Car parks in Britain that require parking apps will soon be given a unique number to identify them. But what system should be used to number them? You could help. CC-licensed photo by Elliott Brown on Flickr.

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

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

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

Reflecting on 18 years at Google • Hixie’s Natural Log

Ian Hickson joined Google in 2005, just after the IPO:

»

My team was nominally the open source team at Google, but I was entirely autonomous (for which I owe thanks to Chris DiBona). Most of my work was done on a laptop from random buildings on Google’s campus; entire years went by where I didn’t use my assigned desk.

In time, exceptions to Google’s cultural strengths developed. For example, as much as I enjoyed [ex-Microsoft] Vic Gundotra’s enthusiasm (and his initial vision for Google+, which again was quite well defined and, if not necessarily uniformly appreciated, at least unambiguous), I felt less confident in his ability to give clear answers when things were not going as well as hoped. He also started introducing silos to Google (e.g. locking down certain buildings to just the Google+ team), a distinct departure from the complete internal transparency of early Google.

Another example is the Android team (originally an acquisition), who never really fully acclimated to Google’s culture. Android’s work/life balance was unhealthy, the team was not as transparent as older parts of Google, and the team focused on chasing the competition more than solving real problems for users.

…Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google’s erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of “don’t be evil”). The effects of layoffs are insidious. Whereas before people might focus on the user, or at least their company, trusting that doing the right thing will eventually be rewarded even if it’s not strictly part of their assigned duties, after a layoff people can no longer trust that their company has their back, and they dramatically dial back any risk-taking.

…It’s definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power from the CFO’s office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google’s extensive resources to deliver value to users. …I do think the clock is ticking, though.

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An important parking infrastructure decision is about to be made – and I feel like us nerds can help make it right • Odds And Ends Of History

James O’Malley on plans afoot inside the Department of Transport, which aims to unify parking apps into a single system, but which then needs to uniquely identify every car park:

»

So here’s the challenge: can you come up with the best way to structure and allocate car park numbers?

I’m told that there will be some key design constraints the final system will need to follow:

• It will need to be numbers only, so that less-tech savvy people can type the numbers on old-fashioned phone keypad when calling to pay for parking
• The largest local authorities have more than 1,000 car parks, but fewer than 10,000, so will need to work with those sorts of numbers in each council area
• Parking codes will be dished out to local authorities in blocks or groups

And for reference, the parking industry is currently kicking around a bunch of ideas that include:

• The numbers could encode some sort of geographic reference (like phone numbers with area codes, or how postcodes contain postal distract letters at the start)
• The system will eventually handle different types of parking (on-street and off-street), and different types of payments (eg, pay before, pay on exit, EV-charging), so some existing proposals include a way of identifying this from the numbers used
• There’s also also lots of complexity in how parking is managed in different places, so there’s some debate over whether codes should reflect geography or owners (eg, a council or a company like NCP).

…So what’s the best way to do it? How many digits should it have? Can you think of some really clever way to encode geography into the numbers? Could the numbers include anything else, like a ‘type’ marker for, eg, car parks at train stations? Is there a rational way to allocate numbers for thousands of car parks that have arisen organically? How would you do it?

«

Seems like a challenge we can rise to! (Grammar note for James: “we nerds”, not “us nerds”.) My initial thought was to have both an “operator” and “geography” field. Trouble is, that could lead to pretty long numbers: there are sure to be more than 100 operators (ergo four-figure number) and perhaps 10,000 geographical regions. Already too long for poking into a smartphone on a cold wet Monday night.

So do something more like the mobile phone numbering system, which is also allocated in blocks, and manages to waste two digits (07) yet give everyone in the country a unique number. Sorted.

Let James know your solution in the comments of his post – else Those Who Matter won’t know.
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Congrats to Elon Musk: I didn’t think you had it in you to file a lawsuit this stupid. But, you crazy bastard, you did it! • Techdirt

Mike Masnick has some fun tearing apart Elon Musk’s “nuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters for pointing out that some big-name brands could find their ads placed alongside objectionable content on “exTwitter”, as Masnick calls it:

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Honestly, this feels like what you get when you have a rich but legally ignorant dude who announces on a Friday that there will be a lawsuit on Monday and finally finds some terrible lawyers who are actually willing to file something just to live up to that promise.

It’s not a good lawsuit. It’s barely even a lawsuit at all.

«

And he takes it apart thoroughly. (Thanks Terry for the link.) As a followup, people are debunking Musk’s claims by sending him screenshots in real time on his site.
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About that OpenAI “breakthrough” • Marcus on AI

Gary Marcus on the Reuters story that OpenAI had a “breakthrough” with something called Q* which got the board a-flutter and worried:

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I have seen this movie before, often.

OpenAI could in fact have a breakthrough that fundamentally changes the world.

But “breakthroughs” rarely turn to be general to live up to initial rosy expectations. Often advances work in some contexts, not otherwise. Arguably every putative breakthrough in driverless cars has been of this sort; somebody finds something new, it looks good at first, maybe even helps a bit, but at the end of the day, “autonomous” cars still aren’t reliable enough for prime time; no breakthrough has gotten us over the threshhold. AV’s still aren’t general enough that you can just plop down a car that was tuned in pilot studies in Menlo Park, SF and Arizona and expect it to drive gracefully and safely in Sicily or Mumbai. We are probably still many “breakthroughs” away from true level 5 driverless cars.

Or consider what was touted at OpenAI as an extraordinary breakthrough in 2019, when they launched a slick video and blog post about how they’d gotten a robot to solve a Rubik’s cube.

To many, the result sounded amazing. VentureBeat gullibly reported OpenAI’s PR pitch wholesale; “OpenAI — the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by Elon Musk and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman — says it’s on the cusp of solving something of a grand challenge in robotics and AI systems.”

Me being me, I called bullshit, slamming OpenAI on Twitter a few days later.

Probably the most relevant bullet point on the right (at least for present purposes) was the one about generalization; getting their algorithm to work for one object (which, cheesily, turned out to be a special Cube instrumented with sensors and LEDS, unlike a Rubik’s cube you’d buy in a store) in carefully controlled lab circumstances hardly guaranteed that the solution would work more broadly in the complex open-ended real world.

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Count him as a big sceptic on Q*, or at least a “show me first”.
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Sonos readies $400-plus headphones to rival Apple and Bose, plus a TV set-top box • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Mark Gurman:

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Sonos, best known for its smart speakers and sound bars, will make a long-awaited push into headphones with a model priced upwards of $400 that’s slated to be released as early as April, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company is also aiming to introduce a TV set-top box, which would compete with products from Apple and Roku, as early as the end of 2024, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t yet public. Sonos looks to charge between $150 and $200 for that device, which would run apps from popular streaming services.

The company is also developing new amplifiers and in-ceiling speakers aimed at professional installers, as well as a higher-end TV sound bar, new subwoofers, an update to the portable Roam speaker and a version of its Era 100 speaker for businesses. And it’s planning an updated voice control system, video service and upgraded smartphone app.

Sonos shares pared losses Tuesday on news of the product push. After falling nearly 4% earlier in the session, they were down 2% by the close in New York.

The new products are part of a bid by chief executive officer Patrick Spence to reignite growth at the audio technology company, which suffered a sales decline in the past year. Demand for smart speakers has cooled, and products like headphones are seen as an opportunity to leverage the Sonos brand to find a new moneymaker.

«

To be honest, it’s surprising that Sonos has held off on doing headphones for so long; Gurman says these have been in development since 2019, but repeatedly revised. The full article is essentially the company’s complete product roadmap for the next couple of years, so you could pick and choose what you think will sell, and what will be profitable. Headphones? Yes. Set-top box? Perhaps, but can’t see any profit in it. High-end soundbar? Sure, always a market for that. And so on.
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Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected • Goldman Sachs

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It wasn’t long ago rising demand and component shortages sparked concern that “greenflation” would drive up prices for the batteries used in electric vehicles. That’s subsiding as prices cool for battery metals, which could help make EVs more competitive with traditional cars more quickly. 

Goldman Sachs Research now expects battery prices to fall to $99 per kilowatt hour (kWh) of storage capacity by 2025 — a 40% decrease from 2022 (the previous forecast was for a 33% decline). Our analysts estimate that almost half of the decline will come from declining prices of EV raw materials such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt. Battery pack prices are now expected to fall by an average of 11% per year from 2023 to 2030, writes Nikhil Bhandari, co-head of Goldman Sachs Research’s Asia-Pacific Natural Resources and Clean Energy Research, in the team’s report.

As battery prices fall, Goldman Sachs Research estimates the EV market could achieve cost parity, without subsidies, with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles around the middle of this decade on a total-cost-of-ownership basis. 

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There’s also a graph showing EV sales as a percentage of passenger car sales around the world: China leads by a long way at just over 25%, the EU is at 15+%, global average about 12.5%, and the US lagging at about 7.5%.

It’s not as if China is smaller than the US, so why isn’t range anxiety and the usual noises about charging a factor in China? Sales are about 2.5m per month there, compared to about 1.3m in the US. Is it because Chinese buyers are often getting their first car?
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‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ players plan lawsuit over injury claims • Deadline

Jake Kanter:

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Squid Game: The Challenge contestants are threatening legal action against Netflix and producers after claiming they were injured during the filming of the game show.

A British personal injuries law firm is representing two unnamed players who say they suffered hypothermia and nerve damage while shooting in cold conditions in the UK.

Express Solicitors said in a press statement that it had sent letters of claim to Studio Lambert, the co-producer of Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge.

The contestants’ allegations concern their experience shooting the show’s opening game ‘Red Light, Green Light,’ in which players must evade the attention of a menacing robotic doll.

The game was filmed at Cardington Studios, a former Royal Air Force base in Bedford, during a cold snap in Britain. Netflix confirmed at the time that three of 456 players required medical attention.

Express Solicitors, which specializes in no win no fee claims, said its clients risked their health by having to stay motionless for long periods during the shoot as they attempted to stay in the competition.

Daniel Slade, CEO of Express Solicitors, said: “We recognise people may see this as a classic David and Goliath battle with the company and its production partners. Contestants thought they were taking part in something fun and those injured did not expect to suffer as they did. Now they have been left with injuries after spending time being stuck in painful stress positions in cold temperatures.”

A spokesperson for Squid Game: The Challenge said: “No lawsuit has been filed by any of the Squid Game contestants. We take the welfare of our contestants extremely seriously.”

Deadline reported in February that Squid Game: The Challenge faced an independent safety inspection after the medical incidents on set.

«

As I recall from the original series, suffering from exposure would have been quite a good outcome after facing the “menacing robot doll”. I suspect that the Netflix release form will have covered this, as Netflix probably has the better lawyers. And did nobody watch Takeshi’s Castle? That was basically Squid Game but without the killing. Far more enjoyable.
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Twitter bets big on … CEO’s son • Semafor

Max Tani:

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Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, formerly Twitter, has turned the service’s Hail Mary bet on an imagined $100m political advertising business over to someone she trusts: her son Matt Madrazo.

Despite owner Elon Musk’s attempts to convert the company into a subscription-based service, the company remains dependent on an advertising business that produced about 90% of its revenue in 2021. And in the initial months after he bought Twitter, Musk expressed a keen interest in restarting the social media company’s political advertising business, which it had voluntarily shuttered in 2019.

In recent weeks, Madrazo, who previously headed ad sales at the non-political, creator-focused media firm Studio71, has been privately introducing himself to influential figures in the political ad world in Washington, D.C. He’s part of what’s essentially a two-man operation to restart X’s political advertising business with the goal of capitalizing on the massive amounts of money that campaigns are about to spend during the 2024 elections.

According to three people with knowledge of the situation, Madrazo has been tasked with outreach to Republican digital advertising firms and spenders. Jonathan Phelps, a Pandora and Univision veteran who also joined X in recent months, is handling the platform’s (far less promising) outreach to Democrats. Working occasionally out of Tesla’s D.C. offices, the duo are hoping to resuscitate a line of cash at a moment when the company is desperate for new revenue.

«

Which would be all well and dandy, except that in 2018, the last time Twitter ran political adverts, they brought in.. $3m. Out of $2.16 billion in revenue. How likely is it that that number will multiply 30-fold, even with a presidential election in the offing?
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The end of anonymity on Chinese social media • Rest of World

Caiwei Chen:

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On October 31, Weibo, as well as several other major Chinese social media platforms including WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou, announced that they now required popular users’ legal names to be made visible to the public. Weibo stated in a public post that the new rule would first apply to all users with over 1 million followers, then to those with over 500,000.

Chinese social media users expressed criticism and concern over the new rule, with many saying it would violate user privacy, enable toxic online behaviors like doxxing and harassment, and limit the diversity of voices on the Chinese internet. Several famous online influencers, such as science blogger Ming Yu Zhui Ran, have decided to remove some of their followers to avoid making their identity public. Others, such as rapper Kindergarten Killer, have decided to delete their social media accounts altogether. (While Tu Pao Ding is still active on Weibo, her follower count was down to 219,700 at the time of publication.) 

When Cathy Zhang, a 33-year-old lifestyle blogger based in Shanghai, first saw a screenshot announcing Weibo’s new policy, she dismissed it as fake news. “It went against common sense, stripping away all anonymity from social media,” she told Rest of World. But the next day, she realized it was real: Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei’s profile now showed his real name and occupation, “mobile internet analyst.”

With a Weibo following of more than 35,000, Zhang has posted about wellness, and occasionally gender issues, on the platform for over 10 years, relying on her account to support herself financially. She has never posted her full name or identity online, which has partially shielded her from the hateful messages she often receives from online trolls. Although Zhang does not have enough followers to be affected by the new rule, she is worried. “I feel like I’ve just barely dodged a bullet,” she said.

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The amazing thing is that China tolerated anonymity on social media at all. Though maybe it’s public anonymity, not anonymity from the authorities, that’s ending. The latter was probably never there.
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Behind the scenes of Sam Altman’s showdown at OpenAI • WSJ

Keach Hagey, Deepa Seetharaman and Berber Jin:

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People familiar with the [now mostly fired OpenAI] board’s thinking said there wasn’t one incident that led to their decision to eject Altman, but a consistent, slow erosion of trust over time that made them increasingly uneasy. Also complicating matters were Altman’s mounting list of outside AI-related ventures, which raised questions for the board about how OpenAI’s technology or intellectual property could be used. 

The board agreed to discuss the matter with their counsel. After a few hours, they returned, still unwilling to provide specifics. They said that Altman wasn’t candid, and often got his way. The board said that Altman had been so deft they couldn’t even give a specific example, according to the people familiar with the executives. 

The executives requested written examples of the board’s allegations.

Meanwhile, Altman was on the phone with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, saying he wanted to keep working on the technology. They gamed out ways to undo the day’s events, but also began to hash out a backup plan for Altman to bring a bunch of his top researchers and start a new division at the tech giant, according to people familiar with their conversation. 

Altman also told friends that he was thinking of starting a new company with Brockman and intended to hire away dozens of OpenAI employees. 

Altman blamed himself for not better managing the board, which he felt was taken over by people overly concerned with safety and influenced by “effective altruism”. 

The specter of effective altruism had loomed over the politics of the board and company in recent months, particularly after the movement’s most famous adherent, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, was found guilty of fraud in a highly public trial. 

…Friday, after being fired, Altman immediately flew back to San Francisco. On Saturday, his Russian Hill home became a war room filled with OpenAI employees, including Murati, then the interim CEO, and other members of the executive team, plotting his return to the company.

They began to use X in a coordinated fashion for their campaign.

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The board not quite being able to figure out what it was they objected to about Altman is the icing on the cake. The article is a little confusing in timeline (was Altman on the phone to Nadella on Friday, or Saturday?) but at its heart, this is about “effective altruism” (EA) v “effective acceleration” (e/acc): Altman’s from the latter tribe, wanting to zoom headlong into new technology, and figure out how to mop up the problems later.
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ExxonMobil vs. Google: profits and perceptions explained • OilPrice.com

Robert Rapier:

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Google’s net margin in Q3 was 22.5% (nearly double ExxonMobil’s) and its return on assets was 17.7% [v 11.1% for Exxon]. Google’s 2022 income bill was $11.4bn on net income of $60.0bn. Google shares trade at a price-to-earnings ratio (P/E ratio) of 20.5 based on earnings estimates for the next 12 months — nearly twice that of ExxonMobil.

So, Google makes more money on lower revenues and pays a lower overall tax rate than ExxonMobil. It has a net margin that is nearly double ExxonMobil’s. So why do people rage over ExxonMobil’s profits, but say absolutely nothing about Google’s?

The main reason is that we can see the direct impact of gasoline prices on our pocketbook, and we can’t really see how Google is impacting us. Thus, we feel like ExxonMobil is taking advantage, but we don’t feel the same way about Google.

Nevertheless, it should raise questions about what is an appropriate profit in a capitalistic society. Sure, Google and ExxonMobil are very different types of companies, but can you say what ExxonMobil’s profit margin should be? If I gave you ExxonMobil’s profit numbers, but told you it was for Starbucks or Apple or Nike, would you complain that it’s too much?

The reality is that the energy industry consistently ranks at or near the bottom of all sectors when it comes to profit margins. If you really think ExxonMobil is making too much money, then perhaps you could explain how much would be an “acceptable” amount, how you made that determination, and whether you apply that same standard to other corporations. And of course, you can always choose not to consume the company’s products and contribute to that profit.

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Rapier contrasts Exxon’s profit, where he suggests it has no power over pricing (of oil – though OPEC’s cartel does control about 40% of crude oil production and price), with Google’s, where he suggests it does.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Despite having more than 500 million devices in homes, Amazon can’t get Alexa to turn a profit, and is cutting jobs. CC-licensed photo by ajay_suresh on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Not that smart. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: Sam Altman’s ouster at OpenAI was precipitated by letter to board about AI breakthrough -sources • Reuters

Anna Tong, Jeffrey Dastin and Krystal Hu:

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Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The previously unreported letter and AI algorithm was a catalyst that caused the board to oust Altman, the poster child of generative AI, the two sources said. Before his triumphant return late Tuesday, more than 700 employees had threatened to quit and join backer Microsoft in solidarity with their fired leader.

The sources cited the letter as one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board that led to Altman’s firing. Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter. The researchers who wrote the letter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

OpenAI declined to comment.

According to one of the sources, long-time executive Mira Murati told employees on Wednesday that a letter about the AI breakthrough called Q* (pronounced Q-Star), precipitated the board’s actions.

The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q*, which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans.

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Murati has been one of the people pumping the brakes on OpenAI’s headlong rush towards AGI, as has chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Both were influential in chucking Altman out last week. Draw your own conclusions. Certainly one of the hot take guesses last weekend was “OpenAI has invented AGI but Altman didn’t tell the board or try to slow it down, ergo defenestration”. Which maybe was close to right.

Anyway, perhaps this will be a hinge moment in human history. I for one welcome our new etc.
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“ChatGPT with voice” opens up to everyone on iOS and Android • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

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It may have been a chaotic week at OpenAI, but the company has somehow still found time to roll out a product. “ChatGPT with voice” is available to free users of the ChatGPT app. This feature launched for paying users in September, and if you haven’t heard, it’s a full-blown voice assistant. The feature is still slowly rolling out to devices; on my Android phone, I don’t have a “headphone” icon anywhere, even with a Plus subscription.

When you have the feature, you can open the app, press the “headphone” icon, ask a question, and a stilted robot voice will read out a reply. It’s just like the voice assistants from Apple, Amazon, or Google, but this one is powered by a large language model. ChatGPT’s voice model is purely a question-and-answer type of voice assistant, though. Usually, these things are handy for what they can do on your behalf—make a phone call, control a smart home, take a note, or make a calendar appointment—but this can only answer questions.

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“Hey, ChatGPT, exactly why was Sam Altman fired a week ago?”
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Amazon to cut jobs at Alexa unit to sharpen focus on generative AI • Computerworld

Charlotte Trueman:

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The company’s emphasis on developing generative AI systems has resulted in the release of new offerings, like the tool rolled out in September to generate copy listings for users selling items on the company’s e-commerce platform. The application is fuelled by a large language model (LLM) that Amazon has been developing internally,  originally to support the Alexa smart assistant.

But in a statement Monday, the company said its latest round of job cuts will impact staff working on Alexa-related efforts. “Several hundred roles are impacted, a relatively small percentage of the total number of people in the Devices business who are building great experiences for our customers.”

Amazon noted that there are more than half a billion Alexa devices in customers’ homes. “Our investments in generative AI are bringing our vision for an even more intuitive, intelligent, and useful Alexa closer than ever before,” the company said. “As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers—which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI. These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in role eliminations.”

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Half a billion devices in people’s homes, and yet can’t make money from them. That must be the definition of market failure.
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Office landlords can’t get a loan anymore • WSJ

Konrad Putzier:

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The office sector’s credit crunch is intensifying. By one measure, it’s now worse than during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

Only one out of every three securitized office mortgages that expired during the first nine months of 2023 was paid off by the end of September, according to Moody’s Analytics. 

That is the smallest share for the first nine months of any year since at least 2008 and well below the nadir reached in 2009, when 47% of these loans got paid off. That share is also well below the rate before the pandemic, when more than eight out of every 10 maturing securitized office mortgages were paid back in some years. 

While the numbers cover only office mortgages packaged into bonds—so-called commercial mortgage-backed securities—they reflect a broader freeze in the lending market for office buildings.

Many office owners can’t pay back their old loans because they can’t get new mortgages. Remote work and rising vacancies have hit building profits, making it harder to pay interest. Higher interest rates have pushed debt costs up and building values down. 

That combination is fueling a rise in defaults. The share of office CMBS loans that are delinquent has tripled over the past year to 5.75%, according to Trepp. It doesn’t help that many banks no longer issue new office loans and that many insurance companies and debt funds have become more cautious.

“People just don’t want to touch it,” said Alex Killick, managing director at CWCapital, a company that handles troubled CMBS loans.

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Quietly, very quietly, the post-pandemic effect begins to be felt.
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Personal data stolen in British Library cyber-attack appears for sale online • The Guardian

Harriet Sherwood:

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The British Library has confirmed that personal data stolen in a cyber-attack has appeared online, apparently for sale to the highest bidder.

The attack was carried out on October 31 by a group known for such criminal activity, said the UK’s national library, which holds about 14m books and millions of other items. Since then, the library’s website has been shut down, with updates posted on X and emailed to members

This week, Rhysida, a known ransomware group, claimed it was responsible for the attack. It posted low-resolution images of personal information online, offering stolen data for sale with a starting bid of 20 bitcoins (about £596,000).

Rhysida said the data was “exclusive, unique and impressive” and that it would be sold to a single buyer. It set a deadline for bids of 27 November.

The images appear to show employment contracts and passport information. The library said it was “aware that some data has been leaked, which appears to be from files relating to our internal HR information”. It did not confirm that Rhysida was responsible for the attack, nor that the data offered for sale was information on personnel.

Academics and researchers who use the library have been told that disruption to the institution’s services after the serious ransomware attack was likely to continue for months.

This week, the library advised its users to change any logins also used on other sites as a precaution. It added: “We have taken targeted protective measures to ensure the integrity of our systems, and we continue to undertake an investigation with the support of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the Metropolitan police and cybersecurity specialists. As this investigation remains ongoing, we cannot provide further details at this time.”

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Personal details about librarians? Sure that will attract the big bidders. The puzzling point is why the Library hasn’t got some sort of backup of its databases. But as is so often the case, it’s only after you get hit by ransomware that you get smart about this stuff.
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Where did they all go? How Homo sapiens became the last human species left • The Guardian

Sarah Wild:

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What we do know is that from about 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was the last human standing out of a large and diverse group of bipedal hominins. Hypotheses range from benign, such as H sapiens having better infant survival rates than other hominins, or climate changes pushing other species to the brink. Others suggest a more active role, such as H sapiens hunting other humans or interbreeding with them and assimilating their genetics.

About 300,000 years ago, the first H sapiens populations were springing up in Africa. They didn’t look like modern humans, but they are more similar to us than other Homo species. They had tall, rounded skulls with an almost vertical forehead. They didn’t have the glowering brows of Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) or the protruding jaw of archaic-looking species such as Homo naledi. They also had chins; something that no other Homo species has had (although we don’t know why only H sapiens has the protuberance).

A study published in Nature this year exploded the idea that H sapiens originated from a single place in Africa in one great evolutionary leap. By analysing the genomes of 290 people, the researchers showed that H sapiens descended from at least two populations that lived in Africa for 1m years, before merging in several interactions.

Palaeoanthropologists continue to argue (quite vociferously) over who the last ancestor of H Sapiens was, but so far there is no conclusive evidence. Also, there is no single origin for H sapiens. There are ancient remains of early H sapiens in Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, Omo Kibish in Ethiopia and Florisbad in South Africa, suggesting that our species arose from multiple sites.

When H sapiens moved out of Africa is also the subject of debate. Genetic evidence suggests there was a big foray out of the continent between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago. But it was not the first expedition. A perplexing H sapiens skull in Apidima in Greece has been dated to being at least 210,000 years old.

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Our ancestry gets more and more complicated. Once it was just Neanderthals. Now it’s loads of rivals.
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Inside the operation to bring down Trump’s Truth Social • WIRED

David Gilbert:

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The North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO) is an online activist group founded last year to combat pro-Russia propaganda related to the invasion of Ukraine. Last month, the group turned its attention to Trump’s social network and launched a campaign to take over the trending topics section on the website. The group says that the operation, which included 50 “NAFO commandos,” as members targeting Truth Social call themselves, was so successful that those running the campaign now have a long-term goal: Take down Truth Social completely.

“The goal we have in mind, which is lofty, is to help bring the platform down ahead of the 2024 election,” Rock Kenwell, the pseudonymous leader of the NAFO commandos, tells WIRED. “We know it’s going to be an aggregator for extremism and probably violence the way things are looking at this point.”

Describing the Truth Social platform’s current environment, Kenwell compared the challenge of combating the spread of pro-Trump messaging on the platform with “dealing with your racist uncle that nobody wants at the Thanksgiving dinner table because he’s just obnoxious and looking to fight with everybody.”

Truth Social was launched in early 2022 by Trump, who had been kicked off of mainstream platforms for inciting violence. Trump claimed that the network would challenge “Big Tech platforms” like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as a free speech platform open to everyone, but in the 18 months since it started, the site has failed to attract anyone outside of Trump sycophants and QAnon conspiracy groups, and has instead become the butt of late night comedy. Last week, a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed that the platform had lost $31m since it launched.

“It’s a very easy platform to manipulate. It’s a very primitive, social media environment,” adds Kenwell.

«

NAFO aims to take over the trending topics section, and claims to have done so with a campaign launched at the end of October which, it claims, led to the suspension of app downloads (to prevent new account registration). The next target is fake ads (though whether these are paid-for fake ads, or just posts that look like ads, isn’t clear.)

One has to wonder though if increasing the (apparent) engagement on the site is really the way you kill it it.
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Inside Linda Yaccarino’s X all-hands after Elon Musk sued Media Matters • Fortune

Kylie Robison:

»

At the staff meeting Monday, one anonymous employee asked Yaccarino what she would consider the best outcome of the lawsuit [against MEdia Matters]. Yaccarino responded that it “would be the validation that Media Matters, unfortunately manipulates, in this case, not just advertisers but people in general.”

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Hopefully this is a disinfectant that surfaces all the great work that all of us are doing at X,” she said.

Both Musk and Yaccarino have defended X on the social media platform in the wake of the report. Musk claimed on Saturday that the watchdog group “created an alternate account and curated the posts and advertising appearing on the account’s timeline to misinform advertisers about the placement of their posts.”

Yaccarino reiterated many of the details in Musk’s post on Monday, telling staff that “this was a contrived experience that could be curated—or this situation could be committed—on any platform today.”

“No platform is gonna get it right,” Yaccarino said. “So they basically gamed the system.”

The X chief executive also sought to calm worries about the advertiser exodus, claiming some brands still doing business with X have told her that they believe that X “is vital for the global community” but want Yaccarino to share more data so they can explain their positions to employees and key stakeholders.

“They know that I work hard on their behalf and that I am a truth teller, and I want them to hear it from me—everything that is going on at the company,” Yaccarino, who has been in the advertising business for several decades, told staff. “And I tell a lot of people this: I didn’t come to the company because I needed the company. I came to the company because I wanted to help lead X and be successful in what we’re trying to achieve here.”

As big brands have paused ads on X, numerous right-wing media companies and influencers have pledged to advertise on X in order to make up for lost revenue. One anonymous staffer asked what should “we do as employees to be more responsible … just to help offset anything that we might be seeing from a loss from advertisers?”

Yaccarino responded that staff should “be as fiscally responsible as possible,” including only expensing “critical and necessary travel.”

«

From my experience at multiple organisations, when the chief exec tells the rank and file to be very careful with the travel expenses, things are financially going very badly.
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Commercial flights are experiencing ‘unthinkable’ GPS attacks and nobody knows what to do • Vice

Matthew Gault:

»

In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission. Since then, air crews discussing the problem online have said it’s only gotten worse, and experts are racing to establish who is behind it.

OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, sounded the alarm about the incidents in September and began to collect data to share with its members and the public. According to OPSGROUP, multiple commercial aircraft in the Middle Eastern region have lost the ability to navigate after receiving spoofed navigation signals for months. And it’s not just GPS—fallback navigation systems are also corrupted, resulting in total failure.

According to OPSGROUP, the activity is centered in three regions: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The group has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks, the group said in a November update, and identified three new and distinct kinds of navigation spoofing incidents, with two arising since the initial reports in September. 

While GPS spoofing is not new, the specific vector of these new attacks was previously “unthinkable,” according to OPSGROUP, which described them as exposing a “fundamental flaw in avionics design.” The spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System (IRS), a piece of equipment often described as the “brain” of an aircraft that uses gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other tech to help planes navigate.

«

Nobody knows who’s doing it (Syria is a suspect) nor why. Not very encouraging; the sort of thing that could accidentally cause a serious international incident if crews aren’t careful.
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Behold the Ozempic effect on business • FT

Rana Foroohar:

»

Let’s start with the pharmaceutical firms themselves. If you don’t have an Ozempic knock-off in the development pipeline, your share price may take a hit. Novo Nordisk now has a market capitalisation that is higher than the entire GDP of Denmark, and Eli Lilly’s share price is up 40% since it rolled out its own weight-loss copycat Mounjaro. But both Pfizer and Moderna — neither of which have a successful semaglutide on the market — have seen their share prices plummet in recent months.  

And it’s not only companies in the weight-loss business that are being affected. In early October, when Novo Nordisk announced that Ozempic was so effective against kidney disease that it was stopping a trial early, shares in some dialysis providers tanked.

Now, healthcare analysts say that the $250bn cardiovascular disease market could be reduced by 10% by 2050, and hundreds of billions-worth of additional business in treatments for diabetes, kidney and liver disease and other weight related illnesses could be disrupted. 

The Ozempic effect doesn’t stop there. Analysts have downgraded doughnut maker Krispy Kreme recently amid worries that Americans on semaglutides just won’t reach for as many sweet treats as they have in the past.

…The new weight-loss drugs will also disrupt the US healthcare system — the only question is how. Semaglutides are expensive, but so is obesity.

One study found that obesity adds $1,861 in annual healthcare costs per American. But if the government decided that Medicare should reimburse for weight-loss drugs (it currently doesn’t) that would create huge costs, too. Insurance companies have long complained about obesity-related costs, but also don’t like the idea of tens of millions of Americans suddenly going on semaglutides.

«

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From Napoleon to Elon Musk • The Bluestocking

Helen Lewis has put a transcript on her excellent Substack (you surely must subscribe) of a conversation she had with David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, about his new book The Handover which is about “the similarities between states, corporations and AIs”. It’s all excellent, though this passage jumped out at me:

»

David Runciman: The great appeal of AI systems, particularly for states and corporations, is their efficiency—and what they mean by “efficiency” is they strip out human error.

But in warfare, mutually assured destruction is a game of chicken. The way you bypass that in a game of chicken is you strip out the human beings and make sure that it’s a robot that presses the button, because the robot won’t have qualms. China and America are currently involved in an arms race which is premised on this. The Chinese state is massively investing in AI weapons technology, precisely because in this great game of chicken that may be played over Taiwan, you want to signal to the other side that you’ve got fewer humans involved in your process than they do. 

Helen Lewis: There was a famous thought experiment once that said the nuclear code should be embedded in the heart of a bodyguard, who walks around with the president all the time. And if he wants to launch a nuclear weapon that will kill 80,000 people, maybe he first of all has to carve into the heart of the guy that’s been walking around with him.

David Runciman: You think Donald Trump wouldn’t do that?

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The time zone system in Windows 95 had a rather sizeable bug which would submerge Poland on demand. CC-licensed photo by 70023venus2009 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. Wetsuit? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A dead friend seemed to contact me on Facebook. The truth was sadder • The Guardian

Akin Olla:

»

I burst into tears when my friend tagged me in another Facebook post this morning. My friend died in 2021. The bot or scammer that had taken over his account was using it to promote weight-loss pills, which felt particularly egregious considering my friend had lost weight before his sudden death; it was as if the bot had scraped his profile for the most marketable details before taking his place.

This was not the first time I’d been contacted on social media from beyond the grave. Earlier this year, my best friend messaged me; that time, too, it was deeply unsettling, since the last time I’d seen him, he was smiling at me from his open casket. As terrible as these uncanny experiences were for me, what really broke my heart was thinking of how my friends’ mothers were likely experiencing the same thing.

I suspect that these “ghost” social media experiences are going to be increasingly common in the coming years. Our profit-driven economic system pushes social media companies to digitize and monopolize our social lives. This same engine drives scammers to seek out every means of exploiting our weaknesses for their benefit. A good password today may not be secure in two or three years, let alone the decades by which our social media accounts may outlive us.

Most social media companies make their money by collecting our information and pipelining their ads right in between wedding announcements and baby pictures. They seek normal social activities, like sharing images or starting clubs, and replicate them online, making them accessible enough that we become reliant on their platforms. This reliance is made worse by algorithms that keep us hooked and clicking.

…Scammers are obligated to be good at their game, and are likely to get better. There are already plenty of means to crack people’s passwords, and new AI-powered tools threaten to exacerbate that. According to the cybersecurity company Avast, 83% of Americans have weak passwords as it is. I am, I suppose, lucky to know that my friends are actually dead.

…The more likely, and already somewhat present scenario, will be a social media hellscape littered with dead people pushing weight-loss pills and cryptocurrency schemes. Facebook has options to preserve accounts as memorials, but one study estimates that there are likely tens of millions of dead people on Facebook and there will likely be hundreds of millions by 2060.

«

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OpenAI and Microsoft sued by nonfiction writers for alleged ‘rampant theft’ of authors’ works • Forbes

Rashi Shrivastava:

»

The lead plaintiff of the lawsuit is Julian Sancton, the New York Times-bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into the Dark Antarctic. Sancton spent five years and tens of thousands of dollars traveling around the world to complete the research for the book, the lawsuit states. In response to a prompt, ChatGPT confirmed that Sancton’s book was a part of the dataset that was used to train the chatbot, according to the lawsuit filed by law firm Susman Godfrey LLP.

Sancton and thousands of other writers did not consent nor were compensated for the use of their intellectual property in the training of the AI, the lawsuit notes. Their complaint also highlights that Microsoft and OpenAI have commercialized their AI models, making billions of dollars in revenue through products like BingChat and ChatGPT Enterprise.

“Nonfiction authors often spend years conceiving, researching, and writing their creations. While OpenAI and Microsoft refuse to pay nonfiction authors, their AI platform is worth a fortune. The basis of the OpenAI platform is nothing less than the rampant theft of copyrighted works,” the lawsuit states.

«

As with all these, I don’t set much store on their succeeding because even if you do it as a class action, on behalf of everyone whose work has been used, the ingestion is permissible (same as reading a book) and the use is transformative (you don’t get the book out at the prompt).

Also: the OpenAI/Altman soap opera is still dragging on, and we still don’t know precisely why Altman was fired, though the board itself may be about to get fired.
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CZ steps down as Binance CEO in $4bn settlement with DOJ • Semafor via Yahoo

Diego Mendoza:

»

Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the billionaire founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has stepped down as CEO and pleaded guilty to money laundering charges as part of $4.3bn settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Tuesday.

Zhao will be personally required to pay $50m as part of the fines.

“The message here should be clear: using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor, it makes you a criminal,” Garland said at a press conference.

Prosecutors said that Binance enabled the financing of terrorist and militant groups like Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, ISIS, and Al Qaeda through its exchange.

“Binance prioritized its profits over the safety of the American people,” Garland said.

The development comes months after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against the crypto giant for artificially inflating its trade volume on its US platform. The company also faces allegations of offering US citizens crypto derivatives, such as futures or options contracts, without registering as a futures commodity merchant. Kraken, another trading firm, was sued by the SEC on Monday for similar alleged violations.

Zhao is based in Dubai, which means he is unlikely to face prison time as the United Arab Emirates does not have an extradition agreement with the US.

«

Is this going to rattle confidence in crypto? Very much doubt it. CZ will swan around, and perhaps start up another crypto exchange which perhaps will ignore money laundering rules. The cycle continues.
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That one time Windows accidentally sent Poland under the sea • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen took to YouTube over the weekend to remind us of the time the Windows vendor accidentally sank Poland.

Speaking on the Dave’s Garage channel, run by former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, Chen added some flourishes to a story from decades ago regarding the neat time zone map that initially shipped with Windows 95.

Readers of a certain age might remember the original Windows 95 time zone map. It was a fun feature where a user could click on a region of a map to select a time zone or regional settings – something that engineers doubtless had a blast making before geopolitical realities hit home.

If you don’t remember the time zone map working that way, don’t worry. Microsoft had to pull the features after governments complained about where their borders were. In 2003, Chen explained: “In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador, and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.”

Talking to Plummer, Chen added some more detail: “There were even arguments from countries who were not engaged in a border conflict where a small European country would contact us and say, ‘Hey, our country is kind of small, can you give us one of our neighbor’s pixels to make it easier to click on?”

This triggered an angry response from another country demanding why one of their pixels had been given away, and so it went on.

Since making everyone happy was impossible, Chen said the solution was to rotate the map to put the selected zone in the center. All good? Not quite…

“There was a bug that we introduced when we did that though…”

«

It’s quite a neat bug; essentially they got bitten by a version of the four-colour theorem.
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Meta, Microsoft, Amazon join Overture maps to vie with Apple, Google • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

»

Google and Apple dominate the market for online maps, charging mobile app developers for access to their mapping services. The other mega-cap tech companies are joining together to help create another option.

A group formed by Meta, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, along with TomTom, is releasing data that could enable companies to build their own maps, without having to rely on Google or Apple.

The Overture Maps Foundation, which was established late last year, captured 59 million “points of interest,” such as restaurants, landmarks, streets and regional borders. The data has been cleaned and formatted so it can be used for free as the base layer for a new map application.

Meta and Microsoft collected and donated the data to Overture, according to Marc Prioleau, executive director of the OMF. Data on places is often difficult to collect and license, and building map data requires lots of time and staff to gather and clean it, he told CNBC in an interview.

“We have some companies that, if they wanted to invest to build the map data, they could,” Prioleau said. Rather than spending that kind of money, he said, companies were asking, “Can we just get collaboration around the open base map?”

Overture is aiming to establish a baseline for maps data so that companies can use it to build and operate their own maps.

«

This appeared in July, perhaps while I was On A Break. It’s a bit puzzling: are they trying to create a commercial product, or just a rival? Because OpenStreetMap already exists. Why not contribute to that? An ex-Meta person says “Overture seeks to distinguish its data from OpenStreetMap’s by being more closely vetted and curated.”
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Musk files lawsuit claiming Media Matters manipulated X by scrolling down • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Musk’s complaint—bizarrely filed in a Texas court despite X Corp. being based in Nevada and Media Matters in the District of Columbia—accused Media Matters of interference with X Corp.’s contract with advertisers, business disparagement, and interference with a prospective economic advantage by allegedly disrupting X Corp.’s relationship with advertisers.

The lawsuit’s business disparagement claim marks the first time that Musk has sued a group monitoring hate speech on X for defaming the platform. Where individuals can sue for defamation, businesses can sue over disparagement. In this case, Musk must prove that Media Matters knowingly published false statements intended to harm X Corp.’s business to succeed in his lawsuit.

According to X, Media Matters “took screenshots of posts from IBM, Apple, Bravo, Xfinity, and Oracle that Media Matters engineered to appear adjacent to inflammatory, fringe content.” All of these advertisers except Oracle, X confirmed, stopped advertising on X, as well as other advertisers whose ads weren’t even included in Media Matters’ report.

If the lawsuit proceeds, Musk may have a hard time proving that Media Matters published any false statements, though. X’s complaint alleged that Media Matters “manipulated” the platform’s algorithm to generate inorganic ad placements to form a “blatant smear campaign,” but the complaint seemingly admitted that no statements that Media Matters published were false. Media Matters will likely argue that advertisers could interpret its reporting however they felt would be best for their business.

«

Indeed, analysis by an independent lawyer on Twitter suggested that the lawsuit admits everything that Media Matters claims; it just insists that they’re not very common. That’s a problem for… Musk.
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Does AI lead police to ignore contradictory evidence? • The New Yorker

Eyal Press:

»

Advocates of facial-recognition technology acknowledge that the quality of the algorithms varies greatly, but they contend that the best ones do not have such demographic imbalances. They also note that, among the millions of searches that have been conducted by police, only a few have been proved to lead to wrongful arrests. But how many people have been erroneously identified without the mistake being recognized?

Nobody can say, in part because the technology is poorly regulated and the police’s use of it is often not shared with either the public or the accused. Last fall, a man named Randal Quran Reid was arrested for two acts of credit-card fraud in Louisiana that he did not commit.

The warrant didn’t mention that a facial-recognition search had made him a suspect. Reid discovered this fact only after his lawyer heard an officer refer to him as a “positive match” for the thief. Reid was in jail for six days and his family spent thousands of dollars in legal fees before learning about the misidentification, which had resulted from a search done by a police department under contract with Clearview AI. So much for being “100% accurate.”

Law-enforcement officials argue that they aren’t obligated to disclose such information because, in theory at least, facial-recognition searches are being used only to generate leads for a fuller investigation, and do not alone serve as probable cause for making an arrest.

Yet, in a striking number of the wrongful arrests that have been documented, the searches represented virtually the entire investigation. No other evidence seemed to link Randal Reid, who lives in Georgia, to the thefts in Louisiana, a state he had never even visited.

«

Naturally, this leans heavily on Kashmir Hill’s book “Your Face Belongs To Us”, about Clearview AI.
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“Make It Real” AI prototype wows devs by turning drawings into working software • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

[Last week] a collaborative whiteboard app maker called “tldraw” made waves online by releasing a prototype of a feature called “Make it Real” that lets users draw an image of software and bring it to life using AI. The feature uses OpenAI’s GPT-4V API to visually interpret a vector drawing into functioning Tailwind CSS and JavaScript web code that can replicate user interfaces or even create simple implementations of games like Breakout.

“I think I need to go lie down,” posted designer Kevin Cannon at the start of a viral X thread that featured the creation of functioning sliders that rotate objects on screen, an interface for changing object colors, and a working game of tic-tac-toe. Soon, others followed with demonstrations of drawing a clone of Breakout, creating a working dial clock that ticks, drawing the snake game, making a Pong game, interpreting a visual state chart, and much more.

Users can experiment with a live demo of Make It Real online. However, running it requires providing an API key from OpenAI, which is a security risk. If others intercept your API key, they could use it to rack up a very large bill in your name (OpenAI charges by the amount of data moving into and out of its API). Those technically inclined can run the code locally, but it will still require OpenAI API access.

«

We don’t know how secure the underlying code might be, but this is definitely taking drudgery out of the design process. Which then means that humans are free to do the more important, subtle changes, so this must be a benefit, correct?
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US companies fight Biden’s efforts to crack down on junk fees • The Washington Post

Tony Romm:

»

Frustrated with airlines that charge passengers steep fees to check bags and change flights, President Biden last fall embarked on a campaign to crack down on the practice — and force companies to show the full price of travel before people pay for their tickets.

Fliers rejoiced, flooding the Department of Transportation with letters urging it to adopt the policy. Airlines including American, Delta and United, however, did not seem so enthused.

It would be too difficult to disclose the charges more clearly, warned Doug Mullen, the deputy general counsel at Airlines for America, an industry lobbying group representing the three carriers. Testifying at a federal hearing in March, he said the new policy would only cause customers “confusion and frustration” — and, besides, the extra costs for bags and other services historically have resulted in “very few complaints.”

“The department should not regulate in this area,” Mullen added.

Since then, the Biden administration has broadened its efforts to expose or eliminate “junk fees” throughout the economy, touching off a groundswell of opposition from airlines, auto dealers, banks, credit card companies, cable giants, property owners and ticket sellers that hope to preserve their profits.

Behind the scenes, these corporations have fought vigorously to thwart even the most basic rules that would require them to be more transparent about hidden charges, according to a Washington Post review of federal lobbying records and hundreds of filings submitted to government agencies. The fees together may cost Americans at least $64bn annually, according to a rough White House estimate, underscoring its efforts to deliver financial relief to families grappling with high prices.

«

What an absolutely colossal amount. “Very few complaints” about the extra costs? How would people complain, exactly? When? Is there an option in the drop-down menu for “pay for extra bag, and complain about it”? The irony is that the people who implement these things at the low level – the programmers and staff – are the ones who suffer from it when it’s done to them by every other company. War by different means. (A 2021 experiment showed that this method, applied to gig tickets, raises the price by 21%.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Gene editing is able to cure sickle cell disease, aka thalassemia, in a remarkable application of CRISPR technology. CC-licensed photo by scooterdmu 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. Neatly edited. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO • The Verge

Alex Heath and Nilay Patel:

»

Sam Altman’s surprise move to Microsoft after his shock firing at OpenAI isn’t a done deal. He and co-founder Greg Brockman are still willing to return to OpenAI if the remaining board members who fired him step aside, multiple sources tell The Verge.

The promised mass exodus of virtually every OpenAI employee — including board member and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who led the initial move to depose Altman! — means that there is more pressure on the board than ever, with only two of the three remaining members needing to flip. Altman posted on X that “we are all going to work together some way or other,” which we are told is meant to indicate that the fight continues.

Altman, former president Brockman, and the company’s investors are still trying to find a graceful exit for the board, say multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation. The sources characterized the hiring announcement by Microsoft, which needed to have a resolution to the crisis before the stock market opened on Monday, as a “holding pattern.”

A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment.

After Altman was suddenly fired on Friday, negotiations with the board to potentially bring him back reached a stalemate.

«

It’s still all up in the air. At the time of compilation, about 95% of OpenAI’s staff had signed an open letter basically telling the OpenAI board they’re idiots. Among the signatories was Sutskever, which is the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen: signing a letter saying two-days-ago-you is an idiot.

Ben Thompson points out that Microsoft will either acquire OpenAI’s staff, or the company. Big winner: Microsoft. Satya Nadella, its CEO, says the oversight of OpenAI needs to change (perhaps put its biggest investor, in effect Microsoft, on the board?). And an analysis of the boards of not-for-profits (such as OpenAI) says “their governance is generally abysmal”.

Plus (at time of compilation) we still don’t know precisely why Altman was fired.
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Portugal just ran on 100% renewable energy for six days • JOE.co.uk

Joseph Loftus:

»

Portugal has reportedly broke a record for energy production after going six days relying entirely on renewable energy.

This apparently includes everything from electrical applianes in home and work, all were running on either wind, hydro, or solar power for six days straight.

Between 4:00AM on 31 October and 9:00AM on 6 November, the nation of ten million relied on only renewable energy, as 1102 GWh was generated.

Hugo Costa, the individual who runs EDP Renewables, the country’s renewable arm of the state utility, said: “The gas plants were there, waiting to dispatch energy, should it be needed. It was not, because the wind was blowing; it was raining a lot. And we were producing with a positive impact to the consumers because the prices have dropped dramatically, almost to zero.”

The news comes as many nations across Europe attempt to hit the Paris Agreement’s climate goals by 2050.

When 2050 finally comes around, nations need not only run via renewable energy for six days, but all year round.

«

Not so sure about that last sentence. “Net zero” means what it says: net, not totally, zero.

As a comparison, the UK’s electricity system uses an average of 715GWh per day; Portugal seems to consume about 184GWh per day. In the UK, wind generates about 10-15GW, or 240-360GWh per day. It’s just a question of scaling up.
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Apple plans to equip MacBooks with in-house cellular modems • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

Apple has reportedly been working on its own modem since 2018, as it seeks to move away from Qualcomm’s component currently used in iPhones. The timeframe for launching the modem has slipped several times and is now expected to be ready around 2026, and Gurman now hears that Apple has plans for the chip appearing in other Apple devices further down the line.

Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that Apple’s custom technology aspirations include integrating an in-house modem into its system-on-a-chip (SoC), which would eventually see the launch of MacBooks with built-in cellular connectivity.

Gurman says Apple will “probably need two or three additional years to get that chip inside cellular versions of the Apple Watch and iPad – and the Mac, once the part is integrated into the company’s system-on-a-chip.”

Apple has explored the possibility of developing MacBooks with cellular connectivity in the past. Indeed, the company reportedly considered launching a MacBook Air with 3G connectivity, but former CEO Steve Jobs said in 2008 that Apple decided against it, since it would take up too much room in the case. An integrated SoC would solve that problem.

«

At least Marco Arment and Casey Liss will be happy. (They’ve wanted modems in laptops for ages. Amusingly, in the early days of the internet, laptops did come with modems: it was how you got online.)

Apple won’t have wanted to use Qualcomm’s modems because Qualcomm charges a percentage of the product’s retail price. If Apple only uses Qualcomm’s patents, that’s a lot cheaper.
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The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars • The Conversation

Muhammad Rizwan Azhar and Waqas Uzair:

»

Close to half (44%) of all Australian commuter trips are by car – and under 10km. Of Perth’s 4.2 million daily car trips, 2.8 are for distances of less than 2km.

This is common in wealthier countries. In the United States, a staggering 60% of all car trips cover less than 10km.

So what’s the best solution? You might think switching to an electric vehicle is the natural step. In fact, for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you – and for the planet. That’s because these forms of transport – collectively known as electric micromobility – are cheaper to buy and run.

But it’s more than that: they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present, due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are a common form of transport.

On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans and trucks.

But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers on the road last year. Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day – about 1% of the world’s total oil demand, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

What about electric vehicles, you ask? After all, EVs have been heralded as a silver bullet for car emissions and air pollution in cities, as their tailpipe emissions are zero. If charged with renewable power, they get even greener.

But to see them as an inarguable good is an error. They are cleaner cars, but they are still cars, taking up space on the roads and requiring a lot of electricity to power them.

«

Only thing is: what about when it rains?
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AI scam calls: This mom believes fake kidnappers cloned her daughter’s voice • CNN

Faith Karimi:

»

Jennifer DeStefano’s phone rang one afternoon as she climbed out of her car outside the dance studio where her younger daughter Aubrey had a rehearsal. The caller showed up as unknown, and she briefly contemplated not picking up.

But her older daughter, 15-year-old Brianna, was away training for a ski race and DeStefano feared it could be a medical emergency. “Hello?” she answered on speaker phone as she locked her car and lugged her purse and laptop bag into the studio.

She was greeted by yelling and sobbing. “Mom! I messed up!” screamed a girl’s voice.

“What did you do?!? What happened?!?” DeStefano asked.

“The voice sounded just like Brie’s, the inflection, everything,” she told CNN recently. “Then, all of a sudden, I heard a man say, ‘Lay down, put your head back.’ I’m thinking she’s being gurnied off the mountain, which is common in skiing. So I started to panic.”

As the cries for help continued in the background, a deep male voice started firing off commands: “Listen here. I have your daughter. You call the police, you call anybody, I’m gonna pop her something so full of drugs. I’m gonna have my way with her then drop her off in Mexico, and you’re never going to see her again.”

DeStefano froze. Then she ran into the dance studio, shaking and screaming for help. She felt like she was suddenly drowning. After a chaotic, rapid-fire series of events that included a $1m ransom demand, a 911 call and a frantic effort to reach Brianna, the “kidnapping” was exposed as a scam. A puzzled Brianna called to tell her mother that she didn’t know what the fuss was about and that everything was fine.

But DeStefano, who lives in Arizona, will never forget those four minutes of terror and confusion – and the eerie sound of that familiar voice. “A mother knows her child,” she said later. “You can hear your child cry across the building, and you know it’s yours.”

«

There’s a fair amount of doubt around this story: can AI voice copying really simulate screams, yelling, sobbing? Though free apps can clone a voice in a minute.

Generally, these sorts of calls are becoming common (or less uncommon) in the US, and of course the WhatsApp scams which don’t need voice are all over the place. Take Rob Leathern’s advice: work out a “safe word” for live calls, and a different one for a recording.
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Sickle-cell treatment created with gene editing wins UK approval • The New York Times

Gina Kolata:

»

Regulators in Britain [last week] approved the first treatment derived from CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing method. Called Casgevy, the treatment is intended to cure sickle-cell disease and a related condition, beta thalassemia.

The manufacturers, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, based in Boston, and CRISPR Therapeutics, based in Switzerland, say about 2,000 patients in Britain with sickle-cell disease or beta thalassemia are expected to be eligible for the treatment.

The companies anticipate that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will approve Casgevy for sickle-cell patients in the United States in early December. The agency will decide on approval for beta thalassemia next year.

In late December, the FDA is expected to approve another sickle cell gene therapy by Bluebird Bio of Somerville, Mass. That treatment does not rely on gene editing, instead using a method that inserts new DNA into the genome.

Sickle-cell disease is caused by a defective gene that leads to the creation of abnormal hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component in red blood cells. The cells themselves become malformed, causing episodes of extreme pain. About 100,000 Americans, who are mostly Black and Hispanic, are believed to have the illness.

…Casgevy relies on CRISPR to nick the DNA, activating a gene that produces an alternative form of hemoglobin. To receive the sickle-cell treatment, patients in Britain must be at least 12 years old and have experienced repeated episodes of extreme pain.

There is no upper age limit, nor are patients excluded because they have suffered too much organ damage from sickle-cell disease, said Dr. David Altshuler, Vertex’s chief scientific officer.

But the patients must have no other options. Sickle-cell disease can be cured with a bone-marrow transplant, but few patients have compatible donors.

«

Expensive, and there’s a (relatively) cheaper alternative – bone marrow transplant – but for that you need donors.
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US is seeking more than $4bn from Binance to end case • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Chris Strohm, Allyson Versprille and Olga Kharif:

»

Negotiations between the Justice Department and Binance include the possibility that its founder Changpeng Zhao would face criminal charges in the US under an agreement to resolve the probe into alleged money laundering, bank fraud and sanctions violations, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Zhao, also known as “CZ,” is residing in the United Arab Emirates, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US, but that doesn’t prevent him from coming voluntarily.

Binance didn’t respond to multiple emails and phone calls seeking comment. The Justice Department declined to comment.

An announcement could come as soon as the end of the month, though the situation remains fluid, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

The BNB cryptocurrency, a token native to Binance and the BNB Chain blockchain that was created by the exchange, rose as much as 8.5% to $266.42 after Bloomberg reported the negotiations.

«

Incredible if a cryptocurrency exchange happened to have that sort of money lying around that actually belongs to it. However this is only the DoJ – the SEC filed suit in June alleging mishandling of customer funds, misleading investors and breaking securities rules. The DoJ complaint is about money laundering, bank fraud and sanctions violations. None of it is what you’d call minor.
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Global warming on track for 2.9ºC as greenhouse gases keep rising, UN says • FT

Kenza Bryan and Steven Bernard:

»

The world is on track for a temperature rise of up to 2.9ºC above pre-industrial levels, a report by the UN environment programme has found, even assuming countries stick to their Paris agreement climate pledges.

UN chief António Guterres said that keeping the Paris goal of limiting the rise to ideally 1.5ºC and well below 2ºC would require “tearing out the poisoned root of the climate crisis: fossil fuels.”

“Otherwise, we’re simply inflating the lifeboats while breaking the oars,” he added. The world has already warmed by at least 1.1ºC.

Coming ahead of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 10 days, the latest UN report estimated the size of the gap between the emissions trajectory implied by climate pledges and the one needed to limit warming,

The level of greenhouse gas emissions stood at a new peak of 57.4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the UN emissions gap report noted, after rising 1.2% from 2021 to 2022.

Guterres referred to this “gap” as a “canyon littered with broken promises, broken lives, and broken records.”

Emissions cuts of 14bn tonnes or 28% are needed by 2030 to keep within 2ºC of warming, and a more ambitious reduction of more than 40% or 22bn tonnes is needed for the 1.5ºC threshold to be realistic.

«

This is what we need a time machine for: to take us back so that we can get things on the right track much earlier. More wind farms, more nuclear power plants.
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Patrick Vallance contradicts Rishi Sunak’s evidence to Covid inquiry • The Guardian

Peter Walker:

»

Rishi Sunak would almost certainly have known scientists were worried about his “eat out to help out” scheme during the pandemic, Sir Patrick Vallance has said, directly contradicting the prime minister’s evidence to the Covid inquiry.

In potentially damaging testimony, Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, said he would be “very surprised” if Sunak, then chancellor, had not learned about objections to his plan to help the hospitality industry.

Sunak had written to the inquiry saying he “[did] not recall any concerns about the scheme” being raised in ministerial meetings despite growing concerns that the discount plan could fuel the spread of the virus.

An extract from Vallance’s contemporaneous diary, in July 2020, provided evidence that Sunak also sought to push back against the scientists’ advice. In one economics-based meeting, Sunak said “it’s all about handling the scientists, not handling the virus”, the entry said.

Vallance said: “There were definitely periods when it was clear that the unwelcome advice we were giving was, as expected, not beloved, and that meant we had to work doubly hard to make sure that the science evidence and advice was being properly heard.”

«

Philip Ball, a science writer, wrote a thread on this, beginning: “I can’t see how Eat Out To Help Out can’t now become a major scandal. Here was a scheme imposed by Sunak with zero scientific consultation, and which in Vallance’s words utterly reversed the public-health messaging: from “Keep distant from those outside your family” to “We’ll pay you to spend hours in an enclosed space with people you don’t know.” Sunak, he suggests, misled the inquiry over this.
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The cassette-tape revolution • The New Yorker

Jon Michaud:

»

The compact audiocassette (to give it its full name) was conceived by Lou Ottens, the head of product development at the Dutch electronics company Phillips. One day, in the early nineteen-sixties, frustrated after “fiddling with that damn reel-to-reel” (as a colleague later recalled), an exasperated Ottens told his design team to create a version of their reel-to-reel tape that was small and portable, with the spools of tape contained inside a case. He wanted it to fit in a pocket and imagined it would be used by journalists and nature lovers (the latter to record birds and other outdoor sounds). Phillips introduced its new cassette system in 1963 and the immediate response was underwhelming. Before long, however, imitations of their compact cassette player began cropping up across the globe, most frequently in Japan.

Ottens then made a decision that helped boost the format. To promote standardization of the cassette, Phillips waived royalties, allowing anyone to license the design for free as long as they adhered to the company’s quality-control standards. This avoided the kind of schism that videotape would face during the VHS-Betamax war and insured that the Phillips cassette would be the dominant design. By the end of the sixties, eighty-five different manufacturers were producing cassette players, with sales of 2.5 million units. By 1983, cassettes were outselling LPs.

The ascent of the cassette caused a major freak-out among record-company executives. Nearly anyone who has ever bought vinyl will be familiar with the cassette-and-crossbones image that was for many years printed on record sleeves, accompanied by the dire warning: “Home taping is killing music.” On both sides of the Atlantic, the recording industry sought, futilely, to make the duplication of music on cassette tapes illegal. Other proposals included a compensatory tax on blank tapes.

«

Journalists and nature lovers! Inventors never know how their inventions will really be used. And strange how the same responses come to any new technology: suppress it, tax it, etc.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK government intends to give energy rebates to homes near new pylons in a scheme being announced on Wednesday. CC-licensed photo by Ruben Holthuijsen on Flickr.

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

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

Sam Altman’s counter-rebellion leaves OpenAI leadership hanging in the balance • WSJ

Berber Jin, Deepa Seetharaman, Tom Dotan and Keach Hagey:

»

Two days after Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI, he was back at the company’s office, trying to negotiate his return.

The former chief executive officer entered with a guest badge on Sunday and posted on X: “first and last time i ever wear one of these.”

The leadership of the company that created the hit AI chatbot ChatGPT remained unclear Sunday, as investors and many employees pushed over the weekend to restore Altman. He has been engineering a countercoup to retake control of one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable and high-profile startups.

The abrupt shake-up at OpenAI turns on one of the oldest tales in Silicon Valley: a breakup between a founder and his board.

But in this case it was a very particular kind of founder—the face of Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence revolution—and a very particular kind of board, which was tasked with making social good a priority over profit. The rupture threatens the future of the company and the billions of dollars investors had put into it.

Altman has also been considering starting his own venture, potentially with talent from OpenAI. He is pursuing both tracks: On Sunday morning, Chief Technology Officer and interim CEO Mira Murati sent a note to staff saying Altman would be returning to the San Francisco office later that day as discussions to reinstate him continued.

Over the weekend, Altman made clear to his allies that if he does return, he wants a new board and governance structure, people familiar with the matter said.

Two days after the board fired Altman, different explanations persisted for the initial firing. The board said Friday it pushed out the CEO after it concluded he hadn’t been candid with the company’s directors. It didn’t elaborate. 

«

At the time of compiling these links, the reason(s) for Altman’s ousting still hadn’t been made clear. Lots of people are spraying around ideas for why he was fired, hoping that their one will be true – hot take bingo – but no clear story has emerged.
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Who’s on the OpenAI board — the group behind Sam Altman’s ouster • CNBC

Hayden Field:

»

On Friday, the board of OpenAI, the buzzy AI company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT, suddenly and publicly ousted its CEO Sam Altman. The announcement came one day after he appeared publicly on behalf of his company at Thursday’s APEC CEO Summit.

OpenAI’s board said it conducted “a deliberative review process” and that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the board’s statement continued.

As of this week, OpenAI’s six-person board included OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman, who was also chairman of the board; Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist; Adam D’Angelo [Quora CEO]; Tasha McCauley [senior scientist at Rand Corporation]; Helen Toner [not an OpenAI employee]; and Altman himself. The company began publicly posting its board’s member list on its website in July, after the departures of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, director of Neuralink Shivon Zilis and former Texas congressman Will Hurd.

«

Marissa Mayer – ex-Google, ex-CEO of Yahoo – tweeted that companies of OpenAI’s size would normally have 8-15 independent directors, rather than the four independent ones it does. Though of course OpenAI has grown really fast, which might have made it hard to staff up the board quickly enough.

Though board membership seems to have been something of a revolving door.
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Nothing Chats has already been pulled from Google Play over privacy issues • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

Nothing has pulled the Nothing Chats beta from the Google Play store, saying it is “delaying the launch until further notice” while it fixes “several bugs.” The app promised to let Nothing Phone 2 users text with iMessage, but it required allowing Sunbird, who provides the platform, log into users’ iCloud accounts on its own Mac Mini servers, which… isn’t great? [It offers an enormous hole for hacking – Overspill Ed]

The removal came after users widely shared a blog from Texts.com showing that messages sent with Sunbird’s system aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted — and that it’s not hard to compromise it. The app launched in beta yesterday after being announced earlier this week.

9to5Google pointed to a thread from site author Dylan Roussel, who found that part of Sunbird’s solution involves decrypting and transmitting messages using HTTP to a Firebase cloud-syncing server and storing them there in unencrypted plain text. Roussel posted that the company itself has access to messages because it logs them as errors using Sentry, a debugging service.

Sunbird claimed yesterday that HTTP is “only used as part of the one-off initial request from the app notifying back-end of the upcoming iMessage connection.”

That was in response to someone pointing to Texts.com’s blog examining the vulnerability. Texts.com wrote that “an attacker subscribed to the Firebase realtime database will always be able to access the messages before or at the moment they are read by the user.”

«

That’s so woeful. Unsurprising that Sunbird hasn’t launched publicly yet, given such truck-sized holes. Almost any of Sunbird’s team could have God Mode to read peoples’ messages.
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Massive cryptomining rig discovered under Polish court’s floor, stealing power • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Police were called to dismantle a secret cryptomining rig winding throughout the floors and ventilation ducts of a Polish court in September, according to Polish news channel TVN24.

Several secured computers were discovered, potentially stealing thousands of Polish Zlotys worth of energy per month (the equivalent of roughly $250 per 1,000 Zlotys.) It’s currently unknown how long the rig was running because the illegal operation went undetected, partly because the computers used were connected to the Internet through their own modems rather than through the court’s network.

While no one has been charged yet with any crimes, the court seemingly has suspects. Within two weeks of finding the rig, the court terminated a contract with a company responsible for IT maintenance in the building, TVN24 reported. Before the contract ended, the company fired two employees that it said were responsible for maintenance in the parts of the building where the cryptomine was hidden.

Poland’s top law enforcement officials, the Internal Security Agency, have been called in to investigate. The Warsaw District Prosecutor’s Office has hired IT experts to help determine exactly how much electricity was stolen from Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court in Warsaw, TVN24 reported.

The Supreme Administrative Court is the last resort for sensitive business and tax disputes, but no records seem to have been compromised.

«

Quite an enterprising bit of IT outsourcing there.
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US aims to triple global nuclear energy production • HuffPost UK Politics

Alexander Kaufman:

»

The United States is preparing to announce a pledge to triple the world’s production of nuclear energy by 2050, with more than 10 countries on four continents already signed on to the first major international agreement in modern history to ramp up the use of atomic power.

Signatories to the pledge, set to be unveiled at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai later this month, include many of the largest current users of nuclear energy such as the United Kingdom, France, Romania, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and South Korea, a senior Biden administration official familiar with the efforts confirmed HuffPost. A handful of newcomers that have not yet built reactors, including Poland, Ghana and Morocco, are also said to have joined the pledge.

The plan will put pressure on the World Bank to end its long-standing ban on financing nuclear-energy projects, which the American Nuclear Society, a nonprofit of academics and industry professionals who advocate for atomic energy in the public interest, said was crucial to any buildout.

“Tripling the world’s nuclear energy supplies by 2050 is the catalyst required to halt rising temperatures and achieve a sustainable future,” the ANS said in a statement to HuffPost. “A large-scale build-out of new nuclear energy can only happen with the crafting of nuclear-inclusive lending policies by financial institutions like the World Bank.”

«

I had no idea that the World Bank had such a ban in place. Utterly bonkers.
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Autumn Statement: Homes close to new pylons to get £1,000 off bills • BBC News

»

Households living close to new pylons and electricity substations could receive up to £1,000 a year off energy bills for a decade under new plans.

It is hoped the plan would convince people to support upgrades in their area, which are needed in part for new electric vehicle charging points.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is expected to announce the policy in the Autumn Statement on Wednesday.
It is unclear at this stage how many households will get the full discount.

Mr Hunt and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are currently finalising the content of the statement, which will set out the priorities for government spending in the final year before a general election has to be held.

It is known that they are considering announcing some tax cuts, and changes to income tax, national insurance, inheritance tax and business taxes are all being discussed.

But the Treasury has indicated the pounds-for-pylons plan will definitely form part of the chancellor’s statement.

«

This might be useful, inasmuch as yes, we do need more pylons. But also what about discounts for being near new onshore wind turbines? Or new nuclear power stations? There’s such a paucity of imagination.
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MPs want UK national security law used to vet Barclay family’s Telegraph offer • The Guardian

Julia Kollewe:

»

MPs, including Edward Leigh, John Hayes and the life peer Margaret Eaton, have written to the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, the business secretary, Kemi Badenoch, and the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, questioning the use of overseas sovereign wealth to buy Telegraph Media Group, the Financial Times reported.

The Barclays had owned the group, which includes the Daily and Sunday Telegraph as well as the Spectator, since 2004 but Lloyds Banking Group took control of it in June after the family failed to reach an agreement over more than £1bn in unpaid debt. It has since been put up for sale by the bank in an auction run by Goldman Sachs.

Last month, the Barclay family tabled an offer valuing the newspaper group at £1bn in an attempt to deter rival bidders from challenging them before the auction. The family has secured financing from investors based in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, after talks that began in August.

The MPs said in the letter that they were concerned that investment vehicles with links to the UAE royal family “may soon gain control of or material influence over two of the most important media publications in Great Britain, the Telegraph and the Spectator”.

They argued that there “is a strong case for close scrutiny by the government under both the Enterprise Act 2002 and the National Security and Investment Act 2021”, especially if the offer involved taking the publications as security for the loan, “an amount which, by any sensible measure, the revenue of the publications will not be able to support”.

«

So the MPs are saying they don’t think the titles are worth anything like that much, and that the loans will fall into default. Hard to argue: the Telegraph titles have been valued around £500m-£700m.
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Ad execs urge Twitter CEO to resign after Musk endorses antisemitic post • Forbes

John Paczkowski:

»

Forbes has confirmed that Yaccarino has been contacted by a groundswell of leading advertising executives who questioned why she is risking her reputation to shield Musk’s behavior—and suggested that she could make a statement about racism and antisemitism by stepping down. She has so far resisted their entreaties, sources said.

Last week, Musk endorsed an explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theory, and a report from watchdog Media Matters found that ads from major companies including IBM and Amazon had been placed next to content promoting Nazis and white nationalism, prompting advertisers including Apple, Disney and IBM to pull ads from the platform. Even the White House has condemned Musk’s antisemitic and racist statement, in which Musk agreed with an X user who espoused a conspiracy theory that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”

On November 16, Yaccarino responded to the firestorm in a post on X: “X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board — I think that’s something we can and should all agree on. When it comes to this platform — X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.” Yaccarino did not immediately respond to a comment request made through X’s press team.

The personal outreach to Yaccarino by leading advertising executives comes as X, previously known as Twitter, struggles to right itself under its mercurial owner and to battle the advertiser-unfriendly content his behavior has emboldened.

«

You have to wonder what she thinks she’s getting out of it. Every blowup like this shows how powerless she is to control Musk, and how pointless her position is.
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Ads watchdog files FTC complaint against X, formerly Twitter, over unlabeled ads • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

X, formerly Twitter, was caught running unlabeled ads on its platform in September. Now that issue, which has been ongoing, has been brought to the FTC’s attention. An independent nonprofit Check My Ads has filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission urging an investigation over the advertising practices at X, including the lack of disclosure about which posts are ads, broken links that explain why ads are targeted and more.

The complaint cites X’s lack of disclosure around ads, saying it misleads consumers that the content and the information they’re consuming on the platform is not paid for.

“This misrepresentation tricks users into trusting content as organic and exacerbates the opportunity for scams to occur,” the complaint states. “Furthermore, by failing to adequately disclose advertisements, X Corp. misrepresents the methods employed to target users or facilitate third-party ad targeting.”

It also points out that X’s promotional materials for advertisers indicate that advertisements are distinguished from non-paid, organic content with a “Promoted” label, but no such label appears for consumers. As Mashable earlier reported, X appeared to be switching between the “Promoted” and “Ad” labeling format for some time. Most of the ads on X are now simply labeled “Ad” but some are surfacing in users’ feeds without any ad label attached at all.

«

When things go bad, they go really bad.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Analysis suggests it was a tweet, not TikTok, which made Osama bin Laden’s manifesto go viral. CC-licensed photo by justgrimes 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 David Cameron, and the past following you around.

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

Apple announces RCS support for iMessage • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Apple shocked the mobile world on Thursday by saying it will adopt the RCS messaging standard. When iMessage users are talking to people off the service, iMessage will soon be able to fall back to the RCS carrier messaging standard instead of SMS, which comes with the advantages of read receipts, higher-quality media sending, and typing indicators. Your chats with your green bubble friends will be slightly less awful.

Apple sent several media outlets a statement:

»

Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.

«

iMessage is currently besieged on all sides by various parties. Google has been waging a “get the message” campaign against Apple for the past year or two, imploring the company to adopt RCS.

Last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked on stage if the company would make messaging with Android better, and he responded, “I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point” and told the audience member to “just buy your mom an iPhone” if he wanted easier communication with his mother. Regulators in the European Union have yet to decide the fate of iMessage, but if it meets the qualifications for being a big tech “Gatekeeper,” the iMessage protocol will be forced to open up in the EU. [Thursday was the last day before the EU might have forced Apple to offer iMessage interoperability – Overspill Ed]

The Wall Street Journal ran an article last year subtitled “Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble,” detailing the bullying that Android users were subject to due to SMS fallback dragging down the capabilities of iMessage group chats (87% of US teenagers have iPhones).

On the Android side of things, companies have been desperate to work better with iMessage, with Google hacking together an emoji response solution for Google Messages and Android manufacturer Nothing planning a wild “hack into iMessage” scheme to run messages through Mac computers hosted in a data center.

«

RCS was devised in 2008, and Google started pushing it harder in 2017. But to actually bang heads together, you need a trade bloc, just as with GSM decades ago.
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Apple’s in-house 5G modem work faces further delays • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple is continuing to run into troubles in its attempt to develop a 5G modem to replace Qualcomm’s 5G modems in the iPhone and other products, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Apple in 2019 acquired the majority of Intel’s smartphone business and started in on a serious effort to develop its own modem hardware, but the project has suffered multiple setbacks. Apple is still “years away” from creating a chip that is able to perform as well as or better than chips from rival Qualcomm.

The Cupertino company initially wanted to have an in-house modem chip ready to go by 2024, a goal that could not be met, and now Gurman says that Apple is also going to miss an extended spring 2025 launch timeline. As of now, the modem chip launch has been postponed until the end of 2025 or early 2026, and Apple is still planning to introduce the technology in a version of the low-cost iPhone SE.

Development on a modem chip is said to be in the early stages, and it “may lag behind the competition by years.” One version in development does not support faster mmWave technology, and Apple has also run into issues with the Intel code that it has been working with. Rewrites have been required, and adding new features has been causing existing features to break, plus Apple has to be careful not to infringe on Qualcomm patents while developing the chip.

…[Apple and Qualcomm] signed a new contract [for Apple to use Qualcomm’s modems], which was extended in September 2023. The latest deal with Qualcomm covers smartphone launches in 2024, 2025, and 2026, and will last through Apple’s delayed modem chip development.

«

Zeno’s modem? It seems like it’s always two, maybe three years away.
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Russian troops deployed on a motorbike. A drone chased them down • Forbes

David Axe:

»

On Oct. 19, Ukrainian marines in small boats motored across the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, landed in the Russian-occupied settlement of Krynky and, in a series of infantry actions, seized a bridgehead across the river.

Provided Russian motor-rifle regiments don’t soon push the marines back into the river, the Krynky lodgment could serve as a base for a wider Ukrainian offensive in Kherson.

In the meantime, it’s an object-lesson in local air-superiority. A lesson a pair of motorbike-riding Russian air-defense troops learned the hard way, as an explosives-laden Ukrainian first-person-view drone chased them down and killed them in dramatic fashion in Krynky recently. Warning: the video of the strike is extremely graphic.

The Krynky river-crossing was the culmination of a long preparatory campaign by Ukrainian pilots, gunners, drone-operators and electronic-warfare specialists who struck Russian supply lines and air-defenses, suppressed Russian artillery, harried Russian strongpoints and—perhaps most critically—jammed Russian drones and struck electronic-warfare systems in order to keep the Russians from jamming Ukrainian drones.

And now the air over Krynky belongs to Ukrainian drone-operators and daring Ukrainian army helicopter pilots flying low-level rocket-attack sorties. Russian troops cannot venture out into the open in and around Krynky without drawing the attention of Ukrainian aircraft.

As early as June, there were reports the Ukrainians were positioning powerful radio-jammers on the Dnipro’s right bank in order to create a 12-mile-deep zone where Russia’s explosive FPV drones cannot reliably operate, but Ukrainian drones can operate.

«

Black Mirror’s “Hated in the Nation“, written by Charlie Brooker: fiction in 2016, a grim reality seven years later.
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Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

It is the architectural embodiment of ridiculousness, a monument to spectacle and to the exceedingly human condition of erecting bewildering edifices simply because we can. It cost $2.3bn; it’s blanketed in 580,000 square feet of LED lights; it can transform its 366-foot-tall exterior into a gargantuan emoji that astronauts can supposedly see from space. This is no half dome and certainly not a rotunda. This is Sphere.

When I approached the Sphere on the ground, around dusk, the building awoke from its screen saver (an unpleasant advertisement for a Spider-Man video game) and began to emit a strange burbling noise. A semi-realistic animation of a womb-bound fetus appeared and spoke the words “This is not a rehearsal” before bursting into flames, flickering violently, and shape-shifting into the following series of images: a blinking eyeball, a thunderstorm, the ocean, some plants, the moon, more flames, all to the pounding drums and metallic guitar clanking of U2’s “Zoo Station.” Even in the context of the pulsing neon goat rodeo of the Vegas Strip, this was a sensory assault.

The kaleidoscopic display made a certain kind of sense, because the Sphere is itself many different things. It’s an arena, conceived by the Madison Square Garden Company in 2018, and home to an ongoing U2 residency. It’s a movie theater, too, like 42 and a half IMAX screens bolted together. (The filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has been screening Postcard From Earth, a documentary he made specifically for this curved megatron.) The Sphere is a new form of architecture, a billboard, a digital canvas for art, and it is a weenie—which, my colleague Ian Bogost informed me, is a term invented by Walt Disney to describe landmarks inside his theme parks that help orient visitors. Las Vegas is a city of weenies, and the Sphere is its most glamorous.

«

A great piece of writing by Warzel, but that headline has subeditors all over the internet grinding their teeth in envy at not having written it.
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AI chatbots just showed scientists how to make social media less toxic • Business Insider

Adam Rogers:

»

On a simulated day in July of a 2020 that didn’t happen, 500 chatbots read the news — real news, our news, from the real July 1, 2020. ABC News reported that Alabama students were throwing “COVID parties.” On CNN, President Donald Trump called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate.” The New York Times had a story about the baseball season being canceled because of the pandemic.

Then the 500 robots logged into something very much (but not totally) like Twitter, and discussed what they had read. Meanwhile, in our world, the not-simulated world, a bunch of scientists were watching.

The scientists had used ChatGPT 3.5 to build the bots for a very specific purpose: to study how to create a better social network — a less polarized, less caustic bath of assholery than our current platforms. They had created a model of a social network in a lab — a Twitter in a bottle, as it were — in the hopes of learning how to create a better Twitter in the real world. “Is there a way to promote interaction across the partisan divide without driving toxicity and incivility?” wondered Petter Törnberg, the computer scientist who led the experiment.

It’s difficult to model something like Twitter — or to do any kind of science, really — using actual humans. People are hard to wrangle, and the setup costs for human experimentation are considerable. AI bots, on the other hand, will do whatever you tell them to, practically for free. And their whole deal is that they are designed to act like people. So researchers are starting to use chatbots as fake people from whom they can extract data about real people.

“If you want to model public discourse or interaction, you need more sophisticated models of human behavior,” says Törnberg, an assistant professor at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. “And then large language models come along, and they’re precisely that — a model of a person having a conversation.” By replacing people as the subjects in scientific experiments, AI could conceivably turbocharge our understanding of human behavior in a wide range of fields, from public health and epidemiology to economics and sociology. Artificial intelligence, it turns out, might offer us real intelligence about ourselves.

«

They used three models: “Echo chamber” full of people who agree with you, “Discover” (sort of “For You”) offering views from all over, and “Bridge”, showing what was most popular with political opposites. Have a guess at which caused the least rancour, and then read it.
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Trade with Europe ‘harder than ever’ for UK businesses • The London Economic

Jack Peat:

»

A comprehensive new survey of UK businesses has exposed the reality of trade with Europe post-Brexit, pointing to ongoing damage to the UK economy caused by the split.

A whopping 94% of respondents to the European Movement poll said leaving the single market and customs union has had a negative effect, while hundreds reported having to reduce their workforce hours, make staff redundant, or even close entirely.

Companies across sectors including engineering, agriculture, hospitality and finance reported they had lost business in the EU, and been made uncompetitive by new red-tape.

More than half of respondents said new red tape had made trading with the EU increasingly difficult, calling it ‘the single biggest obstacle’ to doing business with our largest trading partner.

A further 40% highlighted problems with finding staff since the loss of Freedom of Movement.

Sir Nick Harvey, CEO of European Movement UK, said: “This research shows just how difficult trading with the EU has become for British businesses. Many we have talked to have either cut down their exports into the bloc, or stopped them entirely, citing new costs, increased red tape, and diminishing confidence from EU businesses in UK suppliers. The voices of our small and medium businesses are not being heard, and times are harder than ever.

“Their stories are the ugly truth of trading for UK business after exiting the EU.”

«

Predictable. In case you haven’t heard of The London Economic: here’s the About page.
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Users can’t speak to viral AI girlfriend CarynAI because CEO is in jail for arson • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler:

»

People who paid to speak to an AI girlfriend modelled after real life 23-year-old influencer Caryn Marjorie are distraught because the service they paid for, Forever Companions, no longer works. It appears that the service stopped working shortly after Forever Companion CEO and founder John Meyer was arrested for trying to set his own apartment on fire. 

…“I terminated my relationship with Forever Voices due to unforeseen circumstances,” Marjorie told 404 Media in an email. “I wish the best for John Meyer and his family as he recovers from his mental health crisis. We didn’t see this coming but I vow to push CarynAI forward for my fans and supporters.”

…CarynAI became a viral sensation in May, getting coverage at NBC News, Fortune, Washington Post, and many other publications. While the service was not explicitly promoted for providing adult content, that is what it turned to immediately after users get their hands on it.

«

But of course it did.
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TikTok is removing videos praising Osama bin Laden letter • Semafor

J.D. Capelouto and Louise Matsakis:

»

TikTok says it’s “aggressively removing” videos promoting Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” which explained why he orchestrated the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The platform has also blocked the hashtag #LettertoAmerica, meaning users won’t be able to search for it, a TikTok spokesperson told Semafor.

Several videos from creators encouraging others to read the letter or sympathizing with bin Laden’s views on Israel and the U.S. racked up tens of thousands of views on TikTok and other platforms in recent days. Google Trends data indicates that searches for the document began spiking around a week ago.

Critics argued the videos showed that TikTok was spreading harmful information to young people, who make up a large bulk of its user base. But the platform said in a statement on X that the number of videos about the letter “is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate.” The statement added: “This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”

In its statement, TikTok said that content “promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” adding that it is “investigating how it got onto our platform.” TikTok has been at the center of the conversation about how the Israel-Hamas war is playing out on social media, in part because of a narrative that the app, which is Chinese-owned, leans pro-Palestine.

…Many TikTok users originally read the letter on the website of The Guardian, where it amassed over 100,000 views in recent days before the newspaper took it down, according to a person familiar with the matter. Another person at The Guardian told Semafor that almost all of the traffic came from people searching for the letter on Google, starting on Nov. 9.

The Guardian said it deleted bin Laden’s letter from its website because it was being shared on social media without its original context.

«

Lot of side eye at TikTok’s apparent boosting of this, but analysis by Ryan Broderick suggests that what made it “go viral” was a tweet.
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Apple should share its knowledge of Indian politicians’ iPhone hacks • Rest of World

Barkha Dutt:

»

India’s opposition has accused the government of spying on them after multiple iPhone users in the country received an alert from Apple. “State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone,” the automated text message read. So far, all the members of Parliament who have come forward about receiving the alert are those who oppose the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

An inevitable political row has followed.  

But amid the outrage, Apple’s muted public response has been perplexing, obfuscatory, and contradictory. So far, the iPhone manufacturer has not released a formal public statement. Attributions have been made to sources, government officials, or what Apple has purportedly said when contacted for a response. The absence of any clear or constituent articulation from the American technology giant has left the space wide open for random mudslinging and unverifiable claims and counterclaims.

The Narendra Modi government, while announcing an inquiry, has also described the protesting political figures to be “compulsive critics.” Officials say the alert is “vague,” generic, and no more than an automated advisory sent out in 150 countries.

“If it’s an algorithm tripping up, how can you explain why only one side of the political aisle has been warned?” argued Priyanka Chaturvedi, an opposition leader who received Apple’s alert, in an interview with me.

…In 2021, there was a national furore when a global investigative project reported that Pegasus spyware, developed by Israel’s NSO Group, had been used to target the devices of at least 50,000 individuals globally, including serving ministers, journalists, and opposition members in India. Two years later, a panel of experts failed to reach any clarity. The inquiry panel informed the Indian Supreme Court that the government had failed to cooperate. Malware was found on some devices but could not conclusively be linked to Pegasus. The government refused to confirm or deny whether it owned or used Pegasus.

«

The complaint in this article is that Apple isn’t telling the targeted people who is targeting them, but it seems very likely that Apple doesn’t know; it can just detect something from the logfiles of the devices that say things are awry. It’s always been difficult to know who’s controlling Pegasus; if this is the same or a different piece of spyware, you’d expect the same.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

People are getting injured or even killed taking selfies, a new study shows – and it’s time to warn them properly. CC-licensed photo by Mike Goad 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. Hello, duckface. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s 36% search revenue share with Apple is 3x what Android OEMs get • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

How much more does Google pay for an Apple user than an Android one? A lot. It was recently revealed in the Epic v. Google trial (Google has a few monopoly lawsuits going on) that the highest tier of search revenue share for cooperative Android OEMs is only 12%, a third of what Google pays Apple. In terms of total cash amount, it’s reasonable to assume Apple gets more total money than many smaller companies but to see the direct breakdown that each Apple user is worth three times more than an Android user is a new insight.

A big part of the differing payment rates probably has to do with how threatened Google feels by each company. Apple has already proven that it has the power to dump an established Google service and go off on its own. A prime example is Apple Maps, which replaced Google Maps as a default iOS app and, according to testimony from Google VP of Finance, Michael Roszak, tanked Google Maps mobile traffic by 60% when it launched. Roszak said that Google uses the Apple Maps launch as “a datapoint” when estimating how an Apple search switch would go. No one on the Android side has this kind of power. There’s also the consideration that Apple users are generally more affluent than Android users, making them more desirable ad clickers.

On Android, Google has differing tiers of payments depending on how Google-y your phone is. As revealed in documents from Epic v. Google, Android’s “Premier Device Program” offers 12% search revenue to devices with “Google exclusivity and defaults for all key functions” and no rival app stores.  The big participants in this program are/were Motorola, LG, and HMD, which had at least 98% of their devices qualify. Other brands like Xiaomi, Sony, Sharp, and BBK (that’s OnePlus, Oppo, and Vivo) were at 70%.

Android partners don’t just get search revenue; they also get a cut of Google Play app sales and ads run on their devices. In the case of Motorola and LG, they were getting another 3–6% of Play Store spending.

«

It is fascinating seeing Google’s business model, particularly around TAC (traffic acquisition costs), being picked apart in public like this.
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Meta bars political advertisers from using generative AI ads tools • Reuters

Katie Paul:

»

Facebook owner Meta is barring political campaigns and advertisers in other regulated industries from using its new generative AI advertising products, a company spokesperson said on Monday, denying access to tools that lawmakers have warned could turbo-charge the spread of election misinformation.

Meta publicly disclosed the decision in updates posted to its help center on Monday night, following publication of this story. Its advertising standards prohibit ads with content that have been debunked by the company’s fact-checking partners but do not have any rules specifically on AI.

“As we continue to test new Generative AI ads creation tools in Ads Manager, advertisers running campaigns that qualify as ads for Housing, Employment or Credit or Social Issues, Elections, or Politics, or related to Health, Pharmaceuticals or Financial Services aren’t currently permitted to use these Generative AI features,” the company said in a note appended to several pages explaining how the tools work.

«

So political campaigns won’t be able to use Meta’s generative AI tools to make their ads, but they could certainly do so outside Meta and then just upload them. Hard to see what difference this makes to anything, apart from giving Meta something to say it “doesn’t allow” in US congressional hearings.
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Why I just resigned from my job in generative AI • Music Business Worldwide

Ed Newton-Rex worked at Stability AI on its Stable Audio generative AI music-making platform; he’s a published classical composer in his own right:

»

I’ve resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI, because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’.

…I wasn’t able to change the prevailing opinion on fair use at the company.

This was made clear when the US Copyright Office recently invited public comments on generative AI and copyright, and Stability was one of many AI companies to respond. Stability’s 23-page submission included this on its opening page: “We believe that Al development is an acceptable, transformative, and socially-beneficial use of existing content that is protected by fair use”.

For those unfamiliar with ‘fair use’, this claims that training an AI model on copyrighted works doesn’t infringe the copyright in those works, so it can be done without permission, and without payment. This is a position that is fairly standard across many of the large generative AI companies, and other big tech companies building these models — it’s far from a view that is unique to Stability. But it’s a position I disagree with.

I disagree because one of the factors affecting whether the act of copying is fair use, according to Congress, is “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”. Today’s generative AI models can clearly be used to create works that compete with the copyrighted works they are trained on. So I don’t see how using copyrighted works to train generative AI models of this nature can be considered fair use.

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Well, I guess we’ll see how the courts view this. But it seems to me that this is a “transformational” use and will be allowed. Will Newton-Rex ask for his job back if the courts rule that way?
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The incredible shrinking heat pump • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

Just 10% of households worldwide have heat pumps today. Those are typically bigger, more complex, and expensive systems that need to be professionally installed. For those reasons, they’re usually out of reach for renters. New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) actually did a test run with one of those existing options, called a split system unit, which involved mounting equipment on the roof and on the wall in a tenant’s home. It ended up being too unwieldy, and the project stopped there. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to new, more efficient appliances and clean energy technologies, it’s typically more affluent households that can afford to bring these new things into their homes first. The benefits don’t usually trickle down to lower-income households until later, if at all. 

New York is attempting to flip that scenario now by purchasing new window heat pumps for public housing residents. “The beauty of this project is that some of the lowest-income residents in the city are experiencing the newest technology for the first time so they’re leading in this area, which is really nice and something that we’re very proud of,” says Justin Driscoll, president and CEO of New York Power Authority, the public power organization that procures electricity for NYCHA.

The big motivation to switch to heat pumps now, though, is a deadline. Back in 2019, New York state passed a law to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change by 85% by 2050.

…Heat and hot water in buildings create about 40% of New York City’s planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. So, in 2021, NYCHA and its partners announced a $263m investment in electric heat pumps.

«

They have huge air conditioning units festooned over houses, so why not heat pumps?
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Here’s how bad climate change will get in the US—and why there’s still hope • WIRED

Matt Simon:

»

The [US Fifth National Climate] assessment notes the already staggering cost of climate change in the US, beyond wildfires. In the 1980s, on average, the US experienced one billion-dollar disaster every four months. That’s now one every three weeks. Between 2018 and 2022, the country suffered 89 billion-dollar events. Extreme weather now costs the country nearly $150bn annually. But, the report emphasizes, that’s a conservative estimate, because it doesn’t consider the costs of the aftermath, like loss of life, health care for survivors, or the damage done to ecosystems.

“I think this report really highlights how the changes we’re experiencing now are unprecedented in our nation’s history,” says Kristina Dahl, a technical contributor to the assessment and principal climate scientist for the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The US has warmed more quickly than the planet as a whole. So the US is really feeling this.”

The assessment also points out that in the next three decades, scientists expect sea levels along the contiguous US to rise nearly a foot. By 2050, coastal flooding will happen five to 10 times more often than today, and by the end of the century, millions of seaside residents could be displaced. But we’re dealing with a lot of uncertainty. Sea level rise could accelerate if the ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica start declining faster. Just last week, a study found that northern Greenland’s ice is in much worse shape than previously understood. “Uncertainty in the stability of ice sheets at high warming levels means that increases in sea level along the continental US of 3-7 feet by 2100 and 5-12 feet by 2150 are distinct possibilities that cannot be ruled out,” the assessment warns.

And keep in mind that sea level rise will not unfold uniformly across US coastlines, due to quirks in the physics involved. Some places, like the Gulf Coast, are also rapidly sinking, a phenomenon known as subsidence, which exacerbates the problem.

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2050 actually doesn’t feel that far away.
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YouTubers asked to disclose AI-generated content – or else • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

»

YouTube is slapping a bunch of rules on AI-generated videos in the hope of curbing the spread of faked footage masqueraded as legit; deepfakes that make people appear to say or do things they never did; and tracks that rip off artists’ copyrighted work.

This red tape will be rolled out over the coming months and apply to material uploaded by users, we’re told

Specifically, the Google-owned vid-sharing giant will require content creators to disclose if their videos contain believable synthetic footage of made-up events, including AI-made depictions, or deepfakes that put words in people’s mouths. In those cases, a label will be added to a video’s description declaring the content was altered or digitally generated, and a more prominent note will be added to the video player itself if the content is particularly sensitive. Breaking the rules will lead to content being torn down and accounts punished.

…Faked footage that could mislead viewers about important topics such as elections, conflicts and violence, public health issues, or popular figures must also be flagged in particular. “Creators who consistently choose not to disclose this information may be subject to content removal, suspension from the YouTube Partner Program, or other penalties,” YouTube product veeps Jennifer Flannery O’Connor and Emily Moxley warned today.

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Well, let’s see how that works out for them. How will they know, apart from anything?
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Everyone stop being ridiculous for like five minutes • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

There’s an old journalism joke that reporters cover every new election according to the rules of the previous one. But I think the tech press does the same thing. Which explains why most of the stories you read about AI right now use the same whack-a-mole content cop strategy most news outlets and research groups spent the 2010s using to cover platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Now they’re breathlessly writing up every instance of an AI producing A Forbidden Image. And what’s worse is this attitude helps tech companies continue to undermine labor and consolidate lobbying power, allows politicians to keep dragging their feet on writing real legislation for the internet, and provides fantastic cover for online platforms that still don’t know how to moderate themselves. I have yet to see anything produced by generative AI you couldn’t do with Photoshop or After Effects or, like, Wikipedia. And if everyone stopped being ridiculous for five minutes, we’d all realize that this tech hasn’t introduced a single new problem. We still just have same old ones we refuse to deal with!

And so, my big hot AI take here is that there’s actually nothing new to moderate. I mean, my god, OpenAI is literally using the same Africa-based third-party moderation contractors that Meta and Google use. It’s all just the same stuff with a new Sci-Fi coat of paint.

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Broderick essentially arguing the opposite position from the Tech Against Terrorism research linked here yesterday from Wired.
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Sam Bankman-Fried exposed the fragility of crypto • The New York Times

Molly White:

»

Although some might try to dismiss the FTX collapse as a unique case, it is far from it: the funding model [of issuing a “coin” in an “initial coin offering”, or ICO, and putting a ludicrous value on it, and then using that as collateral for loans of real money] has become all too normal in the cryptocurrency world. Entrepreneurs thought they had found a free money machine in 2017 as initial coin offerings became popular, enabling cryptocurrency companies to bootstrap without needing to find venture investors — investors who might insist on a seat on the board or a view into the company’s operations. A crackdown on I.C.O.s in the United States shortly after failed to stop the practice, with companies either presenting the offerings in disguises designed to stymie if not entirely evade the Securities and Exchange Commission, or moving offshore in hopes of being beyond the reach of the long arms of the Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.)’s enforcers.

FTX is perhaps the best known catastrophe, but the same pattern has played out for customers of the Celsius cryptocurrency lender’s CEL token, the Voyager Digital broker’s VGX and the Terra/Luna ecosystem’s LUNA. Civil and criminal cases have revealed internal conversations among Celsius executives desperately trying to support the CEL token price to keep the floundering company afloat, to no avail, knowing what the token’s collapse would mean for the company. Binance, a still-operational exchange whose balance sheets are as opaque as those of the Bankman-Fried companies before their collapse, heavily promotes its BNB token. The extent to which the company relies on BNB to finance its operations is unclear, but history provides ominous warnings.

The collapse of the FTX exchange revealed the massive duplicity underlying many crypto exchanges, but its implosion should not be attributed to that alone. It, like so many companies in the cryptocurrency industry, had propped itself up on an imaginary foundation of tokens it had invented, and that foundation was bound to fail eventually. When the next company in its position falls, the only surprise should be that people expected any other outcome.

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I’ve long since ceased to be surprised by the things that people will believe will happen differently this time.
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Selfie-related deaths at tourist sites are ‘public health problem’: researchers • NY Post

Angie Raphael:

»

Selfie-related injuries and deaths at tourist hotspots have become such a massive risk that they should be viewed as a “public health problem”, researchers suggest.

Of particular concern are selfie-related deaths at picturesque aquatic locations, such as waterfalls, according to the University of New South Wales, Australia study.

Part of the study examined how selfie-related injuries and deaths were reported in the media.

Four peer-reviewed studies identified falls from a height, such as a cliff or waterfall, as the most common incident. Drowning was the second most common cause of death. People often climbed over barriers and fenced-off areas to get to the perfect selfie spot, the report noted.

The mean age of victims was about 22, most of whom were female tourists. “The selfie-related incident phenomenon should be viewed as a public health problem that requires a public health risk communication response,” the report concluded. “To date, little attention has been paid to averting selfie-related incidents through behaviour change methodologies or direct messaging to users, including through social media apps.”

Previous research recommended “no selfie zones”, barriers and signage as ways to prevent selfie-related injuries and deaths.

«

Perhaps something like “5 people have died here so far taking selfies”, but write the number with 1, 2, 3, and 4 crossed out in front of it. The paper is in the “Journal of Medical Internet Research”, which is an intriguing title in its own right.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Weather forecasting can be done more accurately and more quickly with using machine learning systems, Google DeepMind has shown. CC-licensed photo by Chic Bee on Flickr.

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

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

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

Here’s how violent extremists are exploiting generative AI tools • WIRED

David Gilbert:

»

For years, Big Tech platforms have worked hard to create databases of known violent extremist content, known as hashing databases, which are shared across platforms to quickly and automatically remove such content from the internet. But according to Hadley, his colleagues are now picking up around 5,000 examples of AI-generated content each week. This includes images shared in recent weeks by groups linked to Hezbollah and Hamas that appear designed to influence the narrative around the Israel-Hamas war.

“Give it six months or so, the possibility that [they] are manipulating imagery to break hashing is really concerning,” Hadley says. “The tech sector has done so well to build automated technology, terrorists could well start using gen AI to evade what’s already been done.”

Other examples that researchers at Tech Against Terrorism have uncovered in recent months have included a neo-Nazi messaging channel sharing AI-generated imagery created using racist and antisemitic prompts pasted into an app available on the Google Play store; far-right figures producing a “guide to memetic warfare” advising others on how to use AI-generated image tools to create extremist memes; the Islamic State publishing a tech support guide on how to securely use generative AI tools; a pro-IS user of an archiving service claiming to have used an AI-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to transcribe Arabic language IS propaganda; and a pro-al-Qaeda outlet publishing several posters with images highly likely to have been created using a generative AI platform.

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Nothing is bringing iMessage to its Android phone • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

Nothing Phone 2 owners get blue bubbles now. The company shared it has added iMessage to its newest phone through a new “Nothing Chats” app powered by the messaging platform Sunbird. The feature will be available to users in North America, the EU, and other European countries starting this Friday, November 17th.

Nothing writes on its page that it’s doing this because “messaging services are dividing phone users,” and it wants “to break those barriers down.” But doing so here requires you to trust Sunbird. Nothing’s FAQ says Sunbird’s “architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey,” and that messages aren’t stored on its servers.

Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, “…it’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.”

Nothing’s US head of PR, Jane Nho, told The Verge in an email that Sunbird stores user iCloud credentials as a token “in an encrypted database” and associated with one of its Mac Minis in the US or Europe, depending on the user’s location, that then act as a relay for iMessages sent via the app. She added that, after two weeks of inactivity, Sunbird deletes the account information.

But you’re still giving them access to your iCloud account to make this work, and as we’ve all learned over the years, companies don’t always do what they say they will. It’s worth reviewing Sunbird’s privacy policy and keeping a very skeptical mind about it.

«

Sunbird doesn’t explain how it does this. My understanding is that iMessages require key exchange, and that the private/public keypair is generated by the device itself. How does Sunbird generate an appropriate hardware key for the Android device? At Pocket Lint, Jason Cipriani wags a big finger and says no, don’t do this: it requires Sunbird signing into your iCloud account on a Mac it controls:

»

“You’re more or less giving Sunbird access to your entire Apple ID/iCloud account, and if you’re someone who uses Apple’s services, that’s a scary thought.”

«

Also, jeepers, people: just use WhatsApp, or Signal. Platform-specific messaging apps are so 2010s.
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Robotic putting greens, mixed reality, loud spectators: this is golf?! • WIRED

Steven Levy:

»

Cameron Young slides a driver from his bag. He stares at a hole referred to as Texas Hill Country. It’s new to him—a par 4 with sand hazards and rough to avoid. The 26-year-old is in the top 20 in the Official World Golf Ranking, but he’s not sure how to proceed. He turns to his companion, former pro Roberto Castro. “What’s going on here?” Young asks.

Castro consults with their caddie and reports, “It’s 312 to that bunker there.”

Young makes clean contact. The ball lofts skyward.

But there’s no sky above him. On this steamy day in late October, Young is in an air-conditioned soundstage on the back lot of Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. The building once hosted Nickelodeon TV shows. The “caddie” Castro consulted is virtual—it lives on a 15-inch tablet. The tee is on a patch of natural grass the width of a large mattress. It sits atop wooden pallets on a concrete floor.

Young’s golf ball hits a billboard-sized screen 35 yards away. The dimpled sphere falls meekly to the ground, while up on the giant display its virtual successor continues its flight. A phalanx of supersensitive radar trackers and hi-res cameras sends data to a bank of computer servers that calculate velocity and spin to show how the ball will bounce and where it will ultimately settle on the vista of the screen.

Young’s ball lands in the digital rough. He walks over to a tray of two-inch-high Bermuda grass mixed with rye. The screen now shows him closer to his goal, an 8-iron away. He swings, the ball thuds against the display again, and seconds later his virtual ball lands just outside the green.

…Many pro golfers practice using room-sized simulators in their personal gym, and weekend warriors commonly visit golf centers with plenty of tech. That’s not what Young is up to. He’s testing a system for real competition that will be aired on prime time, with $20m of prize money at stake. He’s one of 24 pros, including golf legends Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, who are involved in the most ambitious effort yet to merge e-gaming and actual pro sports. It’s called TGL, allegedly not an acronym for The Golf League, but three TV-friendly letters that don’t mean anything.

TGL’s first event will take place on January 9 inside a $50m–plus, custom-built arena with an inflatable dome in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. A 200,000-pound [91 tonne] turntable will support an 800,000-pound [363 tonne] green that will shape-shift to give each hole its character. A 4K screen will rival the goliath displays of Taylor Swift concerts. The stands will accommodate around 1,600 live spectators, who are encouraged to boisterously violate golf’s finicky silence rule. Players themselves will be mic’d up, in hopes that their trash talk might go viral online.

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Strange things that the combination of money, TV and empty airtime will make people try.
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Andreessen Horowitz invests in Civitai, which profits from nonconsensual AI porn • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm that was an early investor in Facebook, Lyft, and other tech giants, has invested in Civitai, a giant platform for sharing AI models that enables and profits from the creation of AI generated nonconsensual sexual images of real people. That includes launching a feature where people can list “bounties” for others to create AI models of specific targets.

Civitai said that it raised $5.1m in a seed funding round led by a16z.

A16z’s official website, which includes a jobs board with open positions at companies in its portfolio, currently lists five jobs at Civitai. According to a16z’s site, these jobs were posted more than 30 days ago.

A16z regularly announces investments the company is making on its site, but has not publicly announced its investment in Civitai yet.

A16z did not respond to a request for comment. When asked about a16z’s investment in Civitai over Discord, a community engagement manager at Civitai told 404 Media that “There will be a press release/announcement shortly.” Civitai then published a press release confirming the investment minutes after 404 Media reached out for comment.

In August, 404 Media published an investigation into Civitai, which explained how the platform works, and enables the creation of AI-generated nonconsensual sexual images, and profits from it. Civitai allows users to share modified models of the open source text-to-image AI tool Stable Diffusion. These modified models are often trained on images of celebrities, influencers, YouTubers, and athletes, almost exclusively women, to recreate their likeness. Those models can then be combined with AI models that are trained on porn in order to instantly generate nonconsensual sexual images.

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You know, I’m beginning to think that a16z is a bit skeevy.
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Google DeepMind’s weather AI can forecast extreme weather faster and more accurately • MIT Technology Review

Melissa Heikkilä:

»

In research published in Science on Tuesday, Google DeepMind’s model, GraphCast, was able to predict weather conditions up to 10 days in advance, more accurately and much faster than the current gold standard. GraphCast outperformed the model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in more than 90% of over 1,300 test areas. And on predictions for Earth’s troposphere—the lowest part of the atmosphere, where most weather happens—GraphCast outperformed the ECMWF’s model on more than 99% of weather variables, such as rain and air temperature

Crucially, GraphCast can also offer meteorologists accurate warnings, much earlier than standard models, of conditions such as extreme temperatures and the paths of cyclones. In September, GraphCast accurately predicted that Hurricane Lee would make landfall in Nova Scotia nine days in advance, says Rémi Lam, a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind. Traditional weather forecasting models pinpointed the hurricane to Nova Scotia only six days in advance.

“Weather prediction is one of the most challenging problems that humanity has been working on for a long, long time. And if you look at what has happened in the last few years with climate change, this is an incredibly important problem,” says Pushmeet Kohli, the vice president of research at Google DeepMind.

Traditionally, meteorologists use massive computer simulations to make weather predictions. They are very energy intensive and time consuming to run, because the simulations take into account many physics-based equations and different weather variables such as temperature, precipitation, pressure, wind, humidity, and cloudiness, one by one.

GraphCast uses machine learning to do these calculations in under a minute. Instead of using the physics-based equations, it bases its predictions on four decades of historical weather data. GraphCast uses graph neural networks, which map Earth’s surface into more than a million grid points. At each grid point, the model predicts the temperature, wind speed and direction, and mean sea-level pressure, as well as other conditions like humidity. The neural network is then able to find patterns and draw conclusions about what will happen next for each of these data points.

«

Surprise! Historical data is a good predictor of future weather patterns. Unfortunately “It still lags behind conventional weather forecasting models in some areas, such as precipitation, Dueben says”. In other words, it’s not going to take over rain prediction – the thing we really want – just yet.
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Chatbots may ‘hallucinate’ more often than many realise • The New York Times

Cade Metz:

»

a new start-up called Vectara, founded by former Google employees, is trying to figure out how often chatbots veer from the truth. The company’s research estimates that even in situations designed to prevent it from happening, chatbots invent information at least 3% of the time — and as high as 27%.

Experts call this chatbot behavior “hallucination.” It may not be a problem for people tinkering with chatbots on their personal computers, but it is a serious issue for anyone using this technology with court documents, medical information or sensitive business data.

Because these chatbots can respond to almost any request in an unlimited number of ways, there is no way of definitively determining how often they hallucinate. “You would have to look at all of the world’s information,” said Simon Hughes, the Vectara researcher who led the project.

Dr. Hughes and his team asked these systems to perform a single, straightforward task that is readily verified: Summarize news articles. Even then, the chatbots persistently invented information.

“We gave the system 10 to 20 facts and asked for a summary of those facts,” said Amr Awadallah, the chief executive of Vectara and a former Google executive. “That the system can still introduce errors is a fundamental problem.”

The researchers argue that when these chatbots perform other tasks — beyond mere summarization — hallucination rates may be higher.

Their research also showed that hallucination rates vary widely among the leading AI companies. OpenAI’s technologies had the lowest rate, around 3%. Systems from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, hovered around 5%. The Claude 2 system offered by Anthropic, an OpenAI rival also based in San Francisco, topped 8%. A Google system, Palm chat, had the highest rate at 27%.

«

The problem isn’t so much the fact of hallucination – we often like it when humans make stuff up, a phenomenon we call “stories” – but that we can’t predict or necessarily spot where it’s happening.
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Samsung unveils ChatGPT alternative Samsung Gauss that can generate text, code and images • TechCrunch

Kate Park:

»

Just a few days after OpenAI’s developer event, Samsung unveiled its own generative AI model, Samsung Gauss, at the Samsung AI Forum 2023.

Samsung Gauss, developed by the tech giant’s research unit Samsung Research, consists of three tools: Samsung Gauss Language, Samsung Gauss Code and Samsung Gauss Image.

Samsung Gauss Language is a large language model that can understand human language and answer questions like ChatGPT. It can be used to increase productivity in several ways. For instance, it can help you write and edit emails, summarize documents and translate languages. Samsung plans to incorporate the large language model into its devices like phones, laptops and tablets to make the company’s smart devices a bit smarter. When asked if it supports both English and Korean as interaction languages, a spokesperson of Samsung declined to comment on it.

Samsung Gauss Code, which works with its code assistant called code.i, focuses more specifically on development code. The idea is that Samsung Gauss Code could help developers write code quickly. Samsung said the AI model for code will support “code description and test case generation through an interactive interface.”

As for Samsung Gauss Image, as the name suggests, it will be an image generation and editing feature. For instance, it could be used to convert a low-resolution image into a high-resolution one.

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AI envy is absolutely a thing now, and given that Samsung is the company most given to technology envy, this was inevitable, as is its gradual sunsetting and/or supplanting by users over the next few years in favour of something from Google.
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August 2021: A $1.5m ‘women-led’ NFT project was actually run by dudes • Inverse

Chris Stokel-Walker, in August 20212:

»

The NFT market, like many tech-centric areas, has traditionally been dominated by men, and a women-led project was a much-welcomed change.

The three women behind it — Cindy and Andrea, the U.S.-based marketer and developer, respectively, and Kelda, the Norwegian artist and “ideologist” — were supposedly striking a note for female empowerment. Their head-and-shoulders illustrations of slender women in different guises — which users could pay Ethereum to mint and own — even merited a passing mention in The New Yorker.

But the story behind the project was a lie. The three women purportedly running Fame Lady Squad weren’t women at all. They were Russian men, according to research by NFT enthusiast and fellow Russian Fedor Linnik. And they are allegedly behind other NFT collectible series that claim to be one thing, but are in actuality something else entirely.

The story began with whispered rumors last month, and came to a conclusion, of sorts, this week. After an uprising within the community of investors that bought into the project to the tune of nearly $1.5 million, the Russian men behind Fame Lady Squad have ceded control of the project to actual women, including a self-employed realtor in Canada, Ashley Smith.

…“These guys are just cynically exploiting the Western, left-liberal agenda of protecting female rights and stuff like that,” says Linnik. He points to the fact that at least two of the original team alleged to be behind Fame Lady Squad have previously lived or studied in Canada as an indication that the decision to misrepresent their gender when launching the project was a cynical one. “I believe these guys understand Western society pretty well, and that’s why they can manipulate us easily.”

On Monday, Linnik posted a Twitter thread laying out what he knew. The men who had pretended to be women moved quickly to try and limit the reputational damage. On Tuesday, in a lengthy Twitter thread of their own, the originators apologized for misleading the world. “But it doesn’t mean it’s a scam or a fraud,” they wrote.

«

Nooooo, not a scam at all. NFT stats says average price was $123.20. “Current floor price $0.05”. A couple of years old, but Stokel-Walker pointed to it in the Guardian Technology mailout on Tuesday, and I couldn’t resist.
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China’s spending on green energy is causing a global glut • WSJ

Sha Hua and Phred Dvorak:

»

China’s newest solar-energy manufacturers include a dairy farmer and a toy maker.

The new entrants are examples of a green energy spending binge in China that is fueling the country’s rapid build-out of renewable energy while also creating a glut of solar components that is rippling through the industry and stymying attempts to build such manufacturing elsewhere, particularly in Europe.

Since the start of the year, prices for Chinese polysilicon, the building block of solar panels, are down 50% and panels down 40%, according to data tracker OPIS, which is owned by Dow Jones.

Inside China, some companies fear a green bubble is about to pop. China’s state-guided economy spent nearly $80bn on clean-energy manufacturing last year, around 90% of all such investment worldwide, BloombergNEF estimates. The country’s annual spending on green energy overall has increased by more than $180bn a year since 2019, the International Energy Agency says.

The rush of funding has attracted an unusual array of companies to the bustling business. Last summer, Chinese dairy giant Royal Group unveiled plans for three new projects. There was a farm with 10,000 milk cows, a dairy processing plant and a $1.5bn factory to make solar cells and panels.

“The solar industry is improving over the long term, and the market potential is huge,” Royal Group wrote in a document outlining the project last year. More recently, Royal Group said it wants to create synergies between its core agricultural business and photovoltaics, “and promote solar technology to empower dairy owners to reduce costs and increase efficiency,” the company said in a response to The Wall Street Journal.

The milk manufacturer wasn’t alone in jumping on China’s solar bandwagon in the past two years. Other newbies include a jewelry chain, a producer of pollution-control equipment and a pharmaceutical company.

The newcomers are helping an ambitious wind and solar push in China—this year alone the country is set to install roughly as much solar as the U.S. has in total, Rystad Energy estimates.

«

One feels a disapproving tone in this story: how dare China fund a product that’s in huge demand (and, it’s careful to point out, which the US invented in the 1950s) and make its price crater so more people can benefit from it? Why can’t dairy farmers and toymakers just stick to their knitting?
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The Humane AI Pin is a bizarre cross between Google Glass and a pager • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Not since Magic Leap has a “next-generation” hardware company been so hyped while showing so little. Everyone in the tech world has been freaking out about this new pocket protector thing that wants to “replace your smartphone.” It’s called the “Humane AI Pin.” As far as we can tell, it’s a $700 screenless voice assistant box and, like all smartphone-ish devices released in the last 10 years, it has some AI in it. It’s as if Google Glass had a baby with a pager from the 1990s.

«

Amadeo writes absolutely brutal reviews of hardware. I heartily approve. Savour this one particularly. (He’s also scathingly sceptical about the Nothing/iMessage/Sunbird promise.)

At the end, he asks:

»

Why wasn’t this just a smartwatch? Some of the OpenAI-powered responses are pretty neat, but there’s no reason not to have that just show up on a screen or be read aloud by a smartwatch.

«

That really is the question. This thing more and more looks like an adjunct to a smartphone, not a replacement. And an excellent question in the comments about this suit-lapel-worn (ladies, how do you feel about that?) device:

»

There are so many places to start, but I think my very very favorite is: does Silicon Valley know that, come November, when we go outdoors most of us are wearing coats?

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The smog in Delhi, India is so bad that its officials want to use “cloud seeding” to precipitate it out with rain. CC-licensed photo by ben dalton 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. Looks like rain? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Delhi plans to unleash cloud seeding in its battle against deadly smog • WIRED

Sushmita Pathak:

»

The air is so bad that schools in Delhi and its surrounding areas have announced closures, and offices are allowing employees to work from home. The government has advised children, elderly people, and those with chronic diseases to stay indoors as much as possible. Diesel trucks, except those carrying essential goods, are no longer allowed into the city. Spells of rain last week cleaned up the air, but the respite was short-lived as air quality worsened again, aided by firecrackers set off over the weekend to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.

Now, Delhi officials are seeking permission from federal agencies in India to try cloud seeding. The technique involves flying an aircraft to spray clouds with salts like silver or potassium iodide or solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, to induce precipitation. The chemical molecules attach to moisture already in the clouds to form bigger droplets that then fall as rain. China has used artificial rain to tackle air pollution in the past—but for cloud seeding to work properly, you need significant cloud cover with reasonable moisture content, which Delhi generally lacks during the winter. If weather conditions are favorable, scientists leading the project at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur plan to carry out cloud seeding around November 20.

Until then, at least, Delhi will remain shrouded in a thick gray haze, which has become a toxic winter ritual. The smog, a dangerous cocktail of particulate matter and noxious gasses, results from a series of unfortunate events that happen at the start of winter.

In late October, farmers in northern India, particularly wheat growers in the states of Punjab and Haryana northwest of Delhi, use a cheap and easy method to clear their paddy fields for fresh sowing—lighting fires to burn off stalks left behind after harvesting. In doing so, they inadvertently send plumes of smoke into the air. Authorities have tried to convince farmers to switch to using machines to remove crop residue instead of burning it, but farmers can’t always afford that method. Some small startups turn the crop residue into pulp that can then be used to make cardboard items. State and federal governments have also been looking into paying farmers to not burn their fields.

[But] Even on the worst days, smoke from crop burning only accounts for about a third of Delhi’s pollution, says Somvanshi.

«

In the UK, farm stubble burning was banned in 1993. Cloud seeding will have unpredictable effects; this might not be the magic solution the Delhi authorities think.
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Humane will be updating its AI Pin reveal video to address a big error • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Humane will be updating its AI Pin reveal video to address a big error.In the video, Humane’s AI Pin confidently lied about the best places to watch April’s upcoming total solar eclipse, but Humane staffer (and Verge alum) Sam Sheffer said in Humane’s Discord that this was a bug that’s since been resolved. Sheffer says Humane will be updating the video on its website, but as of this writing, the wrong eclipse information is still in it.

The device also misstated the amount of protein in a handful of almonds. Sheffer says the pin was spelling out the amount of protein for a half cup of almonds, which was the “correct and current” behavior. However, he says the behavior will “improve over time.” The video on Humane’s website has a footnote that says “protein amount estimated” — I’m not sure if this was there originally.

«

That’s a lot of wrong already. How might you know whether the generative AI projecting answers onto your hand is getting other things wrong which are bugs that have yet to be resolved?
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Apple gets 36% of Google’s Safari search revenue • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

We previously learned that Google is paying Apple billions of dollars to be the primary [no: the default – Overspill Ed] search engine on Apple devices, and now, Bloomberg has shared the total percentage of Google’s revenue that Apple earns.

Google pays Apple 36% of the total revenue that it earns from searches conducted on the Safari browser on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with the number shared by an economics expert testifying on Apple’s behalf. According to Bloomberg, Google’s main lawyer “visibly cringed” when the revenue data was shared, as it was meant to remain confidential.

Last month, wealth management company Bernstein suggested that Apple is getting anywhere from $18bn to $20bn per year, representing somewhere around 15% of Apple’s total annual operating profits.

Apple and Google have both worked to keep details in the antitrust lawsuit private, claiming that publicly sharing the information would “undermine Google’s competitive standing.”

Google has been the default search engine on Apple devices since 2002, though the agreement between the two tech companies has been revised multiple times. Apple earns a ton of money from the deal, while Google gets to be the default search option on the world’s most popular smartphone.

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Jason Kint calculates that Google probably spends $90bn annually on search default deals. For its most recent fiscal year, its total revenue was just under $280bn. So nearly a quarter of revenues go straight out the door on default deals. That doesn’t suggest complete confidence in being “the best search engine”.
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UK petrol station group EG to buy Tesla ultra-fast chargers • Reuters

Sachin Ravikumar and Nick Carey:

»

British petrol station operator EG Group said on Monday it would buy Tesla ultrafast charging units to boost its electric vehicle charging network across Europe, as the EV maker continues to expand the reach of its charging business.

EG, owned by the billionaire Issa brothers who also own UK supermarket chain Asda, will expand its charging network to more than 20,000 EV chargers at its own sites over time, from above 600 currently deployed.

The first Tesla chargers will be installed by the end of this year, EG said, though it didn’t provide details on the cost or time frame for the total purchase.

The “open network” Tesla chargers will be accessible to all EV drivers regardless of their vehicles’ brand.

“The rapid installation of reliable, easy-to-use EV charging infrastructure is the right step towards a sustainable future,” said Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla’s senior director of charging infrastructure.

…The UK had just over 49,000 public electric vehicle charging devices installed as of Oct. 1, according to government figures.

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Impressive that the Issa brothers are actually thinking ahead to a time when (fossil) fuelling stations are less and less useful, but electric charger more and more so. Might be ten years, but it’s coming.
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Tech groups push back on Biden AI executive order, raising concerns that it could crush innovation • FedScoop

Nihal Krishan:

»

“Broad regulatory measures in Biden’s AI red tape wishlist will result in stifling new companies and competitors from entering the marketplace and significantly expanding the power of the federal government over American innovation,” Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel at NetChoice, an advocacy group that represents major AI companies such as Amazon, Google and Meta, said in a statement.

“This order puts any investment in AI at risk of being shut down at the whims of government bureaucrats,” he continued. “That is dangerous for our global standing as the leading technological innovators, and this is the wrong approach to govern AI.”

Szabo added that there are many federal government regulations that already govern AI that can be used to rein in the technology, but the Biden administration “has chosen to further increase the complexity and burden of the federal code.”

The Chamber of Commerce said the EO shows promise and addresses important AI priorities, but also raises concerns and needs more work.

“Substantive and process problems still exist,” Tom Quaadman, executive vice president of the Chamber’s Technology Engagement Center, said in a statement. “Short, overlapping timelines for agency-required action endangers necessary stakeholder input, thereby creating conditions for ill-informed rulemaking and degrading intra-government cooperation.” 

«

That last quotation could have come from ChatGPT, but the point about Biden’s EO is that it strengthened the position of the incumbents, and made entrance harder for those not already there. As is going to be the case for any sort of regulation.
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The selfie camera has gotten too good • The Atlantic

Caroline Mimbs Nyce:

»

A camera is fundamentally a tool for documenting the world, but it is also pretty subjective. And what makes a photograph “good” depends on what you want to do with it. If you’re taking a photo of your eyelid eczema to send to your doctor, you probably want an extreme level of detail. If you’re taking a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower to send to your boyfriend, you probably don’t want every blemish on your skin in high-def. Apple’s software is post-processing selfies en masse, but “there’s no one universal algorithm that will make every picture better for the purpose it’s intended for,” Cooper said.

It’s hard to build a camera that’s just right. Five years ago, the iPhone presented the opposite problem. In 2018, Apple’s newly launched XR and XS models took photos that made people look suspiciously good. The phones were accused of artificially smoothing skin, in what came to be known as “beautygate.” Apple later said that a software bug was behind these unusually hot photos, and shipped a fix. “Do you want a nicer photo or a more accurate representation of reality?” Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, wrote in his review of the XR. “Only you can look into your heart and decide.”

The answer to Patel’s question seems to be that people want something in the middle—not too hot, but not too real either. People are chasing a Goldilocks ideal with the selfie camera: They want it to be real, authentic, and messy, just not too real, authentic, or messy.

“When someone thinks of a perfect selfie, they don’t think of having no pores,” Maria-Carolina Cambre, an education professor at Concordia University in Montreal, told me. “And they don’t think of having every single pore visible. It’s neither one of those extremes.” For more than years, Cambre and a colleague ran selfie focus groups in Canada, discussing the style of photography with more than 100 young people. They found that people examine selfies in a very specific way, which they termed the “digital-forensic gaze.” People inspect such images closely, pinching in to look for details and for evidence of any filtering. They look for flaws and inconsistencies. “This is the paradox,” she told me. “Everything is optimized, but the best selfies look like they haven’t been optimized. Even though they have.”

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(Thanks G for the link.)
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The Lego-like way to get CO2 out of the atmosphere • The Washington Post

Shannon Osaka:

»

Graphyte, a new company incubated by Bill Gates’s investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures, announced Monday that it has created a method for turning bits of wood chips and rice hulls into low-cost, dehydrated chunks of plant matter. Those blocks of carbon-laden plant matter — which look a bit like shoe-box sized Lego blocks — can then be buried deep underground for hundreds of years.

The approach, the company claims, could store a ton of CO2 for around $100 a ton, a number long considered a milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbon removal may not seem like a top priority — why not just stop using fossil fuels in the first place? — but virtually every projection of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 involves some amount of it. That’s because certain areas of the economy like aviation, cement-making and steelmaking, are very challenging to do with renewable energy and batteries. It’s hard to make temperatures hot enough with electricity to produce cement or steel, and to fly planes on heavy lithium-ion batteries.

“We’ve bet the future of our planet on our ability to remove CO2 from the air,” said Chris Rivest, a partner at Breakthrough Energy Ventures. “Pretty much every IPCC scenario that has a livable planet involves us pulling like 5 to 10 gigatons of CO2 out of the air by mid- to late-century,” he added, referring to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Five to 10 gigatons of CO2 a year is around 12% to 25% of what humanity currently emits every year.

«

Just a reminder – “giga” is 10^9, so to remove that amount from the atmosphere, even at $100 per ton(ne), would cost $100bn per gigaton. One has to wonder, again, if it isn’t cheaper to not put the stuff in the atmosphere in the first place. (Thanks G for the link.)

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Google’s AI Magic Editor won’t work on IDs, faces, or bodies • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

»

Google’s AI-powered Magic Editor will not work if you try to alter images of ID cards, receipts, human faces, or body parts.

The feature, now available in the Google Photos app on the latest Pixel 8 smartphones, uses generative AI to edit images. Users can do all sorts of things like removing unwanted objects, like people in the background, repositioning the focus of a photo, or changing its lighting. 

But it won’t touch up everything you might want it to. The software has been designed to avoid editing documents that contain personally identifiable information, such as IDs or receipts, or the faces and body parts of humans, Android Authority reported. If you try to highlight any of these things to try and change in Google Photos, the app will likely show you an error message. 

Google refers to its policy detailing what its generative AI technologies should and shouldn’t do. Changing IDs, for example, could allow people to impersonate others or create content for deceptive or fraudulent activities, like helping underage teenagers buy alcohol, for example. Whereas altering faces and body parts could be used to harm others, like creating non-consensual deepfakes or cyberbullying. 

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I thought part of what it did was to alter faces in order to get the “best” picture, but perhaps that’s just picking from the ones that it captures in that moment. Anyway, very reminiscent of scanners refusing to scan dollar bills.
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Analysis: China’s emissions set to fall in 2024 after record growth in clean energy • Carbon Brief

Lauri Myllyvirta:

»

China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are set to fall in 2024 and could be facing structural decline, due to record growth in the installation of new low-carbon energy sources.

The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, shows China’s CO2 emissions continuing to rebound from the nation’s “zero-Covid” period, rising by an estimated 4.7% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2023.

The strongest growth was in oil demand and other sectors that had been affected by pandemic policies, until the lifting of zero-Covid controls at the end of 2022.

Other key findings from the analysis include:

• China has been seeing a boom in manufacturing, which has offset a contraction in demand for carbon-intensive steel and cement due to the ongoing real-estate slump
• The emissions rebound in 2023 has been accompanied by record installations of low-carbon electricity generating capacity, particularly wind and solar
• Hydro generation is set to rebound from record lows due to drought in 2022-23
• China’s economic recovery from Covid has been muted. To date, it has not repeated previous rounds of major infrastructure expansion after economic shocks
• There has been a surge of investment in manufacturing capacity, particularly for low-carbon technologies, including solar, electric vehicles and batteries
• This is creating an increasingly important interest group in China, which could affect the country’s approach to domestic and international climate politics
• On the other hand, coal power capacity continues to expand, setting the scene for a showdown between the country’s traditional and newly emerging interest groups.

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You’re wondering about the mix of renewables? “All in all, 210GW of solar, 70GW of wind, 7GW hydro and 3GW of nuclear are expected to be added in China this year.” Notable how tiny nuclear is in this.
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Netflix and bill: the high price of a subscription lifestyle • Tim Harford

The economist strikes again:

»

The subscription business model has expanded from traditional products, such as newspapers and gym memberships to software, streaming media, vegetable boxes, shaving kits, makeup, clothes and support for creative types via Patreon or Substack. We should all be asking ourselves, if so many people are paying not to go to the gym, what else are we paying not to do?

A new working paper from economists Liran Einav, Benjamin Klopack and Neale Mahoney attempts an answer. Using data from a credit and debit card provider, they examine what happens to subscriptions for 10 popular services when the card that is paying for them is replaced. At this moment, the service provider suddenly stops getting paid and must contact the customer to ask for updated payment details. You can guess what happens next: for many people, this request reminds them of a subscription they had stopped thinking about and immediately prompts them to cancel it. Relative to a typical month, cancellation rates soar in months when a payment card is replaced — from 2% to at least 8%.

Einav and his colleagues use this data to estimate how easily many people let stale subscriptions continue. Relative to a benchmark in which infallible subscribers instantly cancel once they decide they are no longer getting enough value, the researchers predict that subscribers will take many extra months — on average 20 — to get around to cancelling.

Don’t take the precise numbers too seriously — as with most social science, this is not a rigorously controlled experiment but an attempt to tease meaning out of noisy real-world data. What you should take seriously is the likelihood that you are swimming in barely noticed subscriptions, some of which you would choose to cancel if you were forced to pay attention to them for a few minutes. Perhaps you should. Come to think of it, perhaps *I* should.

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The working paper is worth a read; it notes that the “subscription economy” is reckoned to have quadrupled in size over the past decade.
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The Las Vegas Sphere is an amazing new landmark, but so far isn’t anywhere near profitable. CC-licensed photo by Nigel Hoult on Flickr.

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

Advertisers don’t want sites like Jezebel to exist • 404 Media

Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg:

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Lauren Tousignant, Jezebel’s interim editor in chief, told 404 Media that Jezebel was told “brand safety,” the fact that advertisers don’t want to be next to the type of content Jezebel was publishing, was “one of the biggest factors” that led G/O to stop publishing the site and lay off its staff. Tousignant said that a couple of weeks ago, the ads sales team asked if it could remove Jezebel’s tagline—“Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth”—from the site.

“They took it off because they’re like, let’s see if this makes a huge difference,” Tousignant said. “So yeah, it was very much the problem here that no one will advertise on Jezebel because we cover sex and abortion. I know taking the tagline off was to see if the algorithm advertising would change. After it was removed one of the editorial directors was like, ‘I’m seeing an ad for J Crew for the first time ever, maybe this will be good.’”

G/O Media has a long history of destroying or otherwise undermining the work of beloved media outlets that have done incredibly important work. Spanfeller blames, as is seemingly required in every CEO layoff notice, “economic headwinds” and “macroeconomic news.” Spanfeller and Great Hill Partners have, surely, mismanaged Jezebel in ways both big and small, and Spanfeller and G/O haven’t given anyone a reason to take their words at face value, but the subtext here is that Jezebel’s content was hard to sufficiently monetize.

This should not be the case considering that millions of people read it and chose, specifically, to visit Jezebel every month. But this is unfortunately how the internet works now, and has for a long time: News terrifies brands big and small, to the point where “brand safety” and “brand suitability” have become gigantic industries that have brought even giants like Facebook and Google to heel. 

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The clear downside of being ad-supported. The “brand safety” topic cuts both ways: it gets used to cut the funding for right-wing sites, but also against those like Jezebel deemed too controversial.
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Inside the magical world of AI Prompters on Reddit • Hyperallergic

Aidan Walker:

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Recent research shows that Americans who are learning about AI tools are mostly teaching themselves, often through sources and communities found online. And the best prompt engineers seem to be on Reddit. There’s one big subreddit for each kind of generator, including Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALLE-3, along with several others where users debate, post, and refine prompts. A connected universe of wikis, YouTube tutorials, and influencers flesh out the emerging institutional world of AI-generated art.  

Take an image known as “Spiral Town,” generated by a user known as Ugleh and posted to the StableDiffusion subreddit this September. Many of the comments on the original Spiral Town post are people telling Ugleh where they first saw the viral image: “a shrooms facebook group,” says one, while another lists other non-AI subreddits. Ugleh seems ambivalent about it: “I’m fine with it tbh. I only spent about 10 minutes on this photo.”

But as others praise Ugleh and post links to their own YouTube tutorials on how to make images similar to Spiral Town, some commenters double down on the argument that Ugleh should be treated as a “real” artist. Sure, generating the Spiral Town image may have taken minutes, but that doesn’t mean that creating such works doesn’t require skill — in fact, much of the subreddit’s audience seems to be people trying to develop these very abilities. Almost every post on the Stable Diffusion subreddit has a flare next to its title that says “Workflow Included,” meaning it explains the procedure used to create the image. 

An Ugleh piece made three days later seems to have taken more than 10 minutes. The checkerboard image below was created starting with the deceptively simple prompt “Medieval village scene with busy streets and castle in the distance,” followed by fifteen lines of complicated and sometimes indecipherable modifiers, including one that instructs the AI to not make the image like a “bad anime.”  

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“Prompt engineering” really is taking off, becoming a very arcane space in its own right; though the community around it described here reminds me a bit of hackers, with the anti-commercial approach and wide sharing of tools. The images on show are amazing, though.
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Why we can’t quit email, even though we hate it • Tim Harford

Tim went to the Design Museum in London, which has an exhibition of notable emails:

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Email is the cockroach of computing. BlackBerry instant messenger and Friends Reunited may come and go, but email cannot be killed. The variety of emails displayed on the wall of the exhibition make it clear why. Any new ping in your inbox could be your lover dumping you, a friend proposing an idea that will make you both rich or a stranger with a piece of information that could save your life. Even the everyday traffic will contain both time-wasting spam and a message from a senior colleague that you ignore at your peril. There may be semi-useful administrative information (don’t Reply All), sweet nothings from a spouse, disposable quips from friends, politely phrased requests from complete strangers, interesting newsletters and much more.

It’s all in there. No wonder we feel overwhelmed. No wonder we can’t do without it.

It is that vast range of importance in the emails pouring into our inboxes every day, from the trivial to the life-changing, that explains why the inbox can be so addictive. The psychologist BF Skinner once serendipitously discovered while running low on supplies of rat food that the rats in his laboratory were more motivated by unpredictable food rewards than by predictable ones: the uncertainty grabbed their attention in a way that a steady pay-off never could. Whenever we check our inboxes, we’re like Skinner’s rats. It has been at least 90 seconds since we last checked, after all. Will the email slot-machine offer us a jackpot or a disaster? Or just a chance to hit “refresh” and have another spin?

Despite every effort, I still check my own email too often, but even for those with better habits than I, that range of possibility poses a challenge. I have argued before that one of the underrated habits of any productive person is to clarify what needs to be done — if anything — with each new incoming thing. It rarely takes long to decide with a single email but, given that the scope of possible responses could be anything from “delete” to “find a good lawyer”, it is not surprising that we get bogged down and let the undecided emails accumulate.

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My position is that your inbox is a to-do list created almost randomly by other people. The question is whether you acquiesce to doing those things.
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Las Vegas Sphere reports $98.4m loss; CFO quits • Las Vegas Sun News

Ray Brewer:

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The Sphere in Las Vegas reported an operating loss of $98.4m for the fiscal quarter ending Sept. 30, Sphere Entertainment Co. said this morning on an earnings call.

Additionally, the company lost its chief financial officer, as Gautam Ranji has resigned, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Ranji’s exit was “not a result of any disagreement with the company’s independent auditors or any member of management on any matter of accounting principles or practices, financial statement disclosure or internal controls,” the company said in the filing.

The New York Post reported Tuesday that Ranji suddenly quit after a bout of yelling and screaming from CEO James Dolan.

Ranji, who had been on the job for 11 months, will be replaced on an interim basis by Greg Brunner, the company’s senior vice president, according to the filing.

…Next week, there will be a multiday takeover of the Sphere for the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix, Sphere officials said.

Revenue for the quarter included $4.1m in event revenue — those two sold out U2 shows — and $2.6m from suite licensing and advertising on the Sphere exosphere.

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Sounds like Ranji’s exit was over a disagreement about what to do, not how they account for it. Even so, it’s an amazing object.
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Apple’s AI-powered Siri assistant could land as soon as WWDC 2024 • TechRadar

Mark Wilson:

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The iPhone 16’s biggest new feature could be on-device AI, according to fresh rumors claiming that Apple could announce a next-gen Siri assistant at WWDC 2024.

The speculation comes from the well-known leaker Revegnus on X (formerly Twitter), who claims that “Apple is currently using LLM [large language model] to completely revamp Siri into the ultimate virtual assistant” and that “the first product is expected to be unveiled at WWDC 2024”.

According to the leaks, Apple is preparing to develop Siri “into Apple’s most powerful killer AI app” and plans “for it to be standard on the iPhone 16 models and onwards”. This suggests that a next-gen Siri may need new dedicated hardware, which could leave older iPhones unable to access its most powerful features.

Current iPhones like the iPhone 15 Pro already have powerful chips like the A17 Pro, which are capable of powering some AI-powered tasks. The forthcoming Journal app, for example, is coming to iOS 17 soon and “uses on-device machine learning to create personalized suggestions to inspire a user’s journal entry”, according to Apple.

But the suggestion from these new rumors is that Apple is planning to give Siri a much bigger overhaul with more far-reaching powers. And this is backed up by Samsung’s recent musings about Galaxy AI, which suggest that on-device AI will be the next big smartphone battleground in 2024.

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Would be amazing if Apple weren’t doing this, really, but it’s always the timescale that one wonders about. Having been first with Siri, back in 2011, Apple hasn’t really been first on anything to do with AI.
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Lost in space: astronaut’s toolbag orbits Earth after escaping during spacewalk • The Guardian

Diana Ramirez-Simon:

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Nasa astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara were conducting a rare all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) on 1 November when their toolbag gave them the slip, according to Nasa.

The astronauts, both on their first spacewalk, were making repairs on assemblies that allow the ISS solar arrays to track the sun continuously, reported SciTechDaily, which was documenting the spacewalk.

“During the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost. Flight controllers spotted the tool bag using external station cameras. The tools were not needed for the remainder of the spacewalk. Mission Control analyzed the bag’s trajectory and determined that risk of recontacting the station is low and that the onboard crew and space station are safe with no action required,” said Nasa on its blog.

The white, satchel-like bag is surprisingly bright, shining just below the limit of visibility to the naked eye, which means observers would be able to spot it using binoculars, according to EarthSky. Its visual magnitude is around a 6, making it slightly less bright than the ice giant Uranus.

To track the bag, observers need only to find the ISS, which is the third-brightest object in the night sky, according to Nasa, and can be located using the agency’s Spot the Station tool. The bag will be orbiting Earth two to four minutes ahead of the ISS.

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But will burn up on reentry in a few months. Strange they don’t have a leash.
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If you’ve ever heard a voice that wasn’t there, this could be why • The New York Times

Veronique Greenwood:

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Some years ago, scientists in Switzerland found a way to make people hallucinate. They didn’t use LSD or sensory deprivation chambers. Instead, they sat people in a chair and asked them to push a button that, a fraction of a second later, caused a rod to gently press their back. After a few rounds, the volunteers got the creeping sense of someone behind them. Faced with a disconnect between their actions and their sensations, their minds conjured another explanation: a separate presence in the room.

In a new study published in the journal Psychological Medicine, researchers from the same lab used the ghostly finger setup to probe another kind of hallucination: hearing voices. They found that volunteers were more likely to report hearing a voice when there was a lag between the push of the button and the rod’s touch than when there was no delay.

The findings suggest that the neurological roots of hallucinations lie in how the brain processes contradictory signals from the environment, the researchers said.

Hearing voices is more common than you might think, said Pavo Orepic, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva and an author of the new paper. In surveys, scientists have discovered that many people without a psychiatric diagnosis — perhaps 5 to 10% of the general population — report having heard a disembodied voice at some point in their lives. “There is actually a continuum of these experiences,” Dr. Orepic said. “So all of us hallucinate — at certain times, like if you’re tired, you’ll hallucinate more, for instance — and some people are more prone to do so.”

In the new study, as in earlier work, Dr. Orepic and his collaborators had volunteers sit in a chair and push the button that caused the rod to touch their backs. During some sessions, there was no delay between the push and the touch, while others had a half-second delay — enough time to give volunteers that feeling that someone was nearby.

During all trials, the volunteers listened to recordings of pink noise, a softer version of white noise. Some recordings contained recorded bits of their own voice, while others had fragments of someone else’s voice or no voice at all. In each trial, the volunteers were asked if they had heard anyone speaking.

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The impact of fake reviews on demand and welfare • National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Akesson et al:

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Although fake online customer reviews have become prevalent on platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, little is known about how these reviews influence consumer behavior. This paper provides the first experimental estimates of the effects of fake reviews on individual demand and welfare.

We conduct an incentive-compatible online experiment with a nationally representative sample of respondents from the United Kingdom (n = 10,000). Consumers are asked to choose a product category, browse a platform resembling Amazon, and select one of five equally priced products. One of the products is of inferior quality, one is of superior quality, and three are of average quality. We randomly allocate participants to variants of the platform: five treatment groups see positive fake reviews for an inferior product, and the control group does not see fake reviews.

Moreover, some participants are randomly selected to receive an educational intervention that aims to mitigate the potential effects of fake reviews.

Our analysis of the experimental data yields four findings. First, fake reviews make consumers more likely to choose lower-quality products. Second, we estimate that welfare losses from such reviews may be important—on the order of $.12 for each dollar spent in the setting we study. hird, we find that fake reviews have heterogeneous effects. For example, the effect of fake reviews is smaller for those who do not trust customer reviews.

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I’m not totally surprised by the third finding, but the cost – borne by users – of fake reviews really is substantial. Of course, there’s no incentive for the platforms to get rid of them. People buy things anyway.
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Vision Pro, spatial video, and panoramic photos • Daring Fireball

John Gruber got some time with the Vision Pro to find out what it’s like with “spatial video” (which is sort-of 3D) that you shoot yourself on an iPhone 15 Pro:

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Vision Pro is capable of presenting video that looks utterly real — because that’s exactly how pass-through video works and feels. Recorded spatial videos are different. For one thing, reality is not 30 fps, nor is it only 1080p. This makes spatial videos not look low-resolution or crude, per se, but rather more like movies. The upscaled 1080p imagery comes across as film-like grain, and the obviously-lower-than-reality frame rate conveys a movie-like feel as well. Higher resolution would look better, sure, but I’m not sure a higher frame rate would. Part of the magic of movies and TV is that 24 and 30 fps footage has a dream-like aspect to it.

Nothing you’ve ever viewed on a screen, however, can prepare you for the experience of watching these spatial videos, especially the ones you will have shot yourself, of your own family and friends. They truly are more like memories than videos. The spatial videos I experienced yesterday that were shot by Apple looked better — framed by professional photographers, and featuring professional actors. But the ones I shot myself were more compelling, and took my breath away. There’s my friend, Joanna [Stern], right in front of me — like I could reach out and touch her — but that was 30 minutes ago, in a different room.

Prepare to be moved, emotionally, when you experience this.

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I think this, more than the Humane AI pin, is going to be what shifts our view of what’s possible with technology. This creates a human connection: think of how many futuristic films show the protagonist viewing immersive video of past events (particularly, Minority Report).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified