Tape storage is cheap, fast and reliable – yet DOGE is getting rid of it at a claimed annual saving of $1m. Can that last? CC-licensed photo by Seika on Flickr.

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

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

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

UK loses plea to keep Apple ‘backdoor’ case secret • The Register

Connor Jones:

»

Details of Apple’s appeal against the UK’s so-called “backdoor order” will now play out in public after the Home Office failed in its bid to keep them secret on national security grounds.

The confirmation comes after the Investigatory Powers Tribunal held a closed-door hearing on March 14, which was presumed to be related to Apple’s appeal itself, rather than about whether the appeal itself would be heard in public, the details of which were released on Monday.

Lawyers representing the Secretary of State, Yvette Cooper, applied to the tribunal to ensure the “bare details” of the case involving a Technical Capability Notice (TCN) being issued to Apple be kept secret. They argued that airing these was not in the public interest and would be prejudicial to national security.

TCNs are issued under the UK’s Investigatory Power Act 2016 – aka the Snooper’s Charter – and entities that receive one are forbidden from either confirming or denying its existence.

Thus far, the case of Apple vs the Home Office has been shrouded in secrecy, despite privacy campaigners and US politicians vehemently arguing for the details to be made public, honoring the principle of open justice.

However, there must be a careful balancing act between informing the public and preserving national security, and the tribunal said that despite its decision, it had to give considerable weight to the position of the Home Office.

Pablo Sandro, associate professor of public law and legal theory at the University of Leeds, said the tribunal’s deference toward the Secretary of State included “some worrying remarks.”

«

Sandro is worry that the IPT is too deferential. But it is at least not ruling out the possibility that the case might allow some media. The judgment is pretty vague; what really matters after this is the case management, ie who gets to attend, what they’re allowed to say, and when it all happens. This will be expensive, lawyer-wise.
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The trade war is about China • The Daily Scroll

Park MacDougald:

»

It’s certainly possible that the White House’s tariff scheme could turn out poorly—bets tend to come with risk, after all. But there does seem to be a method to the madness. As Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University, wrote in a Monday X thread (emphasis ours):

»

Three things you need to know about Liberation Day tariffs:

1. It’s not about the methodology.

The formula has been widely mocked, but that misses the point. The numbers aren’t meant to hold up in a PhD defense—they’re meant to shock, to create leverage. The more extreme the figure, the stronger the incentive for other countries to come to the negotiating table with the U.S.

2. It’s not even about the tariffs.

The real issue isn’t Vietnam’s tariff rates—it’s China’s trans-shipment tactics and its central role in global supply chains.

The aim is to isolate China and rewrite the rules of global trade. If a country like Vietnam is willing to align with that goal, it doesn’t matter much whether it sets its tariffs for American products at 0%, 5%, or even 9.4% (current rate).

3. It’s not personal with any country—except one. The tariffs are universal, affecting even places like Heard Island and McDonald Islands, sparking confusion and anger worldwide. But as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained, this blanket approach is designed to block every possible loophole China could exploit. In effect, all countries have become collateral damage in the U.S.-China economic standoff.

«

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So the suggestion is that this is all part of a plan to get every country to impose tariffs on China? I didn’t agree with everything in this post, but it seemed worth considering.
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US government eliminates tape data storage at the GSA to save $1m per year, but tape isn’t dead yet • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

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A Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) social media post boasts of the elimination of tape data storage facilities at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSE). A triumphant Tweet by DOGE says that a million dollars per year will be saved “by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.” However, many X users, and a Community Notes addition, highlight that despite its apparent elderliness, tape still remains the best choice in a range of data storage scenarios.

Hopefully, no official installed at DOGE or GSA assumed that because magnetic tape has been around for such a long time, it is outdated and, therefore, a prime target for replacement with new and improved storage tech. Recently, we reported that the tech behind tape storage, the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) standard, carries on with a robust development roadmap that continues to deliver higher densities.

…In the case of the 14,000 magnetic tapes that have been consigned to history by the government, Community Notes attached to the DOGE post reference articles about why tape is still popular for backups in organizations of all sizes and will still be around for “decades to come.” In brief, tape storage remains in favor for multiple reasons, but most importantly due to the format’s huge capacity, long-term development roadmap that continues to evolve, known durability (30 years estimated), low energy consumption, TCO, and suitability for cold storage.

It would be very interesting to know what storage system and media have been selected to replace the GSA’s tape system, but we don’t have these details to hand. We also wonder whether the DOGE-celebrated $1m per year change away from tape will stick.

«

Tape has a surprisingly low failure rate – well below that of disks. It also, counterintuitively, has a faster streaming rate (once you find the file) than disk. Perhaps DOGE is using SSDs – in which the failure rate is 1.2% past four years. Might turn out to be a false economy. Unless they’re trying to lose the data.
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Meta’s surprise Llama 4 drop exposes the gap between AI ambition and reality • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Saturday, Meta released its newest Llama 4 multimodal AI models in a surprise weekend move that caught some AI experts off guard. The announcement touted Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick as major advancements, with Meta claiming top performance in their categories and an enormous 10 million token context window for Scout. But so far the open-weights models have received an initial mixed-to-negative reception from the AI community, highlighting a familiar tension between AI marketing and user experience.

“The vibes around llama 4 so far are decidedly mid,” said independent AI researcher Simon Willison in a short interview with Ars Technica. Willison often checks the community pulse around open source and open weights AI releases in particular.

While Meta positions Llama 4 in competition with closed-model giants like OpenAI and Google, the company continues to use the term “open source” despite licensing restrictions that prevent truly open use. As we have noted in the past with previous Llama releases, “open weights” more accurately describes Meta’s approach. Those who sign in and accept the license terms can download the two smaller Llama 4 models from Hugging Face or llama.com.

The company describes the new Llama 4 models as “natively multimodal,” built from the ground up to handle both text and images using a technique called “early fusion.”

«

This reminds me of the early days of CPUs and GPUs, when each incremental shift would be explained in terms of changes that made no sense to the ordinary person.
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Social Security’s website keeps crashing, as DOGE demands cuts to IT staff • The Washington Post

Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson and Elizabeth Dwoskin:

»

Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to 7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50% cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.

Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.

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It’s the Twitter model – strip the staff to the bone, rewrite the software any old way, who knows if it might work.
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An open letter to U.S. customers • Keyboardio

“Jesse and Kia”:

»

Let’s be real: we would rather make our products in the USA. Doing business in China is hard: a different language, a different culture, a different legal system, and a very long and expensive plane flight every time you have to pop over to help fix what’s gone wrong. So why don’t we make keyboards in the USA instead—and why don’t the vast majority of consumer electronics manufacturers, be they big or indie? 

Most of our electrical components are made in China. Sometimes we’ll use or consider components not made in China—and they’re made in Japan, Taiwan, or Germany. The USA doesn’t make the components we need.

Making keyboards is intrinsically a cross-border activity. (For us, some of that activity involves shipping American goods to China! We make a number of products that use American wood. Unfortunately, China has just announced they will now tax that lumber at 34% in a retaliatory tariff.)

We’re a small company making niche products; we don’t have the volume to justify opening our own factory. We definitely don’t have the capital to do it. We rely on contract manufacturing, where we pay a network of factories to make products to our specifications, without us owning the machinery or hiring the workers ourselves. 

Southern China, Guangdong and Shenzhen in particular, have developed an ecosystem of factories and suppliers within a small radius. Within about thirty miles, we work with a bunch of factories who are specialized in doing low volume production runs. Having so many companies close together saves a lot on transportation and freight. More importantly, it allows for local competition and sharing of knowledge—just like greater Los Angeles is the best place to make TV and movies even though other cities offer incentives, Guangdong is the best place to make consumer electronics.

…If you want to get a sense of what it costs to hand assemble keyboards in the USA, take a look at Norbauer & Co’s Seneca keyboard. It’s gorgeous and beautifully made. It’s also priced at $3600.

«

They presently face between $363 and $518 in import tariffs (the latter on a keyboard costing about $350). So they’re recommending people buy a keyboard now.

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The dire wolf is back • The New Yorker

D. T. Max:

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Beth Shapiro, a noted ancient-DNA researcher who is now the chief science officer at Colossal [which produced the new “dire wolf” pups], said, “We have to figure out how to build a trillion-piece puzzle while working with pieces that were left outside during a hurricane, using the picture of a slightly different puzzle on the top of the box, and the contents of more than a hundred and fifty thousand different puzzles inside”—that is, the DNA of all the microbes and fungi that got into the animal’s bone after it died.

…Much of the dire wolves’ behaviour reminded me of dogs’. Romulus and Remus [two of the three existing animals] rested on their haunches in the sun. They chased falling leaves; they chewed sticks. One peed, and the other hurried over to roll in it. Other aspects seemed wolflike—when Romulus got nervous, he did a sideways slide while facing us. (James explained to me that this maneuver is a way to both check out a threat and look as large as possible.) And, when the wolves ran, they loped as if their lower legs had an extra joint. They didn’t howl, and their footfalls were silent. Was this distinctive dire-wolf behavior? How could anyone say?

Though Romulus and Remus are identical twins—they came from the same engineered cell line—I could see that they were already behaving differently. Remus was braver. He would come up within ten feet of us, then think better of it. Romulus hung back. They both gave off a sense of biding their time; since nothing formidable had yet been asked of them, they had done nothing formidable.

But they could; their bodies were clearly powerful. At one point, Remus seemed interested in getting behind us—he stopped when James looked at him—and I was reminded of the legend on the Dire Wolves card in Magic: The Gathering: “It’s amazing how scared a city kid can get at a dog.” I was told to keep a respectful distance. Lamm, though, seemed unafraid. “I pet Remus last week,” he said proudly. “But, you know, that’s because I’ve been around them forever.” (James says that around the time they enter puberty—at roughly a year old—they will likely be deemed too aggressive to be petted ever again. “We’re about to hit a trigger point,” he said.)

«

A long look at Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to bring multiple animals – the woolly mammoth, the dodo, the thylacine (a marsupial) – “back”. Except of course they don’t have the original DNA, or females to gestate them. But don’t let that get in the way of a story with a Game Of Thrones tinge and the ker-ching for a startup.
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Ukraine is stuck with Musk’s Starlink for now • POLITICO

Mathieu Pollet:

»

the European Union is on the lookout for backup options for Ukraine. One of those is Franco-British operator Eutelsat, which is pitching itself as a way for Kyiv to get out from under Musk’s thumb.

Working with Starlink “is a dependence that can be decided in the White House or [Trump’s private residence] Mar-a-Lago,” Eutelsat Chief Executive Officer Eva Berneke told POLITICO. “It’s good to have multiple options.”

But today’s Starlink alternatives aren’t ready to take on Musk — including Eutelsat, by Berneke’s own admission.

“If we were to take over the entire connectivity capacity for Ukraine and all the citizens, we wouldn’t be able to do that. Let’s just be very honest,” Berneke said. “But I do think we can provide capacity for some of the critical use cases of government.”

Few firms have invested in low-earth orbit satellites. Such systems offer faster connections and lower latency — crucial for real-time operations like drone warfare — but they remain costly and cumbersome to operate. Starlink, which is owned by Musk’s SpaceX, leads the market, with Eutelsat as a strong challenger and others, like Amazon’s Project Kuiper, still lagging behind.

“This type of solution that Starlink is offering is unique,” said Christopher Baugh, a space industry expert at consulting firm Analysys Mason. Starlink has “broken barriers technically” and “filled the void, because nothing else was available,” he said.
With cutting-edge, compact kits and a vast web of flexible beams, Starlink’s 7,000 satellites dwarf Eutelsat’s 600-strong fleet and comparatively clunkier terminals. Musk’s network can offer between 23 and 490 times the capacity of Eutelsat over Ukraine, depending on the use scenarios.

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(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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I remember how the darkness doubled • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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During the 1950s, the television set replaced the cinema as the focal point of American entertainment. At the decade’s start, fewer than one in ten households had a TV. By its close, nine in ten did. Americans were buying TVs at the rate of a hundred thousand a week. Gathering around the set became an evening ritual for most families, everyone on the couch or in an easy chair, watching situation comedies, game shows, variety shows, and dramas on the small screen. Moviegoing, a far more communal activity, dropped sharply.

…Popular TV shows, from I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best in the fifties to the Andy Griffith Show and the Beverly Hillbillies in the sixties to All in the Family and Good Times in the seventies, tended to be set in a familiar, middle-class domestic milieu. Even the occasional oddball show like My Favorite Martian, The Munsters, or Lost in Space shared that same quotidian setting. But there was one commonplace domestic activity you almost never saw people do on television: watch television. Even as television became the conduit and shaper of culture, it remained invisible in the products of culture. It’s not hard to understand why. Watching someone watch TV is boring.

…Like the TV before it, the smartphone has remained largely invisible in the products of culture, even as its dominion over culture has grown. Watching a person look into a phone screen is even more boring than watching someone watch TV. And because people with smartphones know everything that’s going on the instant it happens, a society of phone-wielders is resistant to the development of dramatic tension. There’s a reason so much narrative art is now set in fantasy worlds or in the past: there are no phones there.

That’s beginning to change now, at least in literary story-telling. Because much of what flows through phones takes the form of words, writers who have grown up with texting and social media are incorporating the rhythms and quirks of online writing into their work, just as writers of epistolary novels did after letter-writing became commonplace in the eighteenth century. As the rise of autofiction shows, the claustrophobic solitude that characterizes social-media use is seeping into art.

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If you recognise where the title of the post comes from (clue: 🎪🌚) then you will absolutely love this blogpost.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The American designers of the Scythe boardgame, along with others, are very worried by Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports. CC-licensed photo by Farley Santos 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. Cutting it up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: how the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg got added to the White House Signal group chat • The Guardian

Hugo Lowell:

»

[Trump’s national security adviser Mike] Waltz’s phone had saved [Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey] Goldberg’s number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October.

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.

A day after that Goldberg story was published, on 22 October, Waltz appeared on CNN to defend Trump. “Don’t take it from me, take it from the 13 Abbey Gate Gold Star families, some of whom stood on a stage in front of a 30,000 person crowd and said how he helped them heal,” Waltz said.

According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.

The mistake went unnoticed until last month when Waltz sought to add Hughes to the Signal group chat – but ended up adding Goldberg’s number to the 13 March message chain named “Houthi PC small group”, where several top US officials discussed plans for strikes against the Houthis.

Waltz said in the immediate aftermath of the incident that he had never met or communicated with Goldberg. He also suggested on Fox News that Goldberg’s number had been “sucked” into his phone, seemingly in reference to how his iPhone had saved Goldberg’s number.

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People who can’t correctly add a phone number to their contacts, but sure, put them in charge of nuclear codes and the entire American economy.
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European Union prepares major penalties against Elon Musk’s X • The New York Times

Adam Satariano:

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European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, for breaking a landmark law to combat illicit content and disinformation, said four people with knowledge of the plans, a move that is likely to ratchet up tensions with the United States by targeting one of President Trump’s closest advisers.

The penalties are set to include a fine and demands for product changes, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing an ongoing investigation. These are expected to be announced this summer and would be the first issued under a new EU law intended to force social media companies to police their services, they said.

European authorities have been weighing how large a fine to issue X as they consider the risks of further antagonizing Mr. Trump amid wider trans-Atlantic disputes over trade, tariffs and the war in Ukraine. The fine could surpass $1bn, one person said, as regulators seek to make an example of X to deter other companies from violating the law, the Digital Services Act.

EU officials said their investigation into X was progressing independently from tariff negotiations after Mr. Trump announced major new levies this week. The investigation began in 2023, and regulators last year issued a preliminary ruling that X had violated the law.

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That might be tariff leverage, in time.
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OpenAI, Google reject UK’s AI copyright plan • POLITICO

Joseph Bambridge:

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Leading AI companies OpenAI and Google have rejected the U.K. government’s preferred solution to the thorny issue of AI and copyright.

Their positions, set out in responses to a consultation which closed in February, will pile further pressure on the government over the proposals, which have already sparked protests from creatives and lawmakers.

The submissions were requested by the U.K. parliament’s Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, after representatives of both companies declined to give evidence to MPs on their respective positions.

The government’s “preferred option” in the consultation proposed amending copyright law to allow AI companies to train their models on public content for commercial purposes without permission from rights holders, unless rights holders “reserve their rights” by opting out.

The changes would be coupled with greater transparency requirements on AI firms, according to the government’s proposal.

POLITICO has reported that ministers plan to commit to publishing reviews into technical solutions for how these conditions could be met in a bid to quell criticism of the plans.

But in its response to the consultation, OpenAI said experience from other jurisdictions including the EU shows that opt-out models face “significant implementation challenges,” while transparency obligations could see developers “deprioritize the market.”

“The U.K. has a rare opportunity to cement itself as the AI capital of Europe by making choices that avoid policy uncertainty, foster innovation, and drive economic growth,” the company said, calling for a broad copyright exemption.

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A story repeated again and again: rapacious company says that if you make its life harder, well, then, you’re shooting yourself in the foot, so of course you have to exempt it from all the normal laws that apply to smaller companies.
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‘Netflix levy’ would ‘price out’ consumers, says Irish minister for media • RTE

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Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan has expressed his opposition to proposals for a levy on streaming services like Netflix, saying that people would be priced out of being able to purchase entertainment services.

Speaking on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics, Mr O’Donovan said he did not see why a so-called ‘Netflix levy’ would be imposed on consumers, and would bring a memo to the Cabinet on the matter.

The legislation that established Comisiún na Méan provided for the streaming levy to be charged in order to provide funding for the production of home-produced programming.

Preparations for applying the levy had been taking place during the term of the previous minister, Catherine Martin.

Under the proposed changes Mr O’Donovan intends bringing to the legislation, the concept of levies on streaming platforms will be retained, but the decision to action such levies will have to be agreed by the minister.

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The proposal is hardly gigantic: no fixed figure set, but perhaps 2-3% of each streamer’s national income. Hard to see how that would lead them to price people out of buying them. Plus what happened to the much-vaunted advertising version, which is at a lower price? The idea is that the levy then funds local productions.
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Doge’s attack on social security causing ‘complete, utter chaos’, staff says • The Guardian

Michael Sainato:

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Office closures, staffing and service cuts, and policy changes at the Social Security Administration (SSA) have caused “complete, utter chaos” and are threatening to send the agency into a “death spiral”, according to workers at the agency.

The SSA operates the largest government program in the US, administering social insurance programs, including retirement, disability and survivor benefits.

An average of almost 69 million Americans per month will receive a social security benefit in 2025, totaling about $1.6tn in benefits paid during the year and accounting for 22% of the federal budget. While expensive and challenged by an ageing population, social security remains overwhelmingly popular with Americans. But the agency has been dubbed a “Ponzi scheme” by Elon Musk, the billionaire whose so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is currently slashing its staff and budgets.

“They have these ‘concepts of plans’ that they’re hoping are sticking but in reality, are really hurting American people,” said a longtime SSA employee and military veteran who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “No one knows what’s going on. They’re just coming up with ideas at the top of their head.”

The SSA website has crashed several times this month. Wired reported Doge staff want to migrate all social security data and rewrite code in months, which could cause system collapse and further outages.

The agency plans to eliminate the jobs of 7,000 workers at the agency through voluntary buyouts, resignations or firings, though the union representing SSA employees anticipate even more firings beyond cutting staff to 50,000 workers.

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This is not going to be fixed quickly, or perhaps at all. The question is what the US will look like in the aftermath of all this. Tariffs hitting consumers; veterans and social security having payments delayed or denied. It’s a recipe for an uprising – except most of the people are far too old to take part in real rioting on the street.
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TikTok gets another 75-day reprieve from ban • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said that he is signing an executive order to keep TikTok running for an additional 75 days as his administration continues to work on the sale of the social network’s U.S. operations.

TikTok was barred from operating in the United States when the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act went into effect on January 19, but Trump at the time ordered the Department of Justice not to enforce the law for a 75-day period. The window was set to expire on Saturday, April 5 if TikTok did not reach a deal to sell to an American company, but TikTok now has another two and a half months.

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“Ehh, just don’t enforce the law! What could be the harm in that?”
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Trump tariffs terrify board game designers • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

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Board game designer and entrepreneur Jamey Stegmaier has published hit games like Scythe and Wingspan—the latter a personal favorite of mine, with a delightfully gentle theme about birds—but this week found him in a gloomy mood.

“Last night I tried to work on a new game I’m brainstorming,” he wrote in a blog post on Thursday, “but it’s really hard to create something for the future when that future looks so grim. I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54% tariff on goods manufactured in China and imported to the US.”

Most US board games are made in China, though Germany (the home of modern hobby board gaming) also has manufacturing facilities. While printed content, such as card games, can be manufactured in the US, it’s far harder to find anyone who can make intricate board pieces like bespoke wooden bits and custom dice. And if you can, the price is often astronomical. “I recall getting quoted a cost of $10 for just a standard empty box from a company in the US that specializes in making boxes,” Stegmaier noted—though a complete game can be produced and boxed in China for that same amount.

Meredith Placko is the CEO of Steve Jackson Games, which produces titles like Munchkin, and she had a similar take. “Some people ask, ‘Why not manufacture in the US?’ I wish we could,” she wrote in a post on Thursday. “But the infrastructure to support full-scale boardgame production—specialty dice making, die-cutting, custom plastic and wood components—doesn’t meaningfully exist here yet. I’ve gotten quotes. I’ve talked to factories. Even when the willingness is there, the equipment, labour, and timelines simply aren’t.”

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Related: Switch 2 shipments to the US uncertain due to tariffs.
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Here’s the iPhone. Here’s the iPhone with tariffs • WSJ

Joanna Stern, Adrienne Tong and Nicole Nguyen:

»

Take a look at this iPhone 16 Pro. Your cost, for the 256GB version, is $1,100. The cost of all the hardware inside—aka the bill of materials—was about $550 to Apple when the phone was introduced, says Wayne Lam, research analyst at TechInsights, which breaks down major products. Throw in assembly and testing and Apple’s cost rises to around $580. Even when you account for Apple’s advertising budget and all the included services—iMessage, iCloud, etc.—there’s still a healthy profit margin.

Now factor in the newly announced tariff for goods from China, which currently totals 54%. The cost rises to around $850. That profit margin would shrink dramatically if Apple didn’t up the price. And you don’t become a trillion-dollar gadget company by charging for things at cost.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s pricing plans or manufacturing details.

So what about that American-made iPhone? Wouldn’t it at least save on tariffs? Apple would still pay levies on the device’s many imported parts. Plus, a manufacturing move to the U.S. would be “a massive, mammoth undertaking” that would take years, says Barton Crockett, senior research analyst at brokerage firm Rosenblatt Securities. 

And the phone itself would likely cost more—a lot more. The assembly ecosystem in China is labor intensive and wouldn’t make economic sense in the U.S., Crockett explains. “It’s not clear you can make a competitively priced smartphone here.”

By Lam’s estimates, the assembly labor that might cost $30 per phone in China could cost $300 in the U.S. And if every single component, from the touchscreen display to the internal storage were built here? Yep, a bajillion dollars. And maybe a magic wand.

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There’s a ridiculous amount of magical thinking being used to support Trump’s tariffs, which are nonsensical on their face – based on trade deficits rather than actual tariffs (this More Or Less podcast episode explains it). Once these price changes start to hit, things are going to get wild.
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I study measles. I’m terrified we’re headed for an epidemic • The New York Times

Michael Mina:

»

We used to think of measles outbreaks in the United States as isolated events: short-lived and confined to close-knit communities with low vaccination rates. A flare here, a bubble there. But as those bubbles grow and converge, the United States could be at risk for tens of thousands of cases.

Measles was declared eliminated in this country in 2000. That didn’t mean the virus disappeared. It meant we stopped it from spreading freely. It was a hard-won public health triumph made possible by decades of vaccination. But that protection is now unraveling.

Vaccine skepticism has become increasingly mainstream, amplified by pandemic-era backlash, a torrent of online misinformation and support from the new health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been at the center of vaccine misinformation for over a decade. A growing outbreak in Texas, and cases in over a dozen states, shows how fragile our defenses have become.

Measles is among the most contagious viruses known. A single case can cause dozens more in places where people are unvaccinated. Infants too young for vaccination, immune-compromised people and the elderly are all at risk. Measles isn’t just a fever and rash. It can cause pneumonia, brain inflammation, permanent disability and death. The virus can go dormant in the body only to re-emerge a decade or so after infection and cause rapid and fatal brain tissue deterioration.

It also has a more insidious legacy, one I helped discover. In 2015, I led a team that found that measles can erase the immune system’s protective memory of prior infections. This “immune amnesia,” as it’s called, leaves people vulnerable to viruses and bacteria they were once protected against.

…The current measles outbreak, with more than 480 cases, largely in unvaccinated children, is gearing up to be the worst in years. And it’s likely just the beginning. Recent studies estimate that more than nine million American children are susceptible to measles. The number of people susceptible balloons further still when you add the 3.6 million infants who are too young to be vaccinated and the millions of immunocompromised Americans who can’t safely receive the vaccine.

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Two children have died so far in Texas. It’s the most insane thing ever, though vaccine refusal was rising in some states. The CDC’s stats on this are years out of date.

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‘If you want dystopia, look out your window!’ Black Mirror is back – and going beyond tech hell • The Guardian

Gabriel Tate:

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There is a more reflective, almost nostalgic tone to this seventh season. The episode Plaything flashes back to [Charlie] Brooker’s early years as a gaming journalist in a Bandersnatch-adjacent slice of computer-induced madness; Eulogy immerses Paul Giamatti in his memories as he literally enters decades-old photos; gaslighting parable Bête Noire forces Siena Kelly’s chocolatier to reckon with youthful misdemeanours; Hotel Reverie stars Emma Corrin as a 1940s matinee idol falling for Issa Rae’s modern film star, who plays her white, male love interest in an AI remake of a vintage romance.

“Quite a lot of the technology is being used to relive things or bring them back into the present,” concedes Brooker. “It wasn’t conscious, but then I have a lot more past than future. There’s probably more social commentary and more emotive or vulnerable episodes. That doesn’t mean we don’t go to disturbing places or deliver those chills, but people come to Black Mirror expecting to be surprised, so you can’t give them exactly what they want. I’d say there’s a little less dystopia. If you want that, there’s a 24-hour panel showing it called your window. You don’t necessarily want to see something saying: things are going to get worse.”

…As a family man, Brooker – “the most empathetic father I’ve ever seen,” reckons Rhoades – has some extra skin in the game. “If I play my hand too overtly, my sons will get all secretive about this stuff,” he shrugs. “Luckily, they haven’t got bogged down in the Andrew Tate world of algorithms spewing up shit, but I do worry about them sitting there in front of YouTube and then before you know it …” He grimaces. “I’ve installed all the parental controls you can, but it’s more that I’m struggling to keep up with the weird things they’ll come out with. [Bizarre YouTube animation] Skibidi Toilet is their pop music, their equivalent of ‘Turn that noise down!’ I’d have been into that at their age, I reckon.”

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The new series is available from Thursday 10 April. The trailer looks very interesting.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Prices of PC system builders may rise by 20% or more due to new tariffs on imported parts imposed by the US, companies say. CC-licensed photo by Vasile Cotovanu on Flickr.

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

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

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

Trump’s tariffs put the iPhone in a tough spot • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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Gerrit Schneemann, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, doesn’t necessarily believe we’ll see an immediate price increase.

“I don’t foresee them… on a short-term basis just raising prices unnecessarily,” Schneemann told The Verge.

He points out that Apple’s margins (historically about 38%) give it more wiggle room to absorb the costs of the tariffs, at least in the short term. “But I think if this sticks, then probably with the 17 we could see a price hike,” he said, referring to the iPhone 17 expected in the fall.

If the goal with these tariffs is to get Apple to start making iPhones in the US, that’s not going to happen anytime soon, either. The company would face some massive challenges doing so.

“I don’t think we see a real path to a meaningful US smartphone industry production hub,” says Schneemann. Apple does some manufacturing in the US, but is largely limited to small-scale production. The iPhone and its network of specialized component suppliers are a different beast. Even if Apple established supply chains, a workforce, and manufacturing facilities for the iPhone in the US, the costs would be prohibitively high, likely more than the impact of the tariffs. These tariffs are being carried out through an executive order rather than Congress, so a new incoming president could change them in four years.

Apple will keep making iPhones overseas and finding ways to deal with the extra taxes to import them to the US. “There’s already been reports of [Apple] trying to get the supply chain to absorb some of that additional cost, which is something Apple is good at anyway,” says Schneemann. And if Apple raises prices with the iPhone 17 series, our tendency to buy phones through carrier subsidies could cushion the blow through slightly higher monthly payments.

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Sonos is also trying to figure out what happens next; it shifted manufacturing out of China to Malaysia and Vietnam a few years ago to avoid tariffs being levied on US imports from China (hooray!) only to find out that those are being hit with 24% and 46% tariffs respectively (boo).
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PC prices up at least 20%: Trump tariffs may hurt U.S. system integrators most • Tom’s Hardware

Avram Piltch:

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PCs, particularly those built by smaller, boutique vendors may be hit hardest of all, makers and resellers tell Tom’s Hardware.

Large OEMs such as Dell and HP may be able to limit their exposure by moving production to less-tariffed countries. U.S. brands such as Maingear, iBuyPower and Falcon Northwest assemble their products in America — using parts that come almost exclusively from Asia.

“Tariffs have a direct impact on our cost structure… which we have to pass down to our customers,” Wallace Santos, CEO of Maingear, told us a few minutes before Trump released his latest round of tariffs. “Some of our suppliers are stopping their production lines to move out of China, causing scarcity, which ultimately causes FOMO, which causes even more scarcity.

After yesterday’s announcements, Santos said he expects prices for his PCs to go up 20 to 25% as a result of the tariffs.

On Wednesday, Trump announced his full suite of new tariffs, which include rates of 54% on China (+34% on top of the 20% already announced), 32% on Taiwan, 26% on South Korea and 46% on Vietnam. Those are all countries where a lot of PC components such as SSDs, RAM, PC cases and graphics cards are sourced. That 15% number could rise, in other words.

“Some of our GPU suppliers had to stop their Chinese lines to move to Taiwan or Vietnam, causing additional shortages,” Santos told us.

The tariffs had already worsened GPU shortages as manufacturers tried to move from China to less-taxed countries such as Vietnam. Now that those countries have tariffs of their own, there’s no place to go. These suppliers are less likely to move operations from China now that Vietnam and Taiwan also have huge tariffs applied to them.

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Doesn’t matter if you move – do more trade from a country, you’ll up the trade deficit with the US and the Trump Tariff will rise, because it’s tied to the trade deficit (in defiance of economic theory).
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UK seeks business views on response to US tariffs • GOV.UK

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Following the 10% reciprocal tariffs on a range of products announced by the Trump administration yesterday, UK companies are being invited to give their views on what any future UK response should look like by providing feedback to questions asking them the average value of their US imports, the impact of any possible UK tariffs and how they would adjust to them. 

The Business and Trade Secretary has also today [Thursday] published an indicative list of goods imported from the US that may be considered in a future UK response. This makes it clear to businesses that the Government would not consider products in the wider public interest issues such as medical supplies and military equipment. It marks the next stage in the government’s ongoing preparations and negotiations with the US on our economic relationship.

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The full list is 419 pages. Lots of elements (as in hydrogen, helium, etc) are on there. Lots of makeup and cosmetics, print film, tyres, animal hides… printers too, and literally kitchen sinks.

There are thousands of categories. Only one problem: the PDF isn’t searchable, either on the web or when downloaded. (At least, for me – take any item eg vodka, which is in there.) I think it’s going to get fed into a lot of chatbots and queried.
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Meta is now the UFC technology partner, including for Quest • UploadVR

David Heaney:

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The companies say the partnership will see Meta “leverage its leading technologies to deliver unprecedented engagement with hundreds of millions of UFC fans around the world” and “immerse fans deeper into UFC content than ever before”.

The partnership will include Meta AI, smart glasses, Quest, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads.

“I’ve had a lot of great partners over the years that have helped us grow this sport, but Mark and his team at Meta are going to do things that will blow away UFC fans,” said UFC President and CEO Dana White. “Meta has the greatest minds in tech and they are going to take fan engagement to the next level. We’ve already started to work on some innovations with Meta around a new fighter rankings system that I’ll be sharing soon. The next few years will be an absolute game changer for fans of this sport.”

White joined Meta’s board of directors back in January, and has reportedly been Mark Zuckerberg’s intermediary to the Trump administration, currying favour for Meta with the US president.

Currently, the app Xtadium already lets Quest owners in the US watch select UFC fights in 2D immersive 180º for free, and for UFC Fight Pass subscribers to watch any fight on a large virtual screen.

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Aside from the currying favour bit, this is exactly what Apple should have been doing already with the Vision Pro. It’s as though the company can’t walk and chew gum – lots and lots of content is what the device needs to sell itself to people. Everyone keeps on making this point, yet nothing happens.
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Man catches Hertfordshire hawk that attacked villagers for weeks • The Guardian

Esther Addley:

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A hawk that has been terrorising male residents of a Hertfordshire village for weeks has been captured by a local man after it stalked him through the village while he was jogging.

Dozens of villagers in Flamstead, near Luton, have reported being attacked from behind by the bird, identified as a Harris’s hawk. Some have been left bleeding and in at least one case requiring hospital treatment.

Tall men in particular have reported being swooped at and clawed for more than a month, leading many to wear hats or even cycling helmets when outside. Villagers became more concerned when the bird attacked an 11-year-old boy this week, and someone reported it swooping at other children walking home from school.

Steve Harris, 40, said he caught the hawk on Thursday after it followed him on his daily jog before landing in his garden.

Determined to stop the attacks after weeks of being forced to wear a cycling helmet while out running, he had finally managed it, he said, by clambering on to his shed and throwing a cage over the bird. He had previously tried to lure it into a cage with some chicken, but without success.

“I had just been out on a run. It was following me for a mile, hopping along all the telegraph poles,” he said. “It came into the garden, and I was holding the cage above my head. Eventually it sat in the shed, squawking at me.”

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Could have been worse – could have been dropping tortoises on bald peoples’ heads.
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Everything TV taught you about autopsies is wrong • The Atlantic

Samuel Ashworth:

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Most Americans will never see a real autopsy, so our impressions of them are formed by TV portrayals. That’s how it was for me, until I spent two weeks observing autopsies in a hospital in Pittsburgh as part of research for a novel. In real life, autopsies are performed in brightly lit rooms. (Forensic autopsies must sometimes be completed in the field if, for example, a body cannot be safely moved.)

The autopsist begins with a Y-shaped incision into the sternum and works methodically through the body. Sometimes the internal organs are inspected in situ, but more typically they are removed, washed down, and dissected on a water table. The autopsist doesn’t just pick up an organ, look at it, make a diagnosis, and plop it back in; rather, they catalog as many of the body’s pathologies as possible, whether or not they’re suspected of causing death. They also take care to make sure that none of the evidence of this inspection would be visible in an open-casket funeral. It’s slow, comprehensive work that rarely involves fancy electronics.

Perhaps the most subtly ridiculous aspect of TV autopsies is the lack of personal protective equipment. In real autopsies, the people involved wear head-to-toe PPE—surgical scrubs, armguards, booties, an apron, a face mask, a splash shield, and a cap—because, when you open a human body up, all the blood, bile, and other fluids that a person had in life are still in there. Blood can still ooze from a wound, even when it’s not being pumped through the body.

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Seems like they haven’t seen Silent Witness? But TV drama needs to be able to show faces, for emotion. It may be shocking to learn that TV sometimes (often?) fudges reality in order to create space for drama, but it’s possible that the Greek attack on Troy didn’t play out exactly as described in The Iliad either.
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AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia’s servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation’s bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50% since January 2024. It’s a scenario familiar across the free and open source software (FOSS) community, as we’ve previously detailed.

The Foundation hosts not only Wikipedia but also platforms like Wikimedia Commons, which offers 144 million media files under open licenses. For decades, this content has powered everything from search results to school projects. But since early 2024, AI companies have dramatically increased automated scraping through direct crawling, APIs, and bulk downloads to feed their hungry AI models. This exponential growth in non-human traffic has imposed steep technical and financial costs—often without the attribution that helps sustain Wikimedia’s volunteer ecosystem.

The impact isn’t theoretical. The foundation says that when former US President Jimmy Carter died in December 2024, his Wikipedia page predictably drew millions of views. But the real stress came when users simultaneously streamed a 1.5-hour video of a 1980 debate from Wikimedia Commons. The surge doubled Wikimedia’s normal network traffic, temporarily maxing out several of its Internet connections. Wikimedia engineers quickly rerouted traffic to reduce congestion, but the event revealed a deeper problem: the baseline bandwidth had already been consumed largely by bots scraping media at scale.

This behavior is increasingly familiar across the FOSS world. Fedora’s Pagure repository blocked all traffic from Brazil after similar scraping incidents covered by Ars Technica. GNOME’s GitLab instance implemented proof-of-work challenges to filter excessive bot access. Read the Docs dramatically cut its bandwidth costs after blocking AI crawlers.

Wikimedia’s internal data explains why this kind of traffic is so costly for open projects. Unlike humans, who tend to view popular and frequently cached articles, bots crawl obscure and less-accessed pages, forcing Wikimedia’s core datacenters to serve them directly. Caching systems designed for predictable, human browsing behavior don’t work when bots are reading the entire archive indiscriminately.

As a result, Wikimedia found that bots account for 65% of the most expensive requests to its core infrastructure despite making up just 35% of total pageviews. This asymmetry is a key technical insight: The cost of a bot request is far higher than a human one, and it adds up fast.

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A strange new arms race: sites like Wikimedia don’t want to block AI bots, but they’d like them to behave a lot better.
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Amazon said to make a bid to buy TikTok in the U.S. • The New York Times

Lauren Hirsch, Maggie Haberman, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Karen Weise and Sapna Maheshwari:

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Amazon has put in a last-minute bid to acquire all of TikTok, the popular video app, as it approaches an April deadline to be separated from its Chinese owner or face a ban in the United States, according to three people familiar with the bid.

Various parties who have been involved in the talks do not appear to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously, the people said. The bid came via an offer letter addressed to Vice President JD Vance and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Amazon’s bid highlights the 11th-hour maneuvering in Washington over TikTok’s ownership. Policymakers in both parties have expressed deep national security concerns over the app’s Chinese ownership, and passed a law last year to force a sale of TikTok that was set to take effect in January.

President Trump, who has pledged repeatedly to save the app despite the national security concerns, delayed the enforcement of that law until Saturday, even after it was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court.
Amazon declined to comment. TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump met with top White House officials Wednesday to discuss TikTok’s fate. People familiar with the talks have outlined a potential deal that could involve bringing on a number of new U.S. investors, including Oracle, the technology giant; and Blackstone, the private equity firm, while sidestepping a formal sale. But it isn’t clear that such a structure would satisfy the conditions of the federal law.

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Satisfy the conditions of the law? That’s crazy talk!
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The crisis of zombie social science • The Garden of Forking Paths

Brian Klaas:

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Many social phenomena can be sorted into two categories: “strong link problems” and “weak link problems.”

As the always insightful Adam Mastroianni points out, food safety is an example of a weak link problem, in which you have to worry about the weakest link. Even if 99.9% of a country’s food supply is free of toxic bacteria, the 0.1% can imperil everyone. A rowing crew is also a weak link problem: if seven rowers are Olympians but one scrawny rower is out of sync, the boat will slow to a crawl.

Strong link problems are the opposite: everything will be fine as long as the strongest link is really strong. Basketball, unlike rowing, is a strong link problem. LeBron James is good enough that even if there’s a really weak player on the bench, the Lakers are still going to win a lot. And, as Mastroianni convincingly argues, science is a strong link problem. It’s okay if there’s a lot of junk science out there being published in pseudoscience journals, because the strongest discoveries that change the world are what matter most. Pay attention to the best science, ignore the worst.

I see an exception to Mastroianni’s argument. Zombie Theories in social science short-circuit these dynamics. For the reasons mentioned above, it’s rarely universally agreed what the strongest links actually are in economics, political science, psychology, or sociology. Without being able to kill off the bad but influential theories through falsification, what should be a strong-link problem ends up just being a bit of a mess, with bad ideas lingering on, often obscuring better ones.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot of astonishingly good social science research. I’m often in awe of colleagues across disciplines who have devoted their lives to solving problems in the most innovative ways. My critique is not that social science is useless, but that it could be better.

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Klaas is associate professor of global politics at UCL, so has seen a lot of the good and the bad in social science research. This is a particularly interesting post on the “reproducibility problem” in that field.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new study finds that Thursday is the new Friday where post-work drinks are concerned. CC-licensed photo by chas B on Flickr.

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

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

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

Apple’s appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over the UK’s encryption ‘back door’ explained • Computer Weekly

Bernard Keenan:

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the question turns on whether ordering Apple to compromise the integrity of the ADP [Advanced Data Protection, its end-to-end encrypted backup] system is proportionate to meeting the needs of national security and the prevention or detection of serious crime. The government will likely argue that the TCN [UK government’s Technical Capability Notice] merely requires Apple to facilitate the execution of lawful warrants which are in themselves subjected to careful necessity and proportionality checks. In theory this ensures such powers can only be used judiciously in a limited and targeted fashion. 

Government lawyers may also point out that Standard Data Protection still applies, and that is sufficient to protect the vast majority of users’ data. In effect, the government’s position is that commercial service providers do not have a right to unilaterally provide customers with perfect encryption that cannot be disabled where absolutely necessary. If the TCN is overturned, legitimate targets of state surveillance, including terrorists and child abusers, will “go dark”. 

Governments always argue that they must have access to communications. Yet while there is no doubt that malicious actors and foreign agents rely on encryption, so do millions of innocent people, including lawyers, journalists, businesses, and anyone who has a duty to take care of other people’s secrets. How should that balance be assessed? It is not just Apple that need to know the answer. As I noted in an article from 2019, a TCN could theoretically order communication providers to grant UK authorities the means secretly to disable or modify the operation of encryption protocols applied on behalf of users.

That was not idle speculation – in 2018, two GCHQ directors openly discussed an approach that would see encrypted platforms like WhatsApp modify the notifications function on a target’s device so that a law enforcement participant could be secretly added to an apparently secure chat without the target realising. All transmissions via the app would remain encrypted, but the content would be intercepted. Whether such a capability was actually developed is unknown, but it seemed unlikely to me, given the disproportionate risks to all users that such software modifications would create. 

But is that correct? We do not know what the measure of proportionality is in such a profoundly important matter. The tribunal should clarify these vitally important questions in public.

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Journalists are doing their best to make sure that at least some part of this is heard in public, and Apple probably isn’t against it. The difficulty is finding which judge to trouble with the legal demand to attend the hearing(s).
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Welcome to the semantic apocalypse • The Intrinsic Perspective

Erik Hoel:

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A well-known psychological phenomenon, semantic satiation can be triggered by repeating a word over and over until it loses its meaning. You can do this with any word. How about “Ghibli?” Just read it over and over: Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. You just keep reading it, each one in turn. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli.

Try saying it aloud. Ghiiiiiiiii-bliiiiiii. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli.

Do this enough and the word’s meaning is stripped away. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. It becomes an entity estranged from you, unfamiliar. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. It’s nothing. Just letters. Sounds. A “Ghib.” Then a “Li.” Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Like your child’s face is suddenly that of a stranger. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Only the bones of syntax remain. Ghibli. Ghibli.

No one knows why semantic satiation happens, exactly. There’s a suspected mechanism in the form of neural habituation, wherein neurons respond less strongly from repeated stimulation; like a muscle, neurons grow tired, releasing fewer neurotransmitters after an action potential, until their formerly robust signal becomes a squeak. One hypothesis is that therefore the signal fails to propagate out from the language processing centers and trigger, as it normally does, all the standard associations that vibrate in your brain’s web of concepts. This leaves behind only the initial sensory information, which, it turns out, is almost nothing at all, just syllabic sounds set in cold relation. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. But there’s also evidence it’s not just neural fatigue. Semantic satiation reflects something higher-level about neural networks. It’s not just “neurons are tired.” Enough repetition and your attention changes too, shifting from the semantic contents to attending to the syntax alone. Ghibli. Ghibli. The word becomes a signifier only of itself. Ghibli.

(While writing this, I went to go read a scientific review to brush up on the neuroscience of semantic satiation. And guess what? The first paper I found was AI slop too. I’m not joking. I wish I were. There it was: that recognizable forced cadence, that constant reaching for filler, that stilted eagerness. Published 11 months ago.)

The semantic apocalypse heralded by AI is a kind of semantic satiation at a cultural level.

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Scott Alexander has a good followup post referencing this, The Colours of Her Coat. Both highly recommended.
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The impact of hybrid working on the high street • Centre for Cities

Paul Swinney and Oscar Selby:

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Five years after the UK went into lockdown, this briefing looks at the impact of hybrid working on spending patterns by workers in both city centres and their local neighbourhoods.

While life today looks much closer to what it did in 2019 than many predicted, it is certainly the case that home working is higher on Mondays and Fridays than it was pre-pandemic. And this has affected patterns of worker spending in several ways:

Workers now do a smaller share of their spending in city centres than they did in 2019.

But counter to predictions, this has not led to a boom in local spending. And the shift in spending that has happened has been led by a shift in grocery spending rather than by independent cafes, with suburban supermarkets appearing to have been the biggest winners.

Thursday has become the new Friday for the post-work drink in central London. But after-work socialising appears to have become less common post-pandemic in other large city centres.

Thursdays are now the most popular day for an after-work drink in London, but after-work socialising appears to be less popular post-pandemic in other large city centres outside of London.

A key reason why large city centres had vibrant high streets pre-pandemic was due to the volume of workers who commuted into them each day, creating a market for shops, bars and restaurants to sell to. Therefore, a reduction in worker footfall reduces this source of sales for city centres. The current picture is far better than those 2020 predictions suggested for city centre high streets, but is less positive than what it was in 2019.

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It’s weird that Friday has ceased to be the “let’s go out for a drink” night. The graphs suggest that outside London, people now go out on Saturday rather than Friday. (Via Jim Waterson’s London Centric.)
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BYD car sales soar as Tesla struggles in Europe • Financial Times

Kana Inagaki:

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Vehicle sales at China’s BYD soared 58% in the first quarter in a stark contrast to an expected fall in demand for Tesla’s electric cars, as European consumers shun Elon Musk’s brand.

The Shenzhen-based group on Tuesday said it delivered 986,098 passenger vehicles in the first quarter, of which 416,388 were pure EVs, up 39%.

The strong start to the year came after BYD’s latest annual sales figures recently topped $100bn for the first time, propelled by resurgent demand for hybrid vehicles in its home market.

BYD has benefited from strong domestic demand for its hybrid cars, and has also been making aggressive inroads into overseas markets.

By contrast, analysts warned figures set to be released on Wednesday for Tesla’s first-quarter sales were likely to show a drop of more than 10%, as demand in France and other European markets slumped in March despite a key model upgrade.

Tesla sales have plummeted in Europe since the start of the year, but analysts have been divided over whether the decline has mainly been driven by a backlash to chief executive Musk’s interventions in regional politics or an ageing product portfolio and increasing competition.

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This article was written on Tuesday; on Wednesday Tesla announced a sales fall of 12.9%, delivering 336,681 cars while making 362,615.

Saw a BYD car the other day. They’re probably going to focus a lot on the UK and EU, given the fat new tariffs imposed on Wednesday night by Trump.
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Shingles vaccine can decrease risk of dementia, study finds • The New York Times

Pam Belluck:

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Getting vaccinated against shingles can reduce the risk of developing dementia, a large new study finds.

The results provide some of the strongest evidence yet that some viral infections can have effects on brain function years later and that preventing them can help stave off cognitive decline.

The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that people who received the shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia in the seven years afterward than those who were not vaccinated.

“If you’re reducing the risk of dementia by 20%, that’s quite important in a public health context, given that we don’t really have much else at the moment that slows down the onset of dementia,” said Dr. Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at Oxford. Dr. Harrison was not involved in the new study, but has done other research indicating that shingles vaccines lower dementia risk.

Whether the protection can last beyond seven years can only be determined with further research. But with few currently effective treatments or preventions, Dr. Harrison said, shingles vaccines appear to have “some of the strongest potential protective effects against dementia that we know of that are potentially usable in practice.”

…In the United States, about one in three people develop at least one case of shingles, also called herpes zoster, in their lifetime, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. About a third of eligible adults have received the vaccine in recent years, according to the C.D.C.

Several previous studies have suggested that shingles vaccinations might reduce dementia risk, but most could not exclude the possibility that people who get vaccinated might have other dementia-protective characteristics, like healthier lifestyles, better diets or more years of education.

The new study ruled out many of those factors.

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The results emerged from vaccination in Wales – where a one-year cutoff at the age of 80 created two cohorts of nearly identical age who could be compared. The implication seems to be that having a shingles vaccination late in life has protective effects.

Anyhoooooow, the US can presumably kiss goodbye to the benefits of this since its health secretary doesn’t put any trust in this “vaccine” stuff.
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Glacier melt threatens water supplies for two billion people, UN warns • Carbon Brief

Ayesha Tandon:

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Climate change and “unsustainable human activities” are driving “unprecedented changes” to mountains and glaciers, threatening access to fresh water for more than two billion people, a UN report warns.

The 2025 UN world water development report finds that receding snow and ice cover in mountain regions could have “severe” consequences for people and nature.

Up to 60% of the world’s freshwater originates in mountain regions, which are home to 1.1bn people and 85% of species of birds, amphibians and mammals.

The report highlights a wide range of impacts, including reduced water for drinking and agriculture, stress on local ecosystems and increased risk of “devastating” glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).

It also notes the deep spiritual and cultural connections that mountain-dwelling communities around the world have with mountains and glaciers, from India’s Hindu Kush Himalaya to Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

One expert tells Carbon Brief that glacier loss is already causing “loss of life, loss of livelihood and most importantly of all, the loss of a place that many communities have called home for generations”. 

«

I think the loss of the water is more important, to be honest.
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EU and UK fine carmakers millions over recycling cartel • DW

Matt Ford and agencies:

»

The European Commission on Tuesday fined the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) and 15 of its members a total of €458m ($494.5m) for engaging in cartel-like behavior regarding the recycling of used cars.

German giant Volkswagen was handed the heftiest fine of €127m, followed by Renault/Nissan (€81.5 million), Opel parent company Stellantis (€75m), Ford (€41.5m), BMW (€25m), Opel itself (€25m) and Toyota (around €24m). The ACEA must pay €500,000.

Mercedes-Benz would have been liable for a €35m fine but avoided a penalty after reporting the long-running cartel in which it conspired with its rivals between 2002 and 2017.

The Commission found that the carmakers had entered into anti-competitive agreements and had exchanged confidential information to prevent competition on the stripping, scrapping and recycling of old cars.

One key finding was that the manufacturers had agreed not to advertise their recycling efforts, thus preventing consumers from factoring in environmental impact when choosing a vehicle and reducing any potential pressure on the companies to go beyond minimum legal requirements.

«

The EC decision says that this was going on for 15 years. That’s a lot of cartel-ing.
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Something bizarre is happening to people who use ChatGPT a lot • Futurism

Noor Al-Sibai:

»

Researchers have found that ChatGPT “power users,” or those who use it the most and at the longest durations, are becoming dependent upon — or even addicted to — the chatbot.

In a new joint study, researchers with OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab found that this small subset of ChatGPT users engaged in more “problematic use,” defined in the paper as “indicators of addiction… including preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, loss of control, and mood modification.”

To get there, the MIT and OpenAI team surveyed thousands of ChatGPT users to glean not only how they felt about the chatbot, but also to study what kinds of “affective cues,” which was defined in a joint summary of the research as “aspects of interactions that indicate empathy, affection, or support,” they used when chatting with it.

Though the vast majority of people surveyed didn’t engage emotionally with ChatGPT, those who used the chatbot for longer periods of time seemed to start considering it to be a “friend.” The survey participants who chatted with ChatGPT the longest tended to be lonelier and get more stressed out over subtle changes in the model’s behavior, too.

«

It’s the addiction more than the chatbot, though, isn’t it? If this were just Eliza, the original chatbot, they’d be on it in the same way too.
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Researchers suggest OpenAI trained AI models on paywalled O’Reilly books • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

»

OpenAI has been accused by many parties of training its AI on copyrighted content sans permission. Now a new paper by an AI watchdog organization makes the serious accusation that the company increasingly relied on non-public books it didn’t license to train more sophisticated AI models.

AI models are essentially complex prediction engines. Trained on a lot of data — books, movies, TV shows, and so on — they learn patterns and novel ways to extrapolate from a simple prompt. When a model “writes” an essay on a Greek tragedy or “draws” Ghibli-style images, it’s simply pulling from its vast knowledge to approximate. It isn’t arriving at anything new.

While a number of AI labs, including OpenAI, have begun embracing AI-generated data to train AI as they exhaust real-world sources (mainly the public web), few have eschewed real-world data entirely. That’s likely because training on purely synthetic data comes with risks, like worsening a model’s performance.

The new paper, out of the AI Disclosures Project, a nonprofit co-founded in 2024 by media mogul Tim O’Reilly and economist Ilan Strauss, draws the conclusion that OpenAI likely trained its GPT-4o model on paywalled books from O’Reilly Media. (O’Reilly is the CEO of O’Reilly Media.)

In ChatGPT, GPT-4o is the default model. O’Reilly doesn’t have a licensing agreement with OpenAI, the paper says.

«

Oh but come on, OpenAI was down to its last ten billion dollars. Coincidentally, there’s a big protest today (Thursday 3 April) about Meta’s use of the pirated LibGen database of books and articles (my books are in there, plus an article I wrote for Nature). The ALCS (Society of Authors) is writing an open letter to the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, who has offered pretty much zero response on this. Perhaps if we told her it’s a four-part Netflix drama?
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Lithium-ion battery waste fires are increasing, and vapes are a big part of it • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

2024 was “a year of growth,” according to fire-suppression company Fire Rover, but that’s not an entirely good thing.

The company, which offers fire detection and suppression systems based on thermal and optical imaging, smoke analytics, and human verification, releases annual reports on waste and recycling facility fires in the US and Canada to select industry and media. In 2024, Fire Rover, based on its fire identifications, saw 2,910 incidents, a 60% increase from the 1,809 in 2023, and more than double the 1,409 fires confirmed in 2022.

Publicly reported fire incidents at waste and recycling facilities also hit 398, a new high since Fire Rover began compiling its report eight years ago, when that number was closer to 275.

Lots of things could cause fires in the waste stream, long before lithium-ion batteries became common: “Fireworks, pool chemicals, hot (barbecue) briquettes,” writes Ryan Fogelman, CEO of Fire Rover, in an email to Ars. But lithium-ion batteries pose a growing problem, as the number of devices with batteries increases, consumer education and disposal choices remain limited, and batteries remain a very easy-to-miss, troublesome occupant of the waste stream.

All batteries that make it into waste streams are potentially hazardous, as they have so many ways of being set off: puncturing, vibration, overheating, short-circuiting, crushing, internal cell failure, overcharging, or inherent manufacturing flaws, among others. Fire Rover’s report notes that the media often portrays batteries as “spontaneously” catching fire. In reality, the very nature of waste handling makes it almost impossible to ensure that no battery will face hazards in handling, the report notes. Tiny batteries can be packed into the most disposable of items—even paper marketing materials handed out at conferences.

Fogelman estimates, based on his experience and some assumptions, that about half of the fires he’s tracking originate with batteries. Roughly $2.5bn of loss to facilities and infrastructure came from fires last year, divided between traditional hazards and batteries, he writes.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Baseball has finally started to make technological shifts, with the NY Yankees using bats shaped to improve hitting. CC-licensed photo by terren in Virginia on Flickr.

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

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

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

Open-source genetic database shuts down to protect users from “authoritarian governments” • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The creator of an open source genetic database is shutting it down and deleting all of its data because he has come to believe that its existence is dangerous with “a rise in far-right and other authoritarian governments” in the United States and elsewhere.

“The largest use case for DTC genetic data was not biomedical research or research in big pharma,” Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, the founder of OpenSNP, wrote in a blog post. “Instead, the transformative impact of the data came to fruition among law enforcement agencies, who have put the genealogical properties of genetic data to use.”

OpenSNP has collected roughly 7,500 genomes over the last 14 years, primarily by allowing people to voluntarily submit their own genetic information they have downloaded from 23andMe. With the bankruptcy of 23andMe, increased interest in genetic data by law enforcement, and the return of Donald Trump and rise of authoritarian governments worldwide, Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media he no longer believes it is ethical to run the database.
 
“I’ve been thinking about it since 23andMe was on the verge of bankruptcy and been really considering it since the U.S. election. It definitely is really bad over there [in the United States],” Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media. “I am quite relieved to have made the decision and come to a conclusion. It’s been weighing on my mind for a long time.” 

…OpenSNP has been used for various scientific papers, most notably to show that an earlier paper about chronic fatigue syndrome pulled from 23andMe data could not be replicated and was based on erroneous science.

«

As a reminder, 23andMe had about 15 million genomes stored, so it’s impressive on its own that this dataset could refute work done there. But the world is really changing, and this seems like a very sensible move. Even if it won’t make much difference if the US government “acquires” the 23andMe dataset by some means.
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Cheap TVs’ incessant advertising reaches troubling new lows • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

TVs offer us an escape from the real world. After a long day, sometimes there’s nothing more relaxing than turning on your TV, tuning into your favourite program, and unplugging from the realities around you.

But what happens when divisive, potentially offensive messaging infiltrates that escape? Even with streaming services making it easy to watch TV commercial-free, it can still be difficult for TV viewers to avoid ads with these sorts of messages.

That’s especially the case with budget brands, which may even force controversial ads onto TVs when they’re idle, making users pay for low-priced TVs in unexpected, and sometimes troubling, ways.

An experience recently shared by an apparent Vizio TV owner illustrates how ads delivered via TV operating systems (OSes) can take ads from annoying to intrusive and offensive.

Reddit user DoubleJumps claimed last week that when their Vizio TV is idle, “it plays calming nature video, calming music, and then loops a message from the [T]rump admin[istration] telling illegal immigrants to gtfo over and over and over again.”

…what DoubleJumps detailed is completely within the scope of Vizio’s advertising efforts. Vizio TVs have something called Scenic Mode, which has the sets show, per Vizio, “relaxing, ambient content when your TV is idle for a period of time,” along with ads. Scenic Mode can be disabled, but if it’s enabled, the ads cannot be turned off. Vizio says the ads help it pay for things like the TVs’ free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels and help keep Vizio TV prices low.

Vizio also has ties to political ads. It has previously boasted about its work with “a political candidate on an ad campaign that combined CTV ads with our Household Connect omnichannel feature to reach potential voters both on their TV sets and on other opted in devices.” The company says it can play a “powerful role… in helping political campaigns reach their intended audiences.”

«

I’d love to say I’m sympathetic, but if you live in a culture suffused with advertising and never try to erase it, this really is what you’ll get. Apparently the owner is going to get rid of the TV. That’s a start.
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Earth AI’s algorithms found critical minerals in places everyone else ignored • TechCrunch

Tim De Chant:

»

Earth AI emerged from Teslyuk’s graduate studies. Teslyuk, a native of Ukraine, was working toward a doctorate at the University of Sydney, where he became familiar with the mining industry in Australia. There, the government owns the rights to mineral deposits, and it leases them in six-year terms. Since the 1970s, he said, exploration companies are required to submit their data to a national archive.

“For some reason, nobody’s using them,” he said. “If I could build an algorithm that can absorb all that knowledge and learn from the failures and successes of millions of geologists in the past, I can make much better predictions about where to find minerals in the future.”

Teslyuk started Earth AI as a software company focused on making predictions about potential deposits, then approaching customers who might be interested in exploring sites further. But the customers were hesitant to invest, in part because they didn’t want to bet millions on the predictions of an unproven technology.

“Mining is a very conservative industry,” Teslyuk said. “Everything outside of the approved dogma is considered heresy.”
So Earth AI decided to develop its own drilling equipment to prove that the sites it identified were as promising as its software suggested. The company was accepted to Y Combinator’s spring 2019 cohort, and it spent the next few years refining its hardware and software. In January, Earth AI raised a $20m Series B.

«

Slight correction on the optimistic headline: Earth AI’s algorithms claimed to have found critical minerals. Without digging there, nobody knows. The company’s website doesn’t show any proof of discovery, though it’s an interesting idea – why not apply ML to all that data?
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The Yankees’ ‘Torpedo’ bats that are breaking baseball, explained • SBNation.com

James Dator:

»

The New York Yankees have cracked the code when it comes to hitting dingers, and it’s raising massive questions about whether they’re simply leveraging existing rules, or bending them entirely too much. This year the club introduced a new bat featuring what they call a “Torpedo Barrel,” and it’s quite literally breaking the game of baseball.

This was most apparent on Saturday night in a 20-9 win over the Milwaukee Brewers in which the Yankees hit an astonishing nine home runs across seven players. Even if we take that game as an outlier, New York is still crushing the ball at an unseen rate — more than tripling the competition.

In 2024 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams averaged 182 home runs across the season for an average of 1.12 homers a game. Thus far in 2025 the Yankees already have 15 in three games, on pace for a record-breaking 810. The sample size is small, and obviously that won’t hold — but the result is still staggering as New York leads MLB in home runs, hitting three more than the Dodgers, despite playing two fewer games. That’s largely in part to the Torpedo Barrel.

At the most basic level it’s a new shape of bat. Rather than having an even taper from tip to grip, the Torpedo has a pronounced bulge in the barrel designed to redistribute the center of mass in the bat from the end, moving it down and where players most often make contact. The difference in bats is astonishing when seen side-by-side with a standard MLB bat.

Essentially what this change means is that the hitting of Yankees players is fundamentally altered. They are making contact with the sweet spot far more often, and plays which would normally be tip balls or flares are now converting into home runs.

«

It’s astonishing that it has taken this long – professional baseball has existed in the US since 1876. But these bats, which do what larger rackets did for tennis in the 1970s (enlarge the sweet spot/move it to where you actually make contact) have only been around since 2022. US pro baseball seems to be very resistant to change – right down to the use of a specific sort of mud that is rubbed into baseballs before they’re put into play.
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Anthropic can now track the bizarre inner workings of a large language model • MIT Technology Review

Will Douglas Heaven:

»

The AI firm Anthropic has developed a way to peer inside a large language model and watch what it does as it comes up with a response, revealing key new insights into how the technology works. The takeaway: LLMs are even stranger than we thought.

The Anthropic team was surprised by some of the counterintuitive workarounds that large language models appear to use to complete sentences, solve simple math problems, suppress hallucinations, and more, says Joshua Batson, a research scientist at the company.

It’s no secret that large language models work in mysterious ways. Few—if any—mass-market technologies have ever been so little understood. That makes figuring out what makes them tick one of the biggest open challenges in science.

But it’s not just about curiosity. Shedding some light on how these models work exposes their weaknesses, revealing why they make stuff up and why they can be tricked into going off the rails. It helps resolve deep disputes about exactly what these models can and can’t do. And it shows how trustworthy (or not) they really are.

Batson and his colleagues describe their new work in two reports published at the end of March. The first presents Anthropic’s use of a technique called circuit tracing, which lets researchers track the decision-making processes inside a large language model step by step. Anthropic used circuit tracing to watch its LLM Claude 3.5 Haiku carry out various tasks. The second (titled “On the Biology of a Large Language Model”) details what the team discovered when it looked at ten tasks in particular.

“I think this is really cool work,” says Jack Merullo, who studies large language models at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and was not involved in the research. “It’s a really nice step forward in terms of methods.”

Circuit tracing is not itself new. Last year Merullo and his colleagues analyzed a specific circuit in a version of OpenAI’s GPT-2, an older large language model that OpenAI released in 2019. But Anthropic has now analyzed a number of different circuits inside a far larger and far more complex model as it carries out multiple tasks. “Anthropic is very capable at applying scale to a problem,” says Merullo.

Eden Biran, who studies large language models at Tel Aviv University, agrees. “Finding circuits in a large state-of-the-art model such as Claude is a nontrivial engineering feat,” he says. “And it shows that circuits scale up and might be a good way forward for interpreting language models.”

«

Fun! But also: does that actually help us? At all?
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As AI takes his readers, a leading history publisher wonders what’s next • Big Technology

Alex Kantrowitz:

»

Late last year, Jan van der Crabben’s AI fears materialized. His World History Encyclopedia — the world’s second most visited history website — showed up in Google’s AI Overviews, synthesized and presented alongside other history sites. Then, its traffic cratered, dropping 25% in November.

Van der Crabben, the website’s CEO and founder, knew he was getting a preview of what many online publishers may soon experience. His site built a sizable audience with plenty of help from Google, which still accounts for 80% of its traffic. But as AI search and bots like ChatGPT ingest and summarize the web’s content, that traffic is starting to disappear. Now, his path forward is beginning to look murky.

“There used to be this implicit agreement between publishers and Google that basically, Google could scrape, analyze, process, and do whatever they wanted with publishers’ content and in return, they would send traffic to the publishers, send them readers,” he told me. “Now, this unspoken contract is kind of breaking.”

World History Encyclopedia is just one site and Van der Crabben’s anecdote is just one story, but the migration of readers from the web to AI summaries will likely continue. The internet has always favored ease. And using generative AI to find the most valuable parts of the web’s evergreen content — like recipes, personal finance, and history content — can be a better experience than poking through sites one by one.

…Van der Crabben is well aware that Google has helped him scale in the first place, but what’s different now, he said, is that the arrangement is no longer mutually beneficial. “Now it’s just Google that benefits,” he said. “And the same is true, let’s be honest, for ChatGPT, for Anthropic, for many of the AI chatbots that gobble up the content. And, for most of them, unless you sue them — which only a big corporation like Reuters can do — they are not going to pay you for it.”

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Why does Britain feel so poor? • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins:

»

Speaking at a rail conference last year, HS2 Chair Sir Jon Thompson said: “To build a railway between Euston and Curzon Street in Birmingham, I need 8,276 consents from other public bodies, planning, transport, the Environment Agency or Natural England. They don’t care whether parliament did or didn’t approve building a railway.”

Imagine for a moment the sheer human effort, the cost, the entire lives consumed by the gigantic national project of ticking each of those 8,276 checkboxes. It is absolutely correct that we have additional checks and balances, but this is an organically-grown system operating with no overall oversight or coherent strategy, spawning busy-work for thousands of people, much of it duplicated, unnecessary or redundant, much of it – like the infamous bat tunnel – having little provable benefit for things like environmental protection in the first place.

Indeed, improving things like the environment is not the de facto goal of this system, it is not what it was ‘designed’ or incentivised to accomplish. If it were, much of the money would be far better spent. I cannot stress this enough: this is not a battle between, say, infrastructure and the environment. It’s a battle between people who think we can do both, better; and people who seriously believe that a bat tunnel is the best way to spend £120m to support wildlife, a proposition for which no compelling evidence has ever been provided.

Meanwhile, local government veers towards bankruptcy, in large part because they’re mandated to write blank cheques for social care with no support or strategy from central government.

«

Robbins puts his finger on what feels wrong in this post. The box-ticking is certainly a big thing. The inability of anyone to cut through the Gordian knots is becoming destructive.
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Waltz and staff used Gmail for government communications, officials say • The Washington Post

John Hudson:

»

Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.

The use of Gmail, a far less secure method of communication than the encrypted messaging app Signal, is the latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials already under fire for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.

A senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict, according to emails reviewed by The Post. While the NSC official used his Gmail account, his interagency colleagues used government-issued accounts, headers from the email correspondence show.

Waltz has had less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information sent to his Gmail, such as his schedule and other work documents, said officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe what they viewed as problematic handling of information.

«

As a reminder, it was the hacking of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s Gmail account in 2016 which led to a raft of insane stories. Here we aren’t even starting with the hacking.
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Elon Musk says his AI business xAI has acquired X • Axios

Dan Primack:

»

Elon Musk said on Friday that xAI has acquired X, the social media app previously known as Twitter.

This is Musk trying to prevent his Twitter investors from losing money, and highlights his eagerness to meld different parts of his corporate empire.

Musk said that the all-stock merger valued xAI at $80bn and X at $45bn (including $12bn of debt). A source familiar with the situation says that the combined company would be valued at xAI plus X, absent some small adjustments.

For context, Musk paid $44bn to buy Twitter in late 2022, and some of its investors had marked the shares down by more than 70%. xAI was most recently valued at $50bn, in a late 2024 fundraising round.

The two companies have many shareholders in common, including venture firm Sequoia Capital and mutual fund manager Fidelity.

«

This is just transparent nonsense. There’s no way in the world that X is worth that amount of money compared to when it was sold: not in terms of users, not in terms of advertising it can attract, not in terms of revenue, not in terms of profit. So the number is totally made up, which makes the purchase a misuse of the xAI funds. But the investors won’t care because they’re getting shares in an AI company, and everyone knows they’re the New Fabulous Thing, at least until they turn out to be about as unique and sought-after as NFTs.
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The Signal chat leak and the NSA • Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier:

»

It’s common knowledge that the NSA’s mission is breaking into and eavesdropping on other countries’ networks. (During President George W. Bush’s administration, the NSA conducted warrantless taps into domestic communications as well—surveillance that several district courts ruled to be illegal before those decisions were later overturned by appeals courts. To this day, many legal experts maintain that the program violated federal privacy protections.) But the organization has a secondary, complementary responsibility: to protect US communications from others who want to spy on them. That is to say: While one part of the NSA is listening into foreign communications, another part is stopping foreigners from doing the same to Americans.

Those missions never contradicted during the Cold War, when allied and enemy communications were wholly separate. Today, though, everyone uses the same computers, the same software, and the same networks. That creates a tension.

When the NSA discovers a technological vulnerability in a service such as Signal (or buys one on the thriving clandestine vulnerability market), does it exploit it in secret, or reveal it so that it can be fixed? Since at least 2014, a US government interagency “equities” process has been used to decide whether it is in the national interest to take advantage of a particular security flaw, or to fix it. The trade-offs are often complicated and hard.

Waltz—along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the other officials in the Signal group—have just made the trade-offs much tougher to resolve. Signal is both widely available and widely used. Smaller governments that can’t afford their own military-grade encryption use it. Journalists, human rights workers, persecuted minorities, dissidents, corporate executives, and criminals around the world use it. Many of these populations are of great interest to the NSA.

At the same time, as we have now discovered, the app is being used for operational US military traffic. So, what does the NSA do if it finds a security flaw in Signal?

Previously, it might have preferred to keep the flaw quiet and use it to listen to adversaries. Now, if the agency does that, it risks someone else finding the same vulnerability and using it against the US government. And if it was later disclosed that the NSA could have fixed the problem and didn’t, then the results might be catastrophic for the agency.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Might the beautiful people in New York go to the restaurants with the best reviews? Perhaps! CC-licensed photo by Michele Ursino on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Just desert, thanks. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Things you should never do, part I • Joel on Software

Joel Spolsky:

»

We’re programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.

There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: it’s harder to read code than to write it.

This is why code reuse is so hard. This is why everybody on your team has a different function they like to use for splitting strings into arrays of strings. They write their own function because it’s easier and more fun than figuring out how the old function works.

As a corollary of this axiom, you can ask almost any programmer today about the code they are working on. “It’s a big hairy mess,” they will tell you. “I’d like nothing better than to throw it out and start over.”

Why is it a mess?

“Well,” they say, “look at this function. It is two pages long! None of this stuff belongs in there! I don’t know what half of these API calls are for.”

Before Borland’s new spreadsheet for Windows shipped, Philippe Kahn, the colourful founder of Borland, was quoted a lot in the press bragging about how Quattro Pro would be much better than Microsoft Excel, because it was written from scratch. All new source code! As if source code rusted.

The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Au contraire, baby! Is software supposed to be like an old Dodge Dart, that rusts just sitting in the garage? Is software like a teddy bear that’s kind of gross if it’s not made out of all new material?

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This is in the context of the Musk project to rewrite the code of the Social Security Agency (SSA) from COBOL to Java. And sure, you can use AI to help! (It won’t help. You’ll need to check everything. And that’s before we get to the subsystems that rely on it.)

One commenter yesterday pointed out that this is essentially a ruse to make SSA collapse because the code doesn’t work, and make people use private means instead. Of course it won’t work, for the reasons Spolsky explains above. The US is about to enter a very dark time.
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Twitter (X) hit by 2.8 billion profile data leak in alleged insider job • Hackread

“Waqas”:

»

ThinkingOne, a well-known figure on Breach Forums for their skill in analyzing data leaks, decided to combine the 2025 leak with the 2023 one, producing a single 34GB CSV file (9GB compressed) containing 201 million merged entries. To be clear, the merged data only includes users that appeared in both incidents, creating a confusion of public and semi-public data.

This messy combination led many to believe that the 2025 leak also contained email addresses, but that’s not the case. The emails shown in the merged file are from the 2023 breach. The presence of emails in the merged dataset has given the wrong impression that the contents of the 2025 leak also include email addresses.

As of Jan 2025, X (formerly Twitter) had around 335.7 million users, so how is it possible that data from 2.8 billion users has been leaked? One possible explanation is that the dataset includes aggregated or historical data, such as bot accounts that were created and later banned, inactive or deleted accounts that still lingered in historical records, or old data that was merged with newer data, increasing the total number of records.

Additionally, some entries might not even represent real users but could include non-user entities like API accounts, developer bots, deleted or banned profiles that remained logged somewhere, or organization and brand accounts that aren’t tied to individual users.

Another possibility is that the leaked data wasn’t exclusively obtained from Twitter itself but rather scraped from multiple public sources and merged together, including archived data from older leaks or information from third-party services linked to Twitter accounts.

«

Or, how about this for a third possibility, it’s mostly junk. It’s just about possible that there have, historically, been more than a billion entries in the Twitter (now X) database, but this all feels fanciful. And also: unimportant, for the most part.
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LooksMapping

Riley Walz:

»

I scraped millions of Google Maps restaurant reviews, and gave each reviewer’s profile picture to an AI model that rates how hot they are out of 10. This map shows how attractive each restaurant’s clientele is. Red means hot, blue means not.

The model is certainly biased. It’s certainly flawed. But we judge places by the people who go there. We always have. And are we not also flawed? This website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day. A mirror held up to our collective vanity.

«

There’s a paper explaining the methodology of the website. Which has a wonderfully retro 2005 “look we discovered the Google Maps API!” appearance. Walz has form for doing interesting little projects like this.
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Can an interstellar generation ship maintain a population on a 250-year trip to a habitable exoplanet? • Centauri Dreams

Paul Gilster:

»

One issue is not mentioned, despite the journey duration. Over the quarter millennium voyage, there will be evolution as the organisms adapt to the ship’s environment. Data from the ISS has shown that bacteria may mutate into more virulent pathogens. A population living in close quarters will encourage pandemics. Ionizing radiation from the sun and secondaries from the hull of a structure damages cells including their DNA. 250 years of exposure to residual GCR and secondaries will damage DNA of all life on the starship.

However, even without this direct effect on DNA, the conditions will result in organisms evolving as they adapt to the conditions on the starship, especially the small populations, increasing genetic drift. This evolution, even of complex life, can be quite fast, as the continuing monitoring of the Galápagos island finches observed by Darwin attests. Of particular concern is the creation of pathogens that will impact both humans and the food supply.

In the 1970s, the concept of a microbiome in humans, animals, and some plants was unknown, although bacteria were part of nutrient cycling. Now we know much more about the need for humans to maintain a microbiome, as well as some food crops. This could become a source of pathogens. While a space habitat can just flush out the agricultural infrastructure and replace it, no such possibility exists for the starship. Crops would need to be kept in isolated compartments to prevent a disease outbreak from destroying all the crops in the ECLSS [Environmental Control and. Life Support System].

If all this wasn’t difficult enough, the competition asks that the target generation population find a ready-made terrestrial habitat/terraformed environment to slip into on arrival. This presumably was prebuilt by a robotic system that arrived ahead of the crewed starship to build the infrastructure and create the environment ready for the human crew. It is the Mars agricultural problem writ large, with no supervision from humans to correct mistakes. If robots could do this on an exoplanet, couldn’t they make terrestrial habitats throughout the solar system?

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It’s a long post, but this part stood out to me.
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The tech fantasy that powers AI is running on fumes • The New York Times

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

»

Behold the decade of mid tech!

That is what I want to say every time someone asks me, “What about A.I.?” with the breathless anticipation of a boy who thinks this is the summer he finally gets to touch a boob.

…Most of us aren’t using A.I. to save lives faster and better. We are using A.I. to make mediocre improvements, such as emailing more. Even the most enthusiastic papers about A.I.’s power to augment white-collar work have struggled to come up with something more exciting than “A brief that once took two days to write will now take two hours!”

Mid tech’s best innovation is a threat.

A.I. is one of many technologies that promise transformation through iteration rather than disruption. Consumer automation once promised seamless checkout experiences that empowered customers to bag our own groceries. It turns out that checkout automation is pretty mid — cashiers are still better at managing points of sale. A.I.-based facial recognition similarly promised a smoother, faster way to verify who you are at places like the airport. But the T.S.A.’s adoption of the technology (complete with unresolved privacy concerns) hasn’t particularly revolutionized the airport experience or made security screening lines shorter. I’ll just say, it all feels pretty mid to me.

The economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo call these kinds of technological fizzles “so-so” technologies. They change some jobs. They’re kind of nifty for a while. Eventually they become background noise or are flat-out annoying, say, when you’re bagging two weeks’ worth of your own groceries.

Artificial intelligence is supposedly more radical than automation. Tech billionaires promise us that workers who can’t or won’t use A.I. will be left behind. Politicians promise to make policy that unleashes the power of A.I. to do … something, though many of them aren’t exactly sure what. Consumers who fancy themselves early adopters get a lot of mileage out of A.I.’s predictive power, but they accept a lot of bugginess and poor performance to live in the future before everyone else.

The rest of us are using this technology for far more mundane purposes. A.I. spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our calendars are overscheduled and helps write emails that no one wants. That’s a mid revolution of mid tasks.

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These days, it’s quite easy to be an AI sceptic. But also: it’s hard to find the things that most of us find really useful.
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Careless People book review: Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Facebook memoir reveals Meta’s global problems • Rest of World

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya:

»

In recounting events, the author glosses over her own indifference to repeated warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. that ultimately led to serious harm to communities. She briefly mentions how Facebook’s local staff was held at gunpoint to give access to data or remove content in various countries — something that had been happening since as early as 2012. Yet, she failed to grasp the gravity of these risks until the possibility of her facing jail time arises in South Korea — or even more starkly in March 2016, when Facebook’s vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, was arrested in Brazil.

Her delayed reckoning underscores how Facebook’s leadership remains largely detached from real-world consequences of their decisions until they become impossible to ignore. Perhaps because everyone wants to be a hero of their own story, Wynn-Williams frames her opposition to leadership decisions as isolated; in reality, powerful resistance had long existed within what Wynn-Williams describes as Facebook’s “lower-level employees.”

…Throughout her recollections, Wynn-Williams describes extravagant off-sites, high-profile meetings, and grandiose visions to “sell” Facebook to world leaders. But the truth is, policy outside the U.S. took unglamorous and thankless grunt work, deep contextual and political expertise, and years of trust-building with communities — all faced with the routine risk of arrests and illegal detention. By trying to be the Everyman, she undermines experts, civil society, and local teams who informed her work. These glaring omissions speak to both Facebook’s indifference and moral superiority toward the rest of the world — even from its most well-meaning leaders.

Despite telling an incomplete story, Careless People is a book that took enormous courage to write. This is Wynn-Williams’ story to tell, and it is an important one. It goes to show that we need many stories — especially from those who still can’t be heard — if we are to meaningfully piece together the complex puzzle of one of the world’s most powerful technology companies.

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Enzyme engineering: new method selectively destroys disease-causing proteins • Phys.org

Scripps Research Institute:

»

Scientists have long struggled to target proteins that lack defined structure and are involved in cancer, neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease, and other serious illnesses. Now, a new study from Scripps Research demonstrates a proof of concept for a new strategy: engineering proteases—enzymes that cut proteins at specific sites—to selectively degrade these elusive targets with high precision in the proteome of human cells.

Published on March 24, 2025, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study shows how to reprogram a protease from botulinum toxin to target α-Synuclein—a protein with unstructured regions used here as a model. The study marks one proof point in a broader approach that could be applied to a wide range of targets across the proteome.

“This work highlights how we can use the power of laboratory evolution to engineer proteases that offer a new way to treat diseases caused by hard-to-target proteins,” says senior author Pete Schultz, the President and CEO of Scripps Research, where he also holds the L.S. “Sam” Skaggs Presidential Chair. “It’s an exciting step toward developing new therapeutic strategies for diseases that lack effective treatments.”

The research builds on botulinum toxin, a bacterial protein best known for its use in Botox, a medication utilized for cosmetic purposes and certain medical conditions. This toxin naturally contains a protease. In its original form, the protease only targets SNAP-25—a protein essential for transmitting signals between nerve cells. By degrading SNAP-25, botulinum toxin disrupts nerve signaling, leading to the temporary paralysis effect seen after Botox treatments.

To reprogram this precision for α-Synuclein, the research team modified the enzyme using directed evolution, a laboratory process that involves introducing mutations and selecting variants with improved function over multiple cycles. The result: Protease 5.

…When tested in human cells, Protease 5 nearly eliminated all α-Synuclein proteins, suggesting it could help prevent the harmful buildup seen in Parkinson’s disease. And because the enzyme was designed to precisely target α-Synuclein, it didn’t cause toxicity or disrupt essential cellular functions.

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Only a proof of concept, but a really interesting one. You can imagine that they have their eyes on Alzheimer’s disease, which also involves malformed protein deposits.
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The Gen X career meltdown • The New York Times

Steven Kurutz:

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Gen X-ers [born between the mid-1960s and late 1970s] grew up as the younger siblings of the baby boomers, but the media landscape of their early adult years closely resembled that of the 1950s: a tactile analog environment of landline telephones, tube TV sets, vinyl records, glossy magazines and newspapers that left ink on your hands.

When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn’t seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete.

More than a dozen members of Generation X interviewed for this article said they now find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields.

“My peers, friends and I continue to navigate the unforeseen obsolescence of the career paths we chose in our early 20s,” Mr. Wilcha said. “The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed — it’s just gone. It’s startling.”

Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.

Karen McKinley, 55, an advertising executive in Minneapolis, has seen talented colleagues “thrown away,” she said, as agencies have merged, trimmed staff and focused on fast, cheap social media content over elaborate photo shoots.

“Twenty years ago, you would actually have a shoot,” Ms. McKinley said. “Now, you may use influencers who have no advertising background.”

In the wake of the influencers comes another threat, artificial intelligence, which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5% of the industry’s work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester.

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Apple might buy $1bn worth of Nvidia servers • Quartz

Ece Yildrim:

»

The tech giant is reportedly placing roughly $1bn worth of orders of Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 server platform, including the company’s next-generation Blackwell Ultra chips, built by Super Micro and Dell. With each server costing around $3.7m to $4m, Baruah estimates that Apple is buying approximately 250 servers. Apple didn’t immediately respond to Quartz’s request for comment.

Baruah expects Apple to use these servers to run or train generative AI large language models. The move could have stemmed from the intense backlash Apple received in response to its decision to delay a much-anticipated generative AI upgrade of its voice assistant Siri.

Apple began working on integrating advanced AI technology into its products as part of its Apple Intelligence initiative, which the company introduced last June at its annual developer conference, WWDC.

The tech giant first teased a so-called “LLM Siri” based on advanced large language models last year, in an effort to scale its generative AI capabilities and catch up to industry rivals like OpenAI and Amazon.

Although an arrival date was never publicly set, LLM Siri was widely anticipated to come in an iOS 18.4 upgrade expected next month. Now, the AI-infused Siri will likely be unveiled next year. Apple pulled its previous ads featuring the capability.

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If this is Apple’s response, then.. it’s a little late? Unless they really think they can train these models up that quickly and make a difference, in which case the new Siri leadership has lit a fire under the staff.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Can you smile like Mark Zuckerberg? (What do you mean, he doesn’t smile?) A new webcam game will test you. CC-licensed photo by Enrique Dans 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. We are not amused. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

DOGE plans to rebuild SSA code base in months, risking benefits and system collapse • WIRED

Makena Kelly:

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The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

“Of course, one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se; [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” an SSA technologist tells WIRED.

The Social Security Administration did not immediately reply to WIRED’s request for comment.

SSA has been under increasing scrutiny from president Donald Trump’s administration. In February, Musk took aim at SSA, falsely claiming that the agency was rife with fraud. Specifically, Musk pointed to data he allegedly pulled from the system that showed 150-year-olds in the US were receiving benefits, something that isn’t actually happening. Over the last few weeks, following significant cuts to the agency by DOGE, SSA has suffered frequent website crashes and long wait times over the phone, The Washington Post reported this week.

…Sources within SSA expect the project to begin in earnest once DOGE identifies and marks remaining beneficiaries as deceased and connecting disparate agency databases. In a Thursday morning court filing, an affidavit from SSA acting administrator Leland Dudek said that at least two DOGE operatives are currently working on a project formally called the “Are You Alive Project,” targeting what these operatives believe to be improper payments and fraud within the agency’s system by calling individual beneficiaries.

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This is going to go wrong. One can predict that with certainty. The only question is how wrong. Badly wrong? Quickly wrong? Enormously wrong? All of those wrong? And the other question is: why? What’s to be gained? Nobody seems able or willing to explain that crucial question.
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iOS 19.4 rumoured to revamp Health app with new coaching feature • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

In his Power On newsletter today, Gurman said Apple plans to offer a new AI-powered health coaching feature that offers personalized health recommendations.

The information provided by the coaching feature would be accompanied by videos from health experts that inform users about various health conditions and ways to make lifestyle improvements. For example, Gurman said if the Apple Watch tracks poor heart-rate trends, a video could explain the risks of heart disease.

It is possible that the feature could eventually be part of an Apple Health+ service.

Food tracking will be another big part of the revamped Health app, which could compete with the MyFitnessPal app, according to Gurman.

Apple is also aiming for the AI-powered coaching feature to provide users with fitness-related tips, such as how to improve their technique during workouts. This feature could eventually be built into the Apple Fitness+ service.

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I can’t remember who observed that Apple increasingly seems to be thinking of new features which are aimed at semi-geriatric users, but they’re right. I’ll reserve judgement on the AI-powered coaching, but I don’t have high hopes. If Apple hasn’t got its LLM-based Siri/AI out of the door this year, is it really going to blow the doors off with AI-powered advice on how you’re lifting wrong?
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Nuclear startup Terrestrial Energy goes public via SPAC, netting $280m in merger • TechCrunch

Tim De Chant:

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Terrestrial Energy, a small nuclear startup, merged with an acquisition company on Wednesday. 

The North Carolina-based company is developing small modular reactors and expects to net $280m from the deal. Before the SPAC merger, Terrestrial Energy had raised $94m, according to PitchBook. The combined entity expects to list on Nasdaq under the symbol IMSR.

The ticker is a reference to Terrestrial Energy’s flavor of small modular reactor (SMR), which it calls an integral molten salt reactor. In such a device, uranium fuel is mixed with various salts, such as lithium fluoride or sodium fluoride, that serve to suspend the nuclear fuel and act as the reactor’s main coolant.

Terrestrial Energy’s reactor core is designed to be entirely replaced every seven years, in part to head off some of the problems earlier molten salt reactors experienced like corrosion. The reactor core includes not only the fuel and graphite modulators that regulate the speed of the fission reactions, but also the heat exchangers and pumps that keep the salt cool and flowing.

The startup is targeting a range of markets, including electric power, data centers, and industrial applications that require heat.

There are many extant proposals to build commercial-scale molten salt reactors, but to date, none have been built. The basic technology was invented in the 1950s, but two experiments from that era were plagued with problems.

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The link there in the final sentence is extremely gloomy about the potential for molten salt reactors, so we’ll have to see whether Terrestrial can live up to its promises.
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The Myanmar quake is the first major disaster to suffer the brunt of Donald Trump’s devastating cuts • Sky News

Dominic Waghorn:

»

Trump’s decision to shut down the US Agency for International Development was already reported to have decimated US aid operations in Myanmar. Its global impact is hard to overstate. American aid had provided 40% of developmental aid worldwide.

Yesterday, Trump promised Myanmar aid for the earthquake. In reality, his administration has fired most of the people most experienced at organising that help and shut down the means to provide it.

The last of its staff were ironically only let go yesterday even as the president was making lofty promises to help.

The US State Department says it has maintained a team of experts in the country. But former USAID officials say the system is now ‘in shambles’ without the wherewithal to conduct search and rescue or transfer aid.

As they count the cost of this massive earthquake, the people of Myanmar will be hoping, though, for a silver lining, that the disaster may hasten the fall of their despised dictator.

The catastrophe comes at a very bad time for General Min Aung Hlaing, who seized power in a coup four years ago. The Myanmar junta is losing a civil war against an array of opposition forces, ceding territory and now largely kettled into the country’s big cities. Some of the earthquake’s worst damage has been done in the junta’s urban strongholds.

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More than 1,600 people have died in the earthquake, which is a terrible human price to pay for both Trump (and Musk) and the junta.
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How not to build an AI Institute • Chalmermagne

Alex Chalmers looks in detail at how the Alan Turing Institute (ATI) got to its current position – ie effectively useless:

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The story of the ATI is, in many ways, the story of the UK’s approach to technology.

Firstly, drift. The UK has chopped and changed its approach to technology repeatedly, choosing seven different sets of priority technologies between 2012 and 2023. Government has variously championed the tech industry as a source of jobs, a vehicle for exports, a means of fixing public services, and a way of expanding the UK’s soft power. These are all legitimate goals, but half-heartedly attempting all of them over a decade is a surefire means of accomplishing relatively little.

Connected to this is our second challenge: everythingism. My friend Joe Hill described this aptly as “the belief that every government policy can be about every other government policy, and that there are no real costs to doing that”. This results in policymakers loading costs onto existing projects, at the expense of efficiency and prioritisation.

As the ATI’s original goals were so vague, it was a prime target. Even before the ATI was up and running, the government announced that it would also be a body responsible for allocating funding for fintech projects. It then had a data ethics group bolted onto it as a result of a 2016 select committee report. As one ex-insider put it, “there was never a superordinate goal”.

Finally, the perils of the UK government’s dependence on the country’s universities for research. The UK has historically channelled 80% of its non-business R&D through universities, versus 40-60% for many peer nations.

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Back in December 2024 there was this story about “Staff at Britain’s AI institute in open revolt“. Everyone, including the staff, seems to think it hasn’t kept pace with the changes in AI in the past three years.
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AI models miss disease in Black and female patients • Science

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega:

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From programs designed to detect irregular heartbeats in electrocardiograms to software that tracks eye movements to diagnose autism in children, artificial intelligence (AI) is helping physicians fine-tune the care they provide patients. But for all the technology’s potential for automating tasks, a growing body of evidence also shows that AI can be prone to bias that disadvantages already vulnerable patients. A new study, published in Science Advances, adds to this work by testing one of the most cited AI models used to scan chest x-rays for diseases—and finding the model doesn’t accurately detect potentially life-threatening diseases in marginalized groups, including women and Black people.

These results “are interesting and timely,” says Kimberly Badal, a computational biologist at the University of California (UC), San Francisco, who was not involved in the new study. “We are at the point in history where we’re moving to deploy a lot of AI models into clinical care,” she says, but “we don’t really know” how they affect different groups of people.

The model used in the new study, called CheXzero, was developed in 2022 by a team at Stanford University using a data set of almost 400,000 chest x-rays of people from Boston with conditions such as pulmonary edema, an accumulation of fluids in the lungs. Researchers fed their model the x-ray images without any of the associated radiologist reports, which contained information about diagnoses. And yet, CheXzero was just as good as the radiologists in reading the diseases associated with each x-ray.

Given AI models’ tendencies for bias, Yuzhe Yang, a computer scientist at UC Los Angeles wanted to assess the Stanford team’s model for such biases. His team selected a subset of 666 x-ray images from the same data set that was used to train the model: the data set’s only images that also came with radiologists’ diagnoses and information about each patient’s age, sex, and race. The team then fed these images to CheXzero and compared the results against the radiologists’ diagnoses.

Compared with the patients’ doctors, the AI model more often failed to detect the presence of disease in Black patients or women, as well in those 40 years or younger. When the researchers looked at race and sex combined, Black women fell to the bottom, with the AI not detecting disease in half of them for conditions such as cardiomegaly, or enlargement of the heart.

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Are we surprised? No we are not. The problem of using insufficient training data is a persistent one in AI.
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smile like zuck

»

The secret to a perfect Zuck smile is his mouth and eyes. Focus on those.

Remember to keep the right amount of life in your eyes!

This site requires webcam access, but your face never leaves your computer.

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There’s more explanation at this site. You can also do a “no smile” to “total Zuck smile” at this site, so you know what your target is. Remember, a Zuck smile isn’t like a human smile. It’s not meant to express happiness, empathy or any of that nonsense.
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Agencies say Google reps are pressuring clients on AI ad tools • Digiday

Marty Swant:

»

Ad agencies have long fielded relentless pitches from Google Ads reps pushing new products in search of more money. But now, agencies of all sizes say the pressure is intensifying, with reps pushing harder to drive adoption of automated tools like Performance Max and generative AI features.

Google Ads sales reps are increasingly contacting agencies’ clients with advice that at times contradicts agency strategies — and in some cases mismanages campaigns — according to range of media agencies in the U.S. and U.K. Sources. They also say the tactics feel more aggressive and more inappropriate than in the past.

Many agencies say the efforts seem designed to sow confusion, discredit agencies and ultimately cut them out of the picture. For example, agencies claim that when they reject Google reps’ misaligned advice, the reps go around them — directly to clients — discrediting the agency by implying they don’t understand how Google Ads work. PPC professionals also shared similar concerns in a recent Reddit thread, where one user likened the issue to “being told your house needs paint by the guy who sells the paint and does the job.”

Agencies have been left agencies scrambling, said Ian Harris, founder of Agency Hackers, a U.K.-based community of indie agencies. To address the problem, Agency Hackers has created a new “Don’t Be Evil” campaign for agencies to share their experiences and frustrations about Google’s ad-sales tactics.

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Reflecting on TikTok’s role in society as new ban deadline approaches • The New York Times

Brian Chen:

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TikTok’s effectiveness at keeping people scrolling has been a topic of widespread concern among parents and academic researchers who wonder whether people could be considered addicted to the app, similar to video game addiction.

Studies on the topic are continuing and remain inconclusive. One, published last year and led by Christian Montag, a professor of cognitive and brain sciences at the University of Macau in China, examined TikTok overuse. Very few people in the study, which involved 378 participants of various ages, reported feeling addicted to TikTok.
Yet broadly speaking, the consensus from multiple studies on TikTok and other social media apps is that younger people are more likely to report feeling addicted, Dr. Montag said in an interview.

“I think children should not at all be on these platforms,” he said about TikTok and similar apps. People’s brains can take at least 20 years to mature and self regulate, he added.

A TikTok spokeswoman said the app included tools for people to manage their screen time, including a new setting for parents to block TikTok from working on their children’s phones during certain hours of the day.

…TikTok was banned in the first place because American government officials worry that ByteDance could share the data it has collected on its American users with the Chinese government for espionage purposes.

Those concerns culminated in a Supreme Court hearing in January, where the Biden administration made its case for banning the app, citing concerns that TikTok could create a new pathway for Chinese intelligence services to infiltrate American infrastructure. But officials did not present evidence that TikTok was connected to such threats.

TikTok has, however, been linked to smaller data scandals in the United States. TikTok confirmed in 2022 that four of its employees had been fired for using the app to snoop on several journalists in an effort to track down their sources.

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At this stage it would be astonishing if Trump banned TikTok. Even the proposal of a sale of its US assets or control to an American company looks remote.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Earlier this century Volvo had an anti-theft device that relied on your heartbeat. Why do you think it died? CC-licensed photo by Lars P. on Flickr.

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

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

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

OpenAI halts Studio Ghibli-style images trend • EWeek

Fiona Jackson:

»

If you’ve been wondering why your social media feeds have been awash with Studio Ghibli-style images this week, OpenAI’s new image generator is the answer. On Tuesday, the company embedded the multimodal tool into GPT-4o, and users have been transforming their photos into vibrant, whimsical scenes reminiscent of the Japanese animation studio behind “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro.”

OpenAI’s new image generator allows you to upload an existing image to ChatGPT and simply ask it to change the art style in the accompanying text prompt. Even OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman Ghibli-fied his X profile picture and playfully lamented about how his decade of work in AI has boiled down to people editing their photos into these images. 

However, the fun didn’t last long. The system card for GPT-4o’s native image generator states as of Thursday that OpenAI “added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist.” OpenAI acknowledged that the fact its tool can emulate named artists’ styles “has raised important questions and concerns within the creative community.”

The same was written in DALL-E 3’s system card from 2023, so OpenAI is not making a wild U-turn on its position when it comes to AI art ownership and copyright. Nevertheless, there is an ongoing debate about whether AI companies violate copyright law by training their models on publicly available content. 

Ironically, Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki is vocally anti-AI. While not specifically addressing the copyright debate, he referred to AI-generated artwork as “creepy stuff” and that he “would never wish to incorporate this technology into (his) work at all” in 2016, as shown in NHK’s “Never-Ending Man” documentary.

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Earlier on Thursday there had been some chatter that the Ghibli-style stuff was OK (given it would have had to have come from vacuuming up entire films) because Japan has different copyright laws which do allow AI training. No confirmation of that has emerged, though, and the “living artist” block has come down.
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Facebook launches Friends tab: a new feed that ditches algorithmic junk • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Facebook is trying to go back to its roots with a new “Friends” tab that filters out the algorithmic recommendations that have taken over its main feed. The new tab is rolling out in the US and Canada, and will show your friends’ stories, reels, posts, and birthdays.

In a blog post announcing the feature, the company says, “Over the years, Facebook evolved to meet changing needs and created best-in-class experiences across Groups, Video, Marketplace and more, but the magic of friends has fallen away.”

Facebook previously housed friend requests and friend suggestions within the Friends tab, but now it’s been replaced by a dedicated friends-only feed. I’m not sure I’ll find many recent posts there, but it might be a reprieve from the sponsored content and random group posts that have drowned out all other content on my home feed.

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This is interesting: essentially it’s accepting that all the AI slop which has taken over the algorithmic feed is a big turnoff for a lot of people, and so this redesign is trying to make that go away, or at least offer an option that makes that vanish. The first sign that slop is properly detrimental to user experience and, more importantly, to time spent on the app, which is what Meta really notices.
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You need to use Signal’s nickname feature • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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According to screenshots of the chats and the group chat’s members published by The Atlantic on Wednesday, the outlet’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg used the display name “JG” on Signal. He also said in the original article that he displayed as JG. Presumably National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who accidentally added Goldberg, added the wrong JG. This is a big, big mistake obviously.

But there is a somewhat overlooked setting inside Signal that can ensure you don’t make the same mistake. It’s the nickname feature.

…You can add your own nickname to a Signal contact by clicking on the person’s profile picture in a chat with them then clicking “Nickname.” Signal says “Nicknames & notes are stored with Signal and end-to-end encrypted. They are only visible to you.” So, you can add a nickname to a Jason saying “co-founder,” or maybe “national security adviser,” and no one else is going to see it. Just you. When you’re trying to make a group chat, perhaps.

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Simple advice. One could probably charge a very high consultancy fee for doing this for, say, a government struggling with catastrophic information leakage.
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Volvo’s heartbeat-sensing anti-carjacking technology was Y2K safety at its weirdest • Hagerty Media

Benjamin Hunting:

»

Every once in a while, an automaker debuts a feature that is truly unique, standing apart from everything else on the market. In some cases, these novel technologies serve as the thin end of a wedge that opens up a whole new world of vehicle development, with rivals quickly co-opting and branding their own version of the innovation.

In others, you end up standing in a parking lot in the year 2006, watching “Ray the Burglar” be apprehended by a security system that’s been specifically designed to detect his heartbeat as he hides in the backseat, like some digital combination of Sherlock Holmes and Robocop.

Such was the media introduction given to the most intriguing capability of Volvo’s Personal Car Communicator, a thin slab of plastic that initially served as a super-fob for the flagship S80 sedan. Billed as a bulwark against the threat of kidnappers, carjackers, and bloodthirsty murderers who were apparently lurking around every corner of a Volvo owner’s action-packed existence, the heartbeat sensor was an entirely singular high-tech achievement that no other car company ever came close to implementing in any of their vehicles.

What prompted Volvo, a brand known for sensibility and safety above all else, to infer that its customers were living a lifestyle that required this level of electronic overwatch to keep them from becoming just another statistic on a police blotter? And why didn’t the heartbeat sensor catch on long-term in the industry—or even with Volvo’s modern-day lineup? It turns out that the answers to those questions are tied directly to the times that produced this utterly unusual, and unforgettable, feature.

«

It’s a wild ride of a story. Odd how this technology hasn’t continued, eh. (Might there be people out there still using it?)
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Six unsettling thoughts Google’s former CEO has about artificial intelligence • NPR

Steve Inskeep:

»

Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, is thinking about artificial intelligence – how it interacts with humans, and how it may reshape democracy. Or replace it.

Schmidt coauthored a new book, Genesis, with former Microsoft executive Craig Mundie and the late Henry Kissinger, who died in 2023 about a year before the book’s publication.

Kissinger, Schmidt says, had been thinking about the nature of reality “since before we were born,” and used some of his final years exploring how technology might warp our understanding of reality.

Genesis includes a story from history: the Spanish conquistadors who invaded present-day Mexico in 1519. The ruling Aztecs seem to have mistaken the newcomers for gods. Their emperor first met them, took their advice, and then became their hostage before the conquistadors simply took over.

That’s the unsettling start to a chapter that asks if AI might conquer us.

«

Those six thoughts:
• AI will be available to almost anyone
• AI can be a tool for demagogues
• People are interacting with tech they don’t fully grasp
• Tech leaders may not grasp the implications either
• People might allow themselves to be governed by AI
• The recent presidential inauguration showed a concentration of [tech] power.

Plenty of expansion in the article.
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Turkish female coders leave tech industry over sexism • Rest of World

Kaya Genç:

»

Turkish women who become software engineers generally expect a secure career that can vault them to a better position in society. Instead, they’ve found they are a mistreated and undervalued minority. In Turkey’s tech industry, less than a quarter of workers are women, according to various surveys — lower than the global average of 28%. Female IT engineers have complained about male-dominated workplaces, with 70% saying it negatively affected their careers, according to a 2018 report by consulting firm Deloitte Turkey and the Information Technology Industrialists Association. 

At  the same time, the government is pushing for women to prioritize their families over work. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said that women should have at least three children. In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention, which prevents and fights violence against women. 

Rather than face the turbulent social conditions, many young IT professionals, particularly women, are choosing to leave the country, according to Füsun Sarp Nebil, a tech entrepreneur and CEO of the technology journalism website Turk Internet.

“The increasing pressure in recent years, the obstructions on social life, like the cancellation of concerts, the lack of freedom of expression, the environment of violence … disturbs young people and especially women,” Nebil told Rest of World.

“Salaries are at the bottom of the list of reasons for leaving Turkey,” she said.

«

Turkey withdrawing from the Istanbul Convention is quite the irony.
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California now has 48% more EV chargers than gasoline nozzles in the state • Governor of California

California Governor’s office:

»

Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that California has reached 178,549 public and shared private electric vehicle (EV) chargers installed statewide. 

In a significant milestone for the state, California now has 48% more public and shared private EV chargers than the number of gasoline nozzles. The California Energy Commission (CEC) estimates there are about 120,000 gas nozzles in the state, compared to 178,000 public and shared private chargers.

Governor Gavin Newsom said: “As the federal government works to make it harder for you to charge your electric car, California is doing the opposite. We now have nearly 50% more chargers than gas nozzles in the state, meaning you have more options than ever to charge your vehicle.

“We’re embracing our clean car future and providing consumers more choices – no matter what ‘big government’ mandates come out of Washington.”

Out of the more than 178,000 EV chargers installed in the state, over 162,000 are Level 2 chargers, and nearly 17,000 are fast chargers. In addition to the public network, the CEC estimates that more than 700,000 Level 2 chargers are installed statewide in single-family homes.

“The California EV driver experience is getting better by the day,” said CEC Chair David Hochschild. “The state continues to invest in EV infrastructure, with particular emphasis in hard-to-reach areas, making these vehicles an easy choice for new car buyers.”

California dominates in zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) infrastructure efforts, dedicating billions to support clean transportation goals. With more EVs on the road every day, consumers are responding to the state’s efforts to build a bigger, better, and more reliable charging network. 

«

California has about 13.2m vehicles, of which at December 2023 – the last data update – a total of 1.8m are electric. Probably moved on a fair bit since then.
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Carbon credit auditors suspended in sham rice-farming offsets • Climate Change News

Matteo Civillini:

»

Carbon credit registry Verra has suspended activities by four auditors related to carbon credit projects they vetted in China which claimed bogus emission reductions.

In an unprecedented move, TÜV Nord, China Classification Society Certification Company, China Quality Certification Center and CTI Certification will be prevented from auditing agriculture and forestry offsetting schemes on Verra’s registry. For German certification giant TÜV Nord, the measures will only apply to its operations in China. It is the first time Verra has taken such measures.

The auditors certified the activities of 37 programmes that aimed to slash planet-heating methane gas releases from rice fields across China, resulting in the generation of millions of carbon offsets. But Verra revoked the projects in August 2024 after a 17-month review found a string of integrity failures that the auditors had failed to identify.

Before this week’s suspension, Climate Home previously reported on ten of these projects closely linked to energy company Shell and revealed evidence raising serious doubts over whether any emission-cutting activities had been carried out on the ground at all.

Nearly two million worthless carbon credits produced by the projects – and partly used to offset emissions from Shell’s gas business – still need to be compensated.

«

So not only are the carbon credit schemes often a scam, the auditors do a poor job.
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Paralysed man stands again after receiving “reprogrammed” stem cells • Nature

Smriti Mallapaty:

»

A paralysed man can stand on his own after receiving an injection of neural stem cells to treat his spinal cord injury. The Japanese man was one of four individuals in a first-of-its-kind trial that used reprogrammed stem cells to treat people who are paralysed.

Another man can now move his arms and legs following the treatment, but the two others did not show substantial improvements. The trial was run by Hideyuki Okano, a stem-cell scientist at Keio University in Tokyo, and his colleagues.

The results, which were announced at a press conference on 21 March and have not yet been peer reviewed, suggest that the treatment is safe, say researchers.

“That’s a great positive outcome. It’s very exciting for the field,” says James St John, a translational neuroscientist at Griffith University in the Gold Coast, Australia.

Previous trials using other types of stem cell have also demonstrated that the therapy is safe, but have so far shown mixed results. “Nothing’s really worked so far,” says St John.

Larger trials will be needed to establish whether the improvements observed in the two individuals in the current study were a result of the treatment. It’s possible the patients experienced a natural recovery, says St John.

In 2019, roughly 0.9 million people globally experienced a spinal cord injury, and some 20 million people were living with the condition1.

«

Wait for the peer review! But being able to use arms and legs is quite a peer review in itself. Perhaps there’s a breakthrough just coming here.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Image generation from OpenAI took another step forward on Wednesday, and people discovered it could create Studio Ghibli-style images. CC-licensed photo by Choo Yut Shing on Flickr.

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

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

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

OpenAI upgrades image generation and rolls it out in ChatGPT and Sora • The Verge

Kylie Robison:

»

Users can now use GPT-4o to generate images within ChatGPT itself.

This initial release focuses solely on image creation and will be available across ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team, and Free subscription tiers. The free tier’s usage limit is the same as DALL-E, spokesperson Taya Christianson told The Verge, but added that they “didn’t have a specific number to share” and ”these may change over time based on demand.“ Per the ChatGPT FAQ, free users were previously able to generate “three images per day with DALL·E 3.” As for the fate of DALL-E, Christianson said “fans” will “still have access via a custom GPT.”

“This model is a step change above previous models,” research lead is Gabriel Goh told The Verge, adding that the team used the GPT-4o “omnimodal” — or a model that can generate any kind of data like text, image, audio, and video — foundation for this feature.

Some of the improvements Goh noted include “binding,” which refers to how well AI image generators maintain correct relationships between attributes and objects; a model with poor binding, for instance, might get a prompt for a blue star plus a red triangle and create a red star and no triangle. Most image models struggle with this, Goh said, often mixing up colors and shapes when asked to render multiple items — typically around 5 to 8. He says this new image generation tool can correctly bind attributes for 15 to 20 objects without confusion, representing a significant improvement in accuracy and reliability.

«

And with all that said, what did people discover? That you can give it an image and it will create a version that looks like it was drawn by Studio Ghibli. Consequently social media has been flooded with versions of memes redrawn in that manner. (This is a wonderful thread. Pick your favourite, and note too which faces it makes angry and which sad.)

The question of quite how OpenAI absorbed a ton of Studio Ghibli content remains unanswered.
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A breakthrough moment: researchers discover new class of antibiotics • Phys.org

»

The last time a new class of antibiotics reached the market was nearly three decades ago—but that could soon change, thanks to a discovery by researchers at McMaster University.

A team led by researcher Gerry Wright has identified a strong candidate to challenge even some of the most drug-resistant bacteria on the planet: a new molecule called lariocidin. The findings were published in the journal Nature on March 26, 2025.

The discovery of the all-new class of antibiotics responds to a critical need for new antimicrobial medicines, as bacteria and other microorganisms evolve new ways to withstand existing drugs. This phenomenon is called antimicrobial resistance—or AMR—and it’s one of the top global public health threats, according to the World Health Organization.

“Our old drugs are becoming less and less effective as bacteria become more and more resistant to them,” explains Wright, a professor in McMaster’s Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences and a researcher at the university’s Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research. “About 4.5 million people die every year due to antibiotic-resistant infections, and it’s only getting worse.”

Wright and his team found that the new molecule, a lasso peptide, holds great promise as an early drug lead because it attacks bacteria in a way that’s different from other antibiotics. Lariocidin binds directly to a bacterium’s protein synthesis machinery in a completely new way, inhibiting its ability to grow and survive.

“This is a new molecule with a new mode of action,” Wright says. “It’s a big leap forward for us.”

«

If this works, it’s a huge discovery. And where did it come from? A soil sample in a backyard.
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Solar panel windows that could turn whole buildings into power plants smash electricity record • Euronews

Pascale Davies:

»

Researchers in Denmark have set a new world record in efficiency for converting sunlight into electricity by using new windows that allow light to pass through while simultaneously generating power. 

The transparent solar cell technology could provide a breakthrough for renewable energy by transforming skyscrapers and offices into power plants, using their windows to become solar panels. 

The innovation from the CitySolar project could also help Europe meet its ambitions to make all new buildings nearly zero energy and fully decarbonise the European building sector by 2050.

The researchers from the University of Southern Denmark combined organic solar cells with the material perovskite, which saw an efficiency of 12.3%, which is on par with commercial solar cells. 

The international team say the panels also have a transparency of 30%.
 
Until now, transparent solar windows have not been able to absorb enough energy to be able to generate the amount of electricity needed for a building and the panels have previously not been transparent enough for use.  The CitySolar project says it has now overcome these issues.  

“Transparent solar cells could be the next big step in building integrated energy solutions,” said Morten Madsen, a professor from the University of Southern Denmark who was one of the key researchers behind the breakthrough. “The large glass facades found in modern office buildings can now be used for energy production without requiring additional space or special structural changes… This represents a massive market opportunity”.

Furthermore, Madsen said that the two materials used in the cells are highly affordable and could be scaled for commercial deployment.

When added to the organic solar cell, the perovskite layer absorbs near-ultraviolet light and the cell absorbs near-infrared light. 

«

No word on price or how much energy is generated, but those are decent conversion figures. They’d only be truly useful on south-facing (north, in the southern hemisphere) areas though?
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Google makes Android development private, but will continue open source releases • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Google is planning a major change to the way it develops new versions of the Android operating system. Since the beginning, large swaths of the software have been developed in public-facing channels, but that will no longer be the case. This does not mean Android is shedding its open source roots, but the process won’t be as transparent.

Google has confirmed to Android Authority that all Android development work going forward will take place in Google’s internal branch. This is a shift from the way Google has worked on Android in the past, which featured frequent updates to the public AOSP branch. Anyone can access AOSP, but the internal branches are only available to Google and companies with a Google Mobile Services (GMS) license, like Samsung, Motorola, and others.

According to the company, it is making this change to simplify things, building on a recent change to trunk-based development. As Google works on both public and private branches of Android, the two fall out of sync with respect to features and API support. This forces Google to tediously merge the branches for every release. By focusing on the internal branch, Google claims it can streamline releases and make life easier for everyone.

When new versions of Android are done, Google says it will continue to publish the source code in AOSP as always. Supposedly, this will allow developers to focus on supporting their apps without keeping track of pending changes to the platform in AOSP. Licensed OEMs, meanwhile, can just focus on the lively internal branch as they work on devices that can take a year or more to launch.

…This change to private development doesn’t come out of the blue—Android feels less open today than it did in the early days. For example, Google has been moving Android features from AOSP into closed source packages for years. This gives Google greater control over the platform while also making it easier to update core components without a full OS update.

Currently, most Android development takes place in the internal branch, but a handful of components, like Bluetooth and the kernel, are developed in the open. They’ll be moving to internal under the new system.

«

The most important part anyway has always been Google Play, which gets updated much more regularly, and closed source.
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The new Substack universe • NY Mag

Charlotte Klein:

»

Substack today has all of the functionalities of a social platform, allowing proprietors to engage with both subscribers (via the Chat feature) or the broader Substack universe in the Twitter-esque Notes feed. Writers I spoke to mentioned that for all of their reluctance to engage with the Notes feature, they see growth when they do. More than 50% of all subscriptions and 30% of paid subscriptions on the platform come directly from the Substack network. There’s been a broader shift toward multimedia content: Over half of the 250 highest-revenue creators were using audio and video in April 2024, a number that had surged to 82% by February 2025.

Substack initially rolled out livestreaming in September as a feature available only to publishers with a lot of subscribers; in January, it made live video available to everyone. There’s a collaboration feature that allows you to co-host streams with up to three people, “essentially what is one step up from a public FaceTime call,” says Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie. “It lowers the barrier to entry to saying something important in public; it’s also kind of fun.” Acosta has kept his videos free for now, but others are offering the feature only to paid subscribers, as Tina Brown has for recent conversations with Maureen Dowd and Janice Min.

“Email is something that we will absolutely never abandon,” said McKenzie, noting it’s “important as a guarantor of that direct owned relationship that the writers and creators can have with their audience.” But by limiting yourself to just email, “you’re tying one of your hands behind your back.” When someone like Acosta goes live on Substack, they announce that they’re doing so to their entire email list, who can then jump on and watch. At the end of the stream, they are presented with the full video, which they can then blast out to their Substack followers as well as post on other social platforms.

But even those who’ve resisted new features and kept their newsletters largely text based continue to see an uptick, like journalist Max Read, who writes the twice-weekly Read Max newsletter. “To the extent there’s been a Trump bump in the media, it’s all going to Substackers. I cover tech, not really politics. But I saw incredibly fast growth — it seems to finally be plateauing — between late October/the election last year and two or three weeks ago,” he said. “I was growing twice as fast as I’d been in the months before that.”

Sports journalism has basically migrated to the platform, and food media seems not far behind — if not already there.

«

The inevitable next step is going to be someone or something which aggregates various Substacks into a sort of “daily Substack”. They could charge for it. You could even print it out and bind it and read it over breakfast.
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Exclusive: DOGE staffer ‘Big Balls’ provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show • Reuters

Raphael Satter:

»

The best-known member of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.

Edward Coristine is among the most visible members of the DOGE effort that has been given sweeping access to official networks as it attempts to radically downsize the U.S. government.

Past reporting, opens new tab had focused on his youth – he is 19 – and his chosen nickname of “bigballs,” which became a pop culture punchline, opens new tab. Musk has championed the teen on his social media site X, telling his followers, opens new tab last month that “Big Balls is awesome.”

Beginning around 2022, while still in high school, Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN, opens new tab that provided network services, according to corporate and digital records reviewed by Reuters and interviews with half a dozen former associates. Among its users was a website run by a ring of cybercriminals operating under the name “EGodly,” according to digital records preserved by the internet intelligence firm DomainTools and the online cybersecurity tool Any.Run.

The details of Coristine’s connection to EGodly have not been previously reported.

On Feb. 15, 2023, EGodly thanked Coristine’s company for its assistance in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
“We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,” the message said.

The digital records reviewed by Reuters showed the EGodly website, dataleak.fun, was tied to internet protocol addresses registered to DiamondCDN and other Coristine-owned entities between October 2022 and June 2023, and that some users attempting to access the site around that time would hit a DiamondCDN “Security check.”

Coristine did not return messages seeking comment.

«

I think the administration is a bit backed up with firing people, can this one wait a day or two? But also: what an incredible lack of background checking. Plus anyone who was hit by a DDOS caused by this ring who lost money could sue him as an accessory to crime.
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Oops, DOGE did it again • The Bulwark

William Kristol:

»

Late last month, Elon Musk set off a firestorm when he announced that government employees would be required to email five bullet points describing their accomplishments from the prior week—and that, if they didn’t, it would be considered an act of resignation. Musk insisted this was management 101 and that people were being entitled or, worse, lazy if they couldn’t handle it. Perhaps they were dead.

Four weeks later, the “five bullets” program appears to be a bust, in part because Musk’s DOGE team didn’t set up an email system that could handle the incoming. Four government employees from different agencies tell The Bulwark that they or their colleagues recently attempted to send in five-bullet emails only to receive a bounce-back response that the OPM mailbox was full.

“If you sent your message to OPM and received this response, then please save your email to OPM for your records, but otherwise there is nothing more you need to do today,” Securities and Exchange Commission COO Ken Johnson told employees in an email this week.

“We are aware that emails to HR@opm.gov are being returned as undeliverable. Please send your weekly accomplishments to HR10@opm.gov and cc your supervisor,” read an email from a leadership official at Health and Human Services.

«

It’s just Pelion upon Ossa. Incompetence that can’t think two steps ahead.
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Exclusive: DOD has deployed Signal on government devices, overriding their own policy • On Democracy

FPWellman:

»

A high level information security source inside the Department of Defense has informed me that a month ago they were ordered by political appointees to ignore information security regulations and install Signal on government phones for senior leaders.

This story likely confirms that Signal is a primary means of communications for Trump Administration senior leaders in direct violation of the Presidential Records Act, the Espionage Act, and numerous national security regulations. It appears that much of our national security communications are vulnerable to foreign intelligence agencies to access at the highest levels of our government.

With the explosive news that senior Trump Administration officials had used a Signal chat group that included Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to plan attacks on Yemen questions have been raised about how prevalent the use of the off the shelf civilian app is being used. I can confirm that it has become a primary means of communication.

An anonymous senior level source in the Pentagon’s information technology field reached out to tell me that upon the arrival of newly installed senior military officials in February they were asked to install Signal on their government phones. There had already been instances where newly appointed Trump officials attempted to bring their personal phones in secure areas.

They relented on leaving their phones outside the classified spaces but demanded that CIO install Signal on their government devices.

«

Tulsi Gabbard, the alleged Director of National Intelligence – has someone so stupid ever held that role – told the US House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that Signal comes “preinstalled” on government devices. Sure, if you tell them to, it does. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal • The Atlantic

Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris:

»

So, about that Signal chat.

On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma.

«

Although Mike Waltz (who, the screenshots clearly show, added Goldberg to the group) might have set messages to disappear after one week, he forgot that screenshots, like diamonds, are forever. And there are some real pearls in here. I wonder how long it will take from this publication to the adviser saying “well, if we put secret information into an unclassified app, then it’s not classified any more, so no foul.”
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Hegseth, Waltz, Gabbard: private data and passwords of senior U.S. security officials found online • DER SPIEGEL

Fidelius Schmid, Friederike Röhreke, Roman Lehberger, Roman Höfner, Jörg Diehl and Patrick Beuth:

»

Private contact details of the most important security advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump can be found on the internet. DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the top officials.

To do so, the reporters used commercial people search engines along with hacked customer data that has been published on the web. Those affected by the leaks include National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, with some of them linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. They were used to create Dropbox accounts and profiles in apps that track running data. There are also WhatsApp profiles for the respective phone numbers and even Signal accounts in some cases.

As such, the reporting has revealed an additional grave, previously unknown security breach at the highest levels in Washington. Hostile intelligence services could use this publicly available data to hack the communications of those affected by installing spyware on their devices. It is thus conceivable that foreign agents were privy to the Signal chat group in which Gabbard, Waltz and Hegseth discussed a military strike.

It remains unclear, however, whether this extremely problematic chat was conducted using Signal accounts linked to the private telephone numbers of the officials involved. Tulsi Gabbard has declined to comment. DER SPIEGEL reporting has demonstrated, though, that privately used and publicly accessible telephone numbers belonging to her and Waltz are, in fact, linked to Signal accounts.

«

Words fail.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Excited news stories say a network of tunnels has been found beneath the pyramids. In fact: nope. CC-licensed photo by Vincent Brown on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Plentiful. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

A.I. saved his life by discovering new uses for old drugs • The New York Times

Kate Morgan:

»

A little over a year ago, Joseph Coates was told there was only one thing left to decide. Did he want to die at home, or in the hospital?

Coates, then 37 and living in Renton, Wash., was barely conscious. For months, he had been battling a rare blood disorder called POEMS syndrome, which had left him with numb hands and feet, an enlarged heart and failing kidneys. Every few days, doctors needed to drain liters of fluid from his abdomen. He became too sick to receive a stem cell transplant — one of the only treatments that could have put him into remission.

“I gave up,” he said. “I just thought the end was inevitable.”

But Coates’s girlfriend, Tara Theobald, wasn’t ready to quit. So she sent an email begging for help to a doctor in Philadelphia named David Fajgenbaum, whom the couple met a year earlier at a rare disease summit.

By the next morning, Dr. Fajgenbaum had replied, suggesting an unconventional combination of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and steroids previously untested as a treatment for Coates’s disorder.
Within a week, Coates was responding to treatment. In four months, he was healthy enough for a stem cell transplant. Today, he’s in remission.

The lifesaving drug regimen wasn’t thought up by the doctor, or any person. It had been spit out by an artificial intelligence model.

In labs around the world, scientists are using A.I. to search among existing medicines for treatments that work for rare diseases. Drug repurposing, as it’s called, is not new, but the use of machine learning is speeding up the process — and could expand the treatment possibilities for people with rare diseases and few options.

Thanks to versions of the technology developed by Dr. Fajgenbaum’s team at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere, drugs are being quickly repurposed for conditions including rare and aggressive cancers, fatal inflammatory disorders and complex neurological conditions. And often, they’re working.

The handful of success stories so far have led researchers to ask: how many other cures are hiding in plain sight?

«

OK, but then again, there’s only a limited number of rare diseases. Sometimes what’s needed is known, but drugs companies can’t be persuaded to make the treatment for a reasonable price.
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Research: streaming video services struggling for identity • Advanced Television

Hub Entertainment Research:

»

Many viewers simply can’t identify where they can watch “signature” programmes. A clutter of original shows that could easily play across different services has made it hard for viewers to find specific shows.

While over half (58%) of consumers know that Stranger Things is on Netflix, less than half of consumers could correctly place where to watch signature shows like Game of Thrones (on Max), The Bear (on Hulu/Disney+) and Ted Lasso (on Apple TV+), among others.

In the blurry landscape of scripted content, live sports events have stood out as a key driver for new sign-ups and strengthening subscriber retention.

Netflix’s strong push into live sports with Christmas NFL games paid off well with big subscriber gains – nearly half (49%) of people agree that it increases their interest in both signing up for and keeping the service.

“Services that lean into broad-appeal scripted programmes may not be enough for viewers who struggle to identify what makes services distinct from one another,” commented Jason Platt Zolov, Senior Consultant for Hub. “Emphasising more brand-defining features and value drivers beyond just exclusive originals could have more upside for streamers looking to improve viewer loyalty.”

«

So the streaming services are turning into channels which have scripted entertainment and distinguish themselves through live sports? Does this seem familiar?
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A sneaky phish just grabbed my Mailchimp mailing list • Troy Hunt

Troy Hunt:

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You know when you’re really jet lagged and really tired and the cogs in your head are just moving that little bit too slow? That’s me right now, and the penny has just dropped that a Mailchimp phish has grabbed my credentials, logged into my account and exported the mailing list for this blog. I’m deliberately keeping this post very succinct to ensure the message goes out to my impacted subscribers ASAP, then I’ll update the post with more details. But as a quick summary, I woke up in London this morning to the following message [a screenshot suggesting it’s from Mailchimp and that a “spam complaint” means “sending privileges” are restricted so you have to log in.. to the phishing site.]

I went to the link which is on mailchimp-sso.com and entered my credentials which – crucially – did not auto-complete from 1Password. I then entered the OTP [one-time password] and the page hung. Moments later, the penny dropped, and I logged onto the official website, which Mailchimp confirmed via a notification email which showed my London IP address:

I immediately changed my password, but not before I got an alert about my mailing list being exported from an IP address in New York.

And, moments after that, the login alert from the same IP.

This was obviously highly automated and designed to immediately export the list before the victim could take preventative measures.

…I’m enormously frustrated with myself for having fallen for this, and I apologise to anyone on that list. Obviously, watch out for spam or further phishes and check back here or via the social channels in the nav bar above for more. Ironically, I’m in London visiting government partners, and I spent a couple of hours with the National Cyber Security Centre yesterday talking about how we can better promote passkeys, in part due to their phishing-resistant nature. 🤦‍♂️

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Happens to the best of us; and here’s the proof.
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Apple can’t intervene in battle over Google search, court confirms • Mediapost

Wendy Davis:

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The ruling, issued Friday by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, upholds a decision by U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., who said in January that Apple could submit written testimony and file friend-of-the-court briefs, but couldn’t present live testimony or cross-examine witnesses at the hearing, slated to begin in April.

The appellate ruling comes in an antitrust battle dating to 2020, when the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states alleged that Google monopolized search.

In August, after conducting a trial, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C. ruled that Google violated antitrust law by arranging to serve as the default search engine on browsers operated by Apple and Mozilla, as well as on Android devices.

The federal government in October proposed numerous remedies to Google’s monopoly, including that the company end a long-running revenue-sharing partnership with Apple. That deal involves Google serving as the default search engine for Safari, and paying Apple around 36% of search revenue for queries originating on Safari.

In late December, Apple sought to intervene in the hearing over remedies, arguing that it’s entitled to fully participate because it has a stake in the outcome of the case.

Mehta rejected that request as untimely. 

Apple appealed, arguing that if it couldn’t fully participate in the hearing, it would “be a mere spectator” in a fight that could affect its multi-billion dollar partnership with Google. That deal resulted in an estimated $20bn payment from Google to Apple in 2022 alone.

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Pretty brutal to tell lawyers they’ve been too slow when they thought they were being methodical. But Tim Cook will be gazing at the spreadsheets with a big $20bn hole in them, wondering how to fill that gap.
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Signal founder: don’t be fooled by WhatsApp’s marketing fluff • Cybernews

Anton Mous:

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Last month, [Signal founder Meredith] Whittaker lashed out at WhatsApp’s data collection practices, saying that the messaging app collects too much sensitive metadata.

“It tells you exactly who you’re communicating with, at what time, how often, and where you are. You can derive so much from that. WhatsApp can link that information to Facebook, to Instagram and to payment data that they could buy into. Signal simply doesn’t have all that data,” she said.

Her comment didn’t go unnoticed. Will Cathcart, WhatsApp’s head, spoke to a handful of Dutch journalists last week and told them false rumors are circulating regarding WhatsApp’s security and privacy.

“We strongly believe in private communication,” he said, adding that WhatsApp uses the same security protocol as Signal. In addition, WhatsApp doesn’t keep track of whom and when people communicate, and location data and information about a user’s contact aren’t shared with other companies.

In a statement published on Monday, Whittaker says WhatsApp is making a mockery of things.

“In some ways, we’re amused to see WhatsApp stretching the limits of reality to claim that they are just like Signal – we take it as a bit of a compliment when a massive big tech platform strives to meet the bar we set and be cool like us. But the stakes of such marketing fluff are high, so we need to set the record straight,” she wrote.

Whittaker acknowledges that WhatsApp licenses Signal’s end-to-end encryption technology. Nevertheless, a lot of personal and intimate information isn’t protected. According to Signal’s president, this involves users’ location data, contact lists, when they send someone a message, when they stop, what users are in their group chats, their profile picture, and much more.

“These differences may be marketing gloss to Meta, but to us, they’re fundamental life or death issues that the public deserves to understand so they can make an informed choice,” Whittaker concludes.

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Days after the Signal leak, the Pentagon warned the app was the target of hackers • NPR

Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman:

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Several days after top national security officials accidentally included [on March 11] a reporter in a Signal chat about bombing Houthi sites in Yemen, a Pentagon-wide advisory warned against using the messaging app, even for unclassified information.

“A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application,” begins the department-wide email, dated March 18 and obtained by NPR.

The memo continues, “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations.” It notes that Google has identified Russian hacking groups that are “targeting Signal Messenger to spy on persons of interest.”

Moreover, a memo in 2023, obtained by NPR, warned of using Signal for any nonpublic official information.

A Signal spokesman said the Pentagon memo is not about the messaging app’s level of security, but rather that users of the service should be aware of what are known as “phishing attacks.” That’s when hackers try to gain access to sensitive information through impersonation or other deceptive tricks.

“Once we learned that Signal users were being targeted and how they were being targeted, we introduced additional safeguards and in-app warnings to help protect people from falling victim to phishing attacks. This work was completed months ago,” said Signal spokesman Jun Harada.

The March 18, 2025, Pentagon memo adds, “Please note: third party messaging apps (e.g. Signal) are permitted by policy for unclassified accountability/recall exercises but are NOT approved to process or store nonpublic unclassified information.”

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The whole Signal debacle is top to bottom illegal by all those in the administration, but the fact they were using an app which had a weakness on their personal phones (official phones can’t even download Signal) is just totally predictable.
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Notification summary miscues • One Foot Tsunami

Paul Kafasis:

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Since they were first enabled last year, I have frequently found Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries for emails to be something less than helpful. Here are some I spotted in just the past few days.

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These are all pretty egregious. Understandable – you can see how the machine processed the data to make the mistake – but the problem is, can you ever get rid of them? As I explained to some friends this evening, the trouble with LLMs is that they’re not deterministic, like computers as we usually think of them, but probabilistic: their output is inherently unpredictable. And that is a problem.
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Dubai’s drone show boom is creating jobs, despite instability • Rest of World

Amar Diwakar:

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On a chilly night in January, Ajay Sreekumar stood outside Dubai’s Museum of the Future and craned his head up to the sky. He watched a swarm of 600 drones whirl some 400 feet above in the dark, humming as they formed an LED-illuminated portrait of the city’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Over the next nine minutes, the drones transitioned seamlessly between multicolored and animated 3D images, including a spinning globe and a scientist inspecting the DNA double helix.

Sreekumar was not only a spectator — he was also the spectacle’s lead designer. The drone show was part of the closing ceremony for the World Health Expo Dubai, and the company Sreekumar worked for, Skyvertise, had organized it. When the show concluded and the last drone touched down, Sreekumar felt a glow of satisfaction. His team had spent the previous two days designing, programming, and rehearsing the show, and it had gone off without a hitch, he told Rest of World. 

Part of the thrill was seeing his work as a 3D artist come to life immediately. “You don’t have to wait months to see the product,” as with his former job in film and TV, he said. “Your portfolio can be seen in the sky in real time.”

Two years ago, Sreekumar was working at an Abu Dhabi media studio when he came across a job listing for Skyvertise. He had no experience with drones, but his 3D design skills were transferable. He soon found himself doing everything from operating the drones to changing the batteries to designing the show animations.

…In 2023, the global drone-show market was valued at $339m, with the Middle East accounting for about $41m. While North America is the largest market, the shows in the Middle East are more spectacular and use more drones, according to a report by SPH Engineering, a drone tech company. An average show in the region costs about $112,250 and has 401 drones. That’s far more expensive than a traditional fireworks show, which can range from $13,600 to $41,000. Drones, however, are reusable and more eco-friendly.

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Rest of World continues to capture the most fascinating stories. This one in particular might be the future of fireworks (which will make a lot of wild animals and domestic pets happy).
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Yahoo is still here—and it has big plans for AI • WIRED

Steven Levy:

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In September 2021, Jim Lanzone took over a company whose name once embodied the go-go spirit of the internet but had, over the years, become a joke: Yahoo. He accepted the CEO post from the new private-equity owner Apollo Global Management, which had bought the property from Verizon, the most recent and possibly most clueless caretaker (high bar alert) in a long series of management shifts. Visiting him at the company’s offices in New York City, I ask him why he took the job. “I love turnarounds,” he says.

Lanzone’s résumé confirms that. In 2001 he took over a sagging search property called AskJeeves—its share price was less than a dollar, down from a high of $196—and built it back to the point where Barry Diller’s IAC Corp bought it for $1.85bn. At CBS Interactive and then CBS’s chief digital office during the 2010s, he yanked the stuffy Tiffany network into the streaming age. Yahoo, celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, might be his biggest challenge yet.

…One of Lanzone’s canniest AI moves was acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news aggregator created by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When the pair decided it would not become a viable business, they announced its closure and Lanzone was among multiple suitors vying for the underlying technology. It became the centerpiece of the homepage that Yahoo relaunched earlier this year. “Instead of incorporating their technology into our product, we did it the other way,” Lanzone says. “Essentially Yahoo News is now Artifact.” Systrom approves. “We partnered with Yahoo because they made a strong offer, but also because they planned on deploying our hard work to many millions of people,” he says.

…When I suggest that Yahoo is less than the sum of its parts, Lanzone pushes back, saying that a Yahoo Finance user will get drawn into the Yahoo-sphere and use other services. Bolstering the effort is a nod to 2025 behavior: Yahoo has made deals with over 100 influencers to help establish it as a home for viral content. In a sense, he says, the company is returning to its early mission of delivering the bounty of the internet to a mass audience. In a symbolic reunion, he recently hosted cofounder Jerry Yang at an all-hands, implying a restored legacy.

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Each new CEO of Yahoo is another go-around of the Arrested Development meme: “it never worked for those people. But it might work for us.”
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Napster to become a music-marketing metaverse firm after $207m acquisition • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Infinite Reality, a media, ecommerce, and marketing company focused on 3D and AI-powered experiences, has entered an agreement to acquired Napster. That means that the brand originally launched in 1999 as a peer-to-peer (P2P) music file-sharing service is set to be reborn again. This time, new owners are reshaping the brand into one focused on marketing musicians in the metaverse.

Infinite announced today a definitive agreement to buy Napster for $207m. The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company plans to turn Napster into a “social music platform that prioritizes active fan engagement over passive listening, allowing artists to connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans.” Jon Vlassopulos, who became Napster CEO in 2022, will continue with his role at the brand.

Since 2016, Napster has been operating as a (legal) streaming service. It claims to have over 110 million high-fidelity tracks, with some supporting lossless audio. Napster subscribers can also listen offline and watch music videos. The service currently starts at $11 per month.

Since 2022, Napster has been owned by Web3 and blockchain firms Hivemind and Algorand. Infinite also develops Web3 tech, and CEO John Acunto told CNBC that Algorand’s blockchain background was appealing, as was Napster’s licenses for streaming millions of songs.

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It’s so strange to see the brand names that were so enormous in shaping the web we have today turned into these weird contraptions for random conjugations of latter-day enthusiasms. How much competition is there to “market musicians in the metaverse”? I’m guessing zero.
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No credible evidence supports claims of vast underground structures found beneath Egyptian pyramids • Snopes.com

Joey Esposito:

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Claims that researchers discovered previously unknown structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre — the pyramid situated in the center of the Great Pyramids of Giza — using radar technology circulated online in March 2025. 

The purported discovery was that of “five identical structures near the Khafre Pyramid’s base, linked by pathways, and eight deep vertical wells descending 648 meters underground.” 

Users took to social media to express their excitement over the alleged findings, posting on social media platforms like X (archived), Instagram (archived) and TikTok (archived). Some referred to the discovery as “a vast underground city.” One YouTube video sharing the claim stood at over 35,000 views as of this writing. 

Despite the popularity of the claim, there is no evidence to support it. In addition, no credible news outlets or scientific publications have reported on this rumor.

Rather, this appears to be a spin on already questionable research conducted in 2022 that was subsequently embellished by a variety of right-wing content creators like conspiracy website Infowars contributor Greg Reese, who publishes The Reese Report, listed as a source for many of the claims pertaining to this topic. Infowars founder and well-known conspiracy theorist Alex Jones shared a version of the same claim on X (archived).

In short, the Reese Report theorized the alleged discovery supported the idea that the pyramids were not built as tombs but as a sort of ancient power plant

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Just in case you’d seen this claim repeated somewhere. The Jerusalem Post wrote a breathless writeup which also says, at the end, “The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.” Not increasing my trust in AI systems here, people.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified