In the US, increasingly heavy vehicles such as the Ford F-150 are leading to more and more pedestrian deaths in collisions. CC-licensed photo by F. D. Richards 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. Not pedestrian. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘Going back in time’: the schools across Europe banning mobile phones • The Guardian

Ashifa Kassam:

»

Four years after Calvijn College became one of the first schools in the Netherlands to go smartphone-free, it’s no longer an outlier. As students head back into classrooms across mainland Europe, a growing number of them will be forced to leave their mobile phones behind; In France, 200 secondary schools are testing a ban while French-speaking primary schools in Wallonia and Brussels, in Belgium, have moved forward with their own prohibitions. In Hungary, a new decree requires schools to collect students’ phones and smart devices at the start of the day.

Italy and Greece have adopted milder approaches, allowing students to carry their phones with them through the day but barring their use in classrooms.

For those at Calvijn College, the sweeping tide of change is thrilling. From the moment they began requiring students to either leave their phones at home or lock them up for the day, school officials watched as the culture of the school transformed.

“Basically what we had lost, we got back,” said Bakker. “The students playing with each other and talking to each other. And a lot less interruptions in the lessons.”

Other schools across the country began getting in touch, curious about the impact of the ban. In January 2024, the Dutch government entered the debate, urging schools to ban mobile phones, tablets and smartwatches from most secondary school classrooms across the country, The recommendation was recently extended to primary schools.

Late last year, as secondary schools across the Netherlands geared up to follow the recommendations, researchers at Radboud University seized on the chance to take a before and after snapshot of the change.

They polled hundreds of students and parents, as well as dozens of teachers, at two schools with imminent plans to do away with mobile phones on school premises, visiting the schools again three months after the ban was enacted.

About 20% of students reported that they were less distracted once smartphones were off limits, said Loes Pouwels, one of the researchers, while teachers described students as being more attentive and focused on their work in class. “So I think in terms of cognitive functioning, overall it was a positive thing.”

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Australia thinking of doing the same. Can’t argue that they’re not distracting if you’re trying to work.
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Goodbye Tinder, hello Strava: have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks? • The Guardian

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

Singletons looking to shack up with their soulmates online have relied on two key routes in the past decade or so: take your chance on dating apps, or befriend as many mutuals as possible on social media, in the hope that you find the one.

But some have found a third way, using services such as Goodreads and Strava to meet partners with whom they hope to spend the rest of their lives. Those couples proved to be trendsetters. So-called hobby apps – built around activites such as running, reading or movie-going – are having a moment, and not just for love.

It’s all part of a broader movement as people grow tired of the “digital town square” offered on Twitter/X and other social media platforms. At a time when many are abandoning Elon Musk’s social network over his attitude to “free speech” (which some see as “amplifying hate”), competing apps such as Bluesky and Threads are having a resurgence in users.

Whereas some users are switching to Twitter replicas, others are seeking refuge in apps that promise to connect them to people with whom they have common interests. Running app Strava has seen user numbers grow 20% in a year, according to digital market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That success has led it to add a messaging tool for users to keep in touch, alongside documenting their workouts. Knitting social network Ravelry, which is accessed through a number of third-party apps, has more than 9 million users. Goodreads has clocked up more than 150 million members.

Letterboxd, a film completist’s dream app, where you can tick off the latest movies you’ve seen, and review and rate them, alongside other cinephiles and the occasional famous actor or director, has gone from having 1.8 million users worldwide in March 2020 to more than 14 million users this summer.

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It’s strange how this stuff comes around. You’re far more likely to find a soulmate in a shared pastime than on a speed dating night or a dating app. And people are now rediscovering that.
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Ford seeks patent for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads • The Record

Suzanne Smalley:

»

Ford Motor Company is seeking a patent for technology that would allow it to tailor in-car advertising by listening to conversations among vehicle occupants, as well as by analyzing a car’s historical location and other data, according to a patent application published late last month.

“In one example, the controller may monitor user dialogue to detect when individuals are in a conversation,” the patent application says. “The conversations can be parsed for keywords or phrases that may indicate where the occupants are traveling to.”

The tech — labeled as “in-vehicle advertisement presentation” — will determine where a car is located, how fast it is traveling, what type of road it is driving on and whether it is in traffic. It also will predict routes, speeds and destinations to customize ads to drivers, the application said.

The system could pull data from “audio signals within the vehicle and/or historical user data, selecting a number of the advertisements to present to the user during the trip,” the patent application said.

By monitoring dialogue between vehicle occupants the ad controller system can determine when to deliver audio versus visual ads, providing ads to drivers as they travel “through a human-machine interface (HMI) of the vehicle,” the application said.

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Whoa whoa whoa. Adverts? In a car?? Based on your conversation??? This is immediately three strikes against Ford.
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TV news overtaken by digital rivals for first time in UK • FT

Daniel Thomas:

»

Television has ceased to be the main source of news in the UK for the first time since the 1960s as Britons turn increasingly to online news and social media apps, according to research by the media regulator.

Ofcom said on Tuesday that viewing of TV news had continued to fall steeply, with online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok and digital versions of broadcasters now slightly more widely used as a source of news. 

In its annual study of audience habits, the watchdog said 71% of adults obtained news online, compared with 70% via TV — a finding it described as “marking a generational shift in the balance of news media”.

The reach of TV news has fallen from 75% last year. More than four-fifths of people between the ages of 16 and 24 obtained their news from social media, Ofcom found.

The report underlines the pressure on more traditional linear broadcasters such as the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 to accelerate moves to digital platforms, which include their own streaming sites as well as social media apps such as TikTok. 

Broadcast executives are investing in creating TV and audio content specifically for such digital channels; the BBC, for example, is focused on growing its services such as iPlayer and Sounds. But they also need to cater for the now diminishing number of mainly older people who watch traditional TV. 

…TV remained the leading platform for news among older age groups, serving as the main source for 85% of people over 55, compared with only half of 16- to 24-year-olds.

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Linear TV will have fallen away too. Quite what the future looks like.. is probably some sort of YouTube/TikTok mixup.
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The US finally takes aim at truck bloat – The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

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This week, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stunned safety advocates by proposing new vehicle rules that it says will help reduce pedestrian deaths in America. The new rules appear aimed directly at the trend of increasingly massive SUVs and trucks, which have been shown to be more deadly to pedestrians than smaller and midsize vehicles.

Never in its 50-plus years in existence has the regulator issued new rules for automakers requiring them to change their vehicle designs to better prevent pedestrian fatalities. If enacted, the new rules could change how vehicles are designed in the US — permanently.

“It’s good to see NHTSA acknowledge that a myopic focus on pedestrian detection — which is imperfect — is no substitute for actually regulating car bloat,” said David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative and a Verge contributor. 

…SUVs and trucks, two of the most popular segments in the US, have become larger and heavier than ever before. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000 pounds (2.27 tons), compared to 22% in 2018, according to a recent investigation by The Economist. And with the shift to electric vehicles, many of those vehicles have become even heavier. The Ford F-150 Lightning has a curb weight of around 6,500 pounds, roughly 60% heavier than its gas equivalent.

Meanwhile, pedestrian deaths have skyrocketed in recent years. Between 2013 and 2022, pedestrian fatalities increased 57%, from 4,779 to 7,522, NHTSA reports. In 2022, 88% of pedestrian deaths occurred in single-vehicle crashes.

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America seems to be really bad at keeping its people alive, and only noticing that they’re dying in growing numbers long after it’s got out of control. Though of course the NHTSA isn’t going wild with this. It estimates that the changes it’s proposing will save.. 67 lives per year.
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Apple told to pay Ireland €13bn in tax by EU • BBC News

Charlotte Edwards and Theo Leggett:

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Apple has been ordered to pay Ireland €13bn (£11bn; $14bn) in unpaid taxes by Europe’s top court, putting an end to an eight-year row.

The European Commission accused Ireland of giving Apple illegal tax advantages in 2016, but Ireland has consistently argued against the need for the tax to be paid.

The Irish government said it would respect the ruling. Apple said it was disappointed with the decision and accused the European Commission of “trying to retroactively change the rules”.

A separate European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling on Tuesday also brought a long-running case with Google to a close, with the company ordered to pay a €2.4bn (£2bn) fine for market dominance abuse.

The EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager praised both judgements. “Today is a huge win for European citizens and tax justice,” she said.

In the Apple case, the ECJ said: “The Court of Justice gives final judgment in the matter and confirms the European Commission’s 2016 decision: Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid which Ireland is required to recover.”

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This has been chugging on for ages, and covers the period from 1991 to 2014 – 23 years! – when Ireland treated Apple’s Irish subsidiaries in an overly generous fashion.
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Google loses fight against $2.7bn EU antitrust fine • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

Alphabet’s Google on Tuesday lost its fight against a €2.42bn ($2.7bn) fine levied by EU antitrust regulators seven years ago, one of a trio of hefty fines meted out to the company for various anti-competitive practices.

The European Commission fined the world’s most popular internet search engine in 2017 for using its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.

A lower tribunal had endorsed the EU competition enforcer’s decision in 2021, prompting Google to appeal to the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union.

CJEU judges noted that EU law does not sanction the existence of a dominant position, but its abusive exploitation.

“In particular, the conduct of undertakings in a dominant position that has the effect of hindering competition on the merits and is thus likely to cause harm to individual undertakings and consumers is prohibited,” they said.

Google has racked up €8.25bn in EU antitrust fines in the last decade. It has challenged two rulings involving its Android mobile operating system and AdSense advertising service, and is now waiting for the judgments.

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A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking serious money.
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Why AI is so bad at generating images of Kamala Harris • WIRED

Condé Nast:

»

When Elon Musk shared an image showing Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” on X last week, it was quite obviously a fake, seeing as Harris is neither a communist nor, to the best of our knowledge, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the photo, presumably generated by X’s Grok tool, had only a passing resemblance to the vice president.

“AI still is unable to accurately depict Kamala Harris,” one X user wrote. “Looks like they’re posting some random Latina woman.”

“Grok put old Eva Longoria in a snazzy outfit and called it a day,” another quipped, noting the similarity of the “dictator” pictured to the Desperate Housewives star.

“AI just CANNOT replicate Kamala Harris,” a third posted. “It’s uncanny how failed the algorithm is at an AMERICAN (of South Indian and Jamaican heritage).”

Many AI images of Harris are similarly bad. Meanwhile, a tweet featuring an AI-generated video showing Harris and Donald Trump in a romantic relationship—it culminates in her holding their love child, which looks like Trump—has nearly 28 million views on X. Throughout the montage, Harris morphs into what look like different people, while the notably better Trump imagery remains fairly consistent.

…Despite being a prominent figure, Harris hasn’t been as widely photographed as Trump. WIRED’s search of photo supplier Getty Images bears this out; it returned 63,295 images of Harris compared to 561,778 of Trump. Given her relatively recent entry into the presidential race, Harris is “a new celebrity,” as far as AI image makers are concerned, according to Cuenca Abela. “It always takes a few months to catch up,” he says.

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So both less photographed – offering less supply for the AI generators – and more difficult.
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Apple invents its own version of Google Lens called Visual Intelligence • Engadget

Pranav Dixit:

»

Apple has introduced a new feature called Visual Intelligence with the iPhone 16, which appears to be the company’s answer to Google Lens. Unveiled during its September 2024 event, Visual Intelligence aims to help users interact with the world around them in smarter ways.

The new feature is activated by a new touch-sensitive button on the right side of the device called Camera Control. With a click, Visual Intelligence can identify objects, provide information, and offer actions based on what you point it at. For instance, aiming it at a restaurant will pull up menus, hours, or ratings, while snapping a flyer for an event can add it directly to your calendar. Point it at a dog to quickly identify the breed, or click a product to search for where you can buy it online.

Later this year, Camera Control will also serve as a gateway into third-party tools with specific domain expertise, according to Apple’s press release. For instance, users will be able to leverage Google for product searches or tap into ChatGPT for problem-solving, all while maintaining control over when and how these tools are accessed and what information is shared. Apple emphasized that the feature is designed with privacy in mind, meaning the company doesn’t have access to the specifics of what users are identifying or searching.

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Picking this out because it’s based on a particular button on the iPhone, which is becoming festooned with buttons, compared to what people thought was going to happen a couple of years ago when it was rumoured that there wouldn’t be any buttons at all.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When Jony Ive designs a button, you can bet it’s not like any other button. CC-licensed photo by Steven Lilley 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. All done up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

DOJ claims Google has “trifecta of monopolies” on Day 1 of ad tech trial • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

On Monday, the US Department of Justice’s next monopoly trial against Google started in Virginia—this time challenging the tech giant’s ad tech dominance.

The trial comes after Google lost two major cases that proved Google had a monopoly in both general search and the Android app store. During her opening statement, DOJ lawyer Julia Tarver Wood told US District Judge Leonie Brinkema—who will be ruling on the case after Google cut a check to avoid a jury trial—that “it’s worth saying the quiet part out loud,” AP News reported.

“One monopoly is bad enough,” Wood said. “But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”

In its complaint, the DOJ argued that Google broke competition in the ad tech space “by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.”

The result of such “insidious” allegedly anti-competitive behavior is that today Google pockets at least 30 cents “of each advertising dollar flowing from advertisers to website publishers through Google’s ad tech tools … and sometimes far more,” the DOJ alleged.

Meanwhile, as Google profits off both advertisers and publishers, “website creators earn less, and advertisers pay more” than “they would in a market where unfettered competitive pressure could discipline prices and lead to more innovative ad tech tools,” the DOJ alleged.

On Monday, Wood told Brinkema that Google intentionally put itself in this position to “manipulate the rules of ad auctions to its own benefit,” The Washington Post reported.

“Publishers were understandably furious,” Wood said. “The evidence will show that they could do nothing.”

Wood confirmed that the DOJ planned to call several publishers as witnesses in the coming weeks to explain the harms caused. Expected to take the stand will be “executives from companies including USA Today, [Wall Street] Journal parent company News Corp., and the Daily Mail,” the Post reported.

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Apple’s iPhone 16 event: the eight biggest announcements • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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In addition to inheriting the iPhone 15 Pro’s Action Button, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus now come equipped with a handy new DSLR-like button that you can use to take pictures and videos as well as adjust settings. They also have rear cameras stacked atop one another that support spatial video recording for viewing on the Apple Vision Pro.

The iPhone 16 has a faster A18 processor to handle new AI features coming to the device. The 6.1-inch iPhone 16 starts at $799 and $899 for the 6.7-inch Plus version. They are available in white, black, green, pink, and blue and start shipping on September 20th.

…All of the iPhone 16 models are ready for Apple Intelligence — the new AI features Apple is launching in beta next month starting in English. These features include the ability to search for images in your library by describing them and creating custom emoji.

Yet Apple is also outfitting the iPhone 16’s Camera Control button with a new feature, called Visual Intelligence, which will automatically search for things you take photos of. You can also use it to perform actions, such as snapping a photo of a concert poster and easily adding it to your calendar.

…Later this year, Apple will make the AirPods Pro 2 available as an over-the-counter hearing aid. Apple is launching a couple of other hearing-focused features on the AirPods Pro 2, including a feature designed to protect hearing and a clinical-grade hearing test. These features become available in a free software update in more than 100 countries and regions this fall.

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Of the three picked out there, I’d say the hearing aids is the most interesting, given the ageing population: Apple is moving right to where its customers are going to be. Or possibly are.
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DOJ: Russia aimed propaganda at gamers, minorities to swing 2024 election • WIRED

David Gilbert:

»

In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union’s list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine.

In the conference room, Gambashidze was laying out his plans for a new target: Along with his colleagues, he began drafting what would become known as the Good Old USA Project. The project was supposed to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in favor of former president Donald Trump, specifically targeting certain minorities, swing-state residents, and online gamers, among others, in a scheme that included a full-time team dedicated to the cause.

On Wednesday, Gambashidze and his company were named by the US Department of Justice among the architects of a disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger that has for the past two years been targeting Ukraine and, more recently, US elections. The Doppelganger campaign uses AI-generated content on dozens of fake websites designed to impersonate mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post and Fox Business, using a network of fake social media accounts to disseminate pro-Russian narratives targeting audiences across the globe. Doppelganger is a Kremlin-aligned disinformation campaign that was first linked to the Kremlin in 2023 by the French government.

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Sure is a whole lot of disinformation going on. But.. gamers?
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EV battery makers have been doing it wrong this whole time • Clean Technica

Tina Casey:

»

[The work came from] a research team based at the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center at Stanford University in California, headed up by Professor Will Chueh. The project was a collaborative effort in partnership with the Toyota Research Institute MIT, and the University of Washington.

The team took aim at the common wisdom for battery manufacturing, which holds that factories should hold a newly made lithium-ion battery for an initial charge lasting 10 hours at low current before setting it loose.

The 10-hour initial charge is costly and time-consuming, but the purpose is — or was — to reduce the loss of lithium up front, thereby increasing the lifespan of the battery.

Not so, the researchers discovered. They flipped the script and purposefully charged pouch-type EV batteries on a high current for just 20 minutes. They lost quite a bit of lithium at the outset, but they gained an average improvement of 50% in EV battery lifespan.

If you’re interested in the all the details, look up the study under the title, “Data-driven analysis of battery formation reveals the role of electrode utilization in extending cycle life,” published in the journal Joule on August 29.

The short version is that the low-current strategy was widely adopted under the assumption that minimizing lithium loss at the outset is the best way to extend battery life. The long initial charge enables a semi-solid layer to build up around the negative electrode, protecting it from side reactions that eat away at the remaining lithium with every subsequent charging cycle.

This layer, called SEI (solid electrolyte interphase), is described as “squishy,” which sounds a bit silly. However, it is not silly. Fine tuning the SEI is essential as the final, formative stage of battery manufacturing.

“Formation is the final step in the manufacturing process, so if it fails, all the value and effort invested in the battery up to that point are wasted,” explained lead researcher Xiao Cui in a press statement.

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Yuval Noah Harari’s apocalyptic vision • The Atlantic

Daniel Immerwahr:

»

[Yuval Noah] Harari sits above the fray of Silicon Valley politicking. The hope is that his elevated vantage will allow him to see farther. But just as it’s possible to be too narrowly focused and miss the forest for the trees, it’s also possible to be too zoomed-out and miss the forest for the solar system. Although Harari is a good guide to how future technologies might destroy democracy (or humanity), he’s less helpful on the present-day economics bringing those technologies forth.

The economics of the Information Age have been treacherous. They’ve made content cheaper to consume but less profitable to produce. Consider the effect of the free-content and targeted-advertising models on journalism: Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly a third of its newspapers and more than two-thirds of its newspaper jobs, to the point where nearly 7% of newspaper employees now work for a single organization, The New York Times. In the 21st-century United States—at the height and center of the information revolution—we speak of “news deserts,” places where reporting has essentially vanished.

AI threatens to exacerbate this. With better chatbots, platforms won’t need to link to external content, because they’ll reproduce it synthetically. Instead of a Google search that sends users to outside sites, a chatbot query will summarize those sites, keeping users within Google’s walled garden.

The prospect isn’t a network with a million links but a Truman Show–style bubble: personally generated content, read by voices that sound real but aren’t, plus product placement. Among other problems, this would cut off writers and publishers—the ones actually generating ideas—from readers. Our intellectual institutions would wither, and the internet would devolve into a closed loop of “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four,” as the software engineer Tom Eastman puts it.

Harari has little to say about the erosion of our intellectual institutions. In a way, he is symptomatic of the trend. Although flesh and blood, Harari is Silicon Valley’s ideal of what a chatbot should be. He raids libraries, detects the patterns, and boils all of history down to bullet points. (Modernity, he writes, “can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”) He’s written an entire book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, in the form of a list. For readers whose attention flags, he delivers amusing factoids at a rapid clip.

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Just 15 countries account for 98% of new coal-power development • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

»

Over the past 10 years, the global energy transition away from coal has accelerated. The number of countries with coal power under development (pre-construction and construction) has nearly halved from 75 in 2014 to just 40 in 2024. 

In addition, nearly all of the coal-power capacity under development (98%) is now concentrated in just 15 countries, with China and India alone accounting for 86%. 

This is according to Global Energy Monitor’s latest Global Coal Plant Tracker (GCPT) results, completed in July 2024. The GCPT catalogues all coal-fired power units 30 megawatts (MW) or larger biannually, with the first survey dating back to 2014. 

Despite the concentration of coal-plant development in fewer countries and projections that global coal demand could be peaking, new coal-fired power station proposals continue to outpace cancellations. 

In the first half of 2024, over 60 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity was newly proposed or revived, compared to the 33.7GW that was shelved or cancelled over the same period.

This article details some of the most significant trends driving the continued development of coal across the 15 largest markets, drawing insight from the GCPT, as well as wider context.  

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It is a puzzle how the countries which are moving on a big scale towards renewables are the ones which also are using coal in a big way, and making it bigger.
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‘If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes’: confessions of a chatbot helper • The Guardian

Jack Apollo George:

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For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company.

That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have made it possible to automate huge swaths of linguistic life, from summarising any amount of text to drafting emails, essays and even entire novels. These tools appear so good at writing that they have become synonymous with the very idea of artificial intelligence.

But before they ever risk leading to a godlike superintelligence or devastating mass unemployment, they first need training. Instead of using these grandiloquent chatbots to automate us out of our livelihoods, tech companies are contracting us to help train their models.

The core part of the job is writing pretend responses to hypothetical chatbot questions. This is the training data that the model needs to be fed. The “AI” needs an example of what “good” looks like before it can try to produce “good” writing.

As well as providing our model with such “gold standard” material, we are also helping it attempt to avoid “hallucinating” – a poetic term for telling lies. We do so by feeding it examples that use a search engine and cite sources. Without seeing writing that does this, it cannot learn to do so by itself.

Without better language data, these language models simply cannot improve. Their world is our word.

Hold on. Aren’t these machines trained on billions and billions of words and sentences? What would they need us fleshy scribes for?

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Entertaining. Also slightly worrying. Until the LLMs figure out how to interview people, though, journalism ought to survive.
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Inside the rise of bitcoin-powered pools and bathhouses • TIME

Andrew R. Chow:

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The scene inside Bathhouse, a spa in Manhattan, is one of complete serenity. Visitors recline in 105ºF pools, surrounded by cedar tiles and elegant marble slabs from Brazil. But just beyond closed doors, in harshly-lit back rooms, an unexpected source helps forge the bliss: rows and rows of continuously-running bitcoin mining computers.

The idea of a bitcoin mine heating a pool sounds strange. The machines run constantly to find new bitcoin and safeguard the bitcoin network. The heat they generate from their activity is extracted via pipes, and powers the Bathhouse’s heated pools and marble stones. Co-owner Jason Goodman says the technique allows him to warm his pools more efficiently than traditional methods, while also accruing a stockpile of bitcoin he hopes will increase in value going forward. 

Around the world, a handful of establishments are turning to the same methods in an attempt to harness energy from intensive computing for greater societal use, including to heat a town in Finland and an Olympic pool in Paris.

But while proponents argue that these solutions could lower local energy costs and reduce electricity and water usage, some environmentalists worry these small-scale methods obscure much bigger problems. Data centres use a massive and increasing amount of energy, with many of them powered by fossil fuels—and most of their heat waste isn’t being channelled into productive uses at all. 

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Long past the point at which bitcoin doesn’t make any sense now. Also, do data centres need spas and outdoor pools?
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The Texas billionaire who has Greenpeace USA on the verge of bankruptcy • WSJ

Benoît Morenne:

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Energy Transfer’s lawsuit [led by fossil fuel billionaire Kelcy Warren] alleges several Greenpeace entities incited the Dakota Access protests, funded attacks to damage the pipeline, and spread misinformation about the company and its project. The case is set for trial in February in a North Dakota state court, where both sides expect a fossil-fuel-friendly jury. Energy Transfer is seeking $300m in damages, which would likely wipe out Greenpeace USA, according to the group’s leadership. 

Deepa Padmanabha, Greenpeace USA’s acting co-executive director, said the lawsuit is “an existential threat” to the group.

In court papers, Greenpeace says it played a limited role in the protests, which it says were organized by Native American groups, and never took part in any property destruction or violence.

The litigation is unlikely to affect Greenpeace’s international operations. While the Greenpeace network’s coordinating body in the Netherlands is also a defendant, Energy Transfer may struggle to enforce any award against it because it doesn’t own assets in the U.S. But Greenpeace says losing its affiliate—and influence—in the U.S. would have a profound impact on the group’s ability to address climate change. 

Environmental leaders fear the demise of Greenpeace USA would send a chilling message to their movement. Josh Galperin, an associate professor of law at Pace University, said that environmentalists have long recognized that they can choke off pipelines by challenging them on legal grounds. Now, some oil-and-gas companies are realizing they can use litigation to stop green activists.

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Jony made a button • On my Om

Om Malik:

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Moncler is a luxury ski-apparel company that now makes all sorts of clothing — but is mostly known for its jackets and puffers with a big M logo. LoveFrom, Jony Ive’s design firm, and Moncler started working together four years ago and have come up with “LoveFrom, Moncler,” a three-in-one shell jacket that goes on sale later this month.

At its core is Moncore, a down-filled vest to which you can add a field jacket, a parka or a hooded poncho. None of this is new — companies have built layered outerwear for a long time. What’s new is how it all comes together — with a brand-new kind of button.

Sometimes a button is not just a button — it’s how you build the entire system. Ive focused on a button because that’s how every layer of the “four-in-one jacket” system comes together.

»

“How could you connect something where you didn’t have to pay attention? Velcro’s sort of ingenious in that way. But I don’t think it’s satisfying,” Ive told Fast Company. “Explorations into all methods of attachment followed. “I tried to do better zippers, and zippers are really hard.”

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Ergo, buttons!

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“There wasn’t some arrogant ambition around disruption [of buttons]. It was a very gentle, humble exploration.”

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It’s a two-part design — one half of the button is on the base layer, Moncore vest. The other half, shaped like a donut, is on the other layers. To the touch, they feel solid, but there’s a piston inside the base layer. When the two halves come close, magnets inside the donut engage, pulling out the piston from the base layer and locking the two halves. To unlock, simply press the center. The result is a pressable button.

«

Magnets, huh. Velcro isn’t good enough, pop-connection isn’t good enough.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A common dye used in Doritos and other foods can make skin transparent, new research has found. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart 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. Why is my stomach transparent? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google search monopoly US case remedies to come by December • Reuters

Jody Goday:

»

The US Department of Justice plans to issue an outline by December on what Alphabet’s Google must do to restore competition after a judge earlier found the company illegally monopolized the market for online search, prosecutors said at a court hearing in Washington on Friday.

Prosecutors did not detail what remedy they will propose, but Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist said it should be comprehensive and take into account how Google plans to integrate artificial intelligence into search.

Since the case was brought, Google has rebranded its Bard AI product to Gemini, Dahlquist said.

“What else are they thinking about? What else is beyond that?” he said at the hearing.

Prosecutors could seek to have Google divest certain business units, such as its Android mobile device operating system, or end billions of dollars in annual payments to smartphone makers and others to ensure that its search engine is the default on devices and browsers.

Google’s attorney John Schmidtlein said at the hearing that the company needs a detailed proposal from prosecutors, and will likely seek information from Microsoft (MSFT.O) and OpenAI to prepare any counter-argument on AI search.

Google has said it plans to appeal the judge’s ruling.

US District Judge Amit Mehta said he could hold a hearing in the spring and would like to rule by next August.

«

August! That’s August 2025 – nearly a year away. Then again, the US v Microsoft trial began in May 1998, the judgment (findings of fact) came in November 1999, the conclusions of law in April 2000, and in June 2000 the district court recommended a Microsoft breakup. Which of course didn’t happen. But it does show this stuff runs slooooowly.
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Wind and solar farms power Great Britain’s grid to greenest ever summer • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

»

Great Britain’s electricity system has recorded its greenest ever summer after growing numbers of wind and solar farms cut the need for gas power plants to fresh lows.

Analysis of energy generation data, commissioned by the Guardian, revealed that Britain’s reliance on gas generation fell in August to less than one-fifth of all electricity, or 4 terawatt hours (TWh), its lowest ever level for a one-month period.

This allowed the carbon intensity of the power grid to plummet to the lowest level recorded for a single month, at 144g of CO2 per kilowatt-hour in August, 40% lower than in the same month last year, according to the analysis.

The data, analysed by the energy thinktank Ember, showed that the record lows were sustained even when averaged over the summer months from June to August, meaning the grid experienced its greenest summer ever.

The Labour government aims to run the UK’s power grid on virtually zero carbon electricity by 2030 thanks to a surge in new wind and solar farms. Its flagship auction this week for renewable energy subsidies awarded contracts for 131 new projects, or enough new clean electricity projects to power 11m UK homes. However, it secured just half the offshore wind capacity needed every year for the rest of the decade if the government is to hit its net zero target.

Frankie Mayo, an analyst at Ember, said: “Having the lowest monthly fossil fuel share on record shows that homegrown wind and solar can reduce reliance on imports. This is a great starting point on the path to clean power by 2030 for the new government.

“But gas in the mix still threatens energy bills. Clean power is delivering cheap, low-cost power – ramping up deployment at scale can’t come soon enough.”

«

That 2030 target looks like it will be missed. But it does at least provide something to go for. (Note how we call it a “greenest ever summer”, yet the Green Party is against all the infrastructure needed to support this. Strange how the politics gets unmoored from the word.)
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Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

»

Researchers have peered into the brains and bodies of living animals after discovering that a common food dye can make skin, muscle and connective tissues temporarily transparent.

Applying the dye to the belly of a mouse made its liver, intestines and bladder clearly visible through the abdominal skin, while smearing it on the rodent’s scalp allowed scientists to see blood vessels in the animal’s brain.

Treated skin regained its normal colour when the dye was washed off, according to researchers at Stanford University, who believe the procedure opens up a host of applications in humans, from locating injuries and finding veins for drawing blood to monitoring digestive disorders and spotting tumours.

“Instead of relying on invasive biopsies, doctors might be able to diagnose deep-seated tumours by simply examining a person’s tissue without the need for invasive surgical removal,” said Dr Guosong Hong, a senior researcher on the project. “This technique could potentially make blood draws less painful by helping phlebotomists easily locate veins under the skin.”

The trick has echoes of the approach taken by Griffin in HG Wells’s 1897 novel, The Invisible Man, in which the brilliant but doomed scientist discovers that the secret to invisibility lies in matching an object’s refractive index, or ability to bend light, to that of the surrounding air.

When light penetrates biological tissue, much of it is scattered because the structures inside, such as fatty membranes and cell nuclei, have different refractive indices. As light moves from one refractive index to another, it bends, making tissue opaque. The same effect makes a pencil look bent when dropped in a glass of water.

«

Since you’re wondering: tartrazine, commonly found in Sunny D and Doritos. Though I don’t know, my fingers have never gone transparent while eating them.
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When bats were wiped out, more human babies died, a study found • CBC News

Emily Chung and Benjamin Shingler:

»

White-nose syndrome is a deadly fungal disease that kills an average of 70% of bats it infects, and has been spreading to new areas since it was first reported on the continent in 2006.

The disease wakes bats during their hibernation, often causing them to freeze and starve to death.

Ecologists know that bats play a crucial role in eating up and controlling insect pests. Because of that, Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, decided to look at what happened when white-nose syndrome spread into new counties in the eastern US, decimating bat populations.

He found that farmers responded to the resulting insect outbreaks by increasing their pesticide use by 31%. Pesticides are toxic, and often associated with human health impacts such as increases in infant deaths.

Frank found that infant mortality went up 8% after the arrival of white-nose syndrome in a county, according to his study published in the journal Science.

“At first I was surprised,” Frank said, noting those increases are “big effects.” But he noted that in regions affected by white-nose syndrome, bat populations don’t just decline, but plummet, and are often wiped out altogether. “This is really turning off the switch on biological pest control in some of these counties,” he said.

That forces farmers to compensate with “a lot more insecticides,” which he notes are toxic by design. Frank also found evidence that not only were the pesticides expensive, but they weren’t as good as the bats at controlling insects — farmers’ revenue from crop sales fell 29% in areas hit by the bat pandemic.

«

The higher infant mortality is in the counties where the pesticide was used, which would imply some sort of atmospheric spread – which the paper does allude to. It doesn’t examine whether that higher mortality is among the babies of agricultural workers who might be directly exposed, though.
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The NSA has a podcast—here’s how to decode it • WIRED

Steven Levy:

»

Why an NSA podcast? The spokesperson explains that the NSA has the world’s best cryptologists and cryptanalysts, all of whom work in silence, and the agency wanted to talk about their critical and amazing work. “The podcast,” the spokesperson says, “is a medium that allows for good storytelling and conversation that is distinct from things we already engage in. It provides a different level of connection.” I later received a statement from Sara Siegle, the NSA’s head of strategic communications, echoing that point: “NSA believes in showcasing the incredible, dedicated work of our diverse, expert workforce. No Such Podcast extends our existing efforts into a new and growing medium.” Got it.

I suggest some secondary motivations. Some of the NSA’s social media posts solicit workers, and this podcast seems likewise designed to appeal to STEM graduates who might place patriotism over working for Google or a startup. My source acknowledged that this was the case. “Recruitment is not the number one goal of the podcast, but we are certainly hoping that by showcasing the work we do here, and the real people on the show who work here, listeners might say, ‘Oh, that sounds like a really cool job—and that person seems pretty normal, right?’”

The NSA also apparently sees the podcast as a chance to answer some critics who charge that the agency is a Big Brother-ish snooping operation that threatens our privacy. In the very first episode, guest speaker Natalie Laing, the NSA’s director of operations, speaks at length about how the NSA limits itself to information relevant to national security and similar imperatives. “Compliance is our number one focus,” she says. By hitting this note so hard that my Apple Watch sent me a volume alert, the NSA seems to be using the podcast format to address suspicions that it violates privacy—especially after the shocking revelations from Edward Snowden about how much stuff the NSA does grab.

«

Snowden’s name is never mentioned by the NSA in its podcast, of course. It’s called No Such Podcast, an in-joke referring to its past identity cloaking as “No Such Agency”.
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Teens are making thousands by debating Trump vs. Harris on TikTok • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

»

On the afternoon of August 19, Democrat Liam Keyes entered a TikTok battle. Against a blue background, the 19-year-old lashed out at his Republican opponent, fellow TikToker “Jackson,” who donned a “Trump 2024” cap and spoke in front of a Donald Trump portrait. More than 150 viewers joined the room. 

“She listens to us, bro. She is not self-centered!” Keyes, in a black hoodie, hollored from one side of the split screen. “She puts the people before herself.” 

“Just wait until she gets into an actual debate,” Jackson, livestreaming from the other side, fought back. “You’re gonna see how much of an idiot Kamala Harris really is!” 

The showdown took place through a niche TikTok feature called “live match,” which originated in China and has grown in popularity in the U.S. since 2022. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, a group of creators, known as “political battlers,” have adopted the format to stage political debates. 

Keyes started doing live matches in the spring, after noticing how many gifts streamers received for debating politics. As a liberal, he reached out to conservative creators on TikTok, inviting them to live matches. The hustle paid off quickly. Keyes makes $100 to $1,000 from one night’s battling. In a good month, he could make up to $7,000.

Each round lasts five minutes. During a match, spectators pump up the scores of their favorite hosts by sending them virtual gifts with cash value — popping up on the screen as ice cream cones, a whale, or a lion. The side with the higher score wins. The losing creators often take on comedic punishments on camera, such as pouring milk on themselves and eating raw eggs. Keyes shaved his head after one match.

«

As the article points out, it’s an increasingly popular model – Putin V Zelensky, (Brazil’s) Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against Jair Bolsonaro. The money that sloshes around these social networks is weird.
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Poliovirus that infected a Chinese child in 2014 may have leaked from a lab • Science

Kai Kupferschmidt:

»

Researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris working under strict biosafety conditions recently opened an old box that contained a virological time capsule: four poliovirus samples, each with a handwritten label on the vial, sent to the institute more than 60 years earlier by Albert Sabin, a giant in the field of poliovirus research.

The viruses had to be destroyed, as part of a global campaign to get rid of old poliovirus samples. But first, the Pasteur team would sequence them to preserve their genetic information.

Now, a paper about those sequences, published in Virus Evolution in July, has raised an unexpected and troubling possibility: a poliovirus that infected a four-year old child in China in 2014 may have originated in a research laboratory or a vaccine production facility.

The exact source of that virus is unclear, as is the route by which it infected the child, and the authors are careful not to point fingers. But the paper underscores the fact that accidental releases of poliovirus are remarkably common.

“It is an interesting detective story,” says Mike Famulare, a systems epidemiologist at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who has studied polio but was not involved in the work. And because the child’s virus was analyzed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the finding has, inevitably, become politicized: on social media and in conservative outlets, advocates of a lab-leak origin of the COVID-19 pandemic have seized on it to suggest WIV had “another” lab release—even though there is no evidence the virus came from that institute.

«

Multiple possible scenarios for how the infection happened; no way to weigh them up.
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Interview day at Thiel Capital • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander:

»

You look up from your massive mahogany desk.

“Tom, right? Thank you for coming…hmm…I see you’re applying for the role of Vice-President Of Sinister Plots. Your resume looks very impressive – I didn’t even know any of the masterminds behind the Kennedy assassination were still alive.”

“That’s what we want you to think,” says Tom.

“Of course. Then just one question for you. What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”

“I think we’re in a simulation.”

“Hm, yes, that was very shocking and heterodox back in 2012. But here at Thiel Capital we’re looking for something – “

“Let me finish. I think we’re in a simulation, and it’s a porno.”

“What?”

“Bostrom’s original simulation argument said that if future generations simulated the past, there would be far more of these simulations than there were actual pasts. He thought maybe people would simulate the past to learn about the branching pattern of history. That’s the kind of mistake only a philosopher could make. If we look at existing media consumption – whether it’s videos, RPGs, or incipient VR properties – by far the most common category is porn. Even if you limit your search to historical media, there are a hundred bodice-rippers for every sober investigation of Victorian lifestyles.”

“But . . . people aren’t having sex all the time!”

“Maybe not at Thiel Capital. But go outside, and you’ll find that people are, in fact, having sex all the time. Tindr. Hinge. Grindr. Young people are going out and having casual sex every weekend.

«

Very funny and entertaining little riff on “something off-beam, but further off-beam than that”. There are multiple interviewees and answers to the question. You wish for this much imagination.
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YouTubers are almost too easy to dupe • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel on the YouTubers who were (allegedly) paid millions for a sinecure to parrot Russian talking points:

»

That some of MAGA world’s biggest influencers should find themselves connected to a Russian disinformation operation makes perfect sense. Their incessant posts and rants, attacking Democrats and fearmongering about migrants, transgender Americans, and “wokeness” run amok, track with a brand of divisive rhetoric that foreign governments wish to inject into the bloodstream of American media.

“This idea that Americans are deeply divided, that things are getting worse, that you can’t trust the government—the things that seek to destabilize American society—are a natural fit because of the content,” [Jared] Holt [a senior research analyst who studies the far right at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank] told me.

One does not just become a useful idiot for Russian state media only by being greedy. Should the allegations be proved true, the incident will serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when you chase and optimize for engagement at every available opportunity. Pool and Rubin, for example, made their names as disaffected liberals who came to the realization that their peers had evolved away from rational liberalism toward dangerous leftist ideological values.

This notion, that lifelong moderate liberals have no choice these days but to support right-wing causes, is a common trope among far-right activists (see: Elon Musk). To defect to the right is a proven lucrative path and, just as important, a way to find a highly engaged audience who’s ready to leap to your defense online. Johnson, an alum of BuzzFeed, Independent Journal Review, The Daily Caller, and Blaze Media, is also an inveterate poster and engagement optimizer whose apparent quest for audience has led him deeper down the pro-Trump rabbit hole. (As a point of disclosure: Johnson and I overlapped at BuzzFeed News, before he was fired for plagiarism.) His online biography proudly declares that, “with +5 billion views and +7 million followers across his social media platforms, he is a veteran when it comes to viral content!”

This type of engagement-based worldview—the constant optimizing for maximum attention, regardless of substance—is inherently corrupting, a fact that the Kremlin appears to understand.

«

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Missouri’s first human case of bird flu makes national history • KSDK via MSN

Hunter Bassler:

»

The first human case of bird flu in Missouri was confirmed by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday.

The patient was hospitalized on Aug. 22 and tested positive for influenza A, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) said. The adult reported no known exposure to animals. They have since recovered and were discharged home. Due to patient privacy, the department did not release any further information.

The Missouri State Public Health Laboratory conducted additional testing to determine the specific type of flu the patient was infected with, DHSS said. The tests identified the subtype as H5, also known as bird flu or avian flu. The specimen was forwarded to the CDC, who confirmed the lab’s findings and are undergoing additional testing.

The case made national history, as it is the first-ever human bird flu case that was detected as part of the general flu surveillance system, rather than a targeted bird flu outbreak-specific surveillance that has previously been conducted on animal outbreaks. The latter system has detected the previously identified 15 human bird flu cases in the U.S. since 2022, 14 of which had been in 2024.

“The risk of sustained transmission or infection among the general public remains low,” DHSS said in an emailed release. “DHSS continues to closely monitor available data from influenza surveillance systems, and there has been no sign of unusual influenza activity in people, including no increase in emergency room visits for influenza and no increase in laboratory detection of human influenza cases in Missouri.”

«

Watching brief! Nothing more!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When it comes to Olympic medals, India underperforms compared to its GDP. Then again, it’s pretty handy at cricket. CC-licensed photo by Ashwin John on Flickr.

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

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

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

The secret inside One Million Checkboxes • eieio games

Nolen:

»

One Million Checkboxes was a website with a million checkboxes on it. You probably coulda guessed that.

But the bit – the trick – was that all of those checkboxes were global. Checking or unchecking a box changed it for everyone in the world, instantly.

I thought the site wouldn’t get much traction but I was very, very wrong. Over 500,000 people visited the site in the 3 days after launch; folks checked 650,000,000 boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online.

It made the New York Times and The Washington Post; it’s on Know Your Meme and Wikipedia. I just spoke about it at XOXO Fest and the site won a Tiny Award. The whole thing was a wild ride.

I’ve written at length about the technical details behind the site – you can read about them here. And if you prefer to listen to the story I’m about to tell rather than read it, you can watch it on YouTube (it’s based on my talk from XOXO). This is my first video; I’m trying to figure out if it’s something I’d like to pursue.

But let’s get into the story. To tell you this story, I need to give you some context.

I like to make games that help people interact on the internet. Some people are assholes when they interact on the internet. So when I make games like this I try to add constraints to make the average interaction a little more pleasant.

I’ve been around long enough to know what people will draw if you put an unrestricted canvas on the public internet, so for OMCB [One Million Checkboxes] I wanted to constrain drawing.

«

You won’t be able to guess where this is going, but you will be astounded and delighted, and then you’ll think about The Three Body Problem and alien communication and other surprises.
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LG Display unveils stretchable displays at Seoul Fashion Week • LG Display

»

LG Display, the world’s leading innovator of display technologies, announced today that it is this week presenting its Stretchable displays, which can be freely stretched, folded, and twisted, at one of the world’s most exciting fashion events.

The groundbreaking displays are part of clothing and bag concepts being unveiled at 2025 S/S Seoul Fashion Week at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP).

Their appearance at Seoul Fashion Week marks another milestone after LG Display in 2022 unveiled the industry’s first Stretchable prototype that could extend from 12 to 14 inches while maintaining a high resolution of 100ppi, at the level of a regular monitor, and a full color spectrum.

Allowing designs and colors to shift from one moment to the next, the company’s Stretchable displays feature on the front of garments, sleeves, and clutch bags crafted by leading Korean designers Youn-Hee Park and Chung-Chung Lee. Models are demonstrating these concepts during runway shows on September 5 and 7.

“We have been able to design future fashion concepts with new materials that have never existed before,” said Park, the head of GREEDILOUS. “Stretchable displays will bring a new paradigm to the fashion world.”

Lee, the head of LIE, added, “Stretchable displays will have a great impact on the fashion industry by enabling the implementation of designs that previously could only be imagined.”

«

Could be a big moment? Could be nothing? Foldable displays seemed like a big thing, but phones don’t feel like quite the right place (despite everything). Stretchable and twistable seem much more interesting.
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When reality came undone • Nautilus

Philip Ball:

»

n 1926, tensions were running high at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. The institute was established 10 years earlier by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had shaped it into a hothouse for young collaborators to thrash out a new theory of atoms. In 1925, one of Bohr’s protégés, the brilliant and ambitious German physicist Werner Heisenberg, had produced such a theory. But now everyone was arguing with each other about what it implied for the nature of physical reality itself.

To the Copenhagen group, it appeared reality had come undone.

Bohr had electrified the scientific world in 1913 with his bold theory of how atoms are constituted. Drawing on an idea proposed in 1900 by the German physicist Max Planck, he said that the electrons that orbit the dense central nucleus are constrained to specific orbits, able to jump between them only by emitting or absorbing light in discrete packets of energy called quanta.

The theory won Bohr a Nobel Prize in 1922, but it was an ungainly, ad hoc mix of traditional physics and Planck’s new “quantum” hypothesis. Bohr craved an explanation that got to the root of why atoms seemed to behave in this peculiar way. It couldn’t be constructed from the traditional classical mechanics that had prevailed since Isaac Newton laid out its basic rules in the 17th century but demanded a new mechanics of quanta.

«

Long but absorbing read about a topic that still puzzles us today.
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When the bitcoin scammers came for me • The Atlantic

Annie Lowrey:

»

Earlier this year, an astonishing moneymaking opportunity appeared on my phone. I had somehow been added to a cacophonous group chat populated by scores of high-net-worth investors. For weeks, I watched as they shared photographs of steak dinners and second homes, while also proffering their buy-sell positions, their gains and losses. Keita, a guy with a northern-Florida number, complained about having to hire laborers to clean up his garden. Anthony of New York posted while reading his kids a bedtime story. Jefferson Ogwa talked about smart trades.

The smartest trades of all came from a guy named Mike Wilson, who, along with his assistant at Morgan Stanley, put order recommendations into the chat. When he did, folks would flood the group with screenshots of their Wilson-directed wins and occasionally post their Wilson-advised losses. Wilson’s assistant would aid people in making their trades, encouraging them to hold steady through the inevitable market fluctuations. “Start-up capital is relatively low for those interested in participating,” she wrote. “Stay tuned.”

I stayed tuned. Having not made any trades—as a reporter, I do not actively invest in anything—I nevertheless chimed in: “Can’t wait for the markets to open Monday.” At that point, I got added to other trading groups and my phone started to ping with texts on iMessage and WhatsApp. “This is Marie, do you have time to talk today?” “Are you interested?” From there, escalation, gentle, slow. Would I like to chat? What were my investment goals? How was my week going? Looking forward to anything?

I was enmeshed in a textbook pig-butchering scam—the hallmark of which, its horrifying name aside, is a certain relaxed charm. No rush. No blunt ask for cash. Just a lot of engaging and unthreatening messages leading, inexorably, to an attempt to get me to start trading bitcoin on a dedicated platform or to send it to an anonymous address.

«

Lowrey twigged it pretty much immediately – it would be like being among aliens who’d learnt English from a book – but what’s different here is that the scammers don’t hurry.
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Real-estate shopping for the apocalypse • The New Yorker

Patricia Marx decided to see if there are any affordable bunkers for if, you know, the reds decide to push the button down (in the words of Donald Fagen’s New Frontier):

»

I considered breaking the bank ($4.9 million) for a compound in Battle Creek, Michigan: more than two hundred and ninety acres encompassing several dwellings, the largest being a fourteen-thousand-square-foot affair that looks like a soap opera’s idea of a mansion, with indoor pool and “high-end” appliances (if there’s a Miele waffle-maker, I need that house!)—and, below, a spacious bunker with its own shooting range and grow room. (Phew! Who can survive without daily fresh fenugreek?) Unfortunately, the owner of that particular McBunker wouldn’t allow me to tour the place, because I couldn’t show proof of funding. This is a standard requirement when shopping for bunkers; so few “comps” exist that banks cannot assess their value, and thus won’t give mortgages.

After weeks of scrolling, I found a handful of dream hideaways on the market whose sellers were willing to let me take a tour. There were two bunkers in Montana, one of which sleeps at least ninety; a prepper bunker in Missouri that features an inconspicuous entrance and a conspicuous arsenal of guns (not included in sale, but makes you think twice before criticizing the kitchen-countertop choice); a defunct missile-silo site in North Dakota; and a twenty-thousand-square-foot cave in Arkansas used by its previous owner to raise earthworms. (Favorite bit of real-estate marketing copy: “The worm room speaks for itself.”)

«

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Music producer allegedly used AI songs to swindle Spotify • Variety

Gene Maddaus:

»

A music producer was arrested Wednesday and charged with multiple felonies for allegedly scamming more than $10m in royalties using hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs.

Michael Smith, 52, of Cornelius, N.C., is alleged to have created thousands of bot accounts on platforms like Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music. According to the indictment, he used the accounts to automatically stream AI music he had placed on the platforms, generating as many as 661,440 streams per day.

Smith allegedly orchestrated the scheme to get around the platforms’ fraud detection systems. Prosecutors allege that he initially engaged in fraudulent streaming of music that he owned. But the streaming platforms could detect likely fraud if a particular piece of music was streamed a billion times.

«

Quite possibly related to this 2020 piece by Andres Guadamuz, who found his Spotify account hacked (still haven’t figured out 2FA, people?) and being used to play bizarrely bland music.
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How Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi • Navy Times

Diana Correll:

»

Today’s Navy sailors are likely familiar with the jarring loss of internet connectivity that can come with a ship’s deployment.

For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.

But the senior enlisted leaders among the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew knew no such privation last year, when they installed and secretly used their very own Wi-Fi network during a deployment, according to a scathing internal investigation obtained by Navy Times.

As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship’s chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them.

So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.

The enjoyment of those wireless creature comforts by enlisted leaders aboard the ship carried serious repercussions for the security of the ship and its crew.

“The danger such systems pose to the crew, the ship and the Navy cannot be understated,” the investigation notes.

Led by the senior enlisted leader of the ship’s gold crew, then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero, the effort roped in the entire chiefs mess by the time it was uncovered a few months later.

«

That’s ex-Command Senior Chief Marrero to you, following the court-martial. Can’t figure out if the bust to E-7 is one or three rank demotions. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Why is India so bad at sport? • FT

Tej Parikh:

»

whether it is the Paralympics or Olympics, India underwhelms on the global sports stage, relative to its demographic heft. It has won just 41 medals at the Olympics since 1900. On the balance of probability alone — accounting for 1 in 6 people in the world — the nation’s recent performance is embarrassing. It amassed just six medals at the Olympics this year.

Of course, athletic prowess depends on far more than people power. For instance, America sent over five times the number of athletes India did to this year’s Olympics, despite having just a quarter of its population. Indeed, Rory Green, chief China economist at TS Lombard, finds that GDP explained about 90% of the variation in medal counts at the Paris games. But, India is also the world’s fifth-largest economy. If it has the people and the money, why is it so bad at sport?

Success at the Olympics tends to scale with GDP partly because it acts as a proxy for sport expenditure. “Capital-intensive sports — including gymnastics, sailing, swimming, rowing and diving — accounted for 28% of available medals this year,” notes Green. America, China and Britain excel in many of these. “Economic development also means more leisure time and the creation of a sporting culture.”

India’s economic emergence has, however, not translated into stronger investment in sport, or more recreation. Expenditure on physical recreation has not been a priority for successive governments. As a result, wannabe athletes have faced significant hurdles in the form of poor funding and a lack of access to facilities, coaching and equipment.

«

There’s a graph with a log scale which seems to suggest that the UK, France, China and US are outliers in the medal count.

But of course, there aren’t Olympic medals for cricket, and that is colossal in India: the IPL (India Premier League) is worth over a billion US dollars in media revenue alone.
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Solar module installations could hit 592 GW in 2024 • PV Magazine International

Patrick Jowett:

»

The global solar industry is on track to install 592 GW of modules this year, up 33% from 2023, according to a new report from BloombergNEF. It said in its its “3Q 2024 Global PV Market Outlook” that “low prices for modules are stimulating demand in new markets this year, but hurting manufacturers, who are competing intensely to maintain market share.”

Quarter-on-quarter analysis shows a 1% increase across the world’s largest 28 markets. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and India lead the largest developments, while Japan and South Africa experience notable decreases.The most established solar markets continue to build steadily.

The report forecasts steady year-on-year increases in solar module installations, reaching 996 GW by 2035. BloombergNEF has also reduced its 2024 estimate for polysilicon production to 1.96 million metric tons – enough to produce 900 GW of modules.

Jenny Chase, BloombergNEF’s lead solar analyst, told pv magazine that the main reason for the polysilicon output reduction from 2.2 million tons of estimated annual output in the second quarter of 2024, is “that manufacturers are scheduling maintenance or using other ways to temporarily reduce production, due to the low prices and oversupply.” The report states that polysilicon prices are currently $4.9/kg, below production costs for nearly all manufacturers. 

«

Polysilicon now as cheap as plywood. But generates more energy if you put it on a roof. And look at that growth rate!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Airline Wi-Fi has been very variable, but satellites are about to make it more reliable and faster. CC-licensed photo by Dunk 🐝 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. Flying high. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Appeals court upholds decision against Internet Archive’s book scanning program • Publishers Weekly

Andrew Albanese:

»

In a swift decision, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously affirmed a March 2023 lower court decision finding the Internet Archive’s program to scan and lend print library books is copyright infringement. In an emphatic 64-page decision, released on September 4, the court rejected the Internet Archive’s fair use defense, as well as the novel protocol known as “controlled digital lending” on which the Archive’s scanning and lending is based.

“This appeal presents the following question: Is it ‘fair use’ for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no,” the decision states.

The closely watched copyright infringement lawsuit was first filed on June 1, 2020, in the Southern District of New York by Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley, organized by the Association of American Publishers.

The appeals court ruling comes just over two months after a lengthy June 28 hearing in New York, at which the panel appeared highly engaged, if deeply skeptical of the Internet Archive’s case—a relatively quick turnaround that suggests that the court did not struggle in deciding the case, much like district court Judge John G. Koeltl, who delivered his March 24, 2023 summary judgment ruling in favour of the plaintiff publishers just days after a March 20 hearing.

…In his now affirmed 47-page opinion, Koeltl forcefully rejected the Internet Archive’s fair use defence. “At bottom, IA’s fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book,” Koeltl wrote in his opinion granting the publisher plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and denying the Internet Archive’s cross-motion. “But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points the other direction.”

«

To be honest, I never thought the IA had a good case. It’s so very different from websites – infinitely storeable and reproducible, and intentionally so.
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A select few have tried OpenAI’s Google killer: here’s what they think • The Washington Post

Lisa Bonos and Gerrit De Vynck:

»

A long-awaited search engine being developed by the maker of ChatGPT is far from ready to replace Google, according to interviews with people who got access to the tool, videos shared online and analysis by a search marketing firm.

OpenAI’s SearchGPT uses artificial intelligence to provide slick answers with clearly marked sources, by summarizing information drawn from different webpages. But the search tool struggled with some shopping and local queries, and on some occasions, it presented untrue or “hallucinated” information.

The limitations of the prototype search tool suggest that OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has inspired predictions that some Silicon Valley giants could become sidelined, still has major work to do before it can begin to directly threaten Google’s lucrative search business.

“We’re going to take the best features and merge them into ChatGPT,” OpenAI spokeswoman Kayla Wood said in a phone interview about SearchGPT. When asked if OpenAI’s service would include ads, like Google and other established search engines, Wood said the company’s business model was based on subscriptions. But she added that OpenAI hasn’t announced if SearchGPT will be offered free or as part of a ChatGPT subscription.

«

Nothing about this is in the least bit surprising: why would anyone think that a search engine with an LLM backend would do this right? Surely the right way to do it would be a fantastic LLM (to interpret what the question is) and a fantastic search engine. But Google has demonstrated that that doesn’t work either.
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Microsoft rolled out AI PCs that can’t play top games—and there’s no quick fix • WSJ

Yang Jie:

»

The latest Windows personal computers with artificial-intelligence features have “the best specs” on “all the benchmarks,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella recently said. There is one problem: the chips inside current models are incompatible with many leading videogames.

Microsoft and its partners this spring rolled out Copilot+ PCs that include functions such as creating AI-generated pictures and video.

Under the hood of the new laptops is a hardware change. Instead of the Intel chips that have powered Microsoft Windows PCs for nearly four decades, the initial Copilot+ PCs to hit the market use Qualcomm chips, which in turn rely on designs from UK-based Arm. 

Most PC games, including popular multiplayer games such as “League of Legends” and “Fortnite,” are made to work with Intel’s x86, a chip architecture that has been the standard for many personal computers for decades.

To make some of these programs function on the Qualcomm-Arm system, they must be run through a layer of software that translates Intel-speak into Arm-speak. Chip experts say the approach isn’t perfect and can result in bugs, glitches or games simply not working.

The problem is widespread. About 1,300 PC games have been independently tested to see if they work on Microsoft’s new Arm-powered PCs and only about half ran smoothly, said James McWhirter, an analyst with research firm Omdia. He cited an independent website recommended by Microsoft to check compatibility. Many other less-popular games haven’t been tested.

«

This was always going to be the problem for Windows on ARM – though the question is whether the buyers of those PCs actually care about playing games. If they’re used by corporates, does it matter? PC sales are about 50-50 corporates and consumers, from memory.
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UK electric car drivers should be charged per mile, say campaigners • The Guardian

Gwyn Topham:

»

Campaigners have called on the chancellor to introduce a controversial pay-per-mile road charging scheme on electric cars, warning of a £5bn “black hole” in tax revenues from motoring.

In a letter to Rachel Reeves, the Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) urged her to reform vehicle taxes, with fuel duty poised to dwindle in the coming decade as petrol and diesel cars are phased out. The charity said it was an “urgent issue” as tax revenues were forecast to fall by £5bn between 2028 and 2033, and the public agreed that all vehicles should pay a fair share.

Silviya Barrett of CBT said: “The new chancellor faces a looming black hole. She can avoid it, in a way which is fair, and which garners broad public support. But she should start now, as this issue will only get more pressing.” CBT said the easiest first step would be to levy a small pay-per-mile charge on zero-emission vehicles, with a transition period exempting existing drivers.

The letter said the group “fully appreciate that such a change would be difficult and be criticised by the opposition”. However, it said its research showed that 65% of the public believe it is fair for electric car drivers to be taxed, but at a lower rate than petrol and diesel drivers.

Fuel duty is now 53p a litre for petrol and diesel vehicles. Zero-emission cars will also pay vehicle tax for the first time in 2025..

«

A 30mpg car gets 30 miles per 4.54 litres, ie 6.6 miles/l, so pays 53p/6.6miles = 8p in fuel duty per mile. You could levy it based on MOT figures. The problem is that rural drivers need to drive further, on less congested roads. How do you allow for that? (Or do you not, since fuel duty already doesn’t make that distinction?)

I do recall reading an article suggesting the way to do this is to introduce the tax two years in the future, but can’t now find it. Link welcome!
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The Uruguayan company teaching people how to turn regular cars into EVs • Rest of World

Daniela Dib:

»

In 2010, Uruguayan president-elect José Mujica made headlines for the bright blue mini-truck he rode to his inauguration ceremony.

The vehicle, which looked like any ordinary pickup truck, was used to convey a message: Uruguay was serious about its quest to become more environmentally friendly. The gas-powered four-wheeler had been transformed into an electric vehicle by Organización Autolibre, a local retrofitting company.

Viral press coverage of the ceremony put the company in the spotlight, sparking interest from EV enthusiasts inside and outside Uruguay who wanted to convert their gas-guzzling vehicles into economical EVs. 

“This news coverage in many media outlets across Latin America gave a lot of visibility to this technology, and to this day we tour the region every year across Peru, Mexico, Argentina,” Gabriel González Barrios, founder and CEO of Organización Autolibre, told Rest of World. “The same distributors of Autolibre systems permanently invite us to train the necessary technicians to generate the local ecosystem for the local development of this industry.”

Over the years, González Barrios and his team at Organización Autolibre have helped convert thousands of traditional vehicles into e-cars across 14 Latin American countries. The company trains individuals and mechanics through online courses, and supervises conversions for corporate fleets. So far, at least 40 companies have used Organización Autolibre’s services, González Barrios said. While some countries have flagged concerns about the safety of retrofitting vehicles, González Barrios said his company is leading efforts to make it a safer and standardized practice across Latin America.

“We want to show it’s an industrialized process,” Andrés García, the owner of a retrofitting shop in Bogotá, Colombia, which works with Autolibre, told Rest of World. “This is not for hobbyists or people who are inexperienced.”

«

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Stock plunge wipes out Trump Media’s extraordinary market gains • The Guardian

Callum Jones:

»

Donald Trump’s tiny social media empire has seen its extraordinary stock market rally wiped out by a steep sell-off.

Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of Truth Social, closed below $17 on Wednesday, reversing all their gains since the company’s rapid rise took hold in January.

The former president has been prohibited by a lock-up agreement from starting to sell shares in the firm until late September. While his majority stake in the firm is still worth some $2bn on paper, its value has fallen dramatically from $4.9bn in March.

As a business, TMTG is not growing rapidly. It generated sales of just $4.13m in 2023, according to regulatory filings, and lost $58.2m.

Nor is Truth Social growing rapidly as a platform. While TMTG has not disclosed the size of its user base, the research firm Similarweb estimated that in March it had 7.7m visits – while X, formerly Twitter, had 6.1bn. That same month, however, TMTG was valued at almost $10bn on the stock market.

«

All the people selling ahead of the lock-up expiring really is very, very funny, though that it’s there at all is still a demonstration of the madness of crowds.
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Biden administration announces major actions to tackle Russian efforts to influence 2024 election • CNN Politics

Sean Lyngaas, Evan Perez, Kylie Atwood, Zachary Cohen, Jennifer Hansler:

»

The Biden administration announced a sweeping set of actions to tackle a major Russian government-backed effort to influence the 2024 US presidential election on Wednesday, including unveiling criminal charges against two Russian nationals, sanctions on ten individuals and entities, and the seizure of 32 internet domains.

At Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direction, three Russian companies used fake profiles to promote false narratives on social media, US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.

Two employees of RT, the Russian state media network, were indicted in a US court for allegedly being part of a scheme that funneled nearly $10m to set up and direct a Tennessee-based front company to produce online content aimed at sowing divisions among Americans, according to the Justice Department.

Taken together, the actions represent the Biden administration’s most significant public response yet to alleged Russian influence operations targeting American voters. After the US accused Iran of trying to hack both the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns last month, Wednesday’s expected actions are a reminder that US officials continue to see Russia as a prominent foreign influence threat to November’s election, the sources said.

…In July, the Justice Department accused an RT employee of being involved in a scheme that used a network of about 1,000 social media accounts to pose as US residents to spread disinformation about the Ukraine war and other topics. US officials accuse the Kremlin of financing the scheme; a Kremlin spokesperson denied the allegation.

Asked for comment, an RT spokesperson did not respond to the substance of the allegations, and instead emailed mocking comments including, “2016 called and it wants its clichés back.”

«

Then again, the cliche isn’t a cliche, because there was a Russian disinformation effort – which had some effect – in 2016.
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Intel honesty • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

the problem with Intel’s most recent earnings call was threefold:

• Intel is technically on pace to achieve the five nodes in four years [CEO Pat] Gelsinger [who returned to Intel, where he had previously successfully pushed CISC over RISC, in 2021] promised (in truth two of those nodes were iterations), but they haven’t truly scaled any of them; the first attempt to do so, with Intel 3, destroyed their margins. This isn’t a surprise: the reason why it is hard to skip steps is not just because technology advances, but because you have to actually learn on the line how to implement new technology at scale, with sustainable yield. Go back to Intel’s 10nm failure: the company could technically make a 10nm chip, they just couldn’t do so economically; there are now open questions about Intel 3, much less next year’s promised 18A.

• Intel is dramatically ramping up its Lunar Lake [allegedly ARM-competitive x86] architecture as it is the only design the company has that is competitive with the Qualcomm ARM architecture undergirding Microsoft’s CoPilot+ PC initiative; the problem is that Lunar Lake’s tiles — including its CPU — are made by TSMC, which is both embarrassing and also terrible for margins.

• The third problem is that the goal Gelsinger has been pushing for is the aforementioned 18A, yet Intel has yet to announce a truly committed at-scale partner. Yes, the company is in talks with lots of folks and claims some number of secret agreements, but at this point the foundry strategy needs real proof points; unfortunately Intel itself ramping up on TSMC, even as it loses control of its costs, isn’t exactly a selling point as to why any third-party should put their fortunes in Intel’s hands.

All that noted, my initial response to the meltdown over Intel’s earnings was to defend Gelsinger; what is happening to Intel now is downstream of mistakes that happened years before Gelsinger came back to the company. That remains true, but Gelsinger does have one fatal flaw: he still believes in Intel, and I no longer do.

«

That’s an utterly damning phrase from Thompson, who isn’t given to dumping on companies, especially big ones. But it’s clear that Intel just doesn’t have a strategy that fits how the world is. As Thompson goes on to point out, only the fact that TSMC is based in Taiwan, and China poses a threat, gives Intel any leverage.

Gelsinger’s choice of CISC over RISC paid off.. but not forever.
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We tested Wi-Fi on over 50 flights. It often stinks, but it’s about to get better • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

Soon you might get a low-earth orbit (LEO) connection. LEO satellites are less than a thousand miles from earth, so the data travels a shorter distance, addressing that latency problem. And you certainly feel the difference. 

I packed my bags and tested two providers of LEO connectivity. The first was Starlink from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which now offers in-flight Wi-Fi on Hawaiian Airlines and smaller carriers like JSX. I flew JSX round trip from Dallas to Houston. Next, I tested Intelsat’s upcoming LEO service on the company’s test plane, from Chicago to Newark. It was a stunning leap forward in performance.

• Streaming: I brought 10—yes, 10—devices on board. I could simultaneously stream high-def YouTube and Netflix on my menagerie of tablets, laptops and smartphones.
• Video calling: Without stopping those streams, I also managed to Zoom with people on Earth and on the same flight. The delay was minimal and I was able to keep up with the meeting. (Maybe the true flight nightmare isn’t a crying baby but a seatmate spewing corporate jargon for five solid hours.)
• Real-time apps: Download speeds hit 150 Mbps on the flights. More impressive was the lower latency, resulting in snappier web browsing, scrolling long social feeds and rock solid connections for apps like Google Docs and Slack.

Starlink’s performance was excellent but its availability is limited. Intelsat plans to start equipping planes later this year with antennas that can connect to both GEO and LEO satellites. GEO is still better in the skies over major population centers, because of the way those satellites are concentrated, says Bijur.

American and Alaska plan to start upgrading those old cellular planes this year, wrapping up next year. Viasat and Panasonic plan to offer a similar dual-network system to airlines.  

“In 25 years, I have never seen such a high level of interest from airlines in upgrading,” John Wade, Panasonic Avionics vice president of in-flight connectivity, told me. Since I’m often on United planes with slower Panasonic GEO systems, that’s (streaming) music to my ears.

«

I guess this matters if you’re flying over the US, but any flying I’ve done lately has been over multiple countries, and I’d imagine that gets complicated. Also expensive. Isn’t it nice to know you’re not online sometimes?
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What I’ve learned after a year of serious Substacking • Odds and Ends of History

James O’Malley:

»

When I started my writing career, churning out articles for search engines to find, with titles like “Top 10 iPhone cases 2013”, I was not imagining a rapturous critical reception at my prose. Instead, my main goal was to hit the necessary wordcount as quickly as possible, so that I could bank my £40 and move on to the next piece.

Though I take somewhat more pride in my work today, where I typically work on less depressing articles, what remains true is that not all words are not created equal. The time and effort required to write, say, a thousand words can vary enormously. Sometimes you just want to get to something good enough to before your deadline – because even if you spend double the amount of time finessing every word, the fee at the end is ultimately the same.

However, Substack is very different.

Here, my professional success is closely linked to the quality of work that I’m producing. There is a direct correlation between the quality of my writing and the number of new subscribers (both paid and free) that I earn after each post.

This is a good thing, as this aligns my incentives to produce quality content, because the more effort I make, the more I will be rewarded. That’s why I genuinely think that my writing on this newsletter has been some of the best that I’ve ever done.

«

This is an important observation: by making it possible for people to find the audience with whom they can connect most effectively, and enabling them to monetise that connection, Substack is doing an enormous favour to journalists and people with a yen generally for writing. It’s only taken 10 years to be an overnight sensation.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Don’t fret: an extensive overview of thousands of studies shows mobile phones don’t cause cancer. CC-licensed photo by Nana B Agyei 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. Calling back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Mobile phones not linked to brain cancer, biggest study to date finds • The Guardian

Natasha May:

»

Mobile phones are not linked to brain and head cancers, a comprehensive review of the highest quality evidence available commissioned by the World Health Organization has found.

Led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa), the systematic review examined more than 5,000 studies from which the most scientifically rigorous were identified and weak studies were excluded.

The final analysis included 63 observational studies in humans published between 1994 and 2022, making it “the most comprehensive review to date”, the review lead author, associate prof Ken Karipidis, said.

“We concluded the evidence does not show a link between mobile phones and brain cancer or other head and neck cancers.”

Published on Wednesday, the review focused on cancers of the central nervous system (including brain, meninges, pituitary gland and ear), salivary gland tumours and brain tumours.

The review found no overall association between mobile phone use and cancer, no association with prolonged use (if people use their mobile phones for 10 years or more), and no association with the amount of mobile phone use (the number of calls made or the time spent on the phone).

“I’m quite confident with our conclusion. And what makes us quite confident is … even though mobile phone use has skyrocketed, brain tumour rates have remained stable,” said Karipidis, Arpansa’s health impact assessment assistant director.

«

This has been a claim made at more or less volume for absolutely years. And now we can, surely, say it’s done.
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Bird flu reaches cows in California, the country’s largest milk producer • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

The outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in US dairy cows has now spread to three herds in California, the largest milk-producing state in the country with around 1.7 million dairy cows, federal and state health officials have confirmed.

Fourteen states and 197 herds have now been affected by the unprecedented outbreak in dairy cows, which was first confirmed by federal health officials on March 25.

In a statement, the secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, Karen Ross, said the spread of the virus to California was not unexpected. “We have been preparing for this possibility since earlier this year when [Highly pathogenic avian influenza or HPAI] detections were confirmed at dairy farms in other states,” Ross said. “Our extensive experience with HPAI in poultry has given us ample preparation and expertise to address this incident, with workers’ health and public health as our top priorities.”

The herds in California are thought to have been infected through the movement of cattle, despite a federal order mandating testing of cattle prior to movement between states. So far, health officials believe that all of the dairy infections across the affected states stem from a single spillover event from wild birds to dairy cows in Texas. The virus is thought to spread from cow to cow, as well as from contaminated milking equipment, dirty hands, and boots.

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At what point do we start calling it bovine flu? Just so we know for the watching brief.
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The Third Circuit’s Section 230 decision In Anderson v. TikTok is pure poppycock • Techdirt

Corbin Barthold:

»

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit concluded, in Anderson v. TikTok, that algorithmic recommendations aren’t protected by Section 230. Because they’re the platforms’ First Amendment-protected expression, the court reasoned, algorithms are the platforms’ “own first-party speech,” and thus fall outside Section 230’s liability shield for the publication of third-party speech.

Of course, a platform’s decision to host a third party’s speech at all is also First Amendment-protected expression. By the Third Circuit’s logic, then, such hosting decisions, too, are a platform’s “own first-party speech” unprotected by Section 230.

We’ve already hit (and not for the last time) the key problem with the Third Circuit’s analysis. “Given … that platforms engage in protected first-party speech under the First Amendment when they curate compilations of others’ content via their expressive algorithms,” the court declared, “it follows that doing so amounts to first-party speech under [Section] 230, too.” No, it does not. Assuming a lack of overlap between First Amendment protection and Section 230 protection is a basic mistake.

«

It’s quite a detailed examination of the topic, but those paragraphs set out the essential problem: if it isn’t protected by S230, then it is by the First Amendment.
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Bluesky continues to soar, adding two million more new users in a matter of days • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Social networking startup Bluesky continues to benefit from X’s shutdown in Brazil having now added over 2 million new users over the past four days, up from just half a million as of Friday. This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were “Not Enough Resources” to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable under the influx of new sign-ups.

As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s total downloads soared by 10,584% this weekend compared to last, and its downloads in Brazil were up by a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth seems to be having a halo effect, as downloads outside Brazil also rose by 584%, the firm noted. In part, this is due to Bluesky receiving downloads in 22 countries where it had barely seen any traction before.

«

Well done, Mr Musk, really got hold of the job there.
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I learned the language of computer programming in my 50s; here’s what I discovered • The Guardian

Andrew Smith, a writer, decided he should learn coding to understand what is driving the whole world these days:

»

My dismay at JavaScript was about more than discomfort with algorithms, though. Strange as it seemed for what I’d always thought of as a hyperrational realm, the primary problem was aesthetic. Emotional. Just looking at JavaScript, with its ugly flights of brackets and braces and unnecessary-seeming reams of semicolons, made me miserable. There also seemed to be 25 different ways to accomplish every task and these were constantly changing, turning the language into a kind of coding wild west. The more time I spent with it, the more I thought: “I can’t do this; coding’s not for me – I don’t have the right kind of mind (and never liked Star Wars).”

At this low ebb, I had a stroke of luck when a pro-coder friend of a friend suggested I try another language before giving up. He put me in touch with a man called Nicholas Tollervey, who was prominent within the Python language community. Before calling Tollervey, I looked at Python and instantly felt more at home with it. The first thing I noticed was the spare simplicity of its syntax, which used indentation rather than ugly symbols to delineate instructions to the machine. The language was designed by a naturally collaborative Dutchman named Guido van Rossum, who prized communication, community and concern for how his language would behave in the wild – in other words, empathy – above all else. He named his language Python after Monty Python, a whimsical, human touch that seemed promising. When Tollervey suggested I travel to Cleveland, Ohio, to experience the 4,000-strong PyCon conference, I found myself agreeing, with no idea what I was agreeing to.

The first day was less like the stiff gathering of my imagining than the first day back at Hogwarts.

«

It’s an extract from a book – “Devil in the Stack: A Coding Odyssey” by Andrew Smith, published by Grove Press (£16.99). Smart move to make a book from necessity!
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Did your car witness a crime? Police may be coming for your Tesla • San Francisco Chronicle

Rachel Swan:

»

A Canadian tourist was visiting Oakland recently when he had to talk someone out of taking his Tesla from a hotel parking lot.

This was no thief. It was the Oakland Police Department. Turns out, the Tesla may have witnessed a homicide.

In Oakland and beyond, police called to crime scenes are increasingly looking for more than shell casings and fingerprints. They’re scanning for Teslas parked nearby, hoping their unique outward-facing cameras captured key evidence. And, the Chronicle has found, they’re even resorting to obtaining warrants to tow the cars to ensure they don’t lose the video.

The trend offers a window into how mass surveillance — the expansion of cameras as well as license-plate scanners, security doorbells and precise cellphone tracking — is changing crime-fighting. While few cars have camera systems similar to Teslas, that could change rapidly, especially as the technology in vehicles continues to improve.

“We have all these mobile video devices floating around,” said Sgt. Ben Therriault, president of the Richmond Police Officers Association.

Therriault said he and other officers now frequently seek video from bystander Teslas, and usually get the owners’ consent to download it without having to serve a warrant. Still, he said, tows are sometimes necessary, if police can’t locate a Tesla owner and need the video “to pursue all leads.”

“It’s the most drastic thing you could do,” he acknowledged.

In at least three instances in July and August, Oakland police sought to tow a Tesla into evidence to obtain — via a second court order — its stored video. Officers cited the cars’ “Sentry Mode” feature, a system of cameras and sensors that records noise and movement around the vehicle when it is empty and locked, storing it in a USB drive in the glove box.

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What’s happening to oil market forecasts? • Baker Institute

Mark Finley:

»

Historically, the institutional calculus was that the US was perceived to be vulnerable to higher oil prices — and as a result, policymakers would complain to the US EIA [Energy Information Administration] if the oil market was tighter than they had originally forecast. While this analysis does not include IEA’s [International Energy Agency] short-term outlooks, the same institutional pressures can certainly be ascribed to an organization that was created after the oil shocks of the 1970s and whose members are comprised largely of mature, oil-importing countries — as was the EIA. Accordingly, at the margins, the EIA and IEA had an institutional incentive to err on the side of being slightly overly aggressive on forecasting oil demand growth.

In contrast, OPEC [Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries] forecasters would receive complaints from their members if the market was weaker than they had forecast, since their members are oil exporters and, therefore, vulnerable to lower prices. Accordingly, on the margins, they would have an incentive to err on the side of undershooting on their oil demand forecast. Through 2022 — excluding the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020–21, when demand fell by a massive, unexpected 10 Mb/d after the January forecasting cycle — the differences in revisions after 12 months reflected that institutional bias:

• OPEC tended to undershoot on its annual demand forecast and would on average revise its oil demand figure up after one year by 130,000 b/d.
• The EIA tended to overshoot on its demand forecast and would on average revise its oil demand figure down by 90,000 b/d.

Interestingly, the pattern of revisions after one year has remained consistent for the EIA even as the U.S. policy narrative has shifted since the country became a net oil exporter, and amid a greater emphasis on climate change: It has continued to tend, on average, to revise lower an overly aggressive short-term demand growth forecast. But for OPEC, the pattern has shifted: Instead of having a low-growth demand forecast that tends to be revised higher, in recent years OPEC has moved to a high-growth forecast that, on average, has tended to be revised lower, largely due to a large overshoot for 2022 oil demand as discussed above.

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The puzzle they’re all building their forecasts around is: when will oil demand peak? What will make it peak?
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Get ready for Tesla cops • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

»

Last month, South Pasadena’s police department became the first in the country with a fully electric police fleet, replacing all of its gas-powered vehicles with 20 Teslas. Four officers, after test-driving Teslas for the department, have already bought one for personal use, Abdalla, who leads his department’s EV-conversion project, told me. South Pasadena is one among a growing number of law-enforcement agencies that are electrifying their fleets.

About 50 miles south, the Irvine Police Department just became likely the country’s first to purchase a Tesla Cybertruck. Departments in at least 38 states have purchased, tested, or deployed fully electric cars. Electric patrol cars are not yet legion and in many cities are likely less common than EVs among the general population, but their ranks are growing. They now prowl the streets in Eupora, Mississippi; Cary, North Carolina; and Logan, Ohio.

The nation’s switch to battery-powered police cruisers isn’t only, or even primarily, about the environment. In many cases, they are proving to simply be the best-performing and most cost-effective option for law enforcement. Police departments require vehicles that have rapid acceleration and deceleration; space for radios, sirens, and other special equipment; and extreme reliability for 24-hour emergency responses.

When the South Pasadena police first looked into electrification, in the mid-2000s, no EVs on the market could handle the heavy workload that law enforcement demands. The last thing any police officer needs is to worry about their car running out of charge mid-shift. When Tesla unveiled the Model Y in 2019, Abdalla said, it “perked us up.” The model’s range, safety, and power made it the first EV that appeared potentially suitable for the department.

Five years later, the cars have gotten much better. New EVs can regularly drive upwards of 200 or 300 miles per charge, plenty for many officers.

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The acceleration alone must be useful for chases (though those are obviated more and more by drones). But they’re also cheaper to maintain and run. The only question would be what happens if they’re involved in crashes.
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‘Queen of trash’ among 11 on trial in Sweden’s largest environmental crime case • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

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The [husband and wife Thomas and Bella] Nilssons face charges of serious environmental crime and serious economic crime linked to the company, all of which they deny. The others face a combination of different charges, including serious environmental crime, serious economic crime linked to the company, aiding and abetting serious environmental crime and environmental crime.

From 2018-20, the company’s heyday, the trademark pink construction bags of Think Pink, offering cheap recycling and waste disposal, were a common sight in the capital. Nilsson won awards for her work as chief executive.

The business came crashing down in 2020 when its owners were arrested. The company has been accused of dumping at least 200,000 tonnes of waste around Sweden.

Police investigators, whose report runs to 50,000 pages, found harmful levels of arsenic, dioxins, zinc, lead, copper and petroleum products. Several of the rubbish dumps caught fire, with one fire lasting for months.

Anders Gustafsson, one of the trial’s three prosecutors, has described the case as “the largest environmental crime in Sweden in terms of scope and organisation”.

On Tuesday he said Think Pink had dumped rubbish and used falsified documents to deceive authorities and make big profits. “There are claims for damages of 260m SEK [£19m], mainly from municipalities, when they were forced to clear away the large mountains of rubbish,” he told the broadcaster SVT. “It is exceptional that it is on a large scale and that it has been going on for such a long time in several places in the country.”

«

All that recycling you thought was happening that.. wasn’t.
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Former high-ranking New York State government employee charged with acting as an undisclosed agent of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party • US Department of Justice

»

[Civil servant Linda] Sun and [lobster fisherman husband Chris] Hu laundered the monetary proceeds of this scheme to purchase, among other items, real estate property in Manhasset, New York currently valued at $4.1m, a condominium in Honolulu, Hawaii currently valued at $2.1m, and various luxury automobiles, including a 2024 Ferrari.  Sun never disclosed any benefits she received from representatives of the PRC government and the CCP to the New York State government, as she was required to do as a New York State government employee. 

Hu also laundered unlawful proceeds through bank accounts opened in the name of a close relative but that were actually for Hu’s exclusive use.  To open these accounts, Hu unlawfully used an image of the relative’s driver’s license.

The charges in the indictment are allegations and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

«

And you thought it was just because lobster fishing was really, really lucrative.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Gold nuggets are typically found in quartz because of earthquakes, a new theory says. CC-licensed photo by Dave Bezaire 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. Not fooled. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

OSOM, the company formed from Essential’s ashes, is apparently in shambles • Android Authority

Mishaal Rahman:

»

OSOM Products rose from the ashes of Essential in late 2020. Its founder and “Chief Hooligan,” Jason Keats, wanted to build something new without the involvement (and associated baggage) of Essential’s previous founder, Andy Rubin. The company hired several people who previously worked at Essential, including camera engineer Nick Franco, programmers Gary Anderson and Jean-Baptiste Théou, and marketing officer Wolfgang Muller.

OSOM, which the company says stands for “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” stated that one of its goals was to create privacy-focused products. To lead those efforts, the company hired Mary Stone Ross in early 2021 to be their “Chief Privacy Officer.”

In 2022, the company launched its first product: the Saga, an Android smartphone backed by the large cryptocurrency and blockchain platform company named Solana. It released its second product, the OSOM Privacy Cable, in 2023 and seemingly held talks with Solana Mobile later that year to create a successor to the Saga. However, it seems that not only has the Solana Saga Two been canceled, but its entire smartphone venture might be over.

In a lawsuit docketed on Friday, August 30, 2024, in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware (C.A. No. 2024-0894-BWD), Mary Ross, who left the company in May 2024 according to her LinkedIn, asked the court to compel OSOM Products, Inc. to grant her access to the company’s books and records. She filed this lawsuit in an attempt to prove her many allegations of financial mismanagement by Jason Keats.

The allegations she highlights in the lawsuit, detailed in court records seen by Android Authority, are incredibly damning if true. Shockingly, the lawsuit alleges, citing several meetings with the company’s Board and internal documents provided by former CMO Muller, that Keats misused company funds to purchase two Lamborghinis, pay for his racing hobby, pay for his racing partner’s salary, expense multiple first-class travel tickets, pay his mortgage, and more. The suit suggests that the company’s previous Head of Finance may have resigned due to these practices and that the company’s replacement was brought on board to process payments for Keats’ personal expenses.

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Where are the VCs while all this is going on? Perhaps OSOM applies to their view about this too.
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Overview: AI-implanted false memories • MIT Media Lab

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Participants (N=200) watched a crime video, then interacted with their assigned AI interviewer or survey, answering questions including five misleading ones. False memories were assessed immediately and after one week.

Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users’ responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction.

After one week, the number of false memories induced by generative chatbots remained constant. However, confidence in these false memories remained higher than the control after one week. Moderating factors were explored: users who were less familiar with chatbots but more familiar with AI technology, and more interested in crime investigations, were more susceptible to false memories. These findings highlight the potential risks of using advanced AI in sensitive contexts, like police interviews, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations.

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This is quite a clever study, and a concerning finding: if a chatbot misleads you, even over content that you’ve seen independently, then it can persuade you that something which didn’t happen did happen, or vice versa.
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Escaping a hostage situation • Five Good Hours

“Five” is a PhD candidate at Princeton (subject not stated) and has thoughts about Ted Chiang’s article (linked here yesterday) about AI v art:

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In art, we don’t begin from choice, but from cliché, from a position of determination and dependency. And every proper choice we make in the production of an artwork is achieved by consciously cultivated tactics of resistance to this cliché. In Bacon, one such tactic was actually the restriction of his subjective “choice” in the process of painting, the introduction of chance into the making of the work, the use of materials that did not easily respond to the painter’s hand, the defacing of the face in his great portraits.

A radically “chosen” artwork, an artwork that is actually composed entirely of free “choices” made by the artist is inconceivable. We begin with our given materials, our shared language, our common history, and the overdetermined conditions of our socialization into that history. Only within and against that background of this shared meaning, only by knowing it well enough to navigate the many traps and alleys that may first appear as lines of flight, can we strike out on our own and invent something new—which if we are lucky will integrate itself into the tradition and perhaps even one day become a cliché of its own to be overcome.

A defense of art-making in purely humanist-voluntarist terms will collapse under its own weight when placed under scrutiny, especially when we consider the extent to which so much writing produced by human beings, with human hands and human minds, is as automatic as that of LLMs. I’ve been hesitant to confront students about suspected AI-use because I simply cannot tell if the generic quality of their arguments and phrasing is the product of algorithmic flattening or of the quotidian automaticity of college-writing that has been around at least since Aquinas led disputations at the University of Paris.

…It is not theoretically or practically productive to think along the voluntarist lines that Chiang lays out—between “choice” and “non-choice,” or between different quantities of choices. The better distinction is between abject dependency upon the machine and the relative autonomy achieved by the cultivation of knowledge and skills. We need to create room to maneuver, to create the possibility of a creative life that isn’t utterly parasitized by these tools.

«

There’s also a discussion of the Chiang article on Hacker News, if you wanted to know what brogrammers think of it.
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Hewlett Packard to pursue Mike Lynch’s estate for up to $4bn • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has confirmed it will push ahead with a high court lawsuit against the estate of the deceased tech tycoon Mike Lynch in which it is seeking damages of up to $4bn (£3bn).

The US company said in a statement it would follow the legal proceedings “through to their conclusion” despite Lynch’s death last month when his yacht sank off the coast of Italy.

HPE won a civil claim against Lynch in the English high court in 2022, after accusing him and his former finance director Sushovan Hussain of fraud over its $11bn takeover of his software company Autonomy in 2011.

A ruling on damages is expected soon, although the judge presiding over the case, Mr Justice Hildyard, wrote in 2022 that he expected final damages to be “substantially less than is claimed”.

Lynch, 59, who was cleared in a separate criminal fraud trial over the Autonomy deal in the US in June, and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, were among seven people who died after the Bayesian superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily last month.

HPE said: “In 2022, an English high court judge ruled that HPE had substantially succeeded in its civil fraud claims against Dr Lynch and Mr Hussain. A damages hearing was held in February 2024 and the judge’s decision regarding damages due to HPE will arrive in due course. It is HPE’s intention to follow the proceedings through to their conclusion.”

«

One’s reaction to this will tend towards the “hasn’t HP got enough money then?” but the estate might be sizeable. If it were, say, $5bn then his widow may be able to get by on the remainder. If it puts her into destitution, though, the publicity will quickly turn sour.
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How do gold nuggets form? Earthquakes may be the key • National Geographic

Robin George Andrews:

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Gold has always been a hot commodity. But these days, finding a nugget isn’t too tricky: Much of the world’s gold is mined from natural veins of quartz, a glassy mineral that streaks through large chunks of Earth’s squashed-up crust. But the geologic process that put gold nuggets there in the first place was a mystery.

Now, a new study published in Nature Geoscience has come up with a convincing, and surprising, answer: electricity, and earthquakes—lots of them.

Those nuggets owe their existence to the strange electrical properties of common quartz. When squished or jiggled, the mineral generates electricity. That drags gold particles out of fluid in Earth’s crust. The particles crystallize out as grains of gold—and, over time, with enough electrical stimulation, those grains bloom into nuggets.

“If you shake quartz, it makes electricity. If you make electricity, gold comes out,” says Christopher Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia and the lead author of the new paper. Earthquakes are the most likely natural source of that shaking, and the team’s lab experiments show that earthquakes can make gold nuggets. 

The idea that gold nuggets appear because of electricity instead of a more conventional geologic process is, at first, a peculiar thought. But “it makes complete sense,” says Thomas Gernon, a geoscientist at the University of Southampton in England and who was not involved with the new work. Quartz veins host a disproportionate number of gold nuggets and their environments experience plenty of earthquakes.

…Voisey originally had this hunch that quakes and electrical fields might forge gold several years earlier as a Ph.D. student; to see it realized was an exhilarating moment. “I went nuts when that worked,” he says. “I kicked back on my chair, screaming out and stuff. Dude, I exploded.”

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Always nice to remember that scientists are human beings and get excited about their discoveries too.
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Failure to warn Oasis fans of dynamic pricing may be consumer law breach, say experts • The Guardian

Rob Davies, Josh Halliday and Shane Harrison:

»

Ticketmaster may have breached consumer laws by failing to warn Oasis fans that the price of tickets might soar while they were queueing, experts have said, as it emerged that the company plans to apply “dynamic pricing” more widely.

Excitement about the Mancunian band’s long-awaited reunion tour descended into dismay and outrage over the weekend after fans complained that tickets for 17 shows in 2025, expected to make millions for the Gallagher brothers, were hiked up without warning.

Dynamic pricing, which is common in the US but relatively unusual in the UK and Ireland, meant that some fans queued [virtually] all day long only to find that £135 standing tickets had risen to £355 when the time came to confirm their purchase.

Fans said they were left with a choice of missing out or paying more than they felt able to, and that they only had minutes to decide.

The government announced on Sunday night that it would include dynamic pricing in a review of ticketing that was due to focus on Labour’s plans to ban “rip-off” resale sites and ticket touting.

But on Monday, consumer law experts said that while dynamic pricing was not illegal, the way Ticketmaster applied it may have breached consumer regulations if it was not clear to fans that the price of basic standing tickets might increase.

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It certainly looks like a bait-and-switch to entice people with low-priced items and then increase the price without warning.
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What is NaNoWriMo’s position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)? • National Novel Writing Month

»

NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI. NaNoWriMo’s mission is to “provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.” We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. Please see this related post that speaks to our overall position on nondiscrimination with respect to approaches to creativity, writer’s resources, and personal choice. 
 
Note: we have edited this post by adding this paragraph to reflect our acknowledgment that there are bad actors in the AI space who are doing harm to writers and who are acting unethically. We want to make clear that, though we find the categorical condemnation for AI to be problematic for the reasons stated below, we are troubled by situational abuse of AI, and that certain situational abuses clearly conflict with our values. We also want to make clear that AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse.

«

NanoWriMo has been going since 1999, when it had 21 participants trying desperately to finish their novels during the month of November; it now has over 400,000 participants. But this bizarre notification about how AI is sorta kinda OK really, who are we to judge, has a lot of people puzzled – and other people thinking it must mean that it has licensed content to LLM builders.

Meanwhile, there’s also this closing paragraph, which has no further explanation:

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We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege. 

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Glad to have that sorted.
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Elon Musk vs. Brazil • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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The exact details about what Musk wasn’t complying with has been a little fuzzy. But X launched a Twitter Files spin-off to organize their response to the Brazilian government called the Alexandre Files, named after Alexandre de Moraes, Brazil’s minister of the Supreme Federal Court and the chief architect of the country’s X ban. And according to what X has released, the conflict between the site and the Brazilian government boils down to seven users, which X, confoundingly, decided to dox in their Alexandre Files. The Brazilian supreme court wanted the users suspended, Musk didn’t. And now an estimated 40 million people can’t use X.

Now that we know the exact accounts that were ordered to be suspended, it’s extremely clear why Musk was comfortable sacrificing Brazilian users to keep them. They included Marcos Ribeiro do Val, a senator that’s been investigated for his role in Brazil’s 2023 insurrection, pro-Bolsonaro influencer Ednardo Davila Mello Raposo, and Paola Da Silva Daniel, the wife of Daniel Silveira, a former military police officer and state deputy that has been arrested several times for threatening supreme court ministers.

It should go without saying that if former Brazilian president and far-right COVID magnet Jair Bolsonaro was still in power and asking for leftist accounts to be suspended, Musk would have been more than happy to oblige. In fact, we know this because X restricted content on the request of the Turkish government in 2023 and complied with a government order to block accounts in India in 2024.

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I’d held off linking to this over the weekend because of the lack of clarity. This is clarity. And of course Musk is behaving hypocritically. Of course.
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Bluesky tops app charts and sees “all-time-highs” after Brazil bans X • TechCrunch

Anthony Ha:

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A Brazilian court’s decision to ban X (formerly Twitter) seems to be benefiting its rivals, especially Bluesky.

The microblogging platform announced late Friday that it was seeing “all-time-highs for activity” with 500,000 new users joining in the previous two days. It’s also number one on the free iPhone app chart in Brazil today, ranking just ahead of Meta’s Threads at number two.

Noting the rankings, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber wrote, “good job Brazil, you made the right choice.”

That growth is particularly impressive for a platform that only fully opened to the public in February and winkingly acknowledged its small size (especially compared to rivals X and Threads) by describing itself as “the short king of social apps.” The company says it had more than 6 million users as of May 2024.

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Given there were 40 million or so users of Twitter in Brazil, the upside for Bluesky is considerable. Once it figures out how to make money from those people, of course.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The plummeting price of batteries is making them attractive to homeowners as well as grid companies. CC-licensed photo by Ben Paulos 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. Charged up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why AI isn’t going to make art • The New Yorker

Ted Chiang:

»

Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative AI deserves closer examination.

When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference.

So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

…It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like.

Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

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Chiang writes fabulous stories (his short story “The Story Of Your Life” became Arrival, one of the very best SF films) but is clearly intrigued by this technology. Not enough to let it take over, though.
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Misinformed about misinformation • FT

Tim Harford:

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Not only does misinformation represent a small fraction of online traffic, it is a small fraction which disproportionately attracts a small minority. A paper published in Science in 2019 by Nir Grinberg, Lisa Friedland and others examined Twitter behaviour during the 2016 election and concluded that “only 1% of individuals accounted for 80% of fake news source exposures . . . individuals most likely to engage with fake news sources were conservative leaning, older, and highly engaged with political news”. In other words, the audience for fake news on Twitter in 2016 was a tiny minority of users, most of whom would have voted for Trump in any case.

None of this is to suggest that misinformation is a trivial problem. If 5% or 10% of social media “news” is wrong, that’s a serious concern. I warned last summer that a classic disinformation tactic is to blame a real heinous crime on an entirely innocent group — exactly the kind of lies that circulated after the murder of children in Southport. Lies that circulate among a small minority can still do a lot of harm, especially if that minority enthusiastically turns to intimidation and violence.

And I remain worried about the possibility of a co-ordinated disinformation attack, which if well-timed and well-aimed could swing a close election, and which demands forethought and defensive measures that liberal democracies have been slow to embrace.

These problems are all real. But they require focused attention, not pearl-clutching about fake news. Most of us only hear about the latest online lies because they are being repeated by political elites, or by mainstream news sources — sometimes in a well-meaning but risky “fact-checking” exercise. When it comes to misinformation, social media companies surely have a case to answer. But they are not the only ones who should be looking in the mirror.

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The lightbulb of the 21st century: the battery revolution illuminates a new era • EL PAÍS English

Ignacio Fariza:

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“[Batteries’] impact on demand for fossil fuels is going to be enormous,” says Francisco Blanch, head of global commodities and equity derivatives at Bank of America. “Until now, there was only one way to store energy: in the form of hydrocarbons. That’s no longer the case: clean energy can now be stored in batteries. This will drastically reduce gas and oil consumption,” he adds, on the phone with EL PAÍS from New York City. “When electric cars soon offer ranges of [620 miles] and very fast recharges at affordable prices… who’s going to want a car [with an internal combustion engine]?” he asks rhetorically.

In China, the world leader in this area, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that two out of three battery-powered passenger car models are already cheaper than their petrol-powered equivalents.

Adrián González, a specialist at the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), notes that, in the field of transportation, batteries will be “indispensable for light road traffic and a [viable energy] alternative, with potential for heavy traffic, air and sea [transit].”

…Even without public subsidies, the enormous — and growing — price volatility between lunchtime (when there’s more sun) and breakfast and dinnertime (when the UV index is minimal or non-existent and household demand, contrastingly, soars) already makes arbitrage profitable in many countries: buying electricity when it’s cheap, storing it in a battery, and selling it when it’s expensive. A game in which households are also starting to participate, as they use small batteries to store the surplus energy from their solar panels, so as to not have to draw on the grid at night.

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All of which is creating more demand for batteries, which pulls in supply, which drops the price.
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Empowering farmers in Central Europe: the case for agri-PV • Ember

Paweł Czyżak and Tatiana Mindekova:

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Several years of intensive research across Europe and beyond has shown that agri-PV [the combined use of land for food production and solar electricity generation] can increase crop yields by up to 16% in the case of fruits or berries. With less shade-tolerant crops like wheat, yield losses are kept below 20% thanks to vertical solar panels with wide row spacing. The added revenues from the sale of electricity far outweigh the reduced revenues from grains. A case study shows that an annual profit of €1268 per hectare is possible from combined electricity and wheat sales. This contrasts with traditional wheat production (without agri-PV) that is estimated to be generating net losses in 2024.

Ember’s analysis reveals that Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia could deploy a total of 180 GW of agri-PV and almost triple Central Europe’s annual renewable electricity production from 73 TWh to 191 TWh. Using just 9% of that generation could cover the entire electricity needs of farming and food processing. Consequently, agri-PV would significantly contribute to the 2030 solar capacity targets set in the revised National Energy and Climate Plans. These equate to 60 GW for the four countries combined, compared to the current 25 GW of total installed solar capacity.

Introducing legislation to enable agri-PV would benefit both energy and food security across Central Europe and beyond.

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The idea that you can share fields between crops and solar panels will blow the minds of all the Green Party MPs and NIMBFs (Not In My Back Fields) who keep bitterly opposing solar farms.
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Why I changed my mind on self-driving cars • Exponential View

Azeem Azhar:

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While it’s not clear what proportion of Waymo’s 100,000 weekly rides happens in San Francisco alone, the city is their most mature market, so it is likely the bulk of rides.

That gives us a direct comparison with Uber’s staffed rideshare service, which runs approximately 200,000 rides a day in San Francisco. Given Waymo’s 100,000-a-week figure, the company likely offers 10,000 or more rides a day in the city, a 5%-ish or more market share. This is close to the tipping point of an S-curve of adoption of 6%.1

Waymo’s ride numbers would also give San Francisco a justifiable claim to be the world’s first “driverless city”. Waymo has a larger number of rides per day in San Francisco than Baidu does in Wuhan – despite the Chinese city having a population ten times larger. Wuhan, however, leads by driving the cost of robotaxi journeys down. A 10-kilometre ride in a robotaxi in Wuhan is between a fifth and half the price of a ridesharing equivalent. Anecdotally, a ride in Waymo in San Francisco costs around 20% more than an Uber. 

Without driver fatigue, the number of rides a robotaxi can run a day can be greater than that of its non-automated predecessor. In Wuhan, robotaxis complete up to 20 rides a day, which matches or even exceeds the average of 13.2 for human taxi drivers in the city.

What about the economics? Baidu operated around 336,000 Apollo Go rides in July. This means that Baidu Apollo could be netting $200,000 to $800,000 a month or $2.5-10 million a year. The Apollo, costing only $28,000 to build, is much cheaper than Waymo’s cars, which are estimated to cost $150,000.

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Previously a sceptic, Azhar thinks the computing and economics have flippped in favour of self-driving taxis, and after them cars more generally.
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The AI chip startup that could take down Nvidia • Freethink

Kristin Houser:

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Etched, a startup founded by three Harvard dropouts, also thinks specialization is the best approach to building AI chips, developing Sohu, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that runs just one type of AI — transformers — very, very well.

Transformers are one of the newest kinds of AI systems, having been introduced by Google researchers in just 2017. They were created to improve AI translation tools, which, at the time, worked by translating each word in a sentence one after another.

Google’s transformer model was able to look at the entire sentence before translating it, and this additional context helped the AI better understand the meaning of the sentence, which led to more accurate translations.

Transformers soon proved to be useful for far more than language translation. They have played a pivotal role in the generative AI explosion of the past few years, putting the big “T” in “ChatGPT” and enabling the creation of AI models that can generate text, images, music, videos, and even drug molecules.

“It’s a general method that captures interactions between pieces in a sentence, or the notes in music, or pixels in an image, or parts of a protein,” Ashish Vaswani, co-author of Google’s transformer paper, told the Financial Times in 2023. “It can be purposed for any task.” 

In 2022, Etched’s co-founders decided to put all their chips on transformers (so to speak), betting that they would be important enough to the future of AI that a microchip optimized to run only transformer-based models would be incredibly valuable.

“There aren’t that many people that are connected enough to AI companies to realize the opportunity and also crazy enough to take the bet — that’s where a couple 22-year-olds can come in and give it a swing,” Etched co-founder Robert Wachen told Freethink.

“When we started, this was incredibly crazy,” he continued. “Now it’s only mildly crazy.”

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Raised $120m in funding recently. One to watch.
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Apple stands by decision to terminate account belonging to WWDC student winner • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Apple is standing by its decision to terminate the Apple Developer Account of Appstun, a mobile app company created by one of Apple’s own Worldwide Developer Conference 2021 student winners. According to an announcement published on Appstun’s website, Apple moved to terminate the developer’s account after multiple rejections of its app that Apple says violates its App Store guidelines.

Apple’s decision to shut down the developer’s account was recently highlighted on X by Apple critic and 37Signals co-owner and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, where he celebrated how much better web developers had it, noting they could run their businesses without the involvement of big tech gatekeepers.

“No fear on [sic] capricious rejections that might suddenly kill the business overnight,” he remarked.

…The company went back and forth with App Review, receiving multiple rejections over an app for designing Apple Watch faces. In addition to a more standard watch face, Appstun also came up with a workaround that would allow it to offer more highly customizable watch faces. But these weren’t actually watch faces in the traditional sense, but rather custom images and animations that run independently of the App Watch face system. Essentially, the app would take over the screen showing an image that was similar to a watch face, allowing Appstun to offer more customization. Of course, running a custom animation in this way could drain the Apple Watch battery faster.

Apple was also concerned that customers wouldn’t understand that they weren’t running a normal watch face, and that Appstun deceived them by suggesting that’s what it was offering.

«

Hansson’s comment doesn’t really apply for Apple Watch faces, does it? Apple is dead set against third-party apps for Watch faces, so this is totally unsurprising.
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Inside China’s race to lead the world in nuclear fusion • Nature

Gemma Conroy:

»

China is fast pouring resources into its fusion efforts. The Chinese government’s current five-year plan makes comprehensive research facilities for crucial fusion projects a major priority for the country’s national science and technology infrastructure. As a rough estimate, China could now be spending $1.5bn each year on fusion — almost double what the US government allocated this year for this research, says Jean Paul Allain, associate director of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences in Washington DC. “Even more important than the total value is the speed at which they’re doing it,” says Allain.

“China has built itself up from being a non-player 25 years ago to having world-class capabilities,” says Dennis Whyte, a nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.

Although no one yet knows whether fusion power plants are possible, Chinese scientists have ambitious timelines. In the 2030s, before ITER will have begun its main experiments, the country aims to build the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), with the goal of producing up to 1 gigawatt of fusion power. If China’s plans work out, a prototype fusion power plant could follow in the next few decades, according to a 2022 road map.

“China is taking a strategic approach to invest in and develop its fusion energy programme, with a view of long-term leadership in the global field,” says Yasmin Andrew, a plasma physicist at Imperial College London.

…the International Atomic Energy Agency says that fusion could generate four times more energy than does fission, per kilogram of fuel.

It’s a particularly tantalizing prospect for China where, between 2020 and 2022, several regions experienced massive power outages owing to skyrocketing demand for electricity during frigid winters. Despite rapid progress in renewable energy, the country still generates more than half of its electricity from coal and remains the biggest contributor to global carbon emissions.

«

It still seems to me to be chasing a mirage. But perhaps if you chase it with enough money, the mirage becomes reality.
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The far-reaching ripple effects of a discredited cancer study • WSJ

Nidhi Subbaraman:

»

Four years ago, a team of researchers led by a heavyweight in the field of microbiology made a stunning claim: Cancers have unique microbial signatures that could one day allow tumors to be diagnosed with a blood test. 

The discovery captured the attention of the scientific community, as well as investors. 

A prestigious journal published the research. More than 600 papers cited the study. At least a dozen groups based new work on its data. And the microbiologists behind the claim launched a startup to capitalize on their findings. 

Since then, the work has suffered multiple setbacks. 

The paper was retracted in June following criticisms by other scientists who questioned the methodology and said the findings are likely invalid. Support for the startup has dried up. And published research that relied on the study’s data might have to be corrected or retracted. 

The events illustrate the far-reaching ripple effect of flawed science. 

“It has polluted the literature,” said Steven Salzberg, a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University, whose critique, written with other colleagues in the field, led to the study’s retraction. 

…Salzberg, the computational biologist, and a team analyzed a handful of the cancer types and didn’t find most of the bacteria reported in the Nature study. Their analysis, published in October 2023 in the journal mBio, stated that the “near-perfect association between microbes and cancer types reported in the study is, simply put, a fiction.”

Among the errors, according to the critique, the UC San Diego team had incorrectly deployed a genomic tool built by Salzberg’s lab to match tumor data to microbial sequences.

“It wasn’t a close call,” Salzberg told The Wall Street Journal. “This data is completely wrong.”

«

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End of the road: an AnandTech farewell • Anandtech

Ryan Smith:

»

It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry.

A lot of things have changed in the last quarter-century – in 1997 NVIDIA had yet to even coin the term “GPU” – and we’ve been fortunate to watch the world of hardware continue to evolve over the time period. We’ve gone from boxy desktop computers and laptops that today we’d charitably classify as portable desktops, to pocket computers where even the cheapest budget device puts the fastest PC of 1997 to shame.

The years have also brought some monumental changes to the world of publishing. AnandTech was hardly the first hardware enthusiast website, nor will we be the last. But we were fortunate to thrive in the past couple of decades, when so many of our peers did not, thanks to a combination of hard work, strategic investments in people and products, even more hard work, and the support of our many friends, colleagues, and readers.

Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again. So, the time has come for AnandTech to wrap up its work, and let the next generation of tech journalists take their place within the zeitgeist.

«

Future, the publisher, says it will keep the site online “indefinitely”. Which is a long time. Ditto for the forums, which is an even tougher challenge.

The site’s name came from its founder, then 17-year-old Anand Lal Shimpi: Apple hired him in 2014 for its hardware division (believed to be the chipmaking part).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Installed wind power in the UK hit an amazing milestone this week, having started from zero in 1991. CC-licensed photo by Richard Hawley on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Whirling like a dervish. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The Dome is watching you • The Atlantic

Caroline Mimbs Nyce:

»

Feeding yourself—or, really, doing much of anything—at the [Los Angeles-located $2bn Intuit] Dome requires the use of an official app. When you register, it asks for your name, phone number, email address, and zip code. If you want, you can also add your credit-card information and upload a selfie as part of the “Game Face ID” program. That last part, though optional, is a key feature of the venue: facial-recognition cameras are absolutely everywhere. They’re embedded in large, basketball-shaped devices with circular screens. Some of them are planted in walls, while others stand alone atop black poles. They are the keepers of the Dome. If they recognize you, they will grant you prompt entry to the venue, club suites, and concession stands.

Creeping surveillance is a well-documented phenomenon at major venues: Many arenas throughout the country have used some form of facial recognition for years, typically under the premise that it makes the overall experience more convenient for customers. But the Dome is one of the first to package all of this in earnest, to create the ultimate smartphone-powered, face-recognizing, fully digitized stadium-going experience. It is a preview of a new generation of tech-supercharged event venues, a teaser for a world where you can’t even buy chicken tenders at a basketball game without first setting up an account.

But on the night of the Rodrigo concert, I wasn’t thinking about any of this: I just wanted my hot dog. My boyfriend and I had made the conscious decision not to upload selfies before the event—I try to use facial recognition sparingly, for privacy reasons—but a long wait and technical difficulties left me feeling like I would have given up my Social Security number for some sustenance. After eight minutes in line, we finally approached the cameras. They weren’t working very well. Employees posted at each concession entrance had to manually help guests navigate the system, one by one. It took three minutes of tapping our phones and letting the cameras scan our faces to get the gate to open.

«

The future has been slightly delayed, but it’s definitely on its way.
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UK wind power reaches historic 30GW milestone • RenewableUK

RenewableUK Association:

»

The UK has today hit a historic milestone of 30 gigawatts (30,000 megawatts) of wind generation capacity. The opening of SSE Renewables’ Viking Wind Farm on the Shetland Islands boosted the country’s capacity by 443MW, taking the total past the 30GW threshold.
 
Total operational capacity of combined onshore and offshore wind in the UK now stands at 30,299MW, as tracked by RenewableUK’s EnergyPulse, the industry’s  market intelligence service. This is enough to meet the annual power needs of more than 26 million homes and cut carbon emissions by more than 35 million tonnes a year.
 
Renewables provided a record 46.4% of the UK’s electricity in 2023, according to the latest statistics published by the Government in July, with wind remaining our biggest source of clean power. Combined onshore and offshore wind power generated a record 28.1% of our total electricity last year, whilst accounting for more than 60% of electricity generated from renewable sources.
 
The UK’s first commercial onshore wind farm, Delabole in Cornwall, went operational in 1991, and the first offshore wind project off the coast of Blyth in the north east of England began generating in 2000. Initially, wind deployment climbed slowly to 1GW in 2005 and grew to 5GW in 2010, before expanding rapidly to 10GW in 2013 and 15GW in early 2017. Capacity has subsequently doubled in just seven years to reach the 30GW milestone.
 
Viking Wind Farm has been in development for around 15 years, at a cost of approximately £1.2bn in private investment, and will provide energy for households roughly equivalent to a city the size of Birmingham.

«

UK electricity demand is about 76GW, and the UK government wants to have 100% of energy from zero-carbon sources (some news reports wrongly said “renewables”: have people forgotten about nuclear?) by 2030. Very tall order.
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Midjourney says it’s ‘getting into hardware’ • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

»

Midjourney, the AI image-generating platform that’s reportedly raking in more than $200m in revenue without any VC investment, is getting into hardware.

The company made the announcement in a post on X on Wednesday. Its new hardware team will be based in San Francisco, it revealed.

As for what hardware Midjourney, which has a team of fewer than 100 people, might pursue, there might be a clue in its hiring of Ahmad Abbas in February. Abbas, an ex-Neuralink staffer, helped engineer the Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s mixed reality headset.

Midjourney CEO David Holz is also no stranger to hardware. He co-founded Leap Motion, which built motion-tracking peripherals. (Abbas worked together with Holz at Leap, in fact.)

«

Even so, hard to imagine what sort of hardware an AI generation company would make. A headset is wayyyy too expensive to develop, let alone sell. What else makes sense? Especially given the standard caveat – if you want to make a small fortune in hardware, start with a large fortune.
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Chatbots offer cops the “ultimate out” to spin police reports, expert says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

If you were suspected of a crime, would you trust a chatbot to accurately explain what happened?

Some police departments think the tech is ready. And officers who have started using chatbots to quickly complete their most dreaded task of drafting police reports seemingly don’t want to go back to spending hours each week doing their own paperwork.

In June, a police department in Frederick, Colorado, boasted that it was the “first law enforcement agency in the world to go live with Axon Draft One,” a new kind of police tech that allows a chatbot to spit out AI-generated police reports almost immediately after a body camera stops recording a police interaction.

Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model—which also fuels ChatGPT—Draft One was initially pitched in April to police departments globally. Axon, a billion-dollar company known for its tasers and body cameras, hyped it as “a revolutionary new software product that drafts high-quality police report narratives in seconds based on auto-transcribed body-worn camera audio.” And according to Axon, cops couldn’t wait to try it out, with some departments eagerly joining trials.

Ars confirmed that by May, Frederick’s police department was the first agency to purchase the product, soon followed by an untold number of departments around the US.

Relying exclusively on body camera audio—not video—Draft One essentially summarizes the key points of a recording, similar to how AI assistants summarize the audio of a Zoom meeting.

This may seem like an obvious use for AI, but legal and civil rights experts have warned that the humble police report is the root of the entire justice system, and tampering with it could have serious consequences. Police reports influence not just plea bargains, sentencing, discovery processes, and trial outcomes, but also how society holds police accountable.

«

American police are bad enough, but they keep finding ways to make it worse.
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The rise of wearable smart rings • Forbes

Tim Bajarin:

»

There is a relatively new category of wearables called smart rings.

The leader in this area is the Oura Ring, which started as a Kickstarter project in 2015. It went through two models before the Ring 3, introduced in 2021, took off, and to date, it has sold 2.5 million rings.

According to Toms Guide, the Oura Ring 4 could be released by the end of 2024. Although details about what new features will be in this new ring are sparse, the Oura Ring has solid momentum behind it. In an earlier column in Forbes, I stated that I expect it and other smart rings to be on many people’s holiday wish lists.

I have been testing and using the Ultrahuman Ring AIR since February. I like its health monitoring features, especially sleep tracking. I charge my Apple Watch overnight and defer the sleep tracking to my ring. This ring also has a PPG sensor that can track vital statistics like your heart rate, blood oxygen level, sleep, and movement.

The ring contains a 6-axis motion sensor to make movement tracking more accurate. According to Ultrahuman, it’s constructed from “fighter jet grade titanium,” and reinforced with tungsten, which means it should be able to withstand whatever punishment you put it through.

«

I wonder if he’s being ironic, but what sort of “punishment” is he expecting to put a ring through? Plus I have yet to read a piece that explains how any of the “sleep monitoring” data is in any way actionable. If you don’t sleep well, you tend to know it, and there isn’t much you can do about it. Plus I checked on the Ultrahuman page, and it doesn’t do payments, which you can do with a Watch. I really don’t see the point.
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The rise and fall of OpenSea • The Verge

Ben Weiss:

»

Cryptocurrency values may be back up, but one hyped storyline from the last crypto craze hasn’t recovered: the NFT. In January 2022, the total monthly sales volume for the asset class peaked at more than $6bn, per CryptoSlam. Now, it’s below $430m as of July. NFTs are hanging on, but they’re in troubled waters. “My mom thinks I’m a scam artist,” I overheard one conference attendee [in April, for NFTs] say.

At OpenSea, once the largest marketplace for NFTs, more storms have gathered. One of the most valuable private startups to come out of the incubator Y Combinator is now facing pending litigation from the Securities and Exchange Commission, a previously unreported “matter” with the Federal Trade Commission, inbounds from US and international tax authorities, heightened competition, accusations of gender discrimination, and employee attrition. 

Interviews with 18 current and former employees, as well as internal company documents and conversations with investors, artists, and other stakeholders in the NFT industry, illustrate how a startup inspired by cat JPEGs has morphed into what one former staffer called a “lite” version of Meta that seems lost between the cultures of Big Tech and crypto.

Finzer once pitched OpenSea as a port of entry to a vast new internet. But now that the NFT high tide has receded, that pitch seems shallow.

«

I’d like to know how much of that money was real, believable, fiat currency, and how much was crypto.
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Spotify has a fake-band problem. It’s a sign of things to come • Slate

Andy Vasoyan:

»

If you ask their shareholders, Spotify is in a great place right now. Ask anyone else, and it’s a mess of scams, tone-deaf CEO messaging, and lawsuits. One of the weirdest scams that recently came to light involves (what else) AI-generated content.

Here’s the gist: covers of popular songs were being inserted into large, publicly available playlists, hidden among dozens of other covers by real artists while racking up millions of listens and getting paid.

The artists “performing” the covers—the Highway Outlaws, Waterfront Wranglers, Saltwater Saddles—all fit a certain pattern, with monthly listeners in the hundreds of thousands, zero social media footprint, and some very ChatGPT-sounding bios. A group of vigilante Redditors initially found the pattern in bands covering country classics, but a wider look showed that there were groups covering songs across decades and genres. None of the bands had originals, but a group might cover the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Third Eye Blind and then pivot to “Linger” by the Cranberries in the same record. If you didn’t think the song was AI, you probably wouldn’t suspect a thing.

“Apparently this has been going on for several years, with ambient music and with electronic music and jazz,” said calibuildr, the Redditor who posted the initial thread on r/countrymusic and asked to be identified by their handle. “I think the new thing here is that with A.I. being this consumer product, anybody can make a thing with vocals now.”

A lawyer for 11A, the label claiming to be working with the artists involved in the thread, said their client is properly paying royalties and has documents that show the involvement of human musicians. He would not reply to further requests for comment and did not offer contact information for the label, the only trace of which is an expired domain and a 117-follower Facebook profile with the last post in 2021—not exactly congruent with the numbers its artists are doing online.

«

Does Spotify care? Does it hell. What this does mean is less money for other (human) artists, because the money paid is all pooled and then shared out according to hours played.
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Hello, you’re here because you compared AI image editing to Photoshop • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

“We’ve had Photoshop for 35 years” is a common response to rebut concerns about generative AI, and you’ve landed here because you’ve made that argument in a comment thread or social media.

There are countless reasons to be concerned about how AI image editing and generation tools will impact the trust we place in photographs and how that trust (or lack thereof) could be used to manipulate us. That’s bad, and we know it’s already happening. So, to save us all time and energy, and from wearing our fingers down to nubs by constantly responding to the same handful of arguments, we’re just putting them all in a list in this post.

Sharing this will be far more efficient after all — just like AI! Isn’t that delightful! 

Argument: “You can already manipulate images like this in Photoshop”

It’s easy to make this argument if you’ve never actually gone through the process of manually editing a photo in apps like Adobe Photoshop, but it’s a frustratingly over-simplified comparison. Let’s say some dastardly miscreant wants to manipulate an image to make it look like someone has a drug problem — here are just a few things they’d need to do:

• Have access to (potentially expensive) desktop software. Sure, mobile editing apps exist, but they’re not really suitable for much outside of small tweaks like skin smoothing and color adjustment. So, for this job, you’ll need a computer — a costly investment for internet fuckery. And while some desktop editing apps are free (Gimp, Photopea, etc.), most professional-level tools are not. Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps are among the most popular, and the recurring subscriptions ($263.88 per year for Photoshop alone) are notoriously hard to cancel.
• Locate suitable pictures of drug paraphernalia. Even if you have some on hand, you can’t just slap any old image in and hope it’ll look right. You have to account for the appropriate lighting and positioning of the photo they’re being added to, so everything needs to match up. Any reflections on bottles should be hitting from the same angle, for example, and objects photographed at eye level will look obviously fake if dropped into an image that was snapped at more of an angle.
• Understand and use a smorgasbord of complicated editing tools. Any inserts need to be cut from whatever background they were on and then blended seamlessly into their new environment. That might require adjusting color balance, tone, and exposure levels, smoothing edges, or adding in new shadows or reflections. It takes both time and experience to ensure the results look even passable, let alone natural.

«

Entertaining piece: and yes, AI stuff is way more easy. Never got the hang of Photoshop at all.
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Roblox is already the biggest game in the world. Why can’t it make a profit (and how can it)? • MatthewBall

Matthew Ball:

»

NPD/Circana reports that Roblox is typically one of the 3–7 most played games on PlayStation and Xbox (Roblox is not available on Switch or Steam), and SensorTower says that in 2023, Roblox averaged more iOS/Android monthly active users than any other game (including Candy Crush!).
View fullsize

Compared to its most similar competitors—the social virtual world platforms, Minecraft and Fortnite — Roblox has about 5x and 2.25x as many monthly players. For non-gamers, Roblox has about two thirds as many monthly users as Spotify and half as many as Snap (though it probably has a lower share of daily-to-monthly active users) and is roughly as popular as Instagram circa Q4 2015, and Facebook in Q3 2009. Each month, players spend close to six billion hours using Roblox.

…Run-rate spending on Roblox is over $3.8bn (which likely exceeds that of any other game globally) and should pass $4bn by the end of the year.

…Roblox has a costs problem. Over the last twelve months it has averaged $138 in costs for every $100 in revenue.

…an average of 23% of revenues are consumed by various App Store/platform fees (this sum is less than 30% because roughly 20% of sales are direct via browser or PC, where Roblox pays credit card processing fees but not 30% store commissions). Another 26% of revenues are paid out to Roblox’s UGC developers.

«

It’s a long piece, but basically the solution for Roblox boils down to: stop having to pay app store fees. Possibly governments will come to its aid there.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Poland, renewable energy is making inroads into its coal-heavy electricity generation balance. CC-licensed photo by Greenpeace Polska 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. Clean, honestly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Threads blocks searches for ‘Covid’ and ‘long Covid’ • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz:

»

Instagram’s text-based social platform Threads last week rolled out its new search function, a crucial step toward the platform’s expansion and one that would give it more parity with X, formerly known as Twitter.

Not even 24 hours later, the company was embroiled in controversy. When users went to Threads to search for content related to “covid” and “long covid,” they were met with a blank screen that showed no search results and a pop-up linking to the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Meta acknowledged in a statement to The Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms and said that other terms are being blocked, but the company declined to provide a list of them. A search by The Post discovered that the words “sex,” “nude,” “gore,” “porn,” “coronavirus,” “vaccines” and “vaccination” are also among blocked words.

“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement said, adding that the company will add search functionality for terms only “once we are confident in the quality of the results.”

Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, discovered this himself when he attempted to use Threads to seek out research related to covid, something he says he does every day. “I was excited by search [on Threads],” he said. “When I typed in covid, I came up with no search results.”

Other public health workers criticized the company’s decision and said its timing was especially poor, given the current coronavirus uptick.

«

Just as a reminder, it was literally yesterday that Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to senators complaining about being censored over, um, Covid by the Biden administration was made public. Who needs the government to get in the way, though, when you can just do it yourself?
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Court says Section 230 doesn’t shield TikTok from Blackout Challenge death suit • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

An appeals court has revived a lawsuit against TikTok by reversing a lower court’s ruling that Section 230 immunity shielded the short video app from liability after a child died taking part in a dangerous “Blackout Challenge.”

Several kids died taking part in the “Blackout Challenge,” which Third Circuit Judge Patty Shwartz described in her opinion as encouraging users “to choke themselves with belts, purse strings, or anything similar until passing out.”

Because TikTok promoted the challenge in children’s feeds, Tawainna Anderson counted among mourning parents who attempted to sue TikTok in 2022. Ultimately, she was told that TikTok was not responsible for recommending the video that caused the death of her daughter Nylah.

In her opinion, Shwartz wrote that Section 230 does not bar Anderson from arguing that TikTok’s algorithm amalgamates third-party videos, “which results in ‘an expressive product’ that ‘communicates to users’ [that a] curated stream of videos will be interesting to them.”

The judge cited a recent Supreme Court ruling that “held that a platform’s algorithm that reflects ‘editorial judgments’ about compiling the third-party speech it wants in the way it wants’ is the platform’s own ‘expressive product’ and is therefore protected by the First Amendment,” Shwartz wrote.

Because TikTok’s For You Page (FYP) algorithm decides which third-party speech to include or exclude and organizes content, TikTok’s algorithm counts as TikTok’s own “expressive activity.” That “expressive activity” is not protected by Section 230, which only shields platforms from liability for third-party speech, not platforms’ own speech, Shwartz wrote.

«

It’s taken those who don’t like it a long time to figure out an attack on Section 230, but they’ve finally worked out their angle. This is going to be interesting to watch. And uncomfortable for TikTok.
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Telegram CEO Pavel Durov charged by French prosecutors • NBC News

Kevin Collier and Rob Wile:

»

Pavel Durov, the CEO and co-founder of the news and messaging app Telegram, has been charged in France with enabling various forms of criminality in the app, French prosecutors said Wednesday.

One of the charges — complicity in administering an online platform permitting illicit transactions by an organized group — carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of €500,000 ($555,750), prosecutors said.

It marks one of the few instances in which the CEO of a major internet platform has been charged over alleged criminal failure to moderate what users do on its platform.

In a statement Wednesday, the Paris prosecutor’s office said that Telegram had almost completely failed to respond to its legal requests for user data in prosecuting cybercrime cases.

Prosecutors cited numerous offenses in Wednesday’s statement, including refusal to communicate with authorities, “complicity” in offenses related to child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, and implementing encrypted technology without proper declaration.

While Durov awaits trial, his bail is set at €5m ($5.6m). He will be forbidden to leave France and will be required to report to the police twice a week, the release said.

«

The point about Telegram is that the lack of encryption means it’s easy to bring this charge. Though one wonders if there’s some geopolitics going on underneath, and that France (or its allies) wants something out of Russia in return for Durov’s future release.

Also, he’s one hell of a flight risk. Got to think that there will be undercover police or similar following him around.
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Using LLMs for coding at Amazon • LinkedIn

Andrew Jassy is chief executive of Amazon:

»

One of the most tedious (but critical tasks) for software development teams is updating foundational software. It’s not new feature work, and it doesn’t feel like you’re moving the experience forward. As a result, this work is either dreaded or put off for more exciting work—or both.

Amazon Q, our GenAI assistant for software development, is trying to bring some light to this heaviness. We have a new code transformation capability, and here’s what we found when we integrated it into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades:

– The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).

– In under six months, we’ve been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes.

– The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains.

«

If we assume that this code is robust and tested, the question is: why are LLMs good at this? I think the answer is that coding is a very limited knowledge space, far more constrained in what is allowed than normal language (and especially English). Plus there’s a colossal amount of it online to have trained the LLM on.
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Poland is finally kicking its dirty coal habit • The Progress Playbook

Nick Hedley:

»

After getting off to a late start in the energy transition, Poland is making up for lost time.

Over the first seven months of 2024, renewables comprised 30.2% of the country’s electrical output — on par with the global average, and nearly double the levels seen just three years ago, according to data collated by research group Ember.

On the other hand, coal’s share declined to 57.6% over the seven-month period, with the dirtiest fossil fuel hitting a fresh monthly low of 53% in July. As recently as 2022, coal accounted 70% of Poland’s power generation.

The rapid shift in favour of wind and solar energy was prompted, in part, by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent surge in fossil fuel prices.

More recently, the formation of a new government in December 2023, led by centrist prime minister Donald Tusk, has added new impetus to Poland’s decarbonisation drive.

Whereas the previous conservative government aimed to raise the share of renewables in the electricity mix to just 32% by 2030, Tusk is targeting a share of at least 50% by then, according to a draft update of Poland’s National Energy and Climate Plan.

To get there, his coalition government plans to rely heavily on wind energy — both onshore and offshore — while also steadily increasing solar’s contribution. Developers currently plan to build 5.9GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030, according to Reuters.

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It’s an astonishingly carbon-heavy generation picture: nuclear is basically a rounding error.
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Stolen photos of European influencers used to push Trump propaganda on X • CNN

Katie Polglase, Pallabi Munsi, Barbara Arvanitidis, and Alex Platt:

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Luna, a self-described 32-year-old “MAGA Trump supporter” from the battleground state of Wisconsin, has gained a huge following since she joined X, formerly Twitter, in March. Her timeline has become a digital bullhorn for the “Make America Great Again” movement, praising former President Donald Trump’s re-election bid, promoting conspiracy theories about his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and touting Republican talking points to nearly 30,000 followers, who she addresses as “patriots.”

“Would You Support Trump Being The President forever? I wonder if you all support Trump for president just like me,” @Luna_2K24 posted on July 29, sharing a beach selfie in a white bikini and asking her followers to respond with an American flag emoji if they agreed. The post was viewed by around 54,000 people.

But Luna isn’t real. The photos of the smiling brunette posted periodically on @Luna_2K24’s timeline are of Debbie Nederlof, a German fashion influencer who lives across the Atlantic and won’t be voting in the US presidential election in November. When CNN reached out to the 32-year-old, a trained optician and single mother who is working two jobs – as a social media manager at an engineering firm and as a model to raise money for her child – she was angry and frustrated that her face was being used to push pro-Trump propaganda on X.

“To be honest, ‘what the f**k?’ was my reaction. That was my reaction, because I have nothing to do with the United States. With Trump, the political things over there. What the hell do I – from a small place in Germany – care about US politics?” she said.

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Quite a few of the accounts have “verified” status, which of course means a credit card – perhaps stolen – being used to pay for what used to be a mark of authenticity.
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Just four companies are hoarding tens of billions of dollars worth of Nvidia GPU chips • Sherwood News

Jon Keegan:

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Meta just announced the release of Llama 3.1, the latest iteration of their open source large language model. The long-awaited, jumbo-sized model has high scores on the same benchmarks that everyone else uses, and the company said it beats OpenAi’s ChatGPT 4o on some tests. 

According to the research paper that accompanies the model release, the 405b parameter version of the model (the largest flavor) was trained using up to 16,000 of Nvidia’s popular H100 GPUs . The Nvidia H100 is one of the most expensive, and most coveted pieces of technology powering the current AI boom. Meta appears to have one of the largest hoards of the powerful GPUs. 

Of course, the list of companies seeking such powerful chips for AI training is long, and likely includes most large technology companies today, but only a few companies have publicly crowed about how many H100s they have.  

The H100 is estimated to cost between $20,000 and $40,000 meaning that Meta used up to $640m worth of hardware to train the model. And that’s just a small slice of the Nvidia hardware Meta has been stockpiling. Earlier this year, Meta said that it was aiming to have a stash of 350,000 H100s in its AI training infrastructure – which adds up to over $10bn worth of the specialized Nvidia chips. 

Venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz is reportedly hoarding more than 20,000 of the pricey GPUs, which it is renting out to AI startups in exchange for equity, according to The Information. 

Tesla has also been collecting H100s. Musk said on an earnings call in April that Tesla wants to have between 35,000 and 85,000 H100s by the end of the year.  

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That’s a sneaky move by a16z. The other company which has (or wants to have by year-end) a stack of these is xAI, Musk’s company. I don’t follow what Tesla gets out of the chips – are they essential for car design or similar?
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About half of TikTok users under 30 keep up with politics, news there • Pew Research Center

Colleen McClain:

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TikTok has been so popular among young Americans that presidential campaigns are using it for voter outreach. And some young adults are using TikTok to keep up with politics or get news, a March Pew Research Center survey shows.

Our survey explored various reasons people might use TikTok and other social media platforms. Young TikTok users stand out from their older peers on several of these reasons, including:

• Keeping up with politics or political issues. For 48% of TikTok users ages 18 to 29, this is a major or minor reason why they’re on the platform.

By comparison, 36% of those ages 30 to 49 and even smaller shares of older users say the same:
• 22% of those 50 to 64
•24% of those 65 and older

• Getting news. We also asked TikTok users if getting news in general is a reason they use the platform – regardless of whether that’s political news or another topic entirely. About half of those under 30 say getting news is a major or minor reason they use TikTok.

That compares with 41% of TikTok users ages 30 to 49 who say getting news is a reason they’re on it. The shares of older users saying so are even smaller:
• 29% of those 50 to 64
• 23% of those 65 and older

TikTok has increasingly become a destination for news, bucking trends on other social media sites. A 2023 Center study showed more Americans – and especially young Americans – regularly get news on the platform compared with a few years ago. 

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Hang on though, 23% of TikTok users over 65 are using it for news? Though this doesn’t state what proportion or number of Americans use TikTok. (Notable social network fact: Pew found that two-thirds never post anything.) A 2023 survey suggested one-third of adults use it. That might be higher now, but unlikely to challenge Facebook, at 68%.

Even so. TikTok for news? As folks are apt to say, concerning.
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Brave lays off 27 employees • TechCrunch

Ivan Mehta:

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Web browser and search startup Brave has laid off 27 employees across the different departments, TechCrunch has learned. The company confirmed the layoffs but didn’t give more details about the total headcount left nor the reason for the layoffs. PitchBook however estimates that Brave has around 191 employees, working out to Brave cutting 14% of staff.

The new round of job cuts comes about 10 months after the company let go of 9% of its total workforce in October 2023. At that time, Brave said the cuts were due to “cost management in this challenging economic environment.”

After initially fashioning itself a ‘blockchain browser‘ and adding several crypto-related features, Brave has more recently leaned into AI with its product releases this year. The company launched its AI assistant, Leo, on desktop, Android, iPad, and iPhone in a staggered release cycle.

The company integrated its own search results with its Leo chatbot in June. Users could, for example, use the chatbot to ask about the score of a sports match, or get additional context about an article they are reading without navigating to a search page. The company is also selling a Leo Premium subscription for $14.99 per month for access to better models and higher limit rates.

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Still can’t see how a company reliant on a browser and a bit of search on the side can survive. Talking of which, Mozilla’s accounts (to the end of 2022) show it getting healthy revenue of around $600m, and spending about $425m. All fine? Except “approximately 82% of Mozilla’s revenues from customers with contracts were derived from one customer”. Ah. They’re probably sacrificing goats at Mozilla HQ against Google having to withdraw from default contracts with browsers after the DOJ antitrust verdict.
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Why Texas Republicans are souring on crypto • The Economist

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Just saying no to crypto would be an ideological swerve for Texas. When running for governor in 2014 Greg Abbott took campaign donations in bitcoin before it was cool. He has since fervently embraced miners. After Uri, the winter storm in 2021 that left 4.5m Texans without power and killed nearly 300 people, he looked to crypto as a tool to make the grid more robust. Bringing more large loads onto the grid would incentivise power stations to produce more electricity and keep the cost of energy low, he reckoned. That year Mr Patrick created a working group to “develop a master plan for the expansion of the blockchain industry in Texas”.

Around that time many crypto miners, including Riot, signed contracts with energy suppliers that locked them into fixed rates for up to a decade. Several years on, that decision looks clever. Unlike steel factories or paper mills, bitcoin miners can temporarily shut down without harming supply chains (because, although they say bitcoin is “not just magic internet beans”, there is no product that needs to get to market). That allows them to take advantage of two emergency schemes.

On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price soars, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by [Texas grid operator] Ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.

The Tech Transparency Project, a non-profit organisation based in Washington, DC, accuses miners of acting as an energy-arbitrage business in disguise, holding Texas “hostage” and wasting taxpayer dollars. Their [bitcoin miners – I think? – Overspill Ed] ties to China make them more dubious. But the industry is adamant that it is a stellar corporate citizen and critical to the grid’s health. By acting as “dimmer switches”, mines offer Ercot flexibility at a price that no one else can match, says Lee Bratcher of the Texas Blockchain Council, an advocacy group. Riot reckons the industry is being unfairly targeted and that replacing mines with batteries would cost the state even more.

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So bitcoin mining encourages overcapacity in the electricity grid and that’s good? I don’t think that’s good, actually, even though Texas is adding more renewables than anywhere else.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified