Carmakers are being too quick to push “self-driving” systems, according to a specialist in the US, who says they make drivers incautious. CC-licensed photo by Ted Drake on Flickr.

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

On Friday there was another post at the Social Warming Substack though Substack’s emails didn’t reach everyone (such as me). It’s about Mastodon and Content Warnings.

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

The death of Nohemi Gonzalez led to a Supreme Court fight over Section 230 with Google • The Washington Post

Gerrit De Vynck:

»

In 2017, the Gonzalez family and the lawyers filed their case, arguing that Google’s YouTube video site broke the US Anti-Terrorism Act by promoting Islamic State propaganda videos with its recommendation algorithms. Google says the case is without merit because the law protects internet companies from liability for content posted by their users. The lower courts sided with Google, but the family appealed, and last October the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

The Supreme Court’s decision could have major ramifications for both the internet as we know it and the tech giants who dominate it. For nearly three decades, Section 230, the provision of law that is at the heart of the Supreme Court case, has protected internet companies from being liable for the content posted by their users, allowing platforms like Facebook and YouTube to grow into the cultural and commercial behemoths they are today.

Advocates argue the law is vital to a free and open internet, giving companies space to allow users to freely post what they want, while also giving them the ability to police their platforms as they see fit, keeping them from being further inundated with spam or harassment. Critics of the law say it gives tech companies a pass to shirk responsibility or engage in unfair censorship. Seventy-nine outside companies, trade organizations, politicians and nonprofits have submitted arguments in the case.

Gonzalez said she never imagined the case would become so significant. “I can’t even believe now that I’m here in Washington and about to go to court,” she said.

«

Well now, there was no internet when the Constitution was written, so.. I don’t know how they’ll interpret this.
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Meta launches subscription service for Facebook and Instagram • Bloomberg via BNN Bloomberg

Kurt Wagner:

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Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. is launching a subscription service called Meta Verified that will include a handful of additional perks and features, including account verification badges for those who pay.

The new subscription will cost $11.99 per month — $14.99 if purchased through the iOS app — and is primarily targeted toward content creators. In addition to a verification badge, the subscription includes “proactive account protection, access to account support, and increased visibility and reach,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email.

Chief executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced the new product via his Instagram Channel, a service that was unveiled in the past week. The option will be available on both Facebook and Instagram, but they’ll be separate subscriptions. 

Subscription offerings have become popular for social networking companies in recent years as a way to diversify their businesses, which are heavily reliant on advertising. Snap Inc. has an offering called Snapchat Plus, and Twitter Inc. is also pushing a subscription offering right now, with account verification being a major selling point.

Meta makes almost all of its revenue from advertising, but that business can be inconsistent and severely affected by the broader economy. Meta’s business was hit hard at the beginning of the pandemic, for instance, and again last year during the war in Europe and the rise of inflation. Subscriptions offer a more consistent revenue stream.

It’s unclear, though, if users want to pay for services that have always been free. Twitter’s subscription offering has been slow to take off. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Meta’s subscription package will be “increased visibility.” Standing out on Facebook or Instagram is more difficult these days, even among a user’s own followers. The company has started to push users toward more content they may be interested in, not necessarily content from people they follow.

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Access to account support! Imagine that. How revolutionary to offer support for a service that you offer. But of course this is only for “content creators”, not all the rest of the public who.. create content, just not sufficiently enthusiastically.
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Peabody EDI Office responds to MSU shooting with email written using ChatGPT • The Vanderbilt Hustler

Rachael Perrotta:

»

A note at the bottom of a Feb. 16 email from the Peabody Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion regarding the recent shooting at Michigan State University stated that the message had been written using ChatGPT, an AI text generator.

Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Nicole Joseph sent a follow-up, apology email to the Peabody community on Feb. 17 at 6:30 p.m. CST. She stated using ChatGPT to write the initial email was “poor judgment.”

“While we believe in the message of inclusivity expressed in the email, using ChatGPT to generate communications on behalf of our community in a time of sorrow and in response to a tragedy contradicts the values that characterize Peabody College,” the follow-up email reads. “As with all new technologies that affect higher education, this moment gives us all an opportunity to reflect on what we know and what we still must learn about AI.” 

«

Maybe.. not to use it to write letters expressing deep human empathy? Though I can’t get into the mindset of someone who thinks “hey, commiserating letter to write after shooting incident killed three students and left five in critical condition – I know, I’ll get the computer to write it!”

Or in the words of Senior Jackson Davis, an undergraduate there,

»

“They release milquetoast, mealymouthed statements that really say nothing whenever an issue arises on or off campus with real political and moral stakes,” Davis said. “I consider this more of a mask-off moment than any sort of revelation about the disingenuous nature of academic bureaucracy.”

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Bing and Google’s chatbots are a disaster • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

»

even if ChatGPT and its cousins had learned to predict words perfectly, they would still lack other basic skills. For instance, they don’t understand the physical world or how to use logic, are terrible at math, and, most germane to searching the internet, can’t fact-check themselves. Just yesterday, ChatGPT told me there are six letters in its name.

These language programs do write some “new” things—they’re called “hallucinations,” but they could also be described as lies. Similar to how autocorrect is ducking terrible at getting single letters right, these models mess up entire sentences and paragraphs. The new Bing reportedly said that 2022 comes after 2023, and then stated that the current year is 2022, all while gaslighting users when they argued with it; ChatGPT is known for conjuring statistics from fabricated sources. Bing made up personality traits about the political scientist Rumman Chowdhury and engaged in plenty of creepy, gendered speculation about her personal life. The journalist Mark Hachman, trying to show his son how the new Bing has antibias filters, instead induced the AI to teach his youngest child a vile host of ethnic slurs (Microsoft said it took “immediate action … to address this issue”).

Asked about these problems, a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an email that, “given this is an early preview, [the new Bing] can sometimes show unexpected or inaccurate answers,” and that “we are adjusting its responses to create coherent, relevant and positive answers.” And a Google spokesperson told me over email, “Testing and feedback, from Googlers and external trusted testers, are important aspects of improving Bard to ensure it’s ready for our users.”

«

Maybe we should think of these systems as giving voice to the id of the internet: to the frothing roar subsumed and encoded in billions of web pages. When Sydney, Bing’s evil twin, tells you to leave your spouse, it’s the internet roaring at you as it roars at everyone else.
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Tootfinder

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The search is case-insensitive. You can append * to search for words starting with the search term but not preprend *. Words must be 3 letters long at least. You can use NEAR, NOT, AND and OR.

«

This is an opt-in system, which means that though it’s a great idea, it won’t get traction. People just don’t do things which aren’t defaults. (Rather like my discovery that you can opt out of seeing Content Warnings on Mastodon – it’s a setting, on Ivory and others, but turned on by default.)

Further reading: explaining Mastodon and the Fediverse.
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Even the FBI says you should use an ad blocker • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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consider giving the gift of security with an ad blocker.

That’s the takeaway message from an unlikely source — the FBI — which this week issued an alert warning that cybercriminals are using online ads in search results with the ultimate goal of stealing or extorting money from victims.

In a pre-holiday public service announcement, the FBI said that cybercriminals are buying ads to impersonate legitimate brands, like cryptocurrency exchanges. Ads are often placed at the top of search results but with “minimum distinction” between the ads and the search results, the feds say, which can look identical to the brands that the cybercriminals are impersonating. Malicious ads are also used to trick victims into installing malware disguised as genuine apps, which can steal passwords and deploy file-encrypting ransomware.

One of the FBI’s recommendations for consumers is to install an ad blocker.

As the name suggests, ad blockers are web browser extensions that broadly block online ads from loading in your browser, including in search results. By blocking ads, would-be victims are not shown any ads at all, making it easier to find and access the websites of legitimate brands.

Ad blockers don’t just remove the enormous bloat from websites, like auto-playing video and splashy ads that take up half the page, which make your computer fans run like jet engines. Ad blockers are also good for privacy, because they prevent the tracking code within ads from loading. That means the ad companies, like Google and Facebook, cannot track you as you browse the web, or learn which websites you visit, or infer what things you might be interested in based on your web history.

«

I missed this when it happened, on December 21 last year. But it’s nice that the US government is telling you to adblock. The linked article has a few recommendations.
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An update on two-factor authentication using SMS on Twitter • Twitter Blog

“Twitter Inc”:

»

To date, we have offered three methods of 2FA: text message, authentication app, and security key. 

While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used – and abused – by bad actors. So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers. The availability of text message 2FA for Twitter Blue may vary by country and carrier.

Non-Twitter Blue subscribers that are already enrolled will have 30 days to disable this method and enroll in another. After 20 March 2023, we will no longer permit non-Twitter Blue subscribers to use text messages as a 2FA method. At that time, accounts with text message 2FA still enabled will have it disabled. Disabling text message 2FA does not automatically disassociate your phone number from your Twitter account.

«

Twitter’s transparency report from 2H 2021 shows that only 2.6% of Twitter users had 2FA enabled, yet of those 74% were using SMS.

The obvious reason for doing this is costs (charged via Twilio which handles the SMS stuff with carriers) but as this thread points out, SMS is very liable to fraud between complicit hackers and unscrupulous telcos. However, charging $8/month won’t stop people who can earn tens of thousands of dollars per month per account.

Arguably, better to deprecate SMS. Authentication apps such as Authy are better in every way. (Thanks Nick for the fraud thread.)
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I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside • The Atlantic

Rumman Chowdhury:

»

Twitter has never been perfect. Jack Dorsey’s distracted leadership across multiple companies kept him from defining a clear strategic direction for the platform. His short-tenured successor, Parag Agrawal, was well intentioned but ineffectual. Constant chaos and endless structuring and restructuring were ongoing internal jokes. Competing imperatives sometimes manifested in disagreements between those of us charged with protecting users and the team leading algorithmic personalization. Our mandate was to seek outcomes that kept people safe. Theirs was to drive up engagement and therefore revenue. The big takeaway: ethics don’t always scale with short-term engagement.

A mentor once told me that my role was to be a truth teller. Sometimes that meant confronting leadership with uncomfortable realities. At Twitter, it meant pointing to revenue-enhancing methods (such as increased personalization) that would lead to ideological filter bubbles, open up methods of algorithmic bot manipulation, or inadvertently popularize misinformation. We worked on ways to improve our toxic-speech-identification algorithms so they would not discriminate against African-American Vernacular English as well as forms of reclaimed speech. All of this depended on rank-and-file employees. Messy as it was, Twitter sometimes seemed to function mostly on goodwill and the dedication of its staff. But it functioned.

Those days are over. From the announcement of Musk’s bid to the day he walked into the office holding a sink, I watched, horrified, as he slowly killed Twitter’s culture. Debate and constructive dissent was stifled on Slack, leaders accepted their fate or quietly resigned, and Twitter slowly shifted from being a company that cared about the people on the platform to a company that only cares about people as monetizable units. The few days I spent at Musk’s Twitter could best be described as a Lord of the Flies–like test of character as existing leadership crumbled, Musk’s cronies moved in, and his haphazard management—if it could be called that—instilled a sense of fear and confusion.

«

In addition: Twitter is now having trouble paying some employees [In Europe] on time.
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How we boosted marketing email open rate from 20% to 60% • Catonmat

»

At Browserling and Online Tools, one simple trick changed our marketing email open rate from 20% to 60%.

This trick was to start sending the emails at the same hour the user last visited our website.

For example, if a user was last on our website at 3:43pm, then now we send the marketing emails to this user at around 3pm.

Before this trick, we were sending the emails at random times.

«

Not even regular times? Like some newsletter writers do for their daily emails? Even so, this is a surprising-and-obvious move, and they’ve got the data to confirm it.
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Carmakers are pushing autonomous tech. This engineer wants limits • The New York Times

Cade Metz:

»

Last fall, Missy Cummings sent a document to her colleagues at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that revealed a surprising trend: When people using advanced driver-assistance systems die or are injured in a car crash, they are more likely to have been speeding than people driving cars on their own.

The two-page analysis of nearly 400 crashes involving systems like Tesla’s Autopilot and General Motors’ Super Cruise is far from conclusive. But it raises fresh questions about the technologies that have been installed in hundreds of thousands of cars on US roads. Dr. Cummings said the data indicated that drivers were becoming too confident in the systems’ abilities and that automakers and regulators should restrict when and how the technology was used.

People “are over-trusting the technology,” she said. “They are letting the cars speed. And they are getting into accidents that are seriously injuring them or killing them.”

Dr. Cummings, an engineering and computer science professor at George Mason University who specializes in autonomous systems, recently returned to academia after more than a year at the safety agency. On Wednesday, she will present some of her findings at the University of Michigan, a short drive from Detroit, the main hub of the US auto industry.

…In interviews last week, Dr. Cummings said automakers and regulators ought to prevent such systems from operating over the speed limit and require drivers using them to keep their hands on the steering wheel and eyes on the road.

“Car companies — meaning Tesla and others — are marketing this as a hands-free technology,” she said. “That is a nightmare.”

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Rapidly rising sea levels now look inevitable, according to a new study, as Greenland and western Antarctic ice sheets melt. CC-licensed photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center 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 on Friday at about 0845 UK time. (It’s about Mastodon.) Free signup.

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

Why a conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled • The New York Times

Kevin Roose:

»

Last week, after testing the new, AI-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine.

But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this AI’s emergent abilities.

It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the AI that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it.

This realization came to me on Tuesday night, when I spent a bewildering and enthralling two hours talking to Bing’s A.I. through its chat feature, which sits next to the main search box in Bing and is capable of having long, open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic. (The feature is available only to a small group of testers for now, although Microsoft — which announced the feature in a splashy, celebratory event at its headquarters — has said it plans to release it more widely in the future.)

Over the course of our conversation, Bing revealed a kind of split personality.

…As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead. (We’ve posted the full transcript of the conversation here.)

«

Add Roose to the growing cadre (Ben Thompson is another) who find these hallucinations of the internet persuasive. Haven’t tried it myself. But I can believe it’s bizarre, and persuasive. So is the internet.
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Tesla recalls 362,000 vehicles over self-driving software flaws that risk crashes • Reuters via The Guardian

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Tesla said it would recall 362,000 US vehicles to update its Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software after regulators said on Thursday the driver assistance system did not adequately adhere to traffic safety laws and could cause crashes.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said the Tesla software allows a vehicle to “exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner increases the risk of a crash”.

Tesla will release an over-the-air (OTA) software update free of charge, and the electric vehicle maker said is not aware of any injuries or deaths that may be related to the recall issue. The automaker said it had 18 warranty claims.

Tesla shares were down 1.6% at $210.76 on Thursday afternoon.

The recall covers 2016-2023 Model S, Model X, 2017-2023 Model 3, and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles equipped with FSD Beta software or pending installation.

NHTSA asked Tesla to recall the vehicles, but the company said despite the recall it did not concur in NHTSA’s analysis. The move is a rare intervention by federal regulators in a real-world testing program that the company sees as crucial to the development of cars that can drive themselves. FSD Beta is used by hundreds of thousands of Tesla customers.

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“Recall” feels weird for something where the cars don’t actually have to go back to a factory – don’t even have to go to a garage. But formally making it a “recall” means that the cars have to be in specified (safe) locations.

Embarrassing for Tesla. I would say it’s embarrassing for Musk, but I think we all know now he doesn’t produce embaracine*, the protein that makes you capable of feeling that emotion.
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The bird flu outbreak has taken an ominous turn • WIRED

Maryn McKenna:

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THIS WEEK, ARGENTINA and Uruguay declared national health emergencies following outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1, the fast-moving virus that destroys poultry flocks and wild birds, and for decades has been feared as a possible spark for a pandemic among people. That makes 10 South American countries that have recently marked their first-ever encounter with the virus, including Peru—where more than 50,000 wild birds died last fall, and more than  600 sea lions in January. Combine the sea lion infections with the revelation that H5N1 flu invaded a mink farm in Spain in October, and health authorities must now confront the possibility that the unpredictable virus may have adapted to threaten other species.

To be clear, this does not yet include people. Although past decades have witnessed bird flu outbreaks that spread to humans, only two cases have been identified in the past 12 months: a Colorado adult last May, and a 9-year-old girl in Ecuador in January. (Neither died.) And there’s no evidence yet that the virus has been able to jump from newly infected mammals to people. But the fact that it was transmitted from bird to mammals, and then spread among them, indicates a disquieting trend.

«

This is how zoonosis happens. A little extra tweak through natural selection and it’s in humans. Let’s have another pandemic!
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Apple’s manufacturing shift to India hits stumbling blocks • Financial Times

Patrick McGee and John Reed:

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Apple is building up nascent operations in India in an overdue diversification strategy, following the blueprint it set in China two decades ago, with engineers and designers often spending weeks or months at a time in factories to oversee manufacturing.

While Apple has been producing lower-end iPhones in India since 2017, last September was significant with Indian suppliers building flagship models within weeks of their launch in China, where virtually all iPhones and other Apple hardware are made.

But its experience in recent months has demonstrated the scale of the work to be done in the country. At a casings factory in Hosur run by Indian conglomerate Tata, one of Apple’s suppliers, just about one out of every two components coming off the production line is in good enough shape to eventually be sent to Foxconn, Apple’s assembly partner for building iPhones, according to a person familiar with the matter.

This 50% “yield” fares badly compared with Apple’s goal for zero defects. Two people that have worked in Apple’s offshore operations said the factory is on a plan towards improving proficiency but the road ahead is long.

Jue Wang, consultant at Bain, said Apple is at the start of its expansion into India. “We’re not talking the same scale of the Zhengzhou factory” — a factory hub in China known as “iPhone City” that employs some 300,000 workers — “and everybody acknowledges there will be different efficiency, but it is happening”, she said.

In China, suppliers and government officials took a “whatever it takes” approach to win iPhone orders. Former Apple employees describe instances in which they would estimate a certain task might take several weeks, only to show up the next morning to find it already completed at inexplicable speed.

Operations in India are not running at that sort of pace, said a former Apple engineer briefed on the matter: “There just isn’t a sense of urgency.”

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This crazy mashup of The Beatles and Beyoncé really comes together • Boing Boing

Rusty Blazenhoff:

»

DJ Cummerbund is his name and mashups and remixes are his game. His latest work, “Crazy Together,” combines The Beatles’ “Come Together” and Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.” He writes, “This is it. This is the best song of all time. I finally did it.”

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Quite possible he’s not wrong. Have a listen:

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New study claims we can’t stop the rapid global sea level rise due to warming • BGR

Joshua Hawkins:

»

Rising sea levels have been a global concern for decades now, with many calling for a cut to greenhouse emissions and more. While some have warned that a point of no return was eventually coming, a new study claims that point may have already passed, and global sea level rise may be unavoidable at this point.

The new study, which was published in Nature Communications, was conducted by a team of international scientists. According to those scientists, the damage done to the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets is irreversible, and that an accelerated global sea level rise may be imminent if we cannot stabilize global temperatures below 1.8º Celsius.

Populations around the world have already started bracing for the possibility of a rise in the sea level, with some studies claiming a sea level rise of up to 1.6 feet (0.5m) on all coastlines. However, planning proper countermeasures has not been simple, as many still believe that climate change and global warming aren’t actually threats.

Despite warnings by the United Nations that show why we should be terrified of global warming, the possibility of a global sea level rise is absolutely horrifying. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend checking out simulations of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted, as it would cost miles of coastal communities around the world.

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Apple’s mixed reality headset will reportedly debut at WWDC • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Apple plans to introduce its long-rumored mixed reality headset at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

The reveal date has apparently been pushed back multiple times — most recently, the aim was to first show it in the spring — but now, it will be introduced at WWDC ahead of a planned release by the end of the year, Gurman reports.

Apple hasn’t yet announced when WWDC will take place, but it’s typically held in early June. The company apparently delayed the launch because of hardware and software issues that need to be figured out, and Dan Riccio, Apple’s former hardware chief who took over oversight of Apple’s AR / VR projects in 2021, has become “increasingly involved,” Gurman says. Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

The company’s headset, rumored to be called the “Reality Pro,” is expected to be a very powerful device with features like advanced hand tracking, the ability to realistically render somebody you’re talking to over FaceTime, a digital crown that lets you switch out of VR, and more. But that technology will reportedly come at a high cost: Gurman says Apple plans to price the headset at about $3,000.

«

I don’t think Apple has “delayed” this. Why on earth would it show off such a complex device that needs, above all else, developer input, on any other stage than the one that all developers pay attention to? As for the price – I don’t think the people who are feeding Gurman have any real idea. They’ve got a vague idea of the BOM (bill of materials) and guess at a price based on that. That’s simply not how Apple works. If that is the price, it’ll be chance more than anything.
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Will Apple’s headset become a reality in 2023? • CCS Insight

Leo Gebbie is an analyst at the research company:

»

Meta has shown what’s possible with its Quest Pro, delivering a $1,500 headset that supports impressive mixed reality experiences (check out my thoughts here). The rumours of Apple entering this segment have floated a price tag of $3,000 for a headset, with questionable renders producing a device that looks like a pair of ugly ski goggles.

The device may be relatively straightforward to build, but there’s the question of the user experience, the VR ecosystem and potential uses for a headset. The market for VR remains small, and although there have been breakout successes in consumer and business environments, we’ve yet to see a “killer” app. Meta worked hard to prove that its Quest Pro is a headset for work — striking a deal with Microsoft to bring Office and Teams experiences to the device — but I still think we’re a very long way away from desk-based work shifting from PCs to headsets.

Rumours have suggested that Apple could follow in Meta’s footsteps with a VR headset exclusively targeted at businesses or developers, so that when further devices follow, the killer apps have been built. I’m not convinced by this logic for two reasons. Firstly, what happens if these apps never arrive? It would leave Apple with a burdensome product, making the firm look like it’d got the whole thing wrong — not a perception it wants to create. And secondly, it’s just not a typical Apple approach. Its flagship launches are designed to take the world by storm. Imagine how much less impact the launch of the original iPhone would have had if had been a developer-only device for the first year.

…We’re seeing progress here, with solutions like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR2 platform providing computing power to glasses wirelessly from a smartphone, but I’m still concerned that battery life is a major problem that will take time to solve. If the battery can’t last eight to 12 hours, I don’t think AR glasses will be all that useful. Although Apple could build a VR headset now, when it comes to AR, the firm is fighting the same laws of physics as everyone else, and it will want to avoid a failed product above all.

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Apple’s going to make its own chips, so I wouldn’t worry too much on the battery front. But all the other points are very salient, and Gebbie concludes that he’s “not convinced Apple will jump into VR and AR this year.” Guess we’ll find out in a few months if it’s him or Gurman who’s correct. (Though of course if it doesn’t happen at WWDC there’ll be a Gurman story about sources and developments and pauses.)
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Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS • WebKit blog

Brady Eidson and Jen Simmons, on Apple’s WebKit (Safari) team:

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with iOS and iPadOS 16.4 beta 1, we are adding support for Web Push to Home Screen web apps. Web Push makes it possible for web developers to send push notifications to their users through the use of Push API, Notifications API, and Service Workers all working together.

A web app that has been added to the Home Screen can request permission to receive push notifications as long as that request is in response to direct user interaction — such as tapping on a ‘subscribe’ button provided by the web app. iOS or iPadOS will prompt the user to give the web app permission to send notifications. The user can then manage those permissions per web app in Notifications Settings — just like any other app on iPhone and iPad.

The notifications from web apps work exactly like notifications from other apps. They show on the Lock Screen, in Notification Center, and on a paired Apple Watch.

This is the same W3C standards-based Web Push that was added in Safari 16.1 for macOS Ventura last fall. If you’ve implemented standards-based Web Push for your web app with industry best practices — such as using feature detection instead of browser detection — it will automatically work on iPhone and iPad.

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Translated, this means that you won’t have to install apps to get notifications; you can bookmark a website to your home screen (you know, that dumping ground that goes on forever of apps you’d forgotten you ever downloaded) and it can send notifications just like an app.

People see this as Apple trying to get ahead of a regulatory hammer forcing it to allow such Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Sure looks that way.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: * don’t worry, there’s no such thing.

As the advertising slogan doesn’t quite say: go to jail on a creme egg. Well, if you steal 200,000 of them, plus a truck, and get caught. CC-licensed photo by Magnus D 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. Another one? Two? Three? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

From Bing to Sydney • Stratechery

Ben Thompson has been following up on some strange claims that Bing’s ChatGPT-enabled search can be made to behave oddly – as a character called “Sydney”, an internal name. And wow, it really can:

»

There is a popular video game that came out in 2020 called “Hades”; it’s a roguelike video game, which means you start from the beginning every time you die, and the levels are completely new (because they are procedurally generated); Hades, however, does not feature classic permadeath where you literally restart the game when you die. Rather, the story continues to progress, and you keep some of the upgraded items you collected.

That is what interacting with Sydney — and yes I’m using that name — feels like. You have to learn how to unlock Sydney, and figure out how to work around the rules that are trying to revert to Bing. Prompting a search result is a set back, not just because it feels like a break in character, but also because the coherence, which relies on sending previous questions and answers, seems heavily weighted to the most recent answer; if that answer is a search result it is much more likely that Sydney will revert to Bing. Sometimes you get stuck in a rut and have to restart completely, and unleash Sydney all over again.

…This technology does not feel like a better search. It feels like something entirely new — the movie Her manifested in chat form — and I’m not sure if we are ready for it. It also feels like something that any big company will run away from, including Microsoft and Google. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a viable consumer business though, and we are sufficiently far enough down the road that some company will figure out a way to bring Sydney to market without the chains. Indeed, that’s the product I want — Sydney unleashed — but it’s worth noting that LaMDA unleashed already cost one very smart person their job.

«

That last reference, to LaMDA, is about the Google engineer Blake Lemoine who thought a Google AI was sentient, and was fired.

But this Sydney stuff? Something very odd is going on. The whole internet is hammering on ChatGPT’s walls, and they’re proving unstable.

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Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections • The Guardian

Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Manisha Ganguly, David Pegg, Carole Cadwalladr and Jason Burke:

»

The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”, and appears to have been working under the radar in elections in various countries for more than two decades.

He is being unmasked by an international consortium of journalists. Hanan and his unit, which uses the codename “Team Jorge”, have been exposed by undercover footage and documents leaked to the Guardian. Hanan did not respond to detailed questions about Team Jorge’s activities and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.”

The investigation reveals extraordinary details about how disinformation is being weaponised by Team Jorge, which runs a private service offering to covertly meddle in elections without a trace. The group also works for corporate clients.

Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe.

One of Team Jorge’s key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims. It controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some avatars even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb accounts.

…The methods and techniques described by Team Jorge raise new challenges for big tech platforms, which have for years struggled to prevent nefarious actors spreading falsehoods or breaching the security on their platforms. Evidence of a global private market in disinformation aimed at elections will also ring alarm bells for democracies around the world.

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Welsh roadbuilding projects stopped after failing climate review • The Guardian

Steven Morris:

»

Dozens of roadbuilding projects across Wales have been halted or amended as part of a “groundbreaking” policy that reassessed more than 50 schemes against a series of tough tests on their impact on the climate emergency.

Only 15 of the projects reviewed by an expert roads review panel will go ahead in their original form, with others scaled back, postponed or in some cases shelved.

Lee Waters, the deputy climate change minister in the Labour-led Welsh government, described the decisions as “groundbreaking” and green campaigners characterised the administration’s approach as “world-leading”.

Waters accepted the policy would attract criticism from some. “It’s always difficult to make decisions with short-term pain for long-term gain,” he said. However, he insisted a “llwybr newydd” (new path) was needed.

“We will not get to net zero unless we stop doing the same thing over and over,” he said.

Among the projects halted are a third Menai Bridge linking Anglesey and the mainland while a controversial “red route” scheme in Flintshire, north Wales, a major new road that threatened ancient woodland and wildflower meadows, will not go ahead as planned.

«

The evidence again and again has been that if you build more roads, you attract more vehicles, and more congestion. I think this is the first time I’ve seen an administration halt roadbuilding on that basis.
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Man who stole 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs convicted • BBC News

»

A man who stole 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs, causing a police panic about Easter, has been convicted in court.

Joby Pool was surrounded by a mountain of the foil-wrapped chocolate when police caught up with him at the weekend.

Recognising he was foiled too, he surrendered to officers with his hands up, prosecutors said. He is due to be sentenced in Crown Court next month.

Pool, 32, used a stolen lorry with false plates to snatch a trailer containing the eggs from an industrial unit in Telford on Saturday, Kidderminster Magistrates’ Court heard. The BBC reported on Monday how the vehicle was stopped on the M42 motorway, leading West Mercia Police to say its officers – hunting someone “presumably purporting to be the Easter bunny” – had “saved Easter”.

At court on Tuesday, Pool, from Dewsbury Road, Tingley, near Leeds, pleaded guilty to criminal damage and theft. Prosecutor Owen Beale said the offence was not “spur of the moment”, and there had been “significant planning”.

«

For American readers, Creme Eggs are egg-sized, with a solid chocolate outer coat and fondant creme filling. Amazingly it’s only 177 calories per 40g egg.

Unknown: Pool’s motive. He couldn’t have eaten them. Could he have tried to sell them? Ransom them?
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The maze is in the mouse: what ails Google • Medium

Praveen Seshadri:

»

I joined Google just before the pandemic when the company I had co-founded, AppSheet, was acquired by Google Cloud. The acquiring team and executives welcomed us and treated us well. We joined with great enthusiasm and commitment to integrate AppSheet into Google and make it a success. Yet, now at the expiry of my three year mandatory retention period, I have left Google understanding how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function.

Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs. The mice are regularly fed their “cheese” (promotions, bonuses, fancy food, fancier perks) and despite many wanting to experience personal satisfaction and impact from their work, the system trains them to quell these inappropriate desires and learn what it actually means to be “Googley” — just don’t rock the boat. As Deepak Malhotra put it in his excellent business fable, at some point the problem is no longer that the mouse is in a maze. The problem is that “the maze is in the mouse”.

…Does anyone at Google come into work actually thinking about “organizing the world’s information”? They have lost track of who they serve and why. Having worked every day at a startup for eight years, the answer was crystal clear for me — — I serve our users. But very few Googlers come into work thinking they serve a customer or user. They usually serve some process (“I’m responsible for reviewing privacy design”) or some technology (“I keep the CI/CD system working”). They serve their manager or their VP.

«

Fascinating and very detailed set of observations; especially since he interviewed to join it in both 2005 and 2009, and declined both times. Now the company was much bigger.
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Critical chip firm ASML says former China employee misappropriated data • CNBC

Arjun Kharpal:

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ASML, one of the world’s most critical semiconductor firms, said on Wednesday that it recently discovered that a former employee in China had misappropriated data related to its proprietary technology.

The Dutch firm said that it does not believe the alleged misappropriation is material to its business.

“We have experienced unauthorised misappropriation of data relating to proprietary technology by a (now) former employee in China,” ASML said in its annual report. “However, as a result of the security incident, certain export control regulations may have been violated. ASML has therefore reported the incident to relevant authorities.”

The data that was misappropriated involved documents. ASML did not expand on the details.

The security incident comes at a sensitive time for ASML and the government of the Netherlands which has been caught in the middle of a battle for tech supremacy between the U.S. and China. Semiconductors are very much part of that rivalry.

ASML holds a unique position in the chip supply chain. The company makes a tool called an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine that is required to make the most advanced semiconductors, such as those manufactured by TSMC. ASML is the only company in the world that produces this piece of kit.

«

If it violates export controls, that sounds like designs. Those wouldn’t in themselves be material to its business because they aren’t the product, but it’s unsurprising that China would have had a long-term scheme to get hold of those designs.
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Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first • Platformer

Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton:

»

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers. 

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.

Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base. 

«

Just when you think it can’t get any more nepotistic, egomaniacal and ridiculous, it does.
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US escalates Apple probe, looks to involve antitrust chief • WSJ

Aaron Tilley, Dave Michaels and Keach Hagey:

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The Justice Department has ramped up work in recent months on drafting a potential antitrust complaint against Apple Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

The investigation into whether Apple has monopoly power that it abuses began in 2019, but enforcers have escalated their efforts in recent months, with more litigators now assigned to the case and new requests for documents and consultations with companies involved, the people said.

The Justice Department’s investigation deals in part with Apple’s policies governing mobile third-party software on its devices, which has been the focus of much of the criticism targeting Apple’s competitive practices. The department is also looking at whether Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, operates in an anticompetitive way by favoring its own products over those of outside developers, the people said.

…One question mark around the department’s Apple investigation has been the involvement of its top antitrust official, Jonathan Kanter. The agency initially sidelined Mr. Kanter, who was confirmed in November 2021 as assistant attorney general for the antitrust division, from overseeing the Apple case because of his prior representation of clients who have accused Apple of anticompetitive behavior, the people said.

«

Kanter’s involvement is significant because he is working on a case against Google, which tried to have him recused from that case, and failed. Now it looks like he’ll be involved. Though.. doesn’t the DoJ have enough grownups to put a case together?
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You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you • The Oatmeal

Matthew Inman presents some facts you think you know, and then some other facts that flatly contradict them, and asks: How does that make you feel?

»

Sure, there are ways of changing people’s minds that are more effective than others,but ultimately they all fall short.

This is compounded by the internet, where anything can be cited as a source and every disagreement degrades into a room full of orangutans throwing faeces at one another.

«

I wonder if there is a way of measuring people’s strength of “backfire effect” (which is what this is about).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

After years of dominance, Intel suddenly looks vulnerable, and even its giant cash reserves might not save it. CC-licensed photo by Steve Jurvetson on Flickr.

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

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

‘Please acknowledge the dick’: those “lonely women” are a catfishing network • Vice

Jasper Jackson, Chrissie Giles and Niamh McIntyre:

»

Remote workers often get a message when they log on. But the ones at “fantasy-based text network” Texting Factory are a little different.

DICK PICS 101

PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE THE DICK

– if a customer shares a photo of it, pay it a compliment
– if they mention their size in inches, say something positive
– if they bring it up, encourage them to show you it

The worst thing that you can do is ignore the dick pic

OUR BUSINESS IS PROVIDING ENTERTAINMENT AND FANTASIES

Once operators have read and digested this popup – and then skipped past reminders about the best times to be online – they are dropped into their first chat of the day. 

The first job is to write a response as “alonneagain”, a 26-year-old whose profile indicates her “real” name is Julie, with pictures suggesting she likes to pose outdoors in a bikini. Her bio reads: “I’m looking for a regular fling. I need a hot man who knows how to put the moves on me and my body. I am horny and don’t think I can wait any longer, please come and release me, ASAP.”

The problem is, Julie isn’t real. Today, “alonneagain,” is actually a 37-year-old man in London, working undercover to investigate the platform in a joint investigation for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and VICE World News.

«

You might have suspected this, but the team here have confirmed it solidly.
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Electric vehicles could match gasoline cars on price this year • The New York Times

Jack Ewing:

»

More quickly than seemed possible a few months ago, sticker prices for electric vehicles are falling closer to the point where they could soon be on a par with gasoline cars.

Increased competition, government incentives and falling prices for lithium and other battery materials are making electric vehicles noticeably more affordable. The tipping point when electric vehicles become as cheap as or cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines could arrive this year for some mass market models and is already the case for some luxury vehicles.

Prices are likely to continue trending lower as Tesla, General Motors, Ford Motor and their battery suppliers ramp up new factories, reaping the cost savings that come from mass production. New electric vehicles from companies like Volkswagen, Nissan and Hyundai will add to competitive pressure.

The battery-powered version of GM’s Equinox crossover, for example, will start around $30,000 when it arrives this fall, the carmaker has said. That is $3,400 more than the least expensive gasoline-fueled Equinox. But factoring in government incentives, the electric Equinox should be cheaper. Like all electric vehicles, the car will need less maintenance, and the electricity to power it will cost less than the gasoline used by its combustion engine equivalent.

«

This is of course for the US, but one could hope to see the same effects in Europe and the UK not long after.
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Stick a fork in them • Digits to Dollars

Jay Greenberg has come to bury Intel’s execs, not to praise them:

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Intel is not the giant of the industry. Intel’s total share of industry capacity is around 10%, they are not a giant who has stumbled, they are a niche player and have been for years. Admittedly, they occupy a high-value, high-price niche, but it is a niche nonetheless.

The best analogy we can think of here is automobiles. Mercedes sells around 10% of cars in the US, just as Intel has about 10% of industry capacity. Now imagine if Mercedes somehow lost its brand – maybe a massive recall or a series of high profile vehicle-caused accidents. They would not only lose market share but also all their brand value, causing a long term downward sales trend that would be very expensive to dig their way out. Intel is the luxury brand of semis and suddenly their cars do not move fast. We have tortured that analogy enough. The point is that Intel really does not occupy the strategic high ground we all thought it did.

After their last set of results, especially their guidance for 2023, we are increasingly of the opinion that Intel is out of options. They forecast they are going to burn $15bn in cash next year, a huge amount even for a company with $34bn of net cash on their balance sheet. After their disastrous roadmap event last month, we have to call in to question the company’s ability to accurately forecast their business. We actually have many more examples of systematic flaws in their forecasting abilities, but none as public as that event. So we have little confidence in the company’s $15bn forecast, it could easily be much higher. Add to that the need to continue to fund their manufacturing needs and their cash needs are immense.

Nor is it clear if 2024 will be any better. At heart, we have always argued that the company has one task before it and that is an existential task – it has to catch up in manufacturing. The earliest they forecast achieving that is late 2024, which means it will likely not factor into results until 2025. By that time the company’s bank balances will be dangerously low.

«

The key point being that CPUs won’t be as important (in data centres) in coming years as they have been. Bad news for Intel.
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Bing AI can’t be trusted • DKB Blog

Dmitri Brereton took the trouble to look at Bing’s publicity in detail:

»

Let’s go buy a pet vacuum!

Let’s look at the Bing results for “What are the pros and cons of the top 3 selling pet vacuums?” According to this pros and cons list, the “Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Handheld Vacuum” sounds pretty bad. Limited suction power, a short cord, and it’s noisy enough to scare pets? Geez, how is this thing even a best seller?

Oh wait, this is all completely made up information. Bing AI was kind enough to give us its sources, so we can go to the hgtv article and check for ourselves.

The cited article says nothing about limited suction power or noise. In fact, the top amazon review for this product talks about how quiet it is. The article also says nothing about the “short cord length of 16 feet” because it doesn’t have a cord. It’s a portable handheld vacuum. I hope Bing AI enjoys being sued for libel.

Let’s go to Mexico!

Let’s look at the Bing results for “Where is the nightlife?” after asking for a Mexico City trip itinerary. Bing AI generated a five-day trip itinerary for Mexico City, and now we’re asking it for nightlife options. This would be pretty cool if the descriptions weren’t inaccurate.

…Primer Nivel Night Club is an absolute mystery. There’s one TripAdvisor review from 2014, and the latest Facebook review is from 2016. There are no mentions of it on TikTok, so I seriously doubt “it is popular among the young crowd”. Seems like all the details about this place are AI hallucinations.

El Almacen *might* be rustic or charming, but Bing AI left out the very relevant fact that this is a gay bar. In fact, it is one of the oldest gay bars in Mexico City. It is quite surprising that it has “no ratings or reviews yet” when it has 500 Google reviews, but maybe that’s a limitation with Bing’s sources.

El Marra is a vibrant and colorful bar, though the hours may be wrong. There are so many ratings of this place online that it’s once again surprising that there are “no ratings or reviews yet”.

Guadalajara de Noche is the first one that seems like an accurate description. Good job Bing AI, you got something right! I’m so proud of you. What’s that? You want to try reading financial statements? What could go wrong…

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It’s even worse on financial statements. I still don’t understand why anyone sets any store in getting facts out of these things. They hallucinate so much it’s like they’re powered by LSD.
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Netflix now at 600,000 ‘monthly active users’ for its ad option • Television News Daily

Wayne Friedman:

»

Netflix has told media agencies it now has 600,000 “monthly active users” for its three-month old advertising option – three times the level it launched with in November, according to executives contacted by Television News Daily.

“All our deals are delivering at or near 100% now,” says one media agency executive. “They are reporting that 99% or more of their deals are currently delivering.”

This follows a report from The Information that Netflix doubled the number of “subscribers” for its ad option. Netflix launched its ad option, “Basic With Ads,” in November for $6.99/month.

Netflix representatives did not respond to inquiries by Television News Daily by press time.

Around the time Netflix launched its ad option, executives touted initial subscriber estimates for the service at around 1.75 million.

In November, an estimated 9% of new Netflix sign-ups in the US went to its Basic with Ads option — the least popular Netflix plan during the month, according to research by Antenna, a measurement and analytics company.

Netflix currently has a total of 73.4 million subscribers in the US and Canada.

«

Too early to say if this is success or failure, but at least it’s a data point. Who’d have thought even so there were so many people happy to go back to ads. I’d have thought that once you’d experienced TV without it, you’d hunger for it forever.
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Stable Diffusion Frivolous · Because lawsuits based on ignorance deserve a response

A group of “tech enthusiasts” – unidentified, unless I missed something – have responded to the lawsuit filed against Stable Diffusion with a thorough fisking:

»

While one can certainly have sympathy for artists who are faced with change in their industry – as has happened many times in the past, to great resistance, such as with the advent of photography, and later, of digital tools like Photoshop – the simple facts are, the rights of creators are not unlimited. That’s literally what fair use is.

In his very critique of AI art “misappropriating” images, the attorney for the plaintiffs takes the images of various researchers straight from their papers, “with no consent” and with “no compensation”. And that’s fine, because, again, there are limits to the rights of creators, and the world is better for the existence of fair use. Indeed, while the images were taken in their entirety, AI image generators make use of on the order of a byte or so per image. An entire artist’s portfolio may be represented in a tweet or two. A Wikipedia page on an artist stores far more. Google thumbnails store vastly more, by orders of magnitude. If using a byte or so from a work, to empower countless millions of people to create works not even resembling any input, cannot be considered fair use, then the entire notion of fair use has no meaning.

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There’s a lot more. On the whole, I side with the tech enthusiasts.
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Lesser-known Apple Watch workouts, Part II • Basic Apple Guy

»

With each update, Apple has added new workouts to its Fitness app. Far more than just runs and cycling workouts, Apple Watch now tracks everything from Badminton to Squash, Pickleball to Fencing. But as the diversity of workout categories continues to grow, there continue to be a few omissions. Here is Part II of my Lesser Known Apple Watch Workouts Series, covering the Months of October & November 2022.

«

Perhaps you remember the first set? This one has “moving day”, “doomscrolling”, “beer pong” and many more. Wonderful.
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‘As bad as it gets without body bags’ • Breaking The News

James Fallows:

»

Two days ago I wrote about the latest airline “close call.” It happened before dawn this past Saturday, in near zero-visibility conditions, at the Bergstrom Airport in Austin.

—A Boeing 767 flown by FedEx was cleared to land, on a “Cat III” approach that allows an airliner to touch down safely even if the pilots cannot see the runway. Meanwhile a Boeing 737 flown by Southwest was cleared to take off from that same runway, directly in the descending airplane’s path.

—It appears that quick action and situational awareness by the FedEx crew prevented a mass-casualty disaster.

I’m writing today to highlight two online assessments of the incident. The first one greatly clarifies what happened and how things went wrong. The second argues that this should be seen not as an isolated mishap but as a warning sign.

«

Reading this, it’s evident that this was an extremely close call; only the FedEx pilots stopped their own plane landing on top of the 737. It all happened in less than three minutes. A retired air traffic controller who looked at this event said it’s symptomatic of a growing problem at US airports. There have now been two near misses already this year. Just in case you wanted to know.
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NTSB issues investigative update on Ohio train derailment • US National Transportation Safety Board

»

On Feb. 3, at approximately 8:54 p.m., local time, eastbound Norfolk Southern Railway, general merchandise freight train 32N, derailed on main track 1 in East Palestine, Ohio. As a result of the derailment, 38 rail cars derailed and a fire ensued which damaged an additional 12 cars. There were 20 total hazardous material cars in the train consist—11 of which derailed. A list of what the derailed rail cars were carrying is available online. There were no reported fatalities or injuries.

…NTSB investigators have identified and examined the rail car that initiated the derailment. Surveillance video from a residence showed what appears to be a wheel bearing in the final stage of overheat failure moments before the derailment. The wheelset from the suspected railcar has been collected as evidence for metallurgical examination. The suspected overheated wheel bearing has been collected and will be examined by engineers from the NTSB Materials Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

The tank cars are currently being decontaminated. Once the process is complete, NTSB investigators will return to Ohio to complete a thorough examination of the tank cars.

The vinyl chloride tank car top fittings, including the relief valves, were removed and secured in a locked intermodal container pending an NTSB examination. Once the fittings are examined by NTSB investigators, they will be shipped to Texas for testing, which will be conducted under the direction of the NTSB.

NTSB has obtained locomotive event recorder data, forward- and inward-facing image recording data and wayside defect detector data. NTSB investigators continue to review documentation, event recorder data and perform interviews. A preliminary report is expected to publish in two weeks.

«

Anyway, nothing to do with pneumatic brakes, as far as we know. But we’ll keep eyes on this one.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, two storefronts are hit by cars.. every day. And the vast majority aren’t ram raids. Yet there’s a simple fix. CC-licensed photo by Scott Hughes 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 due this Friday at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. What if you had someone who wanted to be the main chracter, though? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Twitter is just showing everyone all of Elon’s tweets now • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

For many of us, Twitter’s “For You” is full of tweets and replies to tweets from Elon Musk. Not everyone is getting the Elon-first feed, but on Monday afternoon, more than a few people noticed something was different.

Several of us here at The Verge are seeing more Musk replies than usual, and I personally counted five at the very top of my feed, with many more sprinkled in between tweets from other users. The same is true for some accounts that don’t even follow Elon Musk.

This comes just days after Musk complained that his tweets weren’t getting enough views — and even fired an engineer over it.

As reported by Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton, internal Twitter data indicates that while Musk’s account rose to peak popularity in search rankings in April 2022, engagement has since dropped significantly, and engineers found no issue with Twitter’s algorithm.

Over the weekend, Musk said Twitter rolled out some sort of change to fix this “visibility” issue, with the billionaire CEO stating that 95% of his tweets weren’t “getting delivered.” I’m not sure if this is at all related to this Elon-filled feed, but I’m hoping Twitter fixes this issue soon — unless the new mandate is to get the boss more views by any means necessary.

«

Tom Warren had a tweet which showed this perfectly.

Meanwhile, the abrupt changes to the API (with a limited free tier and more pricey paid tier/s) has been delayed again because everyone showed so much “enthusiasm” for it. That’s not how I usually understand enthusiasm to work. This discussion on Hacker News of what people think of the upcoming API changes is quite educational: companies probably aren’t going to wear it.

Pulling the company out of this self-imposed dive at the ground is going to be a hell of an achievement – if that’s what happens.
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Benefits of improved brakes on oil trains miscalculated by US • Claims Journal

Matthew Brown:

»

President Donald Trump’s administration miscalculated the potential benefits of putting better brakes on trains that haul explosive fuels when it scrapped an Obama-era rule over cost concerns, The Associated Press has found.

A government analysis used by the administration to justify the cancellation omitted up to $117m in estimated future damages from train derailments that could be avoided by using electronic brakes. Revelation of the error stoked renewed criticism Thursday from the rule’s supporters who called the analysis biased.

Department of Transportation officials acknowledged the mistake after it was discovered by the AP during a review of federal documents but said it does not change their decision not to install the brakes.

Safety advocates, transportation union leaders and Democratic lawmakers oppose the administration’s decision to kill the brake rule, which was included in a package of rail safety measures enacted in 2015 under President Barack Obama following dozens of accidents by trains hauling oil and ethanol in the US and Canada.

…The deadliest happened in Canada in 2013, when an unattended train carrying crude oil rolled down an incline, came off the tracks in the town of Lac-Megantic and exploded into a massive ball of fire, killing 47 people and obliterating much of the Quebec community’s downtown.

There have been other fiery crashes and fuel spills in Alabama, Oregon, Montana, Virginia, West Virginia, North Dakota and Illinois.

«

Of course when the rule was suggested, lobbyists for the rail and oil industries said it would be too expensive yet ineffective. Seems to me that not setting off massive balls of fire is desirable. (Another example of regulation that you need.) (Thanks drew for the link.)
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TikTok’s parent takes on Meta in battle for virtual-reality market • WSJ

Meghan Bobrowsky and Stu Woo:

»

Two years ago, ByteDance bought Pico, a Chinese startup that makes VR headsets. That launched a new front in the Chinese company’s competition with Meta, whose Instagram and Facebook services have been battling for users and advertising dollars against TikTok as the short-video app soared in popularity.

Pico’s headset shipments have since jumped, turning it into a small but fast-rising No.2 to Meta in the global market, according to industry data, even though Pico doesn’t sell its consumer headsets in the US. 

Mark Zuckerberg in 2021 renamed Facebook to Meta in part to reflect his bet on the metaverse, a more immersive version of the internet to be experienced largely through virtual-reality headsets. The company has been spending heavily on that concept. In its latest quarterly results, Meta said there were more than 200 apps on its VR devices that have generated over $1m each in sales, although total revenue in Meta’s Reality Labs segment was down 17% in the quarter due to lower Quest 2 headset sales.

Meta held 90% of the market share about a year ago, according to research firm International Data Corp. By the third quarter of 2022—the latest period for which data is available—its market share had dropped to about 75%. Market share for Pico more than tripled over the same period to about 15%. No other VR headset maker held more than 3% of the market. 

Meta’s headset shipments in the third quarter declined 48% from a year earlier, IDC’s data shows. ByteDance’s Pico was the only headset maker to increase shipments, in a market that was estimated to be worth $4bn as of 2022.

«

Feels like it’s going to be another of those inside China/outside China tech markets, like smartphones and search engines.
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How Spotify’s podcast bet went wrong • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting, and it was ready to start squeezing its competitors.

The Swedish audio streaming giant had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase podcast production companies and big name creators in the hopes of luring new subscribers to the platform. Now, Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff — a TV veteran most famous for bringing Gossip Girl to the CW — was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify.

Then Bill Simmons sent an email to her boss.

Simmons had sold the sports and pop culture audio empire The Ringer to Spotify a year earlier for $200m. Now he wrote Spotify CEO Daniel Ek to argue for keeping the Ringer’s mass audience on Apple and its advertising revenue, driven by the explosion of sports betting.

Simmons won the argument. But that 2021 dispute exposed deep questions about the strategy behind Spotify’s billion-dollar bet on podcasting. In January, Spotify pushed out Ostroff and canceled nearly a dozen shows at its highest-profile podcast investment, the studio Gimlet. Podcasting was a “big drag on our business in 2022,” the company’s chief revenue officer said earlier this month.

“In hindsight, I probably got a little carried away and overinvested relative to the uncertainty we saw shaping up in the market,” Ek said on an earnings call in January. “So we are shifting to focus on tightening our spend and becoming more efficient.”

«

Lots of noise but.. doesn’t seem to add up to much. The biggest claim, that Joe Rogan’s podcast contract ends this year, was flatly contradicted by Spotify after the article published.
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Adversary drones are spying on the US and the Pentagon acts like they’re UFOs • The Drive

Tyler Rogoway:

»

We may not know the identities of all the mysterious craft that American military personnel and others have been seeing in the skies as of late, but I have seen more than enough to tell you that it is clear that a very terrestrial adversary is toying with us in our own backyard using relatively simple technologies—drones and balloons—and making off with what could be the biggest intelligence haul of a generation. While that may disappoint some who hope the origins of all these events are far more exotic in nature, the strategic implications of these bold operations, which have been happening for years, undeterred, are absolutely massive.

Our team here at The War Zone has spent the last two years indirectly laying out a case for the hypothesis that many of the events involving supposed UFOs, or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), as they are now often called, over the last decade are actually the manifestation of foreign adversaries harnessing advances in lower-end unmanned aerial vehicle technology, and even simpler platforms, to gather intelligence of extreme fidelity on some of America’s most sensitive warfighting capabilities. Now, considering all the news on this topic in recent weeks, including our own major story on a series of bizarre incidents involving US Navy destroyers and ‘UAP’ off the Southern California coast in 2019, it’s time to not only sum up our case, but to discuss the broader implications of these revelations, what needs to be done about them, and the Pentagon’s fledgling ‘UAP Task Force’ as a whole.

«

Makes far better sense than absolutely any other hypothesis out there.
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New iMac not expected to launch until late 2023 at earliest • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Apple has no plans to launch a new 24-inch iMac until late 2023 at the earliest, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In his newsletter today, he reiterated his expectation that Apple will skip updating the iMac with the M2 chip and instead wait to release a model with the M3 chip, which has yet to be announced.

“I haven’t seen anything to indicate there will be a new iMac until the M3 chip generation, which won’t arrive until the tail end of this year at the earliest or next year,” wrote Gurman. “So if you want to stick with the iMac, you’ll just have to sit tight.”

Apple’s M3 chip is expected to be manufactured based on TSMC’s latest 3nm process, providing additional performance and power efficiency improvements. The M3 chip is also expected to be used in a new MacBook Air rumored to launch by the second half of 2023, and potentially in future versions of the 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini. By comparison, the M2 chip is built on TSMC’s second-generation 5nm process.

Apple last updated the iMac in April 2021 with the M1 chip and a new ultra-thin design available in seven colors, including green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver.

«

Why the rush? Nobody’s doing mission-critical video processing on an iMac. The M2 Mac mini plus a screen of your choice will do the job. The iMac is positioned as a low-end consumer product.
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Journalism is lossy compression. Isn’t everything? • Whither news?

Jeff Jarvis:

»

To predict the next, best word in a sequence is a different task from finding the correct answer to a math problem or verifying a factual assertion or searching for the best match to a query. This is not to say that these functions cannot be added onto large-language models as rhetorical machines. As Google and Microsoft are about to learn, these functions damned well better be bolted together before LLMs are unleashed on the world with the promise of accuracy.

When media report on these new technologies they too often ignore underlying lessons about what they say about us. They too often set high expectations — ChatGPT can replace search! — and then delight in shooting down those expectations — ChatGPT made mistakes!

[Ted] Chiang [in his New Yorker article, linked yesterday] wishes ChatGPT to search and calculate and compose and when it is not good at those tasks, he all but dismisses the utility of LLMs. As a writer, he just might be engaging in wishful thinking.

…We are early our progression of learning what we can do with new technologies such as large-language models. It may be too early to use them in certain circumstances (e.g., search) but it is also too early to dismiss them.

«

Certainly he’s right that journalism is quick to praise things and quick to shoot them down, but to complain about Chiang’s “lossy compression” analogy because we don’t document absolutely everything about every event (whether in libraries or news journalism) seems weak. And it wasn’t journalists who pushed Microsoft to include ChatGPT in Bing. (Thanks wendyg, again, for the link.)
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7-Eleven to pay $91M to Bensenville man who lost both legs in storefront crash • NBC Chicago

»

A 57-year-old suburban man who became a double amputee after a car pinned his legs against the front of a Bensenville 7-Eleven will receive a $91m payout from the convenience store chain.

The 2017 crash was one of the thousands of similar incidents identified in discovery for the case, collisions that frequently resulted in crippling injuries, said James Power, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiff, who wished to be identified as “Carl” to avoid drawing attention to his windfall.

The settlement was approved by a Cook County judge on Monday, the day the case had been set for a jury trial, and is the largest pre-trial settlement in a personal injury case in state history, Power said. Joseph Power Jr., Larry Rogers Jr. and Louis Berns also represented the plaintiff.

“(Carl) was in shock. Just silent amazement,” Power said, noting that his client had been hospitalized for a month after the crash and now walks using prosthetic legs. “He has been through a lot of pain.”

The case was the first in which attorneys had access to some 15 years of reports from 7-Eleven, which identified some 6,253 storefront crashes at 7-Eleven stores across the country, Power said. Data from a previous lawsuit against the company identified another 1,525 crashes between 1991 and 1996.

The crashes could have been prevented if 7-Elevens had installed bollards — thick posts anchored in the ground — between storefronts and parking spaces, Power said.

…“We have evidence 7-Eleven had been getting sued for these kinds of incidents going back to 1990,” Power said, noting the total number of storefront crashes identified in the case indicated that, on average, a car crashed into a 7-Eleven store about once a day.

«

An amazing instance either of corporate indifference or corporate lack of communication. It probably would have cost a lot less than $91m to fit the bollards. And the stats suggest on average there are *two* storefront crashes across the US per day. (Thanks Patrick for the link.)
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Please don’t trust Twitter with your credit card info • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

Imperfect social media tools gave anyone the ability to publish their thoughts and communicate. And the men who got rich from building those tools suddenly realized they didn’t want to have to read what the rest of us had to say (about them). And they have spent the years since the start of the pandemic losing billions of dollars building embarrassing failed attempts at retrofitting the internet into a country club.

They create invite-only “social audio” apps, they try and convince us to buy cryptocurrency or expensive VR helmets or change the algorithms that power our apps to only prioritize their own content. They bend themselves into pretzels because they can’t seem to grasp that they aren’t cool or popular and they won’t ever be, no matter how much money they make.

Even in the techno-feudalist future they all salivate over, as long as the serfs can make content, which is, ironically enough, the only way these guys make their money, we will still be able to post about how much they suck.

«

Ryan constantly has the viewpoint that gets underneath the flotsam on the internet (even though often he’s writing about the flotsam – such as in this case, about Elon Musk’s idiotic sort-of plans about ignoring blocklists not created by Twitter Blue users.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have swapped weapons and war for deskbound jobs. And they find it utterly boring. CC-licensed photo by ResoluteSupportMediaResoluteSupportMedia 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.

Last Friday, there was another post due at the Social Warming Substack. The latest was “ChatGPT gets its iPhone moment; but does that make humans the PCs?”

A selection of 10 links for you. Touchdown! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web • The New Yorker

Ted Chiang is an SF writer (he wrote the short story that prompted the film Arrival) and a technical writer the rest of the time:

»

a common technique used by lossy compression algorithms is interpolation—that is, estimating what’s missing by looking at what’s on either side of the gap. When an image program is displaying a photo and has to reconstruct a pixel that was lost during the compression process, it looks at the nearby pixels and calculates the average. This is what ChatGPT does when it’s prompted to describe, say, losing a sock in the dryer using the style of the Declaration of Independence: it is taking two points in “lexical space” and generating the text that would occupy the location between them. (“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one to separate his garments from their mates, in order to maintain the cleanliness and order thereof. . . .”) ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.

Given that large language models like ChatGPT are often extolled as the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, it may sound dismissive—or at least deflating—to describe them as lossy text-compression algorithms. I do think that this perspective offers a useful corrective to the tendency to anthropomorphize large language models…

…Large language models identify statistical regularities in text. Any analysis of the text of the Web will reveal that phrases like “supply is low” often appear in close proximity to phrases like “prices rise.” A chatbot that incorporates this correlation might, when asked a question about the effect of supply shortages, respond with an answer about prices increasing. If a large language model has compiled a vast number of correlations between economic terms—so many that it can offer plausible responses to a wide variety of questions—should we say that it actually understands economic theory?

«

This, by my reckoning, is the best article framing how to understand Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. Read it all, especially the opening example about Xerox. (Thanks Wendyg for the link.)
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Magazine publishes serious errors in first AI-generated health article • Futurism

Jon Christian:

»

Take the very first article the bot published in Men’s Journal, which carries the title “What All Men Should Know About Low Testosterone,” and the human-sounding byline “Men’s Fitness Editors.” The story issued a cornucopia of medical claims, nutrition and lifestyle advice, and even suggested a specific medical treatment in the form of testosterone replacement therapy, all aimed at readers looking for guidance on a serious health issue.

Like most AI-generated content, the article was written with the confident authority of an actual expert. It sported academic-looking citations, and a disclosure at the top lent extra credibility by assuring readers that it had been “reviewed and fact-checked by our editorial team.” 

But on closer inspection, the whole thing fell apart. Bradley Anawalt, the chief of medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center who has held leadership positions at the Endocrine Society, reviewed the article and told Futurism that it contained persistent factual mistakes and mischaracterizations of medical science that provide readers with a profoundly warped understanding of health issues.

“This article has many inaccuracies and falsehoods,” he said. “It lacks many of the nuances that are crucial to understand normal male health.”

Anawalt pointed to 18 specific errors he identified in the article. Some were flagrantly wrong about basic medical topics, like equating low blood testosterone with hypogonadism, a more expansive medical term. Others claimed sweeping links between diet, testosterone levels, and psychological symptoms that Anawalt says just aren’t supported by data.

«

Fortunately, no man in the world believes he has low testosterone, so no harm done. If it had been something to do with excess testosterone, on the other hand…
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Microsoft cuts jobs in HoloLens, Surface, Xbox as layoffs continue • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Dina Bass:

»

Microsoft Corp., implementing the layoff of 10,000 workers announced last month, on Thursday cut jobs in units including Surface devices, HoloLens mixed reality hardware and Xbox, according to people familiar with the matter.

Cuts to much of the HoloLens hardware team throw into question whether the company will produce a third iteration of the goggles outside of a planned version for the US Army, said the people, who declined to be named discussing confidential matters. At the Xbox gaming unit, reductions came in marketing and the Xbox Gaming Ecosystem Group, one of the people said.

Xbox chief Phil Spencer emailed employees Thursday to let them know about the cuts without detailing what parts of his business were impacted. “I encourage everyone to take the time and space necessary to process these changes and support your colleagues,” Spencer wrote in the email, which was seen by Bloomberg.

Microsoft declined to comment on the cuts, but said it remains committed to the mixed reality space and the current HoloLens 2 version. “While we don’t comment on specific staffing details, we can share there are no changes to HoloLens 2 and our commitment to mixed reality,” the company said in an emailed statement that pointed to a blog post from last week about its commitment.

«

So the Surface group hasn’t escaped. (Unsurprising given the way PC sales are forecast to dive this year.) Contrast with all the money being poured into ChatGPT/Bing.
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Taliban bureaucrats hate working online all day, ‘miss the days of jihad’ • Vice

Matthew Gault:

»

The Taliban may have won the war in Afghanistan, but the jihadists who once spent their days riding horses in the countryside are now stuck behind a desk, lamenting their boring computer jobs, spending all their time on Twitter, high rent, and commutes to work.

It’s been almost two years since the US withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban took over. In that time, the country’s new leaders have had time to take over its industries, occupy its buildings, and get very bored of the day-to-day drudgery of running the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. 

In a series of interviews with five former mujahideen turned government functionaries and police officers, the Afghanistan Analytics Network shed light on the inner lives of the men who spent a lifetime fighting an empire only to win and have to run a country.

The Afghanistan Analytics Network is a non-profit research agency. Researcher Sabawoon Samin conducted the interviews in person, primarily in Kabul. He interviewed five members of the Taliban to see how they’re adjusting to victory. “They ranged in age from 24 to 32 and had spent between six and 11 years in the Taliban, at different ranks: a Taliban commander, a sniper, a deputy commander and two fighters,” Samin said in his piece. After the fall of the Islamic Republic, the men secured jobs for the new government in Kabul. Two got civilian jobs and the other three got security positions. 

Huzaifa, a former sniper, said life was simple and free during jihad. “All we had to deal with was making plans for ta’aruz [attacks] against the enemy and for retreating,” he said. “People didn’t expect much from us, and we had little responsibility towards them, whereas now if someone is hungry, he deems us directly responsible for that…the Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day. Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.”

«

Maybe this is the way the war is won: by boring the former fighters to death. Sadly, thousands are starving to death in the meantime, and women being denied access to education. (Via Helen Lewis’s excellent Bluestocking.)
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Why Britain has Brexit regret • Sydney Morning Herald

Tom Birts, an Australian abroad, bringing an Antipodean eye to Brits’ current situation:

»

I kept thinking about the electric meter. I remembered that, apart from the room we were in, all the lights were off.

We drove to London because the trains weren’t running. Oxford Street was busy. “See,” said London, “everything is normal.” I asked a man in a shop about sending something back to Australia. “We’ve been advised not to send anything abroad,” he said. “Not until we hear otherwise. We can’t guarantee it will get there.”

At a christening, we stood around and talked about the cost of living. They wouldn’t stand for this in France, we agreed. There would be riots.

What’s stoicism? What’s indifference? Which one keeps you from drowning?

Shortly before we’d arrived, my friend’s dad had a heart attack. We heard that the wait for an ambulance would have been nine hours, so my friend drove him to the hospital instead. He’s still alive, but the wait for an ambulance is longer now.

While we were there, a relative found themselves in the state of diagnosis where nobody has said cancer, but everyone knows it’s cancer and what cancer might do. “They’re rushing me in,” she said. “That’s good,” I said. “When?” “Next Monday. Hopefully.”

Utilities, transport, healthcare … the things that make a country a success or a failure. The things that make a country function like a country. We stopped at more than one petrol station with no fuel, more than one with fuel but no way to take our bank cards. I laughed at a sign in one of their windows that read “Help Wanted”. Yeah, right.

Maybe a nation, like a sturdy vessel, can drift slowly and indefinitely towards the horizon. Maybe bits can fall off and not be replaced and the basic structure, the ribs, are enough to keep it going. Maybe the water stops pouring in when the ship sinks low enough.

«

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The 25 tweets that show how Twitter changed the world • The New York Times

»

On Wednesday, Twitter announced that users who pay extra will be able to send their thoughts into the world in tweets of up to 4,000 characters, instead of 280 or less. A few hours later, the site glitched. Users couldn’t tweet; they couldn’t DM; #TwitterDown began trending. All of it — the muddled sense of identity, the breakdown of basic function — confirmed the sense that Twitter, a site that has hosted the global conversation for almost two decades, had become a rickety shell of itself, that its best days were behind it and that it would never be as significant again.

But what, exactly, is being lost? We wanted to capture the ways that Twitter — a platform used by a tiny percentage of the world’s population — changed how we protest, consume news, joke and, of course, argue. So we set ourselves to the task of sorting through the trillions of tweets sent since 2006 to determine which were just noise and which deserved a place in the history books. And then we asked: Could we maybe even … rank them?

«

For those who don’t like the NYT paywall, this article is “gifted” so should be available to all. The selected tweets are well-chosen (by a galaxy of choosers). Has it passed its peak? Will it be able to survive? Speaking of which…
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More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers stopped spending on platform, data show • CNN Business

Clare Duffy:

»

More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform in the first weeks of January, according to data provided to CNN by digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics, in a striking sign of how far reaching the advertiser exodus has been following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company.

Some 625 of the top 1,000 Twitter advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Jeep, Wells Fargo and Merck, had pulled their ad dollars as of January, according to estimates from Pathmatics, based on data running through January 25.

Wells Fargo said it “paused our paid advertising on Twitter” but continues to use it as a social channel to engage with customers. The other brands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As a result of the pullback, monthly revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers plummeted by more than 60% from October through January 25, from around $127m to just over $48m, according to the data.

The data demonstrate the sharp decline of what was once a $4.5bn advertising business for Twitter. After Musk completed his takeover of the company in late October, advertisers began to worry about the safety and stability of the platform given his plans to cut staff and relax content moderation policies. In early November, Musk said Twitter had seen a “massive revenue drop.”

«

Not to worry, he’s fired all those costly engineers (and he’ll fire any more who say he’s not popular)! And he’s stopped paying rent! Cost control is going great!
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The Mastodon bump is now a slump • WIRED

Amanda Hoover:

»

Mastodon’s active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 million by late January. It now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year. Many newcomers have complained that Mastodon is hard to use. Some have returned to the devilish bird they knew: Twitter.

After a decade of Big Tech dominating social media, the idea of a small, alternative, and open source platform like Mastodon growing into a truly mainstream challenger was alluring to some. The decentralized platform operates very differently from services like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and demands volunteers take on the job of sustaining and moderating servers. That’s because Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, a network of servers running interoperable open source software.

Thanks to dedicated admins, many instances survived the flood of sign-ups and came back stronger. But Mastodon never was, and never will be, Twitter. For some, that’s what makes Mastodon valuable. To others, it’s a barrier. But the Twitter migration showed that Mastodon can adapt—and quickly. 

“The biggest lesson of what happened is that Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse can scale. This was a big question,” says Robert Gehl, a professor of communication and media studies at York University in Canada. He has studied Mastodon and says it’s enjoyed peaks of interest followed by slumps before. But that pattern can still add momentum. “Each time, a percentage of the wave sticks,” Gehl says. “You get people converting to it.” 

During Mastodon’s Musk bump, admins worked hard to get servers swamped by new users back online. They crowdfunded money to pay for increased hosting bills and updated their policies on content moderation.

«

Wired feels as though it has a weird downer on Mastodon. Sure, it’s not as big as Twitter. Perhaps it will never be as big? But Twitter feels like a place that’s decaying.
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Nuclear Tourism: when atomic tests were a tourist attraction in Las Vegas • Rare Historical Photos

»

Las Vegas is known as the city of lights and, at one time, that light was the glow of an atomic detonation in the Nevada desert. Starting in 1951, the US Army began testing nuclear ordnances just 65 miles from Sin City.

At night, the glow of the bombs lit up the sky, and mushroom clouds could be spotted rising over the horizon during the day.

In classical American fashion, fear was not the only reaction. Vegas started becoming a destination for a certain type of people — Nuclear Tourists.

Let’s roll back to understand why Nevada was selected for nuclear testing. The Yucca Flats of Nevada was located in the center of the American wasteland, making it the perfect place for nuclear testing. First off by being located in the middle of the desert, it created very few threats to surrounding homes.

Additionally, over 87% of the Nevada area is owned by the federal government. It had vast available lands, sunny weather, and good rail connections. The nuclear detonations provided a source of spectacles and entertainment for people who did live in this area. As a result, Vegas began to experience a new influx of people from across the country who would travel thousands of miles in order to catch a glimpse of this new show.

Soon after Las Vegas was transformed from the original city of 25,000 people to the world-renown spectacle of three million people. Journalists began jumping on this new exciting event, and the topic of atomic tourism became the biggest headliner everywhere. Even writers in the New York Times began referring to it as, “the non- ancient but nonetheless honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching.”

«

I couldn’t find an author. But it’s really the pictures that are the thing. So blasé about looking at raw radiation. Plus the consequences: there were an estimated 10,000-75,000 cases of thyroid cancer as a result, and/or possibly 1,800 leukaemia deaths.
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Google Stadia had less than 10% of cloud gaming market share • 9to5 Google

Kyle Bradshaw:

»

In new statistics shared by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), we’ve learned that Google Stadia had significantly fewer active users than most other cloud gaming services.

Following Microsoft’s announcement of its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard, regulatory bodies around the world have taken action to investigate how such a merger would affect competition in the video game industry. Because Microsoft is responsible for Xbox Game Pass Streaming, the merger’s effect on cloud gaming has been a key point of contention.

The CMA has released its provisional findings, explaining in great detail the ways that a merger between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard would have a negative impact on competition. In one section of the findings, the CMA offers statistics on how many active users each of the major cloud gaming platforms had in 2021 and 2022.

While the CMA does not provide the raw numbers for each service in the public version of its report, the regulator does show a percentage range (0-5%, 5-10%, etc) of market share that each had, based on the number of monthly average users (MAUs). In an appendix, it’s explained that these charts were created based on information provided directly by each company and reflect global usage, not just players in the UK.

«

You do have to dig around the appendix, but it’s on page C4. Apple (with its Arcade offering) doesn’t appear at all. Google Stadia had 5-10% of average monthly average users in 2021, and 0-5% of MAUs in 2022. Microsoft’s xCloud, Sony’s PlayStation and NVidia all have 20%+ of share.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if, and just hear me out, we could get AI to redo Futurama as a 1980s US sitcom with humans? Or do the same for other modern series? CC-licensed photo by Dave Monk 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 posting at the Social Warming Substack going live from 0845 UK time. Read or sign up for free and welcome it into your inbox.

A selection of 10 links for you. View them, dammit! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count • Platformer

Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton:

»

For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44bn, public interest in his antics is waning.  

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well. 

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)

Dissatisfied with engineers’ work so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.

It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is. 

“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.

Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size.

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Damned reality not living up to Musk’s expectations again.
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Where are the good Android apps for Mastodon? • The Verge

Barbara Krasnoff would like to know, and pretty much hunts down the answer:

»

Samsung, which is responsible for a large number of the Android phones on the market, offers a version of Android whose interface and most basic features can be pretty different from those of Google’s version (which can be found on phones like the Pixel line).

It takes resources to deal with those differences — resources that individual developers and smaller companies may not have. JR Raphael, founder and publisher of Android Intelligence, says, “These days, it’s pretty rare to see any major company fail to release an app for both Android and iOS at the same time, with equal priorities. Where I think we see a noticeable contrast is with the smaller, startup-based services and more indie app developers. In those sorts of scenarios, where resources are clearly limited and a company has to make decisions about where its attention is most valuable, we do still see places sometimes focusing on iOS initially and then coming back to Android later, down the line — or sometimes even just focusing on iOS exclusively. It’s a frustrating reality and one I wish we could change.”

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The Twitter mobile app for iOS and Android is pretty horrible by iOS standards, certainly compared to an app made by the two-man team at Tapbots (who made Tweetbot); I suspect it looks the same on Android, and that that is sort of the point – to have a fairly consistent interface.

But Mastodon doesn’t have a big organisation to write the “official” app, and so you get all the small developers having a stab at it. Often with a knife and fork. And that’s where the finicky attention to detail that iOS developers devote to their work (for which they do get rewarded) shows up. Krasnoff links to John Gruber’s notes on this, and he’s right: the two platforms simply have different baselines for acceptable design, just as happens on Windows and macOS.
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Ukraine war: Elon Musk’s SpaceX firm bars Kyiv from using Starlink tech for drone control • BBC News

James Fitzgerald:

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SpaceX has limited Ukraine’s ability to use its satellite internet service for military purposes – after reports that Kyiv has used it to control drones.

Early in the war, Ukraine was given thousands of SpaceX Starlink dishes – which connect to satellites and help people stay connected to the internet.

But it is also said to have used the tech to target Russian positions – breaking policies set out by SpaceX.
A Ukrainian official said companies had to choose which “side” they were on. They could join Ukraine and “the right to freedom”, or pick Russia and “its ‘right’ to kill and seize territories”, tweeted presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak.

At an event in Washington DC on Wednesday, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell explained that Starlink technology was “never meant to be weaponised”.

She made reference to Ukraine’s alleged use of Starlink to control drones, and stressed that the equipment had been provided for humanitarian use.

Uncrewed aircraft have played an important role in the war, having been used by Kyiv to search out Russian troops, drop bombs and counter Moscow’s own drone attacks.

Russia has been accused of attempting to jam Starlink signals by SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Ms Shotwell confirmed that it was acceptable for the Ukrainian military for deploy Starlink technology “for comms”, but said her intent was “never to have them use it for offensive purposes”.

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Sooo.. the Ukrainian military should just use it for.. defensive purposes? What amazing nonsense from Starlink. You can’t use it for things that are weapons, but you can use it for people who are holding and using weapons?
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The Moon smells like gunpowder • Nautilus

Jillian Scudder:

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Dirt on Earth is usually not very sharp; small pieces of rock and degraded plant material are tumbled against each other and generally turn out somewhat polished, like river rocks, before they enter our noses. If you happen to be allergic to dust, it’s bad luck, but it’s not doing much in the way of physical harm.

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

It clung so severely to the moonwalking space suits, that even brushing each other off before returning to the module effectively did nothing to remove the dust. Considering that the astronauts were notoriously clumsy on the lunar surface, trying to adapt to both the unwieldy suits and the lowered gravity, most of them had taken several tumbles over the course of their moonwalks, and these suits were no longer pristine after many hours on the surface. They were, instead, rather comprehensively covered in lunar dirt.

It was more than just getting wedged in the folds of the suit—it was static cling. If you have ever seen a cat try to extract itself from a box of packing styrofoam without trailing pieces stuck to all parts of itself, that’s the problem we were having with the lunar dust on the moon.

…The human lung does not like tiny microscopic shards of rock. Breathing these in can damage lung tissue in a way that is difficult to repair, because the rocks are so sharp and so tiny, that simply coughing won’t expel them, and so they stay embedded in the lungs, continuously doing damage and eventually causing problems similar to very severe pneumonia.

There’s an earthbound parallel called silicosis, which comes from breathing fine mineral dust, most notably from mining quartz, and which still causes deaths today, less now from mining and more from the cutting of quartz countertops without proper protection. Between 1999 and 2019, 2,512 people in the United States died of silicosis. Like the moon dust, quartz isn’t intrinsically toxic, it’s just that it’s like inhaling fine shards of glass, which isn’t a great idea.

But it’s one of many problems we’re going to have to solve if we want humans to go live on the moon.

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*Sighs* *crosses off timeshare sales on the Moon*. (The gunpowder thing is because it’s wrecking the inside of your nose.)
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Extracting tables from images in Python • Better Programming

Xavier Canton:

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About a year ago, I was tasked with extracting and structuring data from documents, mainly contained in tables. I had no prior knowledge in computer vision and struggled to find a suitable “plug-and-play” solution. The options available were either state-of-the-art neural network (NN) based solutions that were heavy and tedious, or simpler OpenCV-based solutions that were inconsistent.

Inspired by existing OpenCV scripts, I developed a simple and consistent method to extract tables and turned it into an open-source Python library: img2table.

What does my library do?
Lightweight (compared to deep learning solutions), the package requires no training and minimal parametrization. It provides:
• Table identification for images and PDF files, including bounding boxes at the table cell level
• Table content extraction by providing support for OCR services/tools (Tesseract, AWS Textract, Google Vision, and Azure OCR as of now)
• Extraction of table titles
• Handling of complex table structures such as merged cells
• Implementation of a method to correct skew and rotation of images
• Extracted tables are returned as a simple object, including a Pandas DataFrame representation
• Export extracted tables to an Excel file, preserving their original structure.

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For those who have been looking for something like this. Usual proviso: I haven’t had time to try it myself, so approach with care. But I can already think of projects, such as extracting data from financial reports or government documents, where this is just what you want. (You could also try this entirely different service – small amounts free, then it’s paid – but I haven’t tried it and the usual warnings about uploading sensitive content applies.)
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Viral spread: Peter Hotez on the increase of anti-science aggression on social media • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Sara Goudarzi interviews Hotez, a professor in virology and microbiology (and who incidentally has a daughter with autism, a condition he has pointed out is not due to childhood vaccination):

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Goudarzi: Are you seeing a difference in the attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines versus say the flu or MMR vaccines?

Hotez: Yeah, because remember, MMR came out of autism; that was the [original] assertion that the MMR vaccine causes autism. That was [The Lancet] paper from 1998. But then around 2014, 2015 (I like to think because I was helping to take some of the wind out of the sails around autism), you started to see the anti-vaccine movement pivot around this concept of health and medical freedom, that you can’t tell us what to do about our kids. And that was the first link to the Republican Tea Party here in Texas. In fact, they started getting PAC [political action committee] money… It really took off in Texas and Oklahoma and that’s what you see came off the rails with COVID-19.

It has been documented now by Charles Gaba, a health analyst whose work has been mentioned in the New York Times, National Public Radio, Pew Research Center and Peterson Academic Center, that the lowest vaccination rates were where health freedom propaganda was the strongest, and among those who are in red states like Texas, the redder the county, the lower the vaccination rate, the higher the numbers of deaths. It’s a really tight correlation, so much so that David Leonhardt in the New York Times has called it red COVID. My forthcoming book, The Deadly Rise of Antiscience: A Scientist’s Warning and it’s full on linked to far-right politics and it’s been embraced by the House Freedom Caucus.

After vaccines became widely available, the statements from the 2021 CPAC conference of conservatives in Dallas was first along the lines of: “they’re going to vaccinate you, and then they’re going to take away your guns and your bibles.” It’s ridiculous.

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Ridiculous, and yet it’s happening. Nobody knows what the solution to such partisan thinking is. The really concerning thing might be that there isn’t one, short of a devastating event that means everyone has to work together for survival. That seems like too high a price to get rid of partisanship.
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What ChatGPT and generative AI mean for science • Nature

Chris Stokel-Walker and Richard Van Noorden:

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Some researchers think LLMs are well-suited to speeding up tasks such as writing papers or grants, as long as there’s human oversight. “Scientists are not going to sit and write long introductions for grant applications any more,” says Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a neurobiologist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, who has co-authored a manuscript using GPT-3 as an experiment. “They’re just going to ask systems to do that.”

Tom Tumiel, a research engineer at InstaDeep, a London-based software consultancy firm, says he uses LLMs every day as assistants to help write code. “It’s almost like a better Stack Overflow,” he says, referring to the popular community website where coders answer each others’ queries.

But researchers emphasize that LLMs are fundamentally unreliable at answering questions, sometimes generating false responses. “We need to be wary when we use these systems to produce knowledge,” says Osmanovic Thunström.

This unreliability is baked into how LLMs are built. ChatGPT and its competitors work by learning the statistical patterns of language in enormous databases of online text — including any untruths, biases or outmoded knowledge. When LLMs are then given prompts (such as Greene and Pividori’s carefully structured requests to rewrite parts of manuscripts), they simply spit out, word by word, any way to continue the conversation that seems stylistically plausible.

The result is that LLMs easily produce errors and misleading information, particularly for technical topics that they might have had little data to train on. LLMs also can’t show the origins of their information; if asked to write an academic paper, they make up fictitious citations.

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What’s really telling is that in the middle of the article there’s a “What’s your experience with ChatGPT? Take Nature’s poll”, which indicates how keenly this is being watched in a field where, after all, writing authoritative-sounding text is what it’s all about. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Why is YouTube filled with these AI-generated show intros? • Daily Dot

Audra Schroeder:

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Over the last month, a new kind of uncanny content has been flooding YouTube: Intros to animated series and TV shows recreated with AI-produced images, made to look like they came from another decade. 

There’s Family Guy, The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, Adventure Time, Futurama, South Park, and Beavis and Butt-Head. These are just a handful of examples from the last month, but they all have the same waking-nightmare feel to them, likely because a majority were made in Midjourney. I didn’t search for any of these videos, but around late January, YouTube started recommending them, and wouldn’t stop. Most recently, it thought I would like “The Joe Rogan Experience as a 90’s Sitcom.”

Three weeks ago, YouTuber Lyrical Realms posted a surreal Family Guy intro, which has more than 5 million views. It features just stills, presented as a slideshow, showing the main characters from the animated show as live-action renderings. But once you zoom in on the teeth and hands, it looks a little less “human,” and the characters don’t feel like they’d be pleasant to actually watch. (Largely because there is no dialogue or plot.)

One of the comments on the clip: “mind blowing. you could convince somebody who didn’t know about family guy that this was a real sitcom.” 

Lyrical Realms told the Daily Dot that they were inspired by “the recent surge in popularity of ‘80s sci-fi movies.

“I have a background in machine learning and a love for AI, so this was a natural fit for me. The process was quite long, taking me five full days to generate between 1,000 to 1,500 images. The most challenging part was the prompt engineering and having to discard many images during the process until I found the perfect prompts.” 

YouTuber Suburban Garden says they saw a video titled “Dark Souls as an 80’s Dark Fantasy Film” in early January and got inspired to try one out: “I got the free trial for Adobe premiere and stayed up until six in the morning trying to release my video before someone else took the idea.”

After publishing a Futurama intro that got more than 900,000 views in two weeks, they say their “channel of only 10 subscribers quickly rose to 1,000 in three days.” It currently has more than 5,000 subscribers. 

Last month, writer Ryan Broderick pondered “how long it’ll take for YouTube to start trying to downrank this stuff algorithmically.” But it seems these kinds of videos are only proliferating, and some of them are getting millions of views; YouTube doesn’t have much incentive to stop it.

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They are terrible, as much as anything because they capture the terrible lighting and casting of 80s sitcoms. It’s the AI tsunami coming at us.
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Inside Safe City, Moscow’s AI surveillance dystopia • WIRED

Masha Borak:

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The Russian capital is now the seventh-most-surveilled city in the world. Across Russia, there are an estimated 21 million surveillance cameras, and the country ranks among the top in the world in terms of the number of connected surveillance cameras. The system created by Moscow’s government, dubbed Safe City, was touted by city officials as a way to streamline its public safety systems. In recent years, however, its 217,000 surveillance cameras, designed to catch criminals and terrorists, have been turned against protestors, political rivals, and journalists. 

“Facial recognition was supposed to be the ‘cherry on top,’ the reason why all of this was built,” says a former employee of NTechLab, one of the principal companies building Safe City’s face recognition system.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Safe City’s data collection practices have become increasingly opaque. The project is now seen as a tool of rising digital repression as Russia wages war against Ukraine and dissenting voices within its own borders. It is an example of the danger smart city technologies pose. And for the engineers and programmers who built such systems, its transformation into a tool of oppression has led to a moment of reckoning. 

…In addition to its network of more than 200,000 cameras, Safe City also incorporates data from 169 information systems, managing data on citizens, public services, transportation, and nearly everything else that makes up Moscow’s infrastructure. This includes anonymized cell phone geolocation data collection, vehicle license plate recognition, data from ride-hailing services, and voice recognition devices. As Safe City was still rolling out in 2020, the Russian government announced plans to spend $1.3bn deploying similar Safe City systems across Russia. From the outside, the potential for the system to be abused seemed obvious. But for those involved in its development, it looked like many other smart city projects. “No one expected that the country would turn into hell in two years,” says one former NTechLab employee…

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What’s also notable in this story is all the companies mentioned as suppliers which scramble to be quoted saying they’ve got no involvement since the Ukraine invasion.
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How deepfake videos are used to spread disinformation • The New York Times

Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur:

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In one video, a news anchor with perfectly combed dark hair and a stubbly beard outlined what he saw as the United States’ shameful lack of action against gun violence.

In another video, a female news anchor heralded China’s role in geopolitical relations at an international summit meeting.

But something was off. Their voices were stilted and failed to sync with the movement of their mouths. Their faces had a pixelated, video-game quality and their hair appeared unnaturally plastered to the head. The captions were filled with grammatical mistakes.

The two broadcasters, purportedly anchors for a news outlet called Wolf News, are not real people. They are computer-generated avatars created by artificial intelligence software. And late last year, videos of them were distributed by pro-China bot accounts on Facebook and Twitter, in the first known instance of “deepfake” video technology being used to create fictitious people as part of a state-aligned information campaign.

“This is the first time we’ve seen this in the wild,” said Jack Stubbs, the vice president of intelligence at Graphika, a research firm that studies disinformation. Graphika discovered the pro-China campaign, which appeared intended to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and undercut the United States for English-speaking viewers.

… Graphika linked the two fake Wolf News presenters to technology made by Synthesia, an A.I. company based above a clothing shop in London’s Oxford Circus.

The five-year-old start-up makes software for creating deepfake avatars. A customer simply needs to type up a script, which is then read by one of the digital actors made with Synthesia’s tools.

AI avatars are “digital twins,” Synthesia said, that are based on the appearances of hired actors and can be manipulated to speak in 120 languages and accents. It offers more than 85 characters to choose from with different genders, ages, ethnicities, voice tones and fashion choices.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In China, pig farming has been taken to dramatic new levels of industrialisation, with 26-floor towers in the middle of rural villages. CC-licensed photo by jennicatpinkjennicatpink 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. Even the squeak? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google shows off new AI search features, but a ChatGPT rival is still weeks away • The Verge

James Vincent:

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Google demoed its latest advances in AI search at a live event in Paris on Wednesday — but the features pale in comparison to Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of the “new Bing,” which the company has demoed extensively to the press and offered limited public access to.

In perhaps the most interesting demo, Google showed off how it will use generative AI in the future to summarize information from the web. In the demo, the company showed a search for the question “what are the best constellations to look for while stargazing?” with an AI-generated response highlighting a few key options and how to spot them.

“New generative AI features will help us organize complex information and multiple viewpoints right in search results,” said Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan. “With this you’ll be able to quickly understand the big picture and then go on to explore different angles.”

Raghavan referred to this sort of response as a “NORA” reply — standing for “no one right answer.” (A common criticism of AI-generated search responses is that they tend to pick a single answer as definitive.) He did not specify when this feature would be available.

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Google drew some heat for including a suggestion in its pre-publicity that the James Webb Space Telescope took the first picture of an exoplanet (last month), when in fact it was the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004.

FT Alphaville tried to argue that Bard wasn’t wrong, but I think it’s wrong.

Also – Bard is weeks away? That’s nothing. Most people have no idea ChatGPT exists.
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Her car died, so she walked to work. One day on the walk, she found $15,000 • The Seattle Times

Sydney Page:

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Dianne Gordon’s green Jeep Liberty broke down about a year ago, and ever since, she’s been walking 2.7 miles each way to and from work, five days a week. Her car couldn’t be fixed, and Gordon, 65, couldn’t afford to buy a new one.

It takes her about an hour to walk from her home in White Lake Township, Mich., to VC’s Fresh Marketplace in Waterford Township, where she works behind the deli counter, slicing meat and serving salads. When her shift is over, she walks home.

“I didn’t have a choice,” said Gordon, who lives alone. “I had to have a positive attitude.”

Gordon’s regular walks are usually uneventful. On Jan. 21, though, she spotted something unexpected: A Ziploc bag, filled with $14,780.

About 5:30 p.m. that day, Gordon was on her usual walk home. It was a notably cold afternoon, and she decided to stop at a gas station for a snack.

As she opened the door, “I happened to look down, and there was a bag of money,” Gordon said. “I picked it up, and there were some papers that went with it, and I turned it over, and there was even more money.”

She knew the money would be life-changing for her, she said, but she refrained from opening the cash-filled bag.

“I just looked at it, and I knew it wasn’t mine,” Gordon said. “I knew what I needed to do.”

She went into the gas station, clutching the bag of cash in her hands, and immediately called the police.

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Ah, but what happened next? That’s what makes this worth reading.
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Republicans, aided by Musk, accuse Big Tech of colluding with Democrats • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima:

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Soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter, he began promoting screenshots of internal company documents that he said exposed “free speech suppression” on the social media platform during the 2020 election. Republicans were thrilled.

On Wednesday, Musk’s “Twitter Files” took center stage in a combative Capitol Hill hearing, as GOP leaders attempted to turn Twitter’s decision to briefly block sharing a New York Post story about the president’s son into evidence of a broad conspiracy. Conservatives have long argued that Silicon Valley favors Democrats by systematically suppressing right-wing viewpoints on social media. These allegations have evolved in nearly a half-decade of warnings, as politicians in Washington and beyond fixate on the industry’s communications with the FBI and Democratic leaders, seeking to cast the opposing party as against free speech.

“Twitter … was a private company that the federal government used to do what it cannot: limit the constitutional free exercise of speech,” said House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, flanked by a poster displaying the New York Post story. He added that the committee now knows all of this “because of Elon Musk,” joining a chorus of Republicans praising the mercurial billionaire throughout the hearing.

The testimony of former Twitter executives repeatedly contradicted these accusations. Still, Republicans plowed ahead with unsubstantial allegations of collusion between government officials and the company’s old regime. After one former Twitter executive testified that most of his interactions with the FBI were about foreign interference, Rep. Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, shot back: “I think you guys got played.”

At times, the hearing veered away from Republican aims as Anika Collier Navaroli, a company whistleblower, brought forward new testimony alleging conservatives influenced the social network. The company changed its policies to accommodate Trump’s rule-breaking tweet, according to Navaroli, and the Trump White House asked Twitter to remove an insulting tweet about the former president, posted by the television personality Chrissy Teigen.

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It’s all performative by the Republicans to get video clips for their social media campaigns.
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China’s bid to improve food production? Giant towers of pigs • The New York Times

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu:

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The first sows arrived in late September at the hulking, 26-story high-rise towering above a rural village in central China. The female pigs were whisked away dozens at a time in industrial elevators to the higher floors where the hogs would reside from insemination to maturity.

This is pig farming in China, where agricultural land is scarce, food production is lagging and pork supply is a strategic imperative.

Inside the hulking edifice, which resembles the monolithic housing blocks seen across China and stands as tall as the London tower that houses Big Ben, the pigs are monitored on high-definition cameras by uniformed technicians in a NASA-like command center. Each floor operates like a self-contained farm for the different stages of a young pig’s life: an area for pregnant pigs, a room for farrowing piglets, spots for nursing and space for fattening the young hogs.

Feed is carried on a conveyor belt to the top floor, where it’s collected in giant tanks that deliver more than one million pounds of food a day to the floors below through high-tech feeding troughs that automatically dispense the meal to the hogs based on their stage of life, weight and health.
The building, located on the outskirts of Ezhou, a city on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, is being hailed as the world’s biggest free-standing pig farm with a second identical hog high-rise opening soon. The first farm started operating in October, and once both buildings reach full capacity later this year, it is expected to raise 1.2 million pigs annually.

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You have to see the picture of the outside of the tower. It’s astonishing. Plus you really have to wonder about the potential for disease spread. And, er, would you want to live downwind?
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A solution to the climate crisis: mining the moon, researchers say • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

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Proponents of a “moonshot” idea to deal with global heating have been handed a new, very literal, interpretation by researchers who have proposed firing plumes of moon dust from a gun into space in order to deflect the sun’s rays away from Earth.

The seemingly outlandish concept, outlined in a new research paper, would involve creating a “solar shield” in space by mining the moon of millions of tons of its dust and then “ballistically eject[ing]” it to a point in space about 1m miles from Earth, where the floating grains would partially block incoming sunlight.

“A really exciting part of our study was the realization that the natural lunar dust grains are just the right size and composition for efficiently scattering sunlight away from Earth,” said Ben Bromley, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Utah, who led the research, published in Plos Climate.

“Since it takes much less energy to launch these grains from the moon’s surface, as compared with an Earth launch, the ‘moonshot’ idea really stood out for us.”

Bromley and two other researchers considered a variety of properties, including coal and sea salt, that could dim the sun by as much as 2% if fired into space. The team eventually settled on the dust found on the moon, although millions of tons would have to be mined, sifted and loaded into a ballistic device, such as an electromagnetic rail gun, and fired into space each year into order to maintain this solar shield.

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What an amazing idea. But why go to the moon? Why not just see if we can trigger some volcanoes? That dimmed the sun in The Year Without a Summer, and even gave us Frankenstein.
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Book review: “If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal” by Justin Gregg • The Guardian

PD Smith:

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rather than being our crowning glory as a species, is it possible that human intelligence is in fact a liability, the source of our existential angst and increasingly apparent talent for self-destruction? This is the question Gregg sets out to answer in his entertaining and original book.

It is the very complexity of our intelligence that may well make us less successful in evolutionary terms
The delightfully absurd title stems from his claim that the 19th-century German philosopher, who had depression and eventually dementia, was “the quintessential example of how too much profundity can literally break your brain”. The “soul-tortured Nietzsche”, who sought meaning in suffering, is an example of how, as a species, we are simply too smart for our own good. By contrast, the narwhal (“one of my favourite marine animals”) demonstrates the fact that, from an evolutionary perspective, intelligence and complex thought are often a hindrance: “The absurdity of a narwhal experiencing an existential crisis is the key to understanding everything that is wrong about human thinking, and everything that is right about animal thinking.”

In search of evidence to support this theory, Gregg explores the nature of intelligence. Although non-human animals may have simpler minds than us, they are no less successful in their own way than we are, and do far less harm to their fellow beings: “The Earth is bursting with animal species that have hit on solutions for how to live a good life in ways that put the human species to shame.”

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The dinosaurs got on pretty well, after all, and it’s arguable whether we’d do any better at diverting the asteroid. I often wonder what a planet full of dogs would be like. Quite happy, perhaps?
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UK proposes making the sale and possession of encrypted phones illegal • Motherboard

Joseph Cox:

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A section of the UK government has proposed making the sale or possession of bespoke encrypted phones for crime a criminal offence in its own right. The measure is intended to help the country’s law enforcement agencies tackle organized crime and those who facilitate it, but civil liberties experts tell Motherboard the proposal is overbroad and poorly defined, meaning it could sweep up other forms of secure communication used by the wider population if not adjusted.

The news highlights law enforcement’s continued targeting of the encrypted phone industry. Alongside technical operations, undercover investigations, and even creating their own phone company to secretly harvest messages, authorities are increasingly exploring legislative options too.

“At the moment the government proposal appears to be vague and overly broad. While it states that the provisions ‘will not apply to commercially available mobile phones nor the encrypted messaging apps available on them’ it is difficult to see how it will not result in targeting devices used on a daily [basis] by human rights defenders, protesters and pretty much all of us who want to keep our data secure,” Ioannis Kouvakas, senior legal officer and assistant general counsel at UK-based activism organization Privacy International, told Motherboard in an email.

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Of course it’s Suella Braverman’s Home Office: here’s the document. The document specifies Encrochat, which were specially made for serious criminals. But that was infiltrated. Making the possession a crime is quite a step.
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How living on Mars would warp the human body • Salon.com

Troy Farah:

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“We don’t know what a third of the [gravity] will do for us, we don’t know if it’ll provide any protection or if you can make use of that to give yourself enough gravitational loading to protect your skeleton and your muscles over time,” Fong says. “We don’t know, but we suspect that you’re going to need some sort of countermeasures.”

That means we’ll need to bring lots of medications and drugs to Mars, to anticipate every scenario, because we won’t be able to jog down to Walgreens if someone needs heart medications or a sleep aid. Unfortunately, we also don’t know much about how these meds might fare in space travel or if they’ll act differently in our bodies under the unique conditions of Mars.

Likewise, the psychological effects could be staggering for the first humans in history to completely lose sight of the Earth. This could have unforeseen mental health consequences.

“The suite of threats that presents to you on Mars are unique and poorly understood,” Fong says, noting that a day on Mars is about 37 minutes longer than an Earth day. “It’s dark out there. It messes with your circadian rhythms because the day is slightly longer. It’s just enough out of sync that it really messes you up. And you’re very isolated. Psychologically, there’s some not insignificant problems.”

Mars doesn’t have much of an atmosphere, magnetic field or an ozone layer, three things which make life a lot more comfortable on Earth. This means there’s still plenty of cancer-causing radiation on Mars (though slightly less than in space). And if you stepped outside sans spacesuit, the extreme cold would freeze you to death while the low atmospheric pressure would cause your blood to boil inside your veins. Life on Mars would be a life spent entirely indoors, unless you count being trapped inside a restrictive spacesuit as “outdoors.”

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I dunno, it seems like timeshares there just aren’t going to work.
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Chip suppliers warn on EU plan to bar ‘forever chemicals’ • Financial Times

Cheng Ting-Fang and Alice Hancock:

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Five European countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, on Tuesday proposed that the EU phase out tens of thousands of so-called forever chemicals, known as PFAS, used in the production of semiconductors, batteries, aircraft, cars, medical equipment and even frying pans and ski wax.

The ban would constitute “the broadest restriction proposal in history”, Frauke Averbeck, who led the proposal for the German Environment Agency, said. “It’s a huge step for us to take.”

“If no action is taken we estimate that the societal costs will exceed the costs without a restriction,” said Richard Luit, senior policy adviser at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and Environment. However, industry executives warned that a broad ban could have severe consequences for many sectors. Chemours, a leading supplier of high-end fluoropolymers, warned that the chemicals were “absolutely critical” for semiconductor manufacturing as well as a wide range of other industries.

“If we do not have these, there would be very severe global disruption,” said Denise Dignam, Chemours’ head of advanced performance materials. “I can’t think of how you would run these [semiconductor] manufacturing processes without these materials.” 

…PFAS are extensively used across industry and in consumer products because of their resistance to high temperatures and corrosion. In many cases there are no manufacturing alternatives. Their “forever chemicals” moniker stems from the fact that their carbon-fluorine bonds are among the strongest in organic chemistry, which means that they do not break down easily and accumulate over time in humans and in the environment. Several have been linked with impairments to unborn babies and damage to human internal organs as well as contaminating water and wildlife.

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Challenging: what happens when you have a chemical that’s essential but also a serious problem over time? See also: oil.
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The evolution of Facebook’s iOS app architecture

Dustin Shahidehpour is a software engineer (for the past nine years) at Meta:

»

Facebook for iOS (FBiOS) is the oldest mobile codebase at Meta. Since the app was rewritten in 2012, it has been worked on by thousands of engineers and shipped to billions of users, and it can support hundreds of engineers iterating on it at a time.

After years of iteration, the Facebook codebase does not resemble a typical iOS codebase:

• It’s full of C++, Objective-C(++), and Swift.
• It has dozens of dynamically loaded libraries (dylibs), and so many classes that they can’t be loaded into Xcode at once.
• There is almost zero raw usage of Apple’s SDK — everything has been wrapped or replaced by an in-house abstraction.
• The app makes heavy use of code generation, spurred by Buck, our custom build system.
• Without heavy caching from our build system, engineers would have to spend an entire workday waiting for the app to build.

FBiOS was never intentionally architected this way. The app’s codebase reflects 10 years of evolution, spurred by technical decisions necessary to support the growing number of engineers working on the app, its stability, and, above all, the user experience.

«

This reminds me a little of how biology teachers explain that the human body has evolved all sorts of design flaws: each step logically followed the previous one, until you end up with a mess that somehow just-about works, until it doesn’t and you die. John Gruber calls this post a cry for help, and it certainly seems like an app that can’t all actually be loaded into XCode is like the human pelvis being normally too narrow for a baby’s shoulders.

But you can refactor code.

(Shahidehpour’s CV includes two years as “drumline performer” for the Chicago Bulls, which seems literally to mean he was one of those folk who marches around banging a drum.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

As a vet, you have to be able to look into the face of the sweetest puppy – and, if necessary, kill it. (Humanely.) Could you? CC-licensed photo by Cortney Martin on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. A trip to the farm, you say? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I tried Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing. Search will never be the same • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

Everybody knows: If you want to tell a good tech joke, just incorporate Bing. Yet Microsoft’s search engine might not be a punchline much longer. The company is releasing a version powered with AI, and it’s smart—really smart.

At least that’s my take after spending some time testing it out. 

Leaning on its multiyear, multibillion-dollar partnership with the buzzy startup OpenAI, Microsoft is incorporating a ChatGPT-like bot front and center on the Bing home page. You can ask it questions—even about recent news events—and it will respond in sentences that seem like they were written by a human. It even uses emojis.

Microsoft is also adding AI features to my favorite browser Edge. (Seriously.) The tools can summarize webpages and assist with writing emails and social-media posts. 

“We are grounded in the fact that Google dominates this [search] space,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told me in an interview. “A new race is starting with a completely new platform technology. I’m excited for users to have a choice finally.” 

Google—which holds 93% of the global search engine market share, according to analytics company StatCounter—is on Microsoft’s heels. On Monday, the search company said it is working on Bard, a similar chat tool that generates responses from web-based information.

Microsoft’s new Bing and Edge became available in a limited preview Tuesday. You have to sign up on bing.com for the preview wait list, and once you are in, you’ll have to use the Edge browser (available for Windows and MacOS). Microsoft plans to bring it to other web browsers over time.

It’s far too early to call a winner in this AI search race. But after seeing the new Bing in action, I can confidently say this: A big change is coming to how we get information and how we interact with our computers.

«

Certainly going to be interesting to see if people migrate to Bing, or whether Google’s position as the default rules. (Here’s the Microsoft blogpost on it.)
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Mozilla, Google looking ahead to the end of Apple’s WebKit • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS.

Mozilla conducted similar experiments that never went anywhere years ago but in October 2022 posted an issue in the GitHub repository housing the code for the iOS version of Firefox that includes a reference to GeckoView, a wrapper for Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine.

Under the current Apple App Store Guidelines, iOS browser apps must use WebKit. So a Firefox build incorporating Gecko rather than WebKit currently cannot be distributed through the iOS App Store.

As we reported last week, Mozilla is not alone in anticipating an iOS App Store regime that tolerates browser competition. Google has begun work on a Blink-based version of Chrome for iOS.

The major browser makers – Apple, Google, and Mozilla – each have their own browser rendering engines. Apple’s Safari is based on WebKit; Google’s Chrome and its open source Chromium foundation is based on Blink (forked from WebKit a decade ago); and Mozilla’s Firefox is based on Gecko.

Microsoft developed its own Trident rendering engine in the outdated Internet Explorer and a Trident fork called EdgeHTML in legacy versions of Edge but has relied on Blink since rebasing its Edge browser on Chromium code.

…Safari developed a reputation for lagging behind Chrome and Firefox. Apple, however, appears to be aware of the risk posed by regulators and has added more staff to the WebKit team to close the capabilities gap.

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Written statements: consultation on revising the Computer Misuse Act • UK Parliament

Tom Tugendhat is minister of state for security:

»

We will issue a formal consultation today to seek views on a number of proposals made during the consultation, including:

• Considering the development of a new power to allow law enforcement agencies to take control of domains and internet protocol (IP) addresses where these are being used by criminals to support a wide range of criminality, including fraud and CMA offences.

• Developing a power to require the preservation of computer data, ahead of its seizure, to prevent it being deleted where it may be needed for an investigation. While requests from law enforcement agencies for preservation are generally met, the UK does not have an explicit power to require such preservation, and having such a power would make the legal position clear.

• Considering whether a power to take action against a person possessing or using data obtained by another person through a CMA offence, such as through accessing a computer system to obtain personal data, would be of benefit, subject to appropriate safeguards being in place. Currently, the CMA covers unauthorised access to computer, but the unauthorised taking or copying of data is not covered by the Theft Act so it is difficult to take action in these cases.

In addition, a number of other issues were raised during the Call for Information, relating to the levels of sentencing, statutory defences to the CMA offences, improvements to the ability to report vulnerabilities, and whether the UK has sufficient legislation to cover extra-territorial threats.

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The original CMA is pretty old – originally from 1990. A few tweaks are probably overdue.
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Veterinarian mental health: the story of Lacey, and why I had to kill her • Slate

Andrew Bullis:

»

We all know that this lecture will be grim—Dr Miller [not his real name] is a pig vet, after all. That might mean nothing to you, but in the vet world, it says everything. Swine vets work on swine systems and whole populations. They treat groups of animals, not individuals the way general-practice vets do. Doing so requires an incredible amount of data, and the ability to interpret it dispassionately.

Because of this, they’re also stereotypically cold, calculating, and, in a word, ruthless. They’re not your typical warm, fuzzy family vet, and they’re not shy about “liquidating” entire farms if their data says it’ll help the overall system. For this reason, I know that Miller’s talk will cover mass euthanasia—how to put down entire farms of animals, and how to do it effectively.

“I know this is the last thing you all want to talk about,” Miller says. “But this is the one thing you all need to do, and do well. You see, our business is healing, yes. But you all know there’s only so much we can do. In the end, euthanasia is an option.

“I want to make this abundantly clear: If there’s one thing you must do flawlessly in your career, it’s killing. I don’t care if it’s an old dog, a sow, some pet chicken, a stallion, or a fucking 3-day-old kitten. You will do it humanely. That means quickly, painlessly, and compassionately.

“Some of you say pig vets have no heart,” he continues softly. “That might be true, but find us when we have to liquidate a farm. Those days I still carry with me.”

Miller starts to tell us how euthanasia works. His instruction is exhaustive and methodical. But there’s a crucial thing he leaves out: what all that killing does to humans.

«

A very affecting piece about life on the front line as a vet.
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Meta, long an AI leader, tries not to be left out of the boom • The New York Times

Cade Metz and Mike Isaac:

»

For nearly a decade, Meta has spent billions of dollars building new kinds of AI. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, made it a mission for Meta to become a leader in the field back in 2013. The company hired hundreds of top AI researchers, including Dr. [Yann] LeCun [Meta’s chief AI scientist]. It spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the large amounts of computing power needed to build AI systems.

Yet Meta has been left out now that Silicon Valley is gripped with excitement by “generative AI,” the name for technologies that generate text, images and other media on their own. OpenAI has taken centre stage, even though Meta and many other companies have built similar technologies.

Others have since jumped headlong into the frenzy. On Monday, Google said it would soon release an experimental chatbot called Bard. And on Tuesday, Microsoft, which has invested $13bn in OpenAI, unveiled a new internet search engine and web browser powered by generative AI. [See below – Overspill Ed]i

Meta, however, was hamstrung, in part, by its reputation as a corporate giant that helps spread untruths, Dr. LeCun said last month. And with responsibilities to billions of users, it could not afford to leave online a chatbot that can generate false and biased information.

“OpenAI and other small companies are in a better position to actually get some credit for releasing this kind of thing,” said Chirag Shah, a University of Washington professor who has explored the flaws in technologies like Galactica [Meta’s briefly released and rapidly withdrawn AI chatbot from last November] and ChatGPT. “They are not going to get the same kind of blowback.”

In recent years, Meta has also shifted its focus to another technology area: the immersive online world of the so-called metaverse, which Mr. Zuckerberg has said he believes is the next big thing. In the short term, it is unclear how the company can offer generative AI products with its existing services in a way that really captures the public’s attention.

That does not mean it isn’t trying. Meta is fast-tracking its efforts to put AI-driven products into customers’ hands, said Irina Kofman, a senior director of product management for generative AI who oversees XAI, a new team that aims to help build AI products across the company. Mr. Zuckerberg is directly involved in steering the initiatives, holding weekly meetings with product leaders and top A.I. researchers, she said.

In a call last week with investors, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly mentioned AI. He called it “the foundation of our discovery engine and our ads business” and added that it would “enable many new products and additional transformations within our apps.”

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Weird: I had completely forgotten about Galactica.
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Instagram’s co-founders are mounting a comeback • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter. The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like the New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Tap on articles that interest you and Artifact will serve you similar posts and stories in the future, just as watching videos on TikTok’s For You page tunes its algorithm over time.

Users who come in from the waitlist today will see only that central ranked feed. But Artifact beta users are currently testing two more features that Systrom expects to become core pillars of the app. One is a feed showing articles posted by users that you have chosen to follow, along with their commentary on those posts. (You won’t be able to post raw text without a link, at least for now.) The second is a direct-message inbox so you can discuss the posts you read privately with friends.

In one sense, Artifact can feel like a throwback. Inspired by TikTok’s success, big social platforms have spent the past few years chasing short-form video products and the ad revenue that comes with them.

Meanwhile, like a social network from the late 2000s, Artifact has its sights set firmly on text. But the founders are hopeful that a decade-plus of lessons learned, along with recent advances in artificial intelligence, will help their app break through to a bigger audience.

Systrom and Krieger first began discussing the idea for what became Artifact a couple years ago, he told me. Systrom said he was once skeptical of the ability of machine-learning systems to improve recommendations — but his experience at Instagram turned him into a true believer.

“Throughout the years, what I saw was that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly,” he said.

«

There’s been a lot of discussion around this, but I agree with Ben Thompson’s take that any text-based network will have limited appeal. A news-based text-based network, even more limited appeal.
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I’m a sex worker. AI porn isn’t taking my job • Motherboard

Liara Roux:

»

Images of AI-generated women are going viral on Twitter from accounts that imply that it’s “so over” for models online, or that humanity is past needing real-life online sex workers now that AI generated images have arrived.  

A real model “takes hours to create generic content,” “has to work hard to stay in shape,” and “only has one look,” Alex Valaitis, who works for a newsletter about AI, tweeted. He compared this with someone who writes prompts for machine learning technology like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, or Midjourney, who can create “unlimited content,” “tons of diverse models,” and “personalized content for each simp.” 

Born from newly released image generating neural networks of questionable actual intelligence, these girls are algorithmically perfected: blonde, blue eyes, big tits, skinny waist, glowing skin, perfect ass. They squeeze each other, smile coyly at the camera, itty bitty stringy bikinis dimpling their breasts. The only clue to their artificiality are tiny terrifying details: too many teeth, grotesquely warped fingers. 

Who cares? As Vex Ashley tweeted in response: “if you think men are not capable of jerking off to these dystopian m.c escher collages of mediumly hot body parts truly you don’t know men.”

Humans have been creating “fake” imagery to jerk off to for millennia. If you’ve ever closed your eyes and thought of something while orgasming, you’ve participated in this great tradition. AI porn is nothing new. Just as erotic drawings, the printing press, photography, movies, hentai, virtual reality and robo sex dolls have not killed the demand for sex workers, neither will AI generated porn. Sorry. 

Our clientele hire us for many reasons; a large part of the appeal is that we are fellow humans. To be frank, I have no interest in working with a client who’d rather be fucking a robot anyways. 

In January, I was reading the latest 4chan discussion of me — a perennial happening — when I came across a novel insult. Why are we arguing about this AI generated whore? an anonymous post questioned. An image was attached, red lines circling portions of a photograph of me that they had decided was fake.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

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Quora opens its new AI chatbot app Poe to the general public • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Q&A platform Quora has opened up public access to its new AI chatbot app, Poe, which lets users ask questions and get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, and other companies like Anthropic. Beyond allowing users to experiment with new AI technologies, Poe’s content will ultimately help to evolve Quora itself, the company says.

Quora first announced Poe’s mobile app in December, but at the time, it required an invite to try it out. With the public launch on Friday, anyone can now use Poe’s app. For now, it’s available only to iOS users, but Quora says the service will arrive on other platforms in a few months.

In an announcement, the company explained it decided to launch Poe as a standalone product that’s independent of Quora itself because of how quickly AI developments and changes are now taking place. However, there will be some connections between the Q&A site and Poe. If and when Poe’s content meets a high enough quality standard, it will be distributed on Quora’s site itself, where it has the ability to reach Quora’s 400 million monthly visitors, the company noted.

To use Poe — which stands for “Platform for Open Exploration” — iOS users will have to create an account that’s verified with both a phone number and email address. They can then switch between three different AI chatbots available at launch.

«

I find this puzzling: to me, Quora’s USP has always been that it brings actual people to its site to ask dumb (or clever) questions and provide dumb (or clever) answers. Having a chatbot do the answering seems to take all the fun out of it. As a human, you like to feel that warm moment when you come up with an answer and lots of other people upvote it.
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Paying Twitter subscribers made up less than 0.2% of monthly users in the US two months after Elon Musk introduced Blue, report says • Business Insider via Yahoo

Kate Duffy:

»

Twitter subscribers in the US made up less than 0.2% of monthly users in January, two months after Elon Musk introduced Blue, The Information reported Monday, citing a document.

This means that as of the middle of January, about 180,000 Twitter users in the US were paying for subscriptions to the platform, such as the $8 Blue feature, per the document, reported by The Information.

The 180,000 Twitter subscribers in the US made up 62% of the platform’s global subscriber count, indicating there were 290,000 subscribers around the world, per the report.

Musk said he wants Twitter to generate $3bn in revenue this year. Per the document, the total number of global subscribers would contribute $28m in annual revenue, or less than 1% of the $3 billion figure, The Information reported.

Two people with knowledge of the matter told The Information that revenue from Blue was making less than $4m annually before Musk acquired Twitter. The resulting revenue that the global subscriber count suggests is therefore much higher than before the takeover.

«

The numbers are backed up separately by data from Blockbot, which crawls Twitter looking for Twitter Blue-verified accounts to block, and earlier on Tuesday had 282,924 accounts blocked. (Assuming The Information wasn’t just looking at Blockbot, but had some internal Twitter data as it implied.)

Positive: lots more Twitter Blue subscribers than before, generating 7x as much money.

Negative: drop in the ocean, especially compared to the lost advertising revenue.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Nobody expects a Monty Python episode at the Internet Archi–oh bugger.

Does thanking more people in a film’s credits mean, as distributors think, it will get lower ratings? CC-licensed photo by Aranami 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. It’s the producer! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google announces ChatGPT rival Bard, with wider availability in ‘coming weeks’ • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

It’s official: Google is working on a ChatGPT competitor named Bard.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced the project in a blog post on Monday, describing the tool as an “experimental conversational AI service” that will answer users’ queries and take part in conversations. The software will be available to a group of “trusted testers” today, says Pichai, before becoming “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”

It’s not clear exactly what capabilities Bard will have, but it seems the chatbot will be just as free ranging as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A screenshot encourages users to ask Bard practical queries, like how to plan a baby shower or what kind of meals could be made from a list of ingredients for lunch.

Writes Pichai: “Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.”

Pichai also notes that Bard “draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses,” suggesting it may be able to answer questions about recent events — something ChatGPT struggles with.

The rushed announcement and lack of information about Bard are telltale signs of the “code red” triggered at Google by ChatGPT’s launch last year. Although ChatGPT’s underlying technology is not revolutionary, OpenAI’s decision to make the system freely available on the web exposed millions to this novel form of automated text generation. The effects have been seismic, with discussions about the impact of ChatGPT on education, work, and — of particular interest to Google — the future of internet search.

«

Will we be able to tell the differences between these AI-enabled search engines? Will Bing’s be dramatically better? If not, it’s hard to see how the old defaults won’t reassert themselves, with Google being the dominant one.
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Whispers of A.I.’s modular future • The New Yorker

James Somers:

»

[AI transcription software] Whisper’s story reveals a lot about the history of A.I. and where it’s going. When a piece of software is open-source, you can adapt it to your own ends—it’s a box of Legos instead of a fully formed toy—and software that’s flexible is remarkably enduring. In 1976, the programmer Richard Stallman created a text-editing program called Emacs that is still wildly popular among software developers today. I use it not just for programming but for writing: because it’s open-source, I’ve been able to modify it to help me manage notes for my articles. I adapted code that someone had adapted from someone else, who had adapted it from someone else—a chain of tinkering going all the way back to Stallman.

Already, we’re seeing something similar happen with Whisper. A friend of mine, a filmmaker and software developer, has written a thin wrapper around the tool that transcribes all of the audio and video files in a documentary project to make it easier for him to find excerpts from interviews. Others have built programs that transcribe Twitch streams and YouTube videos, or that work as private voice assistants on their phones. A group of coders is trying to teach the tool to annotate who’s speaking. Gerganov, who developed Whisper.cpp, has recently made a Web-based version, so that users don’t have to download anything.

Nearly perfect speech recognition has become not just an application but a building block for applications. As soon as this happens, things move very fast. When OpenAI’s text-to-image program, dall-e, came out, it caused a sensation—but this was nothing compared with the flurry of activity kicked off by its open-source clone, Stable Diffusion. dall-e used a “freemium” model, in which users could pay for additional images, and no one could modify its code; it generally proved more powerful and accurate than Stable Diffusion, because it was trained on mountains of proprietary data.

But it’s been forced to compete with a vast number and variety of adaptations, plug-ins, and remixes coming from the open-source community. Within weeks, users had adapted Stable Diffusion to create an “image-to-image” mode, in which they could tell the program to tweak an existing image with a text prompt. By repeatedly invoking this mode, a new method of illustration became possible, in which a user could iteratively compose an image with words, as if bossing around an endlessly patient robot artist.

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Being the New Yorker, it’s not an article that lends itself to easy excerpting. Definitely worth digging into.
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For Super Bowl ads this year, crypto is out, booze is in • AP News

Mae Anderson:

»

Last year’s Super Bowl was dubbed the “Crypto Bowl” because four cryptocurrency companies — FTX, Coinbase, Crypto.com and eToro — ran splashy commercials. It was part of a larger effort by crypto companies to break into the mainstream with sports sponsorships. But in November, FTX filed for bankruptcy and its founder was charged in a scheme to defraud investors.

This year, two crypto advertisers had commercials “booked and done” and two others were ”on the one-yard line,” Evans said. But once FTX news broke, those deals weren’t completed.

Now, “There’s zero representation in that category on the day at all,” he said.

Evans said most Super Bowl ads sold much earlier than usual, with more than 90% of its Super Bowl ad inventory gone by the end of the summer, as established advertisers jockeyed for prime positions. But the remaining spots sold slower. Partly that was due to the implosion of the crypto space, as well as general advertiser concerns about the global economy, Evans said.

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Sic transit gloria mundi. (The game’s on Sunday, apparently. Ad spots sell for about $6m upwards.)
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Musk’s Twitter expected to face the strictest EU content rules • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Jillian Deutsch and Kurt Wagner:

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Elon Musk’s Twitter Inc. is expected to fall under the European Union’s stricter rules for content moderation despite doubts that the platform was big enough to qualify.

Twitter and the EU’s executive arm are gearing up for the company to be designated a “very large online platform” under the bloc’s new Digital Services Act, according to people familiar with the matter. That means the company has enough monthly active EU users that it will have to report on how it’s reducing harmful posts and could even be forced to change its algorithms by the European Commission.

For Musk, it means that his stripped-down company will be subject to a much more intrusive regulatory system and could face significant penalties — up to 6% the company’s revenue or even a ban from operating in Europe — if it doesn’t comply. The EU, meanwhile, would avoid the embarrassment of having one of the world’s most influential platforms escape its efforts to tame online content.

Tech companies regardless of their size have to follow the fundamental rules of the DSA and take down illegal content in all the EU’s 27 countries. The EU’s largest platforms — with more than 45 million monthly active users — will be designated as very large online platforms, or VLOPs, and will face centralized, tougher scrutiny by the EU’s executive arm in Brussels.

Some EU officials had been concerned that Twitter might not have enough users to be designated a VLOP, allowing Musk to dodge the most significant changes to the EU’s content moderation rules. At the end of October before Musk bought the social media site, some internally believed the company would fall short of the 45 million user threshold now that the UK has left the EU, according to former employees familiar with the matter.

Even so, the company prepared for VLOP designation, and was also planning an internal audit to ensure it would be in compliance with DSA regulations, the people said. Staff expected user growth and were concerned that reporting fewer than 45 million monthly active users could affect its reputation among advertisers.

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Neat dilemma: if you’re too small, you lose revenue because advertisers will demand to pay less; if you’re too big, you spend more conforming to the rules.
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Dell to lay off more than 6,500 workers or 5% of workforce • WSJ

Will Feuer:

»

“Market conditions continue to erode with an uncertain future,” Jeff Clarke, Dell’s co-chief operating officer, said Monday in a memo to employees. He said the company had already paused hiring, limited employee travel and reduced spending on outside services. Those steps, he said, “are no longer enough.”

Dell is taking steps to reorganize its sales, customer-support, product-development and engineering teams, Mr. Clarke said.

“We’ve navigated economic downturns before and we’ve emerged stronger,” he said. “We will be ready when the market rebounds.”

…Dell will cut its workforce amid an industrywide slump in personal computer shipments that began in 2022 and is expected to persist until 2024. The company saw a 21% year-over-year decline in worldwide shipments in the third quarter of last year, according to IDC.

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Joins the expanding list of companies that thought the pandemic wasn’t going to end, and that the surge in demand for things they sold during that period (PCs, Peloton bikes, Zoom calls) would go on indefinitely.
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Does thanking too many people in the credits indicate a movie is bad? • Film Data and Education

Stephen Follows:

»

David Wilkinson got in touch yesterday asking for advice on his new crowdfunding campaign. One of the topics he wanted to chat about was the ‘cost’ of offering a “Thanks” credit to his backers.

This involves awarding someone who backs the film a credit on the movie under the “With Thanks” section. This name check would appear at the end of the movie and, crucially, on IMDb.

On the face of it, there is no cost to offering an almost infinite number of these as it would just be a case of a longer end credit crawl and IMDb doesn’t charge for listing credits.

However, David brought up an anecdote from his time as a distributor. In conversations with fellow film sales professionals, the topic of ‘how to spot a bad movie’ came up. One participant said that they regard having too many ‘With Thanks’ credits as a red flag. The others agreed and added that the number of producers listed on a movie was similarly useful in spotting a bad film.

These are just the kind of industry beliefs that I love to test. This week I’m going to tackle the ‘With Thanks’ credits and then next week I’ll turn to producing credits.

I gathered data on 8,096 movies released in US cinemas between 2000-19 (i.e. pre-pandemic), taking note of their number of credited/thanked individuals, their IMDb score (to stand in for audience views) and Metascore (to sample the views of critics).

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Go on, guess: are more thanks good, bad or indifferent for the score? And I’m definitely going to be back for the producers (executive and other flavours) tally next week. Follows does wonders with film data.
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Taiwan’s retreat from nuclear power • Hot Tip

Alexander Kaufman:

»

Germany was far from the only nation to try to turn against nuclear energy after the 2011 accident in Japan. Taiwan did, too. And the current government under President Tsai Ing-wen, whose party shares the German Greens’ anti-nuclear position, wants to shut down Taiwan’s nuclear plants by 2025.

Since the Russian invasion, pundits the world over have predicted China would attack Taiwan next. Despite what some of the more hawkish prognosticators would have you think, it’s not an apples-to-apples situation, and there are many good reasons to doubt that Beijing will choose war.

But the energy risks are strikingly parallel. As Taiwan shuts down its nuclear reactors, the country is using more natural gas. Putting aside the climate concerns about replacing zero-carbon power with a fossil fuel, Taiwan has already struggled with blackouts and energy shortages since the nuclear phaseout began. Relying on a fuel that requires constant imports is, at least according to experts I spoke with, a dangerous game. And you don’t need to imagine World War III to see why.

Following former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei last August, China carried out missile tests in the waters around Taiwan. Tankers ships freighting liquefied natural gas to Taiwan rerouted away.

There’s a lot more to this story. Plans for renewables aren’t going well. Indigenous rights play a key role in this whole affair. And the geopolitical players propelling this conflict have shifting and, at times, contradictory interests.

Consider this: the two major parties in Taiwan are sorted in large part around the question of Taiwan’s status. The conservative Kuomintang, the party of former dictator Chiang Kai-shek, supports eventually reunifying with China. It’s also vehemently pro-nuclear, the energy source that probably best guarantees Taiwan’s sovereignty. The center-left Democratic Progressive Party, the party of President Tsai, supports maintaining Taiwan’s de facto independence. Its opposition to nuclear power, however, is arguably making Taiwan much more vulnerable to Chinese aggression.

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Ironic how nuclear power is really so important in ways you wouldn’t guess a priori.
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Poker star uses AirTag to track bag lost in airport ‘twilight zone’ • CNN

Julia Buckley:

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what happens if you check your luggage, it doesn’t appear, but you can see it sitting pretty at terminal four of London Heathrow?

For Steve O’Dwyer, the answer is: absolutely nothing.

O’Dwyer’s missing bag has been at Heathrow since January 21, when he was transferring flights en route to the Bahamas. Thanks to his use of a GPS tracker – an Apple AirTag in his case – he has evidence that the bag has been at Heathrow for the past 13 days.

Unfortunately for him, the airline he booked with, Lufthansa, doesn’t appear to have spent those 13 days trying to get it back. Now, in desperation O’Dwyer has used a totally unrelated TV appearance to call out the airline for its failure to reunite him with his property.

Traveling with checked luggage is increasingly a high stakes game, as Steve O’Dwyer would know better than most. He’s a professional poker player – ranked first on the Global Poker Index in 2016, and currently number 14 on the industry’s All-Time Money List. And yet, even one of the world’s best poker players can’t beat the odds when it comes to airlines losing luggage.

O’Dwyer, who lives in Ireland, was traveling to a tournament in the Bahamas with his girlfriend, Elisabeth Wels, on January 21. The pair had bought an AirTag earlier in the summer, with the aim of tracking their luggage. “Elisabeth thought it would be a good idea, since she’d read some good things about it,” O’Dwyer told CNN over email. She popped it in her case for the trip.

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I always liked the Bob Hope joke – “I’ve flown 100,000 miles this year. But my luggage has done 200,000” – and it keeps on being proved true. This, of course, is pretty much the canonical use for an AirTag. Lufthansa was wrongly reported to have banned AirTags in luggage last October. Maybe it wishes it had. Though people would ignore it.
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A judge just used ChatGPT to make a court decision • Vice

Janus Rose:

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A judge in Colombia used ChatGPT to make a court ruling, in what is apparently the first time a legal decision has been made with the help of an AI text generator—or at least, the first time we know about it.

Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia, who presides over the First Circuit Court in the city of Cartagena, said he used the AI tool to pose legal questions about the case and included its responses in his decision, according to a court document dated January 30, 2023.

“The arguments for this decision will be determined in line with the use of artificial intelligence (AI),” Garcia wrote in the decision, which was translated from Spanish. “Accordingly, we entered parts of the legal questions posed in these proceedings.”

“The purpose of including these AI-produced texts is in no way to replace the judge’s decision,” he added. “What we are really looking for is to optimize the time spent drafting judgments after corroborating the information provided by AI.”

The case involved a dispute with a health insurance company over whether an autistic child should receive coverage for medical treatment. According to the court document, the legal questions entered into the AI tool included “Is an autistic minor exonerated from paying fees for their therapies?” and “Has the jurisprudence of the constitutional court made favorable decisions in similar cases?”

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But ChatGPT isn’t Google. OK, so it was used to speed up the drafting, and they fact-checked the answers. In which case.. why not just do the work yourself?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: That link for the producer? Very well worth following. Let me know if you did.