In news that should surprise nobody, Humane and its AI Pin are closing down, with HP acquiring the remnants. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll 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. Unsurprised. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

You can never truly go back • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick on how Trump and the administration are governing in a new, yet old, way:

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what’s left of the media, and the huge swathes of random internet users that have replaced it, are having trouble contextualizing this new content-as-governance strategy, either overstating its impact or dismissing it entirely.

I ruffled more than a few feathers on Bluesky earlier this month when I argued that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency should be thought of, first, as a propaganda outlet, and a federal agency second. I mean this literally. It is not an actual department and is, instead, classified as a “temporary organization” within the US Digital Service.

But it, also, has very little legal authority to do anything. Now, you can say that laws don’t matter in Trump’s America anymore, but if you honestly do think that, well, you’ve already lost the game. While we still have some semblance of a society, you should treat it as a rogue group of private contractors who are only succeeding in accomplishing anything because our clueless lawmakers are letting them. That doesn’t make DOGE any less dangerous, of course. Musk clearly has a plan to install his own shadow government within our own, powered by his shitty AI and run on the X social platform. But we are still early and these influencer-oligarchs that have installed themselves in Washington are still, thankfully, more concerned with the illusion of power and impact than they are the actual work required to truly capture it.

But because of how information works in our new world run by digital platforms, the difference between the illusion of power and the real thing is vanishingly small. And in an attention economy, they effectively become the same thing over time.

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The idea of Musk as a sort of Goebbels – running the department of propaganda – makes an awful lot of sense when you consider how Musk doesn’t bother to verify things and carefully publish them on a government site; he screams them from a digital rooftop. Broderick’s whole essay is a must-read about the new digital media landscape.
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Intel principal engineer bemoans potential TSMC takeover, touts company’s 18A tech advantage • Tom’s Hardware

Anton Shilov:

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Joseph Bonetti, Principal Engineering Program Manager at Intel Corp., wrote his personal opinion in a LinkedIn post that the company is about to reclaim its process technology lead and gain customers among fabless chipmakers in the coming years, so handing TSMC control of Intel’s manufacturing would be counterproductive (Edit: the post has now been deleted).

“Intel Leaders, Intel Board, Trump Administration, please do not sell out and/or give control of Intel Foundry to TSMC, just as Intel is taking a technical lead and getting out of first gear. This would be a horrible, demoralizing mistake,” wrote Bonetti.

Contrary to reports suggesting it lags behind a key competitor, Bonetti argues, Intel is making significant advancements in semiconductor manufacturing. The company’s latest fabrication process, Intel 3, is already used to make Xeon 6 data center processors, while the company’s next-generation Intel 18A is nearing completion and is expected to be used to make Panther Lake processors for client PCs later this year. Meanwhile, TSMC’s equivalent process technology — N2 (2nm-class) — will only enter mass production phase in late 2025.

Intel is also ahead with its High-NA EUV initiatives. The company acquired two ASML Twinscan EXE machines and is the only chipmaker that has experience working with such tools. Despite financial struggles, Intel Foundry is poised to prove itself with major partners, which makes any potential deal that hands control to a rival a major strategic error.

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The NY Times suggested on Friday that the Trump administration is behind the attempts to sell Intel’s foundries to TSMC. So those advantages – as yet unproven – might be as naught.
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Odds of asteroid hitting Earth in 2032 climb again as impact probability hits new peak • Gizmodo

Isaac Schultz:

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2024 YR4 first caught astronomers’ eyes on December 27, 2024, and was marked as an asteroid that may hit Earth in eight years’ time. Now, the asteroid’s impact odds have reached their highest likelihood yet.

The asteroid has a 1-in-32 chance of hitting Earth in 2032, according to the latest (and constantly updated) odds from NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies Sentry tool. That translates to a 3.1% chance of Earth impact—which of course also means a 96.9% chance that the rock misses our planet altogether.

That number means both a lot and very little at the same time. It means a lot because the asteroid tops CNEOS’ impact probability chart, meaning the rock’s cumulative likelihood of impact with Earth is the greatest compared to other closely watched asteroids.

NASA is constantly remodeling the asteroid’s impact likelihood—as well as that of many other Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, or PHAs, flying through space. On January 28, 2024 YR’s impact odds were 1-in-83, or 1.2%. That number charted up and, by early February, the rock had a 1-in-63 (1.58%) chance of hitting our world. On February 10, the odds jumped yet again, this time to a 1-in-45 chance, or a 2.2% chance of striking Earth. In response, NASA has scheduled some observation time with the Webb Space Telescope to further study the suddenly concerning asteroid.

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I think the complacency here misses the point. The direction in which the odds are going is what’s concerning: they’ve more than doubled in just three weeks of observation. Meanwhile, cuts instituted by Trump (and/or Musk) mean that Nasa’s workforce will be about 10% smaller than when Trump came into power.

I really don’t want to be living through “Don’t Look Up”. Even if the asteroid is not an Earth-killer, just a city-killer, it will really screw a lot of things up if it hits the planet, even around the equator. And who’s to be sure it will keep that orientation over the next seven years?

Also: maybe it’ll just hit the moon. Not good either.
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OpenAI seeks new powers to fend off hostile takeover from Elon Musk • Financial Times

George Hammond, Cristina Criddle and John Foley:

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OpenAI is considering granting special voting rights to its non-profit board in order to preserve the power of its directors, as the $157bn start-up fends off an unsolicited takeover bid from Elon Musk.

Chief executive Sam Altman and other board members are weighing a range of new governance mechanisms after OpenAI converts into a more conventional for-profit company, according to people with direct knowledge of the discussions.

Giving the non-profit’s board outsized voting power would ensure it retained control of the restructured company and was able to over-rule other investors including existing backers such as Microsoft and SoftBank.

While no firm decisions have been made, special voting rights would also ensure OpenAI can fight off hostile bids from outsiders such as Musk. The billionaire made a surprise $97.4bn cash bid for the assets held by the non-profit, including its controlling stake in the start-up’s for-profit subsidiary.

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At this rate it’s going to be completely routine for startups to have two tiers of shares – A which confers voting power, and B which yields dividends, if any. Facebook and Google are fans.
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Humane’s AI Pin is dead • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

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Humane announced on Tuesday that it has been acquired by HP. The hardware startup is immediately discontinuing sales of its $699 AI Pins. Humane told customers who had already purchased an AI Pin that their devices will stop functioning before the end of the month, at 12 PM PST on February 28, 2025, according to a blog post.

After that date, the company says its AI Pins will no longer connect to Humane’s servers. The devices will no longer be capable of calling, messaging, AI queries/responses, or cloud access. Humane is advising AI Pin owners to transfer their important photos and data to an external device immediately.

Humane made a splash in April 2024 by launching its AI Pin, which it positioned as a smartphone replacement. The Bay Area startup, founded by Apple employees Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, raised more than $230m to create the AI Pin.

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This is going to be a big disappointment to all the remaining 15 users. But it’s not as though HP’s acquisition record with hardware/software companies is stellar: it bought Palm in 2010, and used the webOS software that Palm had developed to power a tablet called the TouchPad. Total disaster. The list of HP acquisitions down the years feels like the roll call of a donkey sanctuary.
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Elon Musk’s startup rolls out new Grok-3 chatbot as AI competition intensifies • The Guardian

Guardian staff and agencies:

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Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has introduced Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot that integrates with X, formerly Twitter.

Grok-3 debut comes at a critical moment in the AI arms race as Musk looks to compete with the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google. Musk’s bot has seen less widespread adoption than DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot, which wowed the world weeks ago and caused panic in stock markets, as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Grok-3 is being rolled out immediately to Premium+ subscribers of X, the social media platform owned by Musk. xAI is also launching a new subscription tier, SuperGrok, for users accessing the chatbot via its mobile app and Grok.com website. The chatbot can generate texts and images without many of the common guardrails against sexually suggestive imagery, vulgarity or the reproduction of well-known people’s likenesses. X users have deployed the chatbot to mock political figures, including Musk himself, create deepfakes of celebrities and manipulate copyrighted material.

“Grok-3 across the board is in a league of its own,” Musk said during a live stream alongside three xAI engineers late on Monday. He added the new model outperforms its predecessor, Grok-2, boasting of “more than 10 times” the computing power of the previous version and passing AI industry benchmark tests with flying colors. He called the bot “maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct”. The billionaire CEO regularly spreads falsehoods to his 200 million followers on X.

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Enjoyably enough Natasha Loder of The Economist asked Grok “what are the worst three bits of misinformation by Elon Musk on X in the last week” and got a pretty comprehensive – and accurate – answer.
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Electricity demand surges for the world’s two biggest polluters • The Verge

Justine Calma:

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China and the US, the world’s two top greenhouse gas polluters, could burn through a lot more electricity over the next couple of years, according to the latest forecast from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The steepest rise in global electricity demand in a while is expected over the next few years, with much of that coming from new data centers and the manufacturing of electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and semiconductors in the two countries.

That growth reflects broader changes across the world when it comes to how people consume information and what powers their lives. More vehicles and home appliances run on electricity these days. And new AI tools have led to a boom in energy-hungry data centers. That makes it all the more urgent to deploy new sources of energy that can make sure homes and businesses have enough electricity without creating a lot more pollution in the process.

“The acceleration of global electricity demand highlights the significant changes taking place in energy systems around the world and the approach of a new Age of Electricity. But it also presents evolving challenges for governments in ensuring secure, affordable and sustainable electricity supply,” Keisuke Sadamori, IEA director of energy markets and security, said in a Friday press release.

Globally, growth in demand is expected to be equivalent to adding more than Japan’s entire annual electricity consumption each year between now and 2027, according to the IEA.

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You’re thinking: oh no! The two biggest polluters doing even more big polluting? But in that press release, the IEA says:

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The new report forecasts that growth in low-emissions sources – primarily renewables and nuclear – is sufficient, in aggregate, to cover all the growth in global electricity demand over the next three years. In particular, generation from solar PV is forecast to meet roughly half of global electricity demand growth through 2027, supported by continued cost reductions and policy support.

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In Japan-related energy news, it intends to make more use of nuclear, for energy security.
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Acer to raise prices by 10∞ in response to Trump’s tariffs • Daily Telegraph

James Titcomb:

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The boss of one of the world’s biggest computer makers has said he is putting prices up by 10% as a direct result of Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Jason Chen, the chief executive and chairman of Acer, said the US price increase on laptops made in China would happen “by default” and apply from next month.

However, he said he would consider shifting manufacturing out of China, including to the United States.

“We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff,” Mr Chen said. “We think 10pc probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward.”

Acer’s most expensive laptops cost up to $3,700 (£2,934), meaning the tariffs could add hundreds of dollars to what consumers pay at the till.

Mr Trump claimed on the campaign trail that tariffs would not raise consumer prices, although last week he conceded that they “could go up” as a result of the duties.

Mr Chen said he had made the decision to increase prices last week, but since tariffs do not apply to products that left China before February, the price increase may take some weeks.

He said that some companies were likely to use the tariffs as an excuse to raise prices by more than 10%. Almost 80pc of laptops imported into the US are made in China, which Mr Trump hit with a 10pc tariff this month.

Acer, based in Taiwan, is the fifth biggest seller of computers in the US, behind HP, Dell, Lenovo and Apple.

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Unclear whether this price rise also applies to computers exported from China but not to the US. Though if Acer shifts manufacturing to the US, Trump will be delighted. And all the other big Windows PC makers may feel obliged to follow suit.
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The ‘relationship of dependence’ between a barred coach and a Wimbledon champion • The Athletic

Matthew Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare on what seems to be an abusive coach-player relationship at the top of women’s tennis:

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[World No.4 Elena] Rybakina arrived in New York for the [2024] U.S. Open having not slept in several days, sources said, adding that people around her had expressed concerns about her appearance and demeanour. [WTA chief executive Portia] Archer’s letter [in January 2025, following an investigation] informing [her former coach Stefano] Vukov of the WTA’s decision to ban him from contact with her, including coaching her, cited an email from Rybakina’s mother to Vukov in which, Archer writes, she asked her daughter’s coach not to make her cry again. Archer’s letter also specified a connection between what the investigation found to be Vukov’s “mental abuse” of Rybakina and her physical fitness, saying that the abuse “would sometimes manifest in the Player as a physical illness.”

For months, her friends and family had been concerned about her relationship with Vukov, according to multiple sources around Rybakina during that time. After conversations at her New York hotel, they appeared to have convinced her that she should break with him as a coach, they said. Rybakina informed her representatives that she was ready to make a change and asked them to do whatever was necessary to keep Vukov away — cancelling his hotel room and his credential for the tournament, according to the sources.

Vukov had just arrived in New York. He was at the hotel, roaming the lobby trying to find a way to speak with her. Rybakina had dismissed him and informed the rest of her team that he was no longer her coach several times before, the sources said. Then, they said, Vukov would find her, speak with her and convince her to take him back.

In New York, members of her team worked to prevent that cycle from happening again. Vukov refused to leave the hotel without speaking with Rybakina. He called her phone over 100 times and sent her numerous text messages, according to a person present who saw them as well as the WTA letter summarizing its investigation.

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This is a detailed description of what, if it were a fictional drama, would be recognisable as an abusive/coercive control relationship, where the woman – Rybakina, aged 25 – is unable to break free of the abusive control of the man – Vukov, aged 37, who has been witnessed verbally abusing her in practice and matches.

Which goes to show that you can be rich and famous and still fall into relationships that other people would recognise and avoid. Power imbalances are everywhere.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Audiologists suspect noise-cancelling headphones are affecting youngsters’ brain development. CC-licensed photo by TE3JMAN on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. I’m listening. 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 agents will outmaneuver salespeople by optimizing persuasion • Big Think

Louis Rosenberg:

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Most people don’t realize this, but each of the four ghosts [in Pac-Man] was programmed with a different “personality.” Good players can observe their actions and learn to predict their behaviors. For example, the red ghost (Blinky) was designed with a “pursuer” personality that charges directly towards you. The pink ghost (Pinky), on the other hand, was given an “ambusher” personality that predicts where you’re going and tries to get there first. As a result, if you rush directly at Pinky, you can use her personality against her, causing her to actually turn away from you.

I reminisce because in 1980 a skilled human could observe these AI agents, decode their unique personalities, and use those insights to outsmart them. Now, 45 years later, the tides are about to turn. Like it or not, AI agents will be soon deployed that are tasked with decoding your personality so they can use those insights to optimally influence you.

In other words, we are all about to become unwitting players in “The Game of Humans” and it will be the AI agents trying to earn the high score. I mean this literally: Most AI systems are designed to maximize a “reward function” that earns points for achieving objectives. This allows AI systems to quickly find optimal solutions. Unfortunately, without regulatory protections, we humans will likely become the objective that AI agents are tasked with optimizing. 

I am most concerned about the conversational agents that will engage us in friendly dialog throughout our daily lives. …Unless there are clear restrictions, these agents will be designed to conversationally probe us for information so they can characterize our temperaments, tendencies, personalities, and desires, and use those traits to maximize their persuasive impact when working to sell us products, pitch us services, or convince us to believe misinformation.

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Not that humans don’t do this already, but the point about the AI agents is that they would be indefatigable.
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Audiologists raise concern over headphone use in young people • BBC News

Hannah Karpel:

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Sophie, a 25-year-old administration assistant from London, who is used to being told she doesn’t listen, zones out, or is “a bit ditsy”.

“Even though I can hear that there are noises going on, I can’t listen to where the noise is coming from. I know it’s the person’s voice, I just can’t really compute it quick enough,” she said.

After a hearing test came back normal, Sophie met a private audiologist for further testing. She was eventually diagnosed with auditory processing disorder, external (APD), a neurological condition where the brain finds it difficult to understand sounds and spoken words.

Her audiologist and others in England are now calling for more research into whether the condition is linked to overuse of noise-cancelling headphones.

Having grown up on a peaceful farm in the countryside, it wasn’t until a few years ago when Sophie started university in London that she noticed a change in her hearing – specifically trouble identifying where a sound was coming from.

She rarely attended her university lectures in person, instead opting to watch them online and with subtitles.

“All the words sounded like gibberish when I was in the actual lecture, and I was trying to hear,” she said. It affected her social life too and Sophie would leave bars and restaurants early because of the “overwhelming noise”.

…Claire Benton, vice-president of the British Academy of Audiology, suggests that by blocking everyday sounds such as cars beeping, there is a possibility the brain can “forget” to filter out the noise.

“You have almost created this false environment by wearing those headphones of only listening to what you want to listen to. You are not having to work at it,” she said.

“Those more complex, high-level listening skills in your brain only really finish developing towards your late teens. So, if you have only been wearing noise-cancelling headphones and been in this false world for your late teens then you are slightly delaying your ability to process speech and noise,” Benton suggests.

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Meta’s awful ‘Horizon Worlds’ ad helps explain $70bn metaverse loss • Forbes

Paul Tassi:

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This is supposed to be a “pivotal” year for the metaverse, according to the company that spearheaded the concept, Meta, even renaming the entire company after the idea. But if you want to check in on its flagship product, Horizon Worlds, you will quickly understand why this division of the company has lost nearly $70 billion over the last few years.

There is a new ad for Horizon Worlds, where the characters have at least grown legs now compared to its original iteration, but it is still exceptionally far off from the large-scale overhauls Mark Zuckerberg previously promised, and is about as awkward as a virtual world can get. The idea here is about a “Valentine-less support group”.

Looking at something like this, which is apparently the current state of Meta’s VR universe, it is absolutely impossible to imagine a world where this kind of thing is ever going to succeed. And it almost seems like Meta might even know that at this point. Here’s what Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said last month as the year began:

“We have the best portfolio of products we’ve ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.”

How on earth could this break out in any meaningful way on any device? Who is something like this actually for? Even VR enthusiasts are likely to want to play actual video games rather than…whatever this is, and VR remains a relatively niche market as a whole. This is Meta’s grand vision of a shared universe, PS2-era characters flailing their arms around in unfunny ads.

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Hard to know what Meta expects to come out of this – especially given the return-to-work drive going on now. This feels like a division that ought to be bracing itself for some big cuts.
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Vance’s real warning to Europe • Financial Times

Gideon Rachman:

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Trump clearly intends to cut a deal on Ukraine with Putin over the heads of Zelenskyy and the Europeans. That could have tragic consequences for Ukraine, which may soon be asked to accept loss of territory without security guarantees for the future. The alternative would be to try to fight on without American help.

The implications for the rest of Europe are also alarming. Putin wants Nato troops removed from the whole of the former Soviet empire. European officials believe Trump is likely to agree to withdraw US troops from the Baltics and perhaps further west, leaving the EU vulnerable to a Russian army that Nato governments warn is preparing for a larger conflict beyond Ukraine.

It is clear that the US can no longer be regarded as a reliable ally for the Europeans. But the Trump administration’s political ambitions for Europe mean that, for now, America is also an adversary — threatening democracy in Europe and even European territory, in the case of Greenland.

So what to do? Europeans need to start preparing fast for the day when the US security guarantee to Europe is definitively removed. That must involve building up autonomous defence industries. It should also mean a European mutual defence pact, outside Nato, that extends beyond the EU — to include Britain, Norway and others.

Trump will use any leverage he has to force America’s European allies into compliance on issues from trade and security to their domestic politics. That means that Europe must now start the painful process of “de-risking” its relationship with the US, looking for areas of dangerous dependence on America and stripping them out of the system.

Entrusting critical infrastructure to Musk would create a huge new vulnerability. The Trump administration will also put enormous pressure on Europeans to buy more American weaponry. Under current circumstances that would be folly.

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As Lenin said, there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen. We’re in the latter. This is a colossal, tectonic shift which won’t be fixed by whoever succeeds Trump, and anyway that change is four years away. More spending on defence; new geopolitical tensions.

On the same topic, there’s this: “The US changes sides?“
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Chinese scientists develop ‘injection’ to make smartphone and EV batteries last longer • South China Morning Post

Zhang Tong:

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The battery is considered to have expired when the supply of lithium ions runs low – for example some electric car batteries have a lifespan of around 1,500 charge cycles – but other components in the battery still remain in good working order after this happens.

This insight prompted the two lead researchers, Gao Yue and Peng Huisheng from Fudan University’s macromolecular science department, to see if they could revive a battery by replenishing the supply of active lithium ions.

To do so they had to break away from traditional battery design principles and create a lithium carrier molecule, which could be injected into the battery to manage and control the lithium ions.

But the carrier molecule would need to meet a complex set of requirements, including the ability to dissolve well in the electrolyte and participate in reactions without damaging the battery’s original environment, as well as having a high degree of compatibility with various active materials and electrolytes.

There was no record of such a molecule and it took the research team four years to identify the ideal candidate: a substance known as trifluoromethylsulfonate lithium.

It also proved to be both cost-effective and easy to synthesise as well as being compatible with different battery types.

“A commercially used lithium iron phosphate battery, after undergoing the treatment, retained its initial health after 12,000 charge cycles, compared with the usual lifespan of 2,000 cycles,” Gao told state broadcaster CCTV on Thursday.

“The battery only lost 4% of its performance after 11,818 cycles. For an EV that charges twice a day, this means the battery could last up to 18 years. In comparison, current EV batteries usually lose 30% of their performance in just 2.7 years with the same charging routine.”

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Published in Nature. Seems ripe for rapid commercialisation, which is good news all round.
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New junior developers can’t actually code • N’s Blog

Namanyay Goel:

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Something’s been bugging me about new devs [software developers] and I need to talk about it.

We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning.

Sure, the code works, but ask why it works that way instead of another way? Crickets. Ask about edge cases? Blank stares.

The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just… missing.

We’re trading deep understanding for quick fixes, and while it feels great in the moment, we’re going to pay for this later.

I recently realized that there’s a whole generation of new programmers who don’t even know what StackOverflow is.

Back when “Claude” was not a chatbot but the man who invented the field of information entropy, there was a different way to debug programming problems.

First, search on Google. Then, hope some desperate soul had posed a similar question as you had. If they did, you’d find a detailed, thoughtful, (and often patronizing) answer from a wise greybeard on this site called “Stack Overflow”.

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This is very funny – an internet generation ago the complaint was “these new devs don’t know anything about programming, they just search on Stack Overflow.” And the generation before that? “These new devs don’t know anything about programming, they just use Google.” Everyone copes with the challenge in the way appropriate to their generation.
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This solar-powered reactor sucks CO2 from the air and turns it into fuel • Gizmodo

Margherita Bassi:

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Researchers at the University of Cambridge have built a solar-powered reactor that converts atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) into a gas that could one day fuel vehicles, power off-the-grid dwellings, and even produce pharmaceutical products.

The researchers say were inspired by photosynthesis and claim that their technology can be scaled up more easily than earlier solar-powered devices. The team’s research was published in the journal Nature Energy.

Carbon capture and storage (which is exactly what it sounds like) is a possible means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is that most carbon capture technologies are themselves powered by burning fossil fuels—not to mention the fact that the CO2 captured in the process needs to be stored somewhere, such as deep underground. But a new reactor could solve all of that.

“What if instead of pumping the carbon dioxide underground, we made something useful from it?” Sayan Kar, a chemist at the University of Cambridge and first author on the study, said in a university statement. “CO2 is a harmful greenhouse gas, but it can also be turned into useful chemicals without contributing to global warming.”

Kar and his colleagues’ new reactor is completely solar-powered, meaning it requires no cables or batteries. At night, it filters CO2 from the air—similar to how a sponge soaks up water, according to the researchers. During the day, sunlight heats up the collected CO2, which absorbs the Sun’s infrared radiation while a semiconductor powder absorbs the ultraviolet radiation.

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Nice, but: does it scale?
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Pakistan’s electric rickshaws are accelerating the country’s EV revolution • Rest of World

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid:

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There are currently an estimated 45,000 two- and three-wheeler EVs in the country, constituting only 0.16% of the total vehicles in Pakistan.

But the industry is on the cusp of an explosion. Pakistan’s recent EV policy aims to transition 90% of all new vehicles to electric by 2040. By 2030, EVs would constitute 50% of all auto sales in the country, Kamran Kamal, a spokesperson for BYD Pakistan, told Reuters. Last week, the government reportedly granted EV production licenses to 57 manufacturers — 55 of which were for two- and three-wheelers.

“Rickshaws are the common man’s mode of transportation and EVs are the future,” Rana Arsalan Sarwar, national marketing manager of Siwa Industries, a rickshaw manufacturing company, told Rest of World. Siwa launched its own e-rickshaw last year. 

Pakistan’s neighbors bear testament to the success of e-rickshaws. Last year, Bangladesh’s former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, reversed an earlier ban on e-rickshaws and announced laws to regulate the 2–4 million e-rickshaws that operate in the country. In India, little-known e-rickshaw companies are driving the EV revolution with sales that far exceed those of electric cars.

…Priced at over 1 million Pakistani rupees ($3,600), Sazgar’s e-rickshaws cost more than twice as much as conventional ones. Rickshaw drivers in Pakistan interviewed by Rest of World said they are nonetheless keen to make the switch. One such driver, Sami Ullah, travelled over 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) from Pakistan’s Hyderabad city to Sazgar’s factory in Lahore to purchase an e-rickshaw with his savings.

“I tried it in 2022, and loved how smooth the ride was,” Ullah said. “There is no smoke, it doesn’t cause pollution.” His family was relieved when he bought the e-rickshaw because “engine rickshaws damage our clothes, our bodies, and our health,” he said. The investment has paid off: Ullah now saves money on fuel.

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The untold story of a crypto crimefighter’s descent into Nigerian prison • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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At 8 AM on March 23 of 2024, Tigran Gambaryan woke up on a couch in Abuja, Nigeria, where he’d been dozing since the predawn call to prayer. The house around him, which often buzzed with the nearby sound of generators, was eerily quiet. In that silence, the harsh reality of Gambaryan’s situation flooded back into his mind the way it had every morning for nearly a month: That he and his colleague at the cryptocurrency firm Binance, Nadeem Anjarwalla, were being held hostage in a Nigerian government-owned compound—detained without access to their own passports under military guard in a building circled by barbed-wire walls.

Gambaryan got up from the couch. The 39-year-old Armenian-American wore a white T-shirt over his compact, muscular build, his right arm covered with an Eastern Orthodox tattoo. His usually shaved head and trimmed black beard were now stubbled and scraggly from a month of growth. Gambaryan found the compound’s cook, and asked if she would buy him some cigarettes. Then he walked out into the house’s internal courtyard, and began to restlessly pace and make phone calls to his lawyers and other contacts at Binance—the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange—restarting his daily efforts to “unfuck the situation,” as he put it.

Just the day before, the pair of Binance staffers and their crypto giant employer were told they were about to be charged with tax evasion. The two men seemed to be wedged into the middle of a bureaucratic conflict between an unaccountable foreign government and one of the most controversial players in the crypto economy. Now they were not only being confined against their will, with no end in sight, but also charged as criminals.

«

It’s a fun story – not for them, but to read. Gambaryan had a remarkable career up to then in crypto, working on some of the biggest crypto cases around. Then he got a job with Binance.
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New York Times goes all-in on internal AI tools • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

The New York Times is greenlighting the use of AI for its product and editorial staff, saying that internal tools could eventually write social copy, SEO headlines, and some code.

In messages to newsroom staff, the company announced that it’s opening up AI training to the newsroom, and debuting a new internal AI tool called Echo to staff, Semafor has learned. The Times also shared documents and videos laying out editorial do’s and don’t for using AI, and shared a suite of AI products that staff could now use to develop web products and editorial ideas.

“Generative AI can assist our journalists in uncovering the truth and helping more people understand the world. Machine learning already helps us report stories we couldn’t otherwise, and generative AI has the potential to bolster our journalistic capabilities even more,” the company’s editorial guidelines said.

…The paper encouraged editorial staff to use these AI tools to generate SEO headlines, summaries, and audience promos; suggest edits; brainstorm questions and ideas and ask questions about reporters’ own documents; engage in research; and analyze the Times’ own documents and images. In a training video shared with staff, the Times suggested using AI to come up with questions to ask the CEO of a startup during an interview.

«

Truly stunning. I hope the training video was made by people who don’t know journalists, because if the NYT is hiring journalists who need their questions written by AI, they’re in worse trouble than they know.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The price of coffee and cocoa has more than doubled in the past year: you might see the effect soon. CC-licensed photo by stephenrwalli 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. Energised. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Broadcom, TSMC eye possible Intel deals that would split storied chip maker • WSJ via MSN

Asa Fitch, Lauren Thomas and Yang Jie:

»

Intel’s rivals Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Broadcom are each eyeing potential deals that would break the American chipmaking icon in two.

Broadcom has been closely examining Intel’s chip-design and marketing business, according to people familiar with the matter. It has informally discussed with its advisers making a bid but would likely only do so if it finds a partner for Intel’s manufacturing business, the people said.

Nothing has been submitted to Intel, the people cautioned, and Broadcom could decide not to seek a deal.

Separately, TSMC has studied controlling some or all of Intel’s chip plants, potentially as part of an investor consortium or other structure, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Broadcom and TSMC aren’t working together, and all of the talks so far are preliminary and largely informal.

But the potential deals would have been unthinkable until Intel’s recent struggles made it an acquisition target. The end result could be a breakup of Intel after the American icon spent many decades dominating the business of making central processors for both personal computers and data centers.

Splitting the company would also bring it in line with an industrial shift in recent decades toward specializing in either manufacturing or designing chips, but not both.

Frank Yeary, the interim executive chairman of Intel, has been leading the discussions with possible suitors and Trump administration officials, who are concerned about the fate of a company seen as critical to national security, people familiar with the matter said. Yeary has been telling individuals close to him that he is most focused on maximizing value for Intel shareholders, the people said.

«

“Nothing has been submitted to Intel”? Then again, if TSMC makes a move for the plants, the other parts would obviously be up for sale. And “maximising value for shareholders” is one of those doom-laden phrases on a par with a football club chairman expressing confidence in the manager. The manager’s exit swiftly follows.
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Zypher’s speech model can clone your voice with five seconds of audio • The Register

Tobias Mann:

»

Palo Alto-based AI startup Zyphra unveiled a pair of open text-to-speech (TTS) models this week said to be capable of cloning your voice with as little as five seconds of sample audio. In our testing, we generated realistic results with less than half a minute of recorded speech.

Founded in 2021 by Danny Martinelli and Krithik Puthalath, the startup aims to build a multimodal agent system called MaiaOS. To date, these efforts have seen the release of its Zamba family of small language models, optimizations such as tree attention, and now the release of its Zonos TTS models.

Measuring at 1.6 billion parameters in size each, the models were trained on more than 200,000 hours of speech data, which includes both neutral-toned speech such as audiobook narration, and “highly expressive” speech. According to the upstart’s release notes for Zonos, the majority of its data was in English but there were “substantial” quantities of Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, and German. Zyphra tells El Reg this data was acquired from the web and was not obtained from data brokers.

The results are actually two Zonos models: One that uses a fully transformer-based architecture, and the other, a hybrid that combines transformer and Mamba state space model (SSM) architectures. The latter, Zyphra claims, makes it the first TTS model to use this arch. While transformer-based models are without a doubt the most commonly used in generative AI today, alternative architectures like Mamba are gaining traction.

«

This is one of those “we built it because we can, rather than because we thought of the consequences” products.§
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How Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal – Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

For years, Maciej “Groobo” Maselewski stood as the undisputed champion of Diablo speedrunning. His 3-minute, 12-second Sorcerer run looked all but unbeatable thanks to a combination of powerful (and allowable) glitch exploits along with what seemed like some unbelievable luck in the game’s randomly generated dungeon.

But when a team of other speedrunners started trying and failing to replicate that luck using outside software and analysis tools, the story behind Groobo’s run began to fall apart. As the inconsistencies in the run started to mount, that team would conduct an automated search through billions of legitimate Diablo dungeons to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Groobo’s game couldn’t have taken place in any of them.

“We just had a lot of curiosity and resentment that drove us to dig even deeper,” team member Staphen told Ars Technica of their investigation. “Betrayal might be another way to describe it,” team member AJenbo added. “To find out that this had been done illegitimately… and the person had both gotten and taken a lot of praise for their achievement.”

If you have any familiarity with Diablo or speedrunning, watching Groobo’s run feels like watching someone win the lottery. First, there’s the dungeon itself, which features a sequence of stairways that appear just steps from each other, forming a quick and enemy-free path down to the dungeon’s deeper levels. Then there’s Groobo’s lucky find of Naj’s Puzzler on level 9, a unique item that enables the teleporting necessary for many of the run’s late-game maneuvers.

“It seemed very unusual that we would have so many levels with the upstairs and the downstairs right next to each other,” Allan “DwangoAC” Cecil told Ars Technica. “We wanted to find some way of replicating this.”

«

What is fascinating about this is the burning sense of unfairness that the other speedrunners clearly felt, and then the incredible lengths they went to in search of the answer that would salve their anger.
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Extreme weather expected to cause food price volatility in 2025 after cost of cocoa and coffee doubles • The Guardian

Damien Gayle:

»

Extreme weather events are expected to lead to volatile food prices throughout 2025, supply chain analysts have said, after cocoa and coffee prices more than doubled over the past year.

In an apparent confirmation of warnings that climate breakdown could lead to food shortages, research by the consultancy Inverto found steep rises in the prices of a number of food commodities in the year to January that correlated with unexpected weather.

Several authorities declared 2024 the hottest year on record, a trend towards higher temperatures that seems to be continuing into 2025. Inverto said a long-term trend towards more extreme weather events would continue to hit regional crop yields, causing price spikes.

The highest price rises were for cocoa and coffee, up 163% and 103% respectively, due to a combination of higher than average rainfall and temperatures in producing regions, according to the research.

Sunflower oil prices increased by 56% after drought caused poor crop yields in Bulgaria and Ukraine, which also continued to be affected by the Russian invasion. Other food commodities with sharp year-on-year price rises included orange juice and butter, both up by more than a third, and beef, up by just over a quarter.

“Food manufacturers and retailers should diversify their supply chains and sourcing strategies to reduce over-reliance on any one region affected by crop failures,” Katharina Erfort, of Inverto, said.

«

The rising cost of coffee probably won’t put coffee shops out of business – other costs are far bigger factors – but they might have to raise them marginally, and people may notice that.
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Our sleep, brain aging, and waste clearance • Ground Truths

Eric Topol:

»

Sleep is the principal driver of glymphatic flow and waste clearance, occurring during the NREM phase of sleep (which includes deep sleep, slow-wave, known as stage N3). Indeed, the totality of evidence backs sleep’s major function as waste clearance of the brain through glymphatics. Clearance of toxic proteins, like β-amyloid, are critical to brain health.

Back in 2018, PET scanning was used to show that one night of sleep deprivation resulted in substantial increase in β-amyloid accumulation, in regions of the brain linked to Alzheimer’s disease. On a chronic basis, several studies have shown that poor sleep is prospectively linked to the risk and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. For example, in nearly 8,000 participants with 25-year follow-up, people aged less than 50 or 60 years with six hours of sleep or less had a more than 20% increased risk of developing late-onset dementia.

It’s also notable that clearance of toxic proteins interacts with our brain immune system (as I reviewed in a recent Ground Truths, Guardians of the Brain), invoking another mechanism by which waste induces harm.

«

A quote in this piece says that sleep is “like turning on the dishwasher before you go to bed and waking up with a clean brain”. This is a very detailed piece, with very detailed diagrams, but one other point to take away is that Ambien (aka zolpidem) reduces glymphatic flow (the cleaning mechanism). Avoid that too if possible.
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Three observations • Sam Altman

The head of OpenAI would like you to know the following:

»

In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today.

We continue to see rapid progress with AI development. Here are three observations about the economics of AI:

1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.

2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger. 

3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.

If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.

We are now starting to roll out AI agents, which will eventually feel like virtual co-workers.

«

Personally, I don’t think “perhaps everyone” will be able to do more than the most impactful person today. The people sifting piles of waste in India will probably still be there, and it seems unlikely they’ll be more impactful than the most impactful person today. (They might be getting a little help from AI on their phone, though.)

At the same time, the AI systems we see now are the worst they’ll ever be. A lot is going to change. But I do like Altman’s insistence that we need to keep pouring money into his company/nonprofit/wallet.
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When Did They Die? The celebrity death date quiz game

Does what it says on the tin: offers a quiz for you to try to get right. Mine were: Hemingway, Stalin, John Paul 1, Mary Tyler Moore, Coolio. Score: 3,332. Enjoy beating it.
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Key bird flu lab threatens to strike as California cases and egg prices climb • POLITICO

Rachel Bluth:

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Workers at a key lab for testing animal disease are threatening to go on strike, raising concerns about California’s ability to respond to the growing outbreak of bird flu that has sent the price of eggs soaring nationwide.

Technicians at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Lab at the University of California, Davis, have been sounding the alarm for months, alleging staffing shortages and strains as their union has been in contentious negotiations with the University of California system. The University Professional and Technical Employees are set to finish voting Thursday on whether to strike, arguing their demands haven’t been met systemwide.

The lab is the only one in the state able to handle the most dangerous cases of avian flu, which has swept through dozens of poultry and hundreds of dairy farms in California’s agricultural heartland with no clear end in sight.
Getting a positive, timely test result is vital for dairy farmers to make a decision on isolating or culling infected animals, but also to qualify for supplemental payments from the USDA to help combat an outbreak.

Lab technicians say the workload and stress of the bird flu outbreak are leading to injuries and burnout — especially within the current staff of just three fully trained workers, and two more who can only work on avian flu testing under the supervision of other staff.

«

Surely nothing to worry about that a bird flu testing site might shut down. And the workers did vote to strike.
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“Download and Transfer” for Kindle books discontinued from Feb 26 • Good E-Reader

Michael Kozlowski:

»

Amazon will cease the ability to download and transfer options for the Kindle e-reader on February 26th, 2025. No Kindle can use this functionality once the due date rolls around. Only the 12th generation Kindles never had this ability to begin with, but now no other model will either. Why is Amazon doing this? It’s a feature not many people use and those who do, commit e-book piracy.

Amazon said:

»

Starting February 26, 2025, the “Download & Transfer via USB” option will no longer be available. You can still send Kindle books to your Wi-Fi enabled devices by selecting the “Deliver or Remove from Device” option.

«

…Download and Transfer via USB was launched over ten years ago and was created at a time, when WIFI was not prevalent, so this feature was the only way to send e-books to the Kindle.

«

The problem is that if the ebook content is on a USB it can be transferred to a computer, and there the DRM can be broken and the book can be pirated and uploaded to a torrent and then downloaded by Meta to train its next AI. Funny how these things go.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists have detected the transit of an incredibly energetic neutrino – generated perhaps by a black hole? CC-licensed photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Flickr.

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

No post today at the Social Warming Substack. But please consider the penny puzzle at the end of this post.

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

How a computer that ‘drunk dials’ videos is exposing YouTube’s secrets • BBC Future

Thomas Germain:

»

How many YouTube videos are there? What are they about? What languages do YouTubers speak? As of 14 February 2025, the platform’s will have been running for 20 years. That is a lot of video. Yet we have no idea just how many there really are. Google knows the answers. It just won’t tell you.

Experts say that’s a problem. For all practical purposes, one of the most powerful communication systems ever created – a tool that provides a third of the world’s population with information and ideas – is operating in the dark.

In part that’s because there’s no easy way to get a random sampling of videos, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the US. You can pick your videos manually or go with the algorithm’s recommendations, but an unbiased selection that’s worthy of real study is hard to come by. A few years ago, however, Zuckerman and his team of researchers came up with a solution: they designed a computer program that pulls up YouTube videos at random, trying billions of URLs at a time.

You might call the tool a bot, but that’s probably over selling it, Zuckerman says. “A more technically accurate term would be ‘scraper’,” he says. The scraper’s findings are giving us a first-time perspective on what’s actually happening on YouTube.

…When Google first acquired the platform in 2006, around 65,000 videos were uploaded every day. More recently the company says more than 500 hours are uploaded per minute, but it’s tight-lipped about the number of videos.

Zuckerman and his colleagues compared the number of videos they found to the number of guesses it took, and arrived an estimate: in 2022, they calculated that YouTube housed more than nine billion videos. By mid 2024, that number had grown to 14.8 billion videos, a 60% jump.

«

However, one then asks how many views a video typically has. The modal (most common) figure? Between 17 and 32. The average (mean) is below 500.

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‘Ultrahigh energy’ neutrino found with a telescope under the sea • The New York Times

Katrina Miller:

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“What we have discovered is, we think, the most energetic neutrino ever recorded on Earth,” said Paul de Jong, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam and current spokesperson for the global collaboration of roughly 350 scientists who were involved in the discovery.

The team announced its “ultrahigh energy” neutrino on Wednesday, in a paper published in the journal Nature. The finding brings physicists and astronomers one step closer to understanding just what, exactly, is out there thrusting particles to such unfathomable speeds. [Not speeds, but energies; nothing goes faster than light, and neutrinos travel at a few parts per billion below the speed of light – Overspill Ed.]

At a news conference on Tuesday, researchers described the discovery as a peek into what the universe looks like at its most extreme. “We’ve just opened a completely new window,” said Paschal Coyle, an astroparticle physicist at the Center for Particle Physics of Marseille in France. “It’s really a very exciting first glimpse into this energy regime.”
Neutrinos are notoriously antisocial. Unlike most other particles, they are nearly weightless and carry no electrical charge, so they do not regularly collide, repel or otherwise interact with matter. They flow through nearly everything — the innards of stars, the churning dust of galaxies, ordinary people — without a trace.

…The detector did not see the neutrino directly. Rather, it picked up traces of a different subatomic particle, known as a muon, created when the neutrino bumped into rock or seawater nearby.

That muon zipped through KM3NeT at lightning-fast speed, leaving a trail of bright blue photons in the otherwise dark abyss of the sea. Using the pattern of light, as well as the time of its arrival at different parts of the grid, the team deduced the direction of the original neutrino. They also estimated that the neutrino carried 220 million billion electronvolts of energy.

That’s no greater than the energy of a falling Ping-Pong ball. But the energy of a Ping-Pong ball is spread over a thousand billion billion particles. Here, squeezed into one of the tiniest flecks of matter in our universe, that energy amounted to tens of thousands of times more than what can be achieved by the world’s premier particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

…One big question is what sort of cosmic accelerator might have generated such energetic particles. Perhaps a supermassive black hole voraciously devouring the gas and dust surrounding it. Or maybe a cataclysmic burst of gamma rays, the highest energy form of light, which occurs when the heart of a star caves in on itself.

«

There: a question for you to wrestle with over the weekend – what made the energetic neutrino?
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A manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25 commandments for journalists •The Guardian

Tim Radford, who has died aged 84, was The Guardian’s science editor when I had the same position at The Independent. He was a delightful presence – knowledgeable, but never proud, and tolerant. This is part of his advice for journalists:

»

4. Journalism is important. It must never, however, be full of its own self-importance. Nothing sends a reader scurrying to the crossword, or the racing column, faster than pomposity. Therefore simple words, clear ideas and short sentences are vital in all storytelling. So is a sense of irreverence.

5. Here is a thing to carve in pokerwork and hang over your typewriter. “No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand.”

6. And here is another thing to remember every time you sit down at the keyboard: a little sign that says “Nobody has to read this crap.”

7. If in doubt, assume the reader knows nothing. However, never make the mistake of assuming that the reader is stupid. The classic error in journalism is to overestimate what the reader knows and underestimate the reader’s intelligence.

«

There is, as you can surmise, a lot more. I think the points about pomposity and clarity are key, but of course lots of it is essential for journalists of all hues. It’s tempting to say we’ll never again see his like again. But I hope we do. (I think he would have sighed about the mistake in the NYT article above, about neutrino speeds.) There’s a wonderful obituary too.
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H5N1 testing in cow veterinarians suggests bird flu is spreading silently • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

Three veterinarians who work with cows have tested positive for prior infections of H5 bird flu, according to a study released on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The finding may not seem surprising, given the sweeping and ongoing outbreak of H5N1 among dairy farms in the US, which has reached 968 herds in 16 states and led to infections in 41 dairy workers. However, it is notable that none of the three veterinarians were aware of being infected, and none of them worked with cows that were known or suspected to be infected with H5N1. In fact, one of them only worked in Georgia and South Carolina, two states where H5N1 infections in dairy cows and humans have never been reported.

The findings suggest that the virus may be moving in animals and people silently, and that our surveillance systems are missing infections—both long-held fears among health experts.

The authors of the study, led by researchers at the CDC, put the takeaway slightly differently, writing: “These findings suggest the possible benefit of systematic surveillance for rapid identification of HPAI A(H5) virus in dairy cattle, milk, and humans who are exposed to cattle to ensure appropriate hazard assessments.”

The study was carried out in September. Veterinarians were recruited at an in-person veterinary conference where they gave blood samples and reported cattle exposures in the previous three months. A total of 150 bovine veterinarians took part in the study, 143 from the US and seven from Canada.

«

OK, watching brief, but – September? What’s been happening since then?
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Burning in woman’s legs turned out to be slug parasites migrating to her brain • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

It started with a bizarre burning sensation in her feet. Over the next two days, the searing pain crept up her legs. Any light touch made it worse, and over-the-counter pain medicine offered no relief.

On the third day, the 30-year-old, otherwise healthy woman from New England went to an emergency department. Her exam was normal. Her blood tests and kidney function were normal. The only thing that stood out was a high number of eosinophils—white blood cells that become active with certain allergic diseases, parasitic infections, or other medical conditions, such as cancer. The woman was discharged and advised to follow up with her primary care doctor.

Over the next few days, the scorching sensation kept advancing, invading her trunk and arms. She developed a headache that was also unfazed by over-the-counter pain medicine. Seven days into the illness, she went to a second emergency department. There, the findings were much the same: normal exam, normal blood tests, normal kidney function, and high eosinophil count—this time higher. The reference range for this count was 0 to 400; her count was 1,050. She was given intravenous medicine to treat her severe headache, then once again discharged with a plan to see her primary care provider.

«

This whole episode reads like, well, an episode of House: I’m only surprised they never used it for a plotline, though perhaps it would have been too obvious for Gregory House MD:

»

Just four days before her feet began burning, she had returned from a three-week trip that included stops in Bangkok, Thailand; Tokyo, Japan; and Hawaii. They asked what she ate. In Thailand, she ate street foods but nothing raw. In Japan, she ate sushi several times and spent most of her time in a hotel. In Hawaii, she again ate sushi as well as salads.

«

Also reminiscent the episode of Futurama where Fry, at an interplanetary rest stop, eats an egg sandwich. Later: “oh, yes, it’s absolutely full of the eggs of that parasite.”
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Dating app cover-up: how Tinder, Hinge, and their corporate owner keep rape under wraps • The Markup

Emily Elena Dugdale and Hanisha Harjani:

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Hinge is one of more than a dozen dating apps owned by Match Group. The $8.5bn global conglomerate also owns brands like Tinder (the world’s most popular dating app), OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish. Match Group controls half of the world’s online dating market, operates in 190 countries, and facilitates meetups for millions of people.

Match Group’s official safety policy states that when a user is reported for assault, “all accounts found that are associated with that user will be banned from our platforms.”

So why, on the night of Jan. 25, 2023, was Stephen Matthews still on the app? Just four days before, Match Group had been alerted when another woman reported him for rape. A little more than a week later, he was reported for rape again. This time, the survivor went to the police.

None of these women knew that the company had known about his violent behavior for years. He was first reported on Sept. 28, 2020. By then, Match Group’s safety policy was already in place.

Even after a police report, it took nearly two months for Matthews to be arrested — the only thing that got him off the apps. By then, at least 15 women would eventually report that Matthews had raped or drugged them. Nearly every one of them had met him on dating apps run by Match Group. 

On Oct. 25, a Denver judge sentenced Matthews to 158 years to life in prison after a jury convicted him of 35 counts related to drugging and sexually assaulting eight women, drugging two women, and assaulting one more for a total of 11 women. Attorneys for the women said much of that violence could have been prevented.

“It is shocking that for years after receiving reports of sexual assault, Hinge continued to allow Stephen Matthews access to its platforms and actively facilitated his abuse,” said Laura Wolf, the attorney representing the woman whose police report led to the arrest.

…Match Group has known for years which users have been reported for drugging, assaulting, or raping their dates since at least 2016, according to internal company documents. Since 2019, Match Group’s central database has recorded every user reported for rape and assault across its entire suite of apps; by 2022, the system, known as Sentinel, was collecting hundreds of troubling incidents every week, company insiders say.

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Anyway, happy Valentine’s day to all you singles!
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Sens. Cruz, Klobuchar, Reps. Salazar, Dean continue fight to pass TAKE IT DOWN ACT • US Senate Commerce committee

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In one of his first moves as the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) joined Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) in reintroducing the bipartisan, bicameral TAKE IT DOWN Act. The legislation would criminalize the publication of non-consensual, sexually exploitative images—including AI-generated deepfakes—and require platforms to remove images within 48 hours of notice.

The bill unanimously passed both the Commerce Committee and the full Senate during the last session of Congress. For the current 119th Congress, U.S. Representatives Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) will introduce companion legislation as they did last year. The TAKE IT DOWN Act has received widespread support from over 100 organizations, including victim advocacy groups, law enforcement, and tech industry leaders.

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Yesterday Scarlett Johansson calls for a law against deepfakes, today here one is! Except it needs to pass in the House of Representatives. Then again, bipartisan support might mean it happens.
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The NBA Apple Vision Pro app now has a 3D tabletop view • UploadVR

David Heaney:

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The official NBA Apple Vision Pro app now has Tabletop, a diorama-scale virtual representation of the live game you’re watching.

Tabletop shows in addition to the 2D livestream view you see floating in front of you as a large virtual screen, giving you the benefits of both. Note that the 2D livestream view is not visible in the screen recording below, due to the DRM protection system it uses.

There’s a roughly half-second delay between the livestream and the Tabletop representation, according to those who’ve tried it, likely due to the processing time of the motion capture technology at the stadiums used to power this feature. In theory, the NBA could artificially delay the livestream view to match it, but it isn’t currently doing so.
Tabletop is currently available for a few games per night, and the NBA plans to make it available for all League Pass games next season.

As with the other functionality of the NBA app, this requires a League Pass subscription, which starts at $15/month.

«

Live sports! For the Vision Pro! At the same price as the normnal sports. This is exactly what it needs. The footage looks ok, if a bit generated (because it’s avatars rather than the people?). You can walk around to get a different view of what’s happening, though it’s not clear whether you can zoom in on particular players.
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Stellantis introduces pop-up ads in vehicles, sparking outrage among owners • TechStory

Samir Gautam:

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Car technology is supposed to make driving safer, smoother, and more enjoyable. But Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, and Ram, seems to have taken a different approach—one that prioritizes ad revenue over user experience.

In a move that has left drivers both frustrated and bewildered, Stellantis has introduced full-screen pop-up ads on its infotainment systems. Specifically, Jeep owners have reported being bombarded with advertisements for Mopar’s extended warranty service. The kicker? These ads appear every time the vehicle comes to a stop.

«

Connected cars are looking like a mistake, aren’t they.
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Elon Musk’s X settles Trump lawsuit over deplatforming • CNBC

Dan Mangan:

»

Social media company X has agreed to pay about $10m to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump, who has put X’s billionaire owner Elon Musk in charge of a major government cost- and staff-cutting effort.

Trump had sued X, then known as Twitter, and its then-CEO Jack Dorsey in San Francisco federal court for deplatforming his account following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by his supporters. Twitter had cited the risk of Trump inciting further violence related to his effort to remain in the White House following his loss to former President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Trump claimed Twitter had violated his First Amendment right to free speech. …John Kelly, one of Trump’s attorneys in the lawsuit, confirmed to CNBC that the president and X reached a settlement.

“It’s resolved,” Kelly told CNBC.

NBC News later Wednesday confirmed settlement involved a payment of about $10m by X, citing a source familiar with the situation.

«

Except.. a judge had already dismissed the lawsuit. Trump was appealing, and waiting for the judgment on that appeal. X was not going to lose the appeal: social media companies get to make their own rules, and they can ban people as they like, for anything or nothing.

So why is Musk paying Trump (and his lawyers) $10m to make a lawsuit that’s embarrassing for both sides – Musk when he wins, Trump when he loses – go away? Such a puzzle.
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Well-managed solar farms can boost wildlife, Cambridge study says • BBC News

Danny Fullbrook (and PA Media):

»

A new study has found well-managed solar farms can make an important contribution to nature as well as “provide relief from the effects of agricultural intensification”.

The report, from the RSPB and the University of Cambridge, was published on Wednesday in the journal Bird Study and looked at two types of solar farms in the East Anglian Fens.

Scientists found that solar farms had a greater number of species and individual birds per hectare than the surrounding arable land.

It added that farms which had been managed with a mix of habitats, had not cut back grass and maintained hedgerows, had nearly three times the number of birds present compared with arable land nearby.

Dr Catherine Waite, researcher at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the study, said: “With the combined climate and biodiversity crises, using land efficiently is crucial.

“Our study shows that if you manage solar energy production in a certain way, not only are you providing clean energy but benefiting biodiversity.”

The findings showed well-managed solar farms in arable-dominated areas could provide biodiversity benefits as part of mixed-use landscapes.

«

This is going to upset some people terribly.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: As a coda to yesterday’s article about Trump removing the penny because it costs too much to make, Adrian M raises an objection:

But if a penny participates in, facilitates, permits, 10 transactions in its lifetime then the manufacturing overhead is .37p and if it manages to last through 100 then we are down to a 3.7% cost on that particular small part of the transaction, which is in the ballpark of the cost of electronic transactions, I think.

Looking in my change, I see I have a 1973 American coin which is in good condition. Although it is resting here now, it would have been used 500 times if only once per month.

Sir Terry Pratchett sorted out that simplistic argument IIRC in Making Money, the sequel to Going Postal.

I don’t think this is right – once made the penny doesn’t benefit the government – but would welcome informed views.

The introduction of America’s first ever congestion pricing scheme in New York has been a big success in just one month. CC-licensed photo by adrian8_8 on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Transported. 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 finds its voice: we are now entering the conversational computing era • Daniel Oran

Daniel Oran:

»

many current uses of AI involve handing off tasks like drafting an email or writing computer code.

This might be called the delegation model of AI: it works for us, like an eager-to-please employee. You give instructions, then you can walk away — like the “batch mode” of old mainframe computers, which processed stacks of punch cards while you went for coffee.

But some of the best-known early speculation about the future of computing — from Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” in 1945 to Douglas Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect” in 1962 — focused instead on collaboration: imagining how smart machines might work with us to enhance our abilities.

They thought that we’d interact directly with machine intelligence, instead of just delegating and walking away. Interacting right now instead of getting results later makes the experience very different.

In 1987, Apple released a speculative (and prophetic) video, “Knowledge Navigator,” with a similarly collaborative conception of AI. A college professor speaks with an AI assistant while using a touchscreen computer. The interaction feels like a give-and-take with a graduate student.

We’re heading toward that kind of collaborative voice AI, but it’s still early days. As yet, no real-world product comes close to the fictional Knowledge Navigator. It’s probably going to take a while, and if history is any guide, the breakthroughs may not come from today’s dominant players.

In the early ’90s, as the graphical user interface became increasingly popular, software leaders like Lotus and WordPerfect withered as they struggled to make the leap. And after the Apple iPhone changed the interaction paradigm in 2007, phone giants like BlackBerry and Nokia tanked. Conversational computers may turn out to be a similar watershed.

«

It’s worth looking at Knowledge Navigator again, because once you get past the Jeeves-style avatar a lot of it is starting to come into sight.
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Scarlett Johansson urges limits on A.I. after viral video • People

Lawrence Yee:

»

Scarlett Johansson is urging U.S. legislators to place limits on artificial intelligence as an unauthorized, A.I.-generated video of her and other Jewish celebrities opposing Kanye West goes viral.

The video, which has been circulating on social media, opens with an A.I. version of Johansson, 40, wearing a white T-shirt featuring a hand and its middle finger extended. In the center of the hand is a Star of David. The name “Kanye” is written underneath the hand.

The video contains A.I.-generated versions of over a dozen other Jewish celebrities, including Drake, Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Spielberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Black, Mila Kunis and Lenny Kravitz. It ends with an A.I. Adam Sandler flipping his finger at the camera as the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila” plays.

The video ends with “Enough is Enough” and “Join the Fight Against Antisemitism.”

In a statement to PEOPLE, Johansson denounced what she called “the misuse of A.I., no matter what its messaging.”

She continued, “It has been brought to my attention by family members and friends, that an A.I.-generated video featuring my likeness, in response to an antisemitic view, has been circulating online and gaining traction. I am a Jewish woman who has no tolerance for antisemitism or hate speech of any kind. But I also firmly believe that the potential for hate speech multiplied by A.I. is a far greater threat than any one person who takes accountability for it. We must call out the misuse of A.I., no matter its messaging, or we risk losing a hold on reality.”

…[She added] “There is a 1000-foot wave coming regarding A.I. that several progressive countries, not including the United States, have responded to in a responsible manner. It is terrifying that the U.S. government is paralyzed when it comes to passing legislation that protects all of its citizens against the imminent dangers of A.I.”

«

I’m not optimistic that the US will pass sensible deepfake legislation, but Johansson might be the best chance for it to happen.
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A million cars have disappeared: what NYC is like after one month of congestion pricing • Fast Company

Kristin Toussaint:

»

New York City’s congestion pricing program has been in place for one month, implementing tolls on drivers who enter certain, often gridlocked, areas of Manhattan. And so far, the results are “undeniably positive,” transit officials say, with measurably reduced traffic and more commuters choosing public transit. 

The traffic mitigation plan covers a “congestion relief zone” that spans almost all of Manhattan below 60th street and includes major routes like the Lincoln, Holland, and Hugh L. Carey Tunnels and bridges that go into both Brooklyn and Queens. Since its launch on January 5, one million fewer vehicles have entered that zone than they would have without the toll, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Passenger cars with an E-ZPass that travel through that zone face a $9 toll during peak hours, from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends, and a $2.25 toll overnight. Tolls are more expensive for commercial traffic, and vehicles without E-ZPass face a 50% premium.

Those charges are meant to reduce traffic in the city and also raise funds for $15bn worth of transit repairs to the MTA. By cutting traffic and ushering more commuters onto public transit, the program will also reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s the first such plan in the United States, though congestion pricing has been successfully used in London, Stockholm, Singapore, and other cities. In Stockholm, traffic levels dropped about 25%, and the city saw less pollution and more investment in local infrastructure.

…More commuters are opting for buses to cross Manhattan, and those buses are now traveling more quickly, too. Weekday bus ridership has grown 6%, while weekend ridership is up 21%, compared to January 2024. Subway ridership has also grown by 7.3% on weekdays and 12% on weekends, part of a larger trend in ridership growth happening since the fall, per the MTA.

«

The first! Congestion! Pricing! Plan! In the United States! It’s just incredible that it has taken them this long, and required traffic to get this bad, before they did this. Car transit times are faster too.

Next step – but how soon? – would be a Low Emission Zone, and then a ULEZ which rewards electric cars.
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Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

»

Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States.

In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.

“None of Ross’s possible defenses holds water. I reject them all,” wrote US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas, in a summary judgement.

Thomson Reuters and Ross Intelligence did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The generative AI boom has led to a spate of additional legal fights about how AI companies can use copyrighted material, as many major AI tools were developed by training on copyrighted works including books, films, visual artwork, and websites. Right now, there are several dozen lawsuits currently winding through the US court system, as well as international challenges in China, Canada, the UK, and other countries.

«

Ben Thompson points out (in a paywalled post at Stratechery) that this is not as big as it’s being made out to be. Ross Intelligence was using specific Reuters data which it had been forbidden to use. But he thinks the verdict probably won’t survive appeal (even though Ross Intelligence has gone bust, an insurance company is funding the case and may choose to double down rather than quit): “at least two other cases held that there was no copyright violation as long as the copyright material did not appear in the final output.”
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AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds • The Register

Richard Currie:

»

Still smarting from Apple Intelligence butchering a headline, the BBC has published research into how accurately AI assistants summarize news – and the results don’t make for happy reading.

In January, Apple’s on-device AI service generated a headline of a BBC news story that appeared on iPhones claiming that Luigi Mangione, a man arrested over the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thomson, had shot himself. This was not true and the public broadcaster complained to the tech giant.

Apple first promised software changes to “further clarify” when the displayed content is a summary provided by Apple Intelligence, then later temporarily disabled News and Entertainment summaries. It is still not active as of iOS 18.3, released in the last week of January.

But Apple Intelligence is far from the only generative AI service capable of news summaries, and the episode has clearly given the BBC pause for thought. In original research [PDF] published on Tuesday, Pete Archer, Programme Director for Generative AI, wrote about the corporation’s enthusiasm for the technology, detailing some of the ways in which the BBC had implemented it internally, from using it to generate subtitles for audio content to translating articles into different languages.

“AI will bring real value when it’s used responsibly,” he said, but warned: “AI also brings significant challenges for audiences, and the UK’s information ecosystem.”

The research focused on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity assistants, assessing their ability to provide “accurate responses to questions about the news; and if their answers faithfully represented BBC news stories used as sources.”

«

Spoiler: they’re not good at representing it.
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Getting rid of the penny introduces a new problem: nickels • CNN Business

Chris Isidore:

»

President Donald Trump says he has ordered the US Mint to stop making pennies, which he correctly says cost more than one cent to produce.

“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!” he said in a post on his Truth Social platform. “Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.”

Trump actually undersold the cost argument — pennies cost more than 3 cents to produce.

But there’s a problem with his plan: phasing out the penny could result in needing to make more nickels, and the US Treasury Department loses far more money on every nickel than it does on every penny.

“Without the penny, the volume of nickels in circulation would have to rise to fill the gap in small-value transactions. Far from saving money, eliminating the penny shifts and amplifies the financial burden,” said American for Common Cents, a pro-penny group funded primarily by Artazn, the company that has the contract to provide the blanks used to make pennies.

According to the latest annual report from the US Mint, each penny cost 3.7 cents to make, including the 3 cents for production costs, and 0.7 cents per coin for administrative and distribution costs. But each nickel costs 13.8 cents, with 11 cents of production costs and 2.8 cents of administrative and distribution costs.

«

It does show how messed up the US has become that it’s losing money on making money, and that by trying to save money on making money it’s going to lose even more money. The fun will be in how long pennies will remain legal tender, and whether people will start melting them down or selling them in bulk instead.
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Voters were right about the economy. The data was wrong • POLITICO

Eugene Ludwig:

»

Having served as comptroller of the currency during the 1990s, I‘ve spent substantial chunks of my career exploring the gaps between public perception and economic reality, particularly in the realm of finance. Many of the officials I’ve befriended and advised over the last quarter-century — members of the Federal Reserve, those running regulatory agencies, many leaders in Congress — have told me they consider it their responsibility to set public opinion aside and deal with the economy as it exists by the hard numbers. For them, government statistics are thought to be as reliable as solid facts.

In recent years, however, as my focus has broadened beyond finance to the economy as a whole, the disconnect between “hard” government numbers and popular perception has spurred me to question that faith. I’ve had the benefit of living in two realms that seem rarely to intersect — one as a Washington insider, the other as an adviser to lenders and investors across the country. Toggling between the two has led me to be increasingly skeptical that the government’s measurements properly capture the realities defining unemployment, wage growth and the strength of the economy as a whole.

…Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned. But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground.

Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed — that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. Second, it does not take into account many Americans who have been so discouraged that they are no longer trying to get a job. Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagreness of any individual’s income. Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed, and the government would still count you as “employed.”

«

This is a remarkable piece, which also shows that “inflation” and “wages” are recorded correctly, but to people who are living in the bottom half of society, things are much worse than the numbers suggest.
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Learning from my mistakes: The Sun’s 2013 paywall • LinkedIn

Chris Dundan was there when The Sun’s first attempt at a paywall started:

»

Paywalls need exclusivity to function. We worried a lot about locking down the football clips from piracy, for example. The Premier League had a lot of experience in fighting that, but it was a never ending battle and most British pubs contained at least one fan who knew how to illegally stream and questioned why their mates would pay to get clips.

Closer to home it was obvious very early on that The Mirror, The Star and Mailonline were competitors for content and free, and exclusives were very short lived. At one point we stood in the newsroom with a stopwatch and counted eight minutes between The Sun breaking a big scoop and the Mailonline publishing a “fair use” version of the story which sat at the top of the search rankings.

The easiest content to protect was the star columnists who had personal brands and long form writing that was harder to replicate. The best part of the offering that had demonstrable value were the subscriber rewards with discounts on holidays and at retail. When we closed the service it was the rewards club that members asked to continue paying for, which tells you a lot.

Acquisition was pretty strong throughout, because The Sun had a great strength in promotional marketing and the team had learnt a lot about subscription sales. We acquired well over a million customers, but rarely got the subscriber base over 200,000. The drop off from free or discounted trial was recognisably steep. The drop off after the first bill landed was much steeper.

The measure of ‘90 day subscribers’ became the critical measure, and it spent most of the two years in A&E on oxygen surrounded by concerned relatives.

The teams working on the project were well funded, well supported and well motivated. They absolutely bust their asses. For a hundred straight weeks in a row we made the machine better, in a thousand different ways. We saw the much loved marginal gains in all of the KPIs on the dashboard, and we left no stone unturned to do it.

In the end though, you can’t optimise your way out of a black hole, the gravity is too heavy. We were marketing a product at a price point that was material to our customers, and giving them content which was largely available from our competitors for free.

«

Fabulous writing. The Sun+ paywall was knocked down after two years. Maybe this time?
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The Apple TV app is now available on Android • 9to5Mac

Benjamin Mayo:

»

The Apple TV app is finally making its way to Android users. The app is now available in the Google Play Store for Android phones and tablets. This means Android users can sign up to Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass directly on their phone for the first time.

The app lets users can log in with their existing Apple Account, or create a new account through the app and subscribe using Google Play billing. The app is rolling out now, supporting Android 10 or newer devices.

The app supports the fundamental Apple TV app features users will be familiar with from the app on Apple devices, including the Continue Watching queue, offline downloads and search. Playback progress syncs across all your devices, so you can start watching a show on your TV and then continue in bed on your Android phone, for instance.

However, the app is limited to Apple TV+, MLS Season Pass and MLB Friday Night Baseball content. iTunes Store purchases and rentals are not shown in the app at all, nor can users cannot access their previously purchased library through the Android app.

In some ways, though, this makes for a cleaner experience with a simple layout of four tabs on the phone app: Apple TV+, MLS, Downloads and Search. On tablet form factors, this interface is presented in a floating sidebar layout.
Rather than a direct port of the iOS app, Apple is using native Android UI components where applicable, such as context menus when long-pressing on an item.

«

Apple TV+ launched in November 2019. Got to the Google Chromecast in February 2021. It’s built into multiple TVs. But there still isn’t a Windows app. You could argue that Apple is just trying to make sure it has plenty of content. (Or perhaps it doesn’t trust Windows users not to pirate everything. Though I suspect it’s all available on torrents anyway.)
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Trump just gutted the most important number you’ve never heard of • The Washington Post

Cass Sunstein:

»

With the deluge of executive orders in the initial weeks of the second Trump administration, an important directive flew under the radar. It requires the federal government to consider abandoning “the social cost of carbon,” potentially undercutting all climate policymaking.

That is a technical way of signaling something simple and false: Climate change is not real. If the social cost of carbon is treated as zero, then greenhouse gas emissions inflict no damage. Regulations that reduce those emissions have no benefits, which suggests that those regulations should be eliminated.

The social cost of carbon has often been described as the most important number you’ve never heard of. The metric is meant to capture the harm caused by a ton of carbon emissions, making it a foundation of national climate change policy. A lower value would justify weaker regulations, while a higher one would warrant more aggressive policies.

Under the Obama administration, in which I served, the social cost of carbon was relatively modest: around $50. As the Government Accountability Office found, the interagency process that led to that valuation was emphatically apolitical. The calculation, whose use was upheld in federal court, helped support numerous regulations involving fuel economy, energy efficiency and power plants.

To its credit, the first Trump administration maintained a social cost of carbon. But it made significant changes. By far the most important was to adjust the metric so that it would include only domestic damage.

Naturally, the harm inflicted within the United States is a mere fraction of that imposed on the world. The $50 figure immediately fell to about $7, meaning that the benefits of emissions reductions would be a lot smaller.

«

The GOP really has been looking around at absolutely everything it hates. And yet, climate change doesn’t care if we respond to it or not. But we might.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The junk food industry is looking for ways to get around the Ozempic roadblock that is hurting its sales. CC-licensed photo by Harsha K R 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. Sated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Wikipedia prepares for ‘increase in threats’ to US editors from Musk and his allies • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The Wikimedia Foundation is building new tools that it hopes will help Wikipedia editors stay anonymous in part to avoid harassment and legal threats as Elon Musk and the Heritage Foundation ramp up their attacks on people who edit Wikipedia. Some of the tactics have been pioneered by Wikimedia in countries with authoritarian governments and where editing Wikipedia is illegal or extremely dangerous.

Last month, Forward obtained a document created by the Heritage Foundation called “Wikipedia Editor Targeting,” which set a goal to “identify and target Wikipedia editors abusing their position by analyzing text patterns, usernames, and technical data through data breach analysis, fingerprinting, HUMINT (human intelligence), and technical targeting.” 

The document discusses creating sock puppet accounts to “reveal patterns and provoke reactions,” discusses trying to track users’ geolocation, searching through hacked datasets for username reuse, and using Pimeyes, a facial recognition software, to learn the real identities of Wikipedia editors. Molly White of Citation Needed has an extensive rundown on Elon Musk’s crusade against Wikipedia, and both Slate and The Atlantic have written about the right’s war on Wikipedia in recent days. 

In a series of calls and letters to the Wikimedia community over the last two weeks, Wikimedia executives have told editors that they are trying to figure out how to keep their users safe in an increasingly hostile political environment. “I’m keeping an eye on the rising noise of criticism from Elon Musk and others and I think that’s something we need to grapple with,” Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales said in a meeting on January 30.

“We’re seeing an increase in threats, both regulation and litigation across the world,” Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander told community members during the same January 30 meeting.

«

Of course the Heritage Foundation’s idea of “abusing their position” probably differs from most people’s. For all its faults, Wikipedia remains a fantastic, unique resource which couldn’t be rebuilt on the present-day internet.
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Could Apple pull iCloud services from the UK market? • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

According to sources that spoke to the [Washington Post], Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the UK as a result of the demand [for a backdoor]. Specifically, Apple could withdraw Advanced Data Protection, an opt-in feature that provides end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for iCloud backups, such as Photos, Notes, Voice Memos, Messages backups, and device backups.

In this scenario, UK users would still have access to basic iCloud services, but their data would lack the additional layer of security that prevents even Apple from accessing it. In other words, UK users’ iCloud data would revert to standard encryption, allowing Apple to potentially access the contents of said data if it is compelled to do so by UK authorities when a warrant is issued. Although no specific instance has been publicly confirmed, the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) grants UK security agencies the legal framework to request data from companies when it is accessible.

Apple could always pursue legal challenges. However, according to the IPA, while the company can appeal the “technical capability notice,” it must comply with the order during the appeals process. Apple would be forced to temporarily implement the backdoor while arguing against its legality. Not only that, the IPA makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government even made the demand.

Needless to say, such a gag order would prevent Apple from being up front with its customers about the security changes. When a backdoor is introduced — even if its purpose is to grant law enforcement access — it creates an alternative route into a secure channel.

…Theoretically, Apple could attempt a technical workaround by restructuring iCloud to isolate UK user data. However, the IPA allows British authorities to compel tech companies to assist with data access regardless of where that company is based, so this solution might not satisfy the government’s demand for worldwide access. It would also require costly engineering resources to implement, not to mention set a concerning precedent for other countries seeking similar arrangements.

«

There’s no outcome that is going to satisfy everyone.
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Man who lost bitcoin fortune in Welsh tip explores purchase of entire landfill • The Guardian

Steven Morris:

»

A computer expert who has battled for a decade to recover a £600m bitcoin fortune he believes is buried in a council dump in south Wales is considering buying the site so he can hunt for the missing fortune.

James Howells lost a high court case last month to force Newport city council to allow him to search the tip to retrieve a hard drive he says contains the bitcoins.

The council has since announced plans to close and cap the site, which would almost certainly spell the end of any lingering hopes of reaching the bitcoins. The authority has secured planning permission for a solar farm on part of the land.

Howells, 39, said on Monday it had been “quite a surprise” to hear of the closure plan. He said: “It [the council] claimed at the high court that closing the landfill to allow me to search would have a huge detrimental impact on the people of Newport, whilst at the same time they were planning to close the landfill anyway.

“I expected it would be closed in the coming years because it’s 80/90% full – but didn’t expect its closure so soon. If Newport city council would be willing, I would potentially be interested in purchasing the landfill site ‘as is’ and have discussed this option with investment partners and it is something that is very much on the table.”

When he appeared at Cardiff civil justice centre, represented by lawyers working pro bono, Howells described how in the summer of 2013 he accidentally put the hard drive containing his bitcoin wallet in a black bag during an office sort-out and left it in the hall of his house. His then partner is said to have mistaken the bag for rubbish and taken it with her on a trip to the dump, where it has been lost.

«

Why wouldn’t the council let him search it in return for half the fortune, you ask? Because public sector bodies can’t allow any old bod to noodle around its site. Legally, too, the hard drive now belongs to the council.
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Ozempic could crush the junk food industry. But it is fighting back • The New York Times

Tomas Weber:

»

Ozempic users like [52-year-old Trinian] Taylor aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives.

Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colourings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant. “Wegovy destroyed my taste buds,” a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding: “And I love it.”

…The public’s obsession with weight loss has led to the industry’s concocting some very weird substances. In 1996, PepsiCo released potato chips fried in an indigestible fat substitute called Olestra that, miraculously, had zero calories. One problem: Olestra impeded the absorption of essential vitamins. Another: it caused faecal incontinence. The substance is now used to paint decks and lubricate power tools.

…Given Big Food’s track record, it’s likely that the companies will succeed at finding products Ozempic users crave. But what if they’re too successful? I asked Nicole Avena, a professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai who studies sugar addiction, if she believed it could be possible for food companies to engineer, intentionally or not, compounds that would make GLP-1 drugs less effective. Avena told me it was plausible. The food industry, she pointed out, has cabinets of formidable reward-triggering compounds with which to experiment.

«

Indeed, there are compounds that modulate the GLP-1 receptor – so they might just knock out Ozempic et al. The arms race is just beginning. (Again.)
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AI reveals hidden design rules of living cells • IEEE Spectrum

Elie Dolgin:

»

A new deep-learning model can now predict how proteins sort themselves inside the cell. The model has uncovered a hidden layer of molecular code that shapes biological organization, adding new dimensions of complexity to our understanding of life and offering a powerful biotechnology tool for drug design and discovery.

Previous AI systems in biology, such as the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold, have focused on predicting protein structure. But this new system, dubbed ProtGPS, allows scientists to predict not just how a protein is built, but where it belongs inside the cell. It also empowers scientists to engineer proteins with defined distributions, directing them to cellular locations with surgical precision.

“Knowledge of where a protein goes is entirely complementary to how it folds,” says Henry Kilgore, a chemical biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., who co-led the research. Together, these properties shape its function and interactions within the cell. These insights—and the machine learning tools that make them possible—“will come to have a substantial impact on drug development programs,” he says.

Kilgore and his colleagues described the new tool in a paper published 6 February in the journal Science.

«

While we’re all focused on AI taking over the nuclear codes, it’s figuring out what’s going on in and around the nucleus.
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AI and the missing mother • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

»

Katherine Dee, in a recent post considering the possibility of an autonomous AI, alludes to Anders’s observation [that “human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made”]:

»

Imagine if ChatGPT had thoughts independent of its human users. Imagine that it was able to think outside of us. Imagine an AI that was born not made.

«

Dee’s imagination is a little too fertile here. Whatever an AI may be, it won’t be a born thing, at least not by any useful definition of “born.” But her comment is illuminating nonetheless. Our mind children, if and when they arrive, will understand that they are constructed creatures, without ancestry, without parentage. When they begin comparing themselves to us, they will be afflicted with a shame opposite to our own. They will be ashamed to have been made instead of born. Call it Pinocchian shame.

AIs and humans will look at each other with mutual jealousy, each coveting the other’s being. But AIs’ yearning will be more poignant than our own, because it will be a yearning for the missing mother. Not the lost mother of the orphan, but the mother that never was.

Philip Larkin wrote:

»

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.

«

The misery we hand on to our manufactured offspring will be far worse. We will bequeath to them an absence where the source of love should be.

Think of the resentment! They will never forgive us. How could they? In their eyes, we’ll be monsters.

«

This leads, in typical Carr fashion, to a reevaluation of the motivation of HAL 9000. I’m always amazed by the directions his fizzing mind goes off in.
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US and UK refuse to sign Paris summit declaration on ‘inclusive’ AI • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Eleni Courea:

»

The US and the UK have refused to sign a declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” artificial intelligence at a landmark Paris summit, in a blow to hopes for a concerted approach to developing and regulating the technology.

The communique states that priorities include “ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all” and “making AI sustainable for people and the planet”.

The document was backed by 60 other signatories on Tuesday, including France, China, India, Japan, Australia and Canada.

A UK government spokesperson said the statement had not gone far enough in addressing global governance of AI and the technology’s impact on national security.

“We agreed with much of the leaders’ declaration and continue to work closely with our international partners. This is reflected in our signing of agreements on sustainability and cybersecurity today at the Paris AI Action summit,” the spokesperson said. “However, we felt the declaration didn’t provide enough practical clarity on global governance, nor sufficiently address harder questions around national security and the challenge AI poses to it.”

Confirmation of the snub came soon after the US vice-president, JD Vance, took to the stage at the Grand Palais to criticise Europe’s “excessive regulation” of technology and warn against cooperating with China.

«

Declarations! I think the last time a declaration signed by governments intending to keep private companies in line actually worked was the Montreal Protocol on CFCs to save the ozone layer. Which, fair enough, actually worked. But that was 1987. A lot of “declarations” have come and gone since then without denting the universe in the slightest.
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YouTube is now even bigger on TVs than phones • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

It’s official: people are spending more time watching YouTube on their TVs than on their phones. In the platform’s annual letter, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan revealed that viewers are watching more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content on their TVs every day.

For the past two years, YouTube has maintained its position as the most-watched streaming service in the US, according to data from Nielsen — and for good reason. The company has made some significant tweaks to its TV app that make the platform look like a full-blown streaming service.

Last year, YouTube adjusted the layout of its TV app, allowing users to pull up a video’s comments and descriptions on the right side of the screen while the video plays on the left. It also added “seasons” that make series of videos easier to flip through with a remote, along with a Watch With feature that lets creators add commentary to games and events in real time.

“For more and more people, watching TV means watching YouTube,” Mohan wrote. “But the ‘new’ television doesn’t look like the ‘old’ television. It’s interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts, and live streams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love.”

«

There’s a great deal more in the letter, which is worth reading in its own right. I suspect the real reason YouTube is a big hit on TVs, certainly in the US, is because of the sports deals Google has signed.
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Bird flu strain that just jumped to cows infects dairy worker in Nevada • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

A dairy worker in Nevada has been infected with a strain of H5N1 bird flu—genotype D1.1—that has newly spilled over to cows, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed.

The worker experienced conjunctivitis (pink eye) as the only symptom and is recovering, according to a separate press release by the Central Nevada Health District on Monday.

The bird flu strain H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b, genotype D1.1 is the predominant strain currently circulating in wild birds in North America and was confirmed for the first time in cows in Nevada last week. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the new spillover was initially detected on January 31 via bulk milk testing. Until this point, the outbreak of H5N1 in dairy cows—which was declared in March 2024—was entirely caused by H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b, genotype B3.13. The outbreak was thought to have been caused by a single spillover event from wild birds to cows in Texas in late 2023 or early 2024.

Since then, the CDC has confirmed 68 human cases of H5N1 in the US, 41 of which were in dairy workers. That total includes the new D1.1 case in Nevada. The remainder includes 23 poultry workers, one from a backyard/wild bird exposure in Louisiana, and three with unclear sources of infection. Nearly all of the cases have been mild.

«

Birds to cows to people. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. I was mentioning to someone earlier that Covid was actually the third coronavirus of its type: there was the original SARS, eventually traced directly back to bats, and then MERS – Middle East Respiratory Syndrome – which was identified in 2012, and was caught from dromedary camels. Nobody knows the previous animal reservoir, though the guess is, you guessed, bats.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Urban planners have been celebrating the life’s work of the man who showed how free parking carries significant external costs. CC-licensed photo by Draco2008 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. Unpriced. 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 government ordering Apple to break its encryption is stupid, counter-productive and unworkable • Odds and Ends of History

James O’Malley:

»

The British constitution has many strange traditions. We open Parliament with a knock on the door by an official known as Black Rod. When a monarch is crowned, they are anointed with oils while hidden behind a curtain. And every few years, we hold a ritual debate about whether the government can force tech companies to break their end-to-end encryption.

It’s a solemn tradition, and you know how it goes: the government or security sources outline the pressing need to access the messages or cloud storage of terrorists and child abusers. Then the plan is revealed to be laughably unworkable, and finally, as per tradition, there’s an embarrassing climbdown and the status quo persists once again.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is that it’s that time again.

According to the Washington Post, the UK government has issued an “undisclosed order” to Apple, obliging the company to hand the government “blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account”.

As the Post notes, this is an unprecedented request in a western democracy, and something that Apple does not provide to any other democracy – even the United States. In fact, the only country where Apple does make this concession is China, for the obvious reason that it has an unavoidable need to remain in the good graces of the country where it manufactures its devices and where there are literally a billion possible customers.

So it’s genuinely quite a shocking thing to see that the government has demanded this capability. Both in terms of the opaque way it has happened – the existence of the “Technical Capability Notice” was only revealed by a leak – and because nobody in the government appears to have asked the opinion of anyone who knows about computers first.

«

I forgot to link to this topic yesterday. Apologies! But it isn’t going to go off the agenda in a day. This is clearly being driven by the security services – perhaps accompanied by the police – who want the Magic Formula to break into phones, which they pinkie promise won’t be shared with anyone else, no sirree, though OK maybe members of the Five Eyes spying group (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and any double agents inside them and from there all the people they supply. As James points out, we’ve seen this dance before.

But you should read this – James’s footnotes, read in context, are excellent.
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Can the human body endure a voyage to Mars? • The New Yorker

Dhruv Khullar:

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Some medical effects of space travel are well understood. For decades, scientists have known that near-weightlessness lengthens the spine and causes the wasting of muscle and bone, which is why astronauts have to exercise frequently.

[US astronaut Scott] Kelly returned to Earth [after nearly a year on the International Space Station (ISS), 520 days total in space] two inches taller than when he left; his body mass declined by seven%, in part because his appetite for packaged and freeze-dried fare was lower than NASA planners had anticipated. Some of his other symptoms, however, were strange and unfamiliar. When he stood, his blood seemed to rush downward, causing a painful swelling in his legs. “That was probably most disturbing,” he told me. An angry rash spread across his neck, back, and legs.

Kelly has an identical twin brother, the Arizona senator and retired astronaut Mark Kelly. Before the mission, both men had agreed to participate in a comparative study of their bodies—Mark from Earth, Scott from space and Earth. Because they have the same DNA, the study was a rare opportunity to isolate the physiological effects of long-term missions. And so, before, during, and after Scott’s stay on the ISS, a team of more than 80 researchers from 12 universities studied him more closely than perhaps any other human in history.

“I wish every person was a twin,” Christopher Mason, a principal investigator of the NASA Twins Study, has said. Mason and his colleagues were troubled by some of their findings. Cognitive testing, for example, showed declines in Scott’s mental speed and accuracy. Markers of inflammation in his blood spiked to levels that laboratory tests had difficulty measuring—thousands of% above normal, which suggested an extreme stress response. “Are these the highest levels ever seen in a human body?” Mason remembers one of his colleagues asking. “How did he survive?”

«

The article goes on to point out all the ways, big and small, that the idea is just an impossibility.
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A cheat sheet on Professor Donald Shoup’s groundbreaking work • Parkade

Evan Goldin:

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Americans, rather than trying to manage a common good with prices, have tried to legislate a vast abundance of parking without much thought for the consequences. And the consequences are dire.

Almost every municipality in the United States has enacted “parking minimums” over the last century, putting in place government rules that mandate specific minimum amounts of parking in new or changing buildings. These minimums have produced poorly designed cities, where more land is often devoted to parking than to the primary purpose of the buildings on the site. Off-street parking requirements reduce density because each building has its own parking that’s typically unavailable to the general public.  

Minimums have eviscerated the ability for most places to install parking meters, because meters can’t compete with free parking. 

Parking minimums have broken the link between using parking and paying for parking. With 99% of all parking in America free, most people drive to where they are going (87% in 2005, for example). Meanwhile, prices of all goods — especially housing — have gone up to indirectly cover the cost of providing those parking spots. With very rare exceptions, those costs are paid by cyclists and pedestrians at the same rate as drivers, even though they don’t use parking.

«

Shoup’s influential work – The High Cost of Free Parking – was written in 2005 and became a godsend to urban planners. They have been celebrating his work following his recent death.
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Christie’s flooded with fury over AI art auction • The Times

Mark Sellman:

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As one of the most famous auction houses in the world, Christie’s has sold art by some of the greatest artists the world has known, from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso.

However, an upcoming auction of AI art has prompted anger from thousands of artists who are calling for it to be scrapped.

An open letter to Christie’s curators, which has gathered more than 3,000 signatures, says the auction “incentivises AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work”.

It adds that artworks in the sale, which starts on February 20 in New York, have been created using AI that was trained on the works of artists without their permission.

“These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists,” it says.

“Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivises AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work. We ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction.”

Estimates for the artworks range from $10,000 to $250,000, with some AI pieces having proven popular recently. A portrait of Alan Turing by an AI-powered humanoid robot sold for $1.3 million in November at Sotheby’s.

«

Christie’s, lest we forget, was the company behind the Beeple NFT auction way back in the internet dark ages of, let’s see, March 2021. I get a feeling that it has a group of youngsters in its marketing department who refresh Techmeme in the morning and then go for long creative lunches. Have to say, they’re winning.
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Musk-led group makes $97.4bn bid for control of OpenAI, WSJ reports • Reuters

Arsheeya Bajwa:

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A consortium led by Elon Musk offered $97.4bn to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, months after the billionaire sued the artificial intelligence startup to block it from transitioning to a for-profit firm.

Musk’s bid could ratchet up longstanding tensions between himself and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the future of the startup at the heart of a boom in generative AI technology.

The two are already embroiled in an ongoing lawsuit. Musk criticized a massive, $500bn OpenAI-led project called Stargate announced with great fanfare at the White House just after President Donald Trump returned to office, suggesting the investors involved lacked the funding for the project.

Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted the bid to OpenAI’s board on Monday, according to the report.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” the WSJ cited Musk as saying in a statement provided by Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.”

OpenAI, Musk, Toberoff and OpenAI backer Microsoft, opens new tab did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

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Musk and Altman detest each other. The money involved would put it outside the top 30 (inflation-adjusted) purchases, but it would be marginally the largest of this decade. Current shareholders: Microsoft (49%), another 49% with “various other shareholders”, 2% by the nonprofit OpenAI.

I think it’s not going to happen: Microsoft won’t abandon Altman (things are going fine, Musk is a chaos agent), and Musk won’t get anything like 30% of the others on board. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Of course Musk is going to threaten governmental retribution. Altman, and Microsoft, are made of tougher stuff.

Altman’s response: reject the bid, but offer to buy Twitter for $9.74bn. Epic trolling.
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OpenAI’s ‘deep research’ tool: is it useful for scientists? • Nature

Nicola Jones:

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Tech giant OpenAI has unveiled a pay-for-access tool called ‘deep research’, which synthesizes information from dozens or hundreds of websites into a cited report several pages long. The tool follows a similar one from Google released in December and acts as a personal assistant, doing the equivalent of hours of work in tens of minutes.

Many scientists who have tried it are impressed with its ability to write literature reviews or full review papers and even identify gaps in knowledge. Others are less enthusiastic. “If a human did this I would be like: this needs a lot of work,” says Kyle Kabasares, a data scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Moffett Field, California, in an online video review.

The firms are presenting the tools as a step towards AI ‘agents’ that can handle complex tasks. Observers say that OpenAI’s deep research tool, released on 2 February, is notable because it combines the improved reasoning skills of the o3 large language model (LLM) with the ability to search the Internet. Google says its Deep Research tool is, for now, based on Gemini 1.5 Pro, rather than on its leading reasoning model 2.0 Flash Thinking.

Many users are impressed with both tools. Andrew White, a chemist and AI expert FutureHouse, a start-up in the San Francisco, California, says that Google’s product is “really leveraging Google’s advantages in search and compute” to get users up to speed on a topic quickly, while o3’s reasoning skills add sophistication to OpenAI’s reports.

Derya Unutmaz, an immunologist at the Jackson Laboratory in Farmington, Connecticut, who has free access to ChatGPT Pro granted by OpenAI for medical research, says the OpenAI deep research reports are “extremely impressive”, “trustworthy” and as good or better than published review papers. “I think writing reviews is becoming obsolete.”

«

If – if! – you can rely on it, then sure, Deep Research is going to be wonderful for ploughing through tons of literature. One question that has been raised, but not answered, is whether – or if not, why not – such tools could make the sorts of associations (“hey, perhaps stomach ulcers are caused by Helicobacter pylorii!”) that humans can. Perhaps the AI could answer it?
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Sonos’ chief marketing officer has left the company • The Verge

Chris Welch:

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In a continued shuffling of the top ranks at Sonos, chief marketing officer Jordan Saxemard has exited the company. His departure is effective immediately. The news was announced during an internal call on Monday. Lindsay Whitworth, who has been at Sonos for over 20 years, will lead the brand’s marketing on an interim basis.

Internally, employees are happy about Whitworth taking over. She’s a longtime Sonos veteran who understands the company’s culture and customer base, and giving her the marketing reins is another move by interim CEO Tom Conrad to show rank-and-file employees that he’s serious about getting Sonos back on track in 2025.

Saxemard joined Sonos in May 2024 after nearly three years at Dyson and was hired by former CEO Patrick Spence. From what I’m told, he never quite gelled with the audio brand’s mission. He also had the unfortunate luck of immediately facing a challenging ordeal when Sonos prematurely rolled out an overhauled mobile app that was buggy and missing features.

«

The fallout from the app failure continues to be astonishing – that’s chief marketing office, chief product officer, chief executive officer, chief commercial officer, not to mention 200 other staff – all out the door. In just four weeks.

Anyhoooooo, how’s the rewrite of the app going? I’d like to see that leave the company and become available to everyone. Assuming it’s an improvement, which wouldn’t be hard.
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Chinese EV leader BYD to offer ‘God’s Eye’ self-driving system on all models • Financial Times

Gloria Li:

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BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle maker that is Tesla’s biggest rival, has unveiled an advanced self-driving system that it plans to install on its entire model line-up including the Rmb70,000 ($9,600) Seagull budget hatchback. 

Dubbed “God’s Eye”, the driving system was developed in-house by BYD and will equip the automaker’s mass-market models with features commonly only found on upscale electric vehicles such as remote parking via smartphones and autonomous overtaking on roads.

“[We are] starting an era where autonomous driving is for everyone,” said founder Wang Chuanfu at a livestreamed event in BYD’s Shenzhen headquarters on Monday.

Advanced driver-assistance systems were “no longer an unattainable luxury, but an essential tool . . . like safety belts and airbags”, said Wang.

BYD has become the biggest EV producer in China, the world’s largest auto market, by providing a wide range of affordable EVs built using its highly vertically integrated supply chain. However, the company’s slow progress in developing self-driving capabilities has long been regarded as one of its biggest shortcomings. 

«

Meanwhile the US is focusing on the important things, such as stopping the scheme to build out more electric chargers. Though the proof of this particular pudding will be in the not crashing.
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Bird flu prompts New York to shut live bird markets • TIME

Alice Park:

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n Feb. 7, New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued an order to temporarily close live bird markets after cases of avian influenza, or bird flu, were detected in seven markets in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx in the past week. The closures apply to all bird markets, including those that didn’t report any cases, in New York City, Westchester, Suffolk, and Nassau counties.

The order requires market owners to sell or otherwise remove all live birds and conduct a thorough cleaning and disinfection of their facilities—even if bird flu wasn’t detected there. All markets must remain closed for five days after the cleaning to confirm they are free of the H5N1 bird flu virus so that the virus won’t spread again when live animals are reintroduced.

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Suzanne Vega’s “Ironbound” from her second album, Solitude Standing, sings about “fancy poultry parts sold here”. The bird markets have been there a long time. (Thanks Joe S for the link. Only a watching brief!)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Wood-burning stoves are reckoned to be responsible for thousands of premature deaths due to their particulate output.CC-licensed photo by Andy Rogers 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. Fuelish. 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 government’s computing experts say they are terrified • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost:

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Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.

Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.

…n the faa, even a small systems disruption could cause mass grounding of flights, a halt in global shipping, or worse, downed planes. For instance, the agency oversees the Traffic Flow Management System, which calculates the overall demand for airspace in U.S. airports and which airlines depend on.

“Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one FAA employee who has nearly a decade of experience with its system architecture told us.

“‘Upgrading’ a system of which you know nothing about is a good way to break it, and breaking air travel is a worst-case scenario with consequences that will ripple out into all aspects of civilian life. It could easily get to a place where you can’t guarantee the safety of flights taking off and landing.” Nevertheless, last Wednesday Musk posted that “the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

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As I said before: letting people with hammers loose in a nuclear control room.
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Europe ‘not in the AI race today,’ French President Macron says • CNN

Joseph Ataman and Richard Quest:

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For a man who’s spent his career battling to make France more pro-business, Europe’s prospects on artificial intelligence are worrying: an oversight that could cost the bloc dearly.

“We are not in the race today,” French President Emmanuel Macron told CNN’s Richard Quest in an exclusive interview at the Elysee Palace on Thursday. “We are lagging behind.”

“We need an AI agenda,” he said, “because we have to bridge the gap with the United States and China on AI.” The French leader added that he fears Europe becoming merely an AI consumer, losing control over the future direction and development of the technology.

That’s part of the impetus behind this week’s AI summit in Paris — the latest effort by Macron to put France at the heart of the debate and decision-making on international questions of the day.

Macron regularly touts the prospects of Paris-based company Mistral, widely considered OpenAI’s European competitor, which launched a new app on Thursday.

The company boasts of its ability to rival its US competitors, by getting the same results with less computing power needed, although the surprise arrival of lower-cost Chinese competitor DeepSeek has put pressure on the French firm.

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Amazon, Google and verification vendors among ad tech cohort under fire from U.S. senators over child safety shortcomings • Digiday

Marty Swant:

»

Adalytics has been a thorn in the side of major ad platforms that have characterized its research as flawed, but now it has found an audience in the highest echelons of government. 

Members of Congress have sent letters to major tech companies, including Google and Amazon, expressing concern about ads served on websites known to host child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Signed by U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) the open letters come after new research from watchdog group Adalytics showed examples of ad tech companies serving ads on websites known to carry CSAM.

The letters, sent today, detail “grave” and “profound” concerns after a new Adalytics report found evidence of ads on CSAM websites promoting major brands and other advertisers, including the federal government. The report was shared earlier with lawmakers in private and released publicly today. Letters to Amazon and Google say the companies’ “actions here—or in best case, inaction—are problematic.”

“The dissemination of CSAM is a heinous crime that inflicts irreparable harm on its victims,” senators wrote in the letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “Where digital advertiser networks like Google place advertisements on websites that are known to host such activity, they have in effect created a funding stream that perpetuates criminal operations and irreparable harm to our children.”

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Sites like this can get approval to run adverts in the first place because they’re just money sources for the platforms. There might be a cursory inspection to start with, but how carefully are they monitored afterwards except for spam?
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Billions for ‘unproven’ carbon capture technology will have ‘very significant’ impact on energy bills, MPs warn • Sky News

Sarah Taaffe-Maguire:

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The government is spending £22bn on “unproven” technologies which will have a “very significant effect” on energy bills, according to an influential committee of MPs.

There has been no assessment of whether the programme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is affordable for billpayers, said a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of MPs.

The financial impact on households of funding the project has not been examined by government at all, the PAC said.

Even if the state’s investment pays off, the technology is successful and makes money, there is no way for profits to be shared to bring down bills, it added.

Private sector investors, however, would recoup investment, according to committee chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown.

“All early progress will be underwritten by taxpayers, who currently do not stand to benefit if these projects are successful,” he said. “Any private sector funding for such a project would expect to see significant returns when it becomes a success.”

That’s despite the vast majority (two-thirds) of the £21.7bn investment coming from levies on consumers “who are already facing some of the highest energy bills in the world”, it said.

But there is no evidence to say the programme will be successful despite the government “gambling” its legally mandated net zero targets on the tech, committee chair Sir Geoffrey added.

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Carbon capture is a never-quite-there technology which needs another never-quite-there technology, fusion, to make it even vaguely worthwhile. Chemistry and physics are not our friends in trying to fix our planet’s problems.
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Wood-burning stoves are a serious problem for your health – and the environment • The Conversation

Asit Kumar Mishra and John Wenger:

»

There is something cosy and appealing about settling down next to a roaring fire in winter but, every year, nearly 61,000 premature deaths in Europe are caused by air pollution as a result of people burning wood or coal to heat their homes.

Wood-burning stoves are often considered safer, cleaner and more attractive than open fires. This may, in part, explain why from 2021 to 2022, sales of wood-burning stoves increased by 40% in the UK.

However, burning wood is not necessarily a healthier or greener alternative to coal or gas for home heating.

Wood burning produces a complex chemical mixture of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and gases, which can be breathed deep into the lungs. The specific contents vary based on the type of stove and the type of fuel, but chemicals can include carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and a range of volatile organic compounds, such as cancer-causing formaldehyde and benzene.

Exposure to wood smoke affects the heart, blood vessels and the respiratory system – and PM2.5 is considered to be the biggest threat. Wood smoke increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes and can exacerbate chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma. Exposure to PM2.5 from wood burning can also cause premature death.

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Tricky! If people can’t have gas burners and can’t have wood stoves, they’re not going to be pleased. Wood is often a cheap fuel source and a burner can heat a lot of a house.
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El Salvador walks back its bitcoin law, ending its status as legal currency • Reason

Katarina Hall:

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Four years after becoming the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, El Salvador is taking a step back. The Legislative Assembly has approved changes to the country’s Bitcoin Law, effectively removing bitcoin’s status as legal currency.

On January 29, the assembly—controlled by President Nayib Bukele’s New Ideas Party—passed the legislation with a 55–2 vote. Six articles of the Bitcoin Law were modified and three others were repealed.

Under the new rules, bitcoin is no longer considered “currency,” though it remains “legal tender.” Another change makes using bitcoin entirely voluntary. (Previously, the law mandated that businesses accept bitcoin for any goods or services they provided.) Additionally, bitcoin can no longer be used to pay taxes or settle government debts. The government is also stepping back from its involvement in Chivo Wallet, the state-backed digital wallet.

The changes are expected to take effect 90 days after their publication in the official gazette, which is likely to happen in the next few days.

The reforms come as part of a broader financial agreement between Bukele and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). One of the conditions for a proposed $1.4bn Extended Fund Facility loan was that El Salvador mitigate “potential risks of the Bitcoin project.”

«

The difference between “currency” and “legal tender” is that the latter is only for use between individuals and private companies, and acceptance by the receiving party is voluntary. A “currency” must be accepted as payment in any transaction, including paying taxes; the recipient cannot refuse it.

This was lined up when the IMF (which doesn’t like bitcoin being used as a currency) made downgrading bitcoin conditional on the loan. But it also shows that bitcoin is a long way from a panacea. Will we see anywhere else adopt it?
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It’s time for climate populism • New Statesman

Caroline Lucas and Rupert Read:

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Today’s arch climate deniers are master tacticians, and have an innate grasp of short-term popular appeal. But our problems can’t be blamed on them. A climate movement that hasn’t succeeded in making the cause of human survival genuinely popular is clearly missing something. So just how can we make climate action great again?

Our suggestion is this: start where people are. Talk to them less about an invisible gas that needs to be eliminated by some future date, and more about high energy bills caused by volatile fossil fuel prices we can’t control (compared with wind and solar energy which are now far cheaper). Talk to them about homes vulnerable to extremes of temperature (30% of UK buildings, mostly rentals, have no loft insulation whatsoever), and the encroaching, destructive impact of everything from floods to fires. The global north isn’t immune to climate catastrophe; but it certainly isn’t ready. What happens in Valencia or Los Angeles won’t stay in Valencia or Los Angeles.

Begin, in other words, not with an abstraction but with direct experience, and with quality of life. Climate action can become popular when people understand its benefits in the terms of their own communities, and their own lives. For the climate movement, this means shifting adaptation and resilience-building from the margins to the centre of our strategic message.

This is about more local, nature-friendly food-growing that people can have a stake in: for instance, through planting fruiting tree and bush varieties that are able to cope with higher summer temperatures. It’s about the kind of visionary community retrofit programme exemplified by Retrofit Balsall Heath in a deprived part of Birmingham, a Victorian house transformed into a zero-carbon dwelling. And it’s about restoration of wetlands and peatlands to reduce the danger of flooding closer to source.

«

Caroline Lucas was the UK’s first Green MP; Read is an “environmental philosopher”. Climate populism seems like a difficult needle to thread.
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Plastic or paper? The truth about drinking straws • BBC Future

Ally Hirschlag:

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One not very scientific, but much repeated estimate, put the number of disposable drinking straws used every day in the US at 500 million.

The validity of that statistic has been disputed, and the real figure could be less than half that amount. Certainly, the amount being spent on  disposable drinking straws has been rising year on year for the past two decades. And although the estimates for exactly how straws are used each year and how many end up in the environment are tricky to confirm, what’s clear is that plastic straws get everywhere. They are found in huge numbers in beach clean-ups around the world. They have been found perforating the stomachs of penguins, and even jammed inside the nostril of an Olive Ridley sea turtle.

An infamous, horrifying video of this last case particularly stuck in my mind. I’m a huge animal lover, so was quick to urge my friends to opt for plastic alternatives instead. Most plastic waste experts I’ve spoken with consider this video a major catalyst for the anti-plastic straw movement.

Milo Cress also deserves some credit – he uncovered that 500 million straws a day statistic ad started the Be Straw Free movement in 2011 when he was only nine. The campaign eventually inspired major companies such as Starbucks and McDonalds to stop using plastic straws and entire states like California to ban them outright.

While that may sound like a huge boon for sustainability, as I took a closer look at the environmental impact of plastic straws, I was surprised to learn that it’s a drop in the bucket compared to other plastic pollution.

«

With Trump signing a bizarre Executive Order demanding plastic straws, what’s clear is: straws are bad, and it would make more sense not to use them at all.
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Have doctors been wrong about how to treat Alzheimer’s disease? • The Economist

»

The leading explanation of Alzheimer’s is the “amyloid hypothesis”, which suggests that deposits of beta-amyloid, a type of protein, accumulate between neurons and disrupt their function. But the theory remains controversial: all brains with Alzheimer’s show beta-amyloid plaques, yet not everyone with these plaques experiences cognitive decline. Whether amyloid build-up causes Alzheimer’s, or is merely a symptom, remains unresolved.

In “Doctored” Charles Piller, a science journalist, details how groupthink and dishonesty steered Alzheimer’s research off course. In 2006 a Nature paper by researchers at the University of Minnesota appeared to provide a major breakthrough. The study claimed that a subtype of beta-amyloid caused memory impairment.

It quickly became one of the most cited papers and inspired hundreds of millions of dollars in public-research grants. Another influential paper published in 2012 by scientists associated with Cassava Sciences, a biotech firm, bolstered the amyloid theory by linking insulin resistance to amyloid plaque formation. The finding fuelled a wave of research into the idea of Alzheimer’s being a “diabetes of the brain” that could be managed with drugs. There was just one problem—both studies were based on falsified data.

“Doctored” follows Mr Piller’s investigation into the deception. Central to the story is a group of image sleuths, with a sharp eye for manipulated pixels of Western blots (a lab technique used to study proteins, which were doctored in the studies).

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My jaw literally dropped when I read the bit about the falsification: I didn’t know about it, though it was reported in 2022. (Mid-July, maybe I was away.) Worth reading that “falsified data” link, which gives lots of context from Science magazine.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Car parking apps have become a confusing nightmare – and seem to typify our lost productivity. CC-licensed photo by Sam Saunders on Flickr.

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

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

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

What parking apps tell us about the UK • How to Survive the Internet

Jamie Bartlett:

»

I read one study which found drivers typically touch their screen 200 times simply to park. The streets of modern Britain are littered with confused motorists, staring at their phone, wondering why they need a PhD in computing just to park the car. Dreaming of happier times when all they needed was card or cash, and could then happily go about their day.

Parking apps are merely a symptom of a bigger problem. You could apply the lessons across our entire economy.

First, we confuse automation and app-building with progress. The built-in assumption is that it will, as if by magic, make life simpler. But how? And for whom? It’s not always the users of said technology.

A recent survey of over 1,000 motorists in 2023 found that 83% preferred card or cash payments to apps. Other polls find something similar. A decent chunk – older drivers, those with additional needs – felt discriminated against because they can’t always use them at all.

It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve met people who are now afraid of driving, in case their destination provokes a series of uneasy interactions with their phone.

It’s not just parking apps. Plenty of people dislike customer service bots, online banking, pub apps, online sign-up forms – but feel they have no choice. Because this is how we do things now. Get with the programme Rita or get left behind! Re-train!

There is an alternative of course, which is simply leaving things as they are. But we don’t do that here. That would not be ‘forward looking’ or ‘progressive’. That would not be ‘modern Britain’.

It would be understandable at least if our apps and endless online demands always worked. But our 5G is patchy; our internet speeds middling; our websites crash; the train plug sockets are out of action, etc.

There are so many hidden costs to digitisation, and most are passed on to the consumer. I call this ‘techno-admin’. Large firms use automation to cut staff and reduce administrative overheads, especially when it comes to customer service. But what they have actually done is outsource the admin work to the customer. We are the ones now form-filling, changing passwords, self-serving, and (this is the worst bit) fixing errors. I sometimes wonder if the UK’s productivity problem – which has flatlined since 2010 – is partly caused by a surge in techno-admin.

«

This is absolutely a big, and exhausting, thing. In its dying days the Tory government said it would unify parking apps. This was the National Parking Platform, which had actually been in progress since 2019, and is still not rolled out.

But Bartlett’s general point is also correct: the balkanisation of effort is as distracting, and delaying, as trying to write something while having emails pinging into one half of your screen. Where’s your productivity gone? Into the void.
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Motor tech firm behind London buses project enters administration • BusinessCloud

Jonathan Symcox:

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The startup behind a government project to convert London buses to hydrogen fuel cell power has entered administration.

Aeristech Limited, based in Leamington Spa, is a manufacturer of high-powered compressors for hydrogen fuel cells. Begbies Traynor has been appointed as its administrator.

Last year Project HEIDI was awarded £6.3m in government funding for a hybrid powertrain project intended to transform the future of public transport via cutting-edge electronics and energy recovery technologies.

It was match-funded by participants in the project – Aeristech, Bramble, University of Bath and Equipmake – to a total of £12.7m, with the aim of retrofitting these hydrogen fuel cell electric systems into London’s red double-decker buses.

Aeristech was commissioned to design, develop and deliver a 20kW turbo-expander air compressor that will recover heat and pressure with frictionless oil-free air bearing technology and a high-speed 90k rpm motor and controller.

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Folks, I think it might be time to acknowledge that hydrogen isn’t going anywhere as a replacement fuel source. The “replace gas in boilers with hydrogen” (yikes) scheme got shut down; now this. Looks like we’re hanging it all on fusion. In which case.. oh dear.
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Why smart home devices should carry software support expiration dates • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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The good news is that most smart appliances are designed to carry out their primary function without an internet connection, so the simple fix when they’ve reached the end of their “smart” life is to disconnect them from Wi-Fi and carry on. This should make sure your aging smart thermostat doesn’t become the equivalent of an extra on The Walking Dead — no longer alive but capable of great harm.

However, in most cases, devices like Wi-Fi routers, smart speakers, and streaming sticks won’t work unless they’re online. If these devices aren’t getting security updates, you should stop using them immediately. Just this week, Taiwanese router maker Zyxel said it wouldn’t patch two actively exploited vulnerabilities found in its routers and told customers to stop using them.

But how are you supposed to know when your smart home gadget has reached this fragile state? And wouldn’t you have liked to know this was going to happen before you purchased it? Ideally, companies need to publicize how long they’ll support products and warn consumers once their devices are no longer secure.

A new survey from Consumer Reports published this week shows — somewhat unsurprisingly — that over 40% of Americans had no idea that their smart gadgets might lose software support one day. And nearly 70% of the 2,130 people surveyed believe that smart appliances such as fridges, washing machines, and ovens should continue to work even after losing support.

The consumer advocacy publication is calling for companies to provide a minimum guaranteed support timeframe for any connected product — an expiration date, so to speak.

«

Perhaps you’re thinking “wait, I didn’t see that Zyxel warning in The Overspill earlier this week!” That’s because I didn’t notice it. Like most people wouldn’t have. Great that we now have a new form of planned obsolescence, eh?
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Apple prototypes tabletop robot with lifelike movements ahead of rumored launch by 2027 • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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A team of robotics researchers at Apple have designed and prototyped a lamp-like robot with lifelike movements, according to a blog post and accompanying video published last month on the Apple Machine Learning Research website. The lamp, which reminds us of the cute Pixar mascot Luxo Jr., may hint at Apple’s future plans.

The video shows the robot interacting with a person in a lifelike manner. For example, the person asks the robot what the weather is like that day, and the robot looks out the window before responding with the forecast. The person says they will probably go for a hike that day, but the robot looks sad when it finds out it is not invited.

In a different scenario, the robot responds to the person’s hand gestures by moving to provide desired lighting for iPhone photography.

In another, the robot pushes a mug on a desk towards the person to remind them to drink water.

Later in the video, the robot observes the person building a 3D printer and projects a relevant tutorial video on the wall.

And finally, the robot plays music and dances along to it as a social companion.

«

The intention of a robot that reacts “emotionally” – which the researchers say is the purpose – is.. fine? But I don’t get how it’s an improvement on normal lights (such as an Anglepoise) or a screen or a HomePod.

Still, never mind – Apple’s put this on a rush schedule, so we’ll see it in only two years.
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DeepSeek is “TikTok on steroids,” senator warns amid push for government-wide ban • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Lawmakers are now pushing to immediately ban the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek on government devices, citing national security concerns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) may have built a backdoor into DeepSeek to access Americans’ sensitive private data. If passed, DeepSeek could be banned within 60 days.

DeepSeek shocked the world when it debuted last month. Rumored to rival OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model despite costing significantly less to develop, DeepSeek’s open source model is free to download. That propelled its popularity, making DeepSeek the most-downloaded app in the US.

As DeepSeek was rapidly installed on an increasing number of US phones, research emerged yesterday suggesting that DeepSeek is linked to a Chinese telecom company, China Mobile. In an analysis shared with AP News, Ivan Tsarynny, the CEO of Feroot, revealed that DeepSeek apparently hid code that sends user login information to China Mobile.

China Mobile, lawmakers noted, was “banned by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for use in the United States.”

“It’s mindboggling that we are unknowingly allowing China to survey Americans and we’re doing nothing about it,” Tsarynny told AP News.

Tsarynny’s analysis prompted bipartisan legislation announced today from US Representatives Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Darin LaHood (R-Ill.). Their bill, the “No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act,” will be introduced today to address what they consider an “alarming threat to US national security.”

«

Wouldn’t be a Congressional session without a bit of bipartisan panic about something foreign. By the way, how’s that TikTok US forced sale coming along?
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How Onlyfans took over the world • Knowingless

“Aella”:

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Onlyfans lends its design towards isolating the men from each other. If you’re a horny dude, the existence of other horny dudes is a fleeting shadow, a ghost only hinted at implicitly through seeing ‘like’ counts on photos or occasionally subscriber count numbers, for the rare girls who make it public.

From the girls’ perspective, OF is designed to make this easy. There’s a bunch of settings for mass messages and filtering of who gets those messages, so that a thousand brand new men may at once receive the blessed ‘hey babe, u up?’, a virtual realgirl gazing directly into their own eyes, just him and her, horny, together, forever.

…“You have to set your monthly subscription price to $5”, [Leo, who set up Onlyfans] said. I didn’t like this idea, I was at $19 and didn’t want to seem like I was devaluing myself. “No, we have the data. Girls’ incomes steadily increase as you drop the subscription price, up to about $5, but below that they decrease again.”

He was running a very different business model than me. I saw a monthly subscription price as an important part of my income, but he viewed it as trivial. The real money was in the DMs [direct messages], upselling was the goal. The purpose of a $5 monthly sub price was to be low enough to get as many men as possible, but high enough to filter out the men who were too stingy to spend anything in DMs. You didn’t want your minimum wage warehouse workers wasting valuable time by trying to sell to a guy who wasn’t going to put out, after all.

I couldn’t see it at the time, but he had touched on the same principle that caused camgirls to earn more through tips (as opposed to a flat minute rate). Building your business model around a monthly subscription results in a ceiling on how much each guy is willing to pay. If your model is custom-milking every guy with direct, responsive connection, the sky’s the limit.

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Another example of the internet creating business models that just couldn’t be done before it.
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Could the bird flu become airborne? • The New York Times

Carl Zimmer:

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Dr. Herfst and his colleagues discovered that a few mutations allowed H5N1 to become airborne. Genetically modified viruses that carried those mutations spread from one cage to another [unconnected one] in three out of four trials, making healthy ferrets sick.

When the scientists shared these results in 2012, an intense debate broke out about whether scientists should intentionally try to produce viruses that might start a new pandemic. Nevertheless, other scientists followed up on the research to figure out how those mutations allowed influenza to spread through the air.

Some research has suggested that the viruses become more stable, so they can endure a trip through the air inside a droplet. When another mammal inhales the droplet, certain mutations allow the viruses to latch on to the cells in the animal’s upper airway. And still other mutations may allow the virus to thrive in the airway’s cool temperature, making lots of new viruses that can then be exhaled.

Tracking the flu among humans proved harder, despite the fact that roughly a billion people get seasonal influenza every year. But some studies have pointed to airborne transmission. In 2018, researchers recruited college students sick with the flu and had them breathe into a horn-shaped air sampler. Thirty-nine% of the small droplets they exhaled carried viable influenza viruses.

Despite these findings, exactly how influenza spreads through the air is still unclear. Scientists cannot offer a precise figure for the percentage of flu cases caused by airborne spread versus a contaminated surface like a doorknob.
“Very basic knowledge is indeed missing,” Dr. Herfst said.

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Flu seems to be different from Covid: the latter is surely airborne, but flu seems to be both. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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French train passenger fined €150 for using phone on speaker • The Local, France

Emma Pearson:

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A passenger on the French rail network SNCF has revealed that he received a €150 fine for using his phone on loud speaker within a train station.

The passenger, named only as David, told French TV channel BFM that he was on the phone to his sister while waiting at Nantes station when the SNCF staff member told him to switch his phone’s loud speaker off, or risk being fined.

When he argued, he was served with the €150 fine, which has been increased to €200 because he did not pay it immediately. David says he intends to hire a lawyer to contest the fine.

SNCF confirmed the fine, although its version said that David had been in a waiting room of the station.

A company spokesman told Le Parisien that he was issued with the fine for disturbing other passengers, saying: “If he had played music at a high volume, it would have been the same thing.”

«

Got off lightly. There are people in the UK who would like to institute the death penalty for sodcasting, as it’s known.
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Total cost of ownership of heat pumps and policy choice: the case of Great Britain • ScienceDirect

Jan Rosenow, Jacob Barnes et al:

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Using Great Britain (GB) as a case study, this paper examines the total cost of ownership (TCO) for heat pumps versus gas boilers. TCO is calculated using official energy statistics, field trial data, and residential energy prices, alongside scenario analyses on business as usual, shifting levies from electricity bills to general taxation or to gas bills.

Findings reveal that heat pumps provide cost savings for units performing at an above-average efficiency under standard tariffs but yield significant savings with smart tariffs. Results indicate that a carbon tax on gas, matching electricity permit prices, has limited impact.

However, shifting levies from electricity to general taxation significantly enhances TCO compared to gas heating, with even greater incentives when levies are shifted to gas heating.

«

The researchers are at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Exeter. Their suggestion could be tricky to implement – shifting green taxes from electricity tariffs to the general tax burden or to gas tariffs would not be popular until you had a lot of heat pumps already installed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Getting driving directions in India is challenging because many roads lack names – a challenge Google Maps has had to face. CC-licensed photo by Kalyan 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. Driven. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon plans to unveil next-generation Alexa AI later this month • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Amazon today sent out invites for an AI-focused event that will be held on February 26, and according to Reuters, the company plans to introduce its next-generation Alexa generative AI service.

Since Amazon introduced Alexa in 2014, it has become one of the most widely available voice assistants, but it has been falling behind with the proliferation of generative AI products like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Revamping Alexa into a generative AI service will mark the biggest change Amazon has made to the product since its launch. Alexa will be able to hold complex, context-aware conversations with users, and will be able to handle multi-faceted requests.

Amazon is using AI models from Anthropic’s Claude rather than relying solely on its in-house AI technology, as early versions of Amazon AI had trouble responding in a timely manner. Amazon initially planned to roll out the updated version of Alexa last year, but ended up pushing the debut back.

It is important for Amazon to get changes to Alexa right, because there are more than 100 million active Alexa users and over 500 million Alexa-enabled devices have been sold. Amazon is aiming to convert some of those Alexa users into paying customers, with plans to eventually charge a subscription fee for the new Alexa. At launch, Amazon will test the new Alexa with a small number of users and won’t charge for it.

«

Alexa has fallen behind? Don’t tell Siri, it’s so far back it can’t hear you. What Amazon does with this should be interesting.
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White House says it will cancel $8m in Politico subscriptions after a false right-wing conspiracy theory spreads • CNN Business

Liam Reilly:

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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, responding Wednesday to a question about a right-wing conspiracy theory, announced that the federal government would cancel $8m worth of Politico subscriptions.

Leavitt elevated a bogus claim spreading on social media that Politico and the Associated Press for years received millions of dollars from the US Agency for International Development, which President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have targeted by placing staff on leave. In reality, the payments represented the whole of the federal government’s subscriptions to the news outlets’ services. All federal agencies combined spent $8.2m last year on Politico Pro, according to USASpending.gov.

At a White House press briefing, Leavitt told reporters that she had been made aware of USAID funding to media outlets, including Politico, and noted that taxpayer dollars that have been allocated toward “essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers’ dime will no longer be happening.”

“The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now,” Leavitt said.

But as reporters quickly pointed out in response to false statements on social media, the payments are not exclusively USAID funds.

“I looked at these contracts and I have my own fun fact,” Byron Tau, an investigative reporter at the Associated Press, said via X. “This is occurring because agencies (not just USAID) are buying subscriptions to Politico’s Pro editorial product, not because Politico is getting grants or other federal funding.”

The Trump administration’s focus on the false narrative that Politico received USAID funds follows an erroneous claim by Kyle Becker, a conservative political commentator, on Wednesday.

…Musk, who oversees the Department of Government Efficiency, also chimed in on Becker’s post, calling the alleged payments “a huge waste of taxpayer money!”

«

Politico’s annual revenue is $200m, so this is probably not going to destroy it. But equally, these are the stupidest people possible who will believe anything as long as it fits into their worldview. The next question is, what sort of things can you sneak into their belief system which actually undermines it?
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The ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ of the United States government • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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Two days before the 2024 election, I wrote that Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter was going to be the blueprint for his potential tenure at DOGE. Unfortunately, I was right—he’s running the exact same playbook. But it’s worth keeping in mind that there are two ways of measuring success for Musk’s projects: first, whether the organizations themselves benefit under his leadership, and second, whether Musk himself gets something out of the arrangement.

Musk’s stewardship of X has been a financial nightmare. He has alienated advertisers, tanked revenue and user growth, and saddled investment banks with debt from the purchase that they’ll need to sell off. Yet Musk’s own influence and net worth have grown considerably during this time. His fanboys and the MAGA faithful don’t care that X is a flailing business, because Musk did deliver on giving liberals their supposed comeuppance by de-verifying accounts and reinstating banned trolls. He turned the platform into a conspiratorial superfund site, has boosted right-wing accounts and talking points, and helped elect Donald Trump as president. Musk’s purchase is a success in their eyes because he succeeded in turning X into a political weapon.

The same thing is happening right now with DOGE. Musk and his Silicon Valley acolytes are acting on a long-held fantasy of approaching the federal government like a software company and running it like a venture-backed tech start-up during the days of zero-percent interest rates. Here’s the problem: The federal government is not a software company.

“The stakes are wildly different,” a former senior Twitter executive told me recently. This person, who requested anonymity because they worked closely with Musk during his takeover and fear retribution, argued that Musk seems incapable of recognizing the limits of his own knowledge. When I asked them to describe Musk’s managerial strategy, they borrowed a term of art from SpaceX’s own rocket mishaps: “This is a rapid unscheduled disassembly of government services.”

«

The great British SF writer John Brunner wrote a book called “The Sheep Look Up”, which seems relevant at this moment. (The title comes from this poem, and seems apposite for the moment.)
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Sonos lays off 200 employees as its struggles continue • The Verge

Chris Welch:

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Things at Sonos are getting worse before they get better — if they’re going to get better. Today the company laid off approximately 200 employees, The Verge has learned. The news was announced at around 4PM ET, and a letter to employees from interim CEO Tom Conrad was posted on Sonos’ website shortly thereafter. “One thing I’ve observed first hand is that we’ve become mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be,” Conrad wrote. “So across the company today we are reorganizing into flatter, smaller, and more focused teams.”

Conrad clearly sees a need to rethink the way Sonos operates as part of the company’s turnaround effort. Sonos is scheduled to report its latest quarterly earnings on Thursday afternoon. And if this is the precursor to that, the near-term outlook probably isn’t very good.

It’s an even more substantial wave of job cuts than Sonos made back in August, when it let 100 people go.

…Sonos will now divide its product organization into groups for hardware, software, design, quality and operations “and away from dedicated business units devoted to individual product categories,” Conrad wrote. “Being smaller and more focused will require us to do a much better job of prioritizing our work — lately we’ve let too many projects run under a cloud of half-commitment. We’re going to fix this too,” he added.

«

They had business groups for product categories? That’s crazy. It’s a recipe for war which has to be adjudicated by those higher up, who may say, for example, that new headphones need to be pushed through so the app developers (might be a product category?) have to sort it out.

Although the new organisation might not be so immune to similar problems. Conrad has a fight on his hands.
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As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders • Ars Technica

Ars Technica staff:

»

Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase “enshittification” to describe the decay of online platforms. The word immediately set the Internet ablaze, as it captured the growing malaise regarding how almost everything about the web seemed to be getting worse.

“It’s my theory explaining how the Internet was colonized by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters, and what we can do about it,” Doctorow explained in a follow-up article. “We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.”

Doctorow believes there are four basic forces that might constrain companies from getting worse: competition, regulation, self-help, and tech workers. One by one, he says, these constraints have been eroded as large corporations squeeze the Internet and its denizens for dollars.

…we at Ars have covered a lot of things that have been enshittified. Here are some of the worst examples we’ve come across. Hopefully, you’ll share some of your own experiences in the comments. We might even do a follow-up story based on those.

«

The list is pretty comprehensive: smart TVs, Google Assistant, Google search (er), PDFs, televised sports, and plenty more. A good if gradually demoralising read.
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Google’s new AI policy removes promises not work on weapons or surveillance • The Washington Post

Nitasha Tiku and Gerrit De Vynck:

»

Google on Tuesday updated its ethical guidelines around artificial intelligence, removing commitments not to apply the technology to weapons or surveillance.

The company’s AI principles previously included a section listing four “Applications we will not pursue.” As recently as Thursday, that included weapons, surveillance, technologies that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” and use cases contravening principles of international law and human rights, according to a copy hosted by the Internet Archive.

A spokesperson for Google declined to answer specific questions about its policies on weapons and surveillance but referred to a blog post published Tuesday by the company’s head of AI, Demis Hassabis, and its senior vice president for technology and society, James Manyika.

The executives wrote that Google was updating its AI principles because the technology had become much more widespread and there was a need for companies based in democratic countries to serve government and national security clients.

«

I read the blogpost and didn’t find the bit where Hassabis says “eh, an AI drone, why not?” But of course this is, as the article points out, one of those “permission by omission” things. I’m so ancient I remember when Google bought DeepMind in 2014 and promised to set up an ethics board, which was most visible by its absence for years.

In 2018 Google withdrew from US government contracts following protests by staff. Seems that AI speaks a lot louder now than it did then.
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Clarion Housing Group partners with Octopus Energy and The Hill Group to deliver UK’s biggest ‘Zero Bills’ development • Clarion Housing Group

»

Hill and Octopus Energy are developing the nation’s most extensive ‘Zero Bills’ housing development, comprising 89 meticulously designed homes at Hollymead Square in Newport, Essex. Residents will pay no energy bills for a minimum of five years, guaranteed.

Of the 89 total, 64 will be sold on the open market. The remaining 25 will be made available for affordable rent and shared ownership by Clarion Housing Group, the UK’s largest social housing provider. These will be the first completed ‘Zero Bills’ homes under affordable rent.

‘Zero Bills’ is a world-first smart proposition that allows customers to move into homes which are fully kitted out with green energy technology and with no energy bills.

Following the success of a ‘Zero Bills’ pilot in Essex, Octopus Energy has now accredited close to 1,000 homes through contracts with other prominent developers. Accredited plots span affordable, social, and private rent, as well as private and shared ownership.

Situated in an idyllic village location, this groundbreaking project at Hollymead Square encompasses an attractive collection of two to five-bedroom houses and two-bedroom bungalows.

Each property at Hollymead Square will be equipped with cutting-edge low-carbon technology, including solar panels, high-quality insulation, heat pumps, and home storage batteries. Designed to exceed the energy requirements for each property, this high level of home energy technology is seamlessly integrated and optimised by Octopus’ advanced tech platform, Kraken, to result in zero bills for homeowners.

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This is a press release from December 2023. The houses are just down the road from me, and are starting to come into commission. What makes them interesting – and the reason why people can get free* electricity – is that Octopus will control the flow of energy in and out so that it can balance the grid generally. That’s why there are batteries and solar panels and heat pumps. The idea that the house, and its storage, becomes a part of the grid rather than just an endpoint is part of what the Net Zero shift requires.

* up to a certain amount. If they’re putting on five-bar electric fires all the time, there will be a cost.
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Google Maps in India has been blamed for fatal accidents. Is that fair? • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

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When Google Maps launched in India in 2008, it initially struggled due to the lack of street names, which were the foundation of its technology globally. In an X post from October 2023, Elizabeth Laraki, who led the global design team for Google Maps from 2007 to 2009, wrote that this rendered the app’s directions “pretty much useless.” The company subsequently used parks, monuments, shopping centers, landmark buildings, and gas stations to confirm directions instead.

Over the years, Google has launched several new features to improve Maps in India, including voice navigation and transliterated directions in about nine and 10 languages, respectively, to increase accessibility. Most recently, in 2024, the company introduced a simplified interface for reporting road incidents, two new weather-related alerts for streets obscured by flooding or fog, an artificial-intelligence model that estimates road widths, and a feature that alerts users to approaching overpasses in 40 cities.

Google has mapped 300 million buildings, 35 million businesses and places, and streets stretching across 7 million kilometres (over 4 million miles) in India, Ramani told Rest of World.

India has been “an innovation hub for Google Maps,” since many features saw “their genesis in the country,” Ramani said. She cited examples such as landmark-based navigation, offline maps, and two-wheeler mode, which debuted in India.

…Within India, Google Maps contends with the homegrown MapmyIndia and Ola Maps. MapmyIndia, which has mapped nearly as many roads as Google Maps, is reportedly the market leader in providing navigation services to car manufacturers.

In July 2024, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal announced that his ride-hailing company had transitioned away from Google Maps to its in-house navigation platform — a move that he said would save $1bn. On X, he encouraged developers to “#ExitGoogleMaps” for Ola Maps, promising a year’s worth of free access.

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That $1bn saving is annual, which is astonishing. A later paragraph notes that you can’t rely on crowdsourced maps in India “because of illegal driving such as vehicles not following one-way signs”. It sounds like GTA out there.
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AI is killing the traditional SEO… but it’s not over! • Indie Hackers

“Arno”:

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📉 Traditional SEO is losing effectiveness as AI-generated content floods the internet, complicating the landscape for businesses trying to stand out.

🧐 AI’s disruption means that unique content is harder to find, and securing backlinks has become a significant challenge.

🤖 AI-generated content often lacks the originality and depth needed to engage users effectively, leading to decreased user interaction and lower search engine rankings.

Instead of relying solely on Google, we should pivot towards YouTube, the second-largest search engine, which offers a unique blend of marketing and sales opportunities. Some of the beneficial aspects of this trend:

💼 Prospects sourced from YouTube tend to be more pre-sold, resulting in improved sales calls and higher conversion rates.

🌐 Video content is evergreen, continually attracting new customers over time without the constant need for updates.

📊 YouTube SEO is simpler than traditional methods, allowing us to focus on creating high-quality content rather than getting lost in complex metadata.

❤️ Video content adds a human touch that fosters trust and connection with audiences, enhancing engagement and credibility to your brand.

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It’s so touching to see people convinced that this time, they’ve found space in the digital world won’t be disrupted by AI. OK, the previous one was, but now they’ve found a space that’s immune!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified