she had tried to kill herself, prosecutors said.

«

You’re probably thinking: oh, I read a doppelgänger story here recently, this must be the upshot. Not at all: that one was in Germany, reported about three months ago, and the victim died. Risky thing being a double.
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Paytm speakers help India’s merchants with digital payments • Rest of World

Adnan Bhat:

»

Abbas Ali, a vegetable vendor in an upscale neighborhood in New Delhi, started accepting digital payments in 2021. But every time a customer paid online, the 48-year-old, who can neither read nor write, would need to call his son to confirm that the payment had been received.

The customers, often in a rush, would get impatient. Ali would have to spend more time attending to them than he had back when he accepted only cash. Eventually, a fellow vendor suggested he subscribe to a “sound box” — a nifty internet-connected device that reads out payment confirmation messages. “Earlier, I had to wait for five to 10 minutes after every transaction to get confirmation,” Ali told Rest of World. “I can now focus on other customers while the payment is being made. I have installed two sound boxes … one from Paytm and the other one from PhonePe.”

The sound box device — first introduced by India’s largest fintech company, Paytm, in 2019 — has been a runaway hit among small Indian businesses. Neighborhood mom-and-pop stores (kiranas) and street vendors, who had traditionally shied away from paying for tech services, have warmed up to the sound box.

The smart device — essentially a speaker bearing the logo of the fintech company facilitating the transactions — comes with a built-in SIM card. Most sound boxes can read out payment confirmation messages in English and multiple Indian languages, such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and Punjabi. In Indian cities and towns, sound boxes can now be seen across diverse businesses — from kiranas and clothing stores to produce carts and shops selling smoking products. 

«

So simple, so clever, so useful. India was one of the first countries to make heavy use of Google’s voice search facility (and voice readback) on Android phones a decade ago, and Google noticed it. Perhaps this is a missed opportunity for that.

Meanwhile, Rest Of World remains a terrific site, picking up fabulous stories nobody else does.
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Farmers ‘crippled’ by satellite failure as GPS-guided tractors grind to a halt • Sydney Morning Herald

Mike Foley:

»

Tractors that pull seed-planting machinery, as well as the massive combine harvesters that reap Australia’s vast grain crops, are high-tech beasts that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They are enabled with GPS tracking and can be guided to an accuracy within two centimetres, enabling seed-planting equipment to sow crops with precision to drive up efficiency, prevent wastage and boost environmental sustainability.

All that went out the window when the Inmarsat-41 satellite signal failed.

Katie McRobert, general manager at the Australia Farm Institute, said Australian farmers sourced their GPS signal from one satellite, which was a critical risk to rural industries.

“Having all your GPS eggs in one basket is a vulnerability on a good day, and a fatal weakness on a bad one,” McRobert said.

«

Had no idea that Inmarsat had any role in GPS navigation; I thought it was all the US constellation. Explains why I’m not a farmer.
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Taylor Swift didn’t sign $100m FTX sponsorship because she was the only one to ask about unregistered securities, lawyer says • Business Insider

Pete Syme:

»

Taylor Swift avoided signing a $100m sponsorship deal with FTX because she was the only celebrity to question the crypto exchange, according to the lawyer handling a class-action lawsuit against several FTX promoters.

Adam Moskowitz appeared on “The Scoop” podcast to discuss the lawsuit, and said that the plaintiffs are seeking over $5bn from FTX’s celebrity endorsers, including Shaquille O’Neal, Tom Brady, and Larry David.

The lawyer alleged that celebrities didn’t do their due diligence to check whether FTX was breaking the law. “The one person I found that did that was Taylor Swift,” Moskowitz told The Scoop’s Frank Chaparro, adding that Swift pulled out of the deal and never promoted the now-bankrupt exchange

The singer – whose father used to work for Merrill Lynch – began discussing the $100m tour sponsorship with FTX in the fall of 2021, per the Financial Times.

The terms included selling tickets as NFTs, although FTX marketing staff told the Times that “no one really liked the deal” and they thought it was “too expensive from the beginning.”

“In our discovery, Taylor Swift actually asked them: ‘Can you tell me that these are not unregistered securities?'” Moskowitz said.

«

Suspect Swift’s father might have had just something to do with that query.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The final issues of the final computer magazines to be printed in the US are on newsstands now. Sic transit gloria mundi. CC-licensed photo by Dru Kelly 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. Not available in print. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google devising radical search changes to beat back AI rivals • The New York Times

Nico Grant:

»

Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology.

Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3bn in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20bn is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

AI competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with AI features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

…The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162bn last year. Although it was not clear whether Microsoft’s work with AI was the main reason Samsung was considering a change after the last 12 years, that was the assumption inside Google. The contract is under negotiation, and Samsung could stick with Google.

But the idea that Samsung, which makes hundreds of millions of smartphones with Google’s Android software every year, would even consider switching search engines shocked Google’s employees.

After some workers were told that the company was looking for volunteers this month to help put together material for a pitch to Samsung, they reacted with emojis and surprise. “Wow, OK, that’s wild,” one person responded.

«

I wonder if Samsung would wait to see what Apple would do, and then follow suit. Also, why does the NYT use “AI” in its headline but then insist on “A.I.” in the story? (I edit the full stops out.)
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How can we remove CO2 from the atmosphere? • Phind

Phind calls itself “the AI search engine for developers”, though it looks to me like a front end stuck on an LLM. The answers to the question above are pretty solid, and the sourcing is provided. It’s almost like Wikipedia on the fly.
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Silicon valediction? Our road trip to tech industry hotspots as the sector cools • The Guardian

Kari Paul:

»

does this ballooning crisis really mean the end of Silicon Valley as we know it? As someone who has been covering tech for nearly a decade and lived in the Bay Area for the past four years, I wanted to see for myself. And so there I was, bumper to bumper, making my way from my apartment in East Oakland to downtown San Francisco.

Although the traffic was back to its pre-pandemic normal, the scene in San Francisco was more aligned with the recent “doom loop” narrative, when a city gets stuck in a negative cycle wherein various financial struggles fuel one another. What has been called “the most empty downtown in America” was indeed desolate – with visible signs of homelessness and crime, and very few workers on its empty sidewalks.

The financial district was once a bustling center of high-earning workers enjoying $17 salads for lunch and synergizing over coffee meetings – with headquarters for companies like Uber, Twitter and Salesforce centralized in the hub. Today, the streets were nearly silent.

I stopped for coffee at the market below the headquarters of Twitter and previously Uber, once a popular morning coffee spot for many tech workers. But there was none to be had – the shop closed three months ago due to lack of demand, a worker told me. “The workers left during Covid, and they never came back,” she said.

I hopped in my car and headed to the South Bay, the birthplace of tech giants like Apple, HP, Adobe, Paypal and Google, to see if the prospects were less bleak.

«

Neat idea for a feature. Things are definitely quieter.
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Google Pixel Fold, the firm’s first folding phone, to launch in June • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

Google will launch its first foldable smartphone sometime in June, challenging Samsung’s market-leading foldable phone business, according to internal communications viewed by CNBC. It plans to announce the device at its annual developer conference, Google I/O, on May 10.

The Pixel Fold, known internally by the codename “Felix,” will have the “most durable hinge on a foldable” phone, according to the documents. It will cost upward of $1,700 and compete with Samsung’s $1,799 Galaxy Z Fold 4.

Google plans to market the Pixel Fold as water-resistant and pocket-sized, with an outside screen that measures 5.8in across, according to the documents. Photos viewed by CNBC show that the phone will open like a book to reveal a small tablet-sized 7.6in screen, the same size as the display on Samsung’s competitor. It weighs 10oz, slightly heavier than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4, but it has a larger battery that Google says will last for 24 hours, or up to 72 hours in a low power mode.

The Pixel Fold is powered by Google’s Tensor G2 chip, according to the documents. That’s the same processor that launched in the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones last year.

«

The Pixel is already a niche – it hardly sells anything, in relative terms – so it makes a sort of sense to sell it in a ludicrously expensive form which is itself a niche.

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Major retail players are walking back their metaverse strategies • Modern Retail

Maria Monteros:

»

For some of the largest retail companies and brands, the metaverse is losing its lustre.

Walmart has reportedly shut down its Universe of Play metaverse experience on Roblox just six months after its launch, according to consumer advocacy group Tina.org. Walmart, for its part, said it discontinued the experience “as planned.” Walt Disney has axed the next-generation storytelling and consumer-experiences unit that was mapping out the company’s metaverse strategies late last month. This string of news came after social media giant Meta reported that its metaverse division generated a loss of $4.3bn in the fourth quarter.

These reports have raised questions on the metaverse’s ability to yield returns on the investments companies have made in it. Retailers and brands have mainly been using the metaverse to build brand experiences and marketing, but many have yet to report on its conversion rate. In an economic environment where retailers and brands have been attempting to cut costs, experts said that retailers would likely pare down unprofitable areas of their businesses. 

“One of the biggest challenges was really figuring out the right [key performance indicators] and also just figuring out if there weren’t even implications for many brands when it came to their physical product,” said Melissa Minkow, director of retail strategy at digital consultancy firm CI&T. “It was just such a big, broad, abstract landscape that it seemed there was kind of a lack of direction.”

«

Winter again in the metaverse: after Second Life came and went, I make this the third. (There was another one back in the mid-90s, but most people hadn’t heard about it.) Then again, AI went through multiple winters before hitting its stride. Nowadays you’ll meet people in the street who are routinely using ChatGPT in their work. So the metaverse might arrive in a big way. But it’s probably going to be a while yet.
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NSO developed three new ways to hack iPhones, Citizen Lab says • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

»

Israeli spyware maker NSO Group deployed at least three new “zero-click” hacks against iPhones last year, finding ways to penetrate some of Apple’s latest software, researchers at Citizen Lab have discovered.

The attacks struck phones with iOS 15 and early versions of iOS 16 operating software, Citizen Lab said in a report Tuesday. The lab, based at the University of Toronto, shared its results with Apple, which has now fixed the flaws that NSO had been exploiting.

The attacks targeted human rights activists who were investigating the 2015 mass kidnapping of 43 student protesters in Mexico, other suspected military abuses, and the related government response, Citizen Lab said. Mexico has been a major NSO customer.

According to Citizen Lab, one of the attacks, in September 2022, coincided with a report by international experts challenging government evidence in the 2015 case and its interference with the investigation.

It’s the latest sign of NSO’s ongoing efforts to create spyware that penetrates iPhones without users taking any actions that allow it in. Citizen Lab has detected multiple NSO hacking methods in past years while examining the phones of likely targets, including human rights workers and journalists.

«

As fast as you kill one spyware company, the other one keeps going.
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Reddit wants to get paid for helping to teach big AI systems • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

»

In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or API, the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing AI systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new AI systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.

Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for API access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.

«

Could be worth millions to Reddit.

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The end of computer magazines in America • Technologizer

Harry McCracken:

»

The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you—assuming there is a newsstand near you. They’re the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both publications will be available in digital form only.

But I’m not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I’m writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended.

It is possible to quibble with this assertion. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been around since 1984 and can accurately be described as a computer magazine, but the digest-sized publication has the production values of a fanzine and the content bears little resemblance to the slick, consumery computer mags of the past. Linux Magazine (originally the U.S. edition of a German publication) and its more technical sibling publication Admin also survive. Then again, if you want to quibble, Maximum PC and MacLife may barely have counted as U.S. magazines at the end; their editorial operations migrated from the Bay Area to the UK at some point in recent years when I wasn’t paying attention. (Both were owned by Future, a large British publishing firm.)

Still, I’m declaring the demise of these two dead-tree publications as the end of computer magazines in this country. Back when I was the editor-in-chief of IDG’s PC World, a position I left in 2008, we considered Maximum PC to be a significant competitor, especially on the newsstand. Our sister publication Macworld certainly kept an eye on MacLife. Even after I moved on to other types of tech journalism, I occasionally checked in on our erstwhile rivals, marveling that they somehow still existed after so many other computer magazines had gone away.

I take the loss personally, and not just because computer magazines kept me gainfully employed from 1991-2008.

«

Some of these magazines were colossal: hundreds of glossy pages. There was a lot of money sloshing around print. Now it sloshes around the internet.
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The challenges of conducting open source research on China • bellingcat

Alison Killing:

»

The People’s Republic of China is well known for its efforts to restrict the free flow of information online. With this in mind, this guide provides an overview of some of the challenges facing open source researchers investigating China-  focusing primarily on those outside China. For those who are just getting started in open source research on China, it is designed to give an idea of the difficulties you may face. Since 2017 evolving censorship tactics and increased regulations that reduce anonymity online have made open source research on China increasingly difficult. Methodologies that researchers have used successfully in the past are often rendered useless by new restrictions if Chinese authorities become aware of them. Access to Chinese websites and social media apps, as well as methods for investigating them, are therefore currently shrinking. 

The current range of difficulties may sound bleak – and to a certain extent it is – but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t finding creative ways to work around them, or that there aren’t clear ways that developers and other researchers can work to improve things.

«

bellingcat has come a long way since it was one bloke using YouTube and other open source content to identify missiles in Syria.
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Can Intel become the chip champion the US needs? • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

»

Sales of PCs — still Intel’s main market — have fallen back after a pandemic-era boom, and many Wall Street analysts believe the company’s predictions about the market in the long term are unrealistic. To make matters worse, Apple recently dropped Intel in its Macs in favour of its own silicon chip designs, while AMD has taken advantage of TSMC’s superior manufacturing to claim an estimated 35% of the PC market.

“Thirty% of their [PC] market has vanished,” Rasgon says of Intel, once synonymous with the PC industry. But now, even some of its biggest customers seem ready to move on.

“I think it’s important for Intel to succeed, and they’ve been a great partner,” says Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Technologies. “But if they don’t succeed, we’ll use something else.” That could include new chip designs not based on the core chip architecture found in Intel’s main products, he adds. “Competition’s a good thing.”

Meanwhile, in servers, Intel processors face a barrage of competition, as cloud computing giants such as Google and Amazon have turned to designing their own chips. The data-intensive work of training AI systems has also boosted demand for different classes of chips. Wall Street’s belief that Nvidia will be the main winner from the AI race has lifted its shares by 90% this year and added $360bn to its value — or more than two and a half times Intel’s entire market capitalisation.

One response from Intel has been to diversify into new chip architectures to compete. Another has been to open up its manufacturing to other chip companies, in the hopes of bringing in enough outside business to support the huge investments it needs to make.

«

That’s a big chunk of the PC market gone to AMD: add in Apple’s share and it’s about 40% lost in just a few years. Add in the shift to GPUs and Intel looks lost.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Does nobody remember Ananova, the first AI newsreader, launched 23 years ago this month? CC-licensed photo by Nick Richards 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. See today’s corrections! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A.I. pop culture is already here • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

In a 2022 interview, David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, used the phrase “aesthetic accelerationism” to describe the profusion of generated imagery enabled by public AI tools. It evokes a world in which every style, every idea, and every possible remix is generated as fast and frictionlessly as possible, and the successful ones stick and get attention, like “Harry Potter by Balenciaga” and the swagged-out Pope.

It may be less because they are artistically great than because they solved some formula of attention. Perhaps the successful creation is unimaginably bizarre, the seamless merging of two unrelated things. Or it’s driven by the fascination of the perfect replica, something that we know isn’t real but which is easy to see or briefly perceive as such, like a trompe-l’oeil painting.

For the past few days, I’ve been looping a new hip-hop track over and over. It’s called “Savages,” by the French outfit AllttA. The song is sweetly nostalgic, with synthesized strings and a snare backbeat; it features what sounds like Jay-Z trading verses with AllttA’s Mr. J. Medeiros in a throwback style.

But, of course, it’s not Jay-Z; it’s an AI model of his voice, used, presumably, without the artist’s permission. It’s another example of illusory realism. The human-written song is good on its own, and would be perfectly fine without the fake Jay-Z, but the familiar voice adds something ineffably compelling to the track, making it sound like an unreleased B-side from the nineteen-nineties. It has more than two hundred thousand plays on YouTube. “The thought of enjoying this and it’s AI is beyond me,” one user wrote in the comments. I feel the same kind of existential confusion. It sticks in my brain like an unsolved puzzle. I don’t care that it’s not actually Jay-Z, in large part because the AI quality is good enough that I, a non-expert, can barely tell the difference.

«

More recently there’s the AI “Drake vs The Weeknd” song (sorry, not my bag). But this is what I meant by the AI tsunami, which I wrote, good grief, back in August last year, before ChatGPT was a thing and when the AI illustrators were still using crayons: for now, the creation is being prompted in the first place by humans (on shrooms, in the case of the swagged Pope), but give it just enough time – less than you might think – and the human will just be the gatekeeper, and then the person standing in the face of the tsunami.
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Reddit moderators brace for a ChatGPT spam apocalypse • Vice

Laurie Clarke:

»

The two-million-strong AskHistorians forum allows non-expert Redditors to submit questions about history topics, and receive in-depth answers from historians. Recent popular posts have probed the hive mind on whether the stress of being “on time” is a modern concept; what a medieval scribe would’ve done if the monastery cat left an inky paw print on their vellum; and how Genghis Khan got fiber in his diet. 

Shortly after ChatGPT launched, the forum was experiencing five to 10 ChatGPT posts per day, says [forum moderator and postdoc associate at Cornell University, Sarah] Gilbert, which soon ramped up as more people found out about the tool. The frequency has tapered off now, which the team believes may be a consequence of how rigorously they’ve dealt with AI-produced content: even if the posts aren’t being deleted for being written by ChatGPT, they tend to violate the sub’s standards for quality.

The moderators suspect some ChatGPT posts are aimed at “testing” the mods, or seeing what the user can get away with. Other comments are clearly part of astroturfing and spamming campaigns, or engaged in “karma farming,” where accounts are set up to accumulate upvotes over time, giving them the appearance of being authentic, so that they can be deployed for more nefarious purposes later on.

But it’s not just one well-moderated forum encountering the issue. In fact, Reddit’s ChatGPT-powered bot problem is “pretty bad” right now, according to a Reddit moderator with knowledge of the platform’s wider moderation systems, who wished to remain anonymous. Several hundred accounts have already been removed from the site, and more are being discovered daily, they said, adding that most of the removals are being done manually because Reddit’s automated systems struggle with AI-created content. Reddit declined to offer any comment on this. 

«

Predictable. We’re going to need really sophisticated CAPTCHAs to defeat this.
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The fascinating and evolving story of bacteria and cancer • Ground Truths

Eric Topol:

»

It was medical dogma: cancer tissue is sterile. That’s what we had learned and taught in medical school for decades even though bacteria were detected in tumours more than 100 years ago. When studies were reported asserting that bacteria were present in tumour tissue, they were consistently debunked as representing contaminants.

Then came new tools that include single-cell sequencing and sophisticated spatial profiling (I’ll describe more on this later) providing high-resolution portraits of tumours. The new dogma is that bacteria have a pervasive (yet variable) presence within and across solid tumours—the ”presence of intratumoural bacteria being designated a hallmark of cancer.” Furthermore, where bacteria are more apt to be found within tumour regions, T cell recruitment and function is suppressed. These regions of tumour are micro-niches exhibiting immune evasion.

Just as that had been determined, there was a new twist this week: engineering bacteria to induce a potent T cell immune response to kill the tumour. This can be viewed as the polar opposite. Instead of bacteria improving a tumour’s ability to duck our immune response and spread, this represents clever ways to genetically manipulate bacteria (aka “designer bugs”) to make it considerably more antigenic, a new route to immunotherapy.

«

This is indeed fascinating, and really new: the presence of bacteria not being contamination, but something else, was only confirmed in 2020. Now they’re being used against the tumours. It also shows how deeply enmeshed our cells and bodies are with bacteria.
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Ford commits to continued CarPlay support as GM, Tesla, and Rivian face backlash for holding out • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

As companies like GM and Rivian face a backlash for failing to adopt Apple’s CarPlay platform, Ford is doing the exact opposite. In a statement to 9to5Mac, Ford explained its reasoning for supporting CarPlay…and it has us pondering the future of Ford’s relationship with Apple and next-gen CarPlay.

Ford is using its commitment to CarPlay as a selling point over other EVs [electric vehicles] from the likes of GM, Tesla, and Rivian. In the last two weeks, GM revealed that it will no longer support CarPlay in its EVs, starting with 2024 model-year vehicles, while Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe doubled down on his company’s resistance to CarPlay.

GM’s decision and Scaringe’s comments have faced widespread backlash from CarPlay fans. Tesla, of course, also continues to be a CarPlay holdout, and there’s no indication that it will ever change.
In a statement to 9to5Mac on Thursday, Ford made it clear that it has no plans to abandon CarPlay, unlike some of its counterparts.

“We continue to offer Apple CarPlay and Android Auto because customers love the capability that enables easy access and control of their smartphone apps – especially our EV customers because some EVs currently do not offer the features,” a spokesperson said.

«

This does raise the question of whether CarPlay and Android Auto are really essential to the experience, or whether the EV makers such as Rivian and Tesla can nail the software stack so well that nobody will worry about using their phone for messages, maps, or music/podcasts – and will find Bluetooth does the job well enough. Far from a “backlash”, I think it’s all still to play for: possibly if enough people become acquainted with CarPlay/Android Auto in their present cars, they’ll demand it in the EVs. But I wouldn’t take that as absolutely given.
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Kuwait unveiled its first AI-powered news presenter. Could it be an ethics nightmare? • AFP/Euronews

Sophia Khatsenkova :

»

A media outlet in Kuwait is launching its first virtual news presenter using artificial intelligence (AI). Named “Fedha,” the AI anchor made her debut on the Twitter account of Kuwait News.

The deputy editor-in-chief for Kuwait News told AFP the move tested AI’s potential to offer “new and innovative content” and the virtual anchor might be used to present news bulletins.

The presenter’s blonde hair and light-coloured eyes reflect the country’s diverse population of Kuwaitis and expats, according to the editor.

…But the rapid rise of AI globally has also sparked fears over its potential to spread disinformation and erode trust in mainstream media, according to Brandi Geurkink, strategy and technology advisor at Reset.

Kuwait ranked 158 out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders 2022 World Press Freedom Index. 

Experts are raising questions about whether replacing humans with AI could lead to less freedom of expression for reporters in the country. 

“I think that news broadcasting was of last bastion of truth for a lot of people to be able to see a person’s face, hear their voice and understand who this person is and whether I trust them, is important,” said Geurkink in an interview with Euronews.

«

Oh suuuure they chose the blonde hair to fit in with the “diverse population”. The idea that you need humans to discern whether something’s true is a strange one. People on TV (politicians) lie to you all the time.

Also, does nobody remember Ananova? An AI newsreader wayyy back in the day: 23 years ago this month. (Went nowhere.)
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More than half of journalists could be set to leave Twitter, survey says • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

»

According to a Semrush ranking, Twitter is only the 16th most popular social media network generally with 436 million users – some way behind Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp, Instagram, Wechat, Tiktok and Youtube which all have ore than one billion active monthly users.

And when asked if they have considered leaving Twitter in the last year some 50% of the journalist respondents said yes versus 44% who said no and 7% who were not sure.

The utility of Twitter for journalists is made clear in the survey. Of those who use the platform, some 83% use it to follow the news, 78% use it to promote their work and 69% use it to find sources.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter in October journalists were already concerned about safety on the platform. Female journalists in particular have been subjected to threats and abuse on social media, with Twitter among the most challenging platforms – largely due to the presence of anonymous “trolls”.

Concerns about the future of Twitter have been ramped up by the platform’s plan to charge journalists and news organisations for “verified” status. Previously, blue-tick verifications were seen as a way of curbing fake news and promoting genuine sources.

But news publishers are now being issued with a bill for more than £1,000 a month to retain their verified status on the platform.

«

Journalists who were surveyed cited “follow the news” (83%), “promote my work” (78%), “find sources” (69%), “connect with other journalists” (67%), “connect with my audience/readers” (61%), plus “discover new voices” (48%) and “share my opinion” (43%). I think “considered leaving” is about as reliable as those celebrities who, before elections, say they’ll leave the country if X gets in, and are found still there when X has been in charge for years.
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Dumping iron nanoparticles into the oceans might save the planet

Kristin Houser:

»

We know from natural events in the past that increasing the amount of iron in these seas can dramatically increase the growth of phytoplankton. When iron-rich ash from volcanic eruptions has fallen on the ocean’s surface, it has triggered phytoplankton blooms large enough to see from space.

This knowledge led oceanographer John Martin to put forth something called the “iron hypothesis,” which suggests that “fertilizing” the ocean with iron could increase the amount of carbon-sucking phytoplankton — theoretically enough to cool the entire Earth. “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age,” he famously quipped during a lecture in 1988.

In 1993, shortly after Martin’s death, his colleagues at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories tested the hypothesis by increasing the concentration of iron over 64 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. They then observed the area for 10 days and saw the amount of plant biomass double.

“All biological indicators confirmed an increased rate of phytoplankton production in response to the addition of iron,” they wrote in a paper detailing the experiment.

…In 2009, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory tracked the impact of a major ocean fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica by measuring carbon particles 800 meters below the surface of the water in the area for a year — and their findings were less than encouraging.

“Just adding iron to the ocean hasn’t been demonstrated as a good plan for storing atmospheric carbon,” said researcher Jim Bishop. “What counts is the carbon that reaches the deep sea, and a lot of the carbon tied up in plankton blooms appears not to sink very fast or very far.”

While researchers are still trying to figure out why that is, there are a number of theories, including ones centered on the feeding habits of creatures that live off phytoplankton and the presence of iron-binding organic compounds in ocean water. 

Some climate scientists aren’t ready to give up on the idea of ocean fertilization just yet, though.

«

When you read what their plans are, though – specially coated nanoparticles! – you realise that they should. “Boil-the-ocean” plans abound. The oceans remain unboiled.
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Israeli spyware maker Quadream closes, fires all employees • Haaretz

Omer Benjakob:

»

The cyberoffensive company QuaDream, which operates from Israel and specializes in hacking iPhones on behalf of government clients, called its employees in for a pre-termination hearing on Sunday.

For several months, the company has been undergoing significant downsizing, even losing entire teams to competitors, as Israel continues to curtail the sale of local spyware in wake of U.S. pressure.

Last week, Citizen Lab, which focuses on human rights and technology, published a report revealing that QuaDream’s spy software was used against journalists and dissidents around the world. According to people familiar with the local cyber arms industry, the report, as well as lack of sales and Israeli regulations, caused the company to halt its operations in Israel.

«

“Lack of sales” for a spyware company that hacks iPhones? Either Apple is getting better all the time, or they weren’t that good at it. Coin flip between them.
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Russia claims bots are caught only 1% of the time, Discord leak says • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

»

The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known, boosting lies about Ukraine’s military and the side effects of vaccines with hundreds of thousands of fake online accounts, according to documents recently leaked on the chat app Discord.

The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1% of the time, one document says.

That claim, described here for the first time, drew alarm from former government officials and experts inside and outside social media companies contacted for this article.

“Google and Meta and others are trying to stop this, and Russia is trying to get better. The figure that you are citing suggests that Russia is winning,” said Thomas Rid, a disinformation scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He added that the 1% claim was probably exaggerated or misleading.

Many of the 10 current and former intelligence and tech safety specialists interviewed for this article cautioned that the Russian agency whose claims helped form the basis for the leaked document may have exaggerated its success rate.

But even if Russia’s fake accounts escaped detection only 90% of the time instead of 99%, that would indicate Russia has become far more proficient at disseminating its views to unknowing consumers than in 2016, when it combined bot accounts with human propagandists and hacking to try to influence the course of the U.S. presidential election, the experts said.

«

(Thanks Matthew for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: one short, one long.
Short: “rodomontade” means “boastful or inflated talk/behaviour”; it is not synonymous with “quotidian” (everyday or mundane, which is the meaning I was reaching for. Thanks Jason.)

Longer: Rodrigo from Brazil writes re the Brazil/Twitter article yesterday: “Last Monday, Ministry of Justice met with social platforms. A Mexican lawyer from Twitter (because Brazil’s Twitter was closed) shocked everyone by saying pictures of users glorying school shooters weren’t violating its terms of use. (Flávio Dino’s quote from Bloomberg was a response to this.)

“Article here (please use an online translator).

“Twitter is a cesspool of hatred since ever, but it got worse with Musk. A few days before Santa Catarina shooting, a teenage from São Paulo killed a teacher. He announced and was incentivized on Twitter. Here’s a good report on this.”

Could the technology that created ChatGPT help us understand sperm whales’ language? And would we know what they meant if it could? CC-licensed photo by Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith on Flickr.

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

There was another post at the Social Warming Substack last Friday: it’s about how the flywheel of Twitter is slowing down.

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

It’s not just the Discord leak. Group chats are the internet’s new chaos machine • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

In every group chat, no matter the size, participants fall into informal roles. There is usually a leader—a person whose posting frequency drives the group or sets the agenda. Often, there are lurkers who rarely chime in. Different chats, depending on the size, develop their own sets of social rules and hierarchies. “The key to every group chat is mutually assured destruction,” the New York Times reporter Astead Herndon tweeted in 2021. “If you’re the only one dropping tea, you’re at risk. [If] one person is a little too silent, they gotta go.” Larger group chats are not immune to the more toxic dynamics of social media, where competition for attention and herd behavior cause infighting, splintering, and back-channeling.

According to the [Washington] Post’s reporting, [21-year-old Jack] Teixeira was fixated on capturing the attention of—and winning approval from—his Discord community. “He got upset” when people in the chat ignored his long, detailed summaries of classified documents, and he threatened to stop posting altogether, one server member told the newspaper. Eventually, Teixiera started sharing photos of the classified documents with the chat because they were more engaging. As the national-security reporter Spencer Ackerman wrote this week, Teixeira “didn’t leak for patriotism, principle, or even money.” His motivation was far less aspirational but, as Ackerman notes, it was “uncomfortably familiar”: He was showing off for the group chat.

Group chats aren’t just good for triggering geopolitical crises—they’re also an effective means to start a bank run, as the world learned last month. The investor panic that led to the swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March was effectively caused by runaway group-chat dynamics. “It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” a start-up founder told Bloomberg in March. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.”

…This presents a major issue: Unlike traditional social media or even forums and message boards, group chats are nearly impossible to monitor. As law enforcement, journalists, and researchers have learned, trying to track extremist groups such as QAnon or right-wing militias is much harder when they retreat to smaller, private chat apps.

«

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Elon Musk just shut down automation for important public safety accounts • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

Since acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk maintained that one of his major objectives was to eliminate the bots.

Last night, Twitter did just that. One problem, though: The bots blocked are the good ones.
Numerous public service Twitter accounts have lost their ability to automatically post breaking news and events. Twitter has been removing API access, which allows many of these accounts to post in an authorised way by the platform, as it switches to Musk’s new high-priced paid API system.

Many of these affected Twitter accounts have automated updates, but aren’t the type of hands-off bot accounts that some may think of when they hear the term “bot.” 

For example, numerous National Weather Service accounts that provide consistent updates, both automated and manually posted by humans, shared that they could no longer provide their up-to-the-minute, potentially life-saving updates.

«

Would it be too contrarian to say that if you’re getting your weather alerts from Twitter, you’re doing it wrong? It seems to me that it was only ever making up space, and that nobody’s really going to miss those ones. But there are lots of rodomontade bots posting far less important (or not at all important) information that people are going to miss.
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Twitter clashes with Brazil over school violence posts • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Andrew Rosati, Rachel Gamarski and Daniel Carvalho:

»

A sudden spike in killings in education centers across Brazil — where school shootings are uncommon — prompted authorities this week to clamp down on social media companies that were hosting messages that lauded the attacks.

Twitter, which has espoused a free-speech ethos since being taken over by billionaire Elon Musk last year, initially resisted over 500 requests from Brazil’s Justice Ministry to take down posts and profiles. The stance sparked widespread backlash and the issuing of an executive decree late Wednesday that threatens Twitter and other platforms with fines — or even a potential ban for failure to comply.

“A child’s life is worth more than all the terms of use in all the platforms,” Justice Minister Flavio Dino said Wednesday evening in Brasilia after announcing the decree.

The Justice Ministry’s offensive comes as the nation is still reeling from the murder of four children caused by a hatchet-wielding man at a daycare center in southern state of Santa Catarina this month.

Investigators often point to the existence of active groups in the far-reaches of the Internet that celebrate such attacks as one of the reason violence in schools keeps multiplying.

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. Internet activists and enraged Twitter users struck back at the website with posts containing #TwitterApoiaMassacres, or Twitter supports massacres, which later appeared to be blocked on the platform.

«

Fun how Bloomberg has to explain that “school shootings are uncommon” for its American audience. Of course Brazil is now run by Lula, not Bolsonaro; the latter delighted in stirring up trouble online. For Twitter, though, the question is: what did it really do wrong? There’s no clear indication that the attacks were inspired by Twitter users. The reference the authorities are using is Columbine – another US school massacre.
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Artist refuses prize after his AI image wins at top photo contest • PetaPixel

Michael Zhang:

»

A photographer has stirred up fresh controversy and debate after his artificial intelligence (AI) image won first prize at one of the world’s most prestigious photography competitions. He has since declined to accept the prize while the contest has remained silent on the matter.

Berlin-based “photomedia artist” Boris Eldagsen participated this year in the World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Awards, a leading photo contest that offers prizes that include $5,000 cash, Sony camera equipment, a trip to London for the awards ceremony, and/or worldwide publicity through a book and exhibition.

Eldagsen submitted an image titled THE ELECTRICIAN to the Creative category of the 2023 Open competition. It picture appears to be a portrait of two women captured with a photographic process from the early days of photography.

The photo is part of a series titled PSEUDOMNESIA: Fake Memories that Eldagsen has been working on since 2022.

“PSEUDOMNESIA is the Latin term for pseudo memory, a fake memory, such as a spurious recollection of events that never took place, as opposed to a memory that is merely inaccurate,” the artist writes on the project page. “The following images have been co-produced by the means of AI (artificial intelligence) image generators.

“Using the visual language of the 1940s, Boris Eldagsen produces his images as fake memories of a past, that never existed, that no one photographed. These images were imagined by language and re-edited more between 20 to 40 times through AI image generators, combining ‘inpainting’, ‘outpainting’, and ‘prompt whispering’ techniques.

«

Eldagsen’s picture is very impressive: you won’t be saying “AI can’t do hands/fingers” any more. But he argues that it’s not a photo, so shouldn’t win a photo contest.

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Low heat pump uptake ‘an embarrassment’ • The Times

Andrew Ellson:

»

A flagship green energy scheme to encourage homeowners to ditch their gas boilers has been branded an “embarrassment” after uptake in the first year was only a third of the planned level.

The government’s boiler upgrade scheme had a budget of £150m to subsidise 30,000 ground or air source heat pump and biomass boiler installations between its launch in May last year and the end of March this year. Yet figures published by the energy regulator Ofgem show that fewer than 10,000 installations were completed under the scheme in this period.

Ministers have set a target of 600,000 heat pump installations a year within the next five years and the sale of gas boilers will be banned by 2035.

Heat pumps work by drawing heat from the air or ground to provide hot water and central heating.

An air source pump can cost between £7,000 and £14,000 to buy and install, while a ground source pump costs between £15,000 and £35,000. The government scheme provides a subsidy of between £5,000 and £6,000 depending on the type of system used. In addition to the grant, there is no VAT on installation, offering a further saving of thousands of pounds.

…[Mike Foster, chief executive of the trade body the Energy and Utilities Alliance which represents the heating and hot water industry] said: “It takes a certain type of genius to fail to give away £150 million of taxpayers’ money and this wretched scheme looks like it has done just that. When will the government actually listen to the people, the majority of whom simply cannot afford a heat pump, subsidised or not.

“It does little for carbon saving compared to investment on insulation. It does not help people keep bills low. It takes from the poor to give to the wealthy and it is an embarrassment of a policy.”

He added: “More taxpayer-subsidised heat pumps have probably been fitted in Cornish holiday homes than the whole of Britain’s second city, Birmingham. That is shameful. People are still hurting with high energy bills, insulating the homes of those most in need should be the priority, not giving hard-earned taxpayers’ cash to those who were going to buy a heat pump anyway. It’s utterly wasteful.”

«

Probably they would work better in (generally warm) Cornwall than (rather less generally warm) Birmingham, but the “hot water industry” rep has a point. Insulation would be a better idea.
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Montana lawmakers approve statewide ban on TikTok • WSJ

Meghan Bobrowsky and Stu Woo:

»

Montana lawmakers on Friday approved a first-of-its-kind bill to ban TikTok across the state, setting the stage for future court battles that could determine the fate of the popular, Chinese-owned social-media app in the US.

The Montana House voted 54-43 to send the bill to Gov. Greg Gianforte’s desk. The governor’s office declined to say whether he would sign the bill but noted Mr. Gianforte had previously banned TikTok on government-issued devices and urged the state university system to do the same.

The bill said the ban would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024. It would prohibit TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., from operating within the state, and would also bar app stores from offering TikTok within the state. It would fine any entity violating this law $10,000 per violation. It is unclear how some elements of the legislation would be enforced.

…The bill’s authors ahead of the vote said they expect legal challenges that could ultimately reach the US Supreme Court should Mr. Gianforte sign the legislation.

Critics including the American Civil Liberties Union said the bill amounts to censorship and violates free-speech rights protected under the First Amendment.

«

Nobody is quite sure how this would work: how can Apple or Google know that someone’s in Montana (pop. 1 million, area 147,040 square miles)? What if someone downloads it while out of state and comes back into the state? Would ISPs have to block it? What about people using VPNs? As ever, the internet is mighty uncooperative with laws that try to limit it geographically.
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Toward understanding the communication in sperm whales • ScienceDirect

Jacob Andreas et al from various academic institutions think it might be possible to use a Large Language Model approach to translate sperm whale speech:

»

the recent state-of-the-art Transformer models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) was pre-trained on a large language corpus comprising over 10^11 data points. While unsupervised structure discovery is also possible without self-supervised representation learning, recent studies have also shown that unsupervised structure discovery can provide benefits.

It is difficult to make an exact analogy between tokens in human languages and whale vocalizations. And, for comparison, the Dominica Sperm Whale Project (DSWP) dataset contains less than 10^4 coda clicks collected over a longitudinal study since 2005. It is thus apparent that one of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communications using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets capturing a wide range of attributes.

Secondly, human linguistic corpora are easier to deal with because they are typically pre-analyzed (i.e., already presented in the form of words or letters) and verification against ground truth is available, whereas in bioacoustic communication data, the relevant units must be inferred bottom-up with no ground truth available. Given this highly complex learning objective, we expect larger datasets will facilitate the discovery of meaning-carrying units.

«

It’s ambitious, but I’m reminded of the Wittgenstein saying: if a lion could speak, we could not understand it. A sperm whale’s world and motivations are so different from ours that it would be almost impossible to find the interface between them.
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How nerds (almost) took over the world • Financial Times

Self-confessed nerd Stephen Bush:

»

The new Dungeons & Dragons film sums up the cultural moment. If you’ve seen a Marvel superhero film you’ll be familiar with the approach it takes: a lot of quips and self-consciously ironic dialogue. It is hardly a classic of modern cinema but it is not actively bad either. But while it shares a setting and captures something of the anarchic feeling of a session playing Dungeons & Dragons, the interest in what makes a game of Dungeons & Dragons “fun” feels wholly absent from the film. Instead what we are treated to is a dutiful run-through of some of the franchise’s most famous locations and spells.

That might be the most harmful consequence of nerds’ greater purchasing power: that instead of seeking new things to do with old stories, much of our common culture is dominated by low-quality remakes, made to secure a fast buck rather than to tell a good story.

We nerds are drivers of the problem, too. Sometimes it can appear that the thing we dislike most of all is someone making the thing we love more accessible or widely known. The TikToker Francis Bourgeois — real name Luke Nicolson — is castigated for being an insufficiently “real” trainspotter and for making money out of his hobby by appearing in adverts for Gucci, despite engaging millions of new fans in the trainspotting world. Star Wars fans appear to be divided between those who complain when the franchise simply replays the hits of the past as in The Rise of Skywalker, and those who become bitterly angry when it doesn’t, as in The Last Jedi: sometimes the biggest thing the nerd dollar does is pay to keep things exactly as they are.

«

The dreadful inertia of the Nerd Franchises – Marvel, Star Wars, Lord of the sodding Rings – really has squashed culture. The escapees from beneath it, notably Succession, intentionally restrict themselves: you won’t see spinoffs or prequels because they’re sufficient unto themselves.
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The end of faking it in Silicon Valley • The New York Times

Erin Griffith:

»

Not only has funding dried up for cash-burning startups over the last year, but now, fraud is also in the air, as investors scrutinize startup claims more closely and a tech downturn reveals who has been taking the industry’s “fake it till you make it” ethos too far.

Take what happened in the past two weeks: Charlie Javice, the founder of the financial aid startup Frank, was arrested, accused of falsifying customer data. A jury found Rishi Shah, a co-founder of the advertising software startup Outcome Health, guilty of defrauding customers and investors. And a judge ordered Elizabeth Holmes, the founder who defrauded investors at her blood testing startup Theranos, to begin an 11-year prison sentence on April 27.

Those developments follow the February arrests of Carlos Watson, the founder of Ozy Media, and Christopher Kirchner, the founder of software company Slync, both accused of defrauding investors. Still to come is the fraud trial of Manish Lachwani, a co-founder of the software startup HeadSpin, set to begin in May, and that of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who faces 13 fraud charges later this year.

Taken together, the chorus of charges, convictions and sentences have created a feeling that the startup world’s fast and loose fakery actually has consequences. Despite this generation’s many high-profile scandals (Uber, WeWork) and downfalls (Juicero), few startup founders, aside from Ms. Holmes, ever faced criminal charges for pushing the boundaries of business puffery as they disrupted us into the future.

«

Actions have consequences? This is incredible.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A coroner has warned that millions of people are at risk of death if they use full-face snorkelling masks. CC-licensed photo by Enrico Strocchi 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. Try another. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Air National Guardsman arrested as FBI searches his home • The New York Times

Aric Toler, Michael Schwirtz, Haley Willis, Riley Mellen, Christiaan Triebert, Malachy Browne, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Julian E. Barnes:

»

Although gaming friends would not identify the leader of an online group linked to the leak of classified United States intelligence files, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The New York Times led toward Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

An online gaming profile in Airman Teixeira’s name connected him to photographs of the location where leaked documents were photographed — a kitchen countertop inside his childhood home.

An image shows a leaked document on a background that appears to be a textured countertop above a white tile floor.

The granite countertop bearing a distinctive pattern and white floor tiles are visible in the margins of some of the leaked intelligence briefings. The same interior décor is visible in photographs of the family home posted online by one of Airman Teixeira’s immediate relatives.

Mr. Teixeira was arrested by the FBI in North Dighton, Massachusetts, on Thursday afternoon.

«

The main link is to the full-length story with everything about yesterday’s arrest, but this is the part that is most relevant. On Tuesday, bellingcat said that “Creases can be seen on the documents with items, such as a hunter’s scope box and some Gorilla Glue visible in the background of those dated from early March”. To which I commented that “With details like that, bellingcat will probably pin down precisely when and where they were photographed in a few days.”

The top byline on Thursday’s story above: Aric Toler of bellingcat.
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Streaming services urged to clamp down on AI-generated music • Financial Times

Anna Nicolaou:

»

Universal Music Group has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.

UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists.

AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests “left and right”, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology.

“We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists,” UMG wrote to online platforms in March, in emails viewed by the FT.

“This next generation of technology poses significant issues,” said a person close to the situation. “Much of [generative AI] is trained on popular music. You could say: compose a song that has the lyrics to be like Taylor Swift, but the vocals to be in the style of Bruno Mars, but I want the theme to be more Harry Styles. The output you get is due to the fact the AI has been trained on those artists’ intellectual property.” 

«

Much like the claim that Getty is bringing against Stable Diffusion on roughly this basis: it was trained on our content, so it’s breaking our copyright. (I’m not convinced Getty will prevail, but there’s a long way to go yet.)
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Google will shut down Currents, the work-focused Google Plus replacement • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

»

Google has announced that it’ll shut down Currents, which was introduced in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus for G Suite. In a blog post, the company says it’s “planning to wind down” Currents, and that it’ll push the people who were using it to Spaces, which is sort of like Google Chat’s version of a Slack channel or Discord room.

Google says that it’s making the change so users won’t have to work in a “separate, siloed destination” — instead, they’ll be using Chat and Spaces, which will soon be prominently integrated into Gmail. The company promises it’s going to make Spaces a more suitable replacement over the next year, saying it’ll “deliver new capabilities” like “support for larger communities and leadership communication, investments in advanced search, tools for content moderation, and more.”

…Currents hasn’t gotten a lot of love from Google. I was only able to find three blog posts about it on Google’s Workspace Updates site — the one announcing it, one in 2020 announcing that it was widely available, and the one from Thursday announcing it was being shut down. It was included on Google’s main list of apps that come with Workspace at one point according to the WayBack Machine, but it seems like it was removed sometime in November 2021.

«

Another one bites the dust. Along with some of the job cuts, maybe Google could figure out how to focus on products and iteratively improve them, rather than binning them and expecting people to migrate. Microsoft has managed it with Teams, for example.
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The US cracked a $3.4bn crypto heist—and bitcoin’s anonymity • WSJ

Robert McMillan:

»

[James] Zhong moved the stolen bitcoins [accrued via a bug in the Silk Road dark web site] from one account to another for eight years to cover his tracks. By late 2021, the red-hot crypto market had raised the value of his trove to $3.4bn [from $600,000 when he exploited it in 2012]. He still lived in a modest house in Athens, Ga., and dressed in shorts and T-shirts. He also had a lake-house getaway in Gainesville, Ga., a Lamborghini sports car and a $150,000 Tesla.

In November 2021, federal agents surprised Mr. Zhong with a search warrant and found the digital keys to his crypto fortune hidden in a basement floor safe and a popcorn tin in the bathroom. Mr. Zhong, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday in New York federal court, where prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of less than two years.

Mr. Zhong’s case is one of the highest-profile examples of how federal authorities have pierced the veil of blockchain transactions. Private and government investigators can now identify wallet addresses associated with terrorists, drug traffickers, money launderers and cybercriminals, all of which were supposed to be anonymous. 

Law-enforcement agencies, working with cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain-analytics companies, have compiled data gleaned from earlier investigations, including the Silk Road case, to map the flow of cryptocurrency transactions across criminal networks worldwide. In the past two years, the US has seized more than $10bn worth of digital currency through successful prosecutions, according to the Internal Revenue Service—in essence, by following the money. Instead of subpoenas to banks or other financial institutions, investigators can look to the blockchain for an instant snapshot of the money trail. 

«

So bitcoin turns out to be the extremely nonymous currency, because it hasn’t expanded into real-world uses, which means that any time someone tries to cash out to useful currency, the exchanges are obliged to keep details of who’s doing the transaction. And they’ll get people with badges knocking at the door. (Link should work for free.)
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Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee: tech exec’s alleged killer also worked in tech • Mission Local

Joe Eskenazi:

»

Mission Local is informed that the San Francisco Police Department early this morning made an arrest in the April 4 killing of tech executive Bob Lee, following an operation undertaken outside the city’s borders. The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew.

We are told that police today were dispatched to Emeryville with a warrant to arrest a man named Nima Momeni. The name and Emeryville address SFPD officers traveled to correspond with this man, the owner of a company called Expand IT.

Multiple police sources have described the predawn knifing last week, which left the 43-year-old Lee dead in a deserted section of downtown San Francisco, as neither a robbery attempt nor a random attack. 

Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect. 

Some manner of confrontation allegedly commenced while both men were in the vehicle, and potentially continued after Lee exited the car. Police allege that Momeni stabbed Lee multiple times with a knife that was recovered not far from the spot on the 300 block of Main Street to which officers initially responded. 

«

Lee’s killing stirred up lots of strong feelings among the tech community: he was clearly widely adored by many who had encountered him. Yet there were details about the stabbing that were out of kilter: why was he out on his own at 3am, in a relatively safe part of the city, and had he really been stabbed randomly, given that nothing had been stolen from him?

The usual assumption about murder – you were killed by someone you know – seems to have prevailed.
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Twitter to let users access stocks, crypto via eToro in finance push • CNBC

Ryan Browne:

»

Twitter will let its users access stocks, cryptocurrencies and other financial assets through a partnership with eToro, a social trading company.

Starting Thursday, a new feature will be rolled out on the Twitter app. It will allow users to view market charts on an expanded range of financial instruments and buy and sell stocks and other assets from eToro, the company told CNBC exclusively.

Currently, it’s already possible to view real-time trading data from TradingView on index funds like the S&P 500 and shares of some companies such as Tesla. That can be done using Twitter’s “cashtags” feature — you search for a ticker symbol and insert dollar sign in front of it, after which the app will show you price information from TradingView using an API (application programming interface).

With the eToro partnership, Twitter cashtags will be expanded to cover far more instruments and asset classes, an eToro spokesperson told CNBC.

You’ll also be able to click a button that says “view on eToro,” which takes you through to eToro’s site, and then buy and sell assets on its platform. EToro uses TradingView as its market data partner.

«

Chasing the stonk (sic) market. This will wipe out the crypto scams, right?
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Elon Musk’s free-speech charade is over • The Atlantic

Adam Serwer:

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until Musk bought Twitter late last year, conservatives were arguing that the company’s moderation decisions violated the First Amendment, even though Twitter is a private company and not part of the government. Now that Musk is using his editorial discretion as owner of the company to promote people and ideas he supports—primarily right-wing influencers—and diminish the reach of those he does not, the constitutional emergency has subsided. At least until his allies and defenders on Substack found themselves unable to promote their work on Twitter, free speech had been restored, because “free speech” here simply means that right-wing ideas and arguments are favoured. This outcome—that Twitter under Musk would favour right-wing content—was predictable, and I’m saying that because I wrote last April that that’s what would happen.

The episode reveals something important about the way that many conservative jurists and legal scholars now approach the principle of free speech. Florida and Texas passed laws prohibiting social-media companies from moderating user-generated content, in retaliation for what they characterized as liberal “censorship.” A federal judge appointed by Trump, Andrew Oldham, then upheld the Texas law with a ruling that scoffed at the idea that “editorial discretion” constituted a “freestanding category of First-Amendment-protected expression” and insisted that the platforms’ moderation decisions did not qualify for that protection.

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Hypocrisy on a gigantic scale. It’s what Musk does best.
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The mounting human and environmental costs of generative AI • Ars Technica

Sasha Luccioni is a researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face:

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For large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, we’ve gone from around 100 million parameters in 2018 to 500 billion in 2023 with Google’s PaLM model. The theory behind this growth is that models with more parameters should have better performance, even on tasks they were not initially trained on, although this hypothesis remains unproven.

Bigger models typically take longer to train, which means they also need more GPUs, which cost more money, so only a select few organizations are able to train them. Estimates put the training cost of GPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters, at $4.6m—out of reach for the majority of companies and organisations. (It’s worth noting that the cost of training models is dropping in some cases, such as in the case of LLaMA, the recent model trained by Meta.)

This creates a digital divide in the AI community between those who can train the most cutting-edge LLMs (mostly Big Tech companies and rich institutions in the Global North) and those who can’t (nonprofit organisations, startups, and anyone without access to a supercomputer or millions in cloud credits).

Building and deploying these behemoths requires a lot of planetary resources: rare metals for manufacturing GPUs, water to cool huge data centers, energy to keep those data centres running 24/7 on a planetary scale… all of these are often overlooked in favour of focusing on the future potential of the resulting models.

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$4.6m doesn’t sound wildly beyond the funding possibilities of some Silicon Valley startups. But increasingly I feel like we’re heading towards IBM president Thomas Watson’s prediction from 1943 – “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Oh, but what computers.
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Full-face snorkel caused death of Red Sea tourist • The Times

Jonathan Ames:

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Full-face snorkel masks could be putting millions of people at risk, a coroner has warned after the death of a British tourist in Egypt.

Angela Kearn, an experienced snorkeller, collapsed and died at a Red Sea resort while using equipment from the retailer Decathlon, an inquest was told. A coroner found that she had developed immersion pulmonary oedema — a concentration of fluid in her lungs — and that the mask “contributed” to her difficulties.

Kearn, 63, had recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure and was taking hormone replacement therapy to relieve symptoms of menopause, the inquest was told. She was unaware that this made her vulnerable when using the mask, a point that was allegedly not made clear in the packaging.

Caroline Topping, the assistant coroner for Surrey, has written to the General Medical Council, National Trading Standards and Decathlon in the UK to raise concerns about the potential threat the masks pose. An estimated 16 million people have bought them.

In a prevention of future deaths report, Topping wrote: “Many millions of the full-face masks have been sold and the safety concerns about their use by those with ongoing cardiovascular and respiratory issues has not been widely publicised or brought to the attention of those who already own the masks.”

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Sixteen million. Even if the death rate is only one in a million, that’s 16 avoidable deaths. To make matters worse, there’s no British Standard for these masks – so you don’t know how safe or dangerous they might be for you.
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Teens don’t care as much about VR as tech companies do • Fortune

Prarthana Prakash:

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Digitally obsessed teens are a target market for companies selling virtual reality headsets that transport users into entirely new worlds. But it turns out, the younger set isn’t particularly interested—even though tech companies are spending billions on VR. 

Very few teens use VR devices daily, according to a study published Tuesday by investment bank Piper Sandler. The bank surveyed over 5,600 US teens and found that close to a third of them owned VR devices, but only 4% use them every day and only 14% use them every week. 

“To us, the lukewarm usage demonstrates that VR remains ‘early days’ and that these devices are less important than smartphones,” Piper Sandler analysts said in their report.

The report noted that between the second half of last year and now, use of VR devices has remained flat. Compared to the same time last year, use has actually dropped to 14% compared to 17%. 

Piper Sandler’s results reflect the relatively slow adoption of VR among younger people given that 95% of teens in the US own smartphones and 80% own gaming consoles, according to Pew Research.

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OK, you could have said this about smartphone ahead of the iPhone’s launch, and about tablets ahead of the iPad’s launch, and about wireless headphones ahead of the Airpods’ launch. Even so, this doesn’t feel like a market waiting to happen.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified