The Chagos Islands have beautiful seas – but if they change hands, the .io domain could cease to exist. Then what? CC-licensed photo by Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office on Flickr.

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

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

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

India holds record for internet shutdowns with 771 since 2016 • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

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On September 10, when the northeast Indian state of Manipur announced a five-day internet shutdown in response to student-led protests, citizens were livid — but not surprised.

India has been a leader in internet shutdowns, by a huge margin, for nearly a decade, according to data shared by digital rights watchdog Access Now.

While some authoritarian regimes, such as those in China, North Korea, and Russia systematically censor, surveil, or limit the internet, India’s citizens have relatively free access. But India is unique among democratic countries for its frequent enforcement of blackouts. Between 2016 and 2023, India shut down the internet 771 times, Access Now’s data shows.

Myanmar and Ukraine ranked second on the list of internet shutdowns in 2023 and 2022, respectively. “These are regions obviously embroiled in conflict. And if you look at the margin between India and the second spot — massive,” Namrata Maheshwari, senior policy counsel at Access Now, told Rest of World. “There is no form of an internet shutdown that is proportionate or necessary.”

Reasons for the blackouts in India have included the government’s attempts to control agitation surrounding the Citizenship Amendment Act, suppress the farmers’ protests, and curb cheating during exams, according to Software Freedom Law Center, India’s tracker on internet shutdowns.

The majority of shutdowns in India have historically occurred in Jammu and Kashmir, a region at the center of a decades-long dispute between India, Pakistan, and China. In August 2019, it experienced  552 consecutive days of internet blackout, the world’s longest shutdown in history.

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The irony – or perhaps explanation – is that India’s population absolutely loves the internet, and being connected. So being cut off this much is one of the most frustrating things they can experience.
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The disappearance of an internet domain • Every

Gareth Edwards:

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On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa. 

The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner [by signing a treaty] will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io.

Whether it’s Github.io, gaming site itch.io, or even Google I/O (which arguably kicked off the trend in 2008), .io has been a constant presence in the tech lexicon. Its popularity is sometimes explained by how it represents the abbreviation for “input/output,” or the data received and processed by any system. What’s not often acknowledged is that it’s more than a quippy domain. It’s a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) related to a nation—meaning it involves politics far beyond the digital world.

…Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of retiring existing ones. (There is no official count of the number of extant .io domains.)

Officially, .io—and countless websites—will disappear. At a time when domains can go for millions of dollars, it’s a shocking reminder that there are forces outside of the internet that still affect our digital lives.

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IANA will probably – probably – do something to keep this going, since there’s a lot of money sloshing around in those domains.
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US states sue TikTok, claiming its addictive features harm youth mental health • The Guardian

Johana Bhuiyan, Nick Robins-Early and agencies:

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More than a dozen states and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits against TikTok on Tuesday, alleging the popular short-form video app is damaging children’s mental health with a product designed to be used compulsively and excessively.

The lawsuits stem from a national investigation into TikTok, which was launched in March 2022 by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from several states, including California, Kentucky and New Jersey. All of the complaints were filed in state courts and claim that TikTok’s algorithm is especially dangerous given the platform’s widespread use among young people and its ability to deliver quick hits of dopamine. Design choices such as infinite scrolling, push notifications and in-app purchases prey on youth and create addictive habits among users, prosecutors allege. There are over 170m monthly active TikTok users in the US, and over a billion worldwide.

At the heart of each lawsuit is the TikTok algorithm, which powers what users see on the platform by populating the app’s main “For You” feed with content tailored to people’s interests.

In its filings, the District of Columbia called the algorithm “dopamine-inducing”, and said it was created to be intentionally addictive so the company could trap many young users into excessive use and keep them on its app for hours on end. TikTok does this despite knowing that these behaviors will lead to “profound psychological and physiological harms”, such as anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and other long-lasting problems, the complaint said.

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Popcorn time, though probably won’t reach a court until some time in 2025, and properly until 2026. There’s still a US ban due in January 2025 unless ByteDance sells the US division to a US owner.
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Starlink was offered for free to those hit by Hurricane Helene. It is not actually free • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

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The free Starlink service Elon Musk and SpaceX so graciously promised for communities devastated by Hurricane Helene in the US is not actually entirely free, according to those living in the aftermath – and the satellite operator’s own signup page.

There is a significant caveat: you are still expected to foot the bill for the hardware.

Starlink’s Twitter account declared last week, in a post with tens of millions of views, that “Starlink is now free for 30 days.” The world’s richest man, with a net worth of approximately $260bn, followed up by saying, in quite the PR coup, that all Starlink terminals would now work automatically “without [the] need for payment in the areas affected by Hurricane Helene.” 

But try to sign up for the ostensibly “free” service in an area Starlink has designated as a Helene disaster zone, and surprise: You still have to pay for the terminal (normally $350, but reportedly discounted to $299 for disaster relief, though that’s not reflected in Starlink’s signup page), plus shipping and tax, bringing the grand total to just shy of $400.

You can see for yourself in the video: putting in the address of city hall in Boone, North Carolina, one of the areas wrecked by the lethal super storm, shows folks recovering from the disaster are still expected to pay hundreds for that that free, month-long Starlink service. Though better than nothing at all, it is not quite the humanitarian aid it was promoted and heralded as.

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There’s also the question of being signed up to an auto-renewing contract – so one needs to cancel within 30 days.
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How to delete Your 23andme data • Lifehacker

Beth Skwarecki:

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So far there is no definitive word about the company being sold, with or without its data. However, it’s reasonable to expect that the company could be sold, and that owner could inherit the data. Something similar happened when MyHeritage bought Promethease, another DNA analysis company, in 2020.

Currently, your data may already be shared with other companies. If you signed up to participate in research studies through 23andme, “de-identified” data about you (including genetic data) has likely been given to research institutions and pharma companies. For example, 23andme has a data licensing agreement with GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) to use the 23andme database to “conduct drug target discovery and other research.” 

This isn’t a possible future scenario, but rather the current operation of the business. Licensing agreements like these are a big part of how 23andme makes money. Or intends to make money. Or possibly once made money. They’re not doing so great at the money making thing these days. 

Deleting your 23andme data doesn’t necessarily withdraw it from studies, especially since the data was “de-identified,” that is, stripped from your name and personal information. It does mean that your data will not be used in future research projects.

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OK, but how do you delete your data?

»

If you would like to keep any of your data, sign in to your account and visit your user settings page. (You can also opt out of research studies there.). Click View on the 23andme Data card.

You’ll be asked to enter your date of birth to confirm your identity. In theory this is where you can download your data, but I can’t test this—I have a 23andme account, but I must have given the company a fake date of birth all those years ago. The website just tells me to contact Customer Care.

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Well, huh. Kind of sold us a pup there, Lifehacker.
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Monday, October 7 2024 • Scripting News

Dave Winer has hit 30 years of blogging:

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Blogging started out as a programming adventure and eventually became a form of literature. How about that. I’m up for doing more of that if you all are. But please expect to make contributions, don’t expect it all to come to you for free, because as we know nothing really is free. #

Today’s the big day. Thanks to John Naughton’s wonderful piece in the Guardian, I’m hearing from people all over the world about what blogging means to them. I appreciate all of the messages, but would appreciate them even more if they were on your blog. We need to keep using the tech. Blogging is kind of lost, and I would like to see that change. Every time you post something you’re proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don’t support linking, the web is still there and it still does. #

Interestingly, the clock at the bottom of the nightly emails does not agree with the clock on the home page of Scripting News. It’s a hard thing to test in real life. And it’s completely fitting, given the motto of the blog is: it’s even worse than it appears, which could be the motto of all programmers everywhere, and probably bloggers too. We always focus on the bad news, of course — that’s human nature — but always remember, it could actually be worse. #

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Is blogging going to make a comeback? There are many, many more ways to express oneself nowadays. Is Substack blogging? (I think so.) Is social media? (Arguably not, too difficult to roll back through time.)
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What happens if a hurricane smashes Tampa, Florida? • The Big Newsletter

Matt Stoller:

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Tampa hasn’t been hit directly by a big storm since 1921, and it has grown a lot since then.

Hopefully, [Hurricane] Milton doesn’t hit the city directly, and it may not. These big storms almost always tend to avoid the most catastrophic hits. But let’s go over some of the consequences if it does. First, Tampa has an important port, managing 33 million tons of cargo a year. It’s the biggest exporter of fertilizer in America, and is the biggest importer of gasoline and jet fuel used in Florida. So that means we can expect significant supply shocks, and probably environmental damage. Utilities are already stretched because of Helene, so replacing electrical equipment is going to be difficult. All the major supplies for recovery, everything from lumber to ice to drinking water to skilled labor, are already being sucked into North Carolina to deal with the after-effects of Helene.

In addition, MacDill Air Force Base is in Tampa, which is where CENTCOM, the command center for U.S. forces in the Middle East, is located. So we could see modest disruptions to U.S. military operations. Tampa is near important NASA assets like Cape Canaveral, so there are space and defense contractors in the city.

There’s a lot more than that, of course, since Tampa is a major metropolitan area, an important hub for fishing, tourism, medicine, manufacturing and finance. It has convenient rail lines and highways to pair with its deepwater port, serving as a trans-shipment point for moving goods throughout Florida. Beyond Tampa, a good chunk of Florida is in the path of this storm, with unpredictable consequences. For instance, I wrote earlier about the shortage of IV fluids due to problems in North Carolina. It turns out another large IV solutions manufacturing plant in Daytona Beach is in the path of Milton. Yikes.

The insured losses could be massive, and we could face shortages of all sorts of random and important stuff. But more than these elements, we might lose an entire city, an apocalyptic level of destruction. And increasingly in Florida, there is no way to insure anything. In fact, the state itself, through its Citizens Property Insurance Corp., self-insures against natural disasters, because private insurers just won’t do business in Florida anymore. That means Florida property owners – who in aggregate own about $4 trillion – could enter a death spiral where they can’t get insurance, and so can’t get financing.

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Milton is expected to make landfall on Thursday morning, UK time. Fingers crossed.
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The connected TV industry’s unprecedented “surveillance” • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a “surveillance system” that has “long undermined privacy and consumer protection,” according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers have resulted in connected TVs (CTVs) being a “privacy nightmare,” according to Jeffrey Chester, report co-author and CDD executive director, resulting in calls for stronger regulation.

The 48-page report, How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era [PDF], cites Ars Technica, other news publications, trade publications, blog posts, and statements from big players in streaming—from Amazon to NBCUniversal and Tubi, to LG, Samsung, and Vizio. It provides a detailed overview of the various ways that streaming services and streaming hardware target viewers in newfound ways that the CDD argues pose severe privacy risks. The nonprofit composed the report as part of efforts to encourage regulation. Today, the CDD sent letters to the FTC [PDF], Federal Communications Commission (FCC), California attorney general [PDF], and California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) [PDF], regarding its concerns.

“Not only does CTV operate in ways that are unfair to consumers, it is also putting them and their families at risk as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race, and political interests,” Chester said in a statement.

…The report notes “misleading” privacy policies that have minimal information on data collection and tracking methods and the use of marketing tactics like cookie-less IDs and identity graphs that make promises of not collecting or sharing personal information “meaningless.”

“As a consequence, buying a smart TV set in today’s connected television marketplace is akin to bringing a digital Trojan Horse into one’s home,” it says.

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Machine learning pioneers win Nobel prize in physics • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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Two researchers who helped lay the foundations for modern artificial intelligence – although one later warned of its potential harms – have been awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in physics.

Inspired by the workings of the brain, John Hopfield, a US professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, built artificial neural networks that store and retrieve memories like the human brain, and learn from information fed into them.

Hinton, 76, who is often called “the godfather of AI”, made headlines last year when he quit Google and warned about the dangers of machines outsmarting humans.

The scientists’ pioneering work began in the 1980s and demonstrated how computer programs that draw on neural networks and statistics could form the basis for an entire field, which paved the way for swift and accurate language translation, facial recognition systems, and the generative AI that underpins chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.

Hopfield, 91, was honoured for building “an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data”, while Hinton invented a method that can “independently discover properties in data”, an important feature of the large artificial neural networks in use today.

In 1982, Hopfield built a neural network that stored images and other information as patterns, mimicking the way memories are stored in the brain. The network was able to recall images when prompted with similar patterns, akin to identifying a song heard only briefly in a noisy bar.

Hinton built on Hopfield’s research by incorporating probabilities into a multilayered version of the neural network, leading to a program that could recognise, classify and even generate images after being fed a training set of pictures.

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Doesn’t feel like physics, though, does it. Are we in The Three-Body Problem? Has physics stopped?
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How the US lost the solar power race to China • Bloomberg

David Fickling:

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Washington blames China’s dominance of the solar industry on what are routinely dubbed “unfair trade practices.” But that’s just a comforting myth. China’s edge doesn’t come from a conspiratorial plot hatched by an authoritarian government. It hasn’t been driven by state-owned manufacturers, subsidized loans to factories, tariffs on imported modules or theft of foreign technological expertise. Instead, it’s come from private businesses convinced of a bright future, investing aggressively and luring global talent to a booming industry — exactly the entrepreneurial mix that made the US an industrial powerhouse.

The fall of America as a solar superpower is a tragedy of errors where myopic corporate leadership, timid financing, oligopolistic complacency and policy chaos allowed the US and Europe to neglect their own clean-tech industries. That left a yawning gap that was filled by Chinese start-ups, sprouting like saplings in a forest clearing. If rich democracies are playing to win the clean technology revolution, they need to learn the lessons of what went wrong, rather than just comfort themselves with fairy tales.

To understand what happened, I visited two places: Hemlock, Michigan, a tiny community of 1,408 people that used to produce about one-quarter of the world’s PV-grade polysilicon, and Leshan, China, which is now home to some of the world’s biggest polysilicon factories. The similarities and differences between the towns tell the story of how the US won the 20th century’s technological battle — and how it risks losing its way in the decades ahead.

… the core questions are often almost impossible to answer. Is [China’s] Tongwei’s cheap electricity from a state-owned utility a form of government subsidy? What about [US company] Hemlock’s tax credits protecting it from high power prices? Chinese businesses can often get cheap land in industrial parks, something that’s often considered a subsidy. But does zoning US land for industrial usage count as a subsidy too? Most countries have tax credits for research and development and compete to lower their corporate tax rates to encourage investment. The factor that determines whether such initiatives are considered statist industrial policy (bad), or building a business-friendly environment (good), is usually whether they’re being done by a foreign government, or our own.

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Long piece, but worthwhile.
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Threads knows it has an engagement bait problem • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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If you’ve noticed more engagement bait appearing across your Threads feed, you’re not alone. Meta is aware of the issue and looking at how to address it, according to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri. “We’ve seen an increase in engagement-bait on Threads and we’re working to get it under control,” Mosseri said on Threads in response to comments flagging the issue.

Engagement bait on Threads typically covers posts with banal questions or invites for open-ended discussions to encourage other users to interact. Because Threads, like Instagram, pushes users to see an algorithmic feed of posts by default, getting more interactions can snowball a simple post into virality.

When asked about comparisons between Threads and X in a recent Decoder interview, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg alluded to the fact that comment engagement was a fundamental aspect of a “very good discussion-oriented platform.”

“Not all comments or replies are good,” said Mosseri. “Mark’s comment is more about the Twitter pioneering a format where the reply can be elevated, which is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that every reply should be.” The thread that Mosseri replied to cites one example of a bait post, featuring a seemingly AI-generated image paired with an incendiary take on politeness that had pulled in more than 17,000 responses.

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You’d think – you’d think! – that by now Meta would know what does and doesn’t work for engagement, and what reaction clickbait would get. It’s hard to shake a tiny suspicion that Meta doesn’t mind the wild engagement for now because it keeps people on the site.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Set your watches: in about 40 million years Mar’s moon Phobos will spiral down into the planet. CC-licensed photo by Andrea Luck 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. Orbiting. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US wiretap systems targeted in China-linked hack • WSJ

Sarah Krouse, Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha and Robert McMillan:

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A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of US broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.

For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful US requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said.

Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies are among the companies whose networks were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the people said. 

The widespread compromise is considered a potentially catastrophic security breach and was carried out by a sophisticated Chinese hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon. It appeared to be geared toward intelligence collection, the people said. 

Spokesmen for AT&T, Verizon and Lumen declined to comment on the Salt Typhoon campaign.

Companies are generally required to disclose material cyber intrusions to securities regulators within a short time, but in rare cases, federal authorities can grant them an exemption from doing so on national security grounds.

The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.

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You asked for an example demonstrating what people mean when they say that backdoor systems won’t only be used by “the good guys.”
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Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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Google’s Android app store is an illegal monopoly — and now it will have to change.

Today, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling in Epic v. Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play app store to competition for three whole years. Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually.

These were Epic’s biggest asks, and they might change the Android app marketplace forever — if they aren’t immediately paused or blocked on appeal.

And they’re not all that Epic has won today.

Starting November 1st, 2024, and ending November 1st, 2027, Google must also:
• Stop requiring Google Play Billing for apps distributed on the Google Play Store (the jury found that Google had illegally tied its payment system to its app store)
• Let Android developers tell users about other ways to pay from within the Play Store
• Let Android developers link to ways to download their apps outside of the Play Store
• Let Android developers set their own prices for apps irrespective of Play Billing

Google also can’t:
• Share app revenue “with any person or entity that distributes Android apps” or plans to launch an app store or app platform
• Offer developers money or perks to launch their apps on the Play Store exclusively or first
• Offer developers money or perks not to launch their apps on rival stores
• Offer device makers or carriers money or perks to preinstall the Play Store
• Offer device makers or carriers money or perks not to preinstall rival stores

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Google’s downfall in this case – unlike Apple’s when Epic brought the same complaint – is that it has done all sorts of deals favouring one developer or another, whereas Apple is just consistently brutal to everyone.

However this won’t be an overnight change: Google gets eight months to come up with the system to implement this.
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What happened to Elon Musk? • The Atlantic

Lora Kelley talks to Charlie Warzel:

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Lora: Why is Musk getting so involved in this presidential election, and with Trump (who apparently said he would give Musk a role leading a government-efficiency commission if he wins)? Is he making some kind of play to be a great man of history, or is he after power in a potential Trump administration?

Charlie: Elon Musk basically bought Donald Trump at the top. He endorsed him moments after the first assassination attempt, when Trump was riding a wave of positive attention, when Joe Biden was still in the race and it looked like Trump was probably going to dominate him. So much has changed since Musk endorsed Trump in July. If he were truly a savvy political operator, he would be hedging his bets right now, saying I can’t fully alienate myself from one political party, because I have all these government contracts and so many other interests that I need to be able to at least sit in a room with with Democrats.

I think the fact that he has effectively just become the in-house social-media team for Donald Trump speaks to the fact that he’s not just making a political calculation. He’s not playing a game of 3-D chess. It seems to me that he’s truly radicalized.

Here’s a guy who has, like, six jobs and has decided to spend most of his time tweeting propaganda for a political candidate and hosting him on his platform. Does he want another job? It’s entirely possible. But I really think what he wants more than anything else is to be that sort of Rupert Murdoch person for this political group. He seems to be trying to fit himself into the role of power broker.

Lora: In some ways, Musk’s turn feels surprising. But has he always sort of been like this?

Charlie: I started covering Musk in the 2010s. And there were signs of this stuff—picking the fight with the cave diver, the way he would dismiss claims around Tesla, irresponsibly tweeting in ways that had the power to move stock prices. He was a loose cannon and showed a lot of signs of his disregard for the rule of law and authority.

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Plus, as Warzel points out, there’s been a certain amount of audience capture, which means Musk has begun to perform for those who celebrate his behaviour, reinforcing it.
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Fake News! The Top 100 Community Noted Twitter accounts • MeidasTouch News

Ron Filipkowski:

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I wanted to note some other trends with the Worst 100. Many of the accounts are foreign, and most of those are from Asia. Many of them were permanently banned under the old regime but were reinstated by Musk. Many are not political – they just post fake stuff for clicks and focus on pop culture, the entertainment industry, or post false information about the weather, science, the environment, etc..

49 of the Top 100 worst offending accounts are overtly political. 48 of the 49 most Community Noted political accounts are right-wing. Only one – ‘Blade of the Sun’ is from the Left. Ironically, many of these accounts complain in their bios that they are “anti-fake news” or “anti-woke” while posting one lie and fake video after another. Six of the accounts have been permanently suspended, but for reasons other than posting false info. Most of the accounts have well over 100K followers and many over 1 million. Elon Musk follows many of them and has retweeted them often – including the Community Noted posts. Elon Musk himself checks in at #55 of the list of worst offenders with 89 posts getting Community Noted. 

Another big problem is that Musk has actually created an incentive structure to post fake things. Sensationalized claims get amplified by his algorithm and lots of clicks. There is financial incentive to continue to do it. You don’t face any suspensions and false posts tend to draw more engagement than true ones. Forty of the Worst 100 are monetized subscription accounts – so Musk is actually paying them to post fake things.

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Included in that top 100 is the New York Post (“the only major American media company to make the top 100”) and, scraping in at No.96, ex-PM Rishi Sunak (“the most prominent politician to make the list”, where by “prominent” he means “had an important job”, because there are some right nutters in there).

Basically, all of the top 10 Most Noted should be on your blocklist. Perhaps the next 10 too. Worth pointing out that Community Notes predated Musk; it was called “Birdwatch” and launched in 2021.
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How long will life exist on Earth? • The Atlantic

Ross Andersen:

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Wikipedia’s “Timeline of the Far Future” is one of my favorite webpages from the internet’s pre-slop era. A Londoner named Nick Webb created it on the morning of December 22, 2010. “Certain events in the future of the universe can be predicted with a comfortable level of accuracy,” he wrote at the top of the page. He then proposed a chronological list of 33 such events, beginning with the joining of Asia and Australia 40 million years from now. He noted that around this same time, Mars’s moon Phobos would complete its slow death spiral into the red planet’s surface. A community of 1,533 editors have since expanded the timeline to 160 events, including the heat death of the universe. I like to imagine these people on laptops in living rooms and cafés across the world, compiling obscure bits of speculative science into a secular Book of Revelation.

Like the best sci-fi world building, the Timeline of the Far Future can give you a key bump of the sublime. It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth’s axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish.

Some aspects of the timeline are more certain than others. We know that most animals will look different 10 million years from now. We know that the continents will slowly drift together to form a new Pangaea. Africa will slam into Eurasia, sealing off the Mediterranean basin and raising a new Himalaya-like range across France, Italy, and Spain. In 400 million years, Saturn will have lost its rings. Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels.

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Wait a minute – replenished its fossil fuels with what? Or should that be who?
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Apple shares trailer for ‘Submerged’ immersive Vision Pro short film • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Announced back in July, Submerged is a short film that’s set in World War II, and it follows a group of sailors that are struggling to survive a deadly torpedo attack. It was created by Austrian filmmaker Edward Berger, who directed 2022 movie All Quiet on the Western Front.

Apple has not provided details on the length of Submerged, but most Apple Immersive Video content is on the shorter side. Apple has been regularly adding Immersive Video to the Vision Pro since the device came out last February. The immersive content is in 3D, and is meant to make the viewer feel like they are part of the scene.

Apple Immersive Video content can be viewed in the Apple TV app in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the U.K., and the U.S. Users in China can watch the content through the Migu Video and Tencent Video apps.

Submerged is set to premiere on the Vision Pro on Thursday, October 10.

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There’s a one-minute YouTube promo for the film (which is 17 minutes long) in the article. It’s hard to know what it would really be like, because if you don’t have a Vision Pro, you won’t know what immersive video is like. (Seems like they decided to take “immersive” seriously, with all the water.)

But good to see that Apple is actually trying to create some content for the Vision Pro.
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As bird flu spreads, two new cases diagnosed in California • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli:

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Two more people were diagnosed with bird flu this week, even as scientists in Missouri continued to investigate a possible cluster of infections in that state, federal health officials said at a news briefing on Friday.

In California, two farmworkers who were exposed to infected dairy cattle at different farms tested positive for the virus, called H5N1, state health officials said on Thursday. Those cases bring the total this year to 16, not including those under investigation.

The cases do not come as a surprise, because the number of infected herds in California has risen to 56 from 16 two weeks ago, said Dr. Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“As there are more herds that test positive, there are more workers who are exposed, and where there are more workers who are exposed, the chances of human infection increase,” he said. The risk to the public remains low, he added.

Still, experts said that the appearance of H5N1 in multiple states was worrisome.

«

Watching brief. That’s all it is, nothing else. Not at all.
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Regeneron head says weight-loss drugs could cause “more harm than good” • Financial Times

Oliver Barnes:

»

The co-founder of Regeneron has warned that blockbuster weight-loss drugs could cause “more harm than good” unless the rapid muscle loss associated with the treatments is solved, as the US biotech pushes ahead with trials of muscle-preserving medicines.

Clinical studies suggest that patients treated with the new class of weight-loss drugs, known as GLP-1s, lose muscle at far faster rates than people losing weight from diet or exercise, exposing them to health problems, said George Yancopoulos, who also serves as Regeneron’s chief scientific officer.

For the two in every five patients who discontinue the treatments within a year, according to a 2024 JAMA study, this means that they are likely to rebound to their original weight with less muscle and a higher body fat percentage, “adding insult to injury”, said Yancopoulos.

“I do think that the GLPs should be viewed with a lot of concern in terms of the way they’re actually being used in the real world,” said Yancopoulos. “They could be leading to successive changes in body composition that could be creating more harm than good in the long term.”

Regeneron is among a growing list of drugmakers researching experimental drugs to preserve lean muscle mass in combination with GLP-1 drugs as a route into a potentially $130bn-a-year market that is dominated by Ozempic and Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the company behind Mounjaro and Zepbound.

Regeneron, a $111bn biotech that specialises in antibody treatments, is testing a drug called trevogrumab, which blocks the hormone myostatin, which limits muscle growth, in combination with Wegovy in mid-stage trials.

«

Damn. And we thought we were doing so well with peak obesity.
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Uber and Lyft drivers use Teslas as makeshift robotaxis, raising safety concerns • Reuters

Akash Sriram and Abhirup Roy:

»

A self-driving Tesla carrying a passenger for Uber rammed into an SUV at an intersection in suburban Las Vegas in April, an accident that sparked new concerns that a growing stable of self-styled “robotaxis” is exploiting a regulatory gray area in US cities, putting lives at risk.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk aims to show off plans for a robotaxi, or self-driving car used for ride-hailing services, on Oct. 10, and he has long contemplated a Tesla-run taxi network of autonomous vehicles owned by individuals.

Do-it-yourself versions, however, are already proliferating, according to 11 ride-hail drivers who use Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. Many say the software, which costs $99 per month, has limitations, but that they use it because it helps reduce drivers’ stress and therefore allows them to work longer hours and earn more money.

Reuters is first to report about the Las Vegas accident and a related inquiry by federal safety officials, and of the broad use by ride-hail drivers of Tesla autonomous software.

While test versions of self-driving cabs with human backup drivers from robotaxi operators such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise are heavily regulated, state and federal authorities say Tesla drivers alone are responsible for their vehicles, whether or not they use driver-assist software. Waymo and Cruise use test versions of software categorized as fully autonomous while Tesla FSD is categorized as a level requiring driver oversight.

«

It’s just a common-or-garden shunt though isn’t it. Whether or not the driver had “FSD” (which isn’t) on or not, if they’re in the driving seat, they’re responsible. By contrast the legal situation for the actual robotaxis operated by Waymo and GM is different.

But it does show that being a taxi driver is tedious and tiring. Of course you’d use driver assistance software if you could.
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Police seldom disclose use of facial recognition despite false arrests • The Washington Post

Douglas MacMillan, David Ovalle and Aaron Schaffer:

»

Police departments in 15 states provided The Post with rarely seen records documenting their use of facial recognition in more than 1,000 criminal investigations over the past four years. According to the arrest reports in those cases and interviews with people who were arrested, authorities routinely failed to inform defendants about their use of the software — denying them the opportunity to contest the results of an emerging technology that is prone to error, especially when identifying people of color.

In fact, the records show that officers often obscured their reliance on the software in public-facing reports, saying that they identified suspects “through investigative means” or that a human source such as a witness or police officer made the initial identification.

In Evansville, Ind., for example, police said they identified a man who beat up a stranger on the street from his tattooed arms, long hair and previous jail booking photos. And in Pflugerville, Tex., police said they learned the name of a man who helped steal $12,500 in merchandise from Ulta Beauty “by utilization of investigative databases.”

Both of these suspects were identified with the aid of facial recognition, according to internal police records — information that was never shared with the accused, according to them or their attorneys. A spokeswoman for Pflugerville declined to answer questions about this case. Evansville police did not respond to requests for comment.

«

The problem is that there have been multiple wrongful arrests, including one person who spent six days in jail for using credit cards to buy things in a state he had never visited. (Quite hard to prove you’ve never been somewhere.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New data suggests that obesity rates have fallen in the US – perhaps due to the new generation of GLP-1 agonists. CC-licensed photo by Tony Alter on Flickr.

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

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

How to fight back against a traffic-less web • SparkToro

Rand Fishkin:

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My position on this is that zero click is taking over everything. Google is trying to answer searches without clicks. Facebook is trying to keep people on Facebook. LinkedIn wants to keep people on LinkedIn.

Here’s another post. This is from Tim Soulo over at Ahrefs. Oh, look: 96.55% of web pages get zero traffic from Google.

And this is this is not super shocking to anyone, but what scares me is that this report that we did at SparkToro which looked at zero click searches in US and the EU was done in May, and June of this year looking at the five previous months. And you’ll recall Google had rolled back AI overviews, which hadn’t rolled out very far. But today, if you search for, for example, “my smoke alarm randomly went off”. Well, here’s this AI overview.

Last night I was searching for something related to my Dungeons and Dragons game. The AI overview takes over the whole page. Today Geraldine was searching for something related to lighting installation: AI takes over the whole page. There, you might argue well but look you could get a click here, or maybe someone will click on Reynolds restoration services.

I’m sorry friends, I think this is taking a tremendous amount more traffic than even what we measured back in June of this year. My friend Adam just put together this fireball x y z site, which is actually probably the best website I have ever read, or you will ever read, about finding the best smoke alarms out there. I can’t recommend it enough. Adam walked me through it and was like, what what do you think? I replied, I think that you have done a superb job, that your personal, deep dive into smoke alarms is second to none on the Internet, and that it will get absolutely no freaking traffic.

And what instead you are gonna have to do here is try and influence what these LLMs and Google is telling people. And to do that, you’re essentially gonna have to be in all the places where Google is pulling information from, which is a lot of these websites that rank in the top ten and all across the rest of the web.

«

The original page has lots of repeated little phrases, which I thought was a tactic to spot copying. In fact it’s just a machine-generated transcript of a little video. But this is the new reality: your (new) site won’t get traffic from Google.
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I taught for most of my career. I quit because of ChatGPT • TIME

Victoria Livingstone:

»

In my most recent job, I taught academic writing to doctoral students at a technical college. My graduate students, many of whom were computer scientists, understood the mechanisms of generative AI better than I do. They recognized LLMs as unreliable research tools that hallucinate and invent citations. They acknowledged the environmental impact and ethical problems of the technology. They knew that models are trained on existing data and therefore cannot produce novel research. However, that knowledge did not stop my students from relying heavily on generative AI. Several students admitted to drafting their research in note form and asking ChatGPT to write their articles.

As an experienced teacher, I am familiar with pedagogical best practices. I scaffolded assignments. I researched ways to incorporate generative AI in my lesson plans, and I designed activities to draw attention to its limitations. I reminded students that ChatGPT may alter the meaning of a text when prompted to revise, that it can yield biased and inaccurate information, that it does not generate stylistically strong writing and, for those grade-oriented students, that it does not result in A-level work. It did not matter. The students still used it.

In one activity, my students drafted a paragraph in class, fed their work to ChatGPT with a revision prompt, and then compared the output with their original writing. However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. “It makes my writing look fancy,” one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text.

…I found myself spending many hours grading writing that I knew was generated by AI. I noted where arguments were unsound. I pointed to weaknesses such as stylistic quirks that I knew to be common to ChatGPT (I noticed a sudden surge of phrases such as “delves into”). That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students.

So I quit.

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How Gemini successfully picked out my next read • Pocket Lint

Eli Becht:

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When I’m in a reading slump, I like to go online and get suggestions for my next book. This includes asking people on Reddit or browsing through lists on apps like Goodreads, but I tried something different this time. I recently made the switch from Google Assistant to Google Gemini on my Android, and I decided to let it figure out what my next read was. It’s useful in the workplace, so why not reading suggestions?

Instead of letting it pick blindly, I told Gemini my favorite book is The Hobbit, and asked for five suggestions for what to read next. I’m as wary as they come when it involves AI, but I came away impressed with the response. Instead of coming back with a generic answer, Gemini backed up its suggestions with tidbits about the books and helped sell me on why I should choose one of them as my next read.

With a famous book like The Hobbit, you can easily guess one of the suggestions. Other than The Lord of the Rings, Gemini recommended The Princess Bride by William Golding, The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin, Watership Down by Richard Adams, and The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.

Gemini sort of cheated by recommending an entire series, like Earthsea and Narnia, but it’s hard to argue with the results.

In fact, Gemini understood me so well that I have already read four of the five suggestions, and they are all sitting on my shelf. The only book I haven’t read is Watership Down, so I’ll need to add that one to my cart.

«

That’s a pretty terrible starting point, so I tried: favourite book Ringworld but I have read all the Ringworld series; favourite author Philip K Dick but I have read all the PKD books. ChatGPT recommended The Mote in God’s Eye (not bad, though I’ve read it), The Three-Body Problem (excellent but ditto) and The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (great, ditto).

Next time round it offered Blindsight by Peter Watts (never heard of it/him), The Algebraist by Iain M Banks (know him ofc) and Eon by Greg Bear (think I’ve read it). So not bad if you push it.
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We may have passed peak obesity • Financial Times

John Burn-Murdoch:

»

Around the world, obesity rates have been stubbornly climbing for decades, if anything accelerating in recent years. But now newly released data finds that the US adult obesity rate fell by around two percentage points between 2020 and 2023.

We have known for several years from clinical trials that Ozempic, Wegovy and the new generation of diabetes and weight loss drugs produce large and sustained reductions in body weight. Now with mass public usage taking off — one in eight US adults have used the drugs, with 6% being current users — the results may be showing up at the population level.

While we can’t be certain that the new generation of drugs are behind this reversal, it is highly likely. For one, the decline is steepest among college graduates, the group most likely to be using them.

Crucially, the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which reported the unprecedented decline in obesity levels, uses weight and height measurements taken by medical examiners, not self-reported values. This makes it far more reliable than other surveys. American waistlines really do seem to be shrinking.

What makes this all the more remarkable is the contrast in mechanisms behind the respective declines in smoking and obesity. The former was eventually achieved through decades of campaigning, public health warnings, tax incentives and bans. With obesity, a single pharmaceutical innovation has done what those same methods have repeatedly failed to do.

If you take a step back, this is an astonishing achievement. Weight gain has proved far harder to combat than almost any other public health issue in history. Obesity has been such a formidable foe because everything is stacked against those trying to lose weight.

«

This is amazing. The BBC’s Today programme did an entire segment on it on Saturday morning, and we’re only just getting our heads around the implications of this.
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New molecule can mimic the effects of fasting and exercise • Aarhus University

»

It is well known that regular exercise and periodic fasting have a series of positive effects on the body. Exercise and skipping meals makes for a stronger heart and reduces fat levels in the blood. The explanation lies in the body’s natural reaction in which increasing levels of lactate (the salt of lactic acid) and ketones act as efficient fuel for cells which benefit the body’s organs.

A group of chemistry, metabolism and diabetes researchers from Aarhus University has now created a molecule that can induce the same metabolic effects, without physical exertion or fasting.

The study has just been published in the scientific journal Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

“We’ve developed a molecule that can mimic the body’s natural metabolic response to strenuous exercise and fasting. In practice, the molecule brings the body into a metabolic state corresponding to running 10 kilometers at high speed on an empty stomach,” explains Professor Thomas Poulsen from the Department of Chemistry at Aarhus University. He is one of the leading researchers behind the study.

“When lactate and ketone levels in the blood increase, the production of an appetite-suppressing hormone increases and the level of free fatty acids in the blood decreases. This has a number of health benefits, for example reducing the risk of developing metabolic syndrome.”

…”It can be difficult to maintain motivation to run many kilometers at high speed and go without food. For people with physical ailments such as a weak heart or general weakness, a nutritional supplement can be the key to better recovery,” explains Poulsen.

«

This is mindblowing. Can be taken by mouth (screw you, Ozempic!) and already in human clinical trials.
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Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’ • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

“WordPress.org just belongs to me personally,” Mullenweg said during an interview with The Verge. WordPress.org exists outside the commercial realm of Automattic, as a standalone publishing platform that offers free access to its open-source code that people can use to create their own websites. But it’s not a neutral, independent arbiter of the ecosystem. “In my role as owning WordPress.org, I don’t want to promote a company, which is A: legally threatening me and B: using the WordPress trademark. That’s part of why we cut off access from the servers.”

Mullenweg’s feud with WP Engine fans out in a few different directions. He’s criticized WP Engine for not putting enough time and money into developing the open-source WordPress ecosystem, saying that if you gave $1 to the WordPress Foundation, “you’d be a bigger donor than WP Engine.” And Mullenweg has brought up the possibility that WP Engine “hacked” the Automatic-owned WooCommerce plug-in to collect commissions meant for Automattic, which WP Engine has denied. From those arguments, the fight appears to be one over what is and isn’t appropriate in the open-source software world.

But Mullenweg has since sidelined those arguments to make the case that WP Engine — and its “hacked up, bastardized simulacra” of the WordPress open-source code, as he describes it — is infringing on Automattic’s trademark: WordPress.

«

At this point lawsuits are being filed, and one has to think it’s not wise of Mullenweg to try to take on an organisation (WP-Engine) which is backed by a hedge fund worth billions.
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Stop asking people “What do you do?” • WSJ

Joanne Lipman:

»

For people who have taken career breaks, four little words—“What do you do?”—can provoke dread. It seems to conceal a bundle of judgments: What’s your social status? What’s your income? What’s your education? Are you worth my time to talk to?

This has long been an issue for professional women who leave the workforce to raise kids. They describe feeling invisible and being ignored by people they meet. But the dreaded question is now affecting a wider swath of people: stay-at-home fathers, career-changing young people, gig workers, baby boomers forced into retirement and laid-off workers.

“It is truly the absolute worst question you can get when you’re out of work. Society wants to put you in an easy-to-digest box,” says Orlando-based Jen Kling, 40, a consumer brand marketer who has been laid off three times and is now an independent consultant.

It’s also a head-scratcher when trying to frame an answer. When New York entrepreneur James Reichert, 62, moved to Canada temporarily for his then-wife’s job, he printed up business cards that read “Trophy Husband.” When Ashley Scott, 35, a Philadelphia corporate sustainability manager, was laid off from a previous job, she took to telling people she was in grad school. She found that when she said “I’m looking for a job, or I just got laid off… People would look at you like you’re a loser.”

For many of us, work isn’t just a way to pay for our lives; it’s how we define ourselves—and others. We are what we do. Psychologists have a term for this: “enmeshment.” The concept was first coined to describe an unhealthy blurring of boundaries in personal relationships. But it applies with almost absurd accuracy to our relationship with work, when we are so closely linked to our careers that we have no idea who we are without them.

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Messages via satellite provides lifeline to iPhone users in Hurricane Helene fallout • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

»

Hurricane Helene has caused massive damage and taken over 100 lives across several US states. Many thousands of people are without power and/or cell service. But in the wake of the storm, reports have surfaced about a key iOS 18 feature that has been a lifeline for survivors: Messages via satellite.

Apple added Messages via satellite to millions of iPhones via its recent iOS 18 update. And now, according to reports on social media, it seems the feature arrived just in time.

Here are a few tweets highlighting how useful the feature has proven: Asheville resident;
father contacting son; North Carolina resident.

A common message across social media around the time Helene hit hardest was a call for users to update to iOS 18 so they’ll gain access to this feature. Apple notably shipped iOS 18 and iOS 17.7 simultaneously, leading many to stick with 17 for now.

«

Perhaps I wasn’t the target audience, but I hadn’t heard about iOS 18 offering Messages via satellite. Seems worthwhile. (I still haven’t upgraded to iOS 18; not sure what there is that’s compelling.)
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Quantum advantage for NP approximation? For REAL this time? • Shtetl-Optimized

Scott Aaronson:

»

The other night I spoke at a quantum computing event and was asked—for the hundredth time? the thousandth?—whether I agreed that the quantum algorithm called QAOA was poised revolutionize industries by finding better solutions to NP-hard optimization problems. I replied that while serious, worthwhile research on that algorithm continues, alas, so far I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that QAOA outperforms the best classical heuristics on any problem that anyone cares about. I added I was sad to see the arXiv flooded with thousands of relentlessly upbeat QAOA papers that dodge the speedup question by simply never raising it at all. I said that, in my experience, these papers reliably led outsiders to conclude that surely there must be excellent known speedups from QAOA—since otherwise, why would so many people be writing papers about it?

Anyway, the person right after me talked about a “quantum dating app” (!) they were developing.

«

All the QAOA goes right over my head, but I’m very intrigued by the quantum dating app. Is the idea that you’re compatible with everyone until you meet them? Or (next two © Oliver Johnson) you swipe both right and left? You know where to meet your match but not how fast to go with them?

Your suggestions for how the quantum dating app works welcome.
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Apple releases Depth Pro, an AI model that rewrites the rules of 3D vision • VentureBeat

Michael Nuñez:

»

Apple’s AI research team has developed a new model that could significantly advance how machines perceive depth, potentially transforming industries ranging from augmented reality to autonomous vehicles.

The system, called Depth Pro, is able to generate detailed 3D depth maps from single 2D images in a fraction of a second—without relying on the camera data traditionally needed to make such predictions.

The technology, detailed in a research paper titled “Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second,” is a major leap forward in the field of monocular depth estimation, a process that uses just one image to infer depth.

This could have far-reaching applications across sectors where real-time spatial awareness is key. The model’s creators, led by Aleksei Bochkovskii and Vladlen Koltun, describe Depth Pro as one of the fastest and most accurate systems of its kind.

Monocular depth estimation has long been a challenging task, requiring either multiple images or metadata like focal lengths to accurately gauge depth.

But Depth Pro bypasses these requirements, producing high-resolution depth maps in just 0.3 seconds on a standard GPU. The model can create 2.25-megapixel maps with exceptional sharpness, capturing even minute details like hair and vegetation that are often overlooked by other methods.

«

What is a “standard GPU”? Though 0.3 seconds doesn’t sound too shabby, it’s probably not quick enough for driving.. is it?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Increasing the number of steps you take each day is definitely correlated with living longer, and if you raise them you benefit. CC-licensed photo by Timo Newton-Syms on Flickr.

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

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

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

Someone put facial recognition tech onto Meta’s smart glasses to instantly dox strangers • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

A pair of students at Harvard have built what big tech companies refused to release publicly due to the overwhelming risks and danger involved: smart glasses with facial recognition technology that automatically looks up someone’s face and identifies them. The students have gone a step further too. Their customized glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, including their home address, phone number, and family members. 

The project is designed to raise awareness of what is possible with this technology, and the pair are not releasing their code, AnhPhu Nguyen, one of the creators, told 404 Media. But the experiment, tested in some cases on unsuspecting people in the real world according to a demo video, still shows the razor thin line between a world in which people can move around with relative anonymity, to one where your identity and personal information can be pulled up in an instant by strangers.

Nguyen and co-creator Caine Ardayfio call the project I-XRAY. It uses a pair of Meta’s commercially available Ray Ban smart glasses, and allows a user to “just go from face to name,” Nguyen said.

The demo video posted to X on Tuesday shows the pair using the tech against various people. In one of the first examples, Ardayfio walks towards the wearer. “To use it, you just put the glasses on, and then as you walk by people, the glasses will detect when somebody’s face is in frame,” the video says. “After a few seconds, their personal information pops up on your phone.”

«

It’s very impressive. Unexpectedly, the effect of being able to recognise people and get their context is that you seem to make a lot more friends, or get friendly reactions. People like being recognised and having their achievements mentioned. After all, who wouldn’t?

Give it time: this is going to get faster, more accurate, and the samizdat will become everyday.
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No man’s hand: artificial intelligence does not improve police report writing speed • Journal of Experimental Criminology

Ian Adams, Matt Barter, Kyle McLean, Hunter Boehme and Irick Geary at various US universities:

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Objectives: This study examines the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the time police officers spend writing reports, a task that consumes a significant portion of their workday.

Methods: In a pre-registered randomized controlled trial, we test this claim within the patrol division of a medium-sized police department (n = 85) at the individual report level (n = 755). Analyses utilize mixed-effects regression accounting for the nested structure of report-writing.

Results: AI assistance did not significantly affect the duration of writing police reports. Alternative specifications beyond those specified in the pre-registration, including a difference-in-differences approach observing report duration over a full year (n = 6084), confirm the null findings are robust.

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That’s going to be a disappointment for the police in Colorado who thought chatbots would be good for this job.
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Why the US can’t impose its will over global trade in electric cars • Financial Times

Alan Beattie:

»

middle-income countries such as Turkey and Brazil wanting to increase domestic EV consumption are actively courting Chinese producers.

And even taking into account the protectionist motive, Joe Biden’s administration may well have a point about the security threats of EVs as “smartphones on wheels”, with manufacturers able to collect personal data and potentially control the cars remotely. But this is an unpropitious environment for the American sheriff to stick up “WANTED FOR DATA RUSTLING” posters around the place and try to run Chinese producers out of town.

The lure of US market access, via which Washington traditionally exerts control over other countries’ trade and tech policies, is weaker than it ought to be. American consumer preferences and the domination of the Detroit carmakers have left the US EV market pitifully under-developed. EVs in 2023 had a 10% share of total sales compared with 38% in China and 21% in the EU, and even the EV tax credits in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act have so far had only limited effect.

EV prices relative to traditional vehicles in the US market are higher than in China and the EU, and Washington has reduced competitive pressure by walling off its market to Chinese exporters with 100% tariffs.

…Strict implementation might simply force carmakers to create a separate North American supply chain with non-Chinese software. In that case, Dunne says, the global car market could divide in two: a high-priced low-tech island comprising the US and Canada and a cheaper, more digitally connected market for the rest of the world. (Mexico, which is part of the US-Canada trade bloc but also exports cars outside it, would probably straddle the two.)

It’s somewhat against the historical grain for US companies to be behind on technology and its households weak on consumption. But that’s where we’ve ended up with EVs.

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Israel could bomb Iran’s oil. Energy markets aren’t panicking • POLITICO

Ben Lefebrvre:

»

The risk of an escalating war between Israel and Iran is testing the global market’s faith that crude oil prices would be insulated from a widening of hostilities across the Middle East.

For decades, conflicts in the oil-rich region frequently spooked oil markets and weighed on the economy. But now, Middle East military skirmishes are causing more shrugs than drastic price spikes — a welcome development for the Biden administration, which has faced political criticism from Republicans over fuel prices and is trying to contain the fallout from Iran’s launch of nearly 200 missiles into Israel on Tuesday.

Increased oil production from the United States, Brazil and other places in the past two decades has diversified the global fuel supply, which means oil markets rely less on Middle East shipments that Tehran could disrupt, energy and security analysts told POLITICO.

“For those of us who spend our lives looking at the effects of a [Middle East] crisis on oil prices, obviously the past 10-plus years have been a complete washout,” said Michael Knights, an analyst at the think tank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “No matter how insane the thing is, it has a minimal impact on oil. The market has proven time and time again it can make up shortfalls.”

«

Whatever this is, it’s not 1973 all over again: we’re not going to see those queues at the fuel pumps.
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The Before and After – Columbia Journalism Review

Lauren Watson on the effect of Facebook removing news links in Canada:

»

Meta’s retreat from journalism didn’t stop Canadians from seeking out news—but it did prevent them from finding information from legitimate sources. According to a report by the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a research collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto, in the year since the ban went into effect, Canadians have seen less reporting online, even as they continue to use Meta to read, watch, and listen to news: 70% of survey respondents do so on Facebook, 65% on Instagram.

Some of that can be explained by screenshots of articles, which tripled in frequency in the four months following the ban [by Facebook after a Canadian law demanding payment if it included news links]. But the researchers also found that only 22% of Canadians are aware that Meta has bailed on journalism. That has turned Canadian newsgathering on social media into a game of telephone—out-of-context photos and summaries absent links to the articles from which they’ve been sourced—that few even know is being played.

“It would be one thing if they made the absence clear, but they went from blocking the news to facilitating the bamboozling of the news,” David Beers, the founding editor of The Tyee, told me. “If you were an old-fashioned Orwellian dictator, you couldn’t come up with a more clever plan.”

When fall arrived, Meta’s news ban faced its first major test, in Canada’s worst wildfire season to date. In British Columbia, more than three hundred and eighty fires burned; some twenty thousand people were placed under evacuation orders. Canadian officials observed that public service announcements were failing to get around.

“I find it astonishing,” David Eby, the province’s premier, said in a press conference, “that we are at this stage of the crisis and the owners of Facebook and Instagram have not come forward and said, ‘Look, we’re trying to make a point with the federal government, but it’s more important that people are safe, it’s more important that they have access to basic information through our networks, and then we can deal with our concerns with the federal government and their new laws later.’” Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, complained that Meta’s actions were “inconceivable.”

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Here’s an easy way our trains could usefully connect us • The Times

Tom Whipple:

»

Over the years, there has not been a lot about my daily commute that has been consistent. There have been times during engineering works when I have not been certain when my morning train will arrive. There have been times during strikes when I have not been certain when, or even whether, it will leave.

What has been consistent though, through Covid, floods and industrial action, has been the knowledge that if I’ve forgotten to download an important document beforehand, then the journey will be even more frustrating. Because, despite the jaunty promises of the train operator, I know that for much of the journey the supposed train Wi-Fi is unlikely to help much. And it won’t help at all if I happen to be going past Ascot.

Party conference season has come to an end. We have been told we must face hard choices if we are to achieve growth. We have seen depressing graphs of what our productivity rates have become because those hard choices have gone unmade.

Here is my idea for getting a bit of growth, without hard choices. It won’t involve scarring the Cotswolds countryside or spending Covid-style billions on bat surveys and newt tunnels so that we can finally build a new road. It just involves making the wretched train Wi-Fi work — like it does in other countries.

Each morning I look across a carriage full of open laptops. I see web pages failing to open, emails failing to send. I see people trying to use their mobile hotspots but doing little better. Most of all I see people — who often look like they are paid pretty high hourly rates — trying, and failing, to work.

This is not just my commute. There are many subjects on which journalists are ill-equipped to speak but there is one on which we are world experts: being sent to random parts of the country and trying to work on trains. So believe me when I say that this is a problem everywhere.

This year a report in The Sunday Times revealed that our train wifi network is so dilapidated that operators are being forced to ration access. It also reported that the system could be upgraded across the country for £200m.

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Which really isn’t a lot of money in the scheme of things.
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The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth • Aeon Essays

Michelle Nijhuis:

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In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journal Science called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out. ‘Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest,’ he wrote. ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.’ Hardin’s argument made intuitive sense, and provided a temptingly simple explanation for catastrophes of all kinds – traffic jams, dirty public toilets, species extinction. His essay, widely read and accepted, would become one of the most-cited scientific papers of all time.

Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.

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Except.. what Ostrom demonstrated was that if there are community safeguards and punishments for overuse, then the commons won’t be overexploited. Without that, we see the TOTC (paper available here) occur again and again: overfishing, pollution, even climate change. (The original paper itself is a somewhat Malthusian treatise on the limited planet; it reads oddly in the modern context.)
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The iPhone content machine: a visual essay • On my Om

Om Malik:

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Apple’s iPhone 16 launch event differed greatly from most of its past events. It was larger and more overwhelming. There were fewer familiar faces among the attendees, and there was also a new type of attendee — content creators. They were busy filing short bursts of information to their followers in vertical formats: videos, selfies at Apple Park and occasional comments about the products themselves.

I decided to become a fly on the wall and chronicle the spectacle unfolding in front of me. I focused on those who were there to create content about the devices, not the devices themselves. It was fun to just float among the crowds with my Nikon Zf and a 40mm lens.

It was a wonderful spectacle — just to bask in this new kind of raw media energy. Content for the sake of content. Events for the sake of content. Fog of content. It’s the new way of the world.

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Malik decided just to take some photos, and very good photos they are. (The big closeup is John Gruber, of Daring Fireball.) One person – not Gruber – commented that the attendees this year seemed essentially clueless about Apple, and about the executives they were talking to who tend to have long histories at the company:

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My feeling is that they “saw” the keynote but didn’t actually “watch” it. It’s the same difference as “hearing” music versus “listening” to it. They’re more focused on how to later take selfies next to the new products, not necessarily think deeply about why the products were created and what impact they could have.

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Craft and creativity • The Bookseller

Nadim Sadek:

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There are less perceivably creative people in our world. The architects who design perfect arches. Whoever invented the wheel. The master-distiller, blending liquids in casks of sherry and port to make that perfect single-malt. Or a nurse who finds a way to make an old woman comfortable by playing her songs from her childhood. These days, also the TikToker who produces a new meme, combining a societal insight with a memorable tune and perhaps a signature dance. 

Each human is creative. But not each human can craft, whether it’s with paintbrushes, words or filters on a social-media site.

AI solves this. It’s not a Stradivarius. It’s not a Porsche. It’s not squirrel-hair brush. But it is a new expresser, a means of fashioning an artefact from a creative impulse without having to master the craft of expression.

So long as you can articulate your notion, AI can make a decent stab at producing an artefact to represent your creativity. It’ll make music to your command. Write words. Produce an image. Whatever you’re trying to conceive and give birth to, AI disintermediates the historic imperative of “crafting”. It takes your ideas and makes them evident. Others can see what you intend. People can relate to what you wish to convey. 

…If you’re reading this, you’re likely either a crafter, or someone involved in the craft-trade, including book publishing. AI is challenging the status quo. And it’s a positive thing.

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I’m really not sure that this is a view widely shared by those who have to decide what to publish.
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Effect of daily steps and sedentary time on death and cardiovascular risk • Kudos

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The study (in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, March 2024) suggested that an increase in the number of daily steps is associated with a lower risk of both death and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Here, the greatest benefit was observed between 9,000 and 10,500 steps per day. This optimal range for lowering health risks remains consistent regardless of whether a person has high or low levels of sedentary time. Specifically, individuals with high sedentary time (more than 10.5 hours per day) had a higher risk of death if they walked fewer steps, compared to those with lower sedentary time. Also, even a modest increase in daily steps (between 4,000 and 4,500 steps) can significantly lower the risk of death and CVD.

Increasing daily steps to around 9,000 to 10,500 can significantly lower the risk of death and CVD, independent of sedentary time. Even a small increase in daily steps can have a positive impact on health, and reducing sedentary time further improves these benefits.

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OK, no excuse now! Though Strava data suggests that those who do 9,000 steps per day are in the top 3% of walkers. The fact that increasing steps is helps seems obvious – it’s exercise. But this has come from “device data” – hip-worn accelerometers worn over the course of three years (2013-2015) by 100,000 participants in the UK aged between 40 and 69.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s a move away from touchscreens as a general user interface for specific tasks in cars and even phones. CC-licensed photo by JC 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. Untouchable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A network of AI ‘Nudify’ sites are a front for notorious Russian hackers • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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Multiple sites which promise to use AI to ‘nudify’ any photos uploaded are actually designed to infect users with powerful credential stealing malware, according to new findings from a cybersecurity company which has analyzed the sites. The researchers also believe the sites are run by Fin7, a notorious Russian cybercrime group that has previously even set up fake penetration testing services to trick people into hacking real victims on their behalf.

The news indicates that services for producing AI-generated nonconsensual intimate content are becoming enticing enough that hackers feel it is worth the time and effort to build fake versions they can then use to hack people. The news also shows that Fin7 is alive despite the U.S. Department of Justice saying last year that “Fin7 as an entity is no more.”

Hostinger, the domain registrar for most of the fake nudify sites, blocked the domains after 404 Media sent it a list of questions earlier this week. 404 Media also found that one of the Fin7-run sites was included one of the web’s biggest porn site aggregators, potentially putting many people who stumbled across the site at risk.

“The deepfake AI software may have an audience of mostly men with a decent amount who use other AI software or have crypto accounts,” Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push, told 404 Media in an online chat.

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Honeytraps: old ploy, modern method.
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Staying a step ahead: mitigating the DPRK IT worker threat • Google Cloud Blog

Codi Starks, Michael Barnhart, Taylor Long, Mike Lombardi, Joseph Pisano, and Alice Revelli:

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UNC5267 is not a traditional, centralized threat group. IT workers consist of individuals sent by the North Korean government to live primarily in China and Russia, with smaller numbers in Africa and Southeast Asia. Their mission is to secure lucrative jobs within Western companies, especially those in the US tech sector.

UNC5267 gains initial access through the use of stolen identities to apply for various positions or are brought in as a contractor. UNC5267 operators have primarily applied for positions that offer 100% remote work. Mandiant observed the operators engaging in work of varying complexity and difficulty spanning disparate fields and sectors. It is not uncommon for a DPRK IT worker to be working multiple jobs at once, pulling in multiple salaries on a monthly basis. One American facilitator working with the IT workers compromised more than 60 identities of US persons, impacted more than 300 US companies, and resulted in at least $6.8m of revenue to be generated for the overseas IT workers from in or around October 2020 until October 2023.

…Mandiant has identified a substantial number of DPRK IT worker resumes used to apply for remote positions. In one resume from a suspected IT worker, the email address—previously observed in IT worker-related activities—was also linked to a fabricated software engineer profile hosted on Netlify, a platform often used for quickly creating and deploying websites. The profile claimed proficiency in multiple programming languages and included fake testimonials with stolen images from high-ranking professionals, likely stolen from CEOs, directors, and other software engineers’ LinkedIn profiles.

…To accomplish their duties, UNC5267 often remotely accesses victim company laptops situated within a laptop farm. These laptop farms are typically staffed with a single facilitator who is paid monthly to host numerous devices in one location. Mandiant has identified evidence that these laptops are often connected to an IP-based Keyboard Video Mouse (KVM) device, although a recurring theme across these incidents is the installation of multiple remote management tools on victim corporate laptops immediately following shipment to the farm. These indicate that the individual is connecting to their corporate system remotely via the internet, and may not be geographically located in the city, state, or even country in which they report to reside.

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They’re also not very good at the programming jobs. Which shouldn’t surprise you. But able to work multiple jobs at once? Impressive!
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Touch screens are over. Even Apple is bringing back buttons • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

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The tyranny of touch screens may be coming to an end.

Companies have spent nearly two decades cramming ever more functions onto tappable, swipeable displays. Now buttons, knobs, sliders and other physical controls are making a comeback in vehicles, appliances and personal electronics.

In cars, the widely emulated ultra-minimalism of Tesla’s touch-screen-centric control panels is giving way to actual buttons, knobs and toggles in new models from Kia, BMW’s Mini, and Volkswagen, among others. This trend is delighting reviewers and making the display-focused interiors of Tesla and its imitators feel passé.

Similar re-buttonization is occurring in everything from e-readers to induction stoves.

Perhaps the most prominent exponent of this button boom is the company that set us lurching toward touch screens in the first place. Apple added a third button it calls the “action button” to its full slate of new iPhone 16s unveiled this month, after introducing the feature on its upscale Apple Watch Ultra and Pro-model iPhones over the past couple of years. It also added a button-like “camera control” input on the iPhone’s side.

As Apple shows, companies aren’t just rediscovering buttons, they’re reconceiving them. The camera control includes touch features, and the company has also developed the “force sensor” that enables its AirPods to respond when you squeeze their stems.

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Pendulum swings are probably more common in technology than we realise. Unbundle! Then: bundle again! Make things modular! Then… make things integrated! Replace buttons with touchscreens! Then.. actually, buttons work better while we still have fingers.
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BBC confronts neo-Nazi who gave UK rioters arson tips • BBC News

Ed Thomas:

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The BBC has confronted a neo-Nazi in Finland who shared online instructions on how to commit arson with UK rioters during the summer.

The 20-year-old was an administrator in the Southport Wake Up group on the Telegram messaging app, where he was known as “Mr AG”. He posted the arson manual, which was pinned to the top of the group chat.

In late July and early August, the group was key in helping to organise and provoke protests that turned to violence in England and Northern Ireland.

We tracked Mr AG – whose real name is Charles-Emmanuel Mikko Rasanen – to an apartment on the outskirts of the Finnish capital, Helsinki. It was from here, more than 1,000 miles away from Southport, that the neo-Nazi took a prominent online role during the UK riots.

On 29 July, within hours of the killings of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, the Southport Wake Up group was created. Within days it had grown to more than 14,000 members. Mr Rasanen – or Mr AG as he was known online – helped to run the group chat.

The group organised the very first protest in the UK, on St Luke’s Road in Southport, the day after the killings. That protest later turned into a riot. Before the group was taken down by Telegram, a series of other protest locations were advertised, as well as a list of dozens of refugee centres, suggested as potential targets.

…The BBC travelled to Finland to confront Mr Rasanen – we had previously emailed him. He refused to answer any of our questions, but did not deny sending the posts or being an administrator of the Southport Wake Up group.

Before we left him, he also accused the BBC of harassment and rang the police.

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Totally weird: he’s a mixed-race Finn who celebrates Hitler. Neat work tracking him down, which seems to have been done by Finnish investigative journalists: very Girl With The Dragon Tattoo of them.
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More than 9,000 scam Facebook pages deleted after Australians lose $43.4m to celebrity deepfakes • The Guardian

Josh Taylor:

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Australians could see fewer deepfake images of celebrities being hauled off in handcuffs, or promoting a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment on Facebook, after Meta launched a new one-stop shop for banks to share information on scams that has blocked 8,000 pages and 9,000 celebrity scams in its first six months of operation.

From January to August 2024, Australians reported $43.4m in losses from scams on social media to Scamwatch, with close to $30m relating to fake investment scams.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has faced pressure from politicians and regulators in the past few years to tackle the plague of scams featuring deepfake images of public figures such as David Koch, Gina Rinehart, Anthony Albanese, Larry Emdur, Guy Sebastian and others which are used to promote investment scams.

The company is being sued by the mining magnate Andrew Forrest over the company’s alleged failure to tackle scams using his image.

Meta announced on Wednesday it had partnered with the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) to launch the Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (Fire) that provides a dedicated reporting channel for scams between Meta and financial providers of the victims of the scams.

…Since launching a pilot in April, there have been 102 reports, resulting in Meta removing more than 9,000 scam pages, and 8,000 AI-generated celebrity investment scams on Facebook and Instagram.

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Those celebrity fake ads are all over Twitter, but I doubt that they’re going to be taken down with anything like the same alacrity. It’s hardly worth celebrities suing Twitter, since it will just tie them up in court, and Musk has more money than they do. No obvious solution if the platform doesn’t see it as important.
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The coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It’s the AI • MIT Technology Review

Mat Honan:

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when I tried Snap’s new Spectacles a couple of weeks ago, I was less taken by the ability to simulate a golf green in the living room than I was with the way I could look out on the horizon, ask Snap’s AI agent about the tall ship I saw in the distance, and have it not only identify it but give me a brief description of it. Similarly, in The Verge Alex Heath notes that the most impressive part of Meta’s Orion demo was when he looked at a set of ingredients and the glasses told him what they were and how to make a smoothie out of them.

The killer feature of Orion or other glasses won’t be AR Ping-Pong games—batting an invisible ball around with the palm of your hand is just goofy. But the ability to use multimodal AI to better understand, interact with, and just get more out of the world around you without getting sucked into a screen? That’s amazing.

And really, that’s always been the appeal. At least to me. Back in 2013, when I was writing about Google Glass, what was most revolutionary about that extremely nascent face computer was its ability to offer up relevant,  contextual information using Google Now (at the time the company’s answer to Apple’s Siri) in a way that bypassed my phone.

While I had mixed feelings about Glass overall, I argued, “You are so going to love Google Now for your face.” I still think that’s true.

Assistants that help you accomplish things in the world, without having to be given complicated instructions or making you interface with a screen at all, are going to usher in a new wave of computing. While Google’s Project Astra demo, a still unreleased AI agent that it showed off this summer, was wild on a phone, it was not until Astra ran on a pair of smart glasses that things really fired up.

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That’s always been the obvious use of smart glasses. Especially now we have AI to integrate to it.
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How Hurricane Helene became a monster storm – The Verge

Justine Calma:

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It made landfall with winds reaching 140 miles per hour, making it a major storm and a Category 4 out of 5 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale.

Helene packed a punch with water, too. When it hit Florida’s Big Bend region, it brought a massive storm surge, inundating the coastline with up to 15 feet of seawater. The underwater topography off Florida’s west coast, with a more gradual incline, acted like a ramp, making it easier for the storm to bring a taller wall of water with it. The sheer size of the hurricane also meant that the storm surge flooded a wider area.

Heavy rainfall dropped more water onto communities, leading to historic flooding in western North Carolina. Close to 14 inches of rain were recorded at the Asheville airport over three days between September 25th and 27th. The highest preliminary total was more than 31 inches of rain, recorded in Busick, North Carolina.

…Climate change is altering the calculus for storms like Helene. Rising global temperatures create conditions conducive to more intense storms that can gain strength quickly and stay more powerful onshore. Helene developed amid soaring sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Waters along the storm’s early path got as high as 31ºC (87.8ºf), providing ample fuel. The atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture is increasing because of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, allowing for more severe downpours.

To know how big of a role climate change played with Helene specifically, scientists will have to conduct more research. But Balaguru likens the effect of climate change to the world having a weakened immune system. “It doesn’t mean that you will become sick. It just increases your tendency to become sick,” Balaguru says.

Altogether, the pieces were in place for the perfect storm with Helene. “The storm started big, which was bad, it went over hot water, which was bad, it hit a place that is prone to high storm surge, and then it accelerated and went into populated areas and took wind and rainwater to those populated areas,” Knox says. “You don’t want to see much worse.”

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Oura nears $500m in annual revenue and readies new ring • Bloomberg via MSN

Mark Gurman and Evan Gorelick:

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Oura Health Oy, a Finnish health technology company known for its fitness-tracking rings, will see annual sales double this year to roughly $500m and expects “healthy” growth in 2025.

Chief executive officer Tom Hale, speaking in an interview, said that Oura is building a loyal following after selling more than 2.5 million rings. Still, the company isn’t yet at the stage of planning an initial public offering, he said.

The 11-year-old business, which pioneered the concept of finger-worn activity trackers, makes its money by selling rings for $299 and subscriptions priced at $6 a month. It’s more of a niche market than smartwatches or earbuds, but the field is getting more crowded. Samsung Electronics Co. recently launched a $400 product called the Galaxy Ring.

Hale is upbeat about expanding the business. The company’s profit margins are closer to that of a software company than a hardware maker, he said, and Oura’s subscribers have been sticking with the product.

“Retention is better than any other subscription model I’ve seen,” Hale said. “To double this business, we don’t have to do that much.” He said that the company’s roughly half a billion dollars in revenue for calendar 2024 would be twice what it recorded in 2023.

Though Oura declined to discuss future products, people with knowledge of its plans say the company is introducing a fourth-generation ring in October. The device will have a thinner design and better battery life, as well as more accurate activity tracking, they said. It’s set to be the company’s biggest product overhaul in three years.

In addition to tracking fitness, Oura rings assess the quality of a user’s sleep and provide a “readiness score.” About 80% of Oura’s revenue comes from hardware, with the rest provided by software subscriptions, Hale said

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Neil Cybart (via whom this comes) reckons half of those 2.5 million rings will be sold this year. I just can’t imagine it as a mass market thing.
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Windows MR headsets no longer work in Windows 11 24H2 • UploadVR

David Heaney:

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Microsoft has removed Windows Mixed Reality from Windows 11.

With Windows 11 24H2, the latest major version of Microsoft’s PC operating system, you can no longer use a Windows MR headset in any way – not even on Steam.

This includes all the Windows MR headsets from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, including HP’s Reverb G2, released in 2020.

UploadVR tested Windows 11 24H2 with a Reverb G2 and found the above notice. Microsoft confirmed to UploadVR that this is an intentional removal when it originally announced the move back in December.

In August 3.49% of SteamVR users were using a Windows MR headset, roughly 80,000 people. If they install Windows 11 24H2, their VR headset will effectively become a paperweight.

Steam said: “Existing Windows Mixed Reality devices will continue to work with Steam through November 2026, if users remain on their current released version of Windows 11 (version 23H2) and do not upgrade to this year’s annual feature update for Windows 11 (version 24H2).”

The death of Windows MR headsets comes on the same week Microsoft revealed that HoloLens 2 production has ended, and that software support for the AR headset will end after 2027.

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I think that’s what’s known as a signal. HoloLens going is significant: it seems that Microsoft has decided that VR, at least its form, isn’t the thing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Some university students in America now quail at reading a long book in a week. Or any books. CC-licensed photo by vickysandoval22 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. Novel. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google paid $2.7bn to bring back an AI genius who quit in frustration • WSJ

Miles Kruppa and Lauren Thomas:

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At a time when tech companies are paying eye-popping sums to hire the best minds in artificial intelligence, Google’s deal to rehire Noam Shazeer has left others in the dust. 

A co-author of a seminal research paper that kicked off the AI boom, Shazeer quit Google in 2021 to start his own company after the search giant refused to release a chatbot he developed. When that startup, Character.AI, began to flounder, his old employer swooped in.

Google wrote Character a check for around $2.7bn, according to people with knowledge of the deal. The official reason for the payment was to license Character’s technology. But the deal included another component: Shazeer agreed to work for Google again.

Within Google, Shazeer’s return is widely viewed as the primary reason the company agreed to pay the multibillion-dollar licensing fee.

The arrangement has thrust him into the middle of a debate in Silicon Valley about whether tech giants are overspending in the race to develop cutting-edge AI, which some believe will define the future of computing. 

“Noam is clearly a great person in that space,” said Christopher Manning, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “Is he 20 times as good as other people?” 

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The fact that Google has this amount of money to spend on a single individual (come on, they don’t need the technology) is just mindboggling. Heading off a rival? Is that the true profit that he will add to the company? It’s hard to think anyone since a few of the original hires at Google has managed to be that valuable.
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Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: ‘I see AI as born out of surveillance’ • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia:

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Until 2017, Whittaker had thought she could successfully mobilise change from inside the machine, building up ethical AI research and development programmes at Google in collaboration with academics at universities and companies such as Microsoft. But in the autumn of that year, a colleague contacted her about a project they were working on. They had learnt it was part of a Department of Defense pilot contract, codenamed Project Maven, that used AI to analyse video imagery and eventually improve drone strikes. “I was basically just a . . . dissent court jester,” she says, still visibly disappointed.

She drafted an open letter to Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, that received more than 3,000 employee signatures, urging the company to pull out of the contract. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” the letter said.

“The Maven letter was sort of like, I can’t make my name as an ethical actor redounding to Google’s benefit,” she says. “You’re talking about Google becoming a military contractor. It’s still shocking, although it’s become normalised for us, but this is a centralised surveillance company with more kompromat than anyone could ever dream of, and now they’re partnering with the world’s most lethal military, as they call themselves.

“Yeah, that was the end of my rope.”

Whittaker went on to help organise employee protests and walkouts, in which more than 20,000 Google workers participated, to protest against the company’s handling of other ethical matters such as sexual harassment allegations against high-profile executives. At the time, Google’s management opted not to renew the Pentagon contract once it expired. But Whittaker left Google in 2019, after the company presented her with a set of options that she says gave her no choice but to quit. “It was like, you can go be an administrator, doing spreadsheets and budgets for the open source office [and] stop all the shit I had been building forever.”

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Fascinating interview – there’s much more (the link should pass the paywall) and it’s all engrossing.
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CNN puts a paywall on its website as TV revenues decline • SF Gate

Stephen Battaglio:

»

CNN has long had one of the most visited news websites in the world. Starting Tuesday, users are going to have to pay for it.

The Warner Bros. Discovery-owned news operation is putting a paywall on CNN.com, requiring U.S. users to pay $3.99 for access or a discounted rate of $29.99 a year. The subscription will allow unlimited usage of the site, which is visited by 150 million people globally each month.

Users will be asked to subscribe after accessing a number of free stories, according to an internal memo from Alex MacCallum, executive vice president of digital products and services for CNN.

CNN’s reason for the move is rooted in the problems that plague all of traditional television. Consumers are spending more time with online video and canceling their traditional pay-TV subscriptions. Revenues from cable and satellite subscribers are declining as cord-cutting continues at a steady pace each year. The trend, along with a decline in ratings, has put pressure on CNN’s profit margins.

Whether consumers will pay for a product they have used for free over the years remains to be seen. Mark Thompson, who took over as CNN’s chairman last year, turned the New York Times into a successful digital subscription site during his tenure at that company.

MacCallum’s memo said subscribers “will receive benefits like exclusive election features, original documentaries, a curated daily selection of our most distinctive journalism, and fewer digital ads.” CNN is currently developing video content with some of its talent designed to be behind the paywall on the site, according to people familiar with the plans.

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That’s not a lot of money to ask. And yet it’s going to mean a lot of people not going on the site: any amount of friction will do that. Passwords, usernames, different devices, it’s going to be the usual mess.
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The elite college students who can’t read books • The Atlantic

Rose Horowitch:

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Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

And yet. “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible.

«

Pride & Prejudice is 108,500 words (or so). Crime & Punishment is 107,500 words (or so). Think of all the TikToks you could watch in the time it takes you to read them!
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How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels • Grist

Akielly Hu:

»

Matthias Weyland loves having people ask about his balcony. A pair of solar panels hang from the railing, casting a sheen of dark blue against the red brick of his apartment building. They’re connected to a microinverter plugged into a wall outlet and feed electricity directly into his home. On a sunny day, he’ll produce enough power to supply up to half of his family’s daily needs.

Weyland is one of hundreds of thousands of people across Germany who have embraced balkonkraftwerk, or balcony solar. Unlike rooftop photovoltaics, the technology doesn’t require users to own their home, and anyone capable of plugging in an appliance can set it up. Most people buy the simple hardware online or at the supermarket for about $550 (500 euros.)

The ease of installation and a potent mix of government policies to encourage adoption has made the wee arrays hugely popular. More than 550,000 of them dot cities and towns nationwide, half of which were installed in 2023. During the first half of this year, Germany added 200 megawatts of balcony solar. Regulations limit each system to just 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop, but the cumulative effect is nudging the country toward its clean energy goals while giving apartment dwellers, who make up more than half of the population, an easy way to save money and address the climate crisis.

“I love the feeling of charging the bike when the sun is shining, or having the washing machine run when the sun is shining, and to know that it comes directly from the sun,” Weyland said. “It’s a small step you can take as a tenant” and an act of “self-efficacy, to not just sit and wait until the climate crisis gets worse.”

«

Guess they could also not shut down their nuclear power stations and stop using coal? Just a thought.
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Fraud. So much fraud • Science

Derek Lowe:

»

Charles Piller and the team here at Science dropped a big story on Thursday morning, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should. It’s about Eliezer Masliah, who since 2016 has been the head of the Division of Neuroscience in the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and whose scientific publication record over at least the past 25 years shows multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud. There it is in about as few words as possible.

As is so often the case, image manipulation is at the heart of the scandal. Readers here will be all too familiar with the techniques of cutting and pasting Western blots in order to make them tell the story the authors want told, and of re-using images and parts of images over and over even when they’re supposed to be produced from different experiments at different times. That’s what we’re seeing here, and a 300-page dossier has been assembled with examples of it.

Splicing, cloning, overlaying, copy-and-pasting, duplication of the same image with different captions about different research in different journals: a great deal of effort seems to have gone into carefully doctoring, cleaning, beautifying, and spicing up these papers digitally. After looking over examples, I find the evidence convincing and impossible to explain (at least in my mind) as anything other than sustained, deliberate acts of deception lasting for decades.

Hundreds of them. Again and again. The dossier references 132 papers with apparent problems. Unfortunately, these include many highly cited papers on mechanisms of synaptic damage (Masliah specialized in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s mechanisms, particularly around the alpha-synuclein protein).

As the article details, this all has some direct drug discovery implications, particularly for an antibody called prasinezumab which targets alpha-synuclein. All four of the fundamental papers about prasinezumab (as cited on the web site of its developer, Prothena) are full of manipulated images, unfortunately.

«

As the blogpost points out, this is disastrous for Alzheimer’s research. (Via Benedict Evans.)
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AI crawlers are hammering sites and nearly taking them offline • Fast Company

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

A number of websites have begun to take action to fend off crawlers, seeking to avoid the negative impact of being bombarded with requests. An increasing number of websites are putting restrictions on AI crawlers, according to a recent analysis by the Data Provenance Initiative (DPI), a group of AI researchers. In the DPI’s analysis, around one in four tokens from the most critical web domains called upon by crawlers have put up restrictions. And social media is buzzing with complaints about the increasing instances of web crawlers pushing up traffic on websites.

Edd Coates is one of those who has raised concerns online. He runs Game UI Database, a database of details taken from games designed to be used as a reference tool. The website was relaunched in early August, gaining large volumes of visitors keen to check it out. But then a few weeks later, the website’s performance declined dramatically, slowing to a crawl. “I thought that was weird, because we had about a quarter of the people visiting the website that did at the relaunch,” says Coates. “And it’s somehow running slower.”

Coates and his web developer checked the website’s server logs, which turned up the cause of the problem: a crawler by OpenAI was pouncing on the website. “They were hitting the site so hard,” he says. “It was, like, 200 times a second.” OpenAI doesn’t dispute its GPTBot crawler visited Game UI Database, but does dispute the scale of how frequently their crawler was hitting the website, showing evidence that suggested the number of queries per second was only around three.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Fast Company: “We enable publishers to use industry-standard tools to express preferences about access to their websites. By using robots.txt publishers can set time delays and reduce load on their systems, choose to allow access to only certain pages or directories, or opt out entirely. We stopped accessing this website as soon as they updated their robots.txt directions for our bot, as our systems recognized and respected this.”

«

All these years it’s existed and robots.txt still doesn’t have a “don’t hit this site more than X times per second/minute/hour” setting.
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Study finds zero cases of cervical cancer among women vaccinated for HPV before age 14 • STAT

Annalisa Merelli:

»

A historic new study out of Scotland shows the real-world impact of vaccines against the human papillomavirus: no cases of cervical cancer were detected in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.

Many previous studies have shown that HPV vaccines are extremely effective in preventing cervical cancer. But the study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the first to monitor a national cohort of women over such a long time period and find no occurrence of cervical cancer.

“The study is super exciting. It shows that the vaccine is extremely effective,” said Kathleen Schmeler, a professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the research. “It’s obviously early. We’re just starting to see the first data of the impact of the vaccine because it takes so long from the time of the vaccine to the effects.”

The results underscore the importance of working to increase uptake of the HPV vaccine in the US, said Schmeler. Scotland, for example, introduced routine immunization in schools in 2008, and close to 90% of students in their fourth year of secondary school (equivalent to 10th grade in the US.) in the 2022-2023 school year had received at least one dose of the vaccine. In the US, where HPV vaccines are not administered in school, uptake among adolescents ages 13 to 17 is a little over 60%.

«

In case you didn’t know, HPV is identified as a key cause of cervical cancer. Even one dose given before girls become sexually active seems to be effective. In the age cohort, the expectation was for 15 to 17 cases. There could be other HPV strains, and this isn’t the end of the story. But it’s a big bookmark in the story.
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Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first • Nature

Smriti Mallapaty:

»

A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body.

“I can eat sugar now,” said the woman, who lives in Tianjin, China, on a call with Nature. It has been more than a year since the transplant, and, she says, “I enjoy eating everything — especially hotpot.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.

James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.”

The study, published in Cell, follows results from a separate group in Shanghai, China, who reported in April that they had successfully transplanted insulin-producing islets into the liver of a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes. The islets were also derived from reprogrammed stem cells taken from the man’s own body, and he has since stopped taking insulin.

The studies are among a handful of pioneering trials using stem cells to treat diabetes, which affects close to half a billion people worldwide. Most of them have type 2 diabetes, in which the body doesn’t produce enough insulin or its ability to use the hormone diminishes. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks islet cells in the pancreas.

«

So far the woman’s transplanted cells have generated insulin for a year; other researchers want to see them work for five years before they consider her “cured”. But it’s a big breakthrough.
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Did you solve it? The box problem that baffled the boffins • The Guardian

Alex Bellos:

»

The 15 boxes problem.

Andrew and Barbara are playing a game, in which fifteen boxes are arranged in a 3-row 5-column grid as shown below:

Prizes are put in two randomly-chosen boxes. Andrew will search the boxes row by row, so his search order is ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO. Barbara will search column by column, so her order is AFKBGLCHMDINEJO.

If Andrew and Barbara open their boxes together each turn, that is, on the first turn, they both open A, on the second, Andrew opens B and Barbara opens F, on the third Andrew opens C, and Barbara opens K, and so on, who is more likely to find a prize first?

a) Andrew.
b) Barbara.
c) Both equally likely.

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Think a bit about this one. I got the correct answer despite misreading the question (it matters that there are *two* prizes hidden.) Bellos says it intrigues mathematicians because they struggle to find an intuitive explanation for why the correct answer is correct. The obvious next step to find that intuitive explanation, I think, is to consider whether the result would be different if the grid were square, and if it were taller than it is wide but both players used the same strategy. (And would adding more prizes change anything?) Bellos has a new book out – Think Twice – which is full of intriguing puzzles like this. For those that like that sort of thing, that is the thing they like.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK’s last coal-fired power station closed down forever on Monday night, part of the transformation of its power system towards non-fossil sources. CC-licensed photo by Arran Bee 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. Cleaner. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Coal generation in OECD countries falls below half of its peak • Ember

Dave Jones:

»

Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the UK’s last coal power plant, closes at midnight on the 30th September 2024. And with it, a long chapter of coal power in the UK comes to a rapid close. It’s not just the UK though: many countries around the world expanded coal power and are now in the process of moving away from it.

Among the world’s richest countries, who were the first to embrace coal and will be the first to move away from it, the decline in coal power is rapidly accelerating.

OECD coal generation peaked in 2007, and last year reached half that level for the first time (-52%). Rapid growth in solar and wind was responsible for 87% of the fall in coal during this period. Consequently, coal generation fell to just 17% of the OECD total electricity generation in 2023, down from 36% at its peak in 2007.

The UK is the 14th of 38 OECD countries to achieve a coal-free power system. Among the remaining 24 OECD countries that still have coal-fired electricity, 19 have seen coal power generation fall by at least 30% from its peak in 2007. Only four OECD countries have seen less than a 30% fall in coal from their peak, including South Korea and Japan. Türkiye was the only OECD country to set a new coal power record in 2023.

Of the 38 OECD countries, 13 are targeting a Paris-aligned coal phase-out by 2030, on top of the 14 countries that are already coal-free. Most countries have good plans for expanding wind and solar which means coal power will continue to collapse this decade, even in the 11 countries that have not explicitly committed to a phase-out by 2030.

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It’s a start!
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Essential node in global semiconductor supply chain hit by Hurricane Helene • HUNTERBROOK

Sam Koppelman:

»

“The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina,” wrote Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and codirector of its Generative AI Labs, on March 9, 2024. 

At the end of this inconspicuous road sit two mines that produce the vast majority of high-purity quartz (HPQ) that is indispensable to the global semiconductor industry. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the horrific damage to the community appears to have extended to the roads and freight rail line connecting the mining operations to the outside world — according to images reviewed and geolocated by Hunterbrook Media.

One video posted to TikTok appeared to show the entrance to one of the structures of the mine — owned by SCR Sibelco NV — underwater, with a text overlay praying for the community. A truck is seen underwater at the entrance to Sibelco’s facility.

In the Appalachian Mountains, the facilities in Spruce Pine supply between an estimated 70% and 90% of the mined and processed HPQ used in the electronics industry. Although it is one of Earth’s most common minerals, quartz in its purest form — such as the white quartz in North Carolina — is much rarer. And pure quartz is a critical component for the production of the silicon wafers necessary for everything from your phone and computer to large language models and solar panels.

If the operations of the two major quartz miners in the region — Sibelco and The Quartz Corp. — are interrupted, experts have said, the consequences could be catastrophic. “If you flew over the two mines in Spruce Pine with a crop duster loaded with a very particular powder, you could end the world’s production of semiconductors and solar panels within six months,” said an industry expert in the acclaimed book Material World by economist Ed Conway. 

Conway claims this is because, “no high-purity quartz means no Czochralski crucibles, which means no monocrystalline silicon wafers, which means, well, the end of computer chip manufacture as we know it.” 

A Hunterbrook reporter in North Carolina was unable to reach the government in Spruce Pine for comment because the cell signal is still down. 

«

Following up on yesterday’s piece. Hedge funds (including Hunterbrook Capital, “attached” to Hunterbrook Media here) are now wondering what the effect will be on, well, everything. But especially the stock market.
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Google could use small nuclear reactors to power data centres • Power Magazine

Darrell Proctor:

»

[Google CEO Sundar] Pichai said that Google’s goal of being a carbon-neutral company by 2030 will be challenged by the need to develop data centers amid the boom in artificial intelligence (AI). He said that does not mean the group will miss its goal. Google reportedly is putting together a team looking at carbon-free energy alternatives to serve its growing power demand worldwide.

“We are now working on over 1-GW data centers, which I didn’t think we would be thinking about just maybe even two years earlier, and all of this needs energy, ” Pichai said during a talk in Carnegie Mellon’s Highmark Center as part of the university’s 2024-25 President’s Lecture Series. Pichai spoke on “The AI Platform Shift and the Opportunity Ahead,” as he focused his company’s advancements in AI and his vision for a future driven by AI.

“I think in the short term it is challenging,” said Pichai. “In the medium to long term I’m optimistic, because I think it’s also bringing a lot of capital investment to developing new sources of energy. We invested very early in wind and solar because we saw the opportunity there. And today, many of our data centers operate at around 90% carbon-free basis.”

Pichai did not say Google would use SMRs to power its data centers, but noted, “I see the amount of money going into SMRs … for nuclear energy. And so when I look at the capital and innovation going in, I’m optimistic in the medium to long term.”

Those new energy sources include geothermal.

«

I like how the writer’s great enthusiasm for nuclear (you should see the sidebar on the website: if headlines were radioactive, it would achieve fission) means that when Pichai didn’t rule out nuclear, he ruled it in.
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Griefbots and the perils of digital immortality • The Garden of Forking Paths

Brian Klaas:

»

In late 2012, shortly before Christmas, an old woman sat down in London’s Embankment station. Unlike the other passengers, she wasn’t there to travel. While everyone else ignored the pre-recorded safety announcement, she was eagerly awaiting it. When it came, she was dismayed. Then, she began to cry.

As Tube trains whizzed past, commuters swirling around her, Margaret McCollum wiped tears from her eyes. It had been five years since her husband, Oswald Laurence, had died. But this was the day Margaret felt like he was truly gone forever.

When staff at the station came over to comfort Margaret, they asked her what was wrong. What she told them moved them to tears, too.

She explained that her late husband, Oswald, was an actor. In the late 1960s, he had recorded the “Mind the Gap” announcement for the Northern Line on London’s sprawling underground network. Even after he died in 2007, McCollum could always come to the station, sit on the platform, and listen as her husband’s distinctive, sonorous voice boomed a safety warning to passengers, reminding them about the gap between the train doorway and the platform. It was a ritualized comfort, a tiny audio link to the man she loved and deeply missed.

This time, though, Oswald’s voice had disappeared, replaced in a fresh digital upgrade of the Tube announcements. McCollum’s visceral connection with her husband was gone.

«

This is a paywalled post, but the three examples that are above the wall – including this one – are thought-provoking about our relationship with the dead in the digital world.
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Epic Games accuses Samsung and Google of scheme to block rivals • Reuters via The Guardian

»

Fortnite video game maker Epic Games on Monday accused Alphabet’s Google and Samsung, the world’s largest Android phone manufacturer, of conspiring to protect Google’s Play store from competition.

Epic filed a lawsuit in US federal court in California alleging that a Samsung mobile security feature called Auto Blocker was intended to deter users from downloading apps from sources other than the Play store or Samsung’s Galaxy store. It’s Epic’s second antitrust suit against Google.

Samsung and Google are violating US antitrust law by reducing consumer choice and preventing competition that would make apps less expensive, said US-based Epic, which is backed by China’s Tencent.

“It’s about unfair competition by misleading users into thinking competitors’ products are inferior to the company’s products themselves,” Tim Sweeney, Epic’s chief executive, told reporters.

“Google is pretending to keep the user safe saying you’re not allowed to install apps from unknown sources. Well, Google knows what Fortnite is as they have distributed it in the past.”

Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Samsung said it planned to “vigorously contest Epic Games’ baseless claims”.

“The features integrated into its devices are designed in accordance with Samsung’s core principles of security, privacy, and user control, and we remain fully committed to safeguarding users’ personal data,” Samsung said in the statement, adding that users have choices to disable Auto Blocker at any time.

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Reminder that Epic mostly lost to Apple, but mostly won against Google, in an antitrust case because Google favoured some app makers over others in how they were treated in the Google Play store, whereas Apple was brutal to everyone. If Samsung has shown any favouritism, it’s cooked. (In about three years.)
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AI-assisted reporter • Journalism.co.uk Media jobs

A chance to work for the Hereford Gazette:

»

This is an exciting opportunity for someone passionate about journalism and the potential for AI to contribute to the way we produce and consume news, without losing sight of the importance of quality reporting and writing.

As an AI-assisted reporter, you will have the opportunity to develop your news and technical skills, including learning how to manage and utilise AI technology effectively.

You will play a key role in ensuring that our articles meet the highest standards of accuracy, information, and compliance with media law, plagiarism, and privacy, utilising your journalistic expertise alongside AI tools.

Key responsibilities:  
• Check factual accuracy
• Work with an AI system to help write news articles, while also utilising your journalism skills to maintain the quality and authenticity of the content
• Ensure that all content produced meets legal and ethical standards, including those related to media law, plagiarism, privacy, and accuracy
• Efficiently upload and manage stories, using time-saving AI tools and techniques to ensure a seamless process without compromising the quality of the content
• Contribute to the development of AI technology by monitoring the performance of AI-generated content and identifying areas for improvement
• Work closely with our existing editorial teams to help integrate selected AI-generated content into a variety of newsrooms
• Train other reporters in the use of AI technology

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One little note: the advert says this is “part-time (three days a week), home-based”. If it’s home-based how are you going to train those other reporters? I suppose you could do it webcast-style but it seems a pretty grisly way to go about it. The times, they are a-changing.
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A Logic Named Joe

Murray Leinster:

»

It was on the third day of August that Joe come off the assembly line, and on the fifth Laurine come into town, an’ that afternoon I saved civilization.

«

That’s the opening line of this science fiction short story told by Leinster – real name William F Jenkins, who, it turns out, was Benedict Evans’s grandfather. This story is referenced in a 2017 piece by Evans about how we get predictions about the future wrong because we can’t see how the subtle things will change, so we tend to write about our existing society but with nuclear knobs on.

Yet reading A Logic Named Joe now, seven years after Evans’s original reference to it, I got the feeling that it was describing how people use – or would like to use – LLMs, which of course were not a thing at all seven years ago. (It’s quite an entertaining little story.)

But that might just be our human tendency to retrofit what we think we see in old writing.
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Mapping time: the surprising overlaps of history’s most influential minds • Big Think

Frank Jacobs:

»

We look back on famous past lives through the prism of those mostly fictitious compartments — labelling one as a scientist, another as a pirate — as if they were as neatly separated from life’s complexities as they are from us by time.

This graph [in the article] perforates that temporal prejudice. Called “The Big Map of Who Lived When,” it shows us which historical figures were contemporaries. The co-aliveness of some of these figures may boggle your mind.

The most satisfying way to use this map is to look for long lives with short overlaps. Like a picture of a great-grandparent holding their great-grandchild, there is something poetic about two lives lived so far apart yet intertwining for a brief period.

The map [in the article] focuses mainly on western luminaries, in seven categories: artists (blue), business & industry (yellow), thinkers (green), entertainers (red), athletes (purple), writers (magenta), and leaders & baddies (black). (Credit: profound_whatever via Reddit/DataIsBeautiful)

Take, for example, current US president Joe Biden (°1942), the oldest serving president to date, who for about a year was alive at the same time as Nikola Tesla (1854-1943), the Serbian-American inventor who developed the alternating current (AC) system that is used for distributing electricity.

Here’s another, more recent (and more baffling) overlap: The life of JRR Tolkien (1892-1973), who wrote The Lord of the Rings, coincided ever so slightly with that of Eminem (°1972), voted in 2015 the third-best rapper of all time.

«

Via Sophie Warnes’s Fair Warning newsletter (like everything, it’s on Substack now): she, like me, can’t believe that Tolkien/Eminem overlap. A terrible prose composer and a great one! You choose which is which.
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Possible cluster of human bird-flu infections expands in Missouri • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes:

»

A possible cluster of bird-flu infections in Missouri has grown to include eight people, in what may be the first examples of person-to-person transmission in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday.

If confirmed, the cases in Missouri could indicate that the virus may have acquired the ability to infect people more easily. Worldwide, clusters of bird flu among people are extremely rare. Most cases have resulted from close contact with infected birds.

Health officials in Missouri initially identified a patient with bird flu who was hospitalized last month with unusual symptoms. The patient may have infected one household member and six health care workers, all of whom developed symptoms, according to the C.D.C.

Investigators have not yet confirmed whether any of those seven individuals were infected with the virus, called H5N1, leaving open the possibility that they had Covid or some other illness with flulike symptoms.

Still, the news alarmed experts.

“We should be very concerned at this point,” said Dr. James Lawler, co-director of the University of Nebraska’s Global Center for Health Security.

“Nobody should be hitting the panic button yet, but we should really be devoting a lot of resources into figuring out what’s going on.”

«

Watching brief, nothing more. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In America, videos from stars such as Adele is no longer available on YouTube. Not, we suspect, because YouTube paid too much to license them. CC-licensed photo by Laura Dorney on Flickr.

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

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

The ultra-pure, super-secret sand that makes your phone possible • WIRED

Vince Beiser, in 2018:

»

Spruce Pine is not a wealthy place. Its downtown consists of a somnambulant train station across the street from a couple of blocks of two‑story brick buildings, including a long‑closed movie theater and several empty storefronts.

The wooded mountains surrounding it, though, are rich in all kinds of desirable rocks, some valued for their industrial uses, some for their pure prettiness. But it’s the mineral in Glover’s bag—snowy white grains, soft as powdered sugar—that is by far the most important these days. It’s quartz, but not just any quartz. Spruce Pine, it turns out, is the source of the purest natural quartz—a species of pristine sand—ever found on Earth. This ultra‑elite deposit of silicon dioxide particles plays a key role in manufacturing the silicon used to make computer chips. In fact, there’s an excellent chance the chip that makes your laptop or cell phone work was made using sand from this obscure Appalachian backwater. “It’s a billion‑dollar industry here,” Glover says with a hooting laugh. “Can’t tell by driving through here. You’d never know it.”

…Spruce Pine quartz [is] the world’s primary source of the raw material needed to make the fused‑quartz crucibles in which computer‑chip‑grade polysilicon is melted. A fire in 2008 at one of the main quartz facilities in Spruce Pine for a time all but shut off the supply of high‑purity quartz to the world market, sending shivers through the industry.

Today one company dominates production of Spruce Pine quartz. Unimin, an outfit founded in 1970, has gradually bought up Spruce Pine area mines and bought out competitors, until today the company’s North Carolina quartz operations supply most of the world’s high‑ and ultra‑high‑purity quartz. (Unimin itself is now a division of a Belgian mining conglomerate, Sibelco.)

In recent years, another company, the imaginatively titled Quartz Corp, has managed to grab a small share of the Spruce Pine market. There are a very few other places around the world producing high‑purity quartz, and many other places where companies are looking hard for more. But Unimin controls the bulk of the trade.

«

Why link to this now? Because Spruce Pine lies in North Carolina – which has been hit hard by Hurricane Helene. Spruce Pine is inaccessible and all the bridges to it have been washed out. How long can the industry go without it? The cost of climate change is revealed in many ways. (Thanks @aadetugbo for the link.)
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AI avatars are doing job interviews now • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Jack Ryan from San Diego was recently being interviewed for a job. On a video call, the interviewer, a woman with red hair, said, “I find it helps when candidates tell me a story in answering the questions.” 

“I’m looking for examples from your work experience,” the woman added. During the conversation, Ryan had a smirk on his face.

That’s because the woman is not real. She is an AI avatar from a company called Fairgo.ai, which uses AI agents to interview job candidates on behalf of other companies.

“This HR AI avatar is a perfect demonstration of late stage capitalism,” Ryan told 404 Media in an online chat. “While Fairgo’s intent is to provide a fair and equitable interview process, I can’t imagine AI, LLMs, and other tools are able to interpret the human emotion and facial reactions to provide an actual, well rounded interview.” Ryan posted a clip of his interview to LinkedIn on Thursday.

On its website, Fairgo says its AI agent “talks to candidates any time, any where.” The company claims that it can “Ensure every candidate is evaluated on a level playing field with consistent and unbiased interview practices.” Julian Bright, founder and CEO of Fairgo, told 404 Media in an email that after an introductory video voiced by the AI avatar, candidate interviews are done by an audio-only AI. “At no point is any of the video or audio captured used to evaluate the candidate,” he wrote. Instead, that is done with a transcript afterwards.

Bright said that Fairgo does not make decisions on who to shortlist for a role; that instead falls to the hirers. Fairgo also says on its site that the interview process is low stress, and that “candidates consistently love the interview experience.”

«

Well, how many candidates for the job are going to say that they absolutely detested the technology that you made them use to interact with you?
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Apple Mobile processors are now made in America, by TSMC • Tim Culpan’s Position

Tim Culpan:

»

TSMC Arizona is the marquee project of the US government’s $39 billion CHIPS for America Fund under the CHIPS Act. Six months ago, I thought Apple might tap Arizona for a less-consequential chip like the H-series used in AirPods. I was surprised when I heard it was the A16. The fact that they went for the most-advanced chip they could manage on US soil, in terms of both technology and volume, shows Apple and TSMC want to start big.

(I believe there may be other products also in production at TSMC Arizona, but I don’t have much information on them. If you do, contact me here.)

Currently TSMC is achieving yields in Arizona that are slightly behind what’s enjoyed back home in Taiwan (basically, neck and neck). Most important, though, is that improvements are moving so rapidly that true yield parity between Taiwan and Arizona is expected to be reached in coming months.

I can’t tell you which Apple device these A16 chips will go into. One possibility is that they’re slated for one of the upcoming iPads, though perhaps not the iPad Mini since Mark Gurman believes they’re to be launched around October. Another likelihood is the next iteration of the iPhone SE, which makes sense since it’s supposedly based on the iPhone 14 which uses the A16 processor and is expected next year.

Normally, media outlets will pad out their reportage with lots of background and history. I’ll leave it here. That’s the scoop: Apple’s A16 mobile processors are in production at TSMC on American soil, and that choice of product is hugely significant.

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Culpan has very good contacts with Taiwanese companies, having been there as a journalist for many years. TSMC might breathe a little easier having a reliable US base.
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‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman • The Conversation

Saul Justin Newman, the scientists who won an Ig Nobel for demonstrating that the data on super-centenarians is absurd:

»

In Okinawa [in Japan], the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That’s for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.

According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.

Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.

The oldest man in the world, John Tinniswood, supposedly aged 112, is from a very rough part of Liverpool. The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point.

Q: But most people don’t lose count of their age…

You would be amazed. Looking at the UK Biobank data, even people in mid-life routinely don’t remember how old they are, or how old they were when they had their children. There are similar stats from the US.

Q: What does this all mean for human longevity?

The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know.

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The quest to build a telescope on the Moon • The New Yorker

Matthew Hutson:

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Unlike telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb, which are made from mirrors and lenses, FarView would comprise a hundred thousand metal antennas made on-site by autonomous robots. It would cover a Baltimore-size swath of the moon. To show the FarView site up close, [CEO and co-founder of Lunar Resources, Elliot] Carol drew a big square filled with dots.

Each dot represented a cluster of four hundred antennas; all the clusters together would be sensitive enough to detect a cell phone on Pluto. They would perceive light that is nearly undetectable from Earth: radio waves from a mysterious period known as the Cosmic Dark Ages.

To develop a plan for FarView, Lunar Resources, which is privately owned, has formed a consortium with several scientists and universities. “Usually, these missions are pursued by large academic and research institutions,” Carol told me. “But we said, ‘No, we want to support and fund the development of this observatory.’ ” The company’s goals go well beyond the construction of a telescope. FarView would double as a demonstration of two unprecedented activities: off-planet mining and manufacturing, which are known in the business as “in-situ resources utilization” (I.S.R.U.).

…FarView might not be completed for a decade or more, if at all, and could cost upward of two billion dollars. But it is part of a larger dream that, one day, moon-based mines might produce helium for fusion reactors, and lunar and orbital factories might build satellites that are too large to launch from Earth. Lunar ice could provide hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, which could power trips to deep space. According to a market assessment from the professional-services company PwC, the lunar economy could be worth a $170bn by 2040.

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Alternate view: it won’t happen and the lunar economy won’t be worth anything like that.
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How to crash a wired network with Excel • LaurieWired on X

Laurie Wired:

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An Excel spreadsheet crashed this company’s network.

But it wasn’t malware.

The truth is *much* weirder.

Try this out, open up a xls (not xlsx) file in your favorite text/hex editor. Notice all the repeating characters in the header.

When receiving POP3 emails with an Excel attachment, the characters bit patterns caused a signalling pattern on the physical copper of the company’s T1 line, crashing the network equipment.

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The whole story dates back to 2003, and is documented on Reddit. It’s quite a tale.
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London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: more active kids • Grist

Syris Valentine:

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Restricting the volume of high-emitting vehicles roaming city streets carries many benefits, from clearing the air to quieting the urban din and beyond. Recognition of this simple fact has led to the proliferation of clean air zones, designated regions within a city where vehicles must meet strict pollution standards or pay a fee to operate within it.

At last count, over 300 such areas had been established across Europe. In London, which boasts the largest ultra-low emissions zone in the world, a study has found a secondary benefit: Kids started walking and biking to school more.

In 2018 — the year before London’s rule took effect in the centre of the city, and five years before the zone encompassed its entirety — researchers at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University saw in the impending policy an opportunity to conduct a natural experiment.

They recruited children aged six to nine and their families in central London and in Luton, a small city to the north, for a multi-year study to investigate how the program might affect a child’s health. Though research focused on understanding how lightening a city’s pollution load shaped the way young lungs develop, participants completed questionnaires alongside their annual health assessments. The responses allowed researchers to glean insights into their subjects’ activity levels, mental health, and other ancillary outcomes.

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Odd not to have heard this bit of ULEZ news somewhere else, but maybe the idea of ULEZ being good for something isn’t a popular one with some people.
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Sex and birth are big business. “Suicide pods” show death is next • The Times

Kathleen Stock:

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Thinking of investing in a sleek, ergonomic vehicle with all mod cons in which you can sail off into the sunset? I don’t mean a yacht or even a caravan, I mean a mobile gas chamber.

A 64-year-old American woman in Switzerland last week became the first person to use the Sarco — short for sarcophagus — with the help of its sponsoring organisation, wittily called the Last Resort. A spokesman made the woman’s death sound like a restorative break at Center Parcs. Her end arrived “under a canopy of trees at a private forest retreat”, he said.

Once comfortably ensconced, the unnamed woman, who had an immune condition, entered a four-digit code on a touchpad and the Sarco flooded with nitrogen. She died within minutes.

The Swiss authorities, famously relaxed about the concept of assisted suicide but unhappy about this unregulated initiative, have since arrested several of the organisers.

Dr Philip Nitschke, the machine’s Australian inventor, has been trying to perfect the technological facilitation of suicide for decades. The 77-year-old called his first attempt Deliverance. It was an intravenous system connected to a laptop computer. His second go, a mask delivering carbon monoxide, looked exactly like a plastic bag. Customers rejected it.

Nitschke put it succinctly: “People do not want to leave the world in such an aesthetically displeasing way.”

Enter the Sarco. This capsule looks like a miniature spaceship and its maker says it is “luxurious”. It even has a window to take in the scenery before you depart.

«

It looks like a one-person spaceship and a tanning salon bed had a baby. It’s also a very weird concept. Yet it makes a weird sort of sense: of course you’d like to look at the sky and trees as you breathe your last. Eat your heart out, M*A*SH* theme song.
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YouTube blocks videos from Adele, Green Day, Bob Dylan, others in dispute with SESAC • TechCrunch

Anthony Ha:

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A number of YouTube videos featuring music from artists such as Adele, Green Day, Bob Dylan, Nirvana, and R.E.M. have been unplayable in the United States since Saturday.

For example, if you try to play Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” (whether it’s the classic album recording or a live performance), you are instead told: “This video contains content from SESAC. It is not available in your country.” Sometimes, you even get to watch a pre-roll ad before you get the message.

However, not all videos featuring these artists are blocked; it’s not clear whether the playable videos are exempt from the current dispute or if they’ve simply been overlooked.

In statements to the press and on social media, YouTube blamed the situation on failed negotiations with SESAC, a performing rights group that says it represents more than 35,000 music artists and publishers.

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I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the reason for the failure was that YouTube wasn’t prepared to pay what SESAC wanted. But that, at the same time, that content is still available on Spotify and Apple Music. Which tells us a lot about YouTube and its view of the value of content.
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Rightmove’s property data is more valuable than news • Financial Times

John Gapper:

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If you want to buy the best house in a desirable neighbourhood, you can make a discreet approach and even put notes through the door, but an occupier who does not wish to sell will ignore you. The same applies to Rightmove, the UK’s leading property listings group.

Rightmove this week spurned a £6.1bn bid by REA, its equivalent in Australia, which is majority owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. It was REA’s third takeover approach to Rightmove this month, showing the appeal of classified advertising to publishers, long after they controlled the business. Small ads for jobs and property that once had to be placed in papers now appear online.

News Corp’s stake in REA contributed 70% of the US company’s market value of $15.4bn this week, far outweighing its more famous assets, from Dow Jones to the book publisher HarperCollins. A tiny investment made by Lachlan Murdoch about 25 years ago has come to dominate the business in the view of shareholders, if not of its 93-year-old patriarch.

…News Corp is one of many media groups finding that online classified ads carry more financial clout than news. The German billionaire Mathias Döpfner last week struck a €13.5bn deal with the private equity firm KKR to break up Axel Springer, which publishes the German newspapers Bild and Die Welt, as well as the US news sites Politico and Business Insider.

He will run Axel Springer’s media business, which was valued at €3.5bn, while KKR will be the majority owner, with an investment partner, of its €10bn classified business. This includes the European property listings group Aviv and the job recruitment site StepStone. “I am a firm believer in the future . . . of journalism,” Döpfner declared, but KKR is a firm believer in asset values.

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Chastening.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Researchers have found a flaw in the web connectivity for Kia cars that could let a hacker take over control of some key functions. CC-licensed photo by Sean Davis 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 10 links for you. Unkeyed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Millions of vehicles could be hacked and tracked thanks to a simple website bug • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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When security researchers in the past found ways to hijack vehicles’ internet-connected systems, their proof-of-concept demonstrations tended to show, thankfully, that hacking cars is hard. Exploits like the ones that hackers used to remotely take over a Chevrolet Impala in 2010 or a Jeep in 2015 took years of work to develop and required ingenious tricks: reverse engineering the obscure code in the cars’ telematics units, delivering malicious software to those systems via audio tones played over radio connections, or even putting a disc with a malware-laced music file into the car’s CD drive.

This summer, one small group of hackers demonstrated a technique to hack and track millions of vehicles that’s considerably easier—as easy as finding a simple bug in a website.

Today, a group of independent security researchers revealed that they’d found a flaw in a web portal operated by the carmaker Kia that let the researchers reassign control of the internet-connected features of most modern Kia vehicles—dozens of models representing millions of cars on the road—from the smartphone of a car’s owner to the hackers’ own phone or computer. By exploiting that vulnerability and building their own custom app to send commands to target cars, they were able to scan virtually any internet-connected Kia vehicle’s license plate and within seconds gain the ability to track that car’s location, unlock the car, honk its horn, or start its ignition at will.

After the researchers alerted Kia to the problem in June, Kia appears to have fixed the vulnerability in its web portal, though it told WIRED at the time that it was still investigating the group’s findings and hasn’t responded to WIRED’s emails since then. But Kia’s patch is far from the end of the car industry’s web-based security problems, the researchers say. The web bug they used to hack Kias is, in fact, the second of its kind that they’ve reported to the Hyundai-owned company; they found a similar technique for hijacking Kias’ digital systems last year. And those bugs are just two among a slew of similar web-based vulnerabilities they’ve discovered within the last two years that have affected cars sold by Acura, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Toyota, and more.

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I thought the story sounded familiar. This seems like it will crop up repeatedly because if vehicle makers want to nickel and dime you for things like heated seats, they’ll need to be able to identify your car uniquely, which means it’s hackable in some sense.
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Elon Musk hits back at UK government after he is not invited to tech summit • The Guardian

Ben Quinn:

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Elon Musk has hit back at the UK government after he was not invited to an international investment summit following his controversial social media posts during last month’s riots.

Musk said on X on Thursday: “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts.”

He seemed to be referring to the prison early release scheme, initiated by the Labour government to ease pressure on a system it has said is “on the point of collapse” due to a lack of capacity.

The billionaire owner of X has used the platform to suggest civil war in Britain is “inevitable”, and to criticise Keir Starmer as rioting broke out after disinformation spread about the killing of three children in Southport.

Ministers initially said the early release scheme would not apply to the most serious offenders, but later confirmed that prisoners who had completed a sentence for a serious crime and were serving a consecutive sentence for a lesser one would qualify. But sex offenders are excluded from the early release programme.

Musk’s latest broadside came after it emerged he is not invited to a global investment summit in Britain on 14 October. The government hopes the event will be a boost for investment in the UK two weeks before the autumn budget. Government sources confirmed Musk was not invited.

Musk took centre stage in November last year at a UK summit on AI, where the then Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, played the role of a chatshow host and flattered the entrepreneur during a 40-minute in-person conversation.

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Musk’s immaturity is quite astonishing. Steve Jobs at least had years of failure after his first stint at Apple; even that didn’t quench his self-importance. Musk, though, has never hit the utter nadir that’s needed to really get empathy for everyone else.
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LAPD raid goes bad after gun allegedly sucked onto MRI machine • SF Gate

Lester Black, cannabis editor:

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The owners of NoHo Diagnostic Center are suing the LAPD, the city of Los Angeles and multiple police officers, alleging they violated the business owners’ constitutional rights and demanding an unspecified amount in damages. Officers allegedly raided the diagnostic center, located in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, thinking it was a front for an illegal cannabis cultivation facility, pointing to higher-than-usual energy use and the “distinct odor” of cannabis plants, according to the lawsuit. 

Officers raided the facility on Oct. 18, 2023, and detained the lone female employee while they searched the business, the lawsuit said. However, they didn’t find a single cannabis plant and only saw a typical medical facility with rooms used for conducting x-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans and MRIs, the owners said. 

The officers then released the employee and told her to call a manager, the lawsuit said, while they continued to wander around various rooms of the facility. The plaintiffs say the officers’ behaviour was “nothing short of a disorganized circus, with no apparent rules, procedures, or even a hint of coordination.”

At one point, an officer walked into an MRI room, past a sign warning that metal was prohibited inside, with his rifle “dangling… in his right hand, with an unsecured strap,” the lawsuit said. The MRI machine’s magnetic force then allegedly sucked his rifle across the room, pinning it against the machine. MRI machines are tube-shaped scanners that use incredibly strong magnetic fields to create images of the brain, bones, joints and other internal organs.

An officer then allegedly pulled a sealed emergency release button that shut the MRI machine down, deactivating it, evaporating thousands of liters of helium gas and damaging the machine in the process. The officer then grabbed his rifle and left the room, leaving behind a magazine filled with bullets on the office floor, according to the lawsuit.

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1: I so hope there is CCTV of this. 2: What idiots. 3: wasting that much helium should be a crime. 4: How remarkable that SF Gate has a cannabis editor – though of course it is legal in California.
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Large language models will upend human rituals

Marion Fourcade and Henry Farrell:

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Arthur C. Clarke wrote a story in which the entire universe was created so that monks could ritually write out the nine billion names of God. The monks buy a computer to do this faster and better, with unfortunate consequences for the rest of us: the story’s last sentence is “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

Rituals aren’t just about God, but about people’s relations with each other. Everyday life depends on ritual performances such as being polite, dressing appropriately, following proper procedure and observing the law. The particulars vary, often mightily, across time, space and societies. But they are the foundation of all formal and informal institutions, making co-ordination between people feel effortless. They seem invisible, only because we take them so much for granted.

…Organisational ceremonies, such as the annual performance evaluations that can lead to employees being promoted or fired, can be carried out far more quickly and easily with LLMs. All the manager has to do is fire up ChatGPT, enter in a brief prompt with some cut-and-pasted data, and voilà! Tweak it a little, and an hour’s work is done in seconds. The efficiency gains could be remarkable.

And perhaps, sometimes, efficiency is all we care about. If a ritual is performed just to affirm an organisational shibboleth, then a machine’s words may suit just as well, or even better.

Still, things might get awkward if everyone suspects that everyone else is inauthentically using an LLM. As Erving Goffman, a sociologist, argued, belief in the sincerity of others—and the ritualistic performance of that belief—is one of the bedrocks of social life. What happens when people lose their faith? A bad performance evaluation is one thing if you think the manager has sweated over it, but quite another if you suspect he farmed it out to an algorithm. Some managers might feel ashamed, but will that really stop them for long?

What may hurt even more is the “decoupling” of organisational rituals from the generation of real knowledge. Scientific knowledge may seem impersonal, but it depends on a human-run infrastructure of evaluation and replication. Institutions like peer review are shot through with irrationality, jealousy and sloppy behaviour, but they are essential to scientific progress. Even AI optimists, such as Ethan Mollick, worry that they will not bear the strain of LLMs. Letters of recommendation, peer reviews and even scientific papers themselves will become less trustworthy. Plausibly, they already are.

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Fourcade is a professor of sociology (UCal Berkeley), Farrell a professor of democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.
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Meta’s going to put AI-generated images in your Facebook and Instagram feeds • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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If you think avoiding AI-generated images is difficult as it is, Facebook and Instagram are now going to put them directly into your feeds. At the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, the company announced that it’s testing a new feature that creates AI-generated content for you “based on your interests or current trends” — including some that incorporate your face.

When you come across an “Imagined for You” image in your feed, you’ll see options to share the image or generate a new picture in real time. One example shows several AI-generated images of “an enchanted realm, where magic fills the air.” But others could contain your face… which I’d imagine will be a bit creepy to stumble upon as you scroll.

Other examples include captions that say you can “imagine yourself” as a video game character or an astronaut exploring space. Both images appear to use a person’s photos to create an AI-generated version of them in made-up scenarios.

In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Amanda Felix says the platform will only generate AI images of your face if you “onboarded to Meta’s Imagine yourself feature, which includes adding photos to that feature” and accepting its terms. You’ll be able to remove AI images from your feed as well.

Last week, 404 Media found that using Snapchat’s AI selfie feature gives the company permission to use your face in ads seen only by you (unless you disable the option). It looks like Facebook and Instagram will similarly only show the AI-generated content to you, while sharing remains optional.

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This is very weird. Also, you can imagine that some people are going to be vain enough that they will embrace this with delight. There’s some small text on one of the example pictures saying “Only you can see this”, which some might feel is a blessing.

Anyhow, my principal IG feed is for my dog, so let’s see how the AI copes with that.
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Rail bodies investigate cyberattack at UK’s busiest stations • The Register

Connor Jones:

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A cybersecurity incident is being probed at Network Rail, the UK non-departmental public body responsible for repairing and developing train infrastructure, after unsavoury messaging was displayed to those connecting to major stations’ free Wi-Fi portals.

The message displayed to users via a compromised Wi-Fi landing page, seen by The Register, is Islamophobic in nature and references the 2017 Manchester Arena bombings.

All 20 stations managed by Network Rail across the UK are thought to be affected, with Wi-Fi services still unavailable this morning while investigations into the root cause continue.

The stations affected include 10 in London – all the major rail hubs in the city – and other key commuter stations such as Manchester Piccadilly, Birmingham New Street, Leeds, Reading, Glasgow Central, Bristol Temple Meads, and more.

Network Rail and the British Transport Police (BTP) are on the case, with the latter telling us: “We received reports at around 1703 yesterday [25 September] of a cyberattack displaying Islamophobic messaging on some Network Rail Wi-Fi services. We are working alongside Network Rail to investigate the incident at pace.”

Network Rail’s Wi-Fi is operated by Warwickshire-based communications company Telent, which said it’s working alongside the two transport bodies to resolve the issues.

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I’ll go with “racist script kiddie discovered how to hack the landing page” – rather than the preferred one of a couple of writers, which was “OMG IT IS NIGHTSLEEPER NOW THEY WILL HACK THE TRAINS AND SIGNALLING.” (For reference, for non-UK readers, Nightsleeper is a BBC drama whose premise is the utterly not-possible hacking of an Edinburgh-London overnight train along with all the signalling.)
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Trail running and drug-testing: where do we go from here? • Trail Runner Magazine

Brian Metzler:

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For years, trail running has had a reputation as a clean sport with a bit of a “wild west” vibe. 

But the globalization of the sport, increased level of competition, more sponsorship contracts, and the advent of bigger prize purses has started to change the sport in the past decade, and with it, the concern about performance-enhancing drug use has followed. 

Because there is very little authentic drug testing in trail and ultra-distance running, no out-of-competition testing and often delayed and inconsistent communication among anti-doping agencies, the sport is at a critical juncture with a growing influx of money and professionalism — especially after the results of one of the sport’s most prestigious events were tarnished by doping last year. 

On January 7, Esther Chesang, the women’s winner of the 2022 Sierra-Zinal trail running race last August in Switzerland, was provisionally suspended by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) after it was revealed that the 28-year-old Kenyan runner had triamcinolone acetonide (glucocorticoid) — an anti-inflammatory steroid on banned by World Anti-Doping Agency — present in her system after an in-competition drug test last May 11. 

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A followup on yesterday’s article about ultrarunner Camille Herron fiddling with Wikipedia – which, it turns out, has nothing on the pharmaceutical fiddling going on in the sport. (Thanks wendyg for the link.)
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WordPress vs WP Engine – community drama 2024 • WPJohnny

Johnny Nguyen on the drama (which you may not have heard of) between Matt Mullenweg, whose Automattic company owns Tumblr and also runs the WordPress open source project, who is having a verbal fight with a company called WP Engine:

»

I suspect this fight isn’t a matter of principle and values, but rather of personal conflict. On the WordPress side, we have Matt Mullenweg who’s done a good job of expressing his views as being his views alone. But on WP Engine’s side…it’s Lee Wittlinger, managing director for Silver Lake who overseas the WP Engine brand.

If I had to guess, this probably came down to Matt wanting more financial support from brands who profit off the WordPress space. And/or also wanting more development support. Perhaps feeling certain things should not have to be be managed or developed by WordPress core. And he wanted the big commercial companies in the WordPress space (the ones who profit the most from it) to help contribute to improving WordPress, perhaps maximizing its features and compatibility with 3rd-party extensions. Except only, maybe WP Engine did not lend their help to the degree of Matt’s liking.

And he decided to write them off, and officially end ties with them. Clarifying any mis-affiliations between WordPress and WP Engine moving forward, making clear they aren’t the same. That WP Engine isn’t an official WordPress entity and should not be allowed to profit of it.

• Publicly, WP Engine released a post showing how much contributions they’ve given to the WordPress community in the form of event sponsorships, developing extensions and frameworks.>br />• Privately, WP Engine opened legal action against WordPress…presumably to defend its brand and probably seek monetary damages for Matt’s statements.

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I have tried reading a few takes on this topic, and this one delivers it best. I honestly don’t get Mullenweg’s complaint. The whole thing about OSS is that you can’t stop others using it as they want, including making tons of money. Nor can you force them to contribute back. If you want that, you need a different licence. (Thanks Caleb for the link.)

Though Mullenweg has now blocked WP Engine from accessing WordPress resources (eg themes and plugins). Taste for drama.
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X’s first transparency report since Elon Musk’s takeover is finally here • WIRED

Vittoria Elliott:

»

Comparing the 2021 report to the current X transparency report [released earlier this week] is a bit difficult, as the way the company measures different things has changed. For instance, in 2021, 11.6 million accounts were reported. Of this 11.6 million, 4.3 million were “actioned” and 1.3 million were suspended.

According to the new X report, there were over 224 million reports, of both accounts and pieces of individual content, but the result was 5.2 million accounts being suspended.

While some numbers remain seemingly consistent across the reports—reports of abuse and harassment are, somewhat predictably, high—in other areas, there’s a stark difference. For instance, in the 2021 report, accounts reported for hateful content accounted for nearly half of all reports, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts actioned. (The reports used to be interactive on the website; the current PDF no longer allows users to flip through the data for more granular breakdowns.)

In the new X report, the company says it has taken action on only 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content.

But this may be due to the fact that X’s policies have changed since it was Twitter, which Theodora Skeadas, a former member of Twitter’s public policy team who helped put together its Moderation Research Consortium, says might change the way the numbers look in a transparency report. For instance, last year the company changed its policies on hate speech, which previously covered misgendering and deadnaming, and rolled back its rules around Covid-19 misinformation in November of 2022.

“As certain policies have been modified, some content is no longer violative. So if you’re looking at changes in the quality of experience, that might be hard to capture in a transparency report,” she says.

«

Even so, it’s quite a change. Far fewer active users, but an absolutely dramatic drop in the number of accounts removed. Hatefulness is totally permissible now, it seems. Hilariously, Musk’s Twitter has blocked links to a dossier about JD Vance allegedly obtained by hacking. After all the fulminating about the blocking of links to stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop? The hypocrisy is stratospheric.
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LG Smart TVs, including OLEDs, now show screensaver ads • FlatpanelsHD

Rasmus Larsen:

»

Almost a decade ago, ads began creeping onto user interfaces on our TVs. Initially appearing as paid placements (“recommendations”), the initiative has since expanded to include large ad carousels at the top of the screen and full-screen ads that take over your screen.

While reviewing LG’s latest high-end G4 OLED TV (review here), FlatpanelsHD discovered that it now shows full-screen screensaver ads. The ad appeared before the conventional screensaver kicks in, as shown below, and was localized to the region the TV was set to.

We saw an ad for LG Channels – the company’s free, ad-supported streaming service – but there can also be full-screen ads from external partners, as shown in the company’s own example below.

The ad we saw was muted, but it is unclear if this will remain the case. We observed the ad on a 2024 LG model, but there are no indications to suggest that it will be exclusive to new LG Smart TVs.

Digging a little deeper, we discovered that the initiative is spearheaded by LG Ad Solutions, the company’s division for “connected TV (CTV) and cross-screen advertising”.

The announcement (link) about screensaver ads on LG Smart TVs makes it sound as if the advertising team’s priorities now overshadow those of LG’s webOS team

«

Advertising, like gambling, corrodes everything it touches.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Ceefax system is dead, but if you’ve got enough old videotapes you can reconstruct it. Why not run a project to do so? CC-licensed photo by Andrew Bowden on Flickr.

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

Meta debuts augmented reality glasses and Judi Dench-voiced AI chatbot • The Guardian

Nick Robins-Early (and agencies):

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The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, presented new augmented reality glasses at the company’s annual developer conference on Wednesday, debuting a prototype of the next phase in its expansion into smart eyewear. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta AI will be able to talk in the voice of Dame Judi Dench.

The glasses, named Orion, have the ability to project digital representations of media, people, games and communications on to the real world. Meta and Zuckerberg have framed the product as a step away from desktop computers and smartphone into eyewear that can perform similar tasks.

“A lot of people have said this is the craziest technology they’ve ever seen,” Zuckerberg boasted during his keynote speech, clad in a shirt that read “Aut Zuck aut nihil”, Latin for “Either Zuck or nothing”, substituting his own name into a motto associated with the Roman leader Julius Caesar. A pre-recorded demonstration showed some of the glasses’ capabilities, including two people playing a virtual Pong game and talking on a video chat through augmented reality.

Meta also expanded its bet on artificial intelligence, announcing a raft of new product offerings for its ChatGPT-like chatbot and plans to start automatically injecting personalized images created by the bot into people’s Facebook and Instagram feeds, as it kicked off its annual Connect conference at its California headquarters on Wednesday.

Among the AI updates announced was an audio upgrade to the digital assistant, called Meta AI, which will now respond to voice commands and offer users the option to make the assistant sound like celebrities including Judi Dench, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristen Bell and Awkwafina.

“I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of interacting with AI than text,” Zuckerberg said.

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When can you buy the glasses? Ah, tricky. Don’t hold your breath over “prototypes”. But look, you can get AI junk inserted into your Instagram feed right away! As for AI and voice – yes, that’s how we’ve been doing it for years already.
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BBC Sound Effects: searchable library

Yes: the BBC’s Sounds Effects library. (No results for Dalek. Boo.) The licence allows non-commercial use. Lots of fun to be had!
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Help! I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don’t know what to do with them • Odds and Ends of History

James O’Malley:

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Obviously, teletext was not going to stick around for the internet era. But unlike newspapers and books published in the 1980s and 90s, which historians and nostalgic millennials can go back and rediscover, nobody thought to keep an archive of teletext.

This means there is no great vault containing the millions of words that were written by thousands of people, and read by tens of millions more. A Library or Alexandria’s worth of journalism and culture, some of the most widely read works of the 80s and 90s, have disappeared forever.

Teletext Ltd, which operated the ITV and Channel 4 services, is today a holiday website. It didn’t retain an archive of its pages, because why the hell would it?

But perhaps more surprisingly, beyond holding a few representative pages of what Ceefax used to be like, the BBC didn’t either.

And in retrospect it seems like a bizarre omission. An act of cultural vandalism, akin to how the BBC famously destroyed recordings of Doctor Who, Dad’s Army and the like in the 1970s to save money.

It pains me in particularly that today that a fan archive of Digitiser, which was clearly very formative to me and is partially what inspired me to become a writer, is only about half complete.

But there is some good news for historians: There just might be a way to go back in time.

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It turns out you can pull huge chunks of Ceefax history out of videotapes of old programs. There’s software for it. But James just doesn’t have the time. If anyone knows anyone who wants to do the archiving work…
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Masimo founder Joe Kiani resigns as CEO following ouster from board • Reuters

SK Sneha:

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Masimo said on Wednesday founder Joe Kiani has decided to step down as the medical device maker’s CEO, days after shareholders voted to remove him from the company’s board following a bitter proxy battle with activist hedge fund Politan Capital Management.

The company named veteran healthcare executive, Michelle Brennan, as interim chief. Brennan was nominated by Politan for Masimo’s board last year, along with the hedge fund’s founder Quentin Koffey.

Both were subsequently elected by shareholders. Shares of the company were up 5.4% at $133 in early trade.

The stock has fallen more than 40% since Feb. 15, 2022, when Masimo announced the $1bn acquisition of audio products maker Sound United. The deal was a key factor behind Politan’s activism.

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Notable only because Masimo is the company with which Apple has had a big (losing) patent row over a blood oxygen sensor on the Apple Watch. Might this change something in the relationship? Having the anchor of an audio products maker (even if it has the Denon/HEOS, Marantz, Polk, Bowers & Wilkins, Definitive Technology brands) hasn’t been popular with the board; Apple certainly won’t have been unhappy at the tension.
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Doctors describe the horror of Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon • New Lines Magazine

Edmund Bower:

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On Sept. 17, just before 3:30 p.m., the small waiting room of Dr. Nour’s three-room pediatrics clinic in southern Beirut was packed. A mother was waiting to get preschool checkups for her three children. Two elderly patients were booked in for cataract treatments at the ophthalmologist office next door. Sitting next to them was a young couple whom Nour, whose name has been changed for security reasons, had not met before. The father bounced a 10-day-old baby on his lap. Clipped to his belt was a Gold Apollo Rugged Pager.

Nour brought the young couple into her examination room. She pulled out a blank file for the newborn and wrote his name: Aiman. She placed him on the scales: a little over seven pounds. She lay Aiman on his back on an examination table and began to record his weight. As she did so, the man’s pager beeped twice.

“Excuse me,” he said, and reached down to silence it.

As he did so, about an ounce of explosives concealed within the pager detonated, sending shards of metal and fragments of its thick plastic casing out in all directions. The shrapnel tore deep wounds in the man’s abdomen, lodged in the ceiling of the clinic and lacerated the face of the baby as he lay on his back.

…The mechanism of the explosions appears to have been designed to cause maximum damage. Most of those who were injured were men, along with a number of women and children. They tended to pick up the beeping pager and hold it toward their eyes to read the message. When it exploded, it caused damage to both hands and their face.

…Of the 160 patients who came into the emergency room, 140 suffered serious eye injuries. For almost two hours, American University of Beirut Medical Center’s head of ophthalmology, Bahaa Noureddine, conducted triage among the waiting patients to see “which were the eyes that can be salvaged,” deciding which could wait and which were beyond hope. At 7 p.m., the first case was wheeled into the operating room. Noureddine and his staff of nine surgeons did not stop operating until midnight three days later.

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The baby survived; a few minutes earlier and it wouldn’t have. I doubt that the “mechanism” was intended to maximise the damage to users, but it certainly had that effect.
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US ultrarunner Camille Herron involved in Wikipedia controversy • Canadian Running Magazine

Marley Dickinson:

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Acclaimed American ultrarunner Camille Herron, who has more than 12 ultrarunning world records to her name, along with her coach and husband, Conor Holt, have found themselves at the centre of a Wikipedia controversy. It stems from several edits to the Wikipedia pages of ultrarunners Kilian Jornet and Courtney Dauwalter, which degraded their accomplishments, while also adding accolades to Herron’s own page. The edits have been traced back to Herron’s email and Holt’s IP address.

The couple has been operating under the username “Rundbowie” since February 2024, after their previous Wikipedia account, “Temporun73,” was temporarily banned for violating Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policies for the edits to Herron’s page. Just hours after Temporun73 was banned, a new account under the name “Rundbowie” was created and resumed activity, making edits to Herron’s page and to those of other athletes.

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You’re thinking “oh, she’s only been noodling with Wikipedia pages” (the discovery of which is quite funny, really) but it points to something in her character:

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The Global Organization of Multi-day Marathoners (GOMU) president Trishul Cherns said he was appalled by the situation. “In my forty-six years of ultrarunning, I’ve never seen anyone as talented as Camille, who is so dedicated to creating division and animosity within the ultrarunning community. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia story is part of a pattern of interference. This couple has a history of trying to disrupt athletes, their reputations, races, and performances by citing World Athletics rules that do not apply to ultrarunning and multi-day running. I was appalled by Camille’s criticism directed at athletes challenging “her” records and her efforts to discredit them. This unsportsmanlike behaviour is bullying and mean-spirited and has no place in the larger ultrarunning community.”

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Maybe aggressive Wikipedia use should be taken as indicative of other behaviour.
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New study reveals positive mood changes during video game play • Oxford Internet Institute

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Playing video games can be good for your mood, according to a new international study from researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford.

• Study looks at player data from 67,328 gaming sessions from 8,695 players in 39 countries, analysing their mood before and during gameplay
• Across 162,325 in-game mood reports from players of the popular game PowerWash Simulator (PWS), the average player reported a more positive mood during play than at the start of each session
• Researchers predict 72% of players experience this uplift in mood during the play session based on statistical modelling of player data

The study analysed data from players in 39 countries, including the US, UK, Canada and Germany and found that PWS players’ moods rapidly increased during gameplay. Players consistently reported a higher mood after the first fifteen minutes of the play session compared to the start of each session.

The research team from the Oxford Internet Institute carried out the study to understand more about the short-term effects of playing video games.

Lead author Assistant Professor Matti Vuorre, Tilburg University and Research Associate, Oxford Internet Institute said: “At present short-term changes in video game players’ moods are poorly understood. Gameplay research frequently relies on artificial stimuli, with games created or modified by academic researchers, typically played in a lab environment rather than a natural context. Instead, we wanted to know how real play in natural contexts might predict player mood on short timescales.”

The researchers collaborated with PWS’s developer, FuturLab, to develop a research edition of the game that recorded gameplay events, game status records, participant demographics and responses to psychological survey items. This latest analysis is based on a dataset the team previously published in the journal Scientific Data last year.

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Interestingly, one of the authors is Professor Andrew Przybylski, who – in my experience – is very apt to find positive outcomes, or at least no negative ones, in studies like this.
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OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati resigns • WSJ

Deepa Seetharaman:

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OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, said Wednesday she was resigning, the latest in a string of departures among top executives at the company behind ChatGPT.

Murati was one of chief executive Sam Altman’s top deputies and handled much of the day-to-day management of the company, according to current and former employees.

Over the past few months, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former top researcher John Schulman, and former top researcher Jan Leike all resigned. In addition, co-founder and former president Greg Brockman recently took a leave of absence through the end of the year.

Murati’s departure comes at a critical moment for OpenAI, as it is attempting to close a funding round worth up to $6.5bn. Venture-capital firm Thrive Capital has committed about $1bn and OpenAI is in talks to get investments from longtime backer Microsoft, along with Apple, Nvidia and United Arab Emirates firm MGX, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Murati was a significant player in Altman’s brief ouster as CEO last year. She had previously approached some of OpenAI’s board members with concerns about Altman’s leadership, according to people close to the company. She described some of his leadership tactics as psychologically abusive and said she was likely to leave, according to people close to the company.

Murati was named interim CEO but Altman returned to the job just a few days later following pressure on the board by many of the company’s employees and investors. Murati has said she also shared her feedback directly with Altman and didn’t support the board of directors’ decision to fire him.

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Murati’s statement on Twitter isn’t very dramatic – it’s all jollity and delight. (Did she write it herself, or get ChatGPT to do it? “Write a resignation letter, formal, upbeat, 200 words.”)
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The end of the iPhone upgrade? • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

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The fact that I do not need an iPhone 16 is a testament not so much to the iPhone’s failure as to its resounding success. A lot of the digital software we rely on has grown worse for users in recent years; the iPhone, by contrast, has become so good that it’s hard to imagine anything but incremental improvements. Apple’s teleological phone-design strategy may have simply reached its end point, the same way evolution in nature has repeatedly resulted in an optimized species of crab.

Other tech companies, meanwhile, are embracing radical departures in phone design. Samsung offers devices that fold in half, creating a smaller screen that’s useful for minor tasks, such as texting, and a larger one for watching videos; Huawei is upping the ante with three folds. The BOOX Palma has become a surprise hit as a smartphone-ish device with an e-ink screen, similar to Amazon’s Kindle, which uses physical pixels in its display. Dumbphones, too, are growing more popular by intentionally doing less. Apple devices, by contrast, remain effective enough that they can afford to be somewhat static.

On the way out of the Apple Store, I spoke with one of the protesters, M, a young D.C. resident who was there to speak out against the new phone launch, “because there are human-rights violations being committed in order to produce new Apple products.” She continued, “The product differences between the 15 and the 16, none of them at all justify these destructions that are occurring.” She personally used an iPhone 12 that she bought refurbished, to at least avoid contributing to the proliferation of new Apple products.

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That’s the way to show ’em, lady.
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Apple’s 80% charging limit for iPhone: how much did it help after a year? • MacRumors

Juli Clover tried the optional “only charge to 80%” method:

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I left my iPhone [15 Pro Max, ie last year’s big model] at that 80% limit and at no point turned the setting off or tweaked it. There were some days when I ran out of battery because I was without a charger for most of the day, and there were other times that I had to bring a battery along to make sure I didn’t run out of power. It wasn’t always convenient to keep it at 80%, but there were days when it didn’t have too much of an impact.

It was always a treat when the iPhone randomly decided to charge to 100%, which is something Apple has baked in to the 80% limit to ensure the battery level stays calibrated.

Current capacity (compared to when new): 94%. Cycles (no. times charged): 299.

For the most part, I charged using USB-C rather than MagSafe, but there was some MagSafe charging mixed in. There was probably a 70/30 split between wired charging and MagSafe charging. I did often let my battery get quite low before charging, and it didn’t sit on the charger for long periods of time too often. Most charging was done in a room at 72 degrees. I’m adding this context because temperature is a factor that can affect battery longevity, and wireless charging is warmer than wired charging.

You can compare your level battery to mine, but here are a couple other metrics from MacRumors staff that also have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and did not have the battery level limited.

Current capacity: 87%. Cycles: 329
Current capacity: 90%. Cycles: 271

I don’t have a lot of data points for comparison, but it does seem that limiting the charge to 80% kept my maximum battery capacity higher than what my co-workers are seeing, but there isn’t a major difference.

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I’ve done the same on a 15 Pro: Current capacity 97%, Cycles: 238. I think the significant difference might come in the second year, and succeeding years, but even here I think there’s a visible difference.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified