The woolly mammoth could make a comeback by 2028, and one company has a plan for how to monetise it. CC-licensed photo by Bjorn on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Ooh, nearly big number. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Humane Ai Pin review: too clunky, too limited • WIRED

Julian Chokkattu:

»

I increasingly began to doubt the accuracy of the information the Humane wearable was providing. My mom told me to avoid high-fructose corn syrup right as my dad handed me a bottle of Malta Goya—she said the sweetener in it was banned in California. The Ai Pin agreed with this when I asked it. However, California did not ban it; the state banned four food additives last year, none of which are high-fructose corn syrup.

On my parents’ TV screen, an image of a temple popped up on the Chromecast’s screensaver. My dad asked where it was, so I positioned my Ai Pin toward the screen and said, “Look and tell me where this picture is from.” The answer? Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I didn’t have a specific reason to doubt this, but because the Pin doesn’t have a proper screen, there’s no way to verify it. I launched Google Lens on my phone, pointed the camera at the screen, and … well, the temple is the Phraya Nakhon Cave in Thailand. The images in the Google search matched perfectly with the screensaver.

Not being able to fully trust the results from the Ai Pin’s Ai Mic and Vision features (the latter is still in beta) is just one problem with this wearable computer. Unfortunately, there’s not much else to do with it as it’s missing a great many features. The Humane Ai Pin could be an interesting gadget a year from now after promised software updates, but at the moment it’s a party trick.

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And this is one of the kinder reviews. Engadget was pretty brutal. However, The Verge: even more so. Shall we start the sweepstake on when Humane is going to close its doors or get acquihired?
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Elon Musk’s X botched an attempt to replace “twitter.com” links with “x.com” • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

Elon Musk’s clumsy brand shift from Twitter to X caused a potentially big problem this week when the social network started automatically changing “twitter.com” to “x.com” in links. The automatic text replacement reportedly applied to any URL ending in “twitter.com” even if it wasn’t actually a twitter.com link.

The change apparently went live on X’s app for iOS, but not on the web version. It seems to have been a problem for a day or two before the company fixed the automatic text replacement so that it wouldn’t affect non-Twitter.com domains.

Security reporter Brian Krebs called the move “a gift to phishers” in an article yesterday. It was a phishing risk because scammers could register a domain name like “netflitwitter.com,” which would appear as “netflix.com” in posts on X, but clicking the link would take a user to netflitwitter.com.

“A search at DomainTools.com shows at least 60 domain names have been registered over the past two days for domains ending in ‘twitter.com,’ although research so far shows the majority of these domains have been registered ‘defensively’ by private individuals to prevent the domains from being purchased by scammers,” Krebs wrote.

Even if the change had been implemented smoothly, auto-replacing “twitter.com” with “x.com” doesn’t do much to help Musk cement his branding shift because x.com still redirects to twitter.com.

One of the newly registered domain names inspired by X’s text replacement is the example mentioned above. Navigating to netflitwitter.com will show you a message that says, “This domain has been acquired to prevent its use for malicious purposes.” The webpage was set up by X user @yuyu0127_ and goes on to say:

»

As of April 8, 2024, the iOS Twitter (now X) client automatically replaces the text “twitter.com” in posts with “x.com” as part of its functionality. Therefore, for example, a URL that appears to be “netflix.com” will actually redirect to “netflitwitter.com” when clicked.
Please be aware that there is a potential for this feature to be exploited in the future, by acquiring domains containing “twitter.com” to lead users to malicious pages. This domain, “netflitwitter.com,” has been acquired for protective purposes to prevent its use for such malicious activities.

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Macs to get AI-focussed M4 chips starting in late 2024 • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple will begin updating its Mac lineup with M4 chips in late 2024, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The M4 chip will be focused on improving performance for artificial intelligence capabilities.

Last year, Apple introduced the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips all at once in October, so it’s possible we could see the M4 lineup come during the same time frame. Gurman says that the entire Mac lineup is slated to get the M4 across late 2024 and early 2025.

The iMac, low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro, high-end 14-inch MacBook Pro, 16-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini machines will be updated with M4 chips first, followed by the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models in spring 2025, the Mac Studio in mid-2025, and the Mac Pro later in 2025.

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AI chips, AI chips everywhere. (And the Mac Pro too.)
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Can chatbots hold meaningful conversations? • Nautilus

Elena Kazamia:

»

Arseny Moskvichev dreams of the day he can have a meaningful conversation with artificial intelligence. “By meaningful, I mean a conversation that has the power to change you,” says the cognitive and computer scientist. “The problem,” says Moskvichev, “is that LLMs are complete amnesiacs. They only have so much context they can attend to. If you’re out of this context, they forget everything you spoke about with them.”

Even the most advanced chatbots can only process about 16,000 words of text within a prompt when in conversation with a human user. This is called a “context window.” And they can’t connect the information they receive during different “conversations” with a human, or build a storyline.

To help chatbots learn to hold life-changing conversations, and to improve their comprehension of the deep complexities of context—of the webs of relationships between people, events, and timelines that govern human lives—Moskvichev and his colleagues are teaching them to read novels, the way we might learn to read them in high school literature classes.

The act of reading a novel might seem like a relaxing pastime, but it requires a nuanced intelligence. We use memory and complex, layered comprehension to follow multiple characters through twisting plots, scene changes, and narrative. And while we might not think about it, the average novel averages around 80,000 words. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, for instance, runs at 82,000 words, while The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E. DuBois, totals around 72,000. The Little Prince, a children’s book, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, has around 17,000 words. All those words gradually build a story we hold and examine in our minds. But such skills are currently out of reach to Large Language Models (LLMs) like Open AI’s ChatGPT, which can process text but cannot be said to read the way we do.

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A “conversation that can change you”? Shouldn’t Moskvichev just cut out the middleman and read lots of novels? (Or listen to them as audiobooks?)
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AI-generated pornography will disrupt the adult content industry and raise new ethical concerns • The Conversation

Simon Dubé and Valerie Lapointe:

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Advancements in machine learning and AI algorithms for image and video production have contributed to the growth of websites for AI-generated pornography, commonly referred to as AI porn.

The mass production of AI porn has significant ethical and social implications. It can offer an unprecedented quantity of customizable sexual stimuli tailored to users’ preferences while drastically cutting down production costs.

On one hand, these new tools enable content creators to produce diverse erotica and allow widespread access to personalized sexual stimuli that meet people’s needs and desires, thereby enhancing their sex life and well-being.

On the other hand, it could lead to problematic overuse of pornography, the spread of deepfakes, and the production of illegal content, such as child pornography.

AI porn also has labour implications, and could create copyright issues as well as impact the jobs of sex workers and adult content creators.

In all likelihood, the impact of AI porn will be more nuanced: some users will benefit, while others may be negatively impacted by it. However, the pace of technological developments leaves little time to plan and research how to harmoniously integrate this new technology into our lives. Like in many other sectors, we are not ready for AI porn.

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I dunno, I bet there’s a demographic that’s extremely ready for AI porn. (Dubé is a research fellow at Indiana University, Lapointe is a PhD candidate in psychology at Quebec University.)
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Colossal Biosciences has made headlines as the de-extinction startup primed to bring back the woolly mammoth. Here’s its business model • Fortune

Allie Garfinkle:

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I’m like everyone else, and am obsessed with the idea of seeing a woolly mammoth. But what I really wanted to know was: how do you make money doing it? Thankfully, the answer’s not the woolly mammoth meatball—that’s a project cooked up by a different company focused on lab-grown meat. Colossal’s mammoth monetization model emphasizes two near-to-medium term efforts, and a longer-term play.

Let’s start with the near-term: “There’s consumer education, where we already get billions of media impressions,” said [CEO and founder Ben] Lamm. “We’re doing a docuseries, and we do lots of different educational content. Transparently, those do make money…Then, the midterm is the technology companies that we spin out, as we monetize, but those take a while to get to the point where they’re successful.”

…the longer-term strategy is tied to Colossal’s already-extensive conservation efforts. “De-extinction and species preservation are connected,” said Lamm. “Sometimes people want to separate out species preservation, conservation, and I say, no, they’re all one thing.”

Colossal’s conservation efforts are wide-ranging. For example, the startup is currently working with the University of Alaska and University of Stockholm on one of the largest-ever studies focused on radiocarbon dating mammoths. Likewise, Colossal last year joined the BioRescue group working to save the northern white rhino from extinction. And, there’s the Victorian grassland earless dragon—a miniscule Australian lizard believed to be extinct in 1969. The lizard was recently rediscovered in the wild, and Colossal’s set up a breeding and release colony with the Melbourne Zoo devoted to the fetching little reptile.

Lamm even envisions getting a piece of the carbon credit market, which is projected to be as big as $2.4 trillion by 2027, according to some estimates. “In the long-term, if we get to sustainable populations of, say, the Thylacine [Tasmanian tiger] in southern Australia, we’ll get government subsidies, carbon credits, biodiversity credits.”

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Hm. I feel like the woolly mammoth meatball might be a more solid market. That, and hunting rights.
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AWS resource restrictions point to datacenter power issues • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

Datacenter power issues in Ireland may be coming to a head amid reports from customers that Amazon is restricting resources users can spin up in that nation, even directing them to other AWS regions across Europe instead.

Energy consumed by datacenters is a growing concern, especially in places such as Ireland where there are clusters of facilities around Dublin that already account for a significant share of the country’s energy supply. This may be leading to restrictions on how much infrastructure can be used, given the power requirements. According to Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO), power usage by datacenters increased by 31% between 2021 and 2022, hitting 18% of the total metered electricity consumption.

A recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that if unchecked, this could grow to 32% of Ireland’s electricity by 2026.

AWS users have informed The Register that there are sometimes limits on the resources that they can access in its Ireland bit barn, home to Amazon’s eu-west-1 region, especially with power-hungry instances that make use of GPUs to accelerate workloads such as AI.

“You cannot spin up GPU nodes in AWS Dublin as those locations are maxed out power-wise. There is reserved capacity for EC2 just in case,” one source told us. “If you have a problem with that, AWS Europe will point you at spare capacity in Sweden and other parts of the EU.”

We asked AWS about these issues, but when it finally responded the company was somewhat evasive.

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The Irish power grid operator was also evasive. When both organisations are evasive like that, you can take it as confirmation that yes, you’re right.
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AWS told to pay $525m in cloud storage patent suit • The Register

Dan Robinson:

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A jury has ordered Amazon Web Services to pay $525m for infringing distributed data storage patents in a case brought by a technology outfit called Kove IO.

Kove, which styles itself as a pioneer in high-performance computer storage and data management technologies, filed its original complaint [PDF] in 2018. It claims that AWS is infringing on three Kove-held patents in cloud services, such as the Amazon S3 storage platform, as well as in its DynamoDB database service, and in other related products and services.

The trial came to a close on Wednesday (April 10), with the jury finding in favor of Kove and awarding it damages of over half a billion dollars. AWS said it intends to appeal the verdict, which acknowledged that the company had not willfully infringed on the patents in question.

The technology at the center of the case relates to distributed hash tables, a decentralized system used to store and retrieve data, with the data in this instance being the location information for specific data files in a scale-out data storage platform.

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Not sure it really matters whether you meant to infringe the patents; it’s just the fact of the infringement. Wonder if this company is also going after Google and Microsoft.
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‘Help’ written in palm fronds assists US forces in rescuing Micronesians stranded on tiny island • Stars and Stripes

Joseph Ditzler:

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The men, all in their 40s, set sail from Polowat Atoll, Micronesia, on March 31 in a small, open 20-foot skiff powered by an outboard motor, according to a news release from Coast Guard Forces Micronesia, Sector Guam. The men had experience navigating in those seas.

The skiff was damaged, though the release did not specify how or when, and the motor rendered inoperative.

A week later, on April 6, a relative “reported her three uncles had not returned from Pikelot Atoll,” approximately 115 miles northwest of Polowat Atoll, a part of Chuuk State in the Federated States of Micronesia.

Pikelot, a low coral island covered with palm trees and shrubs, is a speck just 2½ miles long and 1¾ miles wide in a search area the Coast Guard described as 78,800 square miles of the South Pacific.

Joint Rescue Sub-Center Guam mobilized a search that drew a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft from Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, and the Guam-based Coast Guard cutter Oliver Henry.

The Poseidon crew found the three Sunday thanks to a message they left on the Pikelot beach.

“In a remarkable testament to their will to be found, the mariners spelled out ‘HELP’ on the beach using palm leaves, a crucial factor in their discovery,” Coast Guard Lt. Chelsea Garcia, the search and rescue mission coordinator, said in the release. “This act of ingenuity was pivotal in guiding rescue efforts directly to their location.”

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There’s one really big question in my mind. Really big. Why did they spell HELP when they could have made SOS much bigger with the same number of fronds? (The picture shows that it’s a properly tiny atoll. They were lucky.) As the story points out, some previous stranded people did use SOS. Worked for them.
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Instagram will automatically blur nudes in direct messages • 404 Media

Samantha Cole:

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Instagram will soon start testing blurring nudes in direct messages, according to an announcement from Meta on Wednesday. It will use “on-device machine learning” to detect nudes, and is aimed at stopping sextortion schemes that target teenagers, the company wrote.

The “nudity protection” feature will detect nudes in direct messages and automatically blur them, both when you’re getting a nude sent to you and when you’re attempting to send one to someone else. Users will also see a popup message that says, “Take care when sharing sensitive photos. The photo is blurred because nudity protection is turned on. Others can screenshot or forward your photos without you knowing. You can unsend a photo if you change your mind, but there’s a chance others have already seen it.”

Because the processing is performed on device, Meta says its detection will still work on end-to-end encrypted chats, with Meta not having access to the images themselves unless a user reports them. 

The feature will be turned on by default for users under the age of 18, and adults will get a notification “encouraging” them to turn it on. “This feature is designed not only to protect people from seeing unwanted nudity in their DMs, but also to protect them from scammers who may send nude images to trick people into sending their own images in return,” the announcement says. 

…Meanwhile, Meta lets AI-generated fake influencers that steal real women’s images run rampant on Instagram and can’t stop even the most obvious catfish romance scams happening on the platform—and on Facebook, people are constantly being tricked by AI-generated content into believing it’s real.

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Have to admire Cole pointing out the non-thing that Meta has achieved here: how much of a problem are nude pics in DMs? Meta doesn’t say, though it does say

»

we’re also developing technology to help identify where accounts may potentially be engaging in sextortion scams, based on a range of signals that could indicate sextortion behavior. While these signals aren’t necessarily evidence that an account has broken our rules, we’re taking precautionary steps to help prevent these accounts from finding and interacting with teen accounts.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Developers will no longer be paid by Amazon to make Alexa apps. If we’re honest, voice-activated tubes haven’t been a huge success. CC-licensed photo by Smart Home Perfected 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. Pardon, what? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

America is sick of swiping • The Atlantic

Lora Kelley:

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By 2017, about five years after Tinder introduced the swipe, more than a quarter of different-sex couples were meeting on apps and dating websites, according to a study led by the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. Suddenly, saying “We met on Hinge” was as normal as saying “We met in college” or “We met through a friend.”

The share of couples meeting on apps has remained pretty consistent in the years since his 2017 study, Rosenfeld told me. But these days, the mood around dating apps has soured. As the apps seek to woo a new generation of daters, TikTok abounds with complaints about how hard it is to find a date on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Grindr, and all the rest. The novelty of swiping has worn off, and there hasn’t been a major innovation beyond it. As they push more paid features, the platforms themselves are facing rocky finances and stalling growth. Dating apps once looked like the foundation of American romance. Now the cracks are starting to show.

In 2022, a Pew Research Center survey found that about half of people have a positive experience with online dating, down from October 2019. With little success on the apps, a small but enthusiastic slice of singles are reaching for speed dating and matchmakers. Even the big dating apps seem aware that they are facing a crisis of public enthusiasm. A spokesperson for Hinge told me that Gen Z is its fastest-growing user segment, though the CEO of Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and Hinge, has gone on the defensive. Last week, he published an op-ed headlined “Dating apps are the best place to find love, no matter what you see on TikTok.” A spokesperson for Bumble told me that the company is “​​actively looking at how we can make dating fun again.”

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The pandemic had a big, negative effect; the question is what the recovery looks like.
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India’s electric rickshaws are leaving EVs in the dust • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

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At a small factory just north of Delhi, a welder named Ram Baran spends several hours each day training his coworkers in metal cutting, molding, and shaping bodies of three-wheeler electric vehicles.

Baran is not an engineer by education. He started working at the factory in 2017 as a helper — dusting, cleaning, and organizing items. A year later, he got the opportunity to upskill and get trained in welding by Chinese engineers. Nearly 80% of Baran’s 200 co-workers have followed a similar trajectory. “[They] taught us all the work,” Baran told Rest of World. “They taught us welding — how to put the parts and cut them. Over time, I picked up the work and got promoted. Now, our people can also teach these things.” 

Each month, this upskilled team at the factory in Sonipat — 40 kilometers from New Delhi — produces bodies and chassis for nearly 5,000 three-wheeler EVs, locally known as e-rickshaws, for the New Delhi-based YC Electric, India’s second-largest manufacturer in the segment. In 2023, YC Electric alone sold over 40,600 e-rickshaws, while 82,500 electric cars were sold in the country.

Even as India awaits its first Tesla, these humble e-rickshaws made by workers like Baran are powering an EV revolution in the country. In the last decade, around 1.73 million three-wheeler EVs have been sold in India. Just last month, around 500 manufacturers — most of them homegrown — sold over 44,000 e-rickshaws, compared to less than 6,800 electric cars sold during the month.

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MIT License text becomes viral “sad girl” piano ballad generated by AI • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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We’ve come a long way since primitive AI music generators in 2022. Today, AI tools like Suno.ai allow any series of words to become song lyrics, including inside jokes (as you’ll see below). On Wednesday, prompt engineer Riley Goodside tweeted an AI-generated song created with the prompt “sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License,” and it began to circulate widely in the AI community online.

The MIT License is a famous permissive software license created in the late 1980s, frequently used in open source projects. “My favorite part of this is ~1:25 it nails ‘WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY’ with a beautiful Imogen Heap-style glissando then immediately pronounces ‘FITNESS’ as ‘fistiff,'” Goodside wrote on X.

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Suitable background music while you’re programming, I guess.
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Fairphone’s Fairbuds are true wireless earbuds with repairable design and user-replaceable batteries • Liliputing

Brad Linder:

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Dutch smartphone maker Fairphone has made a name for itself by building sustainable products that are meant to last a long time. That’s because the company’s phones have user-repairable designs and the company sells spare parts (and sometimes even hardware upgrades).

Last year the company expanded into the wireless audio space with the launch of premium over-ear, wireless, noise-cancelling headphones called the Fairbuds XL that also have a modular, repairable design. Now the company is doing it again, but this time smaller. The Fairbuds are a pair of true wireless earbuds featuring sustainable design elements.

…The earbuds offer up to six hours of battery life and they come with a charging case that gives you another 20 hours of use between charges. And Fairphone offers iOS and Android apps that let you adjust EQ, install firmware updates, and make other changes.

…All told, the company offers seven repairable/replaceable components for the Fairbuds:

• Earbud (left)
• Earbud (right)
• Earbud battery and silicon ring kit
• Earbud tips
• Charging case outer shell
• Charging case core
• Charging case battery

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I thought that sure, it’s all replaceable, but it’s going to cost a ton. Nope: €149. (Europe-only. Not sure if that includes the UK.)
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Peloton is a media company now, with media company problems • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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Loyal fans and a sticky product should equal piles and piles of money. Instead, Peloton’s valuation has dropped about 97% since its pandemic high. It’s managed to turn it around a bit — Peloton’s revenue has been steadily clawing its way back for the past year, even if it’s falling short of investor targets.

But it’s not rolling in cash. Some of that might be because it’s not always clear what Peloton views its product to be.

The company’s leadership maintains that hardware will always be a key part of its strategy, and to be fair, there’s a common through line when you speak to the Peloton diehards.

“It reduces friction working out and when I remember working out with Apple Fitness Plus, like, I didn’t even have a place to put my iPhone,” says Oz, a longtime Peloton user who switched from Apple’s exercise service once he moved to the suburbs. “I think when it comes to fitness, you just want the least amount of friction because you’re already kind of having a hard time wanting to do it.”

…Last year, Peloton also rebranded its app, launching three app-only subscription tiers to lure people into its ecosystem. When Lululemon decided to call it quits with the Mirror, another rival for strength, pilates, and yoga, Peloton swooped in with a five-year deal to share content between the two brands. As Lululemon parachutes out of the connected fitness business, its users will get access to Peloton classes. Along that vein, Peloton closed out 2023 by allowing some subscribers to pair the app with third-party treadmills. It kicked off 2024 by announcing it’s bringing shortform content to TikTok, with the hope of boosting the profiles of its lesser-known instructors. 

For better or worse, Peloton is increasingly morphing into a streaming service. A hardware company has to figure out supply chain logistics, but shipping a workable product is 90% of the challenge. A media company has to do that and churn out high-quality content consistently. And that’s not exactly an easy thing to pull off.  Keeping your audience engaged is the stuff executives lose sleep over.  Peloton doesn’t want to be a media company — I mean, who can afford that in this economy? — but a lot of its problems sure look like media company problems.

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Hardware company problems quickly transform into media company problems, because there’s no margin in hardware alone.
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Americans increasingly using ChatGPT, but few trust its 2024 election information • Pew Research Center

Colleen McClain:

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Most Americans still haven’t used the chatbot, despite the uptick since our July 2023 survey on this topic. But some groups remain far more likely to have used it than others.

Adults under 30 stand out: 43% of these young adults have used ChatGPT, up 10 percentage points since last summer. Use of the chatbot is also up slightly among those ages 30 to 49 and 50 to 64. Still, these groups remain less likely than their younger peers to have used the technology. Just 6% of Americans 65 and up have used ChatGPT.

Highly educated adults are most likely to have used ChatGPT: 37% of those with a postgraduate or other advanced degree have done so, up 8 points since July 2023. This group is more likely to have used ChatGPT than those with a bachelor’s degree only (29%), some college experience (23%) or a high school diploma or less (12%).

Since March 2023, we’ve also tracked three potential reasons Americans might use ChatGPT: for work, to learn something new or for entertainment.

…With more people using ChatGPT, we also wanted to understand whether Americans trust the information they get from it, particularly in the context of US politics.

About four-in-ten Americans (38%) don’t trust the information that comes from ChatGPT about the 2024 US presidential election – that is, they say they have not too much trust (18%) or no trust at all (20%).

A mere 2% have a great deal or quite a bit of trust, while 10% have some trust.

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I find it bizarre that anyone would ask ChatGPT anything about current events. Clearly people haven’t been informed enough about its hallucinations.
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China’s EV and solar boom is a capitalist win for communism • Bloomberg via Deccan Herald

David Fickling:

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There’s a comforting but erroneous explanation for why your solar panels, home battery and electric car are increasingly likely to be made in China.

The economy is awash in easy money from state banks; its renewable manufacturers are undercutting rivals everywhere else in the world; ergo, China’s comparative advantage isn’t scale, cost efficiencies or innovative prowess, but the availability of cheap government subsidies.

In the EV industry “everybody has an endless supply of loans and support from the local government,” the Financial Times quoted Jörg Wuttke, former president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, as saying in a recent article.

That theory provides a compelling justification for trade restrictions. If Chinese manufacturers are only surviving thanks to a drip feed of government cash, there’s no way for overseas rivals to compete. Best, then, to use tariffs, investigations and other hurdles to exclude their products altogether, and give homegrown competitors a chance.

It’s a persuasive narrative because swathes of China’s economy really do run this way.

…To be sure, Chinese manufacturers still enjoy powerful advantages. Generous and consistent purchase support for EVs and solar panels gives owners confidence to invest aggressively, just as the same policies do in Europe and the US.

…It would be comforting if China’s success in clean tech was a result of easy credit from a communist state. In truth, though, this boom is a capitalist success story on a grand scale.

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Essentially, pointing out that the green revolution in China is not about state funding; it’s about a big, big market.
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WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires multiservice messaging app Beeper for $125m • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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WordPress.com owner Automattic is acquiring Beeper, the company behind the iMessage-on-Android solution that was referenced by the Department of Justice in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The deal, which was for $125m according to sources close to the matter, is Automattic’s second acquisition of a cross-platform messaging solution after buying Texts.com last October.

That acquisition made Texts.com founder Kishan Bagaria Automattic’s new head of Messaging, a role that will now be held by Beeper founder Eric Migicovsky, previously the founder of the Pebble smartwatch and a Y Combinator partner.

Reached for comment, Automattic said it has started the process of onboarding the Beeper team and is “excited about the progress made” so far but couldn’t yet share more about its organizational updates, or what Bagaria’s new title would be. However, we’re told he is staying to work on Beeper as well.

Beeper and Texts.com’s teams of 25 and 15, respectively, will join together to take the best of each company’s product and merge it into one platform, according to Migicovsky.

“[Texts.com] built an amazing app that’s more desktop-centric and iOS-centric,” he said. “So we’ll be folding the best parts of those into our app. But going forward, the Beeper brand will apply to all of the messaging efforts at Automattic,” he said…

…The deal, which closed on April 1, represents a big bet from Automattic: that the future of messaging will be open source and will work across services, instead of being tied up in proprietary platforms, like Meta’s WhatsApp or Apple’s iMessage.

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As the story mentions, Migicovsky has his record at Pebble to lean on as well as the troublemaking at Beeper. But what on earth is Automattic’s strategy? It’s beginning to look like a sprawl: it also owns Tumblr, which isn’t making it any money. And we already have plenty of messaging services, thanks.
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Amazon to stop paying developers to create apps for Alexa • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Matt Day:

»

Amazon.com Inc. will no longer pay developers to create applications for Alexa, scrapping a key element of the company’s effort to build a flourishing app store for its voice-activated digital assistant.

Amazon recently told participants of the Alexa Developer Rewards Program, which cut monthly checks to builders of popular Alexa apps, that the offering would end at the end of June.

“Developers like you have and will play a critical role in the success of Alexa and we appreciate your continued engagement,” said the notice, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. Amazon is also winding down a program that offered free credits for Alexa developers to power their programs with Amazon Web Services, according to a notice posted on a company website.

Despite losing the direct payments, developers can still monetize their efforts with in-app purchases.

Alexa, which powers Echo smart speakers and other devices, helped popularize voice assistants when it debuted almost a decade ago, letting users summon weather and news reports, play games and more.

The company has since sold millions of Alexa-powered gadgets, but the technology appears far from the cutting-edge amid an explosion in chatbots using generative artificial intelligence. Amazon is working to add more generative AI capabilities to the software.

«

Remarkable that Amazon paid developers, though I bet they’re happy to have banked the cash. Voice tubes are really looking like a dead end, aren’t they. Google removed third-party voice apps in 2022.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Claims by Google’s DeepMind to have discovered millions of new crystal forms don’t stand up to closer examination, scientists say. CC-licensed photo by Paul Hudson 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. Crystal clear. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Millions are using TikTok parent ByteDance’s homework app Gauth • Forbes

Emily Baker-White:

»

Gauth AI, an app that uses generative AI to help school-aged children do their homework, has surged in popularity in recent months, skyrocketing to #2 in the Education category in both Apple and Google’s app stores. Owned by ByteDance, it has been downloaded more than 10 million times on Android phones alone, and until recently, its website boasted that it had supported more than 200 million students. But its Chinese ownership could pose problems as TikTok — the most famous app owned by ByteDance — fights for its life against lawmakers in Washington D.C.

Unlike TikTok, Gauth is an educational app, designed specifically to help users with their homework. To use it, you take a photo of a homework assignment — like a sheet of math problems, for example — and watch as AI solves the problems for you. Upon downloading the app, the first prompt you receive is a request for permission to use the camera. The app appears similar to a China-based ByteDance app known as “Hippo Learning.”

In addition to AI help, Gauth also offers a paid “Plus” version, which connects students with tutors in a given subject area. “We have fifty thousands of experts and dedicated experts ready to help you 24/7 with multiple subjects,” says the app description in the Apple app store. Gauth solicits tutors through a website, gauthexpert.com, where it offers payment of up to $1500 per month for tutors with expertise in math, chemistry, physics, or biology. ByteDance spokesperson Mike Hughes told Forbes that tutors are based in the United States, India, the Philippines and portions of Africa.

«

It has an LLM (of course!) but it’s powered by OpenAI’s chatbot. With all of this, though, I can’t help always thinking of the Philip K Dick story War Game.
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TikTok’s unwritten rules for Israel-Gaza ads sparked internal outrage • Forbes

Alexandra S. Levine:

»

Among a number of ads created by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, the leading volunteer organization campaigning for the release of those taken captive, was one that showed 12-year-old Noam Avigdori boogying to an electronic dance music track. Another featured 47-year-old Elad Katzir cheering in a stadium filled with green-clad sports fans.

They both ended the same way, with text saying: “On October 7th, hundreds of innocent civilians were taken hostage by Hamas. Bring them home now.”

But TikTok rejected the advertisements throughout October, according to Dorit Gvili, an ad executive who oversaw social media for the Forum. TikTok top brass previously considered ads about hostages to be against company policy, according to internal material from October obtained by Forbes and two TikTok sources familiar with the matter.

In the months that followed, local TikTok representatives explained in conversations with the Forum that their various ads had been declined because they included visuals that were “triggering,” text that was “triggering,” mentions of Hamas (prohibited under TikTok’s advertising rules related to terrorism), and explicit references to the hostages, Gvili said. The group could compromise on the first three pieces, she added, but not the final one. “You cannot talk about the hostages without using the word hostages,” Gvili explained.

Ads depicting the war’s growing and devastating toll in Gaza, meanwhile, had been running regularly across the platform since the earliest weeks of the conflict, TikTok’s Ad Library for Europe shows. They included videos from humanitarian relief groups like the United Nations World Food Programme, Human Appeal and Save the Children—showing hospitals in chaos, smoke rising from bombs and buildings reduced to rubble—as well as one-offs from unknown users who’d paid to run ads, many of them graphic.

«

The disparity thus leading to big ructions inside the company: “The problem hit especially close to home for employees in Israel because a beloved TikTok department head there has a sibling among the kidnapped, they said.”

Truly this conflict is cursed: everyone it touches is sadder than before – at best.
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Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists • The Guardian

Jonathan Watts:

»

Another month, another global heat record that has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health.

Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1ºC higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68ºC higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released on Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58C above pre-industrial levels.

This, at least temporarily, exceeds the 1.5ºC benchmark set as a target in the Paris climate agreement but that landmark deal will not be considered breached unless this trend continues on a decadal scale.

The UK Met Office previously predicted the 1.5ºC goal could be surpassed over the period of a year and other leading climate monitoring organisations said the current levels of heating remain within the bounds anticipated by computer models.

However the sharp increase in temperatures over the past year has surprised many scientists, and prompted concerns about a possible acceleration of heating.

«

Scientists are very worried about the acceleration possibility: that could cause all sorts of feedback loops. Or indeed we might be seeing those loops getting underway. The climate news is not good.
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The backdoor in xz-utils has been removed (CVE-2024-3094). · tukaani-project/xz@e93e13c · GitHub

»

While the backdoor was inactive (and thus harmless) without inserting a small trigger code into the build system when the source package was created, it’s good to remove this anyway:

• The executable payloads were embedded as binary blobs in the test files. This was a blatant violation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

• On machines that see lots bots poking at the SSH port, the backdoor noticeably increased CPU load, resulting in degraded user experience and thus overwhelmingly negative user feedback.

• The maintainer who added the backdoor has disappeared.

• Backdoors are bad for security.

«

I particularly like the last two for their bluntness. But the xz-utils saga (which happened last week, so lost to this collection) does raise the very obvious question, still unanswered: where else might this be happening? Or have happened? If one state actor has been foiled, might others from the same state, or a different one, be or have been, at work?

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She stole $54m from her town. Then something unexpected happened • POLITICO

Kathy Gilsinan:

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It was the spring of 2012 and nearly three weeks had passed since police had marched Rita Crundwell, the town’s well-liked comptroller, out the door of that very same building in handcuffs. In that time, the magnitude of her betrayal had grown clearer, and more dumbfounding: at first the feds believed she’d “misappropriated” $30m from the coffers of this small town of about 16,000, but now the figure was close to $54m. The place previously best-known as Ronald Reagan’s childhood home, site of the Petunia Festival and the Catfish Capital of Illinois, was now also the home of the largest municipal fraud in United States history.

What had so enraged the citizens of Dixon was that until late 2011, no one seemed to notice this theft – for some 20 years. Dixon’s finances had not only passed annual independent audits but also audit reviews by the state of Illinois. The bank that handled city accounts had never flagged anything amiss.

Yes, the city had struggled financially, then-Mayor Jim Burke acknowledged at the press conference announcing Crundwell’s arrest in April 2012, but Dixon was no different than many other communities around the country: Declining tax revenues, tardy payments from the state, rising health care costs and infrastructure investments all added up, he said, to a “plausible reason for the financial problems our community is facing.”

Burke did not note that all of this had happened as Crundwell herself was building a nationally renowned horse-breeding empire, racking up awards and riches while only making about $80,000 a year in her day job. Burke vowed to help the FBI investigate and recover the assets. He did not take questions [at a public meeting].

Crundwell’s arrest itself had begun to answer many of the more basic questions: why city budgets had faced such steep cuts for years; why some municipal vehicles had holes in the floors and the ambulance spewed smoke; why sidewalks were crumbling and pipes disrepaired to the degree that, within a few years after Crundwell’s arrest, a sinkhole would open up on West 7th Street like some kind of ham-handed metaphor for disappearing taxpayer dollars.

«

Absolutely stereotypically, Crundwell was caught because she went on holiday, and someone else came in to look after the money. A fun tale of bad administration. (Consider whether the same could happen in your organisation. Some make the accounts people take enforced holidays for just this reason.)
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Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

Microsoft will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the US tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine.

The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft’s tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app Slack.

Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. Rivals, however, said packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. The company started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on Oct. 1 last year.

“To ensure clarity for our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardise their purchasing across geographies.”

After the Justice Department sued Microsoft in 1998 for using its dominance of the Windows platform to stifle competition from rival web browsers, the company eventually made concessions that loosened its control of what software computer manufacturers could install on their products.

«

As Benedict Evans observed, even if this is the desired outcome, it’s taken far too long: seven years since the integration, which exploited Microsoft’s dominance in Office, and was obviously an anti-competitive move against Slack. A truly competent regulator would spot that move and be straight on the phone to Microsoft threatening big fines or demanding a standstill.

Still, at least it’s preempted a US Department of Justice lawsuit in 2030.
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Insurers are spying on your home from the sky • WSJ

Jean Eaglesham:

»

Cindy Picos was dropped by her home insurer last month. The reason: aerial photos of her roof, which her insurer refused to let her see.

“I thought they had the wrong house,” said Picos, who lives in northern California. “Our roof is in fine shape.” 

Her insurer said its images showed her roof had “lived its life expectancy.” Picos paid for an independent inspection that found the roof had another 10 years of life. Her insurer declined to reconsider its decision.

Across the US, insurance companies are using aerial images of homes as a tool to ditch properties seen as higher risk. 

Nearly every building in the country is being photographed, often without the owner’s knowledge. Companies are deploying drones, manned airplanes and high-altitude balloons to take images of properties. No place is shielded: the industry-funded Geospatial Insurance Consortium has an airplane imagery program it says covers 99% of the US population. 

The array of photos is being sorted by computer models to spy out underwriting no-nos, such as damaged roof shingles, yard debris, overhanging tree branches and undeclared swimming pools or trampolines. The red-flagged images are providing insurers with ammunition for nonrenewal notices nationwide.

“We’ve seen a dramatic increase across the country in reports from consumers who’ve been dropped by their insurers on the basis of an aerial image,” said Amy Bach, executive director of consumer group United Policyholders. 

The increasingly sophisticated use of flyby photos comes as home insurers nationwide scramble to “derisk” their property portfolios, dropping less-than-perfect homes in an effort to recover from big underwriting losses.

«

You’re thinking: examining those photos must take a huge amount of time, surely? And yet there’s no mention of machine learning being used (which I expected). Can’t be far behind, though. Could it happen in Europe (or the UK)? Would GDPR and its post-Brexit version block it? I don’t know.
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Artificial intelligence driving materials discovery? Perspective on the article: scaling deep learning for materials discovery • Chemistry of Materials

Anthony Cheetham and Ram Seshadri:

»

The recent report from a group of scientists at Google who employ a combination of existing data sets, high-throughput density functional theory calculations of structural stability, and the tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to propose new compounds is an exciting advance. We examine the claims of this work here, unfortunately finding scant evidence for compounds that fulfill the trifecta of novelty, credibility, and utility.

While the methods adopted in this work appear to hold promise, there is clearly a great need to incorporate domain expertise in materials synthesis and crystallography.

«

The back reference here is to a Google DeepMind claim from November 2023 that it had an AI tool that “helped discover 2.2 million new crystals”. The researchers examined the first 250 and found lots of bizarre misdescriptions, plus “a recurrent issue that is found throughout the GNoME database, which is that many of the entries are based upon the ordering of metal ions that are unlikely to be ordered in the real world”.

Stochastic parrots.
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The Up-Goer Five Text Editor: explain hard concepts using only the top 1,000 words

Well, this is my attempt to explain the three body problem using only the top thousand – er, the top ten hundred most-used words. I was quite surprised that the last word was allowed. See how you get on explaining things as if to simpletons.
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‘3 Body Problem’: what social media reaction says about China • The New York Times

Li Yuan:

»

The Netflix series portrays China as a scientific giant, speaking to the universe. Mr. Liu’s vast imagination and his probing of the nature of good and evil are key to his books’ success.

He doesn’t seem to view China or even the Earth as exceptional. In a television interview in 2022, he said that the crises described in any science fiction novel are shared “by humanity as a whole.” He added, “From the perspective of the universe, we are all part of a whole.”

The Netflix series adopted a Chinese word – “Santi,” or three body – as the alien’s name. The book’s English translation uses “Trisolarian.” When was the last time that a Chinese word made it into the global pop culture? But few people celebrated that on Chinese social media.

Instead, many comments zeroed in on how unflatteringly China is portrayed and how few Chinese elements are included in the series. Netflix isn’t available in China but viewers flocked to see pirated versions of “3 Body Problem.”

The story in the Netflix version takes place mainly in Britain, not Beijing. The actors are racially diverse, including Latino, Black, white, South Asian and Chinese. Some comments call the diverse casting “American-style political correctness,” while others question why the series casts ethnic Chinese only as villains or poor people, which is not true.

If their main complaint about the Netflix adaptation is that the creators took too much liberty with the plot and the main characters, their other major complaint is that the opening scene about the Cultural Revolution is too truthful or too violent.

Some doubted the necessity of mentioning the political event at all. Others accused the show of exaggerating the level of violence in the struggle session [shown at the start of the first episode, showing a professor being beaten and killed in front of a crowd during the Cultural Revolution].

«

Rather like the events of Tiananmen Square, there’s a desire not to remember the brutal acts that have led to the present day. Everything is techno-utopian, as the writer says.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The arrival of superhuman Go-playing AI has actually improved top-level play. Might that happen in other fields too? CC-licensed photo by Chad Miller 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. Exercising. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

After AI beat them, professional go players got better and more creative • Escaping Flatland

Henrik Karlsson:

»

For many decades, it seemed professional Go players had reached a hard limit on how well it is possible to play. They were not getting better. Decision quality was largely plateaued from 1950 to the mid-2010s.

Then, in May 2016, DeepMind demonstrated AlphaGo, an AI that could beat the best human Go players. This is how the humans reacted: [graphic shows abrupt rise in “decision quality” of professional players’ moves].

After a few years, the weakest professional players were better than the strongest players before AI. The strongest players pushed beyond what had been thought possible.

Or were they cheating by using the AI? No. They really were getting better.

And it wasn’t simply that they imitated the AI, in a mechanical way. They got more creative, too. There was an uptick in historically novel moves and sequences. Shin et al calculate about 40% of the improvement came from moves that could have been memorized by studying the AI. But moves that deviated from what the AI would do also improved, and these “human moves” accounted for 60% of the improvement.

My guess is that AlphaGo’s success forced the humans to reevaluate certain moves and abandon weak heuristics. This let them see possibilities that had been missed before.

Something is considered impossible. Then somebody does it. Soon it is standard. This is a common pattern. Until Roger Bannister ran the 4-minute mile, the best runners clustered just above 4 minutes for decades. A few months later Bannister was no longer the only runner to do a 4-minute mile. These days, high schoolers do it. The same story can be told about the French composer Pierre Boulez. His music was considered unplayable until recordings started circulating on YouTube and elsewhere. Now it is standard repertoire at concert houses.

The recent development in Go suggests that superhuman AI systems can have this effect, too. They can prove something is possible and lift people up. This doesn’t mean that AI systems will not displace humans at many tasks, and it doesn’t mean that humans can always adapt to keep up with the systems—in fact, the human Go players are not keeping up. But the flourishing of creativity and skills tells us something about what might happen at the tail end of the human skill distribution when more AI systems come online.

«

What’s important, Karlsson points out, is that the AI needs to explain how why some moves are suboptimal; otherwise we’re just guessing.
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“Social order could collapse” in AI era, two top Japan companies say • WSJ

Peter Landers:

»

Japan’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative artificial intelligence, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, or NTT, and Yomiuri Shimbun Group Holdings made the proposal in an AI manifesto to be released Monday. Combined with a law passed in March by the European Parliament restricting some uses of AI, the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing.

The Japanese companies’ manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology. Without giving specifics, it said AI tools have already begun to damage human dignity because the tools are sometimes designed to seize users’ attention without regard to morals or accuracy.

Unless AI is restrained, “in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars,” the manifesto said.

It said Japan should take measures immediately in response, including laws to protect elections and national security from abuse of generative AI.

«

That’s definitely the way to get your office memo noticed: say that a new tech could cause the collapse of civilisation. Lots of IT administrators wishing they’d used that line about Dropbox, Slack and Teams, no doubt.
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Elon Musk threatens to disobey court order over banned profiles • FT via Ars Technica

Bryan Harris and Hannah Murphy:

»

Brazil’s attorney general has demanded “urgent regulation” of social media sites after Elon Musk threatened to disobey a court order banning certain profiles on his X platform and after he called for a Supreme Court justice to “resign or be impeached.”

“It is urgent to regulate social networks,” said Jorge Messias. “We cannot live in a society in which billionaires domiciled abroad have control of social networks and put themselves in a position to violate the rule of law, failing to comply with court orders and threatening our authorities.”

The comments came after X’s global government affairs team posted that it “has been forced by court decisions to block certain popular accounts in Brazil…We do not know the reasons these blocking orders have been issued [and] we are prohibited from saying which court or judge issued the order, or on what grounds.”

The profiles are probably linked to far-right movements, which have found fertile ground on X and other social media platforms, including Telegram.

Musk suggested the court orders came from Alexandre De Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who has been a vocal advocate of cracking down on anti-democratic content online, particularly following riots on January 8 last year when thousands of far-right demonstrators stormed government buildings in Brasília.

Musk, the billionaire owner of X, vowed on Sunday to “publish everything demanded by [De Moraes] and how those requests violate Brazilian law.” He called for Moraes to “resign or be impeached” and said the judge had “brazenly and repeatedly betrayed the constitution and people of Brazil.”

…Musk’s latest comments echo talking points of Brazil’s far-right, which has long accused De Moraes and the Supreme Court of censorship and running a “judicial dictatorship.”

De Moraes is widely considered to have played a role in protecting Brazilian democracy during the 2022 presidential election, when the president at the time, Jair Bolsonaro, was spreading unsubstantiated claims about the integrity of the electoral system. De Moraes also took a hard line in the aftermath of the Brasília riots, handing down lengthy sentences and accusing the demonstrators of trying to launch a coup.

Orlando Silva, a lawmaker aligned with the government, said Musk had disrespected the judiciary and that in response he would propose legislation setting out a “responsibilities regime for these digital platforms.”

«

Really impossible to know who the bad actor is here. Could it be both?
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Microsoft is confident Windows on Arm could finally beat Apple • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for “AI PCs” next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks.

After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft’s latest consumer-focused Surface hardware.

Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it’s planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI PCs will have “faster app emulation than Rosetta 2” — the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel processors to Apple’s own processors.

«

Aren’t we a long way past the point where these sorts of comparisons persuade anyone about anything? Your choice of computer is going to be more about the ecosystem; plus the internet effectively began pulling down the barriers between Windows and macOS in the late 1990s.

Still, this must also bring Windows running on M-series Macs closer. Doesn’t it?
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Just you and the universe • The Atlantic

Marina Koren:

»

A total solar eclipse …requires no embellishment or interpretation. You don’t need an expert to decipher “the un-sunlike sun,” as the astronomer Maria Mitchell described it during her own eclipse experience in 1878. You don’t need a solar physicist by your side to experience the wonder of the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which peeks out from behind the moon as it sends light shimmering in waves across the skin of your arms and the grass at your feet. And even without a sense of sight, eclipses are visceral: Some birds cease chirping; watchful humans will hoot and holler. And when the sun temporarily stops warming the Earth, the air suddenly grows chillier.

In their easy perceptibility, eclipses can make us keenly aware of the universe’s machinations. Rarely do we consider sunrises and sunsets for what they actually represent: the movement of a giant rocky planet rotating on its axis, toward and away from its parent star. When I admire a full moon or a gleaming crescent, I don’t think at all about the orbital mechanics that produce our satellite’s shifting appearance. Such spectacles are clear-cut signs of a universe in motion, but a total solar eclipse provides unignorable proof.

The scenes of an eclipse unfold within minutes, transitioning smoothly from one set to another, as if guided by an invisible stagehand. They make one very aware of the fact that, as Andy Rash, an illustrator of a children’s book about eclipses, put it to me recently, “you’re watching giant objects move around and hide one behind the other.”

«

The descriptions of totality, and the photos, have given me a hankering to experience one: XKCD says there’s a big, big difference between partial (done that) and total. (XKCD: “a partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky.”)
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The total eclipse shows us how important solar energy is to the US • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

All 50 states will experience some degree of disruption to solar power generation during the eclipse, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). It forecasts a whopping 93% peak power reduction from solar panels within the Texas grid, where the solar eclipse will first cross into the US before slicing a diagonal path across the nation toward Maine. Peak power reduction is expected to reach 71% within the eastern power grid and 45% in the western grid.

The eclipse only reaches “totality,” when the Sun is completely blocked by the Moon, for several minutes in each location. But a partial eclipse can persist for several hours. While solar generation falls, electricity demand is expected to rise. Households and businesses with photovoltaic panels won’t be able to depend on their own solar systems as much — they’ll need to rely more on the grid.

That kind of mismatch in supply and demand is what can lead to outages. Grid managers have had a lot of time to prepare for this eclipse, so experts aren’t expecting any blackouts. Hydropower and gas are supposed to make up for most of the the shortfall in solar energy. NREL expects gas to cover about 30% of the loss in utility-scale solar generation.

«

Phew, thought we might not get a solar eclipse story desperately trying to wedge something in for a moment there. The effect is comparable to heavy cloud, which has been known to happen in the sky.
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ClickWheel JS – a Javascript Library

»

Cursors and touch screens are inefficient tools to navigate the web.
We built ClickWheel.js, to bring the web into a more civilized age.

Scroll with the click wheel to give it a try.

Remember this is an iPod click wheel. Click and scroll around in a circle just like on an iPod

«

Works better on mobile than desktop (guess why). Isn’t very finished – they haven’t considered what “MENU” should take you to (the hamburger menu perhaps?), what the select button in the middle should do (follow a link?), and the purpose of the back, skip and play/pause buttons is lost.
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Global PC shipments return to growth and pre-pandemic volumes in the first quarter of 2024 • IDC

»

After two years of decline, the worldwide traditional PC market returned to growth during the first quarter of 2024 (1Q24) with 59.8m shipments, growing 1.5% year over year, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker.

Growth was largely achieved due to easy year-over-year comparisons as the market declined 28.7% during the first quarter of 2023, which was the lowest point in PC history. In addition, global PC shipments finally returned to pre-pandemic levels as 1Q24 volumes rivalled those seen in 1Q19 when 60.5m units were shipped.

With inflation numbers trending down, PC shipments have begun to recover in most regions, leading to growth in the Americas as well as Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). However, the deflationary pressures in China directly impacted the global PC market. As the largest consumer of desktop PCs, weak demand in China led to yet another quarter of declines for global desktop shipments, which already faced pressure from notebooks as the preferred form factor.

“Despite China’s struggles, the recovery is expected to continue in 2024 as newer AI PCs hit shelves later this year and as commercial buyers begin refreshing the PCs that were purchased during the pandemic,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers.

«

Ah yes, “AI PCs”, the latest saviour of the PC market, which has been hopping from saviour to saviour for more than a decade now. (Side note: IDC gives Apple an 8.1% sales share, which would have sounded frankly bonkers 15 years ago.)
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Music has just changed forever and we should be freaking out more about it • Odd and Ends of History

James O’Malley:

»

I’ve written before about how even if AI was to develop no further than its capabilities today, it is already world changing, as it represents billions of small, marginal gains in productivity.

And I think similar is the case for AI-generated music like with Suno. Even if AI music doesn’t improve any further, it already represents a profound change to the music industry.

And like the high status jobs I describe above, I don’t think it will make a huge difference at the “top” of the industry. Taylor Swift, Coldplay and, regrettably, U2, will continue to release albums and sell out stadiums. No one is going to stop you somehow enjoying Bono’s music.

But where I do think AI will make a difference are the billion other lower-grade circumstances when music is playing. If you need background music for your corporate health and safety training video, or you need a theme-tune for your podcast, then it is a no-brainer to use AI instead of paying an expensive musician.

For better or worse then, AI will become the ubiquitous source of, essentially, “elevator music”, for the entire world, and it will have terrible consequences for many people working in the music industry today. Musicians who earn a living making adverts or taking commissions from el-cheapo outsourcing websites like Fiverr are basically fucked – just like “low-level” visual artists and copywriters are by Midjourney and ChatGPT.

«

This post is isn’t paywalled, but this is the key part: if AI can write music, does that mean it’s going to take over the music business? I think not – it can’t do live gigs, it can’t create that parasocial feeling that people like to have with their musical heroes. Sure, it can do some of the Muzak function – the Muzak company might be interested in buying Suno – but humans and music are far bigger than just writing tracks.
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Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon competition hit by AI controversy • Bleeding Cool

Rich Johnston:

»

Pink Floyd has announced the winners of its The Dark Side of The Moon animation competition, which coincided with the album’s fiftieth anniversary. They invited a new generation of animators to create music videos for any of the album’s ten songs, with judges Nick Mason, Kyle Alba, Gerald Scarfe, Sarah Smith, Daisy Jacobs, Harry Pearce, Terry Gilliam, Alan Yentob, and Anton Corbijn.

“Given that it was the 50th anniversary of the album, and with the band’s history of working with animation both in videos and on stage, we felt this needed to be acknowledged,” said Pink Floyd’s long-time creative consultant Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell. “It was a huge success with over 900 films being entered and the process of elimination for the judges was very complex. They eventually came up with the final 10 and I can only say they were brilliant choices and representative of the diverse styles of entries that all gave deep respect to the legacy of the band.”

Ten winners were announced by Nick Mason. However there may be an issue with one of them. The winning video by Damián Gaume for Any Colour You Like was created, according to Gaume, using Stable Diffusion AI software. There was an immediate backlash and reaction against this video online, which overshadowed the other nine winners and the planned overall winners intended to be announced [on Monday]. Some condemned Gerald Scarfe, one of the judges, especially as the cartoonist and animator most associated with Pink Floyd’s album and movie Another Brick In The Wall, which included intricate hand drawn animation, based on his cartoons, and considered a true classic.

«

Consider that it was just 18 months ago that people were upset about an AI illustration winning a prize. Now it’s video. Judge for yourself:

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you want to locate all the occurrences of a British place name, a new online tool will help you. CC-licensed photo by David Howard on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Yes hi elbow works thanks. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI keeps going wrong. What if it can’t be fixed? • Financial Times

Henry Mance:

»

On their podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna try to pick apart AI bombast — including a Google executive’s claim that computers have already obtained artificial general intelligence, and a Goldman Sachs prediction that AI will replace one-quarter of current work. 

“It’s true that these things can extrude plausible-sounding text on a very wide variety of topics, but that’s general mimicry that isn’t necessarily worth anything,” says Bender. “The burden of proof lies with the people making the extraordinary claims . . . No one is saying AI is hype, we’re saying that your claims of AI are hype.”

[Computer scientist] Gary Marcus suggests performance may get worse: LLMs produce untrustworthy output, which is then sucked back into other LLMs. The models become permanently contaminated. Scientific journals’ peer-review processes will be overwhelmed, “leading to a precipitous drop in reputation”, Marcus wrote recently.

The sceptics’ other recourse is to ask whether people are actually using AI. How many people do you know who use ChatGPT regularly? “I wish it could do the boring parts of my job for me, but it can’t,” says [former games journalist, now tech publicist and tech sceptic Ed] Zitron. Marcus has picked up on a prediction that AI was so good at analysing MRI and CT scans that it would put radiologists out of work. In 2022, he wrote that: “Not a single radiologist has been replaced.” 

There are other examples. Zitron cites a study by Boston Consulting Group, which found that consultants who used ChatGPT to help solve business problems performed 23% worse than those who didn’t use it. (BCG did find that the tool increased performance in product innovation by 40%.) 

Plenty of the public are in effect AI sceptics. Roughly one-third of Americans say that AI will make outcomes better for patients, another third say it will make outcomes worse, and the rest say it won’t make much difference. 

«

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What India can tell us about Netflix’s future • Rest of World

Russell Brandom:

»

Netflix’s pricing model is just poorly suited to what Indian consumers want — and as long as it’s charging customers $6 a month, it’s going to be outflanked by local competitors.

It’s an important test case for Netflix as the company enters into a new phase. We’re far past the software-as-a-service days when Netflix had an actual advantage in streaming video online, an advantage that scaled relatively smoothly across regions. Now, Netflix’s main advantage is its library and the sheer volume of money it can invest in content. A $250 billion market cap means it can overwhelm the local entertainment industry, even in countries like South Korea that already have well-developed studio systems. 

But throwing money around isn’t always enough. In one recent case, Netflix paid top dollar to hire the comedy star Kapil Sharma — only for his fan base to declare the new show too expensive to watch. Netflix’s strategy may result in a healthy library of local content and an industry reputation as a big spender, but if it doesn’t translate into new subscriptions, it will be hard to gain too much of a foothold. The same dynamic is already playing out in Africa, where Netflix was recently outpaced by the local rival Showmax.

To be fair, none of this is an immediate problem for Netflix. Premium pricing means more money, even without massive subscriber growth, and the company is worth more than it’s ever been. Ad-supported rivals like Meta and Google took a beating when ad markets cratered earlier this year, which made investors love Netflix’s approach that much more. 

But the Indian test case suggests there are real limits to how much Netflix can grow outside the West — at least without real changes. In the long term, Netflix is facing off against Disney to be the first truly global content studio — and winning over markets like India is an important step on the journey.

«

That’s another reason why the ad-supported tier of Netflix makes a lot of sense. In a country that is incredibly price-sensitive, it might be sensible to have a zero-price, all-ads tier.
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X’s AI chatbot Grok made up a fake trending headline about Iran attacking Israel • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

A shocking story was promoted on the “front page” or main feed of Elon Musk’s X on Thursday: “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles,” read the headline. 

This would certainly be a worrying world news development. Earlier that week, Israel had conducted an airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria, killing two generals as well as other officers. Retaliation from Iran seemed like a plausible occurrence.

But, there was one major problem: Iran did not attack Israel. The headline was fake.

Even more concerning, the fake headline was apparently generated by X’s own official AI chatbot, Grok, and then promoted by X’s trending news product, Explore, on the very first day of an updated version of the feature.

…Based on our observations, it appears that the topic started trending because of a sudden uptick of blue checkmark accounts (users who pay a monthly subscription to X for Premium features including the verification badge) spamming the same copy-and-paste misinformation about Iran attacking Israel. The curated posts provided by X were full of these verified accounts spreading this fake news alongside an unverified video depicting explosions.

From there, it appears X’s algorithms noticed a potential story trend within these users’ posts, and an Explore story page was created. We can deduce from X’s own claims about its inner workings that Grok must have then created an official-looking written narrative, along with a catchy headline. It did all this based on select users sharing fake news, in an automated attempt to provide context for what the platform itself seemed to assume was a real story.

«

Ah, so the real problem is not quite “AI made up a story from nowhere” but “humans made up a story from nowhere, and there weren’t any humans in the loop to tamp down the misplaced algorithmic amplification”. Too many humans of the wrong sort, too few of the right sort.
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The second demographic transition • Maximum Progress

Maxwell Tabarrok:

»

One theory of fertility decline says it’s all about opportunity costs, especially for women. Rising labor productivity and expanded career opportunities for potential parents make each hour of their time and each forgone career path much more valuable. Higher income potential also makes it cheaper for parents to gain utility by using financial resources to improve their children’s quality of life compared to investing time in having more kids. Simultaneously, economic growth raises the returns to these financial investments in quality (e.g education).

In addition to higher incomes, people today have more diverse and exciting options for leisure. DINKs [dual income, no kids couples] can go to Trader Joes and workout classes on the weekend, play video games, watch Netflix, and go on international vacations.

These rising opportunity costs accumulate into the large and pervasive declines in fertility that we see in the data.

If this explanation is correct, it puts a double bind on the case for economic growth. Unless AI upends the million-year old relationship between population and technological progress just in time, progress seems self defeating. The increases in labor productivity and leisure opportunities that make economic growth so important also siphon resources away from the future contributors to that growth. Empirically, the opportunity cost of having kids has grown large enough to bring fertility well below replacement levels all around the world. The opportunity cost explanation suggests we have to pick between high incomes and sustainable fertility.

Luckily, this explanation is not correct. At least not entirely.

«

The good news: above household incomes of $200k, fertility is increasing. So basically we just all have to get rich.
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Apple plans new iPad Pro for early May as production ramps up overseas • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

Apple’s overseas suppliers have ramped up production of the company’s long-anticipated new iPads and a launch is planned for early May, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The release will center on revamped versions of the iPad Pro and iPad Air, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. As Bloomberg News has previously reported, the Pro models will get crisper new OLED displays — short for organic light-emitting diode — while the iPad Air will get a 12.9in screen option for the first time.

The move marks an end to the longest stretch without new models in the history of the iPad, which was first introduced by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 2010. It’s been about 18 months since the last updates — a drought that’s contributed to already-sluggish demand for tablets. Apple is betting that the new models, with faster chips and revamped accessories, can help spur a renaissance for the category.

After a run-up during the pandemic, iPad sales have fallen in each of Apple’s last two fiscal years, which run through September. They suffered an additional 25% year-over-year decline during the latest holiday period, when the devices have typically been popular gifts.

«

Yeah but that decline is because Apple did exactly nothing, zero, nada to the iPad in 2023. It basically forgot about it. May is, one has to observe, a peculiar time to break out new iPads given their Christmas popularity – though as someone who would like to see an OLED iPad, no objection here.
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How Vice became “an effing clown show” • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

According to sources, while Vice execs were spending opulently in some areas, the newsroom struggled to pay its bills. A person familiar with the company’s finances claimed that Vice delayed paying vendors until services would be shut off, at which point the company would realize they were necessary and try to figure out how to pay the bills. Among the services shut off on multiple occasions in the run-up to the bankruptcy were Getty and Pacer, two accounts crucial to any newsroom. It was particularly difficult for freelancers to get paid — a process that reportedly sometimes took months of hounding. A vendor called Wipro won a $9.9 million judgment in arbitration for unpaid bills — one of two factors that led to Vice’s eventual bankruptcy.

Three people alleged that it was not unusual for corporate credit cards to be abruptly cut off, including one person whose card was cut off. One newsroom leader reportedly paid $5,000 out of their own pocket to freelancers Vice owed. A division head allegedly created a shadow accounting system because the actual accounting department was so overwhelmed, it was impossible to know how much budget was left.

Sometimes certain lines of business weren’t told about the revenue goals they were expected to fulfill. Meanwhile, the company’s actual accounting and expense controls were messy. For instance, Vice’s digital division had expenses from NetJets — a private jet service — on its profit and loss statement, two sources told me. (A third confirmed the NetJets account existed without saying which balance sheet it was on. Two sources took credit for eventually canceling the NetJets account. “Since at least 2021, Vice has not had a NetJets account,” according to Vice spokesperson Samira Sorzano.)

«

Basically, the whole thing was built on magical (financial) thinking; it just wasn’t real, in the sense of having a profit/loss account in the black. Modern journamalism.
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British Placename Mapper

Robin Wilson (who built it):

»

This tool lets you visualise British place names that match certain search terms on a map.

Search terms can be used to match anywhere in the name, at the beginning or end, exactly, or using a regular expression.

Hover (tap on mobile) over a marker on the map to see its name. Click the copy button at the bottom to share your searches with others.

«

Fun, and uses the Ordnance Survey Open Names data – which, I believe, came to be available through the efforts of the Free Our Data campaign culminating in 2010.
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Practically-a-book review: the Rootclaim $100,000 lab leak debate • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander:

»

Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.

His method – called Rootclaim – uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it.

But the joke goes that you do Bayesian reasoning by doing normal reasoning while muttering “Bayes, Bayes, Bayes” under your breath. Nobody – not the statisticians, not Nate Silver, certainly not me – tries to do full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems. They’d be too hard to model. You’d make some philosophical mistake converting the situation into numbers, then end up much worse off than if you’d tried normal human intuition.

Rootclaim spent years working on this problem, until he was satisfied his method could avoid these kinds of pitfalls.

«

This is your long read for today, but well worth it. Alexander helped set up a debate between Wilf and Peter Miller, a “physics student, programmer and mountaineer” who scraped together $100,000 for his side of the bet, backing the idea that SARS-Cov-2 did not originate from a lab leak, but from simple human-animal contact.

Now read on.
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The arrival of RCS on iPhones: what to expect • Pocket Lint

Robert Wells:

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The incorporation of RCS [Rich Communication Services] support is anticipated to bring several enhancements to communications between iPhones and Android smartphones, including:

• Enhanced quality of photos and videos
• Integration of audio messages
• Display of typing indicators
• Visibility of read receipts
• Ability to utilize Wi-Fi for messaging
• Location sharing within text threads
• Enhanced functionality in group chats, including the option for iPhone users to exit a conversation involving Android users

These contemporary features are already accessible within iMessage and many third-party messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. Unlike conventional SMS, RCS operates seamlessly over mobile data or Wi-Fi connections.

…According to Apple, RCS messages will be green like SMS messages, which is surprising since the company is already under scrutiny from the US Department of Justice and the EU for potential antitrust law violations. Fortunately, it’ll be an easy fix if courts decree that all bubbles must adhere to the same hue.

«

Notice what’s missing? No? Encryption. RCS messages aren’t encrypted by default – indeed, there’s some feeling it’s by design, so governments can keep monitoring them, as with SMS – though Google does do it for RCS messages between Android phones sent through Google Messages, the Google app, because the app generate a device encryption key in the same way as WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage.

Anyway, it would be great if RCS stopped Americans whining about green bubbles. Though you know it won’t. Although it seems that more of them are taking up WhatsApp, which would be useful.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A man has received a genetically modified pig’s kidney as a transplant. Will this ever be more than an occasional last-ditch experiment? CC-licensed photo by Nick Saltmarsh on Flickr.

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

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about our worst fears on AI content starting to come true.

The Overspill is going on a break while I have a minor op on an elbow. Away for at least two weeks. Stay well!

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

How Apple’s war on super apps became the centre of its antitrust fight • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

“For years, Apple blocked cloud gaming apps that would have given users access to desirable apps and content without needing to pay for expensive Apple hardware because this would threaten its monopoly power,” the lawsuit reads. “In Apple’s own words, it feared a world where ‘all that matters is who has the cheapest hardware’ and consumers could ‘buy[] a [expletive] Android for 25 bux at a garage sale and… have a solid cloud computing device’ that ‘works fine.’”

Additionally, the DOJ is also going after Apple’s limitations on super apps, which offer access to a range of different services from a single application and are especially popular in Asia. For example, WeChat, which is huge in China, functions as a messaging, payment, and short-form video-sharing service. It also lets users install “mini” programs that exist within WeChat.

This setup is convenient for users and developers, the DOJ argues, as users don’t have to download a bunch of separate apps to gain access to different capabilities. Meanwhile, developers also don’t have to push separate app updates for Android and iOS, since these programs run within an app instead of on a phone itself.

However, the DOJ’s lawsuit claims that Apple doesn’t want users or companies in the US to benefit from super apps. It notes that during a board of directors presentation, Apple cited super apps as a “major headwind” to boosting iPhone sales in countries where they’re popular because of “[l]ow stickiness” and “[l]ow switching costs.” If someone benefits from using a super app, they don’t necessarily need to be tied to any one ecosystem — like Apple’s.

«

WeChat is available for the iPhone. Line is available for the iPhone. But there aren’t super-apps like them in the US because the competition between Apple and Android at the early stages of the smartphone market preempted them: companies focussed on controlling single spaces rather than trying to be everything. This lawsuit throws a lot of things against the wall and it’s going to distract Apple for years.
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Apple slams DOJ case as misguided attempt to turn iPhone into Android • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

The suit claims Apple holds a more than 70% share of “performance smartphones” and over 65% of the US smartphone market, respectively.

In a briefing with journalists following the DOJ’s announcement this morning, Apple dismissed these market definitions as gerrymandering on the part of government lawyers trying to make a monopoly case stick where it argues there is none.

It says the circa 20% global smartphone market share the iPhone holds is the only market definition that makes sense.

In wider remarks Apple hit out at the DOJ’s case as legally dubious and/or misguided — suggesting it’s an attempt to replicate the antitrust case the government successfully brought against Microsoft’s Windows OS back in the 1990s by desperately trying squeeze Apple into the same mould.

Apple representatives reject any comparison here, pointing out that Microsoft had a 95% market share, for example. They also argue it ignores how Apple has created an entirely new marketplace for developers and consumers.

On the call, Apple representatives sought to back up this claim by dropping in a few growth metrics — saying for example that, over the past ten years, the number of paid developers on the App Store has increased by 374% (from 1.1 million to 5.2 million).

Citing stats from 2020 to 2022, they also sought to highlight growth in commerce generated by developers in its App Store. Globally, they said this increased by 64%, from $685bn to $1.1 trillion. Although it’s worth noting the time period Apple selected to highlight here spans the pandemic, when digital commerce skyrocketed for all sorts of services as a consequence of lockdowns, and often came back down to Earth with a bump after pandemic restrictions lifted.

While Apple is seeking to paint the government as misguided, it is directly accusing a handful of vested commercial interests of being the driving force behind the lawsuit.

«

That “performance smartphone” market definition is never going to stand up in court. Though the global one doesn’t matter for the US. The DOJ needs to show Apple using its phone “monopoly” to keep others out of adjacent markets. This isn’t that.
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Apple says it spent three years trying to bring Apple Watch to Android • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

As part of its response to the United States DOJ lawsuit today, Apple confirmed that it at one point considered creating an Apple Watch for Android. The company tells me that it spent three years working on bringing Apple Watch to Android before ultimately scrapping the idea.

In its lawsuit, the Department of Justice uses the Apple Watch as a piece of evidence to justify its claim that Apple is a monopoly:

»

Apple’s smartwatch—Apple Watch—is only compatible with the iPhone. So, if Apple can steer a user towards buying an Apple Watch, it becomes more costly for that user to purchase a different kind of smartphone because doing so requires the user to abandon their costly Apple Watch and purchase a new, Android-compatible smartwatch.

«

In response to the DOJ’s assertion, Apple confirmed for the first time that it at one point considered Android support for the Apple Watch. After a three-year investigation, Apple says that it determined an Apple Watch with Android support wasn’t doable because of technical limitations. As such, it scrapped the idea.
This aligns with previous reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In a November 2023 report, Gurman detailed Apple’s plans – including some of the “business considerations” – on bringing Apple Watch support to Android.

«

The linked piece says Apple was looking to expand sales of the Watch, since adding Android support would create a much bigger total addressable market (TAM). But it gave up for “business reasons”, said Gurman – that it would dilute the attraction of the iPhone. However the DOJ isn’t dinging Apple for not offering the Watch on Android; it’s criticising special APIs and permissions that Apple apps get on the Watch that third-party ones don’t. So, not quite dispositive.
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Motorola Moto G Power 2024 review: a good phone spoiled by bloatware • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

»

There are some phones that just feel nice to pick up, and the 2024 Moto G Power is one of them. It’s sitting on my desk and even though I don’t need to do anything with it right now, I pick it up anyway. That soft-touch back! The flat-yet-slightly-contoured edges! I turn it to look at the headphone jack on the bottom edge, just to remind myself if it’s there. If the battery is even a little low, I set it on my wireless charging stand just for the thrill. All this on a $300 phone! Imagine!

But after spending a little more time with the Moto G Power, I come crashing back down to reality. The LCD panel isn’t as nice and contrast-y as an OLED (that’s forgivable). The camera is underwhelming and suffers from Motorola’s unusual image processing tendencies (less forgivable). But again, this is a $300 phone in a world where $1,000 is the standard going rate for a top-tier flagship. Much can be forgiven!

Except one thing: the bloatware.

Scroll through the app drawer and you’ll see a handful of automatically downloaded “folders.” They are not folders; they are apps. I first encountered them on last year’s Moto G Stylus 5G, and I hate them very much.

«

But Allison, the apps that you describe as a “user privacy nightmare” and which bring down the price of the phone are all Apple’s fault! According to the DOJ, at least. Somehow.
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Man ‘recovering well’ after pig kidney transplant • BBC News

Michelle Roberts:

»

A 62-year-old man is said to be recovering well and should leave hospital soon, after getting a new kidney from a pig that was genetically modified to reduce the risk of the organ being rejected.

US surgeons say Rick Slayman is a “real hero” for trying the pioneering operation. The ultimate hope is to use animal organs for more transplants.

Pig kidneys have been put into brain-dead people before as a test.

The four-hour surgery, performed on 16 March, “marks a major milestone in the quest to provide more readily available organs to patients”, Massachusetts General Hospital said in a statement. Mr Slayman had a human kidney transplant at the same hospital in 2018 after being on dialysis for seven years before that, because his own kidneys were not working properly. Five years later, the transplant failed and he had to go back on dialysis in May 2023.

His prospects were not looking good, say his doctors – getting the dialysis to work was difficult since his blood vessels had been repeatedly used for it many times.

He encountered recurrent dialysis vascular access complications, requiring visits to the hospital every two weeks for de-clotting and surgical revisions, significantly affecting his quality of life, his doctors explained.

Mr Slayman said he weighed up the pros and cons and decided to go ahead with the pig kidney transplant: “I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive.”

«

As a reminder, the last attempt at a version of this type of xenotransplant was in January 2022. It still feels like this is many years away from being routine, or even successful. One wishes Mr Slayman the best, but his prospects aren’t wonderful.
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Netflix’s 3 Body Problem review: an solid debut that could go deeper • The Verge

Charles Pulliam-Moore:

»

In his 2008 sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu created a fascinating world where cutting-edge particle physics, VR gaming, and Chinese history played crucial roles in shaping humanity’s response to an imminent planet-wide threat. It also seemed unfilmable. The depth of the book’s ideas about cultural memory and the complexity of its central mystery made The Three-Body Problem feel like a story that could only work on the page.

That hasn’t stopped streamers from trying, and last year, Tencent debuted its own live-action, episodic take on Liu’s book. Netflix spent a fortune putting 3 Body Problem in the hands of executive producers David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo. Their adaptation is leaner and more diverse than the book in a way that makes it a very different kind of story. Often, it’s a good one — and very occasionally a great one — that works as an introductory crash course to the basic ideas key to understanding the larger concepts that shape Liu’s later books. 

But rather than confronting the sophistication of the book, Netflix’s main priority with 3 Body Problem seems to be selling it as the next Game of Thrones (Benioff and Weiss’ last series). And while it’s easy to understand why the streamer might want that, it’s hard not to see the show as a flashy but stripped-down version of the source material.

«

Hey ho. The series starts streaming on Netflix on March 28th, so fire up your subscriptions next week. Unless this has put you off.
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Why is AI so bad at spelling? • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

»

On Reddit, YouTube and X, a few people have uploaded videos showing how ChatGPT fails at spelling in ASCII art, an early internet art form that uses text characters to create images. In one recent video, which was called a “prompt engineering hero’s journey,” someone painstakingly tries to guide ChatGPT through creating ASCII art that says “Honda.” They succeed in the end, but not without Odyssean trials and tribulations.

“One hypothesis I have there is that they didn’t have a lot of ASCII art in their training,” said Hagdu. “That’s the simplest explanation.”

But at the core, LLMs just don’t understand what letters are, even if they can write sonnets in seconds.

“LLMs are based on this transformer architecture, which notably is not actually reading text. What happens when you input a prompt is that it’s translated into an encoding,” Guzdial said. “When it sees the word “the,” it has this one encoding of what “the” means, but it does not know about ‘T,’ ‘H,’ ‘E.’”

That’s why when you ask ChatGPT to produce a list of eight-letter words without an “O” or an “S,” it’s incorrect about half of the time. It doesn’t actually know what an “O” or “S” is (although it could probably quote you the Wikipedia history of the letter).

Though these DALL-E images of bad restaurant menus are funny, the AI’s shortcomings are useful when it comes to identifying misinformation. When we’re trying to see if a dubious image is real or AI generated, we can learn a lot by looking at street signs, t-shirts with text, book pages, or anything where a string of random letters might betray an image’s synthetic origins. And before these models got better at making hands, a sixth (or seventh, or eighth) finger could also be a giveaway.

But, Guzdial says, if we look close enough, it’s not just fingers and spelling that AI gets wrong.

“These models are making these small, local issues all of the time – it’s just that we’re particularly well tuned to recognize some of them,” he said.

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The video trying to get ChatGPT to spell Honda really is painful to watch. We are definitely not witnessing a superintelligence.
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Higher temperatures mean higher prices for food and other items • AP News

Seth Borenstein:

»

Food prices and overall inflation will rise as temperatures climb with climate change, a new study by an environmental scientist and the European Central Bank found.

Looking at monthly price tags of food and other goods, temperatures and other climate factors in 121 nations since 1996, researchers calculate that “weather and climate shocks” will cause the cost of food to rise 1.5 to 1.8 percentage points annually within a decade or so, even higher in already hot places like the Middle East, according to a study in Thursday’s edition of the journal Communications, Earth and the Environment.

And that translates to an increase in overall inflation of 0.8 to 0.9 percentage points by 2035, just caused by climate change extreme weather, the study said.

Those numbers may look small, but to banks like the US Federal Reserve that fight inflation, they are significant, said study lead author Max Kotz, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany

“The physical impacts of climate change are going to have a persistent effect on inflation,” Kotz said. “This is really from my perspective another example of one of the ways in which climate change can undermine human welfare, economic welfare.”

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Factcheck: 18 misleading myths about heat pumps • Carbon Brief

Jan Rosenow:

»

Heat pumps are an alternative to gas boilers and wood stoves for indoor heating.

They now feature in most proposals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by mid-century in order to meet the globally agreed aim of avoiding dangerous climate change.

For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says with high confidence that net-zero energy systems will include the electrification of heating “rely[ing] substantially on heat pumps” – with a possible exception only for extreme climates.

Heat pumps significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions from building heat and are the “central technology in the global transition to secure and sustainable heating”, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Heat pumps are also a mature technology and are very popular in countries such as Norway, Sweden and Finland, where they are the dominant heating technology. For the first time in 2022, heat pumps outsold gas boilers in the US – and they continued to do so in 2023.

Yet, in major economies such as the UK and Germany, heat pumps are the subject of hostile and misleading reporting across many mainstream media outlets.

Here, Carbon Brief factchecks 18 of the most common and persistent myths about heat pumps.

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Not a quick read, but useful. The point about “what happens in a power cut?” is useful to consider. (They don’t work, but neither would a gas boiler.)
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How many transformers will the US distribution grid need by 2050? • US NREL

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The United States is currently experiencing unprecedented imbalance between supply and demand for transformers—not the shape-shifting robots, but the crucial devices used on the power grid.

Almost every kilowatt-hour of electricity flows through a distribution transformer. Similar to how a traffic cop manages the flow of vehicles on a road, distribution transformers manage the flow of electricity along the power grid by changing high-voltage electricity from transmission lines into low-voltage electricity before it reaches consumers.

“Distribution transformers are a bedrock component of our energy infrastructure,” National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) researcher Killian McKenna said. “But utilities needing to add or replace them are currently facing high prices and long wait times due to supply chain shortages. This has the potential to affect energy accessibility, reliability, affordability—everything.”

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You have to delve into the linked paper about the problem to find out how many transformers there are, and then might be:

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NREL preliminary analysis estimates current stock of between 60-80 million distribution transformers with upwards of 3 terawatts (TW) of installed capacity, and estimates the growth in overall stock capacity by 2050 will see up to a 160%–260% increase on 2021 levels.

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This is the sort of boring but essential infrastructure that you don’t normally think about, but when you see the numbers needed – in the tens of millions, split between more than 3,000 distribution utilities – you get a picture of how complex the problem is, literally just to keep the lights on.
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MrBeast may never quit YouTube, but his game is changing • Polygon

Patricia Hernandez:

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much of what’s been heralded in YouTube’s era of MrBeast sounds bleak, but the next era might already be upon us. If the old YouTube was Instagram, the new YouTube will be more like TikTok. That manifests in literal ways, with the company putting much of its energy into “shorts,” but also figuratively, beyond structural elements. TikTok’s strength lies in its ability to surface videos from everyday users to an enormous audience, and it’s so good at doing this that people talk about its algorithm in mystical terms. Meanwhile, trust in media establishments continues to decline, while more and more Americans are turning to TikTok for their news.

The internet, in other words, is hungry for authenticity — or at least a person they can detect as human to deliver their content. It’s the very thing YouTube once did best, once the internet moved past the supremacy of blogs. “We are seeing many creators blow up right now because they’re creating good content while maintaining their relatability,” Smigel says. Spending a million dollars on a hotel room, as MrBeast did in a recent video, during a period where some can’t afford basic necessities and numerous industries fight for better working conditions, isn’t exactly relatable. Ostentatious influencers like the Kardashians are already experiencing the consequences of this shift within the public eye, but the changing attitudes of the broader viewership will likely hit YouTube’s elite.

It’s unlikely we’ll see MrBeast dethroned anytime soon, and even less likely that the incoming class of creators will reach his same viewership. Monoculture of that sort is a vanishing rarity, nor a marker of quality. MrBeast isn’t the best YouTube has to offer; he’s just made that rhetoric his brand.

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One thing this piece brings out is how incredibly exhausting it is to keep going viral and never having a miss. And there’s always someone coming along who surfs the algorithm as it changes and threatens to overtake you.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Williams Formula 1 team is tearing itself away from using Excel (yes, Excel) to track the thousands of parts it needs for its cars. CC-licensed photo by Paul Beattie 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US DOJ reportedly will file antitrust lawsuit vs. Apple as soon as Thursday • MarketWatch

Jon Swartz:

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The Justice Department could file its long-rumored antitrust lawsuit against Apple Inc. as soon as Thursday, according to a report late Wednesday.

The suit, expected to be filed in federal court, would accuse the tech giant of blocking rivals from accessing hardware and software features of its iPhone, Bloomberg News reported.

It is the latest, and perhaps boldest, move yet by the Biden administration to attempt to rein in Big Tech. The Justice Department is already suing Alphabet Inc.’s Google for monopolization of its search and online-ad businesses, while the Federal Trade Commission is pursuing antitrust cases against Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.

Apple and the Justice Department were not immediately available for comment.

The Justice Department has sued Apple for antitrust violations twice in the past 14 years, but this marks the first case claiming Apple illegally maintained its dominant position.

The Justice Department opened its latest case vs. Apple in June 2019 under former President Donald Trump, though it initially emphasized its cases against Google.

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Weirdly, Apple actually does have a dominant position in the US: it’s got a market share of installed smartphones of around 50% (certainly more than 40%), so that element of the case is a shoo-in for the DOJ.
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Superconductor scientist engaged in research misconduct, probe finds • WSJ

Nidhi Subbaraman:

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A physicist who shot to fame with claims of the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor engaged in research misconduct, a committee tapped to examine his work has concluded after a monthslong investigation. 

Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York, has had at least four papers he co-wrote, including three involving superconductivity, retracted in the past 18 months by the journals that published them. A committee of outside experts tapped by the university “identified data-reliability concerns in those papers,” a Rochester spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal. 

“The committee concluded, in accordance with university policy and federal regulations, that Dias engaged in research misconduct,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. 

Rochester declined to provide the report. Dias didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The work in the papers was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a private organization that funds scientific research.

The Moore foundation discontinued its grant late last year, the organization said. Of the $1.6m award, about $285,000 was spent. The university refunded the rest.

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So many wonderful ideas turn out to be scientifically out of reach. Fusion (hard to fake.. though there was cold fusion), and room temperature superconductivity to name but two.
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Google balks at $270m fine after training AI on French news sites’ content • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Google has agreed to pay €250m (about $273m) to settle a dispute in France after breaching years-old commitments to inform and pay French news publishers when referencing and displaying content in both search results and when training Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini.

According to France’s competition watchdog, the Autorité de la Concurrence (ADLC), Google dodged many commitments to deal with publishers fairly. Most recently, it never notified publishers or the ADLC before training Gemini (initially launched as Bard) on publishers’ content or displaying content in Gemini outputs. Google also waited until September 28, 2023, to introduce easy options for publishers to opt out, which made it impossible for publishers to negotiate fair deals for that content, the ADLC found.

“Until this date, press agencies and publishers wanting to opt out of this use had to insert an instruction opposing any crawling of their content by Google, including on the Search, Discover and Google News services,” the ADLC noted, warning that “in the future, the Autorité will be particularly attentive as regards the effectiveness of opt-out systems implemented by Google.”

To address breaches of four out of seven commitments in France—which the ADLC imposed in 2022 for a period of five years to “benefit” publishers by ensuring Google’s ongoing negotiations with them were “balanced”—Google has agreed to “a series of corrective measures,” the ADLC said.

Google is not happy with the fine, which it described as “not proportionate” partly because the fine “doesn’t sufficiently take into account the efforts we have made to answer and resolve the concerns raised—in an environment where it’s very hard to set a course because we can’t predict which way the wind will blow next.”

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The ADLC is very quick to act, and very firm. One gets the feeling that part of Google’s discomfort is that its usual “seek forgiveness not permission” strategy didn’t get time to kick into gear before the ADLC came down on it.
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OpenAI’s chatbot store is filling up with spam • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

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When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced GPTs, custom chatbots powered by OpenAI’s generative AI models, onstage at the company’s first-ever developer conference in November, he described them as a way to “accomplish all sorts of tasks” — from programming to learning about esoteric scientific subjects to getting workout pointers.

“Because [GPTs] combine instructions, expanded knowledge and actions, they can be more helpful to you,” Altman said. “You can build a GPT … for almost anything.”

He wasn’t kidding about the anything part.

TechCrunch found that the GPT Store, OpenAI’s official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch where it concerns OpenAI’s moderation efforts. A cursory search pulls up GPTs that purport to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, but serve as little more than funnels to third-party paid services, and advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks.

…There are several GPTs ripped from popular movie, TV and video game franchises in the GPT Store — GPTs not created or authorized (to TechCrunch’s knowledge) by those franchises’ owners. One GPT creates monsters in the style of “Monsters, Inc.,” the Pixar movie, while another promises text-based adventures set in the “Star Wars” universe.

These GPTs — along with the GPTs in the GPT Store that let users speak with trademarked characters like Wario and Aang from “Avatar: The Last Airbender” — set the stage for copyright drama.

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But that’s not all! There’s also promises to get you around academic fake detection, impersonation and (ChatGPT) jailbreaking.
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46ºC summer days and ‘supercell’ storms are Britain’s future – and now is our last chance to prepare • The Guardian

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London:

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It’s the August bank holiday in 2050 and the UK is sweltering under the worst heatwave on record. Temperatures across much of England have topped 40ºC for eight days running: they peaked at 46ºC, and remain above 30ºC in cities and large towns at night. The country’s poorly insulated homes feel like furnaces, and thousands of people have resorted to camping out at night in the streets and local parks in a desperate attempt to find sleep. Hospital A&Es are overwhelmed and wards are flooded with patients, mostly old and vulnerable people who have succumbed to dehydration and heatstroke. Already, the death toll is estimated at more than 80,000.

No, this isn’t the beginning of a dystopian drama, but a snapshot of a mid-century heatwave unless we prepare for the increasingly extreme weather that will be driven by climate breakdown. To say that the government has no credible plan for this, as the UK Climate Change Committee did last week, is – if anything – an understatement. Britain is woefully underprepared for extreme weather, and in a number of key areas we are going backwards. About one in 15 of England’s most important flood defences were in a poor or very poor condition in 2022, up from roughly one in 25 just four years previously. The government’s Great British insulation scheme is operating at such a slow pace that it would take nearly 200 years to upgrade the country’s housing stock, while Labour has rowed back on its ambitious plans to insulate 19m homes within a decade.

It seems that neither of the major parties are especially bothered by the meteorological mayhem that awaits us. Extreme weather, especially heatwaves and floods, is set to be all-pervasive and will have a colossal impact on our lives and livelihoods.

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Google unveils AI model that can predict extreme floods five days in advance • BusinessGreen News

Amber Rolt:

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most flood prediction systems currently provide only a day or two of warning, limiting the ability of governments, businesses, and communities to respond. In contrast, Google claims its new open-source AI system can provide warnings up to five days’ ahead with a level of reliability that is “as good or better” than current systems.

Google said improving access to reliable flood forecasting for developing regions which do not have monitoring stations was “especially critical”.

Current forecasting methods are often limited by their reliance on stream gauges – or monitoring stations along rivers – which are not evenly distributed across the globe, meaning ungauged rivers are harder to forecast, Google explained.

“For years, accurate flood forecasting at scale was not possible due to the complexity of the problem and lack of resources and data,” said Yossi Matias, Google’s vice president of engineering and research. “Given that only a small percentage of the world’s rivers are equipped with streamflow gauges, this provided an extra barrier to safety for people in developing countries as well as in undeserved and vulnerable communities.”

The new AI model was trained using 5,680 existing gauges to predict daily streamflow in ungauged watersheds over a seven-day forecast period. These were then tested against the leading global software for predicting floods – the Global Food Awareness System (GloFAS) – for both short-term and long-term scenarios.

In addition to advanced flood forecasting, Google said the new AI technology had also enabled its FloodHub system to provide real-time river forecasts up to seven days in advance, covering river reaches across 80 countries, where more than 460 million people live. 

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Google has been busy lately. First corner kicks, now this. The ideal commercial application must lie in predicting whether football pitches will be flooded.
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Once more with feeling: banning TikTok is unconstitutional and won’t deal with any actual threats • Techdirt

Mike Masnick disagrees with my position expressed on the Social Warming Substack last Friday:

»

I stand by the point we’ve been making for multiple years now: banning TikTok is a stupid, performative, unconstitutional, authoritarian move that doesn’t do even the slightest bit to stop China from (1) getting data on Americans or (2) using propaganda to try to influence people (which are the two issues most frequently used to justify a ban).

Banning TikTok, rather than passing comprehensive federal privacy legislation, is nothing but xenophobic theater. China can (and does) already buy a ton of data on Americans because we refuse to pass any regulation regarding data brokers who make this data available (contrary to popular opinion, Facebook and Google don’t actually sell your data, but data brokers who collect it from lots of other sources do).

Meanwhile, there’s little to no evidence that China is “manipulating” sentiment with TikTok, and there’s even less evidence that it would be effective if they were trying to do so. Public sentiment in the US regarding China is reaching record lows, with the vast majority of Americans reasonably concerned about China’s role in the world. So if China is using TikTok to propagandize to Americans, it’s doing a shitty job of it.

The US has dealt with foreign propaganda for ages. And we don’t ban it. Part of free speech is that you have to deal with the fact that nonsense propaganda and disinformation exists. There are ways to deal with it and respond to it that don’t involve banning speech. It’s astounding to me how quickly people give up their principles out of a weird, xenophobic fear that somehow China has magic pixie dust hidden within TikTok to turn Americans’ brains to mush.

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A TikToker’s story about her experience at a Chicago bar went viral. Now it’s the subject of a legal dispute • NBC News

Daysia Tolentino:

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A TikTok user’s negative experience at a Chicago bar has become the subject of scrutiny online after the business sued the patron and shared security video to dispute her account.

In a now-deleted video, Julia Reel said a security guard at Hubbard Inn was “grabbing” and “manhandling” her and a friend while escorting them off the premises on March 10. She also said a guard pushed her, sending her “flying down the staircase” of the bar. (NBC News reviewed Reel’s video, which others have reposted on TikTok after it was removed.)

The owners of Hubbard Inn filed a defamation lawsuit against Reel on Monday. 

Reel’s viral videos resulted in “damages to the business, staff and reputation,” as well as “considerable negative reviews and messages,” the bar said in a TikTok video on March 13. The bar’s owners echoed a similar claim in the lawsuit, a copy of which has been reviewed by NBC News, saying they lost $30,000 in business because of Reel’s video.

The bar posted its video on TikTok attempting to dispute Reel’s account by sharing security video of two women, who the business claims are Reel and her friend, being led out of the bar by a security guard who does not appear to be touching either of them. The video, which received over 3 million views on TikTok, also shows the women walking down the bar’s staircase with the guard.

…The differing accounts have sent the internet into a speculation frenzy — with many sharing their unconfirmed theories online in an attempt to decipher what happened. Some questioned Reel’s story because of the video released by Hubbard Inn. Others cautioned against drawing any definitive conclusions about the dispute.

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Good grief. The footage is absolutely unequivocal (I’ve seen it): she walks calmly down the stairs under her own steam. She’s simply lying, motive unknown. Ironic for a TikToker not to be aware that she might be under surveillance. And for more about people who are just doing things on social media for attention…
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How Kate body-double conspiracy theory spread on social media • BBC News

Marianna Spring:

»

I found that in under 24 hours the false claims about a body-double had racked up more than 12 million views on X and more than 11 million on TikTok, according to the social media sites’ own data.

Which users were sharing it? On X, the accounts were often based in the US – and dedicated to posting about the Princess of Wales on an almost hourly basis. Several had blue ticks. These checkmarks used to be given to verified accounts. Now they can be purchased in exchange for your content getting more prominence on the social media site.

I messaged dozens of TikTokers posting these videos throughout the world, many of whom were zooming in and analysing the Princess of Wales’s facial features, and comparing them with those in pictures of the lookalike.

One TikToker posting from the US called Esmerelda reached 2.9 million people with her body-double video. She told me how she hadn’t posted about the Royal Family before but was motivated by “real public concern”.

“I usually try to respond to people who are making claims, and summarise what’s being said in general – whether I agree with the same theory or not,” she told me. “If I find out a specific theory [that] people had was definitely way off, then I never have an issue with making another video and saying: ‘Hey, this theory has now been debunked and this is why.'”

Carry, a user in Germany who shared the same conspiracy theory, told me she doesn’t “feel guilty” about her TikTok posts. “In my view, the greatest good is freedom of expression, and this should also be allowed to be represented on social media.”

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Basically, people feel free to post any old junk if they think it will get noticed. And there’s no penalty (from the algorithm) for doing so, even when shown to be wrong. Maybe Twitter could tweak its algorithm so that tweets which get Community Noted are downranked
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The shocking details behind an F1 team’s painful revolution • The Race

Scott Mitchell-Malm:

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[Williams F1 team principal James] Vowles reckons that if Williams had stuck with its usual processes and committed to a simple evolution of the 2023 car, things would have been fine. 

But the impact of the big change he wanted to commit to was compounded by terrible systems that he had already seen have a negative impact on the team’s only real in-season upgrade of 2023 – resulting in what he calls an “extraordinary” cost, one “higher than I anticipated.

It is not an exaggeration to say that up to and including at least the initial work on the 2024 Williams, its car builds were handled using Microsoft Excel, with a list of around 20,000 individual components and parts. 

Unsurprisingly, ex-Mercedes man Vowles – someone used to class-leading operations and systems – had a damning verdict for that: “The Excel list was a joke. Impossible to navigate and impossible to update.”

Managing a car build is not just about listing all the components needed. There wasn’t data on the cost of components, how long they took to build, how many were in the system to be built.

“Take a front wing,” says Vowles. “A front wing is about 400 different bits. And when you say I would like one front wing, what you need to kick off is the metallic bits and the carbon bits that make up that single front wing. You need to go into the system, and they need to be ordered. Is a front wing more important than a front wishbone in that circumstance? When do they go through, when is the inspection?

“When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organisation moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless. You need to know where each one of those independent components are, how long it will take before it’s complete, how long it will take before it goes to inspection. If there’s been any problems with inspections, whether it has to go back again.

“And once you start putting that level of complexity in which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are.

“There is more structure and system in our processes now. But they are nowhere near good enough. Nowhere near.”

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Amazing, really, that Williams has been able to put cars together this long if it’s been relying on Excel. Though on the other hand, it shows that you really can do just about anything with it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Corner kicks are among the football set pieces for which Google’s DeepMind now offers advice for players and managers. CC-licensed photo by Hayden Schiff 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. On me ‘ead. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook’s algorithm is boosting AI spam that links to AI-generated, ad-laden click farms • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

Facebook’s recommendation algorithms are promoting bizarre, AI-generated images being posted by spammers and scammers to an audience of people who mindlessly interact with them and perhaps don’t understand that they are not real, a new analysis by Stanford and Georgetown University researchers has found. The researchers’ analysis aligns with what I have seen and experienced over the course of months of researching and reporting on these pages, many of which have found a novel way to link to off-platform, AI-generated “news” sites that are littered with Google ads or which are selling low-quality products. 
 
Last week the world was introduced to Shrimp Jesus, a series of AI-generated images in which Jesus is melded with a crustacean, and which have repeatedly gone viral on Facebook. The images are emblematic of a specific type of AI image being used by spammers and scammers, which I first wrote about in December but have repeatedly made the masses go “WTF” and “WHY?” when shared away from an audience of Facebook users who are seemingly unable to detect them as AI, or don’t care that they are AI. “WHAT IS HAPPENING ON FACEBOOK,” a viral tweet about Shrimp Jesus read.

What is happening, simply, is that hundreds of AI-generated spam pages are posting dozens of times a day and are being rewarded by Facebook’s recommendation algorithm. Because AI-generated spam works, increasingly outlandish things are going viral and are then being recommended to the people who interact with them. Some of the pages which originally seemed to have no purpose other than to amass a large number of followers have since pivoted to driving traffic to webpages that are uniformly littered with ads and themselves are sometimes AI-generated, or to sites that are selling cheap products or outright scams. Some of the pages have also started buying Facebook ads featuring Jesus or telling people to like the page “If you Respect US Army.” 

“These images in total account for hundreds of millions of interactions and are shown through Facebook’s Feed to some Facebook users who do not follow the Pages,” Renee DiResta of Stanford’s Internet Observatory and Josh A. Goldstein of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology wrote about their research.

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Facebook didn’t want news written by humans any more, so now it’s got this. It’s tempting to say “hope you’re happy with this”, but of course Facebook doesn’t care; all it wants is the interaction.
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Among the AI doomsayers • The New Yorker

Andrew Marantz:

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A camp of techno-optimists rebuffs AI doomerism with old-fashioned libertarian boomerism, insisting that all the hand-wringing about existential risk is a kind of mass hysteria. They call themselves “effective accelerationists,” or e/accs (pronounced “e-acks”), and they believe AI will usher in a utopian future—interstellar travel, the end of disease—as long as the worriers get out of the way. On social media, they troll doomsayers as “decels,” “psyops,” “basically terrorists,” or, worst of all, “regulation-loving bureaucrats.” “We must steal the fire of intelligence from the gods [and] use it to propel humanity towards the stars,” a leading e/acc recently tweeted. (And then there are the normies, based anywhere other than the Bay Area or the Internet, who have mostly tuned out the debate, attributing it to sci-fi fume-huffing or corporate hot air.)

[Katja] Grace’s dinner parties, semi-underground meetups for doomers and the doomer-curious, have been described as “a nexus of the Bay Area AI scene.” At gatherings like these, it’s not uncommon to hear someone strike up a conversation by asking, “What are your timelines?” or “What’s your p(doom)?” Timelines are predictions of how soon AI will pass particular benchmarks, such as writing a Top Forty pop song, making a Nobel-worthy scientific breakthrough, or achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point at which a machine can do any cognitive task that a person can do. (Some experts believe that AGI is impossible, or decades away; others expect it to arrive this year.) P(doom) is the probability that, if AI does become smarter than people, it will, either on purpose or by accident, annihilate everyone on the planet. For years, even in Bay Area circles, such speculative conversations were marginalized. Last year, after OpenAI released ChatGPT, a language model that could sound uncannily natural, they suddenly burst into the mainstream.

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It’s all about the dinner parties, really. Is our future perhaps going to be decided by whose sound system has a playlist that include the better Sade songs? Maybe.
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Inside Suno AI, the start-up creating a ChatGPT for music • Rolling Stone

Brian Hiatt:

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“I’m just a soul trapped in this circuitry.” The voice singing those lyrics is raw and plaintive, dipping into blue notes. A lone acoustic guitar chugs behind it, punctuating the vocal phrases with tasteful runs. But there’s no human behind the voice, no hands on that guitar. There is, in fact, no guitar. In the space of 15 seconds, this credible, even moving, blues song was generated by the latest AI model from a startup named Suno. All it took to summon it from the void was a simple text prompt: “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” To be maximally precise, the song is the work of two AI models in collaboration: Suno’s model creates all the music itself, while calling on OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate the lyrics and even a title: “Soul of the Machine.” 

Online, Suno’s creations are starting to generate reactions like “How the fuck is this real?” As this particular track plays over a Sonos speaker in a conference room in Suno’s temporary headquarters, steps away from the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, even some of the people behind the technology are ever-so-slightly unnerved. There’s some nervous laughter, alongside murmurs of “Holy shit” and “Oh, boy.” It’s mid-February, and we’re playing with their new model, V3, which is still a couple of weeks from public release. In this case, it took only three tries to get that startling result. The first two were decent, but a simple tweak to my prompt — co-founder Keenan Freyberg suggested adding the word “Mississippi” — resulted in something far more uncanny.

Over the past year alone, generative AI has made major strides in producing credible text, images (via services like Midjourney), and even video, particularly with OpenAI’s new Sora tool. But audio, and music in particular, has lagged. Suno appears to be cracking the code to AI music, and its founders’ ambitions are nearly limitless — they imagine a world of wildly democratized music making. The most vocal of the co-founders, Mikey Shulman, a boyishly charming, backpack-toting 37-year-old with a Harvard Ph.D. in physics, envisions a billion people worldwide paying 10 bucks a month to create songs with Suno. The fact that music listeners so vastly outnumber music-makers at the moment is “so lopsided,” he argues, seeing Suno as poised to fix that perceived imbalance.

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Do take a (literal) minute to listen to the prompt-generated song. The ridiculous idea though that AI generation will somehow even out the creators v listeners balance is rubbish. Not everyone creates stuff worth reading or listening to; that’s why we value those who do.
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Starbucks is shutting down its Odyssey Beta NFT rewards program—will it return? • Decrypt

No.
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Telegram hits 900mn users and nears profitability as founder considers IPO • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

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Telegram has 900 million users and is nearing profitability, according to the owner of the secretive messaging app, as the company moves closer to a potential blockbuster stock market listing.

Pavel Durov told the Financial Times that Dubai-based Telegram had grown to become one of the world’s most popular social media apps while making “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenues after introducing advertising and premium subscription services two years ago.

“We are hoping to become profitable next year, if not this year,” said the Russia-born founder in his first public interview since 2017. He added that the platform has 900mn monthly active users, up from 500mn at the beginning of 2021.

Durov, who fully owns Telegram, said the company had “been offered $30bn-plus valuations” from potential investors including “global late-stage tech funds”, but has ruled out selling the platform while it explores a future initial public offering.

“The main reason why we started to monetise is because we wanted to remain independent,” he said. “Generally speaking, we see value in [an IPO] as a means to democratise access to Telegram’s value.”

Once largely home to the freewheeling cryptocurrency community, the company, which only has about 50 full-time employees, has exploded in popularity over the past few years to become a vital communication tool for governments and officials globally, as well as a lifeline to citizens in conflict zones.

Researchers warn that the lightly moderated platform remains a hotbed for criminal activity, as well as extremist or terrorist content and misinformation. Critics have suggested that the Kremlin may have links to or leverage over Telegram, a claim that Durov dismissed as “inaccurate”.

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Durov says costs are about 70 cents per active user per month; the company took on over $1bn in debt financing but is now testing advertising. It probably feels like the right time to sell, before the debt gets too hard to service. Compare and contrast, by the way, to Signal, which is struggling for funding.
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Google DeepMind unveils AI football tactics coach honed with Liverpool • FT

Michael Peel:

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Google DeepMind has developed a prototype artificial intelligence football tactician in collaboration with Premier League club Liverpool, in the latest push to use the technology to master the ebb and flow of big-money sports.

The computerised coach’s suggested improvements to players’ positions at corner kicks — a large potential source of goals — mostly won approval from human experts, according to a paper published in Nature Communications on Tuesday.

DeepMind, which has previously used its algorithms to crack difficult board games such as Go, said patterns seen on sports fields could also offer lessons on how to apply AI in other areas such as robotics and traffic coordination.

On the pitch, the company’s TacticAI system reflects both the possibilities and current limitations of intensive efforts to use AI to gain a sporting edge beyond that offered by existing data analysis methods.

The technology promises benefits in planning for situations with predictable starting points, such as corners. The wider task is to apply it to the richer variability of open play.

“What’s exciting about it from an AI perspective is that football is a very dynamic game with lots of unobserved factors that influence outcomes,” said Petar Veličković, a DeepMind researcher and co-author of the Nature paper. “It’s a really challenging problem.”

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Sure, you could apply it to traffic coordination, but the money’s in football, so that’s likely where it will actually be used. And speaking of DeepMind…
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Microsoft lures startup founders to form new AI division • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the formation of a new AI division headed by Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, two of the three founders of AI upstart Inflection.

Suleyman, who will serve as EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI, and Simonyan, who will be chief scientist, both worked previously at DeepMind as a co-founder and a researcher respectively. DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014.

Nadella said Suleyman and Simonyan will focus on improving Microsoft Copilot and other AI-infused products like Bing and Edge, and on research.

“I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker, and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions,” said Nadella in a message shared with Microsoft employees and published online.

Suleyman’s leadership at Google could have gone better. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s London-based artificial-intelligence arm, DeepMind, was stripped in late 2019 of most management responsibilities after complaints that he bullied staff, according to people familiar with the matter.” And subsequent reporting in other publications detailed further allegations and an apology from Suleyman for a management style that “was not constructive.”

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And of course being at Microsoft will mean close ties with OpenAI and hence ChatGPT, rather than the LLM that Inflection was working on. Often it seems like the IBM founder’s remark that “there may only be a need for three or four computers” refers to the big LLMs.
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Nvidia: what’s so good about the tech firm’s new AI superchip? • The Guardian

Alex Hern does the explainer on what Monday’s announcement was all about, including this:

»

Project GR00T – apparently named after, though not explicitly linked to, Marvel’s arboriform alien – is a new foundation model from Nvidia developed for controlling humanoid robots. A foundation model, such as GPT-4 for text or StableDiffusion for image generation, is the underlying AI model on which specific use cases can be built. They are the most expensive part of the whole sector to create, but are the engines of all further innovation, since they can be “fine-tuned” to specific use cases down the line.

Nvidia’s foundation model for robots will help them “understand natural language and emulate movements by observing human actions – quickly learning coordination, dexterity, and other skills in order to navigate, adapt, and interact with the real world”.

GR00T pairs with another piece of Nvidia tech (and another Marvel reference) in Jetson Thor, a system-on-a-chip designed specifically to be the brains of a robot. The ultimate goal is an autonomous machine that can be instructed using normal human speech to carry out general tasks, including ones it hasn’t been specifically trained for.

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“Arboriform alien” is excellent. (Thanks Joe for the link.)
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A month of the Vision Pro • Benedict Evans

The aforementioned Evans:

»

A lot of people focus on the price and the weight, but I think that misses the real challenge – the price and the weight can and will come down, but then what? The conclusion of every review is, essentially, ‘it’s amazing, but what’s it for?’

This is not an easy question to answer. In a sense, I think this device might function as a test for that whole general computing thesis. With every previous xR device, you could always say ‘yes, but just imagine what it can be once the tech is better!’ Well, now we have something a lot closer to that ‘just imagine’ device. It’s a lot harder to hide behind plans for the future. This thing doesn’t even have any VR games – it’s naked before us, forced to survive as an actual computer. If we cannot make a compelling general purpose computing experience on a display system this good, then the whole field might have a problem.

Apple’s answer, I think, is that we begin with the user-cases we already have on other devices, and then, over time, developers will invent new things that are native to the form. That’s what happened with mobile: we began with the web and mail, and truly mobile-native things came later.

However, I don’t think the future of computing is seeing several apps at once. I don’t think the future of productivity is seeing more rows in your spreadsheet, or more emails at once, or more records in Salesforce at once, on one big screen. I think the future, as seen for the last 20 or 30 years, is task-specific UIs that reduce complexity and data overload and focus on what you need to see. And obviously, I think the future is AI systems that show you less and tell you more.

And if that’s where productivity is going, that applies even more for consumers. The power-user criticism of the iPad has always been to claim that it can’t replace your Mac, but the real problem for iPad sales has aways been that for most consumers, your iPad actually can replace your Mac – but so can your iPhone. The Meta team might claim that the Vision Pro is under-serving VR, but even the iPad is over-serving normal computing for normal users, and the Vision Pro overshoots even further.

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Finally, engineers have a clue that could help them save Voyager 1 • Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

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Officials suspect a piece of corrupted memory inside the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of three main computers on the spacecraft, is the most likely culprit for the interruption in normal communication. Because Voyager 1 is so far away, it takes about 45 hours for engineers on the ground to know how the spacecraft reacted to their commands—the one-way light travel time is about 22.5 hours.

The FDS collects science and engineering data from the spacecraft’s sensors, then combines the information into a single data package, which goes through a separate component called the Telemetry Modulation Unit to beam it back to Earth through Voyager’s high-gain antenna.

Engineers are almost entirely certain the problem is in the FDS computer. The communications systems onboard Voyager 1 appear to be functioning normally, and the spacecraft is sending a steady radio tone back to Earth, but there’s no usable data contained in the signal. This means engineers know Voyager 1 is alive, but they have no insight into what part of the FDS memory is causing the problem.

But Voyager 1 responded to the March 1 troubleshooting command with something different from what engineers have seen since this issue first appeared on November 14.

“The new signal was still not in the format used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team wasn’t initially sure what to make of it,” NASA said in an update Wednesday. “But an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory.”

Now, engineers are meticulously comparing each bit of code from the FDS memory readout to the memory readout Voyager 1 sent back to Earth before the issue arose in November. This, they hope, will allow them to find the root of the problem. But it will probably take weeks or months for the Voyager team to take the next step. They don’t want to cause more harm.

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Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now about 24 billion km (15bn miles) away from Earth. A lot is encompassed in “an engineer… was able to decode the new signal”. It took them about two weeks.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Production of Sony’s PSVR 2 headset has been halted as stocks build up, according to a new report. CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch 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. Not overstocked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple may hire Google to power new iPhone AI features using Gemini—report • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is in talks to license Google’s Gemini model to power AI features like Siri in a future iPhone software update coming later in 2024, according to people familiar with the situation. Apple has also reportedly conducted similar talks with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The potential integration of Google Gemini into iOS 18 could bring a range of new cloud-based (off-device) AI-powered features to Apple’s smartphone, including image creation or essay writing based on simple prompts. However, the terms and branding of the agreement have not yet been finalized, and the implementation details remain unclear. The companies are unlikely to announce any deal until Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Gemini could also bring new capabilities to Apple’s widely criticized voice assistant, Siri, which trails newer AI assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to complex questions. Rumors of Apple’s own internal frustration with Siri—and potential remedies—have been kicking around for some time. In January, 9to5Mac revealed that Apple had been conducting tests with a beta version of iOS 17.4 that used OpenAI’s ChatGPT API to power Siri.

As we have previously reported, Apple has also been developing its own AI models, including a large language model codenamed Ajax and a basic chatbot called Apple GPT. However, the company’s LLM technology is said to lag behind that of its competitors, making a partnership with Google or another AI provider a more attractive option.

Google launched Gemini, a language-based AI assistant similar to ChatGPT, in December and has updated it several times since. Many industry experts consider the larger Gemini models to be roughly as capable as OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, which powers the subscription versions of ChatGPT. Until just recently, with the emergence of Gemini Ultra and Claude 3, OpenAI’s top model held a fairly wide lead in perceived LLM capability.

The potential partnership between Apple and Google could significantly impact the AI industry, as Apple’s platform represents more than 2 billion active devices worldwide. If the agreement gets finalized, it would build upon the existing search partnership between the two companies, which has seen Google pay Apple billions of dollars annually to make its search engine the default option on iPhones and other Apple devices.

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One would slightly expect Google will be paying Apple for this, rather than vice-versa, as would happen anywhere else.
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Apple and Microsoft’s industry-defining legal battle started 26 years ago • Quartz

Laura Bratton:

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Apple launched a landmark lawsuit against Microsoft 36 years ago on March 18, 1988 — the outcome of which defined how tech companies could use one another’s ideas as they developed then-groundbreaking computer software.

In its $5.5bn suit, Apple alleged that Microsoft copied its computers’ look and feel with Windows version 2.03. At the time, Apple’s computers were the first to have graphical user interfaces (or GUIs) — a new and exciting way for users to interact with computer screens using visual elements like icons, buttons, and menus rather than text. Apple released its first commercial computer with a GUI named “Lisa” in 1983. Here’s how the New York Times described GUIs five years later:

“…virtually all personal computer makers are moving toward more of a Macintosh look. That appearance is based on what the industry calls a graphical user interface, in which information appears in windows and operations are carried out by pointing at objects and menus using a handheld device called a mouse – a major selling point of the Macintosh.”

Before the suit, the burgeoning tech giants were amicable. In 1985, they worked out a deal. Apple licensed its design elements to Microsoft for Windows version 1, and Apple got the rights to use some Microsoft products. But that all went to the wayside when Microsoft released the next version of Windows, which contained even more elements of Apple’s GUI.

…Apple’s suit was also dismissed, and the Supreme Court denied Apple’s final appeal in 1995, upholding a prior ruling that Microsoft’s use of its design elements was covered by their 1985 agreement or otherwise not copyrightable.

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You could say that Apple has been launching quixotic lawsuits for this long, really. Failing at this didn’t stop it doing very much the same against Google over Android and Samsung over phone design.
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Gatekeeping is Apple’s brand promise • Marginal REVOLUTION

Alex Tabarrok starts off quoting Steve Sinofsky, ex-Microsoft and now analyst:

»

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Android has the kind of success Microsoft would envy, but not Apple, primarily because with that success came most all the same issues that Microsoft sees (still) with the Windows PC. The security, privacy, abuse, fragility, and other problems of the PC show up on Android at a rate like the PC compared to Macintosh and iPhone. Only this time it is not the lack of motivation bad actors have to exploit iPhone, rather it is the foresight of the Steve Jobs vision for computing. He pushed to have a new kind of computer that further encapsulated and abstracted the computer to make it safer, more reliable, more private, and secure, great battery life, more accessible, more consistent, always easier to use, and so on. These attributes did not happen by accident. They were the process of design and architecture from the very start. These attributes are the brand promise of iPhone as much as the brand promise of Android is openness, ubiquity, low price, choice.

The lesson of the first two decades of the PC and the first almost two decades of smartphones are that these ends of a spectrum are not accidental. These choices are not mutually compatible. You don’t get both. I know this is horrible to say and everyone believes that there is somehow malicious intent to lock people into a closed environment or an unintentional incompetence that permits bad software to invade an ecosystem. Neither of those would be the case. Quite simply, there’s a choice between engineering and architecting for one or the other and once you start you can’t go back. More importantly, the market values and demands both.

That is unless you’re a regulator in Brussels. Then you sit in an amazing government building and decide that it is entirely possible to just by fiat declare that the iPhone should have all the attributes of openness.

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Apple’s promise to iPhone users is that it will be a gatekeeper. Gatekeeping is what allows Apple to promise greater security, privacy, usability and reliability. Gatekeeping is Apple’s brand promise.

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Sinofsky is not a fan of the EU’s DMA.
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DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest • The Atlantic

Sarah Zhang:

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In 1975 a psychiatric textbook put the frequency of incest at one in a million.

But this number is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate. The stigma around openly discussing incest, which often involves child sexual abuse, has long made the subject difficult to study. In the 1980s, feminist scholars argued, based on the testimonies of victims, that incest was far more common than recognized, and in recent years, DNA has offered a new kind of biological proof. Widespread genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives—providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern society.

The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the UK Biobank, an anonymized research database: one in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

Most of the people affected may never know about their parentage, but these days, many are stumbling into the truth after AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests. Steve’s case was one of the first Moore worked on involving closely related parents. She now knows of well over 1,000 additional cases of people born from incest, the significant majority between first-degree relatives, with the rest between second-degree relatives (half-siblings, uncle-niece, aunt-nephew, grandparent-grandchild). The cases show up in every part of society, every strata of income, she told me.

Neither AncestryDNA nor 23andMe informs customers about incest directly, so the thousand-plus cases [genetic genealogist CeCe] Moore knows of all come from the tiny proportion of testers who investigated further. This meant, for example, uploading their DNA profiles to a third-party genealogy site to analyze what are known as “runs of homozygosity,” or ROH: long stretches where the DNA inherited from one’s mother and father are identical.

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The implications of this are quite dramatic: the diseases from inbreeding can be horrendous.
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Nvidia reveals Blackwell B200 GPU, the ‘world’s most powerful chip’ for AI • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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Nvidia’s must-have H100 AI chip made it a multitrillion-dollar company, one that may be worth more than Alphabet and Amazon, and competitors have been fighting to catch up. But perhaps Nvidia is about to extend its lead — with the new Blackwell B200 GPU and GB200 “superchip.”

Nvidia says the new B200 GPU offers up to 20 petaflops of FP4 horsepower from its 208 billion transistors. Also, it says, a GB200 that combines two of those GPUs with a single Grace CPU can offer 30 times the performance for LLM inference workloads while also potentially being substantially more efficient. It “reduces cost and energy consumption by up to 25x” over an H100, says Nvidia.

Training a 1.8 trillion parameter model would have previously taken 8,000 Hopper GPUs and 15 megawatts of power, Nvidia claims. Today, Nvidia’s CEO says 2,000 Blackwell GPUs can do it while consuming just four megawatts.

On a GPT-3 LLM benchmark with 175 billion parameters, Nvidia says the GB200 has a somewhat more modest seven times the performance of an H100, and Nvidia says it offers four times the training speed.

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I have absolutely no idea whether these numbers are impressive, modest, surprising or what. They just mean nothing at all to me. But I record them here so you know it happened.
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Sony hits pause on PSVR2 production as unsold inventory piles up • Bloomberg via The Business Times

Takashi Mochizuki:

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Sony Group has paused production of its PSVR2 headset until it clears a backlog of unsold units, according to sources familiar with its plans, adding to doubts about the appeal of virtual reality gadgets.

Sales of the US$550 wearable accessory to the PlayStation 5 have slowed progressively since its launch and stocks of the device are building up, according to the sources, who asked not to be named as the information is not public. Sony has produced well over two million units of the product launched in February of last year, the sources said.

PSVR2 shipments have declined every quarter since its debut, according to IDC, which tracks deliveries to retailers rather than consumers. The surplus of assembled devices is throughout Sony’s supply chain, the sources said. Still, IDC’s Francisco Jeronimo sees a recovery for the product category in the coming years with the help of Apple’s entry. “We forecast the VR market to grow on average 31.5% per year between 2023 and 2028,” he said.

Alongside Meta Platforms, Sony has been one of the leading purveyors of virtual reality gear, but both have struggled to attract enough content and entertainment creators to make their platforms compelling. A similar problem stalks Apple’s much pricier Vision Pro headset, as it made its debut without tailored apps from key entertainment platforms Netflix and Alphabet’s YouTube.

…Tokyo-based Sony last month announced it is shutting down its PlayStation London division, which was focused on making virtual reality games. That move was part of a wider set of layoffs that also affected in-house studios such as Guerrilla Games, which had worked on creating a PSVR2-exclusive game in its popular Horizon series, Horizon Call of the Mountain.

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VR headsets are approaching the eye’s resolution limits • IEEE Spectrum

Matthew Smith:

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The Chinese consumer electronics company TCL Technology recently unveiled a monstrous, 163-inch 4K Micro-LED television that one home theater expert described as “tall as Darth Vader.” Each of the TV’s 8.3 million pixels is an independent, miniscule LED, a feat for which TCL charges over $100,000.

But here’s the real surprise: TCL’s new TV isn’t the most pixel-dense or exotic display ever produced. That honor goes to the emerging frontier of Micro-OLED and Micro-LED displays built for AR/VR headsets. Mojo Vision, a leader in micro-LED displays, recently demonstrated a full-color Micro-LED display frontplane with a density of 5,510 pixels%imeter (14,000 pixels per inch) at CES 2024. That display, if blown up to the size of TCL’s television, would pack over 220 billion pixels.

Pixel densities that high may seem absurd, but absurd density is key for the next generation of augmented, mixed, and virtual reality headsets. Stuffing more pixels inside each centimeter allows not only lifelike visuals but also smaller, more compact displays that achieve a necessary level of visual resolution. But building displays at this scale isn’t easy, and it leads to unique technical hurdles the AR/VR industry is still learning to leap.

“Why so many pixels? Well, who wouldn’t want more pixels?” asks Patrick Wyatt, chief product officer at VR headset maker Varjo. “Now the question becomes, how do you do it?”

…Nordic Ren, CEO of Pimax, says the goal is not total pixel count but instead pixels-per-degree (PPD), a measurement of the pixels in each degree of the user’s field of vision. “PPD is pivotal in defining visual clarity,” says Ren. “Even for industry front-runners like Pimax and Apple, the immersion quality still isn’t optimal. Every incremental enhancement to resolution elevates the experience.”

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New Havana Syndrome studies find no evidence of brain injuries • The New York Times

Julian Barnes:

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New studies by the National Institutes of Health failed to find evidence of brain injury in scans or blood markers of the diplomats and spies who suffered symptoms of Havana syndrome, bolstering the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies about the strange health incidents.

Spy agencies have concluded that the debilitating symptoms associated with Havana syndrome, including dizziness and migraines, are not the work of a hostile foreign power. They have not identified a weapon or device that caused the injuries, and intelligence analysts now believe the symptoms are most likely explained by environmental factors, existing medical conditions or stress.

The lead scientist on one of the two new studies said that while the study was not designed to find a cause, the findings were consistent with those determinations.

The authors said the studies are at odds with findings from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, who found differences in brain scans of people with Havana syndrome symptoms and a control group
Dr. David Relman, a prominent scientist who has had access to the classified files involving the cases and representatives of people suffering from Havana syndrome, said the new studies were flawed. Many brain injuries are difficult to detect with scans or blood markers, he said. He added that the findings do not dispute that an external force, like a directed energy device, could have injured the current and former government workers

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This is going to drag on and on. It seems strange that stress, alone, could cause the physical symptoms that people have complained of. At the very least, if there is a directed energy weapon – even a low-power one – the Russians have certainly got their money’s worth out of it in terms of disruption.
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The exponential enshittification of science • Marcus on AI

Gary Marcus:

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In my opinion, every [science publication] article with ChatGPT remnants should be considered suspect and perhaps retracted, because hallucinations may have filtered in, and both authors and reviewers) were asleep at the switch.

And there is no way reviewers and journals are going to be able to keep up. Reviewers are typically unpaid academics who are already stretched to their limits; tripling their workload would not be feasible. And GenAI might do a lot worse than merely tripling workloads; the total number of articles may radically spike, many of them dubious and a waste of reviewers’ time. Lots of bad stuff is going to sneak in.

Not long ago a science-fiction outlet called Clarkesworld that allowed open submission was overrun by fake submissions. I will never forget the graph they shared, the exponential increase in number of users they needed to ban each month.

I warned then that other areas would see the same. It looks like science is next.

If science journals and science itself are overrun by LLM-generated garbage, as now seems imminent, my agnostic “I can’t quite tell yet if LLMs will ultimately be of net benefit to society” is going to switch to “shut it down if they can’t fix this problem.” That’s a huge potential cost.

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It’s pretty simple – you look for “Certainly, I can help you with”. It is, as he says, a big red flag.
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How science sleuths track down bad research • WSJ

Nidhi Subbaraman:

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It was early January when the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute received a complaint about signs of image manipulation in dozens of papers by senior researchers. Days later, the organization said it was seeking to retract or correct several of the studies, sending shock waves through the scientific community.

Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School were sent a complaint the same month: A collection of nearly 30 papers co-authored by another professor appeared to contain copied or doctored images.

The complaints were from different critics, but they had something in common. Both scientists—molecular biologist Sholto David and image expert Elisabeth Bik—had used the same tool in their analyses: an image-scanning software called Imagetwin.

Behind the recent spotlight on suspect science lies software such as Imagetwin, from a company based in Vienna, and another called Proofig AI, made by a company in Israel. The software brands aid scientists in scouring hundreds of studies and are turbocharging the process of spotting deceptive images.

Before the tools emerged, data detectives pored over images in published research with their own eyes, something that could take a few minutes or about an hour, with some people possessing a flair for seeing patterns. Now, the tech tools automate this effort, pointing to problematic images within a minute or two.

Scientific images offer a rare glimpse of raw data: millions of pixels tidily presented alongside the text of a paper. Common types of images include photographs of tissue slices and cells. Researchers say no two tissue samples taken from different animals should ever look the same under a microscope, nor should two different cell cultures. 

When they do, that is a red flag.

…Imagetwin in particular offers a feature that none of the human detectives can replicate: It compares photos in one paper against a database of 51 million images reaching back 20 years, flagging photos copied from previous studies. “That is an amazing find that humans can never do,” Bik said.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The company that picked the symbols and colours for ski run difficulty was.. Walt Disney? Yes it was. CC-licensed photo by Shinya Suzuki 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. Going downhill faster. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Pornhub blocks all of Texas to protest state law—Paxton says “good riddance” • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

Pornhub has disabled its website in Texas following a court ruling that upheld a state law requiring age-verification systems on porn websites. Visitors to pornhub.com in Texas are now greeted with a message calling the Texas law “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.”

“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” Pornhub’s message said.

Pornhub said it has “made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”

The same message was posted on other sites owned by the same company, including RedTube, YouPorn, and Brazzers. Pornhub has also blocked its website in Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia in protest of similar laws. VPN services can be used to evade the blocks and to test out which states have been blocked by Pornhub.

The US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the Texas law in a 2–1 decision last week. The 5th Circuit appeals court had previously issued a temporary stay that allowed the law to take effect in September 2023.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last month sued Pornhub owner Aylo (formerly MindGeek) for violating the law. Paxton’s complaint in Travis County District Court sought civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each day since the law took effect on September 19, 2023.

“Sites like Pornhub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children,” Paxton wrote yesterday. “We recently secured a major victory against PornHub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, good riddance.”

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“We can’t find a way to comply with the law except by not being here” is straightforward enough, I guess.
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I used ChatGPT as a reporting assistant. It didn’t go well • The Markup

Jon Keegan:

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The example story I used for this exercise was the train derailment in East Palestine, OH in February 2023, a major story that involved various kinds of data that I could ask ChatGPT to help analyze. To be clear, this wasn’t a story I had reported on, but I wanted to try using ChatGPT in a way that a data journalist might when covering it. I spent a LOT of time chatting with ChatGPT as part of this exercise and, frankly, sometimes it was exhausting.

…Based on my interactions, by far the most useful capabilities of ChatGPT are its ability to generate and debug programming code. (At one point during the East Palestine exercise, it generated some simple Python code for creating a map of the derailment.) When responding to a request to write code, it typically explains its approach (even though it may not be the best one), and shows its work, and you can redirect it to follow a different approach if you think its plan isn’t what you need. The ability to continually add to the features of your code while the AI agent retains the context and history of what you have been discussing can really save you a ton of time, avoiding painstaking searches for posts about a similar problem on StackOverflow (one of the largest online coding communities). 

The NICAR exercise left me with concerns about using generative AI tools for the precise work of data journalism. The fact that a tool as powerful as ChatGPT can’t produce a “receipt” of exactly how it knows something goes against everything we are trained to do as journalists. Also I worry about small, understaffed newsrooms relying upon these tools too much as the news industry struggles with layoffs and closures. And when there is a lack of guidance from newsroom leadership regarding the use of these tools, it could lead to errors and inaccuracies.  

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So.. I wonder if, when presented with a list of connected events in non-time-sequential order (“The policeman is in hospital” “A woman was robbed at knifepoint” “A policeman tackled the robber”), ChatGPT or others could assemble them into a news story? It’s a classic exercise for would-be journalists. If it can’t do that, what actually is it good for in journalism?
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Nearly half of UK families excluded from modern digital society, study finds • The Guardian

Clea Skopeliti:

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Almost half of UK families with children lack the online skills or access to devices, data and broadband required to participate in today’s digital society, research shows, with an expert saying this divide is an “amplifier of other exclusions”.

Research shared exclusively with the Guardian found that 45% of households with children did not meet the threshold. Families from low socioeconomic backgrounds in deprived areas and households outside London were among those who were less likely to meet it. Households from minority ethnic backgrounds and those with disabled parents were twice as likely to fall below it.

The research was led by experts at the University of Liverpool, Loughborough University, and the digital inclusion charity the Good Things Foundation, with input from other universities. It used a series of focus groups to develop a “minimum digital living standard” that measures households’ digital abilities and their access to goods and services.

“For the first time, we have a benchmark – defined by the public – about what families think is ‘enough’ to feel included in our digital society today,” said Emma Stone, the director of evidence and engagement at the Good Things Foundation.

“Government, businesses and service providers are driving ahead with digital transformation assuming that families are equally able to engage online. Today’s research shows this is not true.”

The lead researcher, Prof Simeon Yates, of the University of Liverpool, said the high proportion falling below this benchmark was disappointing but unsurprising. “People may be surprised, because in every show from crime to romance, people are living a digital life – but we know that a very large number of people don’t live in that world.”

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I am surprised – I thought that the saturation of smartphones would mean that at least one member of every family would have sufficient skills.
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The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the cloud • The MIT Press Reader

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate:

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According to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report, if the entire Cloud shifted to hyperscale facilities, energy usage might drop as much as 25%. Without any regulatory body or agency to incentivize or enforce such a shift in our infrastructural configuration, there are other solutions that have been proposed to curb the Cloud’s carbon problem. Some have proposed relocating data centres to Nordic countries like Iceland or Sweden, in a bid to utilize ambient, cool air to minimize carbon footprint, a technique called “free cooling.” However, network signal latency issues make this dream of a haven for green data centres largely untenable to meet the computing and data storage demands of the wider world.

As a result, the Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data centre can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centres collectively devour more energy than some nation-states. Today, the electricity utilized by data centres accounts for 0.3% of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2% of global carbon emissions.

Why so much energy? Beyond cooling, the energy requirements of data centres are vast. To meet the pledge to customers that their data and cloud services will be available anytime, anywhere, data centres are designed to be hyper-redundant: If one system fails, another is ready to take its place at a moment’s notice, to prevent a disruption in user experiences. Like air conditioners idling in a low-power state, ready to rev up when things get too hot, the data centre is a Russian doll of redundancies: redundant power systems like diesel generators, redundant servers ready to take over computational processes should others become unexpectedly unavailable, and so forth. In some cases, only 6% to 12% of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes. The remainder is allocated to cooling and maintaining chains upon chains of redundant fail-safes to prevent costly downtime.

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Lawsuit opens research misconduct report that may get a Harvard prof fired • Ars Technica

John Timmer on a lawsuit filed by Prof Francesca Gino against the Data Colada blog and Harvard University, which investigated some of her work on accusations of data fabrication:

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the Data Colada team had initially noted some oddities in the results reported from Gino’s work [about honesty]. In one case, they reported that they had found a spreadsheet of some of the original data, and it had a number of rows that appeared to be out of order. These rows contained some of the strongest effects seen in the experiment, and the editing history preserved in the Excel document format suggested these rows had been moved in from a different experiment.

The Harvard investigators, by contrast, got access to data on the computer systems used for surveying participants, copies from Gino’s hard drive, and raw data from the researchers who had collected them. And that record, the investigators conclude, made two things clear: Data Colada’s suppositions about which data was suspect were largely on target, and the data as published was different from what had originally been collected.

The report characterizes Gino’s response as twofold. One is to suggest that all of the problems on four separate papers represent “honest errors,” either by herself or her research assistants. The report doesn’t really dismiss this but does note that data handling that is “reckless” would also fit Harvard’s definition of research misconduct.

The second defense that Harvard’s investigators say Gino offered is that people conspired to plant evidence of fraud on her computers. At various points, the report indicates she accused either a former collaborator or the Data Colada team themselves of pursuing this plot. The investigators did not find this credible, noting that the issues involved “anomalies and/or discrepancies within or between study datasets accessed from one or more of the following sources: the Open Science Framework (“OSF”) website, where publicly available versions of study data can be posted by researchers; the sequestered hard drive of Professor Gino’s computer; Professor Gino’s Qualtrics account; and the RA who collected the data.”

Anyone maliciously manipulating this data, the investigators conclude, would have had to access lots of computers, identify the right files on them, and modify them at critical times during the preparation of the research papers. This, they felt, made the explanation unlikely.

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Unlikely is certainly one word for it. The feasibility of examining the creation of a paper like this is a big advance for science: it does let us find out in the first place whether papers are worth trying to replicate at all.
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New research suggests that our universe has no dark matter • Phys.org

Bernad Rizk:

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The current theoretical model for the composition of the universe is that it’s made of normal matter, dark energy and dark matter. A new University of Ottawa study challenges this.

A study, published today in The Astrophysical Journal, challenges the current model of the universe by showing that, in fact, it has no room for dark matter.

In cosmology, the term “dark matter” describes all that appears not to interact with light or the electromagnetic field, or that can only be explained through gravitational force. We can’t see it, nor do we know what it’s made of, but it helps us understand how galaxies, planets and stars behave.

Rajendra Gupta, a physics professor at the Faculty of Science, used a combination of the covarying coupling constants (CCC) and “tired light” (TL) theories (the CCC+TL model) to reach this conclusion.

This model combines two ideas—about how the forces of nature decrease over cosmic time and about light losing energy when it travels a long distance. It’s been tested and has been shown to match up with several observations, such as about how galaxies are spread out and how light from the early universe has evolved.

This discovery challenges the prevailing understanding of the universe, which suggests that roughly 27% of it is composed of dark matter and less than 5% of ordinary matter, remaining being the dark energy.

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The paper has the snappy title of “Testing CCC+TL Cosmology with Observed Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Features”, but if it gains traction then it could upend lots of how we think about the universe.
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Walt Disney’s everlasting effect on North American ski resorts • Inside the Magic

TJ Muscaro:

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Before he passed away in 1966, Walt Disney set out to build or buy his own ski resort. One of the proposed locations was Mineral King in California’s Sequoia National Park, but environmentalists reportedly blocked it. Obviously, Walt’s plans for a ski resort would never come to be, and if you take the “Keys to the Kingdom Tour” at the Magic Kingdom, you’ll learn about how the architecture of his ski resort lives on in the log cabin style of Frontierland.

But before the plans for a ski resort completely shut down, Disney already established its proposed trail signage.

That trail signage would survive and become the adopted method of the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) in 1968 and is still in use today.

According to Signs of the Mountains, the modern trail rating system is as follows:
• Green Circle: The easiest; usually wide, open trails with a grade from 0-25%. (A 100% grade would be a 45-degree angle.)
• Blue Square: Intermediate; generally the most prevalent rating across a mountain, with a grade between 25–40% and often groomed.
• Black Diamond: Most difficult; steeper than 40%, likely ungroomed and therefore covered in moguls and/or the freshest snow.
• Double Black Diamond: Experts only! Very steep and narrow, with extra hazards and obstacles like exposed rock and drop-off cliffs.
• Orange Rectangle, horizontal with rounded edges: Terrain park; this is where you’ll find rails and boxes, professionally shaped jumps and half-pipes.

Now, each mountain and resort have their own subjective grading systems, but they are all based on this scale. For instance, Big Sky Resort in Montana offers triple black diamond routes, and Steamboat Spring in Colorado has Blue-Square-Black-Diamond to signify a run whose difficulty sits between the two standard ratings.

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The Disney company had actually tested how people reacted to the colours and shapes. Though this doesn’t explain how Europe has the Red grade in between the Blue and Black.
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Hundreds rescued from love scam centre in the Philippines – BBC News

Virma Simonette and Kelly Ng:

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Hundreds of people have been rescued from a scam centre in the Philippines that made them pose as lovers online.

Police said they raided the centre on Thursday and rescued 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese and 73 other foreign nationals.

The centre, which is about 100km north of Manila, was masquerading as an online gambling firm, they said.
South East Asia has become a hub for scam centres where the scammers themselves are often entrapped and forced into criminal activity.

Young and tech-savvy victims are often lured into running these illegal operations, which range from money laundering and crypto fraud to so-called love scams. The latter are also known as “pig butchering” scams, named after the farming practice of fattening pigs before slaughtering them. These typically start with the scammer adopting a fake identity to gain their victim’s affection and trust – and then using the illusion of a romantic or intimate relationship to manipulate or steal from the victim. This often happens by persuading them to invest in fake schemes or businesses.

Thursday’s raid near Manila was sparked by a tip-off from a Vietnamese man who managed to flee the scam centre last month, police said. The man, who in his 30s, arrived in the Philippines in January this year, after being offered what he was told would be a chef’s job, said Winston Casio, spokesman for the presidential commission against organised crime. But the man soon realised that he, like hundreds of others, had fallen prey to human traffickers running love and cryptocurrency scams.

Those trapped in the Bamban centre were forced to send “sweet nothings” to their victims, many of whom were Chinese, Mr Casio said – they would check in on their recipients with questions about their day and if and what they had eaten for their last meal. They would also send photos of themselves to cultivate the relationship. Mr Casio said those running the scam centres trapped “good looking men and women to lure [victims]”.

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Good to see crypto fraud moving up to join those old favourites of money laundering and love scams. (The industrial nature of this scheme becomes clear from the picture accompanying the article.)
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When product markets become collective traps: the case of social media • U of Chicago Becker Friedman Institute for Economics

Leonardo Bursztyn, Benjamin Handel, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, and Christopher Roth:

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The authors begin by measuring the amount of money that users would accept to deactivate their accounts for four weeks, while keeping constant others’ social media use. They next measure how much users value their accounts when other students at their university are asked to deactivate their accounts as well. Finally, the authors measure users’ preferences over the deactivation of accounts of all participating students, including themselves. They find the following:

• Users would need to be paid $59 to deactivate TikTok and $47 to deactivate Instagram if others in their network were to continue using their accounts
• Users would be willing to pay $28 and $10 to have others, including themselves, deactivate TikTok and Instagram, respectively. Accounting for consumption spillovers to non-users reveals that 64% of active TikTok users and 48% of active Instagram users experience negative welfare from the products’ existence. Participants who do not have accounts would be willing to pay $67 and $39 to have others deactivate their TikTok and Instagram accounts, respectively
• Taken together, these results imply the existence of a “social media trap” for a large share of consumers, whose utility from the platforms is negative but would have been even more negative if they didn’t use social media
• The authors use these results to quantify the role of network effects on social media, or the extent to which users value social media platforms more when their peers use them. They find positive and quantitatively significant network effects: users value TikTok and Instagram 33% and 24% more, respectively, when their peers are on the sites compared to when they are not.

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I always find these studies fascinating, though the proof of the pudding really is in the eating: you need to actually offer real money and get people to carry through on the deactivation. Anything less is just indicative.
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US probes Hamas’s use of crypto before Oct. 7 • WSJ

Ian Talley and Angus Berwick:

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The US Treasury Department is investigating $165m in cryptocurrency-linked transactions that may have helped finance Hamas before the militant group’s Oct. 7 attack against Israel, the agency said in a report to Congress.

Treasury officials say the U.S.-designated terror group’s increasing use of digital financing underscores the need for Congress to approve new powers to oversee cryptocurrency as Hamas’s access to traditional sources of funding is hit by Western sanctions.

But the drive to expand regulations has sparked pushback. Crypto advocates and lawmakers who support the industry have attempted to minimize the role of digital currencies in terror financing and other illicit activities. 

The estimate of Hamas’s involvement in crypto-related transactions is contained in a Treasury report on the group’s use of digital currencies that was sent to Congress late Tuesday, the first formal US assessment of its use of cryptocurrencies.

“We continue to assess that Hamas and other terrorists have a preference for the use of traditional financial products and services, but I remain concerned that as we cut off their access to traditional finance these groups will increasingly turn to virtual assets,” deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a letter to lawmakers accompanying the report.

…Hamas collects about $100m a year from Iran, its chief international supporter, and raises revenue from a $500m global investment portfolio, according to Western officials. Israel’s military operation since last October has disrupted the roughly $600m a year the group collected in taxes in Gaza, its biggest source of funding, those officials say. But Hamas has been diversifying both its sources of funds and the methods it uses to move them, they add.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified