Would you buy a dishwasher if you knew you had to connect to the company’s cloud account to run certain cleaning cycles? CC-licensed photo by Kevin Dooley on Flickr.

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

The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans • The Atlantic

Jeffrey Goldberg:

»

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.

I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.

I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”

The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

«

The creator of the group broke the law in multiple ways; the participants too. Why or how Goldberg was added – autocomplete? – may emerge in time, when someone is fired, as has to happen. But it also tells us how government, like private life, has shifted to messaging apps. (Using messaging apps break US government records rules. Maybe they should be updated, especially if the messages are set to disappear. But who can police that?)
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I won’t connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud • Jeff Geerling

Geerling’s old General Electric dishwasher died, so he bought a Bosch one:

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So I turned it on, and immediately hated the new touch sensor stuff on it.

The old GE had buttons: you press them in, they click and you know that you pressed a button.

The touch sensor, you kind of touch it and the firmware—like this new dishwasher actually takes time to boot up! I had to reset it like three times and my wife meanwhile was like laughing at me like look at this guy who does tech stuff and he can’t even figure out how to change the cycle on it. That took about five minutes, sadly.

But eventually I pulled out the manual book because I was like… “this is actually confusing.” It should be like: I touch the button and it changes to that mode! But that was not how it was working.

I wanted to run just a rinse cycle to make sure the water would go in, the water would pump out through the sump, and everything worked post-install. But I couldn’t find a way to do a rinse cycle on the control panel.

So I looked in the manual and found a note: it says options with an asterisk—including Rinse, Machine Care (self-cleaning), HalfLoad, Eco, and Delay start, are “available through Home Connect app only and depending on your model.”

The 500 series model I bought isn’t premium enough to feature a seven-segment display like the $400-more-expensive 800 series, so these fancy modes are hidden behind an app and cloud service.

I was like, “Okay, I’ll look up this app and see if I can use it over Bluetooth or locally or whatever.”

Nope! To use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to your Wi-Fi, which lets the dishwasher reach out on the internet to this Home Connect service. You have to set up an account on Home Connect, set up the Home Connect app on your phone, and then you can control your dishwasher through the Internet to run a rinse cycle.

That doesn’t make any sense to me.

An app? I mean, I can understand maybe adding some neat convenience features for those who want them. Like on my new fridge—which I chose not to connect to WiFI—it has an app that would allow me to monitor the inside temperature or look up service codes more easily. If I wanted those add-on features, which my old fridge didn’t have, I could get them.

But requiring an app to access features that used to be controllable via buttons on the dishwasher itself—or are still if you pay $400 more for the fancy “800” model? That’s no bueno.

«

I wouldn’t mind if my dishwasher could notify me in some way other than an annoying loud repetitive beeping that it had finished its cycle. But joining a cloud service? Sorry, that won’t wash.
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UK on alert after H5N1 bird flu spills over to sheep in world-first • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

The H5N1 bird flu has spilled over to a sheep for the first time, infecting a domesticated ruminant in the United Kingdom much like it has in US dairy cows, according to UK officials.

The single sheep—a ewe—in Yorkshire, England, was confirmed infected after captive birds on the same property had tested positive for the virus, according to an announcement Monday. The ewe’s milk was found to be positive for the virus through a PCR test, which detected genetic signatures of the virus. The ewe also had H5 antibodies in its blood. At the time of the confirmation, the ewe had symptoms of the infection in the way of mastitis, inflammation of the mammary glands.

This mirrors what US dairy farmers have been seeing in cows. An outbreak of H5N1 in dairy cows erupted a year ago, on March 25, 2024. Since then, at least 989 herds across 17 states have been infected with bird flu. In previous reports, farmers and researchers have noted that the virus appears to attack the animal’s mammary glands and their milk is teeming with the virus.

In the US, at least 70 people have been infected with the virus, 41 of whom were dairy workers. In some cases, workers reported having milk splashed on their faces before developing an infection. While nearly all of the cases have been relatively mild so far—some only with eye inflammation (conjunctivitis)—one person in the US has died from the infection after being exposed via wild or backyard birds.

In the UK, officials said further testing of the rest of the sheep’s flock has found no other infections. The one infected ewe has been humanely culled to mitigate further risk and to “enable extensive testing.”

“Strict biosecurity measures have been implemented to prevent the further spread of disease,” UK Chief Veterinary Officer Christine Middlemiss said in a statement. “While the risk to livestock remains low, I urge all animal owners to ensure scrupulous cleanliness is in place and to report any signs of infection to the Animal Plant Health Agency immediately.”

While UK officials believe that the spillover has been contained and there’s no onward transmission among sheep, the latest spillover to a new mammalian species is a reminder of the virus’s looming threat.

«

It’s not so much that it can infect sheep – we already know humans can catch it – but that if it goes to other species than birds, the virus could recombine with something else and become much more dangerous. (Watching brief, but slightly concerning for all our ovine readers.)
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Understanding live facial recognition statistics • Big Brother Watch

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The vast majority of matches recorded by the Metropolitan Police from its deployments of live facial recognition (LFR) over the years have been false.

• 85%, or six out of every seven matches, have been false
• 15%, one in seven alerts, were a correct match.
 
Not all of the matches the Met claims to be true have been confirmed as definite true matches, meaning the false match figure may be even higher. In Big Brother Watch’s observations of LFR deployments in London, we have seen a number of people trigger an alert who were not then stopped by officers, yet these matches have sometimes been recorded as true without additional verification.

The 84.7% figure is the number of false matches, as a percentage of the total number of facial recognition matches obtained by the Met Police since its first deployment in 2016. There have been 175 matches in total, of which 150 have been false and 25 have been recorded as true.

False positive rate = 100 * number of false matches/ total number of matches.

Professor Peter Fussey, from the University of Essex, used similar methodology to calculate the accuracy rate of the Live Facial Recognition deployments he assessed in the Independent Report On The London Metropolitan Police Service’s Trial Of Live Facial Recognition.

The study, commissioned by the Met Police, found that in the limited number of deployments it observed, 63.64% of matches leading to a stop were inaccurate (14 of 22 total matches), and just 36.36% (8 of 22) were accurate. Similarly South Wales Police has returned false matches for 2,825 of its 3,140 LFR flags, giving it a false match rate of 89.9%.

The Metropolitan Police chooses to use different metrics which present Live Facial Recognition as much more accurate than it is.

The False Positive Identification Rate (FPIR) used by the Met Police is measured as the number of false matches against the total number of faces seen, with the figure quoted by the Met Police being 1 in 6,000 or 0.017%. This figure is reached independently of the number of true matches, allowing the Metropolitan Police to overstate the algorithm’s accuracy.

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Tricky: what is the false negative rate? How many criminals walk past the cameras and don’t get spotted? Because if that’s zero, then we don’t really mind false positives as much, do we? But of course the false negative is impossible to know.
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The LibGen data set: what authors can do • The Society of Authors

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The Atlantic says that court documents show that staff at Meta discussed licensing books and research papers lawfully but instead chose to use stolen work because it was faster and cheaper. Given that Meta Platforms, Inc, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has a market capitalisation of £1.147 trillion, this is appalling behaviour.

According to The Atlantic, Meta argued that it could then use the US’s ‘fair use exception’ defence if it was challenged legally.

It is not yet clear whether scraping from copyright works without permission is unlawful under the US fair use exception to copyright, but if that scraping is for commercial purposes (which what Meta is doing surely is) it cannot be fair use. Under the UK fair dealing exception to copyright, there is no question that scraping is unlawful without permission.

We wrote to Meta in August 2024 to assert our members’ rights around uses of their works by generative AI. As a matter of urgency, Meta needs to compensate the rightsholders of all the works it has been exploiting.

This is yet more evidence of the catastrophic impact generative AI is having on our creative industries worldwide. From development through to output, creators’ rights are being ignored, and governments need to intervene to protects authors’ rights.

In the UK, and globally, we need to see strong legislation from governments to uphold and strengthen copyright law, ensure transparency and fair payment, and to penalise big tech companies who ride roughshod over the law.

• We are continuing to explore all options available for collective action on behalf of our members
• We are continuing to raise this matter with Government through letters and briefings to MPs
• We are continuing our campaign work on AI and Copyright; working with policy makers on the issue of the unremunerated use of copyrighted works in large language model (LLM) training.

«

The Atlantic making waves again.
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23andMe files for bankruptcy protection – BBC News

Lily Jamali:

»

Popular DNA testing firm 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy protection, and announced that its co-founder and CEO, Anne Wojcicki, has resigned with immediate effect.

The company will now attempt to sell itself under the supervision of a court.

23andMe said in a press release that it plans to continue operating throughout the sale process and that there “are no changes to the way the company stores, manages, or protects customer data.”

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s data protection watchdog, said on Monday it had notified the company of its intent to hand down a £4.59m fine over a 2023 data breach.

The ICO, which launched a joint investigation with Canada’s data watchdog into the genetic testing company last June, said the findings were provisional. And deputy commissioner Stephen Bonner said the regulator was aware of the company’s bankruptcy filing in the US and “monitoring the situation closely”.

“As a matter of UK law, the protections and restrictions of the UK GDPR continue to apply and 23andMe remains under an obligation to protect the personal information of its customers,” he said.

The Attorney General in 23andMe’s home state of California issued a consumer alert on Friday advising customers to delete their data from the site given the company’s “reported financial distress.”

23andMe’s saliva-based test kits were once celebrated among customers and investors, who helped to push the company’s value as high as $6bn (£4.6bn). But it has been struggling for survival. Founded in 2006, the company went public in 2021 but has never turned a profit.

«

The value crashed in 2013 when the US FDA told the company it couldn’t use its tests for analysing “health conditions and traits” without authority and passing tests for accuracy. Even so, by February 2019 more than 26 million people had taken an “at-home ancestry test”, and 23andMe was one of the main suppliers.

It’s not clear that any company is going to meet the FDA’s requirements. But maybe it’s not a bad thing that we don’t know every prediction about our future? Would you want to know the day on which you’re going to die?
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China unveils a powerful deep-sea cable cutter that could reset the world order • South China Morning Post

Stephen Chen:

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A compact, deep-sea, cable-cutting device, capable of severing the world’s most fortified underwater communication or power lines, has been unveiled by China – and it could shake up global maritime power dynamics.

The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has such an asset, capable of disrupting critical undersea networks.

The tool, which is able to cut lines at depths of up to 4,000 metres (13,123 feet) – twice the maximum operational range of existing subsea communication infrastructure – has been designed specifically for integration with China’s advanced crewed and uncrewed submersibles like the Fendouzhe, or Striver, and the Haidou series.

Developed by the China Ship Scientific Research Centre (CSSRC) and its affiliated State Key Laboratory of Deep-sea Manned Vehicles, the device targets armoured cables – layered with steel, rubber and polymer sheaths – that underpin 95% of global data transmission.

While it was created as a tool for civilian salvage and seabed mining, the dual-use potential of the tool could send alarm bells ringing for other nations.

For example, cutting cables near strategic chokepoints such as Guam, which is a linchpin of the US military’s second island chain, a defence strategy used to contain China, the tool could essentially destabilise global communications during a geopolitical crisis.

«

Of course China says it’s for “repairs”, but the publicising of this is a statement in its own right – as overt as the USSR having a military parade of tanks rolling past the Kremlin.
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CEO of AI ad-tech firm pledging “world free of fraud” sentenced for fraud • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

In May 2024, the website of ad-tech firm Kubient touted that the company was “a perfect blend” of ad veterans and developers, “committed to solving the growing problem of fraud” in digital ads. Like many corporate sites, it also linked old blog posts from its home page, including a May 2022 post on “How to create a world free of fraud: Kubient’s secret sauce.”

These days, Kubient’s website cannot be reached, the team is no more, and CEO Paul Roberts is due to serve one year and one day in prison, having pled guilty Thursday to creating his own small world of fraud. Roberts, according to federal prosecutors, schemed to create $1.3m in fraudulent revenue statements to bolster Kubient’s initial public offering (IPO) and significantly oversold “KAI,” Kubient’s artificial intelligence tool.

The core of the case is an I-pay-you, you-pay-me gambit that Roberts initiated with an unnamed “Company-1,” according to prosecutors. Kubient and this firm would each bill the other for nearly identical amounts, with Kubient purportedly deploying KAI to find instances of ad fraud in the other company’s ad spend.

Roberts, prosecutors said, “directed Kubient employees to generate fake KAI reports based on made-up metrics and no underlying data at all.” These fake reports helped sell the story to independent auditors and book the synthetic revenue in financial statements, according to Roberts’ indictment.

Before Kubient’s IPO in August 2020, Kubient issued a prospectus noting research figures that suggested $42bn lost to ad fraud in 2019. Kubient’s technology was touted as fast enough to work in the 300-millisecond real-time ad auction window. It leveraged “machine learning powered [sic] pre-bid ad fraud prevention technology” and a “self-learning neural network always getting smarter.”

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I suppose you could say that he has made the world a little bit more free of fraud by getting caught?
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Plants can take up CWD-causing prions from soil in the lab. What happens if they are eaten? • CIDRAP

Mary Van Beusekom:

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When Christopher Johnson, PhD, set out to study whether lab mice fed prion-contaminated plants developed neurodegenerative disease, he expected the plants to take up only small prion clusters, but they absorbed large clusters characteristic of prion diseases in deer and other animals.

Then again, “prions are constantly surprising,” Johnson, a study coauthor and deputy director of the Office of Science Quality and Integrity at the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, told CIDRAP News. “But perhaps we shouldn’t ever be allowed to be surprised by them, because they are so resistant to degradation, and they are so resilient that finding prions in unusual settings is maybe something that we should all begin to just expect.”

Prions are infectious misfolded proteins that cause fatal neurodegenerative diseases such as chronic wasting disease (CWD) in cervids like deer and elk, scrapie in sheep and goats, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad cow” disease) in cattle, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.

In the case of CWD, once an animal is infected, it can spread the disease through direct contact, saliva, antler velvet, urine, feces, and carcasses, and the prions can persist in the environment for years. Once an animal is exposed, the incubation period in a host—the time before symptoms appear—is thought to be up to 2 years.

But given the rapid spread of CWD throughout North America and parts of Europe and Asia, scientists question whether it is also being transmitted through a different route, such as the ingestion of contaminated plants.

While researchers have been experimenting with protein uptake into plants since the 1970s, Johnson and colleagues’ laboratory study, published in iScience in December, takes those investigations a step further. They demonstrated that alfalfa, barley, and Arabidopsis thaliana, a small plant from the mustard family called thale cress and other names, all accumulated sufficient prions from contaminated soil in their above-ground tissues to cause mice that ingested the plant tissues to develop prion disease.

«

So it doesn’t have to be an intermediate host, though this doesn’t quite explain how CWD would spread across the US. Might it be in feed where farmed venison has been kept? Thanks to Natalie Bennett (ex-Guardian) for the link.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, government webpages referencing the Enola Gay bomber were wiped – then restored. Guess why? CC-licensed photo by chris favero 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. Flying high. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta settles UK ‘right to object to ad-tracking’ lawsuit by agreeing not to track plaintiff • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

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A human rights campaigner, Tanya O’Carroll, has succeeded in forcing social media giant Meta not to use her data for targeted advertising. The agreement is contained in a settlement to an individual challenge she lodged against Meta’s tracking and profiling back in 2022.

O’Carroll had argued that a legal right to object to the use of personal data for direct marketing that’s contained in U.K. (and E.U.) data protection law, along with an unqualified right that personal data shall no longer be processed for such a purpose if the user objects, meant Meta must respect her objection and stop tracking and profiling her to serve its microtargeted ads.

Meta refuted rebutted [tch – Overspill Ed.] this — claiming its “personalized ads” are not direct marketing. The case had been due to be heard in the English High Court on Monday, but the settlement ends the legal action.

For O’Carroll it’s an individual win: Meta must stop using her data for ad targeting when she uses its services. She also thinks the settlement sets a precedent that should allow others to confidently exercise the same right to object to direct marketing in order to force the tech giant to respect their privacy.

Speaking to TechCrunch about the outcome, O’Carroll explained she essentially had little choice to agree to the settlement once Meta agreed to what her legal action had been asking for (i.e. not to process her data for targeted ads). Had she proceeded and the litigation failed, she could have faced substantial costs, she told us.

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O’Carroll is actually a very experienced lawyer, and her case was handled by a company which does a lot of similar cases. Whether this sets a useful precedent is a different question, though. The BBC’s writeup suggests.. only if you go through the Information Commissioner’s office.
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A big drop in programmers may be the first sign of job loss to AI • The Washington Post

Andrew Van Dam:

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More than a quarter of all computer programming jobs have vanished in the past two years, the worst downturn that industry has ever seen. Things are sufficiently abysmal that computer programming ranks among 10 hardest-hit occupations of 420-plus jobs for which we have data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Learning to code was supposed to save millions of would-have-been liberal arts majors. But today there are fewer programmers in the United States than at any point since 1980. That’s a 45-year period in which America’s total workforce has grown by about 75%! It’s so long ago that millennials hadn’t been invented, the oldest Gen Xers were barely in high school, and even many boomers were too young for their first real coding jobs.

…Upon perusing the fine print, we saw that while programmers do in fact program, they “work from specifications drawn up by software and web developers or other individuals.” That seems like a clue.

In the real world, “developer” and “programmer” can seem almost interchangeable. But in the world of government statistics, where we have legal permanent residency, there’s a clear distinction.

In the government’s schema, programmers do the grunt work while the much more numerous — and much faster-growing — software developers enjoy a broader remit. They figure out what clients need, design solutions and work with folks such as programmers and hardware engineers to implement them.

Their pay reflects this gap in responsibilities. The median programmer earned $99,700 in 2023, compared with $132,270 for the median developer. And while 27.5% of programming jobs vanished, jobs for developers have only fallen 0.3%, similar to the broader industry.

So it’s not just industry-wide headwinds holding programming back. What could account for the difference between the coder collapse and everyone else?

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Yes, it is: the most obvious and best explanation is AI taking over slog programming.
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Humming along in an old church, the Internet Archive is more relevant than ever • NPR

Emma Bowman:

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As one of the few large-scale archivists to back up the web, the Internet Archive finds itself in a particularly unique position right now. After President Trump’s inauguration in January, some federal web pages vanished. While some pages were removed entirely, many came back online with changes that the new administration’s officials said were made to conform to Trump’s executive orders to remove “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility policies.” Thousands of datasets were wiped — mostly at agencies focused on science and the environment — in the days following Trump’s return to the White House.

Information about climate change, reproductive health, gender identity and sexual orientation also have been on the chopping block. For example, pages referencing the Enola Gay — the B-29 aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and is not particularly related to LGBTQ history — were among a leaked list of posts the Pentagon flagged for removal. Some deleted pages, including those related to the Enola Gay, have resurfaced as agencies figure out how to comply with Trump’s directives.

The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine director Graham said, the Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump’s inauguration. 

Graham noted that, for example, the Internet Archive is currently the only place the public can find a copy of an interactive timeline detailing the events of Jan. 6. The timeline is a product of the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack, and has since been taken down from their website. Graham said it’s in the public’s interest to save such records.

“How much money did our tax dollars pay to make it?” he said, referring to the timeline and committee proceedings. “It was a non-trivial exercise and it’s part of our history — and for that reason alone, worthy of preservation and worthy of exploration, of understanding.”

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The Trump admin is, let’s say it again, utterly insane in its desire to expunge its own content from the web. Removing the Enola Gay? Can we guess, just take a guess, why?
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What does a “Personal Net Zero” look like? • Terence Eden’s Blog

Terence Eden:

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Five years ago today, we installed solar panels on our house in London. Solar panels are the ultimate in “boring technology”. They sit on the roof and generate electricity whenever the sun shines. That’s it.

This morning, I took a reading from our generation meter: 19MWh of electricity stolen from the sun and pumped into our home. That’s an average of 3,800 kWh every year. But what does that actually mean?

The UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero publishes quarterly reports on energy prices. Its most recent report suggests that a typical domestic consumption is “3,600 kWh a year for electricity”. Ofgem, the energy regulator, has a more detailed consumption breakdown which broadly agrees with DESNZ.

On that basis, our solar panels are doing well! A typical home would generate slightly more than it uses.

…We imported 2,300 kWh over 2024. Quick maths! Our total electricity consumption was 4,500 kWh during the year. Very roughly, we imported 2,300 and exported 1,500. That means our “net” import was only 800kWh.

There’s a slight wrinkle with the calculations though. Our battery is aware that we’re on a a dynamic tariff; the price of electricity varies every 30 minutes. If there is surplus electricity (usually overnight) the prices drop and the battery fills up for later use. In 2024, our battery imported about 990 kWh of cheap electricity (it also exported a negligible amount). If our battery hadn’t been slurping up cheap energy, we would be slightly in surplus; exporting 190 kWh more than we consumed.

So, I’m happy to report that our panels take us most of the way to a personal net zero for domestic electricity consumption.

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Solar panels and/or batteries (for the cheap rate) really are easy wins for reducing consumption. The payback is remarkably fast, especially as electricity prices (decided by gas!) keep going up.
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GB Energy announces first major rooftop solar project • Energy Voice

Mathew Perry:

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The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) said the investment in rooftop solar projects will help the schools and NHS trusts save “hundreds of millions on their energy bills”.

The funding includes £80m to support rooftop solar for around 200 schools in England, alongside a further £100m for nearly 200 NHS sites. Meanwhile, there will be £9.3m funding for devolved governments to use for renewable energy schemes on either public sector buildings or new community projects. This includes £4.85m for Scotland, £2.88m for Wales and £1.62m for Northern Ireland.

Elsewhere, community energy groups will be able to apply for a share of £5m in grant funding for local clean energy projects. There will also be £6.8m in funding included for existing local net zero hubs across England.

A DESNZ spokesperson told Energy Voice that GB Energy will commit £90m from its initial £8.3bn budget to fund the solar partnership. This includes £50m for NHS hospitals and £40m for schools, with the health and education departments providing match funding.

…Chancellor Rachel Reeves had allocated £100m for GB Energy over its first two years as part of the government’s first budget in October.

It comes amid reports that the Labour government is considering cutting the £8.3bn budget for GB Energy amid efforts to increase UK defence spending. However, the DESNZ spokesperson told Energy Voice the government “remains fully committed” to the GB Energy budget.

DESNZ said the NHS is the “single biggest public sector energy user” in the UK, with an estimated annual energy bill of £1.4bn.

…Currently, only about 20% of schools and under 10% of hospitals have solar panels installed, according to the government.

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Putting solar panels on schools and hospitals is shooting at an open goal: schools in particular tend to need their electricity during the day. Hospitals maybe can get some batteries too to store their surplus energy (if any?).
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Bicycle renderings based on people’s attempts to draw them from memory • Booooooom

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In 2009 designer Gianluca Gimini started asking friends and strangers to draw a men’s bicycle from memory. While some got it right, most made technical errors — missing fundaments parts of the frame or chain.

The exercise is similar to psychological tests used to demonstrate how little we know compared to what we think we do. However, for Gimini this isn’t about proving how dumb we are but, rather, how extraordinary our imaginations can be! Having now amassed a collection of 376 drawings from participants ranging from 3 – 88 years of age, Gimini has started building realistic renderings of the bikes based on these sketches, in a 3D program.

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Do you think you could sketch a bicycle from memory? It’s worth having a try and then comparing it to these efforts. A lot of them would collapse the first time somebody sat on them – which also raises the question of how many designs the prototype product needed.
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The world will only get weirder • Steve Coast’s Musings

Steve Coast (the brains behind OpenStreetMap) back in 2015:

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As we find more rules to fix more things we are encountering tail events. We fixed all the main reasons aircraft crash a long time ago. Sometimes a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less probable events.

We invented the checklist. That alone probably fixed 80% of fatalities in aircraft. We’ve been hammering away at the remaining 20% for 50 years or so by creating more and more rules.

We’ve reached the end of the useful life of that strategy and have hit severely diminishing returns. As illustration, we created rules to make sure people can’t get in to cockpits to kill the pilots and fly the plane in to buildings. That looked like a good rule. But, it’s created the downside that pilots can now lock out their colleagues and fly it in to a mountain instead.

It used to be that rules really helped. Checklists on average were extremely helpful and have saved possibly millions of lives. But with aircraft we’ve reached the point where rules may backfire, like locking cockpit doors. We don’t know how many people have been saved without locking doors since we can’t go back in time and run the experiment again. But we do know we’ve lost 150 people with them.

And so we add more rules, like requiring two people in the cockpit from now on. Who knows what the mental capacity is of the flight attendant that’s now allowed in there with one pilot, or what their motives are. At some point, if we wait long enough, a flight attendant is going to take over an airplane having only to incapacitate one, not two, pilots. And so we’ll add more rules about the type of flight attendant allowed in the cockpit and on and on.

…On a personal level we should probably work in areas where there are few rules.

To paraphrase Peter Thiel, new technology is probably so fertile and productive simply because there are so few rules. It’s essentially illegal for you to build anything physical these days from a toothbrush (FDA regulates that) to a skyscraper, but there’s zero restriction on creating a website. Hence, that’s where all the value is today.

If we can measure economic value as a function of transactional volume (the velocity of money for example), which appears reasonable, then fewer rules will mean more volume, which means better economics for everyone.

«

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A first look at how Apple’s C1 modem performs with early adopters • Ookla

Sue Marek, Mark Giles, Luke Kehoe and Kerry Baker:

»

Speedtest data shows the iPhone16e recorded faster median download speeds than the iPhone 16 on both AT&T and Verizon’s networks, but was markedly slower on T-Mobile’s network. 

iPhone 16e users on T-Mobile’s network experienced median download speeds of 264.71 Mbps, which is at least 47% faster than iPhone 16e users on Verizon’s network that experienced median download speeds of 140.77 Mbps. The download speed performance for iPhone 16e users on AT&T’s network was 226.90 Mbps, closer to that of T-Mobile users. 

However, when comparing median download speeds for T-Mobile users with the iPhone 16e (264.71 Mbps) to T-Mobile users with the iPhone 16 device (357.47 Mbps), the iPhone 16 outperformed the iPhone 16e by at least 24%.

The iPhone 16e’s underperformance in median download speed compared to the iPhone 16 on T-Mobile’s network is most likely due to the fact that T-Mobile is the only US carrier to have a nationwide commercialized 5G standalone network (SA) and one of the few operators globally to deploy significant spectrum depth and advanced features like carrier aggregation (CA) on the new 5G architecture. 

«

Those are all very respectable speeds, though. The real takeaway seems more to be that the C1 performs just fine, which is going to be a relief for Apple now the product is out in the real world.
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Yahoo is selling TechCrunch • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday.

Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday. Founded in 2005, TechCrunch has experienced many shakeups in ownership after AOL acquired the site in 2010.

When Verizon acquired AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017, the company folded TechCrunch, Engadget, Yahoo Sports, and other sites into a new division called Oath, which later became Verizon Media. In 2021, Verizon sold its media division to Apollo Global Management for $5bn, and it was renamed Yahoo!

“Yahoo decided to sell TechCrunch because, in the end, our DNA is simply different from the rest of its portfolio,” TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos writes in the announcement, noting that Yahoo will still have a “small interest” in TechCrunch.

«

In the “announcement” on Techcrunch’s site, editor-in-chief Connie Loizos says

»

“While the financial terms remain undisclosed, one thing is clear: Regent is acquiring an iconic brand. TechCrunch isn’t just a tech news site; it’s the most influential voice chronicling innovation in Silicon Valley and beyond.”

«

Is that true any more, though? Does it chronicle innovation, or just recycle press releases? It’s not the blog that changed the tech world back in 2005. Things have changed a lot in 20 years.
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USDA announces funding for bird flu research • Iowa Capital Dispatch

Cami Koons:

»

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will fund research projects that explore the highly pathogenic avian influenza in poultry, as well as novel vaccines and therapeutics to treat the bird flu, according to a Thursday announcement. 

The $100m investment is part U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ $1bn plan to combat avian influenza and inflated egg prices. 

Rollins, in a conference call with poultry and farm stakeholders, said the agency has made “significant progress” on its five-pronged approach to the bird flu issue, especially with a decrease in the wholesale price of eggs. 

“While we’re noting today that prices are exponentially down, and we’re really, really encouraged by that, there is always a possibility those prices could tick back up,” Rollins said, noting the increased egg demand associated with the upcoming Easter holiday. 

The USDA egg market report from March 14 shows a “sharp downward trajectory” of wholesale prices for loose eggs, with prices dropping from more than $8 per dozen in late February to $4.15 per dozen for white large shell eggs. 

Rollins said the department confirmed agreements with South Korea and the west-Asian nation of Türkiye [aka “Turkey” – Overspill Ed.] to provide temporary increased egg imports to the country, which was also part of her plan.

…Rollins said she has been in communication with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other departments, about preventing the spread to humans and limiting impact on farmers. Kennedy recently suggested farmers allow the virus to spread in a flock, rather than culling it after a detection, to see which birds survive.

Rollins left the call before taking questions, but staff members declined to share if her conversations with Kennedy were about this approach.

«

So is that $100m on vaccine and $900m on buying eggs? It’s not clear, but wouldn’t be surprising. Some relief though that RFK Jr doesn’t hold sway over everything vaccine-related.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In a new lawsuit, Google claims to have found thousands of scammy locksmith entries on its maps. Which is hardly news to most people. CC-licensed photo by Steve Snodgrass 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.

No Social Warming Substack today. Maybe next week?

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

The unbelievable scale of AI’s pirated-books problem • The Atlantic

Alex Reisner:

»

When employees at meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realise that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defence for using copyrighted books to train AI.

Court documents released on Wednesday night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.

This act, along with other information outlined and quoted here, recently became a matter of public record when some of Meta’s internal communications were unsealed as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by Sarah Silverman, Junot Díaz, and other authors of books in LibGen. Also revealed recently, in another lawsuit brought by a similar group of authors, is that OpenAI has used LibGen in the past.

«

That title of the new book about Facebook, “careless people”, rings ever more true. Spend money? To get approved access to content? Copyright is for the little people.
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Google finds 10,000 fake listings on Google Maps, sues alleged network of scammers • CBS News

Kara Fellow and Cait Bladt:

»

Google says it uncovered thousands of illegitimate listings, including for fake businesses, on Google Maps and has announced a lawsuit against the alleged scammers behind the fraud.

The lawsuit, announced Wednesday, claims a man working within a wider network, created and sold fake business profiles on Google Maps.

An initial alert came from a Texas business that flagged an unlicensed locksmith impersonating them on Google Maps. That was just the tip of the iceberg.

The claim sparked an investigation that led Google to uncover and eliminate more than 10,000 illegitimate listings, the company said. The scams ranged from outright fake businesses to legitimate accounts that had been hacked or hijacked.

“Once we’re alerted to the actual fraud, we take extreme efforts to identify similar fraudulent listings,” Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel, said on “CBS Mornings Plus” Wednesday.

Google found many of the scams were concentrated in what they call “duress verticals” – services people need in urgent or stressful situations, like locksmiths or towing companies.

“Scammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated,” DeLaine Prado said.

Google’s investigation also uncovered that these alleged scammers aren’t working alone. They collaborate with agents around the world and leverage social media to increase their reach. One example in the lawsuit shows an alleged scammer posted in multiple Facebook groups to advertise “5 star reviews” that can bypass Google’s guidelines.

«

Oh, the scams were for things like locksmiths? Because I linked to a piece in January 2016 about “Fake online locksmiths may be out to pick your pocket, too” (congratulations if you were a subscriber then) which pointed out exactly this sort of problem. Google never seems to learn from anything – such as that “duress verticals” attract scammers and so ought to be monitored closely.

So if Google “found” that’s where these scams are, it can’t have been paying much attention in the past nine years.
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Claude can now search the web • Anthropic

»

You can now use [the chatbot] Claude to search the internet to provide more up-to-date and relevant responses. With web search, Claude has access to the latest events and information, boosting its accuracy on tasks that benefit from the most recent data.

When Claude incorporates information from the web into its responses, it provides direct citations so you can easily fact check sources. Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format. This enhancement expands Claude’s extensive knowledge base with real-time insights, providing answers based on more current information.

«

But of course there’s a catch:

»

Web search is available now in feature preview for all paid Claude users in the United States. Support for users on our free plan and more countries is coming soon.

«

The free plan isn’t that great, to be honest. I asked it the tennis question I asked ChatGPT and Grok last week and it responded “As of my knowledge cutoff in October 2024, the head-to-head record between Jack Draper and Taylor Fritz was 1-1.”

Which is wrong. At that point, it was 2-1 Fritz: he had a win at the Paris Olympics in the middle of 2024, and they were split before that. I remain unimpressed by these chatbots, and by people’s reliance on them. Given that the web is pretty unreliable to start with, this can only make things worse.
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Apple TV+ is losing $1bn every year, report says • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

»

Wayne Ma wrote on Thursday at The Information about the state of Apple TV+ as a business, analyzing where the streamer stands in terms of revenue and subscribers after five years.

In the heavily-paywalled article, Ma reports that Apple’s losses on TV+ amount to over $1 billion per year. While it’s long been known that the streamer was not yet profitable, this is the first time I can recall that we’ve had a solid number to quantify the losses.

The report also claims Apple TV+ had 45 million subscribers last year.

It’s unclear, though, how many Apple has added during the current Severance hot streak. For example, a recent Antenna report said the streamer added two million new subscribers in a single month, which was a sizable boost.

We’ve seen reports in the past of Apple working to rein in spending, especially with its film division. Apple’s original movies have achieved some success, including CODA being the first from a streaming service to win the Best Picture Oscar. But several theatrical disappointments reportedly led to the company cutting budgets and prioritizing direct-to-streaming.

On the TV side though, while there may be some budget cuts happening, generally Apple has seemed content stomaching its losses from TV+ as it builds up the service.

It’s entirely normal for streaming services to experience losses for a while before achieving profitability, and Apple happens to be in a great position to ride that train longer than most. While $1bn is no doubt a big number, it’s a relatively small loss in light of Apple’s overall very profitable business.

For example, last quarter alone Apple reported $124 billion in revenue, with $36 billion of that being profit.

«

TV+ only launched in November 2019, with pretty much no licensed content (unlike Netflix and other services, which have shows coming and going all the time), so it’s not surprising that it has been slow to get anywhere near breakeven. Amazon Prime used to be $700m in the hole a few years back, but is now vaguely profitable. Ditto Disney+, which has plenty of content it hasn’t had to pay for. TV+ is building up a back catalogue of programmes that aren’t linked to any time – Slow Horses and especially Severance – so it might license them in future, as Amazon does.
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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Mark Gurman:

»

Chief executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.

Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea’s command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week. The iPhone maker’s senior leaders — a group known as the Top 100 — just met at a secretive, annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. Its AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit, Bloomberg News has reported.

The moves underscore the plight facing Apple: its AI technology is severely lagging industry rivals, and the company has shown little sign of catching up. The Apple Intelligence platform was late to arrive and largely a flop, despite being the main selling point for the iPhone 16. [It was not in fact “the main selling point” for the iPhone 16, because it was released well after the phone, and Gurman knows this – Overspill Ed]

Rockwell is currently the vice president in charge of the Vision Products Group, or VPG, the division that developed Apple’s headset. As part of the changes, he’ll be leaving that team and handing the reins to Paul Meade, an executive who has run hardware engineering for the Vision Pro under Rockwell.

«

John Gruber points to that mention of the Top 100 and infers that two separate people (because that’s how many Bloomberg would, or should, demand for reliable sourcing) told Gurman about this, because it hasn’t been announced by Apple at the time of writing.

That Giannandrea is being moved doesn’t surprise me at all (five days ago I commented “I wonder if John Giannandrea will be shuffled away from being in charge of Siri soon, because if you were giving him a performance review, what could he present in his favour?”). That Siri is being put under the software banner, rather than living in the “machine learning” group, says that Federighi is gaining power. Though of course Siri is currently a poisoned chalice. The software group, though, might be the ones who can actually set it alight.
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How three alleged Tesla vandals got caught • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The first case relates to a March 7 arson of a set of Tesla charging stations in South Carolina. Witnesses said that a man used red spray to write “Fuck Trump” and “Long Live Ukraine” in a Tesla charging station parking spot, according to court records. The male then lit beer bottles on fire and threw them at the charging stations, with some setting on fire, the documents say.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) collected evidence from the scene, including a charred piece of fabric suspected to be a wick and shards of glass bottle, the documents continue. Investigators reviewed surveillance video from a nearby restaurant and saw a white male in a grey sweater, black facemask, black shorts, and black shoes. During the footage, the man was carrying a green item, the documents say.

ATF investigators then reviewed more footage from the North Charleston Police Department (NCPD). In that clip, the man was not holding the green item. Investigators then found it: a cardboard bottle carrier for Holland 1839 beer. More footage showed the man getting into a white van and leaving the area, a Tanger Outlet mall, the court documents say.

Investigators then contacted the outlet mall’s security who said they had access to license plate reader (LPR) technology. LPR cameras are typically set up in a fixed area which continuously monitor which vehicles drive by and record their license plates. These systems are run by both government agencies and private businesses, and some surveillance contractors sell access to such data. The LPR footage identified the vehicle as a white 2006 Chrysler Town and Country van with South Carolina license plate 331ANL, according to the court documents.

Investigators then queried the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles to find who the vehicle was registered to. That led to the name Clarke-Pounder. The Tanger Outlet mall security consultants were then also able to pull a photograph of the man without his mask from their surveillance cameras, the documents say.

«

The police procedural that is detailed here – there are plenty more steps after this one – demonstrates how it’s not as easy as the TV shows might make you think. It’s pretty hard to remain anonymous in the modern world.
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‘Don’t call it zombie deer disease’: scientists warn of ‘global crisis’ as infections spread across the US • The Guardian

Todd Wilkinson:

»

In a scattershot pattern that now extends from coast to coast, continental US states have been announcing new hotspots of chronic wasting disease (CWD).

The contagious and always-fatal neurodegenerative disorder infects the cervid family that includes deer, elk, moose and, in higher latitudes, reindeer. There is no vaccine or treatment.

Described by scientists as a “slow-motion disaster in the making”, the infection’s presence in the wild began quietly, with a few free-ranging deer in Colorado and Wyoming in 1981. However, it has now reached wild and domestic game animal herds in 36 US states as well as parts of Canada, wild and domestic reindeer in Scandinavia and farmed deer and elk in South Korea.

In the media, CWD is often called “zombie deer disease” due to its symptoms, which include drooling, emaciation, disorientation, a vacant “staring” gaze and a lack of fear of people. As concerns about spillover to humans or other species grow, however, the moniker has irritated many scientists.

“It trivialises what we’re facing,” says epidemiologist Michael Osterholm. “It leaves readers with the false impression that this is nothing more than some strange fictional menace you’d find in the plot of a sci-fi film. Animals that get infected with CWD do not come back from the dead. CWD is a deathly serious public and wildlife health issue.”

«

CWD is like BSE (bovine spongiform encepalopathy, in cows) and variant CJD (in humans) – a prion disease. All of them can only be spread by eating infected meat (or brains 😬), which does raise the question of how all these wild deer are catching it; is there an intermediate host?

However the human risk exists:

»

The risk of a CWD spillover event is growing, the panel of experts say, and the risk is higher in states where big game hunting for the table remains a tradition. In a survey of US residents by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20% said they had hunted deer or elk, and more than 60% said they had eaten venison or elk meat.

Tens of thousands of people are probably eating contaminated game meat either because they do not think they are at risk or they are unaware of the threat. “Hunters sharing their venison with other families is a widespread practice,” Osterholm says. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises people who suspect they have killed an animal infected with CWD not to eat it, and states advise any hunters taking animals from infected regions to get them tested. Many, however, do not.

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U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services suggests letting bird flu spread naturally through poultry farms • Phys.org

I Edwards:

»

A controversial proposal from U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to let bird flu naturally spread through poultry farms is raising alarms among scientists, who say the move could be inhumane and dangerous.

Kennedy recently suggested that instead of culling infected birds, farmers should instead allow the virus to run through flocks to identify naturally immune birds. “We can identify the birds and preserve the birds that are immune to it,” Kennedy recently told Fox News.

Though Kennedy has no direct control over farms, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has also expressed interest in testing the idea. “There are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity,” Rollins told CBS News.

But veterinary experts say this could backfire. “That’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” said Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, in a report published by The New York Times.

Since January 2022, bird flu has affected more than 166 million birds across every U.S. state. Experts warn that allowing the virus to spread could increase the risk of it mutating. If the bird flu were to run through a flock of five million birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen said. It could also put farm workers and other animals at risk.

«

Truly the stupidest people who are also unwilling to listen to the advice of those who have actually studied the topic. The slightly concerned watching brief. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Apple and Google in the hot seat as European regulators ignore Trump warnings • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

The European Commission is not backing down from efforts to rein in Big Tech. In a series of press releases today, the European Union’s executive arm has announced actions against both Apple and Google. Regulators have announced that Apple will be required to open up support for non-Apple accessories on the iPhone, but it may be too late for Google to make changes. The commission says the search giant has violated the Digital Markets Act, which could lead to a hefty fine.

Since returning to power, Donald Trump has railed against European regulations that target US tech firms. In spite of rising tensions and tough talk, the European Commission seems unfazed and is continuing to follow its more stringent laws, like the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This landmark piece of EU legislation aims to make the digital economy more fair. Upon coming into force last year, the act labeled certain large tech companies, including Apple and Google, as “gatekeepers” that are subject to additional scrutiny.

Europe’s more aggressive regulation of Big Tech is why iPhone users on the continent can install apps from third-party app markets while the rest of us are stuck with the Apple App Store. As for Google, the European Commission has paid special attention to search, Android, and Chrome, all of which dominate their respective markets.

Apple’s mobile platform plays second fiddle to Android in Europe, but it’s large enough to make the company subject to the DMA. The EU has now decreed that Apple is not doing enough to support interoperability on its platform. As a result, it will be required to make several notable changes. Apple will have to provide other companies and developers with improved access to iOS for devices like smartwatches, headphones, and TVs. This could include integration with notifications, faster data transfers, and streamlined setup.

«

Europe is too big for Apple to ignore, but will it bring these changes to users outside the EU?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A proposed law in California might make “emitters” liable for damages such as the LA fires: but would it really stand up in court? CC-licensed photo by Scott 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. Nonuninflammable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

China delays approval of BYD’s Mexico plant amid fears tech could leak to US • Financial Times

Gloria Li, Cheng Leng, Thomas Graham and Kana Inagaki:

»

Beijing is delaying approval for carmaker BYD to build a plant in Mexico amid concerns that the smart car technology developed by China’s biggest electric-vehicle maker could leak across the border to the US.

BYD first announced plans for a car plant in Mexico in 2023, along with intentions to make cars in Brazil, Hungary and Indonesia. It said the Mexican plant would create 10,000 jobs and produce 150,000 vehicles a year.

But domestic automakers require approval from China’s commerce ministry to manufacture overseas and it has yet to give approval, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Authorities feared Mexico would gain unrestricted access to BYD’s advanced technology and knowhow, they said, even possibly allowing US access to it. “The commerce ministry’s biggest concern is Mexico’s proximity to the US,” said one of the people.

Beijing is also giving preference to projects in countries that are part of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure development programme, according to the people.

Shifting geopolitical dynamics have also contributed to Mexico cooling on the plant. Mexico has sought to maintain relations with US President Donald Trump, who has put tariffs on cross-border trade, threatening exports and jobs.

«

Hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the reversal: it was always the worry of American companies that if they shifted their manufacturing to Chinese factories, their precious intellectual property would leak out. (They always did, and it always did.) BYD, of course, is the company which earlier this week announced a superfast electric vehicle charging system that would be nearly as quick as filling a car’s fuel tank.
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How much does Big Oil owe Californians for the LA fires? • Breakthrough Journal

Alex Trembath, Lauren Teixeira, and Patrick Brown:

»

Last year, both New York and Vermont passed “climate Superfund” laws that impose financial liabilities on large carbon emitters for the damages caused by extreme weather and other climate impacts. California lawmakers introduced similar legislation last year, and are widely expected to do so again in the wake of Southern California’s recent devastating fires—the most expensive natural disasters in American history. With an estimated $250bn in economic damages and about 30 confirmed deaths caused by the fires, there will likely be significant political support for a law like this.

So how much would large carbon emitters owe Californians if the bill becomes law?

The legislative text allows one year for the California Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a “climate cost study” determining the total amount of climate damages owed by each large emitter, defined as institutions that are “responsible for more than 1,000,000,000 metric tons of covered fossil fuel emissions, as defined, in aggregate, globally during the covered period” of 2000-2020.

According to data collected by the UK nonprofit group InfluenceMap, there are 86 eligible entities, but most of them operate outside the United States. For the purposes of this exercise we confined our analysis to the 19 eligible entities headquartered in America.

If the bill becomes law, these large emitters collectively would be, hypothetically, liable for 0.2% of the damages from the LA fires, or just under $495.27m.

«

It’s a fascinating idea, but I do wonder how enforceable it would really be in the courts. The two biggest “entities” are ExxonMobile and Chevron, both oil companies. But, your honour, are they actually emitters? My clients simply supply the product in its unconsumed form. It is not their fault what people then do with it, such as burning it in their vehicle engines.
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Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones • Eric Migicovsky

The Pebble Is Back guy points out that you still can’t do everything you’d like to with a third-party smartwatch connected to an iPhone:

»

The problem is that 40% of everyone who signed up on rePebble.com still uses an iPhone. So we’re going to make a damn iOS app. I guess we’re gluttons for punishment. Just understand a few things:

• Our watch will always appear to have less developed functionality on iOS than Android. This is Apple’s fault, not ours.

• Some features will appear first on our Android app, and then eventually we’ll add them to the iOS app. This is because the majority of our development team uses Android phones, and generally we’re building things for ourselves, so naturally Android comes first.

I don’t want to see any tweets or blog posts or complaints or whatever later on about this. I’m publishing this now so you can make an informed decision about whether to buy a new watch or not. If you’re worried about this, the easiest solution is to buy an Android phone.

«

John Gruber’s response is, well, roll with it. I’m not sure the European Commission would see it that way.

The Pebble is still going to feel like a retro statement. Not that that won’t sell; vinyl is making a comeback, after all.
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Superior replication, pathogenicity, and immune evasion of a Texas dairy cattle H5N1 virus compared to a historical avian isolate • Nature Scientific Reports

Cassio Pontes Octavani et al:

»

The current outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses of the H5N1 subtype clade 2.3.4.4b in dairy cattle in the United States has affected nearly 900 dairy farms and resulted in at least 39 human infections, putting health authorities and the scientific community on high alert.

Here we characterize the virus growth properties and host-pathogen interactions of an isolate obtained from a sick dairy cow in Texas in vitro and in vivo and compare it to an older HPAI isolate. Despite so far being associated with mild disease in human patients, the cattle H5N1 virus showed superior growth capability and rapid replication kinetics in a panel of human lung cell lines in vitro. In vivo, cattle H5N1 exhibited more intense pathogenicity in mice, with rapid lung pathology and high virus titers in the brain, accompanied by high mortality after challenge via different inoculation routes.

Additionally, the cattle H5N1 demonstrated efficient antagonism of overexpressed RIG-I- and MDA5-mediated innate antiviral signaling pathways. In summary, this study demonstrates the profound pathogenicity and suggests a potential innate immune escape mechanism of the H5N1 virus isolated from a dairy cow in Texas.

«

Octavani and the other authors are all based at the University of Texas. Basically, what they found is: it’s bad! Only a watching brief, of course. 🤞
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No one knows what the hell an AI agent is • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff and Kyle Wiggers:

»

Silicon Valley is bullish on AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said agents will “join the workforce” this year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that agents will replace certain knowledge work. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that Salesforce’s goal is to be “the number one provider of digital labour in the world” via the company’s various “agentic” services.

But no one can seem to agree on what an AI agent is, exactly.

In the last few years, the tech industry has boldly proclaimed that AI “agents” — the latest buzzword — are going to change everything. In the same way that AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT gave us new ways to surface information, agents will fundamentally change how we approach work, claim CEOs like Altman and Nadella.

That may be true. But it also depends on how one defines “agents,” which is no easy task. Much like other AI-related jargon (e.g. “multimodal,” “AGI,” and “AI” itself), the terms “agent” and “agentic” are becoming diluted to the point of meaninglessness.

That threatens to leave OpenAI, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and the countless other companies building entire product lineups around agents in an awkward place. An agent from Amazon isn’t the same as an agent from Google or any other vendor, and that’s leading to confusion — and customer frustration.

Ryan Salva, senior director of product at Google and an ex-GitHub Copilot leader, said he’s come to “hate” the word “agents.”

«

I’ve been hearing about software agents since, let me see, the late 1990s when British Telecom did a concept demo (yes, that vague) about how “software agents” would patrol the telephone system discovering bugs and fixing them. I have no idea if this ever happened. Anyway, now they’re back, for about the third time.
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Global VR market declines 12% YoY in 2024; ‘AR+AI’ smart glasses to take centre stage in 2025 • Counterpoint Research

»

Global virtual reality (VR) headset shipments fell 12% YoY in 2024, the market’s third consecutive year of declines, according to the latest update from Counterpoint’s Global XR (AR/VR) Headset Model Tracker. In Q4 2024, the shipments fell 5% YoY. Hardware limitations, lack of compelling VR content and usage scenarios, and decreased consumer engagement continued to impact the market. However, demand from the enterprise market, though relatively limited in size, remained more resilient, particularly in large-scale immersive Location-Based Entertainment (LBE), education, healthcare and military.

Meta continued to dominate the global VR headset market in 2024 with a share of 77%. In Q4 2024, Meta’s market share rose to 84% primarily due to the launch of the more affordable Quest 3S headset. Sony’s PSVR2 shipment share surged to 9% in Q4 2024, fuelled by aggressive promotions and discounts during the Black Friday and Christmas sales. Apple’s Vision Pro shipments saw a steep 43% QoQ decline in Q4 2024, reflecting a slowdown after the initial market hype. In Q4, Apple expanded the Vision Pro’s availability to new markets, including South Korea, UAE and Taiwan, which helped partially offset the overall decline. The device’s enterprise sales also saw an uptick.

«

Meta dominates the market, with more than two-thirds of sales. Guess why? Because it’s affordable and has lots of content. Apple meanwhile isn’t even in double figures (the Q4 estimate is 2% of what should be the Christmas market). Guess why? Because it’s expensive and has basically no content.

(In passing: all hail Counterpoint, using the British spelling for “centre” in its prediction of the future for smart glasses.)
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Factcheck: why Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is wrong about UK’s net-zero goal • Carbon Brief

Simon Evans:

»

In a speech launching a “policy renewal programme” to shape the Conservatives’ approach to key issues, Badenoch disowned the target passed into law by her own party in 2019.

She offered no alternative to the 2050 net-zero target and failed to cite any evidence in support of her assertion that meeting it would be “impossible” without “bankrupting” the country.

…Despite the clear evidence of the need to reach net-zero emissions to stop global warming, Badenoch said in her speech that reaching the target by 2050 was “impossible”. She did not offer any evidence to support this supposedly “unvarnished truth”.

Announcing the adoption of the target in 2019, Conservative then-secretary of state Greg Clark said that it was “necessary and feasible”, pointing to the CCC’s advice as evidence.

Indeed, the 2019 advice set out in detail how it would be “feasible” to cut UK emissions to net-zero by 2050. In its latest advice to the government, the CCC set out a “balanced pathway” to net-zero by 2050 that showed the target was “feasible and deliverable”.

Similarly, in 2024 the National Energy System Operator (NESO) published three “credible” and “affordable” pathways to net-zero by 2050, as part of its annual “future energy scenarios”. It said: “Our net-zero pathways identify three credible, strategic routes to reach net-zero…Decisive action is needed within the next two years to deliver the fundamental change required for a fair, affordable, sustainable and secure net-zero energy system by 2050.”

A peer-reviewed research paper in 2022 identified and compared seven pathways to net-zero by 2050, published by four different organisations.

Directly contradicting Badenoch’s speech, the study concluded that “the breadth of pathways analysed in this paper has shown that there are several possible routes to net-zero”. Moreover, the Conservative government in 2021 published its own strategy for reaching net-zero by 2050, including an entire section titled “why net-zero”.

In a foreword to the 2021 strategy, then-Conservative prime minister Boris Johson wrote that “reaching net-zero is entirely possible”.

«

It is astonishing how the Tories’ latest policies suggest that whoever was in charge between 2010 and 2024 was completely mad and useless. Robert Hutton, sketch writer for The Critic, calls them Hot Dog Tories – after the sketch of the Hot Dog Guy who has crashed his Hot Dog Car into a shop saying “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” – and it’s completely true.
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shifts its mission • The New York Times

Lisa Friedman and Hiroko Tabuchi:

»

The E.P.A. has “no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment,” the first administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, said as he explained its mission to the country weeks after the E.P.A. was created by President Richard M. Nixon. He said the agency would be focused on research, standards and enforcement in five areas: air pollution, water pollution, waste disposal, radiation and pesticides.

Perhaps the most significant of the agency’s regulatory changes is an effort to revise a 2009 legal opinion known as the E.P.A. “endangerment finding,” which concluded that rising greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to public health.

The finding gives the agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Eliminating it would make it virtually impossible for the E.P.A. to curb climate pollution from automobiles, factories, power plants or oil and gas wells.

Some of the other significant policy changes Zeldin said he planned include:
• Rolling back restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Currently the E.P.A. requires existing coal-burning power plants and new gas plants built in the United States to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions by 90% by 2039.

• Rewriting tailpipe pollution standards that were designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032.

• Easing limits on mercury emissions from power plants, as well as restrictions on soot and haze from burning coal. A Biden-era rule had aimed to slash by 70% emissions from coal-burning power plants of mercury, which has been linked to developmental damage in children.

• Greatly reducing the “social cost” of carbon, an economic estimate of the damage caused by each additional ton of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. That figure plays a significant role in weighing the costs and benefits of regulating industries.

«

This is completely insane. It’s the Environmental “Eh Who Cares” Agency. It might as well not exist; it isn’t going to do anything to protect the environment, nor the people who rely on it (ie everyone). Pollution levels will rise, people will get ill and/or die, and that cohort will include the rich who are old – air doesn’t discriminate.

Also, excuse me, but: “the EPA shifts its mission“? I know the American papers and the NYT particularly are terrible at headlines, but wouldn’t “abandons its mission” be more truthful? Or “says yes to pollution”? Almost anything would be more accurate.
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Bryan Burrough on Graydon Carter’s memoir and Vanity Fair’s heyday • The Yale Review

Bryan Burrough is a successful author in his own right, but also wrote for Vanity Fair in its heyday – the 1990s:

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By 1994, Vanity Fair was “hugely profitable,” and Graydon received unyielding support from the magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, and its owners, the Newhouse family—especially the enigmatic Si Newhouse, who adored magazines and adored Graydon. Not to mention the river of Newhouse cash that flowed Vanity Fair’s way. Oh, the money. Good Lord, the money.

As i look back today, Graydon’s Vanity Fair does feel like some lost world, a gold-encrusted Atlantis ultimately inundated by economic and technological tsunamis, its glories only now being picked over by media anthropologists. I’ve never talked much about what it was like to write there. Because I have always worried about how I’d come off. I mean, the money alone. I’m probably breaking some unwritten law of publishing, but here it is: For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.

Then there was the Hollywood money. Every third or fourth article I wrote ended up optioned for the movies. Most were in the $15,000 to $25,000 range for a renewable eighteen-month option. A handful crossed into six figures. (You haven’t lived until you’ve sat across from Robert De Niro on a film set as he reads your own words back to you—although, sadly, that adaptation of my piece “The Miranda Obsession” never made it past development.) This was an era when management allowed writers to keep that movie money. These days? One magazine I love takes 90% off the top.

I am aware of peers who did just as well. Nowadays, though, such windfalls are a distant memory. Today, for a rare magazine article, I’m lucky to receive two dollars a word, or $20,000 for that same ten-thousand-word story. (Don’t even ask what they’re paying me for this piece.) People sometimes wonder why I don’t write more. It’s a chore to explain that, at these rates, it is hard to get that excited.

«

Burrough gets TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS for a magazine article?! I don’t think he realises what life is like for the many, many freelancers scratching around for £150 per thousand words, and never getting a sniff of being asked to write ten thousand.

It’s like glimpsing another world. The article is fascinating. You can read it for free, so don’t ask me how or what the Yale Review pays for it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK’s DVLA managed to update many of its processes for the web – but still needs to rely on daily batch jobs. CC-licensed photo by Amy Whitney 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. Licensed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

GLP-1s are crazy effective — just not cost-effective • Medscape

F Perry Wilson:

»

How much is your life worth?

To an economist, the answer is basically $100,000 per year of perfect health. The ways they arrive at this number are pretty fascinating, but a lot of it is done by looking at what we as a society are willing to pay for. A cost of $100,000 per “quality-adjusted life year” (QALY) is our standard candle here. More than that is not particularly cost-effective. Less than that is. The “quality” in the QALY is important too. Economists know that a year of perfect health is worth more, in dollar terms, than a year of moderate or poor health.

…The authors modeled the cost of the [semaglutide] drugs, the cost of medical care for people taking the drugs, even the cost of lifestyle modification alone (gym memberships aren’t free). Over the lifetime of a given individual, the total cost of a policy of using lifestyle interventions to treat overweight and obesity would be $244,000. A policy of lifestyle interventions plus tirzepatide? $313,000 dollars. Sure, the cost of medical care is lower with the tirzepatide strategy; those averted cases of heart disease and diabetes save money — about $30,000 per person over their lifetime. But the cost of the drug itself adds up. At current prices (about $1000 a month), we’re talking $111,000 dollars per person. 

Now that we have a measure of the effectiveness of the drugs and a measure of the cost, we can do some division and calculate the cost per QALY gained. And here’s what you see.

For tirzepatide, the most effective of the drugs, about $200,000 per quality-adjusted life year. For semaglutide? $470,000 per QALY (since it’s less effective and similarly priced). The older, less used drugs are remarkably more cost-effective: $85,000 for the phentermine drug, and Contrave actually saves money. Society saves $2500 per QALY for using this drug, even though it doesn’t work as well as the pricier stuff.

Does that mean we should abandon these amazingly effective agents? Definitely not. I love a drug that works, and these drugs work. They’re just, quite simply, too expensive. If we want to bring them down below the $100,000 per QALY threshold for cost-effective treatments, the price of tirzepatide needs to decrease by 30%, and the price of semaglutide by 82%. Honestly, I suspect Lilly and Novo would do fine at these price points, but what do I know? I’m not an economist.

«

I remain fascinated by the social effects of these drugs. If they get to the point where NICE in the UK thinks the price v QALYs equation is right, everyone gets on board.
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Apple’s Passwords app was vulnerable to phishing attacks for nearly three months after launch • 9to5Mac

Arin Waichulis:

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In iOS 18, Apple spun off its Keychain password management tool—previously only tucked away in Settings—into a standalone app called Passwords. It was the company’s first move at making credential management more convenient for users. It’s now been revealed that a serious HTTP bug left Passwords users vulnerable to phishing attacks for nearly three months, from the initial release of iOS 18 until the patch in iOS 18.2.

Security researchers at Mysk first discovered the flaw after noticing that their iPhone’s App Privacy Report showed Passwords had contacted a staggering 130 different websites over insecure HTTP traffic. This prompted the duo to investigate further, finding that not only was the app fetching account logos and icons over HTTP—it also defaulted to opening password reset pages using the unencrypted protocol. “This left the user vulnerable: an attacker with privileged network access could intercept the HTTP request and redirect the user to a phishing website,” Mysk told 9to5Mac.

“We were surprised that Apple didn’t enforce HTTPS by default for such a sensitive app,” Mysk states. “Additionally, Apple should provide an option for security-conscious users to disable downloading icons completely. I don’t feel comfortable with my password manager constantly pinging each website I maintain a password for, even though the calls Passwords sends don’t contain any ID.”

Most modern websites nowadays allow unencrypted HTTP connections but automatically redirect them to HTTPS using a 301 redirect. It’s important to note that while the Passwords app before iOS 18.2 would make a request over HTTP, it would redirected to the secure HTTPS version. Under normal circumstances, this would be totally fine, as the password changes occur on an encrypted page, ensuring that credentials are not sent in plaintext.

However, it becomes a problem when the attacker is connected to the same network as the user (i.e. Starbucks, airport, or hotel Wi-Fi) and intercepts the initial HTTP request before it redirects.

«

Mysk were “surprised”? It’s a shockingly bad piece of app design that should never have come through testing. How could someone write a piece of code that says “http” and not think “wait, that should probably be https, shouldn’t it”?

Apple has made lots of software mistakes in the past, but I can’t think of such an obviously avoidable one offhand. The discussion about software quality at Apple will intensify; apart from anything, who was asking for passwords to be hived off into a new app with such a wonderful bug?
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Apple innovation and execution • Benedict Evans

Evans considers the delay to the new Siri in the context of what Apple has done in the past, then looks ahead:

»

a year is a long time given the speed of AI progress right now, especially given the ferocity of competition that Apple faces in China and the waves of new features that the OEMs there are pushing. And ‘Apple Intelligence’ certainly isn’t going to drive a ‘super-cycle’ of iPhone upgrades any time soon.

Indeed, a better iPhone feature by itself was never going to drive fundamentally different growth for Apple, but failures like Humane and Rabbit point to what else Apple (or others) might do with this technology once it works. The rumoured new home smart-screen device is probably a lot less appealing without this, and the AR glasses would need this too, except that those really are years away.

However, it clearly is a problem that the Apple execution machine broke badly enough for Apple to spend an hour at WWDC and a bunch of TV commercials talking about vapourware that it didn’t appear to understand was vapourware. The decision to launch the Vision Pro looks like a related failure. It’s a big problem that this is late, but it’s an equally big problem that Apple thought it was almost ready.

And the failure of Siri 2 is by far the most dramatic instance of a growing trend for Apple to launch stuff late. The software release cycle used to be a metronome: announcement at WWDC in the summer, OS release in September with everything you’d seen. There were plenty of delays and failed projects under the hood, and centres of notorious dysfunction (Apple Music, say), and Apple has always had a tendency to appear to forget about products for years (most Apple Watch faces don’t support the key new feature in the new Apple Watch) but public promise were always kept. Now that seems to be slipping. Is this a symptom of a Vista-like drift into systemically poor execution?

On the other hand, I’m old enough to remember when people said Apple was going to miss Machine Learning, and narratives are always easy to build when something’s gone wrong.

«

Certainly there are lots of people prepared to say “nobody knew what the LLM bit was going to do! Ordinary people weren’t looking forward to it, so it’s no loss if it’s delayed!” But people who watch Apple closely know that that isn’t the point. To announce and then backpedal is not the Apple way.
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The first new Pebble smartwatches are coming later this year • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

The first watch that Migicovsky and [his company] Core plan to ship is called the Core 2 Duo (not to be confused with the old Intel processor), which Migicovsky says will cost $149 and will ship in July. The name explains the whole idea, he says: “It’s like a Pebble 2, but it’s made by Core devices. And then ‘Duo’ is for do-over.” It has the exact same black-and-white e-paper display as the old Pebble 2 (technically a transflective LCD, if you’re curious), and it even comes in the exact same frame. “We were able to find a supplier that still had the frames for Pebble Time 2 and Pebble 2,” he says. “They were never used. So we’ve been able to just draft on that.”

The Core 2 Duo does get a couple of upgrades, mostly by virtue of overall technological progress — Migicovsky says the new watch will last more than 30 days, instead of the Pebble 2’s seven, largely because Bluetooth chips have become so much more efficient. There’s also a speaker in the device now, which Migicovsky uses for chatting with AI assistants. Overall, though, this is an 8-year-old device simply made new again. (This is part of the idea behind the Pebble reboot: Migicovsky is convinced that Pebble mostly had it right a decade ago and simply wants to get back to that.) He estimates there will be around 10,000 Core 2 Duos available and figures a lot of developers and hardcore fans will be happy to have a new watch to play with as soon as possible.

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I recall an analyst saying once that you can probably sell 100,000 of any new hardware – it’s the next 7,999,900,000 that are the problem. Can Migicovsky make a profit from that small group?
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Sobering revenue stats of 70K mobile apps show why devs beg for subscriptions • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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If you’re frustrated by some of your favorite apps pestering you to sign up for a subscription, some new data may help you empathize with their developers more. According to revenue data from “over 75,000” mobile apps, the vast majority have a hard time making $1,000 per month.

The data is detailed in RevenueCat’s 2025 State of Subscription Apps report. RevenueCat makes a mobile app subscription tool kit and gathered the report’s data from apps using its platform. The report covers “more than $10bn in revenue across more than a billion transactions,” and RevenueCat’s customer base ranges from indie-sized teams to large publishers. Buffer, ChatGPT, FC Barcelona, Goodnotes, and Reuters are among the San Francisco-based firm’s customer base.

Additionally, the report examines apps that rely primarily on in-app subscriptions, as well as those that only generate some revenue from subscriptions. All apps examined, though, actively generate subscription revenue and “meet a minimum threshold of installs or revenue (to ensure statistically meaningful findings,” according to the report.

RevenueCat’s report doesn’t cover every single mobile app available, but it paints a picture of the challenges related to monetizing mobile apps across different types of categories, as well as how uneven the distribution of app revenue is.

RevenueCat’s report concluded that most apps fail to make $1,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years. It says: “Across all categories, nearly 20% reach $1,000 in revenue, while 5% reach the $10,000 mark. Revenue drop-off is steep, with many categories losing ~50% of apps at each milestone, emphasizing the challenge of sustained growth beyond early revenue benchmarks.”

«

$12,000 per year really isn’t living wages. So it’s not surprising that scams proliferate from less honest developers. The internet is big, but it’s also parsimonious.
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Britain’s car parking is a complete disaster • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins:

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Car parks are a key part of something I like to call the ‘National User Experience’: a category of things that have been largely abandoned by government yet have a major impact on people’s daily lives and their perception of how the country is being run. Car parks, potholes, neglected public spaces, boarded-up shopping centres, persistent antisocial behaviour, the punctuality of trains – things people encounter day after day after day that make life a little bit harder, a little bit more miserable.

When Labour tries to get reelected in 2029, yes national issues will play a big part, but I think Westminster politicians massively underestimate the impact of unglamorous daily drudgery on much of the population: fix potholes and parking and you’re showing visible change to a lot of grateful people. Fail, and whatever you do at national level is overshadowed by the continuing enshittification of Britain.

In a sane world, all public transport including car parking would be wrapped up in a single, easy payment system. You should be able to tap in and out of car parks with an Oyster card or equivalent, with the parking charge rolled into your ticket. If you want to get people out of cars and onto public transport, providing a frictionless way to move between the two is a good start, particularly outside London where bus services will never be sufficient and personal transport is a necessity for many people.

«

I know what you’re thinking: don’t worry, Martin, the government’s funding a single-payer app! But as Robbins points out, the government cancelled it in February, citing fiscal straitjackets.

From the article about the cancellation:

»

There are thought to be at least 30 different parking apps in the UK, and it is not unusual for someone to have a number on their phone. Among the biggest are RingGo, PayByPhone and JustPark.

A survey published in 2024 by Autocar, however, found that “more than four in five motorists dislike using car parking apps”, with 83% saying they preferred to use cash or contactless card payments.

«

This is not good for the National User Experience.
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Why some DVLA digital services don’t work at night • Dafydd Vaughan

Vaughan worked at the UK’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, and was there when it tried to make everything webby:

»

As part of the GDS [Government Digital Service] exemplar programme in 2013, DVLA committed to delivering a set of new digital services for managing vehicles and personal registrations. To deliver these services, we had to navigate the complexity of the existing tech in place.

Building a new front-end service would be relatively straightforward. However, updating the vehicle record would be more complex – we’d have to integrate with the legacy systems and deal with IBM/Fujitsu to do it. But the even bigger issue – how would we deal with the fragile overnight batch jobs?

We faced a choice. Step back and spend the next few years redesigning and rebuilding the underlying infrastructure to remove/remediate the overnight batch jobs, or accept the service couldn’t initially operate overnight.

Organisations often fall into this trap – spending years and huge amounts of money fixing the underlying foundations before starting to do new things. It’s difficult for an organisation to keep its focus and attention on a complex upgrade – particularly without getting noticeable benefits along the way. DVLA tried this in the early 2000s when migrating away from the mainframe. They ran out of money, and ended up in an even worse half-state.

I pushed for us to press on and deliver a service that could operate normally during the day, but would be turned off overnight. This would allow us to get some value early – giving people access to a new service quickly, while we looked to fix the issues behind the scenes. Luckily the political pressure of the exemplar programme supported us to do that.

«

So they did create a system that in effect still ran batch jobs – stopping taking new entries at some point in the 24 hours so all the records could be updated without creating conflicts.

Two neat codas in his writeup:

»

It’s now 2024 – 10 years on from the launch of the first service. The legacy infrastructure, which really should have been replaced by now, is probably still the reason why the services are still offline overnight.

Is this acceptable? Not really. Is it understandable? Absolutely.

«

And:

»

Transforming government services isn’t as easy as the tech bros and billionaires make it out to be.

«

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Former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams on her “Careless People” memoir • Business Insider

Pranav Dixit interviewed Sarah Wynn-Williams, who makes some interesting points about why she wrote her book:

»

PD: You left Facebook in 2017. Why did you decide to release it now, after all these years?

SWW: Because I think we’re on the cusp of this new era of technology. We’re stepping into this AI era, and at a high level, I don’t want the mistakes that were made during the social media era to be applied to the AI era.

One of the things that I’ve worked on since leaving [Meta] is the US-China AI dialogue on AI in weapons. So, I really understand the existential nature of AI. I also understand these people and how decisions are made. That’s why, as we go into this new era, we have to do it better. China is such a big part of the story of AI. It’s this growing strategic rivalry and how technology is so central to that rivalry.

And yet, this company has been doing things in the shadows for so long with the Chinese Communist Party, and their line is, “Oh, you know, we tried to get our services [into China] and we told you in 2019 that didn’t happen.” Have a look at how much of [Meta’s] revenue comes from China — it’s $18 billion.

(Editor’s note: According to Meta’s 2024 annual report, the company made $18.35 billion from China, primarily through resellers serving Chinese advertisers targeting global users.) So it seems that everyone is operating under the false notion that Meta is not operating in China when actually, it is fundamental to its current valuation, it’s fundamental to its future growth. And we don’t talk openly about it at the very time that we’re about to enter this new AI era.

…PD: A Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, has said that your book wasn’t fact-checked and that nobody reached out to Meta for comment. Did you get the book fact-checked?

SWW: I think Meta’s problem is using this to not answer the questions themselves. What I would love is for us not to fall into the distraction. There’s a real risk that we talk about things that don’t matter. We’ve got these huge issues like China and I notice they’re not providing any detail on that. There are so many smart people who’ve worked at this company and who are covering this company. Like, we have to do better.

«

She gave the interview just before the arbitration ruling she couldn’t publicise her book. So this is worth reading now.

Also, it only just occurred to me that the title comes from The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
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How bribes helped a crime ring steal thousands of iPhones from porches • WSJ via MSN

Esther Fung:

»

[Phone shop] Wyckoff Wireless looked like many other mom-and-pop shops around New York City—except federal agents were surveilling the scene, as they later recounted in a criminal complaint.

They suspected the wireless shop was a fence, or middleman, that authorities say was being used to move thousands of stolen iPhones. Last month, federal authorities arrested 13 people in connection with what they say was an international crime ring that targeted FedEx deliveries nationwide.

Porch thefts aren’t new, but they have become increasingly sophisticated. There was a spree last year—captured on doorbell cameras—where thieves stole iPhones just moments after they were dropped on front steps. They knew when the packages were coming and what was inside.

The Wyckoff Wireless case reveals how authorities say they did it: by harnessing technology and old-fashioned bribery.

The group created software to scrape FedEx tracking numbers and bribed AT&T store employees to get order details and delivery addresses, according to a criminal complaint filed in New Jersey. The group then sent thieves to pick off the packages and bring them back to destinations like the Brooklyn shop.

The software was created by Demetrio Reyes Martinez, who is known online as “CookieNerd,” according to the complaint. The 37-year-old wrote code to get around FedEx limits on delivery-data requests and sold it via Telegram with instructions on how to run the program, prosecutors said.

Reyes Martinez, a citizen and resident in the Dominican Republic, is still in the Caribbean nation, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey, which declined to provide further information on his status.

…An AT&T store employee in Paterson, New Jersey, Alejandro Castillo, used his employment credentials to track hundreds of shipments that were subsequently reported stolen in transit, prosecutors said. He took photos of customers’ names, addresses and tracking numbers and shared them with the criminal group, according to the complaint.

He also worked with another store employee in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and recruited other employees at the cellular carrier, prosecutors said. Law-enforcement officials believe Castillo was receiving $2,000 to $2,500 if he recuirted other employees.

«

Because Americans capitalise first letters in headlines (I take them down), I saw “From Porches” and thought the phones were stolen from Porsches and thought that was a bit niche to hit thousands. A theft from a porch, though? Sure.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The tolerances required for the ball bearing of a ballpoint pen eluded Chinese manufacturing for decades, and only in the past few years has it met them. CC-licensed photo by Andrew Magill on Flickr.

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

Last week’s Social Warming Substack post is available for your delectation.

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

AI slop is a brute force attack on the algorithms that control reality • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

Consider, for a moment, that this AI-generated video of a bizarre creature turning into a spider turning into a nightmare giraffe inside of a busy mall has been viewed 362 million times. That means this short reel has been viewed more times than every single article 404 Media has ever published, combined and multiplied tens of times. 

Any of these Reels could have been and probably was made in a matter of seconds or minutes. Many of the accounts that post them post multiple times per day. There are thousands of these types of accounts posting thousands of these types of Reels and images across every social media platform. Large parts of the SEO industry have pivoted entirely to AI-generated content, as has some of the internet advertising industry. They are using generative AI to brute force the internet, and it is working. 

One of the first types of cyberattacks anyone learns about is the brute force attack. This is a type of hack that relies on rapid trial-and-error to guess a password. If a hacker is trying to guess a four-number PIN, they (or more likely an automated hacking tool) will guess 0000, then 0001, then 0002, and so on until the combination is guessed correctly. 

As you may be able to tell from the name, brute force attacks are not very efficient, but they are effective. An attacker relentlessly hammers the target until a vulnerability is found or a password is guessed. The hacker is then free to exploit that target once the vulnerability is found.

The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.

What this means, and what I have already seen on my own timelines, is that human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by AI-generated content because of the sheer amount of it. On top of the quantity of AI slop, because AI-generated content can be easily tailored to whatever is performing on a platform at any given moment, there is a near total collapse of the information ecosystem and thus of “reality” online. I no longer see almost anything real on my Instagram Reels anymore, and, as I have often reported, many users seem to have completely lost the ability to tell what is real and what is fake, or simply do not care anymore.

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It’s that latter point which is relevant. People don’t care. They don’t reject it and so it inveigles its way into their content, and the platforms don’t care because it all gets viewed and keeps people on there.
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AI search has a citation problem • Columbia Journalism Review

Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar:

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AI search tools are rapidly gaining in popularity, with nearly one in four Americans now saying they have used AI in place of traditional search engines. These tools derive their value from crawling the internet for up-to-date, relevant information—content that is often produced by news publishers. 

Yet a troubling imbalance has emerged: while traditional search engines typically operate as an intermediary, guiding users to news websites and other quality content, generative search tools parse and repackage information themselves, cutting off traffic flow to original sources. These chatbots’ conversational outputs often obfuscate serious underlying issues with information quality. There is an urgent need to evaluate how these systems access, present, and cite news content.
Building on our previous research, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism conducted tests on eight generative search tools with live search features to assess their abilities to accurately retrieve and cite news content, as well as how they behave when they cannot.

We found that…
• Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead
• Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts
• Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences
• Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles
• Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.

Our findings were consistent with our previous study, proving that our observations are not just a ChatGPT problem, but rather recur across all the prominent generative search tools that we tested. 

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One of the sections is headed “Chatbots’ responses to our queries were often confidently wrong”, which certainly sums up a lot of what one sees.
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AI failed to detect critical health conditions: study • Axios

Maya Goldman:

»

Hospitals increasingly use tools that harness machine learning, a subset of AI that focuses on systems that continuously learn and adjust as they’re given new data.

A separate study recently published in Health Affairs found that about 65% of U.S. hospitals use AI-assisted predictive models, most commonly to figure out inpatient health trajectories.

Researchers looked at several machine learning models commonly cited in medical literature for use in predicting patient deterioration and fed them publicly available sets of data about the health and metrics of patients in ICUs or with cancer.

The researchers then created test cases for the models to predict potential health issues and risk scores if some patient metrics were altered from the initial data set.

The models for in-hospital mortality prediction could only recognize an average of 34% of patient injuries, the study found.

What they’re saying: “We are asking the models to make big decisions, and so we really need to figure out … in what kind of situations they can perform,” said Danfeng (Daphne) Yao, an author of the study and a computer science professor at Virginia Tech.

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Here’s a “dead” person on Social Security in Seattle, with plenty to say • The Seattle Times

Danny Westneat:

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“DOGE Has 10 Staffers at Social Security in Hunt for Dead People,” the headlines read this past week.

I found a dead person on Social Security. Right here in Seattle, on Capitol Hill.

Of course the circumstances of Ned Johnson’s death were completely the opposite of what Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had claimed was rampant.

“You wake up one day and discover you’re dead,” Johnson told me. “It’s been truly surreal.”

That’s the biggest difference — my deceased guy turns out to be very much alive. Musk is contending that hordes of dead people are listed as alive in the Social Security databases, and are fraudulently still drawing benefits (which the Social Security director disputes).

Johnson is 82 and still kicking. Yet sometime last month, someone or something led Social Security to both tag him as dead and start clawing back his benefits.

Johnson’s strange trip through the netherworld began in February, when a letter from his bank arrived addressed to his wife, Pam. “We recently received notification of LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s passing,” it began. “We offer our sincerest condolences …”

At first she figured it was a scam — her husband, after all, was sitting right there. But then the bank got to the point. “We know this is a difficult time, and we’re here to help,” the bank wrote. “We received a request from Social Security Administration to return benefits paid to LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account after their passing.”

“There’s nothing you need to do — we’ve deducted the funds from LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account.” Uh oh. It itemized how $5,201 had been stricken from their bank account, on the grounds that Ned wasn’t justified to get those benefits — because he was dead. That was for payments he’d received in December and January.

…What followed was a nearly three-week battle to resurrect himself. He called Social Security two or three times a day for two weeks, with each call put on hold and then eventually disconnected. Finally someone answered and gave him an appointment for March 13. Then he got a call delaying that to March 24.

In a huff, he went to the office on the ninth floor of the Henry Jackson Federal Building downtown. It’s one of the buildings proposed to be closed under what the AP called “a frenetic and error-riddled push by Elon Musk’s budget-cutting advisers.”

It was like a Depression-era scene, he said, with a queue 50-deep jockeying for the attentions of two tellers. The employees were kind but beleaguered.

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This scene is going to be repeated all over the US, and journalism is going to be almost powerless to describe it – individual stories like this don’t give any scale, and stories of thousands of people being denied benefits lack focus.
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Top broadband official exits Commerce Department with sharp Musk warning • POLITICO

John Hendel:

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A top Commerce Department official sent a blistering email to his former colleagues on his way out the door Sunday warning that the Trump administration is poised to unduly enrich Elon Musk’s satellite internet company with money for rural broadband.

The technology offered by Starlink, Musk’s company, is inferior, wrote Evan Feinman, who had directed the $42.5bn broadband program for the past three years.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Feinman said.

Feinman’s lengthy email, totaling more than 1,100 words and shared with POLITICO, is a sign of deep discomfort about the changes underway that will likely transform the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently pledged a vigorous review of BEAD, with an aim to rip out what he sees as extraneous requirements and remove any preference for particular broadband technologies like fiber.

Musk, who runs the Starlink satellite broadband service, stands to reap a greater share of these subsidies under the revised rules.

Musk and Starlink did not respond to requests for comment.

The program, created in the 2021 infrastructure law program, became a source of partisan fighting last year on the campaign trail as Republicans attacked the Biden administration for its slow pace. No internet expansion projects have begun using BEAD money, although some states were close at the beginning of this year.

Feinman’s critique: In his email, Feinman notes Friday was his last day leading BEAD and that he’s “disappointed not to be able to see this project through.”

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Certainly the problem with fixed internet is.. getting it in. Once that’s done, it’s cheap. Satellite internet is quick to get in, but expensive forever.
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Alphabet spins off laser-based internet project from “moonshot” hub • Financial Times

Stephen Morris:

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Alphabet is spinning out laser-based internet company Taara from its “moonshot” incubator, hoping to turbocharge the start-up that provides high-bandwidth services to hard-to-reach areas in competition with Elon Musk’s Starlink network of satellites.

Taara is the latest project to spring from X — Alphabet’s experimental hub that produced artificial intelligence lab Google Brain and Waymo’s self-driving cars — and has its origins in a concept called Loon. That envisaged shooting beams of light between thousands of balloons floating on the edge of space to provide phone and internet services across remote areas.

Loon was wound up in 2021 because of political and regulatory hurdles to flying the balloons and the difficulty of servicing the 20-mile-high equipment. However, its lasers found a second life on Taara’s towers under engineer Mahesh Krishnaswamy.

The technology works by firing a beam of light the width of a pencil from one traffic light-sized terminal to another, using a system of sensors, optics and mirrors to fix it on a 1.5 inch receiver. Alphabet says the system can transmit data at 20 gigabits per second over 20km, extending traditional fibre-optics networks with minimal construction and lower costs.

Based in Sunnyvale near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, Taara has two dozen staff and is hiring aggressively. The start-up has secured backing from Series X Capital and Alphabet will retain a minority stake, but the company refused to disclose any details about its seed funding or financial targets.

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Feels like a long time since Alphabet spun off something from its moonshot.
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Regional newspaper ABCs: no daily now has print circulation of 20,000 or more • Press Gazette

Bron Maher:

»

Print circulations at UK regional daily newspapers collectively declined 16% between 2023 and 2024, according to the latest data from ABC.

That marks a slight slowing after circulations dropped 17% between the first halves of 2023 and 2024.

But it nonetheless marks a milestone as circulations at the last two regional dailies to circulate 20,000 print copies or more per day, the Irish News and Aberdeen’s Press & Journal, sank below that benchmark and the Evening Standard [in London] ceased as a daily title.

The Standard’s average daily circulation in its final month reported to ABC, August, was 273,631. The weekly London Standard is now the non-daily regional paper with the largest circulation, averaging 148,021 copies per issue between October and December.

Total circulations per issue at the 417 non-daily UK local newspapers audited by ABC fell at a slightly slower rate of 14% between 2023 and 2024.

Across the 69 dailies, the total number of single copies sold at newsstands circulated per day also dropped 16%, to 279,000. Paid subscriptions fell 15% to 67,000 per day and free copies dropped more than a third to a total average of 1,364 per day.

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The golden days for local papers were 1985 to 2004, according to this article in the New Statesman (free registration). The slope now is very steep, and downhill.

Losing local coverage means the loss of so much accountability.
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BYD unveils new super-charging EV tech, to build charging network in China • Reuters

Qiaoyi Li, Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh:

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BYD on Monday unveiled a new platform for electric vehicles (EVs) that it said could charge EVs as quickly as it takes to pump gas and announced for the first time that it would build a charging network across China.

The so-called “super e-platform” will be capable of peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW), enabling cars that use it to travel 400 km (249 miles) on a five-minute charge, founder Wang Chuanfu said at an event livestreamed from the company’s Shenzhen headquarters.

Charging speeds of 1,000 kW would be twice as fast as Tesla’s superchargers whose latest version offers up to 500 kw charging speeds. Fast-charging technology has been key to increasing EV adoption as it is seen to help assure EV drivers’ concerns over being able to charge their cars quickly.

“In order to completely solve our user’s charging anxiety, we have been pursuing a goal to make the charging time of electric vehicles as short as the refuelling time of petrol vehicles,” Wang said.

“This is the first time in the industry that the unit of megawatt (charge) has been achieved on charging power,” he said.
The new charging architecture will be initially available in two new EVs – Han L sedan and Tang L SUV priced from 270,000 yuan ($37,330) and BYD said it would build over 4,000 ultra-fast charging piles, or units, across China to match the new platform.

The company didn’t specify the time frame or how much it would invest in building such facilities. To date, BYD owners have largely relied on other automakers’ charging facilities or public charging poles run by third-party operators to charge their vehicles.

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This is certainly the part of the trifecta to make EVs completely acceptable: plentiful locations with rapid charging at low prices. It’s the latter which may still be out of reach.
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2017: Finally, China manufactures a ballpoint pen all by itself • The Washington Post

Adam Taylor, in 2017:

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To anyone outside of the ballpoint pen manufacturing world, it might seem hard to understand what, exactly, is so surprising about this development. China already produces 38 billion ballpoint pens a year, according to China Daily, which is about 80% of all ballpoint pens in the world. That’s a lot of pens, but there was a catch: China had long been unable to produce a high-quality version of the most important part of the pen, its tip.

The tip of a ballpoint pen is what makes it a ballpoint pen. At the tip, a freely rotating ball is held in a small socket which connects it to an ink reservoir that allows the pen to write or draw lines. Manufacturing a ballpoint pen tip that can write comfortably for a long period of time requires high-precision machinery and precisely thin steel, but for years China was unable to match those crafted by foreign companies.

While there were over 3,000 companies manufacturing pens in China, none had their own high-end technology for the tip. Instead, about 90% of the pen tips and refills, too, were imported from Japan, Germany and Switzerland, according to Chinese state media. This cost the industry $17.3m a year, according to the China National Light Industry Council.

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The fact that ballpoints require such very careful manufacturing isn’t that obvious – we take it for granted – but shows how China has speedrun through manufacturing history.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Norway, a ski jumping scandal involving an added seam in a suit has led to two suspensions. CC-licensed photo by Alexander Nilssen 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Have humans passed peak brain power? • Financial Times

John Burn-Murdoch:

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Given its importance, there has been remarkably little consistent long-running research on human attention or mental capacity. But there is a rare exception: every year since the 1980s, the Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.

This inflection point is noteworthy not only for being similar to performance on tests of intelligence and reasoning but because it coincides with another broader development: our changing relationship with information, available constantly online.

Part of what we’re looking at here is likely to be a result of the ongoing transition away from text and towards visual media — the shift towards a “post-literate” society spent obsessively on our screens.

The decline of reading is certainly real — in 2022 the share of Americans who reported reading a book in the past year fell below half.

Particularly striking however is that we see this alongside decreasing performance in the application of numeracy and other forms of problem-solving in most countries.

In one particularly eye-opening statistic, the share of adults who are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” has climbed to 25% on average in high-income countries, and 35% in the US.

So we appear to be looking less at the decline of reading per se, and more at a broader erosion in human capacity for mental focus and application.

Most discussion about the societal impacts of digital media focuses on the rise of smartphones and social media. But the change in human capacity for focused thought coincides with something more fundamental: a shift in our relationship with information.

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The article is paywalled (sorry) but Burn-Murdoch has a long thread on X or if you prefer on Bluesky containing many of the charts and ideas. It’s.. not encouraging.
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Five million • Substack Reads

Sophia Efthimiatou is head of “Writer Relations” at Substack:

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Today [March 11] we are celebrating five million paid subscriptions on Substack. This comes less than four months after our co-founder Hamish McKenzie shared that we crossed four million paid subscriptions. It is a milestone that can be enjoyed in purely transactional terms: these are real people rewarding the work of writers and creators with real money, allowing them to achieve and maintain their independence. But to consider this purely as a financial achievement would be myopic. What we want is to create a wealth of culture.

Five million paid subscriptions represent five million different tastes, perspectives, political views, and psyches. They represent dog lovers, cat owners, food allergics, hat wearers, high-heel haters, opera aficionados, recipe experimentalists, nudists, puritans, cinephiles, royalists, classicists, crocheters, and some who would prefer not to. Five million paid subscriptions represent five million multitudes, yet by buying a subscription to support a mind they love, they are united in their desire for a better cultural model.

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Looks like the “Substack is evil and full of Nazis, leave it at once” campaign of late 2023 had the predictable outcome, ie less than zero. Back then there were two million subscriptions (and 17,000 writers getting them, ie a mean of about 120 per paid publication – though a power law surely applies).

I certainly spend more on subscriptions to big media organisations than on Substack subscriptions, but the delta is shrinking. Increasingly, the Substack model feels like the way forward for any journalist serious about what they’re doing in the long term, especially in light of the next item below.
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Daily Mail redundancies are being watched by Fleet Street with horror • New Statesman

Alison Phillips:

»

Think what you may about the Daily Mail, but it has long been committed to funding journalism. And yet now the axe has fallen even at DMGT, which runs the Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online.

A redundancy process, which will lead to up to 99 job losses, is well under way. Reporters found out last week if they were casualties of this latest step to bring digital and the two papers under one operation, rather than remaining separate entities. The departure of many experienced journalists is being watched by Fleet Street with horror. If such cost-saving measures are being taken at the historically well-resourced Mail, they can happen anywhere.

As they are. The journalist’s trade mag Press Gazette (which shares a publisher with New Statesman) has taken to keeping a monthly tally of news job losses across the UK and US. More than 900 jobs were cut in January. The February tally sits at 210. Last year Press Gazette recorded a total of 4,000 jobs lost on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, those impacted included journalists at the Observer – where staff were offered redundancy after the buy-out by Tortoise Media – and the BBC World Service.

Journalism across the UK is struggling to make money from digital advertising (of which an astonishing 80% is sucked up by Google and Facebook). Digital subscriptions offer some hope, but many readers are hooked on introductory offers and reluctant to stick at full price. Print revenues still bolster profits for many British news brands, but that cannot last.

We need to start thinking seriously about the state of our news ecosystem. More than ever it is imperative that a workable alternative to the BBC licence fee is sold to the British people to protect public service broadcasting. The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, appears to favour mutualisation, with licence-fee payers having some kind of stake in owning the business and a role in managing it. But in an interview with the Sunday Times, the BBC chair, Samir Shah, indicated he leans towards an annual fee for all households – regardless of whether they use the BBC or not.

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It’s so hard to get people to understand that the BBC is incredibly good value – all that TV and the radio stations and the news for less than the price of a monthly Netflix subscription. Joni Mitchell comes to mind: “don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
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Apple reassures Siri team members feeling disappointed and embarrassed by Apple Intelligence delay • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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In a Siri team meeting, Apple senior director Robby Walker acknowledged that employees might be feeling “angry, disappointed, burned out and embarrassed” following the Siri delay, but he praised the hard work of employees and the “incredibly impressive” features they developed, saying that Apple would continue to work to “ship the world’s greatest virtual assistant” to Apple users. “I saw so many people giving everything they had in order to make this happen and to make incredible progress together,” he said.

The situation was described as “ugly” because the Siri features were shown off in public with marketing campaigns and TV commercials before there was a fully functional product. Siri ‘s new functionality was also tied to the iPhone 16 launch in advertising, and it was a feature that Apple used to promote its iPhone 16 models.

Apple decided to delay the functionality because of quality issues, with Walker telling employees that Siri ‘s new features were only working properly 60% to 80% of the time.

To encourage employees, Walker demonstrated Siri locating his driver’s license number, manipulating apps by embedding content in an email and adding recipients, and finding specific photos of a child. Employees on the Siri team will be able to use time away to recharge and prepare for “hard work ahead.”

Walker told employees that it is not yet clear when the new Siri features will be ready for launch, but Apple’s statement about the delay mentioned “in the coming year.” That has been interpreted as 2026, or in an update to the iOS 19 operating system launching this fall.

«

John Gruber (who stirred things up with his “Something is rotten in Cupertino” post last week) is extremely rude about the news of this meeting, arguing that nobody deserves any praise in this. I agree with him.

I wonder if John Giannandrea will be shuffled away from being in charge of Siri soon, because if you were giving him a performance review, what could he offer to persuade you he has done well?
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How zonal energy pricing works, and why we need it • Octopus Energy

»

Pricing at the national level is leading to consumers across the country paying much more for their energy than they need to.

Take grid constraints for example: often, we are generating so much wind in places like Scotland that our cables can’t transport it to the south where it needs to go. In the current system, the solution is to simply switch the turbines off. This wastes vast amounts of clean power and still costs you money, as we have to pay the producers to shut down.

At the same time, electricity costs shoot up as consumers all over the country pay to burn gas to fill gaps.

Combined these added over a billion to British energy bills in 2024, and the costs are growing. So far, it’s already cost you over £300m in 2025. That’s £180,000 wasted every hour.

At the same time, we often send our power overseas from the south (where we need it most), whilst buying in power from overseas in the north (where we need it least), making the problem even worse.

These so-called ‘constraint costs’ are skyrocketing, and could more than double from today’s levels – up to £3.6bn per year in a best case scenario by 2030! – if we continue to use this outdated system.

«

Ofgem, the electricity regulator, looked into zonal pricing in 2023 and found that it would be an unalloyed Good Thing which, apart from anything else, could save domestic households £38 per year – more than any other tweaks have managed.

Another study published in February found benefits of between £5bn and £15bn.

At which one has to ask: what’s the delay in implementing this?
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Norway suspends two staff members in ski jump cheating scandal at world championships • AP News

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The Norwegian ski federation has suspended a ski jumping coach and an equipment manager over their alleged role in a cheating scandal which shook the world championships this weekend.

The federation said coach Magnus Brevik and equipment manager Adrian Livelten were suspected of modifying ski suits by sewing in an extra seam in an attempt to create more lift in the air.

Norway is one of the traditional powers within ski jumping, and the cheating attempt at its home world championships has caused a massive outcry in a country that prides itself on its winter sports prowess.

Two Norwegian ski jumpers, Marius Lindvik and Johann Andre Forfang, were disqualified from Saturday’s men’s large hill competition after organizers said their suits broke the rules. Lindvik had finished second in the event before he was disqualified.

The federation on Sunday admitted that the suits had been deliberately altered, after a video emerged online of the alterations being made.

Brevik on Monday told Norwegian media that several team members had been involved in the decision to alter the suits, but that “I should have stopped it.”

He claimed it was the first time they had stitched in an extra seam, but made a sailing analogy to explain why a stiffer suit would help the jumpers fly farther in the air.

“A tighter sail is better than a loose sail,” Brevik said.

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Apparently this has “tarnished Norway’s standing for honesty in sports“. But the video came from a whistleblower, so one out of three for honesty?
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Why can’t programmers… program? • Coding Horror

Jeff Atwood:

»

Between Reginald, Dan, and Imran [quoted in the blogpost being amazed at the lack of competence in programming of people applying for programming jobs], I’m starting to get a little worried. I’m more than willing to cut freshly minted software developers slack at the beginning of their career. Everybody has to start somewhere. But I am disturbed and appalled that any so-called programmer would apply for a job without being able to write the simplest of programs. That’s a slap in the face to anyone who writes software for a living.

The vast divide between those who can program and those who cannot program is well known. I assumed anyone applying for a job as a programmer had already crossed this chasm. Apparently this is not a reasonable assumption to make. Apparently, FizzBuzz style screening is required to keep interviewers from wasting their time interviewing programmers who can’t program. [FizzBuzz: a program that counts up from 1, writing “Fizz” for multiples of 3, “Buzz” for multiples of 5, and “FizzBuzz” for multiples of both.]

Lest you think the FizzBuzz test is too easy – and it is blindingly, intentionally easy – a commenter to Imran’s post notes its efficacy:

»

I’d hate interviewers to dismiss [the FizzBuzz] test as being too easy – in my experience it is genuinely astonishing how many candidates are incapable of the simplest programming tasks.

«

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This blogpost appeared in February. But: which year? Have a guess. Answer at the bottom of this post.
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The cystic fibrosis breakthrough that changed everything • The Atlantic

Sarah Zhang:

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in the fall of 2019, a new triple combination of drugs began making its way into the hands of people with the genetic disease. Trikafta corrects the misshapen protein that causes cystic fibrosis; this molecular tweak thins mucus in the lungs so it can be coughed up easily. In a matter of hours, patients who took it began to cough—and cough and cough and cough in what they later started calling the Purge. They hacked up at work, at home, in their car, in bed at night. It’s not that they were sick; if anything, it was the opposite: They were becoming well. In the days that followed, their lungs were cleansed of a tarlike mucus, and the small tasks of daily life that had been so difficult became unthinkingly easy. They ran up the stairs. They ran after their kids. They ran 10Ks. They ran marathons.

Cystic fibrosis once all but guaranteed an early death. When the disease was first identified, in the 1930s, most babies born with CF died in infancy. The next decades were a grind of incremental medical progress: A child born with CF in the ’50s could expect to live until age 5. In the ’70s, age 10. In the early 2000s, age 35. With Trikafta came a quantum leap. Today, those who begin taking the drug in early adolescence, a recent study projected, can expect to survive to age 82.5—an essentially normal life span.

CF was one of the first diseases to be traced to a specific gene, and Trikafta is one of the first drugs designed for a specific, inherited mutation. It is not a cure, and it doesn’t work for all patients. But a substantial majority of the 40,000 Americans with CF have now lived through a miracle—a thrilling but disorienting miracle. Where they once prepared for death, they now have to prepare for life. “It’s like the opposite of a terminal diagnosis,” Jenny Livingston told me.

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CF is one of the conditions that has been considered for gene therapy – either of the patient, or even germ-line gene therapy to remove the gene from the person’s DNA. Neither has worked. So they focused on the protein that goes wrong and causes mucus to gather. This is a comprehensive writeup.
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Meta tries to bury a tell-all book • WIRED

Steven Levy on the Wynn-Williams book that everyone has rushed out to buy now Meta is running a campaign against it:

»

The arbitrator’s Meta-friendly “emergency” ruling was the climax of an intense campaign against the book that erupted once the company got a look at it. Even as I turned the pages of Careless People, my inbox was fattening with dispatches from Meta. “Her book is a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives,” a company spokesperson says. They characterize her firing as the result of “poor performance and toxic behavior.” They call her “a disgruntled activist trying to sell books.” Meanwhile on social media, current and former employees posted comments defending the maligned executives.

If the news is so old, one might ask why is Meta going nuclear on Wynn-Williams? For one thing, its author was a senior executive who was in the room, and on the corporate jet, when stuff happened—and she claims that things were worse than we imagined. Yes, Meta’s reckless disregard in Myanmar, where people died in riots triggered by misinformation posted on Facebook, was previously reported, and the company has since apologized. But Wynn-Williams’ storytelling paints a picture where Meta’s leaders simply didn’t care much about the dangers there.

While the media has written about Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China, Wynn-Williams shares official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on face recognition and AI, and says that the company’s behavior was so outrageous that the team crafted headlines to show what the company would have to deal with if their plans leaked. One example: “Zuckerberg Will Stop at Nothing to Get Into China.” While making blanket statements that the book can’t be trusted, Meta hasn’t denied all these allegations specifically. (In general, when a company tries to dismiss charges as “old news,” that translates to a confirmation.)

Still, in the context of what we know about Meta already, nothing Wynn-Williams says about the company’s actions and inactions is shockingly new… Careless People’s most memorable moments come not from Meta’s substandard corporate morals, but gossipy anecdotes of misbehavior on the corporate plane or at luxury hotels. Despite the lofty F. Scott Fitzgerald title reference, much of the book reads like a Big Tech–themed episode of White Lotus.

«

Levy is unpersuaded by Wynn-Williams’s stated reasons for staying at the company (healthcare, principally). But certainly Meta’s campaign has been the most amazing Streisand Effect bit of publicity. The book probably would have sunk without trace. Instead, it’s become the talk of the town.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Atwood’s post was in February 2007. Has programming collapsed since then?

If you tell Strava you’re running in North Korea, it’ll delete your account. But why? CC-licensed photo by Roman Harak on Flickr.

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

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about AI (as almost everything seems to be these days).

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

Strava bans user for running in North Korea • DC Rainmaker

Ray Maker:

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On the list of quirky things, I didn’t have “Strava bans user for running in North Korea” on my bingo card today. But here we are. I’ve just spent the last hour going down the rabbit hole that is the Pyongyang Marathon (in North Korea), and it turns out – it’s a thing. As in, as thing that outsiders come and run. There’s even an official website for it. In fact, there’s been 31 editions of it. And over 1,000 foreigners run in it and the affiliated running events each year, including plenty of diplomats such as the British Ambassador to North Korea.

The event has been happening for decades, but that’s actually not what got this person their account banned. Rather, they were there for a trip because they are working on their doctorate about North Korea, while there, went on a run, then came home (to a different country). After which, they upload run to Garmin Connect, which then synced it to Strava. Finally, Strava then sent them a note that their account was being terminated.

But wait, it gets better!

Last month, a person did a treadmill run where their virtual run location was set as North Korea. Guess what? Their account too was banned. Albeit, after contacting support, the company eventually re-instated it – but clearly Strava has some pretty funky rules in place around uploading activities related to North Korea. What’s strange here though is that it’s not simply hiding the workout, but straight-up deleting the account. Which obviously, makes no sense – so, I did what I do best: Dig into it.

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It turned out there was a lot of digging to do, and the hole was deep. (Thanks Peter R for the link.)
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Something is rotten in the state of Cupertino • Daring Fireball

John Gruber finds the scales falling from his eyes over Apple’s pulling back of the release of its Siri-AI-that-can-do-everything:

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Who decided these features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and advertise these features in a TV commercial, and promote them as a selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup — not just any products, but the very crown jewels of the company and the envy of the entire industry — when those features still remained in such an unfinished or perhaps even downright non-functional state that they still could not be demoed to the press? Not just couldn’t be shipped as beta software. Not just couldn’t be used by members of the press in a hands-on experience, but could not even be shown to work by Apple employees on Apple-controlled devices in an Apple-controlled environment? But yet they advertised them in a commercial for the iPhone 16, when it turns out they won’t ship, in the best case scenario, until months after the iPhone 17 lineup is unveiled?

…Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.

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There’s a subtle hint that Gruber thinks it was John Giannandrea, SVP of machine learning and AI strategy, who was behind the overconfidence in pushing this. But clearly Cook bears responsibility for not demanding better proof it could be done.

More generally, I think – as I said earlier this year – the question is: how would we know if Apple was becoming sclerotic, and saying “no” to the wrong things? Here we have the opposite: saying “yes” to the wrong things. Both are destructive, though.
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OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies’ unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.

Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity’s creative output overall.

OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren’t substitutes for original works.

So far, one landmark ruling favored rights holders, with a judge declaring AI training is not fair use, as AI outputs clearly threatened to replace Thomson-Reuters’ legal research firm Westlaw in the market, Wired reported. But OpenAI now appears to be looking to Trump to avoid a similar outcome in its lawsuits, including a major suit brought by The New York Times.

“OpenAI’s models are trained to not replicate works for consumption by the public. Instead, they learn from the works and extract patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights,” OpenAI claimed. “This means our AI model training aligns with the core objectives of copyright and the fair use doctrine, using existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the commercial value of those existing works.”

Providing “freedom-focused” recommendations on Trump’s plan during a public comment period ending Saturday, OpenAI suggested Thursday that the US should end these court fights by shifting its copyright strategy to promote the AI industry’s “freedom to learn.” Otherwise, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will likely continue accessing copyrighted data that US companies cannot access, supposedly giving China a leg up “while gaining little in the way of protections for the original IP creators,” OpenAI argued.

«

While I do think that what these systems do isn’t actually copyright infringement – they don’t regurgitate content, they “learn” from it – the special pleading sticks in the craw rather. Though one can’t help thinking that nothing would make Apple happier than hearing the AI race is over.
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AirPods getting live translation feature later this year • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Apple is working on feature that will let the AirPods translate in-person conversations from one language to another, reports Bloomberg. The functionality will be linked to iOS 19, and it will be introduced in an AirPods software update planned for later this year.

The AirPods will be able to provide a simpler translation process for people who are speaking different languages, though the process will rely on the Translate app on the iPhone.

If an English speaker with AirPods is talking to someone who is speaking Spanish, the iPhone will detect the audio, translate the speech, and relay it back in English to the person wearing AirPods. The person speaking English will then be able to respond and have their response translated to Spanish and spoken aloud by the iPhone . Apple’s iPhone Translate app can already be used for conversations like this, but having the function included in the AirPods will streamline the exchange.

«

Nice. Though Google has been offering this between 40 languages through its Pixel Buds since late 2023. It’s not just AI where Apple has fallen behind what’s available.
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‘An ideal tool’: prisons are using virtual reality to help people in solitary confinement • The Guardian

Abigail Glasgow:

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ne Monday in July, Samantha Tovar, known as Royal, left her 6ft-by-11ft cell for the first time in three weeks. Correctional officers escorted her to the common area of the Central California Women’s Facility and chained her hands and feet to a metal table, on top of which sat a virtual reality headset. Two and a half years into a five-year prison sentence, Royal was about to see Thailand for the first time.

When she first put on the headset, Royal immediately had an aerial view of a cove. Soon after, her view switched to a boat moving fairly fast with buildings on either side of the water. In the boat was a man with a backpack, and it was as if she were sitting beside him. With accompanying meditative music and narration, the four-minute scene took Royal across a crowded Thai market, through ancient ruins, on a tuk-tuk (a three-wheeled rickshaw) and into an elephant bath with her backpacked companion. For Royal, these vignettes felt real enough to be deserving of a passport stamp.

Before Thailand, Royal had been held in the facility’s “restricted housing unit”, or solitary confinement. There, the only opportunity incarcerated people typically have to speak with each other is through cell vents or across the yard during recreation. Typically for this program, participants in solitary sit inside individual cells the size of phone booths known as “therapeutic modules”. In Royal’s facility, she and fellow participants were separated by plastic dividers, and each participant was shackled to a metal seat attached to a table.

The transformative scene for [Carlos] Ortega [since released, but who went through the program in March 2024] was sitting around the Eiffel Tower. “You see tourists, regular people going to and from work,” he said. “And that’s when it hit me: I want to live life like that. I deserve it. I owe it to myself.”

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What went wrong with Horizon Worlds? Former Meta devs share surprising insights – and a solution • New World Notes

Wagner James Au:

»

For one thing, it helps explain why Horizon Worlds is floundering, with far less active users than Second Life (now 21 years old), let alone VRChat and Rec Room, which are far more popular on Meta’s own Quest headset. Despite billions spent in development and marketing, including a literal Super Bowl ad, Horizon Worlds has roughly 300,000 users, versus Second Life’s 500,000.

For another, it helps explain why the Metaverse “failed” in the general public’s eye, since most people assume Meta was the leading developer of the technology.

I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the Metaverse, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds.

Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).

It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding:

»

Before I left they were mandating that employees spend a certain number of hours per week in the game actively playing it. So therein started an automation war where all the people with 200 hours a week never actually played the game once. People just had to launch the game with an Android command over USB, then make sure the proximity sensor on the headset was taped to keep it on.

«

Yes: Instead of playing Horizon Worlds, developers of Horizon Worlds at Meta figured out a hack where they could just pretend to do so.

As this anonymous developer further explains, Meta’s assumptions were evident even on the code level, with Meta treating the Metaverse as a 3D version of a mobile app…

…The guy that was put in charge of Horizon Worlds needed help learning how to don the headset and launch the game after being in charge of it for three months.

«

Automating use, a boss who hasn’t used the product: no wonder Meta is losing billions on its metaverse gambit.
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Microsoft’s quantum breakthrough claim labeled ‘unreliable’ • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Microsoft’s claim of a quantum computing breakthrough has attracted strong criticism from scientists, though the software giant says its work is sound – and it will soon reveal data that proves it.

Redmond’s quantum claims were made in February when it announced its in-house boffins had created “the world’s first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers.”

…The super-corporation has made big claims about Majorana particles before, but it didn’t end well: In 2021 Redmond’s researchers retracted a 2018 paper in which they claimed to have detected the particles.

Shortly after Microsoft’s recent announcement, scientists expressed concern that the claims in the company’s paper, published in Nature, lacked important details.

Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak has reaffirmed Redmond’s claims and pointed out that the paper was submitted in March 2024 and published in February 2025. In the intervening months he said Microsoft has made even more progress that he will discuss at an American Physical Society (APS) meeting scheduled for next week in California.

While the quantum world waits for that update, critics have voiced their concerns about Microsoft’s paper.

Henry Legg, a lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in the UK, recently published a pre-print critique that argues the software giant’s work “is not reliable and must be revisited.”

Vincent Mourik, an experimental physicist at the German national research organization Forschungszentrum Jülich, and Sergey Frolov, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh in the US, took to YouTube to criticize “distractions caused by unreliable scientific claims from Microsoft Quantum.”

«

Frolov goes even further in direct comments, say the project is essentially fraudulent, and “This is a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established.”

There’s plenty more, and the scientists are dunking so hard on Microsoft it should change its name to Donuts.
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Revealed: how the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice • New Scientist

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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This week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the UK government should be making far more use of AI in an effort to increase efficiency. “No person’s substantive time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality and standard,” he said.

Now, New Scientist has obtained records of Kyle’s ChatGPT use under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, in what is believed to be a world-first test of whether chatbot interactions are subject to such laws.

These records show that Kyle asked ChatGPT to explain why the UK’s small and medium business (SMB) community has been so slow to adopt AI. ChatGPT returned a 10-point list of problems hindering adoption, including sections on “Limited Awareness and Understanding”, “Regulatory and Ethical Concerns” and “Lack of Government or Institutional Support”.

The chatbot advised Kyle: “While the UK government has launched initiatives to encourage AI adoption, many SMBs are unaware of these programs or find them difficult to navigate. Limited access to funding or incentives to de-risk AI investment can also deter adoption.” It also said, concerning regulatory and ethical concerns: “Compliance with data protection laws, such as GDPR [a data privacy law], can be a significant hurdle. SMBs may worry about legal and ethical issues associated with using AI.”

“As the Cabinet Minister responsible for AI, the Secretary of State does make use of this technology. This does not substitute comprehensive advice he routinely receives from officials,” says a spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), which Kyle leads. “The Government is using AI as a labour-saving tool – supported by clear guidance on how to quickly and safely make use of the technology.”

Kyle also used the chatbot to canvas ideas for media appearances, asking: “I’m Secretary of State for science, innovation and technology in the United Kingdom. What would be the best podcasts for me to appear on to reach a wide audience that’s appropriate for my ministerial responsibilities?” ChatGPT suggested The Infinite Monkey Cage and The Naked Scientists, based on their number of listeners.

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Let’s hope – I’m hoping very hard! – that Kyle used this as a comparator for the advice from his human civil servants, to see how far wrong ChatGPT is or was.
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Did Mars harbour life? One of the strongest signs yet is spotted in a peculiar rock • Nature

Alexandra Witze:

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NASA’s Perseverance rover has found possible hints of ancient life on Mars― one of the strongest signs yet of Martian life, according to planetary scientists. Dark-rimmed ‘leopard spots’ in a rock studied by the rover last year could be the remains of Martian microbial activity, researchers said at a conference today.

The announcement comes loaded with caveats. Yes, the spots look a lot like those produced by microbes on Earth. But the spots might have formed without the help of living organisms, researchers say, even if they don’t entirely understand the chemical and physical processes on Mars that would have been at work in that case.

For now, the discovery remains a 1 on the scale of 1 to 7 for evaluating claims of extraterrestrial life, where 1 represents the detection of an intriguing signal, and 7 is a slam-dunk confirmation. Jim Green, the former chief scientist at NASA who developed the scale, says he would like researchers to make additional confirming measurements to move it up another notch on the scale. Doing that would require bringing the leopard-spot rock back to Earth for analysis. A sample is sitting in Perseverance’s belly, awaiting a ride off Mars for precisely that purpose.

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Very exciiit.. oh no never mind. Every “life on Mars” story for the past 50 years has been like this.
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Correcting the record about Social Security Direct Deposit and Telephone Services • US Social Security Agency

Social Security Administration:

»

Recent reports in the media that Social Security plans to eliminate telephone services are inaccurate. SSA is increasing its protection for America’s seniors and other beneficiaries by eliminating the risk of fraud associated with changing bank account information by telephone.

SSA continuously investigates and analyzes potential threats to strengthen and secure our programs and protect people who receive benefits. Approximately 40% of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information. SSA’s current protocol of simply asking identifying questions by telephone is no longer enough to prevent fraud.

If someone needs to change their bank account information on SSA’s record, they will need to either:

• Use two-factor authentication with SSA’s “my Social Security” service; or
• Visit a local Social Security office to prove their identity.

These methods align with most major banks.

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What’s weird is that it’s taken until now, when Musk is turning it all upside down and shaking it really hard, to do this – which is an eminently sensible move. Of course fraudsters would pretend to be relatives or individuals and steal payments like this. The OIG recognised the problem in 2013. Yet it took 12 years to act?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s a new CEO at Intel – but will he keep the chip design division or focus on foundries, or both? CC-licensed photo by HRYMX 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. Unreplaceable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Intel has a new CEO • The Verge

Jay Peters and Sean Hollister:

»

Intel has appointed a new CEO, three months after former CEO Pat Gelsinger was pushed out of the company. The company’s new chief executive is Lip-Bu Tan, who served as CEO of chip design hardware and services company Cadence from 2009 to 2021 and as a member of Intel’s board of directors from 2022 to 2024.

While Intel’s official story was that Gelsinger retired after less than four years in the CEO post, reporting quickly came out that he was pushed out by the board of directors after they lost faith in his strategy to turn things around at the beleaguered company. Gelsinger worked at Intel for 30 years, from 1979 to 2009, before leaving and eventually returning in 2021 to take the CEO job.

Tan will take over as CEO on March 18th from interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle (MJ) Johnston Holthaus. Zinser will continue to be Intel’s CFO, while Johnston Holthaus will still be CEO of Intel Products.

…This isn’t the first time Tan has been tapped to become CEO following a period on a company’s board; that happened with Cadence as well. According to Intel’s press release, Tan more than doubled Cadence’s revenue while he was CEO.

The question now is whether Tan will resume Intel’s previous plan to win with its own wholly owned chipmaking business while simplifying its aims, accelerate plans to spin off some or all of its manufacturing business, or maybe even wind up selling off parts of the company.

In his first public memo as CEO, Tan doesn’t offer many obvious hints about what he wants to do next, but he does suggest that Intel will continue to offer manufacturing as well as chip design.

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We’re not surprised to hear that Intel will keep on doing both. What isn’t clear is how much of the chip design or manufacturing Intel will keep.
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Book review: “Careless People: a cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism” • The New York Times

Jennifer Szalai:

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For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes.

“Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire. Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods.

During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

…Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them [unclear which “both” is meant here – Wynn-Williams or the assistant – Overspill Ed], budget be damned. (The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.

…Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-Williams’s manager. A former Marine who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and who was part of the “Brooks Brothers riot” of 2000, which helped bring George W. Bush into office, Kaplan went on to serve as a deputy chief of staff in his administration.

Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband. …An internal Facebook investigation into her “experience” with Kaplan cleared him of any wrongdoing.

«

There’s also some detail about Myanmar mentioned which tallies exactly with what I learnt in researching Social Warming: warnings many years before trouble, too few staff. Notably, though, Meta staff and ex-staff were out on social media on Wednesday hotly denying Wynn-Williams’s claims, particularly about Kaplan. We live in the Rashomon world.

Also: on Wedneday, Meta got an emergency injunction against Wynn-Williams and her publisher, on the basis the book breached a non-disparagement agreement. Some more mileage in this, evidently.
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The 90somethings who revolutionized how we think about strength training • The Guardian

Michael Joseph Gross:

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In 1988, 712 people lived at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged, a Boston nursing home affectionately named “Hebrew rehab” by its residents and staff. The residents’ average age was 88, and three-quarters of them were women. Every resident had multiple medical conditions. Almost half required help to engage in the essential activities of daily life: getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, bathing, walking, eating. But they were survivors. Some had survived the Holocaust. Others fled the Cossacks. They all lived through the Great Depression.

They were ideal research subjects for Maria Fiatarone, a young doctor and faculty member in geriatric medicine at both Tufts and Harvard. In terrible shape, with lifetimes of practice overcoming great challenges: to Fiatarone, they were perfect.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Fiatarone ran a series of studies in which she asked residents to commit to a regimen of high-intensity strength training. To many of her colleagues, the research seemed risky. Conventional wisdom in medicine at that time said the oldest people were not capable of lifting heavy weights – it might cause cardiac events. In all of western medical literature, Fiatarone found no evidence that any doctor had ever previously tried to teach frail 90-year-olds to do this kind of training.

But she pressed forward with the research, and the Hebrew rehab lifters produced unprecedented proof that high-intensity progressive resistance training can strengthen and build muscle even for the oldest people, with life-changing effects. Hebrew rehab residents who lifted weights gained power to function more independently, and to live with more autonomy and dignity, into their last years.

…In 1990, the Journal of the American Medical Association published results of Fiatarone’s study, a paper now widely considered to mark the start of a paradigm shift in scientific understanding of muscle, strength and ageing. The 90-year-olds’ muscles grew by almost the same amount that a younger person’s muscles would grow in response to a similar lifting program.

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Fabulous recruiting material for any gym smart enough to mailshot it to retirement homes. Or just build gyms in them! Because, as Fiatarone points out, strength training is very safe.
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Mozilla’s response to proposed remedies in U.S. v. Google • Mozilla blog

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Last week the Department of Justice and some state attorneys general filed revised proposed remedies in the U.S. v. Google LLC search case. If the proposed remedies barring all search payments to browser developers are adopted by the court, these misguided plans would be a direct hit to small and independent browsers—the very forces that keep the web open, innovative and free. This case was meant to promote search competition, yet somehow the outcome threatens to crush browser competition, making it even harder for challengers to stand up to dominant players like Google, Apple and Microsoft.

Mozilla agrees that we need to improve search competition, but the DOJ’s proposed remedies unnecessarily risk harming browser competition instead.

Here’s why:
• The DOJ wants to ban all search agreements between Google and browsers, even independent browsers that make up a smaller part of the market.

• Dominant players that own browsers, like Apple, don’t rely on search deals as they have significant revenue streams from other sources, like hardware, operating systems and app stores.

• Meanwhile, independent browsers like Firefox fund the development of their browsers mainly through search revenue––they require this revenue to survive. Search revenue underpins a large part of our work, keeping Firefox competitive and ensuring that web users have privacy-first alternatives.

• Punishing independent browsers will not solve the problem. Judge Mehta found that independent browsers account for just 1.15% of U.S. search queries. This means that cutting off our access to search deals won’t fix the issue of search dominance—not by a landslide. Instead, it hurts browser competition.

“The big unintended consequence here is the handing of power from one dominant player to another. So, from Google Search to Microsoft, or Bing for example—while shutting out the smaller, independent challengers that actually drive browser innovation and offer web users privacy and choice,” [Mozilla president Mark] Surman added.

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Basically, Mozilla is saying that it will die if Google can’t pay it to route searches there. There was a time, of course, when Yahoo took Google’s place (it was 2014), paying $375m – about $100m more than Google was. Wouldn’t Microsoft or someone else want Firefox’s business? I’m not sure this special pleading will have any impact on the judge.
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Sam Altman on X: “we trained a new model that is good at creative writing…”

Sam Altman is very proud of his toy’s new, um, capability, which produced this as the opener for its “creative writing” based on a prompt to write some “metafiction”:

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I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

«

There’s lots and lots more, but this is, let’s not quibble, terrible. You could argue that this is the worst it will ever be – that every iteration after this will be better – but creative writing isn’t like that. Lots of humans never improve, and when they do they’re not entirely sure how. If you’re trying to “improve” the creative writing of a chatbot, what exactly are you trying to do? Humans write about human experience. Chatbots do not.
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Here’s how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are actually using ChatGPT in schools • Teen Vogue

Steffi Cao:

»

According to a Pew Research Center study released in January, more teenagers are using ChatGPT for their homework, with 26% of them age 13 to 17 reporting that they have used the AI service to help with their assignments this year, compared with 13% who used it two years ago. As traditional tech companies continue to roll out AI chatbots and summarization features on their platforms, Amari [Holt, aged 13] says, the use of AI has indeed become more common at her school. “Usually if kids don’t get the work done, they’ll probably use ChatGPT or they use their Snapchat AI,” she says. “I try to use it as little as possible, though.”

Amari is not the only one who feels that way. After all, the data shows that the majority of teenagers are still not using AI in their assignments (though, of course, self-reported studies are sometimes not entirely accurate). In conversations with Teen Vogue, students say that, despite the rising commonality of AI tools, they still have a desire to learn on their own — even if some of their peers are turning to shortcuts.

Sadie, 16, who asked to redact her surname for privacy, just committed to a college where she’ll play soccer. She’s also staunchly against using ChatGPT for schoolwork, partly because she doesn’t want to have to learn how to use it and partly because she doesn’t want to get in trouble for using it; mostly, though, she’s against using it because she feels she’d be cheating herself on the process of digesting new information. “I think that sometimes it’s a little bit unfair how people can get answers from it without really knowing what they’re reading,” Sadie explains. “They just use what they see and aren’t really processing it. I think that’s just the main reason why I’m against it.”

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They, at least, sound like smart kids. Plenty of adults aren’t anywhere near as smart.
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Chinese battery maker Gotion faces backlash over U.S. expansion • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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n the spring of 2024, Chuck Thelen came to an unpleasant conclusion: He would have to eat part of a battery. It was, he figured, maybe the only way to solve his problem.  

Thelen, 59 at the time, has broad shoulders, graying short hair, and an assertive way of speaking that seems to come naturally to American executives. He was a vice president at the U.S. subsidiary of Gotion, a Chinese battery company that was trying to outcompete its peers by betting on overseas markets. With operations spread across the world, Gotion tasked Thelen with bringing the company’s first factory to America. 

On its face, the expansion was a big, ambitious project, and exactly the kind of thing Michigan — and the U.S. economy — needed. The facility would bring an estimated 2,350 jobs and $2.3bn of investment to a small college town called Big Rapids. Gotion would pay future workers in this semi-rural community some $62,000 a year, more than 50% higher than the local median household income. And a new plant would be aligned with the revival of U.S. manufacturing — a goal espoused by both Democrat and Republican politicians. 

But that’s not how some locals saw it. In fact, they were furious. Hundreds of residents protested the factory: putting up yard signs, creating Facebook groups, and organizing rallies. Broadly calling themselves the “No Gos,” they claimed the chemicals produced from the plant would be toxic, and said the electric-vehicle revolution was a scam. They called Gotion’s Chinese ownership suspicious, and painted the battery plant as a Communist Trojan horse. Thelen became the face of the project. The No Gos called him “China Chuck.”

…China’s battery industry is a crowded and highly competitive space. As EVs and other battery-powered devices took off over the past decade, two Chinese players emerged to dominate the market: CATL, which makes batteries for companies such as Volkswagen, BMW, and Tesla; and BYD, which started as a battery manufacturer and now sells more electrified cars than any other company in the world. Together, CATL and BYD produced more than half of the world’s EV batteries in the first half of 2024. Gotion came in 11th place in global market share, with 1.9%. The company’s batteries mostly go into cheap domestic Chinese brands, such as Geely and Chery.

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China, of course, has to be the big baddie now that Russia is apparently everyone’s friend.
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The Pixel 9’s hidden desktop mode is a glimpse of a future I want • Pocket Lint

Ian Carlos Campbell:

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Not everyone wants to lug around a laptop as their mobile computer. Laptops have never been as light or compact in 2025, but they’re still not as portable as a tablet. Which would be fine if tablet operating systems weren’t such a mixed bag. That leaves an increasingly strange set of options for anyone looking for something else. It’s really just DeX, the feature Samsung offers on some Galaxy devices, that lets you run Android apps in a windowed, desktop-style environment.

That is, unless you know where to look on your Pixel 9. The hidden desktop mode in Google’s smartphones is a developer tool rather than a fully thought-out feature, but it suggests a possible future where your Android phone is a monitor, keyboard, and mouse away from being something like a lightweight ChromeOS machine. Having spent the last few years realizing how much of my work can happen in a web browser, it’s a future I really want.

It’s important to caveat that the “desktop mode” on the Pixel 9 is unfinished to the point that it doesn’t really feel like a “mode” at all. But it does give you a noticeably different experience than using your smartphone normally. The vast majority of Android phones max out at running two apps side-by-side (or one on top of the other). Having a whole monitor’s worth of space to run windowed Android apps does let you do more at once. It might also make you release the limits of the current design of some apps.

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Ah. This is me sighing the sigh of the person who has written this article 11 years ago, except from the opposite position. You don’t want your phone to be your desktop, because that means you need a monitor, and if you need a monitor, you might as well have a laptop (or a tablet), because you can’t rely on there being a monitor where you are with your phone if you haven’t brought the monitor with you.

Back in 2013 the nonexistent smartphone that would do this phone-desktop thing was called the Ubuntu Edge, which missed its huge crowdfunding target. Now you can get phones which kinda sorta do the phone-desktop thing – 11 years and much Moore’s Law later – but nobody wants to. Trust me.
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Sonos has canceled its streaming video player • The Verge

Chris Welch:

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Sonos is abandoning far-along plans to release a streaming video player this year, The Verge has learned. The news was announced by the company’s leadership during an all-hands call today. That product, codenamed Pinewood, was set to be Sonos’ next major hardware launch. It was already deep into development and has spent months in beta testing. But now the team behind it will be reassigned to other projects as interim CEO Tom Conrad reprioritizes the company’s future roadmap and continues what he hopes will be a turnaround from a bruising 2024. He told employees that a push into video from Sonos is off the table “for now.”

The abrupt cancellation of Pinewood leaves Sonos without a significant new product to ship in the second half of 2025. The company most recently released the Arc Ultra soundbar and Sub 4 at the end of last year. Internally, some employees were concerned that Pinewood would ultimately become a repeat of the Sonos Ace headphones and see the company trying to take on well-established players in a new product category. When it comes to streaming hardware, Roku, Amazon, Apple, and Google dominate the field.

Instead, at least for now, Sonos will continue its all-hands-on-deck effort to restore the performance and reputation of its software.

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What I said when Welch revealed this five weeks ago: “I understand why – home theatre has become a huge thing for Sonos through soundbars and side speakers – but this cannot work.”

Conrad is showing real focus here. I haven’t looked at the Sonos app in months (I now use the third-party Sonophone) but when people start talking about that app being good to use, that will be the time for Sonos to start working on new hardware.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Denmark, falling letter volumes mean deliveries will cease this year. How long might the UK’s letter service have left? CC-licensed photo by Sergey on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Not going postal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Greenhouse gases reduce the satellite carrying capacity of low Earth orbit • Nature Sustainability

William Parker, Matthew Brown and Richard Linares:

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Anthropogenic contributions of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere have been observed to cause cooling and contraction in the thermosphere, which is projected to continue for many decades. This contraction results in a secular reduction in atmospheric mass density where most satellites operate in low Earth orbit.

Decreasing density reduces drag on debris objects and extends their lifetime in orbit, posing a persistent collision hazard to other satellites and risking the cascading generation of more debris. This work uses projected CO2 emissions from the shared socio-economic pathways to investigate the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the satellite carrying capacity of low Earth orbit. The instantaneous Kessler capacity is introduced to compute the maximum number and optimal distribution of characteristic satellites that keep debris populations in stable equilibrium.

Modelled CO2 emissions scenarios from years 2000–2100 indicate a potential 50–66% reduction in satellite carrying capacity between the altitudes of 200 and 1,000 km.

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Starlink orbits in low Earth orbit, at about 500km up. Contradictory result: warming of the planet goes together with cooling of the upper atmosphere. And fewer satellites, of course.
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Volkswagen reintroducing physical controls for vital functions • Autocar

James Attwood:

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All future Volkswagen models will feature physical controls for the most important functions, design chief Andreas Mindt has said.

The German firm has been criticised over the past few years for moving many of the vital controls in its cars from physical buttons and dials to the infotainment touchscreen. Volkswagen also introduced haptic ‘sliders’ below the touchscreen for the heating and volume and it started using haptic panels instead of buttons for controls mounted on the steering wheel.

More recently, the firm has reintroduced physical steering wheel buttons and Mindt said it is committed to reintroducing physical buttons, starting with the production version of the ID 2all concept that will arrive next year.

“From the ID 2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions – the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light – below the screen,” said Mindt. “They will be in every car that we make from now on. We understood this.

“We will never, ever make this mistake any more. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing any more. There’s feedback, it’s real, and people love this. Honestly, it’s a car. It’s not a phone: it’s a car.”

Mindt said VW will continue to offer cars with touchscreens, in part due to new legal requirements that, as in the US, will require all cars to feature a reversing camera.

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The obvious question – which someone who first linked to this pointed out – is, why didn’t you notice these problems before? How long did it take driving the car to recognise that this wasn’t ideal? Or were touchscreens just so much cheaper and simpler you closed your eyes to the disbenefits for the driver?
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How plants are responding to a warming world — and why it matters • The MIT Press Reader

Theresa Crimmins:

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in India, the flowering period for saffron has been substantially shortened in recent years. Saffron “threads,” highly valued for the flavor and rich color they bring to dishes and drinks, are actually the female reproductive parts of the saffron crocus flower. In parts of India, saffron flowers now open when temperatures are too warm for their development. This leads to a high rate of flower death, and with no flowers, there is no saffron. Between 2013 and 2017, saffron production in Kashmir declined by 90 percent. Consequently, many saffron farmers are shifting their plantings to higher elevations with cooler temperatures.

The northeastern United States is a major fruit production region, as are southern states. As temperatures in these regions have warmed, leaf out and flower bud development as well as the last spring frost have shifted earlier in the season. In many locations, however, the date of the last frost has not shifted earlier to the same degree as plant activity. Consequently, tender plant tissues are at greater risk of exposure to damaging frosts. Many of the plants that produce fruits we enjoy, including blueberries, apples, and cherries, open their flower buds early in the season, sometimes even before they break leaf buds. Once flower buds begin to open, they become sensitive to cold temperatures.

As with saffron, if flower buds are killed by frost, there are no fruits. So advancing phenology is expected to worsen the risk of frost damage in the coming decades. The start of springtime biological activity in the United States is projected to advance by up to three weeks by the end of the century. One set of predictions indicates that we can expect to experience early warm springs followed by damaging freeze events in nearly one out of every three years by the mid-21st century. The same is predicted for Europe and Asia, with up to a third of Europe and Asia’s forests predicted to be threatened by frost damage in future decades.

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Crimmins has a book out on “phenology” – the timing of seasonal plant activity.
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Why extracting data from PDFs is still a nightmare for data experts • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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The PDF challenge also represents a significant bottleneck in the world of data analysis and machine learning at large. According to several studies, approximately 80–90% of the world’s organizational data is stored as unstructured data in documents, much of it locked away in formats that resist easy extraction. The problem worsens with two-column layouts, tables, charts, and scanned documents with poor image quality.

The inability to reliably extract data from PDFs affects numerous sectors but hits hardest in areas that rely heavily on documentation and legacy records, including digitizing scientific research, preserving historical documents, streamlining customer service, and making technical literature more accessible to AI systems.

“It is a very real problem for almost anything published more than 20 years ago and in particular for government records,” Willis says. “That impacts not just the operation of public agencies like the courts, police, and social services but also journalists, who rely on those records for stories. It also forces some industries that depend on information, like insurance and banking, to invest time and resources in converting PDFs into data.”

…Unlike traditional OCR methods that follow a rigid sequence of identifying characters based on pixel patterns, multimodal LLMs that can read documents are trained on text and images that have been translated into chunks of data called tokens and fed into large neural networks. Vision-capable LLMs from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta analyze documents by recognizing relationships between visual elements and understanding contextual cues.

The “visual” image-based method is how ChatGPT reads a PDF file, for example, if you upload it through the AI assistant interface. It’s a fundamentally different approach than standard OCR that allows them to potentially process documents more holistically, considering both visual layouts and text content simultaneously.

And as it turns out, some LLMs from certain vendors are better at this task than others.

“The LLMs that do well on these tasks tend to behave in ways that are more consistent with how I would do it manually,” Willis said. He noted that some traditional OCR methods are quite good, particularly Amazon’s Textract, but that “they also are bound by the rules of their software and limitations on how much text they can refer to when attempting to recognize an unusual pattern.” Willis added, “With LLMs, I think you trade that for an expanded context that seems to help them make better predictions about whether a digit is a three or an eight, for example.”

This context-based approach enables these models to better handle complex layouts, interpret tables, and distinguish between document elements like headers, captions, and body text—all tasks that traditional OCR solutions struggle with.

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What really happened with the DDoS attacks that took down X • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman and Zoe Schiffer:

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Multiple researchers tell WIRED that they observed five distinct attacks of varying length against X’s infrastructure, the first beginning early Monday morning with the final burst on Monday afternoon.

The internet intelligence team at Cisco’s ThousandEyes tells WIRED in a statement, “During the disruptions, ThousandEyes observed network conditions that are characteristic of a DDoS attack, including significant traffic loss conditions which would have hindered users from reaching the application.”

DDoS attacks are common, and virtually all modern internet services experience them regularly and must proactively defend themselves. As Musk himself put it on Monday, “We get attacked every day.” Why, then, did these DDoS attacks cause outages for X? Musk said it was because “this was done with a lot of resources,” but independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont and other analysts see evidence that some X origin servers, which respond to web requests, weren’t properly secured behind the company’s Cloudflare DDoS protection and were publicly visible. As a result, attackers could target them directly. X has since secured the servers.

“The botnet was directly attacking the IP and a bunch more on that X subnet yesterday. It’s a botnet of cameras and DVRs,” Beaumont says.

A few hours after the final attack concluded, Musk told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow in an interview, “We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”

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As usual, Musk is talking complete and utter bollocks. And in this case he certainly knows it. Ukraine’s hacker groups have far better things to do with their time.
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North Korean Lazarus hackers infect hundreds via npm packages • Bleeping Computer

Bill Toulas:

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Six malicious packages have been identified on npm (Node package manager) linked to the notorious North Korean hacking group Lazarus.

The packages, which have been downloaded 330 times, are designed to steal account credentials, deploy backdoors on compromised systems, and extract sensitive cryptocurrency information.

The Socket Research Team discovered the campaign, which linked it to previously known Lazarus supply chain operations. The threat group is known for pushing malicious packages into software registries like npm, which is used by millions of JavaScript developers, and compromising systems passively.

Similar campaigns attributed to the same threat actors have been spotted on GitHub and the Python Package Index (PyPI). This tactic often allows them to gain initial access to valuable networks and conduct massive record-breaking attacks, like the recent $1.5bn crypto heist from the Bybit exchange.

The six Lazarus packages discovered in npm all employ typosquatting tactics to trick developers into accidental installations.

The packages contain malicious code designed to steal sensitive information, such as cryptocurrency wallets and browser data that contains stored passwords, cookies, and browsing history. They also load the BeaverTail malware and the InvisibleFerret backdoor, which North Koreans previously deployed in fake job offers that led to the installation of malware.

…Software developers are advised to double-check the packages they use for their projects and constantly scrutinize code in open-source software to find suspicious signs like obfuscated code and calls to external servers.

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Good idea! Perhaps though we could get machines that could do this? We could call it something like “intelligence”. Stumped for a good name though.
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TikTok’s owner hasn’t negotiated with prospective buyers as deadline looms • Axios

Dan Primack:

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TikTok has less than one month until its U.S. lifeline expires on April 5, but sources say there still haven’t been negotiations between its Chinese owner and prospective buyers.

Suitors are increasingly frustrated by their inability to get under TikTok’s hood, in terms of both finances and technology. There also has been some confusion as to who is actually in charge of Trump administration negotiations for the deal. Early expectations were that it would be Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, given his role as chairman of CFIUS, but Vice President Vance seems to have taken the baton.

Beijing, meanwhile, continues to be publicly silent; one source suggested the situation is like juggling four balls when one is invisible.

Everyone has ideas of how a deal could be structured, but no confidence on how it needs to be structured.

The April 5 deadline isn’t really set in stone. President Trump had no legal authority to extend the U.S. ban by 75 days, so there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t extend it out further (or even indefinitely). [ie “He already broke the law, so why not break it further?” – Overspill Ed.]

But his hand would be helped if at least a term sheet were submitted, since that could trigger a legal extension under the law passed last year. There’s also a proposal from Sen. Markey (D-Mass.) to push back the deadine by another 270 days, although it’s stuck in legislative limbo.

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JD Vance, the meme-Veep, is also said to be involved in the discussions. To no effect, apparently.
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Denmark’s postal service to stop delivering letters – BBC News

Adrienne Murray and Paul Kirby:

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Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century.

The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company’s letter service. Denmark’s 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June.

Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen sought to reassure Danes, saying letters would still be sent and received as “there is a free market for both letters and parcels”.

Postal services across Europe are grappling with the decline in letter volumes. Germany’s Deutsche Post said on Thursday it was axing 8,000 jobs, in what it called a “socially responsible manner”.

Deutsche Post has 187,000 employees and staff representatives said they feared more cuts were to come.

…The decision will affect elderly people most. Although 95% of Danes use the Digital Post service, a reported 271,000 people still rely on physical mail.

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Denmark has a population of about 6 million; letter volumes have fallen from just over 1.4bn in 2000 to less than 200m last year. That’s an average of over 230 per person in 2000 to 33 last year.

In the UK, 2024 volumes were 6.6 billion for about 69 million people, or 95 per person per year. The peak was 2004-5, with 20.1bn letters – a bit less than 300 per person.

The trend is the same, and now Royal Mail is in private hands, when will the tipping point come?
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DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Google has gotten its first taste of remedies that Donald Trump’s Department of Justice plans to pursue to break up the tech giant’s monopoly in search. In the first filing since Trump allies took over the department, government lawyers backed off a key proposal submitted by the Biden DOJ. The government won’t ask the court to force Google to sell off its AI investments, and the way it intends to handle Android is changing. However, the most serious penalty is intact—Google’s popular Chrome browser is still on the chopping block.

“Google’s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that—no matter what occurs—Google always wins,” the DOJ filing says. To that end, the government maintains that Chrome must go if the playing field is to be made level again.

The DOJ is asking the court to force Google to promptly and fully divest itself of Chrome, along with any data or other assets required for its continued operation. It is essentially aiming to take the Chrome user base—consisting of some 3.4 billion people—away from Google and hand it to a competitor. The government will vet any potential buyers to ensure the sale does not pose a national security threat. During the term of the judgment, Google would not be allowed to release any new browsers. However, it may continue to contribute to the open source Chromium project.

This filing includes some changes from the initial remedy filings of 2024, but more changes could be coming. The case is currently under the purview of Omeed Assefi, who is leading the DOJ’s Antitrust Division until Trump nominee Gail Slater gets Senate confirmation. Slater expressed support for increased scrutiny of Big Tech in her confirmation hearings, suggesting she could seek to turn the screws on Google after taking charge.

…There are two notable changes in the government’s position regarding Android and AI investment. Neither area will completely escape the government’s grasp under the proposed remedies, but Google won’t have to sell anything immediately.

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Still awaiting the new Trump-appointed chief, and the decision of the judge in the case.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified