An audio deepfake of Sir Keir Starmer circulating at the weekend suggests that the general election in 2024 may be fraught. CC-licensed photo by Steve Bowbrick 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.

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

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

‘This is a false advertisement’: X ads are being challenged by reader context • WSJ

Patrick Coffee and Megan Graham:

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Elon Musk, who acquired the company last year, has praised Community Notes as key to making X a more reliable source of information, but told CNBC in May that X had lost $40m in revenue after two unnamed advertisers had notes added to their posts.

Ads for brands from Apple to Uber have in recent months been called out for making allegedly false or misleading claims. Results vary. Uber deleted an ad with a critical Community Note, while Apple’s Community Note later disappeared when other members of the notes community weighed in against it.  

One note accused an ad for videogame company Evony of showing action that is different from what takes place in the game, telling X users, “This is a false advertisement.” Evony couldn’t be reached for comment. 

Political ads will likely face even greater scrutiny as the 2024 election cycle heats up, according to experts. 

X has published more than 21,200 Community Notes below posts and ads on its platform since the feature’s debut, though most proposed notes never become public, said Alex Mahadevan, director of digital media literacy organization MediaWise, citing data provided publicly by X.

Notes are proposed and must be approved by a group of volunteers for the project, which is open to users who provide a verified phone number, joined the platform more than six months ago and have not recently violated its rules. 

X requires that each suggested note be rated as helpful by a certain number of users with different points of view before it is approved, said Mahadevan. 

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I love Community Notes (which of course predate Musk): they’re an excellent antidote to idiots. The likely upshot of this point though is that Musk will change the system so Notes can’t be put on an ad.
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UK opposition leader targeted by AI-generated fake audio smear • The Record

Alexander Martin:

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An audio clip posted to social media on Sunday, purporting to show Britain’s opposition leader Keir Starmer verbally abusing his staff, has been debunked as being AI-generated by private-sector and British government analysis.

The audio of Keir Starmer was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a pseudonymous account on Sunday morning, the opening day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. The account asserted that the clip, which has now been viewed more than 1.4 million times, was genuine, and that its authenticity had been corroborated by a sound engineer.

Ben Colman, the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender — a deepfake detection business — disputed this assessment when contacted by Recorded Future News: “We found the audio to be 75% likely manipulated based on a copy of a copy that’s been going around (a transcoding).

“As we don’t have the ground truth, we give a probability score (in this case 75%) and never a definitive score (‘this is fake’ or ‘this is real’), leaning much more towards ‘this is likely manipulated’ than not,” said Colman.

“It is also our opinion that the creator of this file added background noise to attempt evasion of detection, but our system accounts for this as well,” he said.

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Be interested to see whether the account that posted it gets sued. It is defamation, and the disinclination to check or remove it must make it worse. Not very promising for the coming election, though.
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Google changed ad auctions, raising prices 15%, [government] witness says • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Leah Nylen:

»

Michael Whinston, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Friday that Google modified the way it sold text ads via “Project Momiji” – named for the wooden Japanese dolls that have a hidden space for friends to exchange secret messages. The shift sought “to raise the prices against the highest bidder,” Whinston told Judge Amit Mehta in federal court in Washington.

Google’s advertising auctions require the winner to pay only a penny more than the runner-up. In 2016, the company discovered that the runner-up had often bid only 80% of the winner’s offer. To help eliminate that 20% between the runner-up and what the winner was willing to pay, Google gave the second-place bidder a built-in handicap to make their offer more competitive, Whinston said, citing internal emails and sealed testimony by Google finance executive Jerry Dischler earlier in the case.

“It’s really easy to slip into the thought that it’s an auction and an auction is competition,” Whinston said, explaining how Google’s ability to tweak the rules demonstrates its monopoly over online advertising. But “it’s the advertisers who are running in this race. It’s Google setting the rules.”

The Justice Department alleges that Google has illegally maintained a monopoly over online search by paying billions of dollars to web browsers and smartphone manufacturers to ensure it’s the preselected option for users accessing the web.

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It would be good to have a little more clarity on what Whinston believes he unearthed: how did the “built-in handicap” work? The auction system was, initially, Google’s moat against rivals: you can’t undercut an auction, because in theory it finds the exact price the market is willing to pay – no more, no less. But if Google did put its finger on the scales once it was big enough, that distorts the market.
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Innovative Health Monitoring acquires assets of Miku, maker of baby monitors • Miku Care

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Notice To Customers: Notice of Miku Inc. Acquisition by Innovative Health Monitoring, LLC and Implementation of Subscription Services

To our valued customers:

We at Innovative Health Monitoring (IHM) are very excited to share that we have purchased the assets and operations of Miku Inc. as of September 15, 2023. The core technology of the Miku touchless monitoring system and in-app features are unmatched, and we are thrilled to continue to offer our customers all of the features of the Miku product.

Our purchase of the assets of Miku and the resulting rebranding and redirection of the company under consolidated new ownership represents the culmination of a financial restructuring of the company which was necessary in order for Miku’s business to continue. As a necessary part of this ongoing process, on October 1, 2023 we will be introducing a subscription service that will allow current customers to continue to use their monitors and the Miku app to access all the features we love about this product.

…For those that do not wish to sign up for the subscription service, you will continue to receive Live HD video and audio streaming locally, as long as both the monitor and your device are operating on the same local Wi-Fi network.

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Subscription (at $9.99 monthly) also gives you Live HD video and audio (remote access), two-way talk, “live breathing waveform”, sleep and health analytics, “environmental analytics”, “various notifications and alerts”, “sounds and lullabies”, three days of video storage, “Care+ access”, “wellness trends”, tips from medical and sleep experts, and wellness tracking tools (height, weight, feeding, body temp, diaper changes).

I think those used to be free. Then Miku, maker of smart baby monitors, realised it hadn’t been so smart with its finances.
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Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd shares how AI will ‘supercharge’ love with digital matchmakers • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Though much of the industry is focused on novel uses of AI — like Meta’s introduction of AI chatbots and generative AI features at its event yesterday — Wolfe Herd pointed out that AI technology has actually been a big piece of Bumble’s business for years.

“I think this is something that is lost on the general public, maybe,” she said. “Because our matching algorithms are AI-driven. This is machine learning. This is how we understand relevance and compatibility,” she said.

She added that various safety measures the app uses are also powered by AI and machine learning and these areas will improve along with AI advances.

But [matchmaking app Bumble CEO] Wolfe Herd believes that AI technology will also help to make online dating even better in the future.

“I would really think about AI as a supercharger to love and relationships,” she explained. “I want to be very clear, we are not intending on replacing humans with bots. We are not intending for people to fall in love in the sci-fi version of a digital boyfriend, girlfriend, [or] partner. What we will do, however, is we will really lead with the customers’ pain points and reducing friction, reducing things that stress a customer out,” Wolfe Herd said.

For example, she wants to leverage AI technology to help people find more compatible matches. In addition, she imagines a future where Bumble could leverage AI to train people to interact in a way that makes them feel more positive.

…One example of something she’s been thinking about is building a personal matchmaker or dating coach for Bumble users that leverages AI technology. Users would tell the bot everything they wanted it to know about what’s important to them in a relationship — like their non-negotiables and values that must exist in a partner, as well as the things they like to do, how they want to spend their summer, what a typical Sunday morning looks like and so on.

This AI matchmaker could then talk to other digital matchmakers to determine two users’ compatibility.

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What. What the whatting what. That is just bonkers, and not in a good way.

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‘A new form of warfare’: how Ukraine reclaimed the Black Sea from Russian forces • The Guardian

Luke Harding:

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Speaking this week, James Heappey, the UK armed forces minister, said Russia’s Black Sea fleet had suffered a “functional defeat”. “It has been forced to disperse to ports from which it cannot have an effect on Ukraine,” he told the Warsaw security forum. The liberation of Ukraine’s waters was “every bit as important” as the counteroffensive last year in Kharkiv oblast, during which Kyiv regained territory, Heappey added.

According to Ukraine’s former defence minister Oleksii Reznikov, drones have been vital to winning back the Black Sea. Reznikov likened the boom in indigenous drone production to the early days of Silicon Valley, when Steve Jobs built the first Apple computers in his garage. He said: “This war is the last conventional land one. The wars of the future will be hi-tech. The Black Sea is like a polygon. We’re seeing serious combat testing.”

Reznikov said Ukraine was making an array of uncrewed aerial vehicles, as well as drones that travelled on sea and underwater. There was “competition” between rival outfits – Ukraine’s navy, special forces, GUR and SBU intelligence agencies – as to who made the best drone. “We have no serious fleet or naval capability. But we can hit them with drones,” he said.

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Reznikov’s predecessor as defence minister, said Kyiv had pioneered “a new form of warfare”. It cost $10,000-$100,000 (£8,260-£82,600) to build a sea drone filled with explosives. Released in “swarms”, they targeted Russian ships costing hundreds of millions of dollars. “It’s an extremely asymmetric way of fighting enemy boats. This is true of cost and time. You can’t build a new ship quickly. They are huge platforms,” he said.

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We’re seeing more of that asymmetry elsewhere: Hamas’s attack on Israel’s border wall was enhanced by dropping munitions into the top of Israeli watchtowers from drones. Any hope this will make war more precise are also dashed by the example of what followed.
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Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing in Latin America worked • Rest of World

Daniela Dib and Andrew Deck:

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Despite the initial outcry, Netflix’s new pricing scheme appears to be working. The company has reported that subscribers are once again signing up across Latin America. New data from piracy intelligence firm EtherCity, shared with Rest of World, also shows that restricting password sharing seems to have stifled account resales. The practice, in which account access is sold online at a reduced price, is a popular way of pirating Netflix in Latin America.

Netflix reported 1.2 million additional subscriptions in Latin America during the second quarter of this year, reversing the loss in the previous quarter and marking its best second quarter in the region since 2020. The service is forecast to gain another 930,000 Latin American subscribers in the third quarter, according to data shared by industry research firm Ampere Analysis.

The crackdown also correlates with a marked decline in black market sales of Netflix accounts, which either belong to the seller or are created using stolen credit cards. 

“In the Argentine case, anyone looking to acquire passwords for Netflix or other streaming platforms through Facebook Marketplace or MercadoLibre can find a large number of options,” Ezequiel Rivero, professor at the University of Business and Social Sciences in Buenos Aires, told Rest of World. Login credentials to these accounts often cost half the price of a Netflix subscription.

According to EtherCity’s data, the volume of these credentials — sold across Latin America on marketplaces like MercadoLibre, Facebook Marketplace, and AliExpress — has decreased by 51% since October 2022, after the new password-sharing charges were initially trialed.

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I’m a little puzzled – and the story doesn’t quite explain – how the password crackdown would reduce black market sales of Netflix accounts created with stolen credit cards. Hacked ones, OK, you’d spot the novel IP address, but tying a credit card to an IP address seems more sophisticated altogether.
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The bots have come for podcasts • Semafor

Max Tani:

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Earlier this year, PJ Vogt received a strange proposition: If he paid a few dollars to a small self-described media buying company, his new podcast, Search Engine, would be boosted to the top of the podcast charts.

An online audience company called iBoostReach — which works largely with a series of fitness and personal finance influencers, but has also claimed to work with Warner Music Group — was offering thousands of downloads, and a representative for iBoostReach offered to prove its effectiveness by boosting the downloads on Search Engine’s trailer episode.

The proposition immediately raised red flags for Vogt, the former co-host of Reply All, and his team, he told Semafor. They had contracts with advertisers and agreements to reach certain download targets organically. While iBoostReach did not specify how it would immediately deliver thousands of downloads to the show, Vogt said he was concerned that an arrangement like that would mislead advertisers.

“It’s a tough industry right now. People will do things out of fear they wouldn’t have done out of greed,” Vogt said. “I hope everyone ignores these people and that they go away.”

…A podcast executive familiar with the practice told Semafor that iHeartMedia has often examined downloads to see if a large number were coming through the web browser Mozilla Firefox. The audio company believed that disproportionate traffic from this source as a sign that a host or show may be deliberately attempting to juice downloads in order to get an order for another season or a better deal.

But even some major publishers have bought downloads from shady places in recent years. In 2022, Bloomberg reported that the New York Post and iHeartMedia had both purchased ads that played episodes of podcasts during some online video games, boosting the number of podcast downloads — even if they were playing to gamers who were not particularly interested in those podcasts.

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The podcast advertising business has cratered this year, both for dynamically inserted ads and “sponsor reads”, where the host reads out a message. From four DIA/sponsor reads to zero, in quite a few cases that I listen to.
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Dropshipping: the hustlers making millions from goods they never handle • BBC News

Osman Iqbal:

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Gabriel Beltran moved from Uruguay to Miami with the dream of making it big as a drummer.

Five years ago, he was struggling to pay his rent and living on his girlfriend’s student loan. Then he made over $20m (£15m) through a little-known online retail technique: dropshipping. 

And in bedrooms around the world other savvy individuals are getting rich the same way. 

The sellers never see their products. They typically remain completely anonymous. And their marketing reaches hundreds of millions of people.

The process is simple: the dropshipper goes to an online Chinese marketplace and identifies a cheap product. The seller sets up a flashy website, suggesting the product is made in the US or Europe, and adds a huge markup.

The dropshipper uses social media for promotion, often paying influencers to add legitimacy. When an order is received, the seller collects the customer’s money, and only then do they buy the product. Finally, the product is shipped directly to the customer from China.

In practice, the vendors act as virtual middlemen or women.

All this is legal and often done well. But the anonymity it confers means there is also abuse. The sale of counterfeit products is commonplace, and customers often don’t receive their orders. Gabriel started off selling fake NFL products and made $50,000 in just one month. He says he hasn’t sold knock-off products since.

“Stores come and go, and they literally steal money from people,” he told the BBC. “Those stores make millions of dollars within a month and then disappear and don’t even ship a product.”

Sometimes the goods aren’t actual counterfeits, but may still infringe the intellectual property rights of the tech firms whose designs have, in effect, been cloned, even though the product is sold under a different brand and uses its own packaging.

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The most common Community Note I see on Twitter is “this product comes from a dropshipping company..” attached to an advert.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is Tesla’s Autopilot making the car “drive itself” or just “a fancy cruise control”? The car company has described it both ways – the latter in court. CC-licensed photo by pedrikpedrik 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Not for use in airplanes. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Inside the final seconds of a deadly Tesla Autopilot crash • Washington Post

Trisha Thadani, Rachel Lerman, Imogen Piper, Faiz Siddiqui and Irfan Uraizee:

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[Jeremy] Banner researched Tesla for years before buying a Model 3 in 2018, his wife, Kim, told federal investigators. Around the time of his purchase, Tesla’s website featured a video showing a Tesla navigating the curvy roads and intersections of California while a driver sits in the front seat, hands hovering beneath the wheel.

The video, recorded in 2016, is still on the site today.

“The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons,” the video says. “He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”

In a different case involving another fatal Autopilot crash, a Tesla engineer testified that a team specifically mapped the route the car would take in the video. At one point during testing for the video, a test car crashed into a fence, according to Reuters. The engineer said in a deposition that the video was meant to show what the technology could eventually be capable of — not what cars on the road could do at the time.

While the video concerned Full Self-Driving, which operates on surface streets, the plaintiffs in the Banner case argue Tesla’s “marketing does not always distinguish between these systems.”

Not only is the marketing misleading, plaintiffs in several cases argue, the company gives drivers a long leash when deciding when and how to use the technology. Though Autopilot is supposed to be enabled in limited situations, it sometimes works on roads it’s not designed for. It also allows drivers to go short periods without touching the wheel and to set cruising speeds well above posted speed limits.

For example, Autopilot was not designed to operate on roads with cross-traffic, Tesla lawyers say in court documents for the Banner case. The system struggles to identify obstacles in its path, especially at high speeds. The stretch of US 441 where Banner crashed was “clearly outside” the environment Autopilot was designed for, the NTSB said in its report. Still, Banner was able to activate it.

Identifying semi-trucks is a particular deficiency that engineers have struggled to solve since Banner’s death, according to a former Autopilot employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

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Banner died in 2019 when his Tesla, on autopilot (over the prevailing speed limit) drove under an articulated truck. Braking 1.6 seconds before impact could have avoided the collision.
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We finally have proof that the internet is worse • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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This week, Wired published a story by the former FTC attorney Megan Gray that illustrates the dynamic in a nutshell. The op-ed argued that Google alters user searches to include more lucrative keywords. For example, Google is said to surreptitiously replace a query for “children’s clothing” with “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear” on the back end in order to direct users to lucrative shopping links on the results page.

It’s an alarming allegation, and Ned Adriance, a spokesperson for Google, told me that it’s “flat-out false.” Gray, who is also a former vice president of the Google Search competitor DuckDuckGo, had seemingly misinterpreted a chart that was briefly presented during the company’s ongoing U.S. et al v. Google trial, in which the company is defending itself against charges that it violated federal antitrust law. (That chart, according to Adriance, represents a “phrase match” feature that the company uses for its ads product; “Google does not delete queries and replace them with ones that monetize better as the opinion piece suggests, and the organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems,” he said.)

Gray told me, “I stand by my larger point—the Google Search team and Google ad team worked together to secretly boost commercial queries, which triggered more ads and thus revenue. Google isn’t contesting this, as far as I know.” In a statement, Chelsea Russo, another Google spokesperson, reiterated that the company’s products do not work this way and cited testimony from Google VP Jerry Dischler that “the organic team does not take data from the ads team in order to affect its ranking and affect its result.” Wired did not respond to a request for comment. Last night, the publication removed the story from its website, noting that it does not meet Wired’s editorial standards.

It’s hard to know what to make of these competing statements.

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As Warzel points out, Gray seems wrong on the facts (Google is very vocal on that point; I’ve removed that link from the site archive, and would ask readers to ignore the claims previously made by Gray) but the broad concern is that monetisation now beats utility. And ditto for Amazon.
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23andMe user data stolen in targeted attack on Ashkenazi Jews • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

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The genetic testing company 23andMe confirmed on Friday that data from a subset of its users has been compromised. The company said its systems were not breached and that attackers gathered the data by guessing the login credentials of a group of users and then scraping more people’s information from a feature known as DNA Relatives. Users opt into sharing their information through DNA Relatives for others to see. 

Hackers posted an initial data sample on the platform BreachForums earlier this week, claiming that it contained 1 million data points exclusively about Ashkenazi Jews. There also seem to be hundreds of thousands of users of Chinese descent impacted by the leak. On Wednesday, the actor began selling what it claims are 23andMe profiles for between $1 and $10 per account, depending on the scale of the purchase. The data includes things like a display name, sex, birth year, and some details about genetic ancestry results, like that someone is, say, of “broadly European” or “broadly Arabian” descent. It may also include some more specific geographic ancestry information. The information does not appear to include actual, raw genetic data.

The company emphasized in a statement that it does not see evidence that its systems have been breached. It also encouraged users to use strong, unique passwords and enable two-factor authentication to keep attackers from compromising their individual accounts using login credentials exposed in other data breaches.

…the [23andme] spokesperson said that verifying the data is pending and that the company cannot currently confirm whether the leaked information is real.

This point is significant both for everyone whose information may have been compromised and because the data posted by the actor claims to include “celebrities.” Entries for technologists Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin are all visible in the sample data, including “Profile ID,” “Account ID,” name, sex, birth year, current location, and fields known as “ydna” and “ndna.” It is unclear if the data for these entries is legitimate or was inserted. For example, Musk and Brin appear to have the same profile and account IDs in the leak.

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You could imagine a blackmail or similar plot if someone’s DNA had warning signals, such as a liability to degenerative illness.
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Misinformation about Israel and Hamas is spreading on social media • NBC News

Elizabeth Chuck, Ben Goggin and Anna Schecter:

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As one of the largest invasions in 50 years unfolded on the streets, sea and skies over Israel, misinformation about the assault proliferated on social media.

In one instance, a widely circulated video of an Israeli airstrike was said to show a retaliation to Saturday’s surprise attack by Palestinian group Hamas, which has left hundreds dead.

“BREAKING: Israeli Air Force is striking terror targets in Gaza,” read the caption of the video, which was shared on Facebook and social media platform X. But the video was from airstrikes that happened in May, Reuters reported.

In another, numerous users on X and TikTok shared a video that showed two jets being towed by ground. Some users claimed it showed Israeli Defense forces evacuating air bases near Gaza. One user said it showed Hamas forces towing Israeli jets.

That video, however, was published last month, appearing on YouTube on Sept. 19, according to Reuters. The reposted version of the video had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times by Saturday afternoon.

Many of the misleadingly labeled videos were shared by verified users on X, who are eligible for monetization of their content.

Meanwhile, both fighting parties turned to social media and tech platforms to engage in information warfare.

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Did we ever expect TikTok to be better than Twitter? I’m not sure I did, so haven’t been disappointed. Twitter, though, at least didn’t previously operate like this.
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The tyranny of the marginal user • Nothing Human

Ivan Vendrov:

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Nearly all popular consumer software has been trending towards minimal user agency, infinitely scrolling feeds, and garbage content. Even that crown jewel of the Internet, Google Search itself, has decayed to the point of being unusable for complicated queries. Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time. Like old Victorian mansions in San Francisco they stand, shielded by a quirk of fate from the winds of capital, reminders of a more humane age.

How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here?

In my six years at Google, I got to observe this force up close, relentlessly killing features users loved and eroding the last vestiges of creativity and agency from our products. I know this force well, and I hate it, but I do not yet know how to fight it. I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User.

Simply put, companies building apps have strong incentives to gain more users, even users that derive very little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize low value users by selling them ads. Often, it’s because your business relies on network effects and even low value users can help you build a moat. So the north star metric for designers and engineers is typically something like Daily Active Users, or DAUs for short: the number of users who log into your app in a 24 hour period.

What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user – the billion-plus-first user – and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app.

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“X” axed headlines. That sucks for accessibility • Mother Jones

Julia Métraux:

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Yet again, X, the social media firm formerly known as Twitter, has gone through an abrupt design change. As of Wednesday, users can no longer see headlines to links shared on the platform. While it’s a blow to news sites, the change also hampers the site’s accessibility to screen readers, software that people who are blind or have low vision use to read text and other features of web pages.

Alexa Heinrich, creator of resource and education hub Accessible Social, says Musk’s latest update “further proves that the platform does not prioritize accessibility anymore.”

Now, when a screen-reader user encounters a link, “all their device says…is ‘link, image,’” Heinrich explains. That lack of descriptive information, she says, is “horrible for accessibility and user experience in general.”

The oversight is perhaps not that surprising: Musk did lay off the site’s accessibility team last fall. As Kate Knibbs wrote for Wired at the time, “there may be no one left to ensure the site complies with laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act.” Since then, the platform has made a series of drastic changes that slashed accessibility. The decision to charge a lot of money to operate Twitter-based apps meant the end of multiple services that helped disabled people use the platform, such as bots that created alt-text descriptions or captioned videos. 

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A classic mistake, as the next conversation (by the same writer) explains.
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“Elon is learning the hard way”: Taylor Lorenz on Twitter’s collapse • Mother Jones

Julia Métraux interviewed Lorenz:

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Métraux: You trace the rise and fall of social media platforms such as Vine. What has Elon Musk missed about the rise of Twitter that’s led to whatever its current state is?

Lorenz: Elon Musk makes the classic mistake pervasive among Silicon Valley executives, which is a deep disrespect for their users. This is how Clubhouse died. It’s how Vine died. This is how app after app is killed by Silicon Valley hubris: “I don’t care how users want to use this product. I’m going to tell them how to use it, and I’m going to decide who’s popular on this app.”

Of course, social media apps will boost people that they think might be interesting to users, but you can’t force-feed users content that you want them to see. Overall, that’s not going to be a compelling app to the majority of users, and so it is going to fail. Elon is learning that lesson the hard way. He’s alienated all the big content creators. Twitter’s an ideological project for him. It’s not about building a sustainable business.

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Good thing, because as you’ll see, he certainly doesn’t have a sustainable business. (Extra points for still calling it Twitter, MoJo.)
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US ad revenue at Musk’s X declined each month since takeover, data says • Reuters

Sheila Dang:

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Monthly US ad revenue at social media platform X has declined at least 55% year-over-year each month since billionaire Elon Musk bought the company formerly known as Twitter in October 2022, according to third-party data provided to Reuters.

The company has struggled to retain some advertisers since the takeover, as brands have been wary of rapid changes under Musk’s ownership. X’s chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, is expected to meet on Thursday with bank lenders who helped finance Musk’s acquisition to outline the company’s business plans, according to a person familiar with the plans.

US ad revenue dropped by 78% in December 2022 compared with the same month the previous year, the steepest monthly decline since the acquisition, according to ad analytics firm Guideline, which tracks advertising spending data from major ad agencies.

Ad revenue in August, the latest data available from Guideline, declined 60% year-over-year. X declined to comment on the data.

Musk has previously acknowledged that the platform has taken a hit on revenue and has blamed activists for pressuring advertisers. Last month, he accused the Anti-Defamation League of being the primary cause behind a 60% decline in US ad revenue, though he did not provide a time frame.

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Incredible to think it’s been a whole year since he took over. The decline has been much more rapid in the past couple of months, and most noticeable with the current Israel conflict: the lack of verifiable sources, replaced with people trying to make money by amplifying outrage, has made it useless for actually finding news.

Although there is a claim floating around that Visa has only spent $10 on advertising there. I’m inclined not to believe it without direct confirmation from Visa.
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Rishi Sunak’s misguided attempt to woo irritated British drivers • The Economist

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Driving in Britain is often annoying, and at times miserable. There are 33m cars registered in the country; outside the capital, poor public transport means many depend on their cars for every journey. In 2022 drivers in Britain’s ten most congested cities spent 80 hours stuck in traffic, double the amount in Germany. Even with the upgrades, the jams are set to worsen. Traffic could increase by as much as 54% by 2060 because of population growth and cheaper-to-run electric vehicles, according to the Department for Transport.

Yet Mr Sunak’s claim of a “war on motorists” is hogwash. Few groups have been more coddled over the decades than drivers. To take one obvious example, fuel duty has been frozen for 13 years, at a cost to the Treasury of around £80bn ($98bn), almost as much as the price of a high-speed train line. Meanwhile, fares for trains and buses have risen much faster than the cost of driving. The result is what economists call “induced demand”: more people drive because it is easier to do so.

What’s more, Mr Sunak’s ire is directed at policies that aim to curb the worst impacts of cars. London’s ULEZ [Ultra-Low Emissions Zone] is crudely designed but will save lives by making the city’s air less toxic. Cutting speeds in built-up areas is supposed to prevent crashes, which have killed more than 2,000 pedestrians in Britain in the past five years. And because traffic flows more smoothly, studies show that 20mph schemes tend to increase average journeys by less than a minute. Mr Sunak chides the Welsh government for making 20mph the default in built-up areas. But the same policy has been introduced in Edinburgh, much of London and in other areas across England without causing an uprising.

Drivers can feel unfairly targeted when alternative modes of transport are unrealistic: when buses are slow, trains are unreliable and cycling is unsafe. But that is an argument for improving public transport.

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When The Economist, famously right-wing libertarian, is against you, you’re in trouble.
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The poverty of anti-smoking laws • The Critic Magazine

Christopher Snowdon:

»

British governments have understood the economics of smoking for decades. In 1971, the Department for Health and Social Security modelled what would happen if smoking rates fell by 20% in one scenario and by 40% in another scenario. In both cases, it found that there would be a small reduction in healthcare costs in the short term but that these savings would soon be greatly outweighed by increases in welfare payments — mostly pensions — as the would-be smokers got older. Economic calculations of this sort were amusingly satirised in an episode of Yes, Prime Minister, but there is many a true word spoken in jest and there is masses of evidence to support it.

There are plenty of open questions in economics, but there are some things that economists have firmly established which the general public gets completely wrong. This is one of them. As the Oxford Handbook of Health Economics notes: 

Although it is frequently argued (though not by economists) that prevention will save expenditure on future treatment, the current body of evidence demonstrates that it is more likely to generate additional health care costs.

This is true of preventive health measures in general but is particularly true of anti-smoking measures because the government rakes in a lot of money from smokers. If the sale of tobacco were prohibited tomorrow, the government would lose the £12bn a year it currently gets in tobacco duty and would have to spend more on health and welfare, in addition to dealing with a rampant black market. The upshot is that nonsmokers would have to be taxed more.

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Rishi Sunak has proposed – out of thin air – to make it illegal for anyone born after 2008 to smoke; details tbc. Snowdon is a Tufton St regular: head of lifestyle economics at the (very right wing) Institute of Economic Affairs. But I agree: it’s so arbitrary to deny it to someone who’s 19 but not 20. Just raise tobacco taxes if you want to stop people smoking.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Dog people have certain personality characteristics – as do dog breeds. CC-licensed photo by Jean Ogden Just Chaos Photography on Flickr.

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

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

Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era • The New York Times

Cory Doctorow:

»

Having first subsidized end-users and then offered favorable terms to business customers, Amazon was able to exploit its digital flexibility to lock both in and raid them for an ever-increasing share of the value they created. This program of redistribution from platform users to shareholders continued until Amazon became a vestigial place, a retail colossus barely hindered by either competition or regulation, where prices go up as quality goes down and the undifferentiated slurry of products from obscure brands is wreathed in inauthentic reviews.

It’s hard to remember that the internet was originally supposed to connect producers and shoppers, artists and audiences, and members of communities with one another without permission or control by third parties. In its early years, Amazon was good to its users. It sold products affordably and shipped them swiftly and reliably. It attended closely to the authenticity of the reviews that appeared on its site and operated an “honest search” that populated results pages with the best matches for each query.

Then Amazon started locking everyone in. Through Prime, it presold customers a year’s worth of shipping. With its digital publishing ventures, it nudged customers toward subscriptions, building a captive base of readers and deploying technology and expansive readings of obscure copyright laws to stop them from moving their books to other platforms. It opened Prime shipping at a low rate to its suppliers, relieving businesses of messy fulfillment logistics.

Meanwhile, its heavy subsidies, made possible by its investors’ appetite for backing an incipient monopoly, made it increasingly difficult for rival retail sites to gain traction, because Amazon’s seemingly bottomless coffers meant that it could sell goods below cost and extinguish any upstart that dared to compete with it.

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Cory has a hell of a way with words. This does slightly avoid the fact that Amazon went through a long, very rocky period during the dot-com bust when it wasn’t clear that it would survive. Prime was indeed clever, but not a slam dunk: pricing it right was not exactly a given. We now see it as a behemoth, but for some time it was more like a moth.
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Some major brands are giving up on Threads as engagement craters • KTLA via Yahoo News

Marc Sternfield:

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Hello, hello. Is there anybody in there?

While Pink Floyd could not have envisioned the internet, let alone social media, when they released Comfortably Numb in 1979, the lyrics might as well apply to Meta’s wannabe “Twitter Killer,” Threads.

After quickly amassing over 100 million users during its initial launch in early July, engagement has bottomed out. Very little has been reported on this topic lately, but the most recent data from Sensor Tower showed an 82% drop in Threads’ active daily users with only eight million accessing the app at the end of July.

This is not to say many major brands and celebrities aren’t still sharing content on Threads. You don’t want to fall behind if or when Meta finally gets it right. Today, however, is painfully clear that posting to Threads is more of an exercise in hope than a realistic expectation of engagement.

For example, the Los Angeles Dodgers have 2.5 million followers on X, formerly Twitter, and 269K on Threads. This amusing tweet showing the team in costumes reached 553,000 users with 6,000 likes and 183 comments. The same post on Threads only received a few dozen likes and seven “replies.”

The playoff-bound Dodgers are fairly active on Threads. The same cannot be said for all major sports teams or even entire leagues, some of which have given up.

As of Monday, the Los Angeles Rams hadn’t posted to Threads in three weeks. The National Football League hasn’t posted anything in six weeks, before the start of the regular season. This is the nation’s most popular sports league, and it has completely abandoned Meta’s new platform. Even with its 1.9 million followers.

Among news publishers, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) stopped posting to Threads 11 weeks ago, not long after the launch. CBS News hasn’t posted in five weeks.

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That.. sounds bad?
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Zelle fraud: I got scammed out of $31,000 and my bank didn’t care • Business Insider

Devin Friedman:

»

Gary — I changed his name so I could be as honest about him and his nipples as possible — spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate. A man trapped in the amber of another era, the type of guy who answers his phone yellllow and says bye now when he hangs up. But at this moment, Gary was not answering his phone at all. And I was desperate to reach him, because my wife and I had paid him a deposit of $31,500 to build us a pool, and he had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth.

“I’m sorry, Gary is not available right now,” said Cheryl when I phoned that morning.

As best I could tell, there were three women who worked at Royal Palace Pools. Cheryl, Cheryl, and Sheryl. (Could be wrong on that.) The Cheryls didn’t have offices. They stood point at the front of the store, behind the glass cases where the chlorine tablets and pool thermometers are displayed. There was a rumor that one of the Cheryls — Sheryl — was Gary’s wife, but I couldn’t imagine Gary making love, or having breakfast each morning with someone in his home. I believed the likelier scenario was that each night when the Cheryls went home, Gary climbed into an empty Jacuzzi shell with a bag of Funyuns and a worry-worn pad of invoices that served as his transitional object, pulled the thermal cover over himself, and waited in the dark with his eyes open until he could go back to the office. Regardless, if you wanted to get in touch with him, there was going to be at least one Cheryl between you and Gary.

“Do you know where he is?” I said. “This is urgent.”

“Um. And who is this?” said Cheryl.

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A wonderfully told story of getting horrendously ripped off. This is why Americans need WhatsApp. And the Faster Payments Service.
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March 1997: You can kiss your web browser goodbye • WIRED

Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, writing back in March 1997:

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As everything gets wired, media of all kinds are moving to the decentralized matrix known as the Net. While the traditional forms—broadcast, print—show few signs of vanishing, the Net is being invaded by new media species. The Web is one. Yet with each additional node, each new T1 line, the media the Internet can support become richer, more complex, more nuanced. The Net has begun offering things you simply can’t browse.

Networked communications need interfaces that hop across nodes, exploiting the unique character of distributed connections. Technology that, say, follows you into the next taxi you ride, gently prodding you to visit the local aquarium, all the while keeping you up-to-date on your favorite basketball team’s game in progress. Another device might chime on your wrist, letting you know that the route home is congested with traffic, and flashing the address of a restaurant where you can eat cut-rate sushi while waiting it out. At home on your computer, the same system will run soothing screensavers underneath regular news flashes, all the while keeping track, in one corner, of press releases from companies whose stocks you own. With frequent commercial messages, of course.

Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we? But the center of interactive media—increasingly, the center of gravity of all media—is moving to a post-HTML environment, a world way past a Web dominated by the page, beyond streamed audio and video, and fast into a land of push-pull, active objects, virtual space, and ambient broadcasting. You might not want to believe us, but a place where you can kiss your Web browser goodbye.

«

Included as an example of how fantastically, confidently wrong one can be when in the grip of misplaced futurism. Found via Dave Karpf’s excellent chapter on WIRED’s startup days. 26 years on, browsers are still doing OK.
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The completely unbelievable story of the “deepfake cheer mom” • Gizmodo

Mack DeGeurin:

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When Bucks County, Pennsylvania District Attorney Matthew Weintraub stepped up to a podium on March 15, 2021, he set in motion a chain reaction of events that would capture the attention of millions and manifest a host of festering anxieties about the dangers of deepfake technology.

Police from Bucks had recently arrested 50-year-old Raffaela Spone, whose 17-year-old daughter was part of a highly competitive local cheer squad called the Victory Vipers All-Stars. Weintraub accused Spone of using artificial intelligence to fabricate salacious images and videos of the other teenagers on the cheerleading team, a sinister ploy to harass the girls, ruin their reputations, and get them kicked off the Vipers. Weintraub recounted those shocking allegations to the room and warned of an impending deepfake crisis that would jeopardize the very nature of truth.

“This tech is now available to anyone with a smartphone,” Weintraub said to a crowded room of reporters. “All one needs to do is download an app, and you’re off to the races.”

But evidence shows Weintraub’s deepfake Cassandra was built on a lie.

«

It’s a detailed unravelling of a story that got everyone excited back in 2021. I linked to the story with the comment “Well, I guess it’s really out of the lab now. She doesn’t seem (based on a search) to be any great computer whiz.” Right about the second part, at least.
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The moral case for no longer engaging with Elon Musk’s X • Bloomberg

Dave Lee:

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A man was murdered in my neighbourhood on Monday. Ryan Carson was waiting at a bus stop with his girlfriend just before 4 a.m. when a man stabbed him repeatedly him in the chest. The couple had been at a wedding.

A video of the attack, obtained initially by the New York Post, was soon seized upon by one of X’s newest “stars” — one of those users who has thrived under the new Elon Musk regime at the former Twitter. His feed (which I will not publicise) is a stream of incendiary incidents from around the world, posted several times a day to an audience that is approaching a million followers.

I don’t follow this account, but X’s algorithm makes absolutely sure that I see what it has to say. A senseless murder is apparently a content opportunity not to be missed. The user’s post on Tuesday contained all the ingredients for success: It was timely. It was shocking. It was an innocent 32-year-old man dying on the streets of New York City. It was a chance, duly taken, to write an inflammatory comment on Carson’s work in public policy, as though it had somehow led to this moment, as though he had it coming.

As I rode the subway home to Bedford-Stuyvesant, I watched as the video clocked 1 million views, then 2 million. Up up up. Disgusting replies flooded in by the thousands: That’s what you get for supporting woke policies; should have carried a gun; looks planned. By the time I got home, I had deleted the app from my phone.

I will have to continue to follow X, of course, because it’s part of my job. But it’s time to step back as an engaged user, one who for the past decade has posted several times a day and scrolled countless times more. My eyeballs are no longer for sale to Musk and whatever grotesque content he wants to serve up in front of them.

…One thing the prior Twitter management didn’t do is actively make things worse. When Musk introduced creator payments in July, he splashed rocket fuel over the darkest elements of the platform. These kinds of posts always existed, in no small number, but are now the despicable main event. There’s money to be made. X’s new incentive structure has turned the site into a hive of so-called engagement farming — posts designed with the sole intent to elicit literally any kind of response: laughter, sadness, fear. Or the best one: hate. Hate is what truly juices the numbers.

«

Certainly some people have completely abandoned Twitter/X on this basis. Lee and so many journalists simply can’t. Maybe an adblocker for the website. I could offer a phrase for what Musk is doing, of course.
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Elon Musk removes news headlines from displaying on X, formerly Twitter • The Washington Post

Leo Sands:

»

X, the site formerly known as Twitter, has removed automatically generated headlines from links to external websites, including news articles, the latest change introduced by owner Elon Musk as he seeks to remold the social media company and reduce traffic to other sites.

Under the new format, posts linking to third-party news stories or websites automatically load those articles’ lead images in preview tiles along with their web domains — but with no headlines, depriving readers of key context from the publishers about their articles, according to a review by The Washington Post on Thursday. The change also appeared to affect shared links to non-news websites, although it did not affect paid advertisements, which still loaded with headlines, The Post’s review found.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.

The change comes amid a wider push by X to discourage users from clicking on external links, including links leading to news sites. “Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” Musk said in a tweet Tuesday.

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The idea of Twitter (latterly X) as a nexus for the world’s news is ebbing away so fast that it’s gobsmacking. Remember, it’s less than a year since Musk took control. In that time, he’s destroyed much of the goodwill (literally and figuratively) and utility that the site used to have.

And if links on the platform don’t drive traffic, sites will focus on posting links on platforms that do drive traffic. The echo chamber will narrow and tighten.
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Clickworkers in Brazil are turning on each other – Rest of World

Laís Martins and Gabriel Daros:

»

“We don’t give support to beginners,” is the first automated message one receives on joining a popular Telegram group for microworkers in Brazil. Microwork is a form of gig work consisting of simple tasks that can be completed online in a short time. Available on platforms like Appen, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and UHRS, the tasks range from typing out an entire spreadsheet to reviewing social media content moderation decisions. More recently, a popular microwork gig involves tagging objects in images to train artificial intelligence.  

The hours may be long but pay is adequate, Sônia Coêlho, a Brazilian microworker, told Rest of World, so long as novice “turkers” — as microworkers are informally known — are kept at bay. Turkers like Coêlho blame newcomers for triggering a drop in rates paid by microwork platforms. The community is bracing for a flood of new jobs that they believe are inevitable given the rise of AI, and experienced turkers have been trying to keep those future opportunities to themselves.

Microworkers are spread across the world (Coêlho is from the remote city of Foz do Iguaçu, on the triple border dividing Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay), so they typically communicate, gossip, and share tips and grievances in online spaces. On social media platforms like Facebook, there are dozens of public groups for Brazilian turkers. On Telegram and WhatsApp, microworkers constantly create new private groups based on geographical location, microwork platform, or type of project.

Over time, the camaraderie across these forums has given way to competition and hostility.

«

Inevitable, really: there’s only a limited space for this, and more people joining inevitably will drive the price down.
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Competitive, warm and conservative: what exactly makes someone a dog person? • The Guardian

Zoe Williams:

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Trait studies are typically divided into the “Ocean” big five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. But Coren, instead, used the interpersonal circumplex model , devised by his colleague Jerry Wiggins: extroversion, dominance, trust and warmth. It made sense practically; the Ocean evaluation is 48 questions minimum, whereas Coren wanted to get people while they were at dog shows or out walking, and the circumplex profile can be established in eight.

Coren expected dog people to be more extroverted, friendly and affiliative: “Dog people, they walk into the house, the first thing they do is say ‘where are you, Lassie? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.’ Cat people, they walk in, if they happen to trip over the cat, they said ‘hello’ to the cat. So those results I expected.” But he didn’t necessarily expect there to be a difference in terms of warmth: “Once a person’s sitting there with a cat on their lap, I thought that was adequate affection: but dog people seem to have a much stronger bond overall.”

This bond is rather unflinchingly measured in the amount people would be prepared to spend to save their dog’s life, and Dr Deven Carlson, an associate professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma established the statistical value of a dog at $10,000 (approx £8,000) – what people would be prepared to pay for a hypothetical vaccine in the event of an epidemic. “The interesting thing,” Coren says, “is the people who have both dogs and cats act more like dog lovers. In a mixed household, their response, their protectiveness, for their dogs and their cats are pretty much the same. They’re willing to spend a hell of a lot more on saving the cat than in a cat-only household.”

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Escape from the rabbit hole: the conspiracy theorist who abandoned his dangerous beliefs • The Guardian

Amelia Gentleman:

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In 2003, [Brent] Lee was 24, a musician working behind the till in a garage in Peterborough, when he downloaded a series of videos from the internet that offered alternative perspectives on 9/11 and suggested the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 was self-inflicted by the US government, as a way of justifying military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. His starting point was a strong anti-war stance and a healthy scepticism about politicians’ motivations, but from there he came to believe that a network of secret societies and cults was running the world.

It is hard to summarise precisely why he made that step – and harder still to fathom his later preoccupation with paedophiles and ritual murders. He attempts to explain when we meet on a weekday afternoon in an empty Bristol wine bar (idle waiters keep glancing over, startled by fragments of conversations about satanic lizards), but I have to email him a few days later to ask him to try to explain again.

His answer remains confusing, but begins with George W Bush and Democrat John Kerry’s membership, when at Yale University, of the Skull and Bones club, a secretive student society that conducts bizarrely morbid rituals. This led him to believe that there were evil politicians interested in satanic rituals. “Once you’ve been swayed by these arguments, it’s easy to just keep going down the rabbit hole, finding more dots to connect,” he says. “Once you have such a skewed view of the world, you can be convinced of other stuff.”

The tone of his podcast is disconcertingly upbeat, chatty and jokey with other ex-truthers who join as guests. “If I’m laughing at conspiracy theorists, it’s because I’m laughing at myself,” he says. “It is funny – that you’re adults who believe in Santa Claus or something equally ridiculous.”

«

The difficulty in the modern world is that we’re asked to believe lots of things we can’t verify (matter is made up of teeny-tiny things, vaccines rely on the use of microscopic body structures) and for some people, why not make the unbelievable things just a bit bigger? Fascinating look at how you get sucked in.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Do you think you could draw a really accurate circle with your trackpad or finger? Now’s your chance to try. CC-licensed photo by Travis Wise 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.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. And we’re back again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI beats human sleuth at finding problematic images in research papers • Nature

Anil Oza:

»

Scientific-image sleuth Sholto David blogs about image manipulation in research papers, a pastime that has exposed him to many accounts of scientific fraud. But other scientists “are still a little bit in the dark about the extent of the problem”, David says. He decided he needed some data.

The independent biologist in Pontypridd, UK, spent the best part of several months poring over hundreds of papers in one journal, looking for any with duplicated images. Then he ran the same papers through an artificial-intelligence (AI) tool. Working at two to three times David’s speed, the software found almost all of the 63 suspect papers that he had identified — and 41 that he’d missed. David described the exercise last month in a preprint, one of the first published comparison of human versus machine for finding doctored images.

The findings come as academic publishers reckon with the problem of image manipulation in scientific papers. In a 2016 study, renowned image-forensics specialist Elisabeth Bik, based in San Francisco, California, and her colleagues reported that almost 4% of papers she had visually scanned in 40 biomedical-science journals contained inappropriately duplicated images.

Not all image manipulation is done with nefarious intent. Authors might tinker with images by accident, for aesthetic reasons or to make a figure more understandable. But journals and others would like to catch images with alterations that cross the line, whatever the authors’ motivation. And now they are turning to AI for help.

Some 200 universities, publishers and scientific societies already rely on Imagetwin, the tool that David used for his study. The software compares images in a paper with more than 25 million images from other publications — the largest such database in the image-integrity world, according to Imagetwin‘s developers.

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OK, so AI is helpful now? It’s hard to keep up.
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Apple addresses iPhone 15 overheating with a new iOS 17 update • The Verge

Richard Lawler:

»

Over the weekend, Apple blamed several factors for reports of iPhone 15s running hot, pointing to problems with specific apps like Instagram and Uber, post-transfer background processing, and unspecified bugs in iOS 17. Today, the company released a new software update with patch notes saying that iOS 17.0.3 “addresses an issue that may cause iPhone to run warmer than expected.”

In an update detailing the security fixes for this patch, Apple listed two fixes addressed on both iOS and iPadOS (via 9to5Mac). One is a kernel exploit for an attacker with local access to the device that Apple said “may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS before iOS 16.6,” as well as a fix for a libvpx bug — which CISA issued a warning about — that could allow someone to take over a device remotely, that has also been patched recently in apps like Chrome and Firefox.

Checking for the newest update from your device should snag the update, which is shown as a 423.2MB download from Apple.

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Should only be a couple of days before we’re hearing from some quarters that no, their phone still gets hot.
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September broke the global heat record by a ‘gobsmackingly bananas’ margin • BNN Bloomberg

Eric Roston:

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The global average temperature for September broke records by such an absurd margin that climate experts are struggling to describe the phenomenon.

“This month was — in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” Zeke Hausfather, a researcher with Berkeley Earth, said on the social media platforms Bluesky and X. 

The numbers are stark. September 2023 beat the previous record for the month, set in 2020, by 0.5C (0.9F), according to data sets maintained by the Japan Meteorological Agency and the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The temperature anomaly for the month was roughly 1.7C above pre-industrial levels, which is above the symbolic 1.5C mark set as the stretch goal in the Paris Agreement.

“We’ve never really seen a jump anything quite of this magnitude,” Hausfather said. “Half a degree C is analogous to slightly less than half of all the warming we’ve seen from pre-industrial [temperatures].”
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main driver of rising temperatures. The global average temperature this year has also seen a boost from El Niño, a natural climate shift in the Pacific. Other factors may also be pushing temperatures up incrementally, such as a decline in cooling aerosol pollution from ships.

Hausfather said next September may be unlikely to have all the same compounding factors, and consequently may be not as extreme. But either way, he described September 2023 as a “sneak peek” of what the back-to-school month may feel like in a decade as climate change pushes temperatures higher.

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I won my three-year AI progress bet in three months • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander:

»

DALL-E2 is bad at “compositionality”, ie combining different pieces accurately. For example, here’s its response to “a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table”.

Most of the elements – cubes, spheres, redness, yellowness, etc – are there. It even does better than chance at getting the sphere on top of the cube. But it’s not able to track how all of the words relate to each other and where everything should be.

I ran into this problem in my stained glass window post. When I asked it for a stained glass window of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth, it gave me everything from “a library with a stained glass window in it” to “a half-human, half-raven abomination”.

At the time, I wrote:

»

I’m not going to make the mistake of saying these problems are inherent to AI art. My guess is a slightly better language model would solve most of them…for all I know, some of the larger image models have already fixed these issues. These are the sorts of problems I expect to go away with a few months of future research.

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This proved controversial.

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He then shows how quickly the parsing ability of LLMs is improving. It’s quite something.
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Bing is generating images of SpongeBob piloting a plane in the 9/11 attack • 404 Media

Samantha Cole:

»

Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator, produced by one of the most brand-conscious companies in the world, is heavily filtered: images of real humans aren’t allowed, along with a long list of scenarios and themes like violence, terrorism, and hate speech. It launched in March, and since then, users have been putting it through its paces.

That people have found a way to easily produce images of Kirby, Mickey Mouse or Spongebob Squarepants doing 9/11 with Microsoft’s heavily restricted tools shows that even the most well-resourced companies in the world are still struggling to navigate issues of moderation and copyrighted material around generative AI.

I came across @tolstoybb’s Bing creation of Eva pilots from Neon Genesis Evangelion in the cockpit of a plane giving a thumbs-up and headed for the twin towers, and found more people in the replies doing the same with LEGO minifigs, pirate ships, and soviet naval hero Stanislav Petrov. And it got me thinking: who else could Bing put in the pilot’s seat on that day?

«

Turns out that the prompt phrase “flying towards two tall skyscrapers” will get your character of choice to reënact the WTC attack, no matter what Bing’s proscriptions are. No doubt this is going to get tuned; and then we’ll move on to the next scenario described in words, and the next… Related: Facebook Messenger does the same sort of thing with AI-generated stickers.
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India’s gender gap is a problem for the country’s tech future • Rest of World

Barkha Dutt:

»

In September, the Indian government passed a landmark law, under which a third of the seats in the lower house and state assemblies would be reserved for women. Amid the euphoria of celebrating this development, a somewhat cynical question I’ve been thinking about is: why do only 31% of women own a mobile phone in India compared to over 60% of men? This in a country that is poised to have 1 billion smartphone users by 2026.

…Mobile phones have either been denied to women and girls to police their personal choices, or they have been weaponized against them. Across classes, communities, and cities, it is not uncommon for intimate and sexually explicit images to be leaked, either among a group of male friends or on pornographic sites. In 2004, the first known “MMS video” leaked from a high school and ended up on an online auction site. In 2022, a major university erupted in protest after videos of female students bathing were filmed on a smartphone and leaked.

Between violative sexualization and puritanical moral policing, the smartphone has become a battlefield for gender wars. In several village panchayats, local community decrees specifically forbid phone access for unmarried young women. 

Ironically, two years after the pandemic, as the state of Rajasthan heads into elections, a key poll promise of the incumbent government is to distribute free phones to women. In 2023, phones have become what bicycles once were for the aspirations of school-going girls in rural India. 

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Draw a Perfect Circle ⭕️💯 • Neal.fun

Simple enough challenge: draw a circle using your trackpad, mouse or finger. It’s quite forgiving of circularity, but being accurate is surprisingly hard. I managed 90% with a trackpad, 95% with a finger, but you’d be generous in calling them “circles”.

However you might spend longer on this page than any other today..
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Slovakia’s election deepfakes show AI is a danger to democracy • WIRED

Morgan Meaker:

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Just two days before Slovakia’s elections, an audio recording was posted to Facebook. On it were two voices: allegedly, Michal Šimečka, who leads the liberal Progressive Slovakia party, and Monika Tódová from the daily newspaper Denník N. They appeared to be discussing how to rig the election, partly by buying votes from the country’s marginalized Roma minority.

Šimečka and Denník N immediately denounced the audio as fake. The fact-checking department of news agency AFP said the audio showed signs of being manipulated using AI. But the recording was posted during a 48-hour moratorium ahead of the polls opening, during which media outlets and politicians are supposed to stay silent. That meant, under Slovakia’s election rules, the post was difficult to widely debunk. And, because the post was audio, it exploited a loophole in Meta’s manipulated-media policy, which dictates only faked videos—where a person has been edited to say words they never said—go against its rules.

The election was a tight race between two frontrunners with opposing visions for Slovakia. On Sunday it was announced that the pro-NATO party, Progressive Slovakia, had lost to SMER, which campaigned to withdraw military support for its neighbor, Ukraine.

Before the vote, the EU’s digital chief, Věra Jourová, said Slovakia’s election would be a test case of how vulnerable European elections are to the “multimillion-euro weapon of mass manipulation” used by Moscow to meddle in elections. Now, in its aftermath, countries around the world will be poring over what happened in Slovakia for clues about the challenges they too could face. Nearby Poland, which a recent EU study suggested was particularly at risk of being targeted by disinformation, goes to the polls in two weeks’ time. Next year, the UK, India, the EU, and the US are set to hold elections. The fact-checkers trying to hold the line against disinformation on social media in Slovakia say their experience shows AI is already advanced enoug

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Two things: a 48-hour moratorium is obviously outdated; and Meta needs to update its policy. Yet amid all this, the principal problem (as we’re seeing in the UK) isn’t AI, it’s actual humans telling ridiculous lies about what their opponents plan to do on media outlets.
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Amazon used secret ‘Project Nessie’ algorithm to raise prices • WSJ

Dana Mattioli:

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Amazon.com used an algorithm code-named “Project Nessie” to test how much it could raise prices in a way that competitors would follow, according to redacted portions of the Federal Trade Commission’s monopoly lawsuit against the company.

The algorithm helped Amazon improve its profit on items across shopping categories, and because of the power the company has in e-commerce, led competitors to raise their prices and charge customers more, according to people familiar with the allegations in the complaint. In instances where competitors didn’t raise their prices to Amazon’s level, the algorithm—which is no longer in use—automatically returned the item to its normal price point.

The company also used Nessie on what employees saw as a promotional spiral, where Amazon would match a discounted price from a competitor, such as Target.com, and other competitors would follow, lowering their prices. When Target ended its sale, Amazon and the other competitors would remain locked at the low price because they were still matching each other, according to former employees who worked on the algorithm and pricing team. 

The algorithm helped Amazon recoup money and improve margins. The FTC’s lawsuit redacted an estimate of how much it alleges the practice “extracted from American households,” and it also says it helped the company generate a redacted amount of “excess profit.” Amazon made more than $1bn in revenue through use of the algorithm, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

“The FTC’s allegations grossly mischaracterize this tool,” an Amazon spokesman said. “Project Nessie was a project with a simple purpose—to try to stop our price matching from resulting in unusual outcomes where prices became so low that they were unsustainable. The project ran for a few years on a subset of products, but didn’t work as intended, so we scrapped it several years ago.”

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It seems that Amazon is the one that has redacted this part of the FTC’s complaint, so the FTC is saying that if there’s nothing to hide, just unredact it. Which Amazon isn’t doing so far. “We tried to make sure our prices didn’t stay too low” isn’t the greatest argument. (Link should be free to read.)
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TikTok confirms small test of an ad-free subscription tier outside the US • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

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code within the TikTok app indicates that TikTok might begin to test an ad-free subscription tier for users. The site reported that for $4.99, subscribers could get an ad-free experience on TikTok — no other major strings attached, from the looks of it.

TikTok confirmed to TechCrunch it’s testing this product but only in a single, English-speaking market outside the US. It disputed the Android Authority report that said it was coming to the U.S. as small-scale tests don’t indicate a product launch is inevitable.

Based on the blog’s findings, however, the subscription appears to only cover ads served by TikTok — not influencer marketing one-offs or campaigns. So it won’t do much to combat the raft of TikTok users failing to disclose their brand sponsorships, which include big-name influencers like Charli D’Amelio.

TikTok makes most of its money from ads, and so far, it’s proven resilient to the broader slowdown in online ad spending.

A recent report from market research firm Cowen found a TikTok embrace even amid more cautious ad buyers, with 60% naming TikTok as their preferred short-form video venue. Standard Media Index reported that, as of November, TikTok parent startup ByteDance’s share of big agency spending on social media reached to 11%, with companies including Pepsi, DoorDash, Amazon and Apple among the top spenders.

The question is whether an ad-free tier can meaningfully replace any of that revenue.

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A “single, English-speaking market outside the US”? I wonder where that could be. Interesting how these companies are looking at substituting ads, and the pricing. The $5/month compares with Meta’s very aggressive prices – one assumes in the expectation that essentially nobody will go for them, so it can Carry On Tracking. I’m not sure the EU will accept that approach.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Claiming to be carbon-neutral is easy – but proving it is a lot harder, as a new report challenges Apple to do. CC-licensed photo by Mountain/\Ash on Flickr.

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

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

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

How Google alters search queries to get at your wallet [note: subsequently retracted] • WIRED

Megan Gray:

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I was attending the [DOJ-Google antitrust] trial out of long-standing professional interest. I had previously battled Google’s legal team while at the Federal Trade Commission, and I advocated around the world for search engine competition as an executive for DuckDuckGo. I’m all too familiar with Google’s secret games and word play. With the trial practically in my backyard, I couldn’t stay away from the drama.

This onscreen Google slide had to do with a “semantic matching” overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results.

…Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.

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Wired has now taken this article down. Google says the piece has “serious inaccuracies“. Google also shared the slide referred to. It certainly makes the case even stronger for the trial being much, much more open..
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New report casts doubt on Apple’s first ‘carbon neutral’ products • The Verge

Justine Calma:

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Apple needs to disclose more information about its suppliers to back up claims about its first carbon-neutral products, says a new report by an environmental organisation that had previously given the company high marks.

Apple has backtracked when it comes to transparency about its supply chain emissions, the new report says. That makes it difficult to see how Apple is able to market its products as carbon neutral, meaning the company didn’t produce more carbon dioxide emissions than it could capture or offset while making the device.

“We believe there is a need for full disclosure and explanation of how Apple achieves carbon neutrality of its products, given the increase in carbon emissions from some of its suppliers,” the report says. The report was published by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), a nonprofit environmental research organization based in Beijing that was founded by former investigative journalist Ma Jun.

Apple released its latest Apple Watch models last month and said that “select” combinations of cases and bands make them carbon neutral. To reach carbon neutrality, Apple says it cut down emissions from materials, electricity, and transportation — with the help of suppliers who use clean energy. Any remaining pollution was then offset through nature-based projects like restoring forests so that they could capture more CO2.

…Apple stopped requiring that its suppliers publicly disclose data on their greenhouse gas emissions this year, according to the report. And based on data IPE was able to gather in the past, the math isn’t quite adding up…

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Tricky thing, claiming carbon neutrality.
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OVO to offer heat pumps at lower cost than gas boilers • BusinessGreen News

Michael Holder:

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OVO Energy is offering to halve running costs for heat pumps in order to make them cheaper than operating a conventional gas boiler, as fierce competition among energy suppliers to offer consumers more affordable low carbon heating options continues to intensify.

The energy supplier today announced its new Heat Pump Plus, promising to provide the cheapest rate for low carbon heating on the market and making it £500 a year cheaper to heat the average home compared to a gas boiler, while also slashing domestic greenhouse gas emissions.

By offering a separate rate of 15p per kilowatt hour for electricity specifically used to power heat pumps, alongside the standard rate for the rest of a home’s electricity usage, OVO said it hoped the new tariff would encourage more households to swap out their gas boiler for an electric-powered alternative.

Moreover, OVO said it was partnering with installer Heat Geek to deliver heat pump installations at an upfront cost of just £500 for one of the appliances when including the government’s £7,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last month announced the grant available through the Boiler Upgrade Scheme would increase by 50% to £7,500.

…The government has set a goal for 600,000 heat pumps to be installed in the UK each year by 2028, but experts have repeatedly warned that without urgent action, more funding and ambitious policy support, the target is likely to be missed.

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Don’t know how they would know which electricity is used specifically for the heat pumps, unless they run at exactly the same rate all the time so that there’s a base load.
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How Michael Lewis got snowed by Sam Bankman-Fried • Los Angeles Times

Michael Hiltzik is a business columnist at the LA Times:

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Journalism schools will be able to use “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” Michael Lewis’ new book about the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and the fall of its boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, as a textbook on the imperative need to approach a subject with a healthy helping of skepticism.

To make a long story short, in this book Lewis doesn’t exercise any.

The result is what amounts to a defense brief for Bankman-Fried for his fraud trial in New York federal court, which [opened] Tuesday — coinciding, as it happens, with the publication date of Lewis’ book.

Fortunately, readers interested in the story of the cryptocurrency scam and Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall can turn to a much more convincing (and more entertaining) book. That’s “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall,” by Zeke Faux, a financial investigative reporter for Bloomberg.

Faux demonstrates his incisive grasp of the story with the very first words of his prologue: “‘I’m not going to lie,’ Sam Bankman-Fried told me,” he writes. “That was a lie.”

Lewis, by contrast, opens his book with an anecdote about a long hike he took with Bankman-Fried in the hills above Berkeley in which he listened to his subject spin wild yarns about all the money he was making in crypto, “all of which, I should say here, turned out to be true.”

Well, no. Not really.

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It is so interesting how Lewis couldn’t see that crypto was an utter scam. There’s also a fascinating long read in The Guardian, in which Samanth Subramanian takes plenty of time to talk to Lewis, and does challenge him about SBF:

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Lewis’s habit of falling in love with his characters is so ingrained that he really doesn’t judge them. In Going Infinite, that can make him seem credulous – and that’s even before we know if Bankman-Fried has committed any crimes.

Lewis was keen to investigate this response of mine. He thought Bankman-Fried hadn’t lied to him at all – or at least, that he’d only lied by omission, not commission.

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But do read it all.

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Meta plans to charge $14 a month for ad-free Instagram or Facebook • WSJ

Sam Schechner:

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Would people pay nearly $14 a month to use Instagram on their phones without ads? How about nearly $17 a month for Instagram plus Facebook—but on desktop?

That is what Meta Platforms wants to charge Europeans for monthly subscriptions if they don’t agree to let the company use their digital activity to target ads, according to a proposal the social-media giant has made in recent weeks to regulators.

The proposal is a gambit by Meta to navigate European Union rules that threaten to restrict its ability to show users personalized ads without first seeking user consent—jeopardizing its main source of revenue.

Meta officials detailed the plan in meetings in September with its privacy regulators in Ireland and digital-competition regulators in Brussels. The plan has been shared with other EU privacy regulators for their input, too.

Meta has told regulators it hopes to roll out the plan—which it calls SNA, or subscription no ads—in coming months for European users. It would give users the choice between continuing to access Instagram and Facebook free with personalized ads, or paying for versions of the services without any ads, people familiar with the proposal said.

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Hard nope for both proposals from me. I’m pretty confident I don’t consume $14 per month worth of ads on Instagram. But I don’t see that that obligates me to agree to be tracked. Plus, would people find VPNs for a little less and appear to be in the US?
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Social media traffic to top news sites craters • Axios

Sara Fischer:

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Traffic referrals to the top global news sites from Meta’s Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, has collapsed over the past year, according to data from Similarweb.

Website business models that depended on clicks from social media are now broken.

Regulatory pressure and free speech concerns have pushed tech giants to abandon efforts to elevate quality information, leaving the public more susceptible to misinformation ahead of the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, news companies are scrambling to find business solutions while simultaneously fighting to protect their work in the AI era.

While the news industry has known this day would come, many are still unprepared. A slower ad market and less reliable traffic contributed to a record number of media job cuts this year. Efforts to reach voters with trusted information are becoming more difficult as tech platforms lean into viral trends, instead of quality news.

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According to the data, Facebook referrals have fallen from nearly 120m per month in August 2020 to 21.4m in August 2023; for Twitter, from a peak of nearly 80m in January 2021 to 22.6m in August 2023. Collectively, now less than referrals from either back in August 2020. (Of course, that was the midst of an election.)
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How common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children • The Economist

Natasha Loder:

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It was a sunny day in September 2007 when Garrett Pohlman, then seven years old, came home from school. Crying, he warned his mother that radiation was coming out of the house’s electrical sockets. If they went outside, he said, birds would peck them to death. These pronouncements were accompanied by odd facial movements. The boy would stick his tongue out and jerk his arms and legs. The day before, Garrett had been a normal boy. Both the paranoia and the tics had come out of the blue, but they proved to be the start of a horrifying mental decline.

In the end, Garrett was lucky. A hospital scan three months later revealed a bacterial sinus infection. A course of antibiotics cured the infection and brought about a striking improvement in his psychiatric symptoms. Garrett had been suffering from pandas, which stands for Paediatric Autoimmune-Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus.

Many other children are not so fortunate; some have suffered long-term damage. In plain English, Garrett’s unsettling behaviour was the result of an immune system gone haywire following an infection with group A Streptococcus, a common bacterium. (A similar illness, triggered by other infections, goes by the acronym pans, for Paediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome.)

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The role of bacteria and viruses in psychiatric illness is largely unknown, but we’re starting to understand them as having key roles in illnesses that had previously been thought idiopathic. Loder writes about PANDAS at greater length on her Substack.
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Book review: ‘Extremely Online,’ by Taylor Lorenz • The New York Times

Clay Shirky:

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[The six-second video app] Vine’s rapid success and sudden implosion encapsulate most of the book’s themes: the creators who understand a new platform better than its inventors do; the competing interests of talent, agents, advertisers, audience and owners; the particular hostility directed at successful women online. Vine closed in 2017, in part because of poor relations with its star creators; as Lorenz dryly notes, “The company’s only problem was itself.” Vine’s demise fueled rather than dampened the fervor for short-term video and autobiographical content, sending experienced creators to other platforms, especially TikTok.

Lorenz has a beat reporter’s eye for detail, which can occasionally be overwhelming. Explaining the rise of online gossip sites and “Dramageddon,” a falling-out among a friend group of YouTube-famous makeup artists, she introduces six gossip sites and 13 creators in four pages. (To be fair, “Dramageddon” was also exhausting to witness firsthand.)

But “Extremely Online” aims to tell a sociological story, not a psychological one, and in its breadth it demonstrates a new cultural logic emerging out of 21st-century media chaos.

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As much as anything, it’s nice to see Clay Shirky writing again. He used to be one of the most influential voices on the web, about 15 years ago; then got a promotion at NYU and effectively vanished.
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Official stop and search figures published with ‘dodgy’ warning • BBC News

Daniel Wainwright is a data journalist at BBC Verify:

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The Home Office has released one of its most politically sensitive datasets with a note attached describing some of the figures as “dodgy”.

The note, spotted by BBC Verify, was on a Home Office spreadsheet about the number of people arrested after being stopped and searched by police. It said: “Reason for arrest data is dodgy so maybe we shouldn’t publish it.” The note was removed after we contacted the Home Office.

The data was about the number of people stopped and searched in England and Wales under Section 60. This means that police do not need to have reasonable suspicion to carry out a search. The orders give the police powers to stop people within a designated area, such as the Notting Hill Carnival.

The arrests were broken down into those “for offensive weapons” or those “for other reasons”. Attached to the offensive weapons column was the note from an “author” asking whether the figures should be published.

…Dr Simon Harding, director of the National Centre for Gang Research, says different forces have different ways and procedures for recording their data. “There is data coming in from 43 different constabularies and there are varying levels of quality,” he said. “These things ought to be ironed out before they get to the Home Office.”

We showed the note to Habib Kadiri, director of StopWatch, a campaign group which focuses on police stop and search and the “overpolicing of marginalised communities”. He said: “The comment in question is indicative of a long history of questionable recording practices by police forces.”

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Now you start to understand why the government is so keep to publish data as PDFs.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Coal use in Britain peaked in 1956. Since then it’s fallen to a level not seen since 1757. CC-licensed photo by rauter25 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Anil Kapoor wins battle against AI, supports Hollywood strikes • Variety

Naman Ramachandran:

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Top Indian actor Anil Kapoor has won a landmark judgement against artificial intelligence (AI).

The “Slumdog Millionaire” star had filed a suit in the Delhi High Court through his lawyer Ameet Naik for protection of his personality rights including his name, image, likeness, voice and other attributes of his personality against any misuse including on digital media. The suit provided various instances of misuse of his attributes. The court, after a detailed hearing, granted an order on Wednesday acknowledging his personality rights and restraining all offenders from misusing his personality attributes without his permission in any manner.

“I’m very happy with this court order, which has come in my favor, and I think it’s very progressive and great for not only me but for other actors also,” Kapoor told Variety. “Because of the way technology and the AI technology, which is which is evolving every day [and] which can completely take advantage of and be misused commercially, as well as where my image, voice, morphing, GIFs and deep fakes are concerned, I can straight away, if that happens, send a court order and injunction and they have to pull it down.”

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Simples! Well, good luck with that, Mr Kapoor. I’m sure conquering the internet with legal letters will be a pushover now. In fact, Tom Hanks would like a word…
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Tom Hanks warns fans about ‘AI version of me’ promoting dental plan • Variety

Michaela Zee:

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Tom Hanks is not informing fans to get their teeth cleaned.

The Oscar-winning actor shared a computer-generated image of himself on Instagram Saturday, warning his followers about a promotional video for a dental plan circulating online.

“BEWARE!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it,” Hanks wrote over the photo of his AI counterpart.

Hanks has previously discussed the rise of artificial intelligence and deepfake technology in the creative industries, saying on an episode of “The Adam Buxton Podcast” that it’s now possible for him to continue acting after his death.

“Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deep fake technology. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on,” Hanks said. “Outside the understanding of AI and deepfake, there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone. And it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality. That’s certainly an artistic challenge but it’s also a legal one.”

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We imagine that AI is going to bring us a brand new frontier, marvellous new insights, an inspired depth of knowledge. Instead it’s used for hokey porn and to push crypto and dental plans.
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Why Kagi is the best Google alternative I’ve tried yet • The Verge

David Pierce:

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I’ve become a total convert to the Kagi search engine. I wrote a big story about Neeva and search a few months ago, and a bunch of people were like, “Try Kagi! It’s awesome!” It is, in fact, awesome. Here’s what I like about it:

• It’s customisable. Kagi looks a lot like Google and generally feels very similar to use. But unlike Google, Kagi lets you block sites you don’t like and promote sites you do like. You can also create “lenses” to only search certain sites or domains — Kagi has a bunch built in, too, like a “Small Web” lens that favors blogs, forums, and other parts of the web that tend to get blotted out by the giants
• No ads. The catch with Kagi is you have to pay for it. You get a few searches a month for free, but $10 buys you unlimited access. That’s a lot of money for a search engine! But the pages are so much cleaner and less confusing that I was surprised how quickly I paid up
• It’s great for videos and podcasts. Podcast search is, like, impossible. But I’ve had surprisingly good luck Kagi-ing topics I’m interested in and finding related podcast episodes, and the engine does a similarly good job of scouring YouTube for interesting stuff
• Its AI is handy but not in the way. For a lot of queries, Kagi puts a little “Quick Answer” button at the top — click it, and you get a brief AI-generated answer, with cited sources you can click on. That’s exactly the amount of AI I’m looking for in most of my searches
• The mobile browser is great. Kagi’s mobile app is a browser called Orion, and it’s as no-frills a mobile browser as you’ll find. But that’s cool by me! It’s fast and easy to use. You can also supposedly download Kagi as a Safari extension on iOS, but I haven’t managed to make that work. (On Android, you can just switch to Kagi as your default search engine because Android is much better at this.)
• It seems… good? I’ve tried basically all the search engines, and I usually end up back on Google because Google has better results. (Or at least the results I’m expecting and looking for.) With Kagi, I’ve found myself going back to Google less than usual. I don’t know if that’ll hold up forever, but I’m impressed so far.

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I wondered why I hadn’t used Kagi, then came to the bit about needing to pay. Even if you don’t sign up, you can see some example results (here’s “best headphones” (and here’s the comparison for DuckDuckGo).
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Passport database ‘will be used to catch shoplifters and burglars’ • The Times

Matt Dathan:

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Britain’s passport database of 45 million people will be used to help catch shoplifters, burglars, car and bike thieves under plans to tackle crime.

Video of suspected crime from CCTV, doorbell and dashcam technology would be compared against facial images from a range of government databases to find a match under the plans.

The immigration and asylum biometrics system would also be available in order to search for foreign nationals who are not on the passports database.

Chris Philp, the crime and policing minister, said he is planning to integrate data from the police national database (PND), HM Passport Office and other national databases in order to enable police to find a match with the “click of one button”. He said he is aiming to have the amalgamated system up and running within two years and predicted it would be a gamechanger for catching thieves. He also called on members of the public to make citizen’s arrests in supermarkets if they see shoplifters.

Currently, police forces only run facial recognition software through the PND but that only holds information on people who have been arrested.

While they currently have access to the passport database, police forces are not using it to find criminals as it sits on a completely separate IT system.

Philp said in the short term he wants police forces to start running footage of crime scenes through the separate passport system while the new combined database is created.

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Easy to predict that this is going to be challenged in the courts by every NGO imaginable.
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The art of aphantasia: how ‘mind blind’ artists create without being able to visualise • The Conversation

Matthew MacKisack:

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Glen Keane, the Oscar-winning artist behind such Disney classics as The Little Mermaid (1989), was once described by Ed Catmull the former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Studios as “one of the best animators in the history of hand-drawn animation”. But when he sat down to design Ariel, or indeed the beast from Beauty and the Beast (1991), Keane’s mind was a blank. He had no preconception of what he would draw.

This is because he has aphantasia, a recently-identified variation of human experience affecting 2-5% of the population, in which a person is unable to generate mental imagery. Perhaps surprisingly, Keane is not alone in being a visual artist who cannot visualise.

When aphantasia was named and publicised, a number of creative practitioners – artists, designers and architects – contacted the researchers to say that they too had no “mind’s eye”. Intrigued by the seemingly counter-intuitive notion, we gathered a group of these people together and curated an exhibition of their work.

How is it, then, that a person like Keane can draw a picture of Ariel without a mental picture to guide him?

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I wasn’t aware of aphantasia (how wonderful that a Disney illustrator should have it, given that Disney’s first film was called Fantasia), but it is fascinating to consider. One person told me they can’t read fiction because they can’t imagine the voices of the characters; nor can they imagine a conversation they’d have between themselves and someone else. The link to the article about aphantasia really is worth your time.
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June 2021: The mRNA vaccine revolution is just beginning • WIRED UK

Stephen Buranyi in June 2021:

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The scope of mRNA vaccines always went beyond any one disease. Like moving from a vacuum tube to a microchip, the technology promises to perform the same task as traditional vaccines, but exponentially faster, and for a fraction of the cost. “You can have an idea in the morning, and a vaccine prototype by evening. The speed is amazing,” says Daniel Anderson, an mRNA therapy researcher at MIT. Before the pandemic, charities including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) hoped to turn mRNA on deadly diseases that the pharmaceutical industry has largely ignored, such as dengue or Lassa fever, while industry saw a chance to speed up the quest for long-held scientific dreams: an improved flu shot, or the first effective HIV vaccine.

Amesh Adalja, an expert on emerging diseases at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in Maryland, says mRNA could “make all these applications we were hoping for, pushing for, become part of everyday life.”

“When they write the history of vaccines, this will probably be a turning point,” he adds.

While the world remains focused on the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, the race for the next generation of mRNA vaccines – targeted at a variety of other diseases – is already exploding. Moderna and BioNTech each have nine candidates in development or early clinical trials.

There are at least six mRNA vaccines against flu in the pipeline, and a similar number against HIV. Nipah, Zika, herpes, dengue, hepatitis and malaria have all been announced. The field sometimes resembles the early stage of a gold rush, as pharma giants snap up promising researchers for huge contracts – Sanofi recently paid $425m (£307m) to partner with a small American mRNA biotech called Translate Bio, while GSK paid $294m (£212m) to work with Germany’s CureVac.

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On Monday the Nobel for Physiology and Medicine went to the people who figured out how to tweak mRNA to make vaccines. There are now two candidate vaccines for malaria. The speed with which this has gone from theory to practice to product is about 30 years. Still impressive.
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Warning: BMW wireless charging may break iPhone 15’s Apple Pay chip • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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If you have an iPhone 15 and drive a BMW, it might be best to avoid charging the device with the vehicle’s wireless charging pad for now.

Over the past week, some BMW owners have complained that their iPhone 15’s NFC chip no longer works after charging the device with their vehicle’s wireless charging pad, according to comments shared on the MacRumors Forums and X, formerly known as Twitter. Affected customers say the iPhone goes into a data recovery mode with a white screen, and the NFC chip is no longer functional after the device reboots.

In an iPhone, the NFC chip powers features like Apple Pay and digital car keys. Affected users receive a “Could Not Set Up Apple Pay” error message in the Wallet app, and there does not appear to be a way to fix the problem. Some customers say Apple replaced their iPhone after confirming the NFC chip failed, but the replacement iPhone is then vulnerable to the same issue, so there is currently no permanent solution.

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Yikes. And it only seems to be the new iPhones. Which is odd. Side note: I got a new iPhone 15 Pro, and it wouldn’t charge or (I thought) send/receive data via the USB-C port. Took it to the Apple Store, where it did plug in to a laptop and take a firmware update. Voila: port works for charging and data. Not sure what the solution for BMWs is, though.
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Rivian’s quest to build the ultimate electric truck burns through billions • WSJ

Sean McLain:

»

Rivian Automotive set out to build the ultimate electric vehicle for American consumers—a pickup truck with sports-car handling and a dizzying array of features. 

Engineers gave the truck a beefy underlying metal frame for higher crash-test ratings and one of the most complicated suspension systems on the market for a smoother ride on- and off-road. It can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in 3 seconds. Rivian added pop-out flashlights stored away in the doors and a portable Bluetooth speaker.

All that comes at a cost. Rivian vehicles sell for over $80,000 on average. Yet they’re so expensive to build that in the second quarter the company lost $33,000 on every one it sold. That’s roughly the starting price of a base model Ford F-150.

When Rivian launched onto the electric-vehicle scene, industry watchers expected it to beat rivals to market and become the “Tesla of trucks.” Investors piled into its splashy market debut in 2021, when it raised nearly $12 billion in cash and became the U.S.’s largest IPO in years. For a short while, Rivian was worth more than Ford Motor and General Motors.

In two years, Rivian has blown through half of its $18 billion cash pile, in part because it struggled to master the nuts and bolts of manufacturing. While production is now growing and losses have narrowed, Rivian still loses money on its vehicle sales. In an industry known for narrow margins and tough competition, Rivian pays too much for parts and produces too few vehicles to cover its costs. 

«

So you’re suggesting that Tesla’s ability to make a profit is actually impressive? Also, Rivian is aiming to produce about 52,000 vehicles annually. Tesla was doing more than that back in 2016.
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‘Big Short’ author Michael Lewis says Sam Bankman-Fried came to him for advice on ideas — like buying Twitter with Elon Musk • Business Insider via Yahoo News

Kai Xiang Teo:

»

Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of crypto exchange FTX, used “The Big Short” author Michael Lewis  as a sounding board for ideas — including one about acquiring Twitter.

That’s according to Lewis, who was speaking to CBS’ “60 Minutes” about his upcoming book on cryptocurrency exchange cofounder, “Going Infinite.”

Lewis told CBS that Bankman-Fried came to him for advice on a variety of ideas. When asked for details, Lewis said, “For just, like, decisions he was making. Should I join Elon Musk in buying Twitter? You know? Should we do this? Should we do that?”

“Mostly, my answers were no, no, and no. And he would look at me and say, ‘You’re a boring grownup.'” Lewis added.

For context, Bankman-Fried’s interest in acquiring Twitter with Musk appears to have gone past the ideation stage. Text exchanges from March last year revealed that philosopher Will MacAskill — an advisor to Bankman-Fried — relayed his interest to Elon Musk and tried to set up a meeting between the two. The text messages were part of the discovery process in Musk’s court battle with Twitter.

In April last year, Musk’s former partner Grimes texted Musk that Bankman-Fried would be willing to contribute up to $5bn to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

«

Only one of Lewis and SBF is facing jail time, of course. I’m a little puzzled that Lewis, who for decades has looked razor-sharp in spotting the bad guys and scammers, seems to have been taken in by SBF.

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Analysis: UK emissions fall 3.4% in 2022 as coal use drops to lowest level since 1757 • Carbon Brief

Simon Evans:

»

The UK’s coal demand fell by another 15% in 2022 to just 6.2m tonnes. This is the lowest level since 1757, according to Carbon Brief analysis of historical data.

That year in the UK, George II was king, William Cavendish was prime minister and the industrial revolution had not yet begun. A year earlier, Wolgang Amadeus Mozart had been born in Austria.

In the years that followed, UK coal use climbed rapidly as industrialisation took off. Annual demand for the fuel rocketed to 60Mt by 1850 and peaked at 221Mt in 1956.

This is shown in the chart [in the article], which combines data covering 1853 onwards from the UK government with estimates for earlier years published by historian Paul Warde.

(The UK’s historical coal use is the main reason it remains the eighth-largest contributor to current warming. Its contribution is particularly notable given its modest population.)

…Last year, there had been fears of a coal “comeback” or a “return to coal” in the face of the global energy crisis. In the event, use of the fuel to generate electricity fell by 15% in 2022.

Electricity system operator National Grid had paid an estimated £386m to keep old coal plants open and stocked with coal, in case electricity supplies were tight. But the plants never ran.

«

The graph shows use peaking in 1956, at 221m tonnes. Lots of fascinating data in the article.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists have discovered bacteria that will eat plastic – but how will we control them? CC-licensed photo by Ivan Radic on Flickr.

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

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

Did you miss the Social Warming Substack post last Friday? It’s about Twitter v Threads, and how one will catch the other.

Watch Linda Yaccarino’s wild interview at the Code Conference • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

»

On Wednesday evening, X CEO Linda Yaccarino appeared onstage at the Code Conference with frustration and protest. “I think many people in this room were not fully prepared for me to still come out on the stage,” she told interviewer Julia Boorstin, senior media and tech correspondent at CNBC.

Yaccarino sounded rattled. She’d found out earlier in the day that Kara Swisher, a Code Conference co-founder, had booked a surprise guest to appear an hour before her: Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety. He has been an outspoken critic of the direction Elon Musk has taken the site.

In his interview with Swisher, Roth recounted how Musk put him personally in danger. Musk suggested on Twitter that Roth had advocated for sexualizing children — a completely unfounded claim — which led to death threats and his address being posted online. “I had to sell my house. I had to move,” Roth said. He encouraged Yaccarino to think about how Musk could turn on her, too, and said the site was bleeding users and advertisers.

These criticisms are nothing new, but Yaccarino was visibly bothered by having to appear shortly after a well-known critic of her company. “I’d be happy to respond,” Yaccarino said. “I think I’ve been given about 45 minutes [of notice].” The conference’s 300-some-seat ballroom was packed for her appearance; I caught Swisher reclining on a couch in the back before things kicked off, waiting to see the results of her surprise play out.

Throughout the interview, Yaccarino repeated that she’s only been on the job at X for 12 weeks, as if to say there’s only so much she could have done by now. But in that time, she’s managed to do one thing consistently: dismiss concerns about X, whether it’s the platform’s disinvestment in moderation or Musk’s chaotic leadership.

Her dismissive stance was very much on display Wednesday night.

«

And how. I wasn’t impressed by the interviewing (In Britain, we’ve got a different view of what “tough questions” involves, and keeping an interviewee on track), but Yaccarino comes across as befuddled, incoherent, out of touch. She’ll fit in perfectly. Related: How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson, pointing out how credulous Isaacson is.
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The AI fight in Hollywood is probably coming to other industries • Associated Press

Jake Coyle:

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In the coming weeks, WGA [Writers Guild of America, who write screenplays] members will vote on whether to ratify a tentative agreement, which requires studios and production companies to disclose to writers if any material given to them has been generated by AI partially or in full. AI cannot be a credited writer. AI cannot write or rewrite “literary material.” AI-generated writing cannot be source material.

“AI-generated material can’t be used to undermine a writer’s credit or separated rights,” the proposed contract reads.

Many experts see the screenwriters’ deal as a forerunner for labour battles to come. “I hope it will be a model for a lot of other content-creation industries,” said Tom Davenport, a professor of information technology at Babson College and author of “ All-in on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence.” “It pretty much ensures that if you’re going to use AI, it’s going to be humans working alongside AI. That, to me, has always been the best way to use any form of AI.”

The tentative agreement between the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the studios, doesn’t prohibit all uses of artificial intelligence. Both sides have acknowledged it can be a worthwhile tool in many aspects of filmmaking, including script writing.

The deal states that writers can use AI if the company consents. But a company cannot require a writer to use AI software.

Language over AI became a sticking point in the writers’ negotiations, which dragged on in part due to the challenges of bargaining on such a fast-evolving technology.

When the writers strike began May 2, it was just five months after OpenAI released ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that can write essays, have sophisticated conversations and craft stories from a handful of prompts. Studios said it was it too early to tackle AI in these negotiations and preferred to wait until 2026.

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So, contrary to some earlier reports, the WGA hasn’t completely fought off AI; it just won’t have to share a credit with it.
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Thousands of Derby City Council callers struggling to get help from new AI helpers • Derbyshire Live

Nigel Slater:

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Thousands of callers to Derby City Council have been struggling to get the help they need when being dealt with by the council’s new AI (Artificial Intelligence) digital helpers, according to new figures. And a leading councillor has said a “ring back” option to help solve the problem cannot be put on the cards because it would be too expensive for the local authority to pay for.

New figures have been published showing that within a single week – starting from Monday, September 11 – more than 3,700 callers to the council could not get the answer they required by AI assistants Darcie and Ali or had to be transferred to a human for support. More than 1,500 of these calls ended up as abandoned.

The figures come just months after the council implemented new AI-led phone system technology. Since April, visitors to Derby City Council’s website and those who call the council’s main phone line can seek help from AI “helpers”. Darcie helps with council services and Ali is available to help Derby Homes customers/tenants with housing enquiries.

A human being is on standby if the AI helpers cannot assist callers directly. This form of AI was aimed to improve customer services and make them accessible 24/7, while at the same time delivering cash savings for the authority.

…In July, council bosses said its new AI digital assistants Darcie and Ali had been a huge success. A presentation revealed the use of AI technology since April had already met a savings target of £200,000 within the council’s budget plan. At the time the council said the AI helpers answered more than 100,000 questions from the public via its main phone line.

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So maybe not really that much of a saving or improvement? It’s hard to tell.

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The art of Wikiracing • Slate

Stephen Harrison:

»

The final round required navigating from the Wikipedia article on “Stroopwafel” to the page about “Jimmy Wales,” Wikipedia’s co-founder—a tough leap for even the most seasoned Wikiracers. As the challenge appeared on their screens, the contestants leaned into their laptops and tried to quickly strategize their path across the internet encyclopedia. Whoever made it to “Jimmy Wales” from “Stroopwafel” with the fewest clicks would be crowned champion.

Wikiracing has long been viewed as a quirky, low-stakes pastime for friendly nerds—a world away from the high-pressure environment of competitive Scrabble or speedcubing. But while those other “geek sports” have already established their own versions of a Super Bowl, Wikiracing has traditionally remained confined to college dorm rooms and high school computer labs.

Not anymore. Wikiracing was a featured event at this year’s Wikimania, the global conference for dedicated Wikipedia editors, which took place this past August in Singapore. “People took Wikimania 2023’s Wikiracing very seriously, and the level of competition was incredibly high,” said Zack McCune, director of brand at the Wikimedia Foundation. “We had F1 Grand Prix energy in the room.”

«

Take any totally innocent activity such as clicking links: people will find a way to turn it into a competition, ideally for money.
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End of the line for barcodes as new square QR code shapes up in shops • The Sunday Times

Louise Eccles:

»

The barcode is so integral to daily life that it is scanned ten billion times a day, more times than Google’s search engine is used.

But the familiar black lines are likely to be replaced by the QR code at main supermarkets within five years, according to GS1, the not-for-profit regulator behind most of the world’s barcodes.

A dual-purpose QR code is being developed that can be scanned at the checkout, but also by shoppers on their smartphones, if they want to learn more about the ingredients, potential allergens, expiry date, product recalls, and how to recycle it.

Sarah Atkins, membership director at GS1, said: “This is as significant — if not more significant — than when we first introduced the barcode. The potential for the transformation in the way we shop is massive.”

With increasing labelling demands on retailers, such as making clear what allergens a product contains, shoppers now need 20-20 vision to decipher the tiny but crucial writing on the backs of packets.

In the future, shoppers will be able to scan a jar of sauce and be taken to a screen with a series of icons that can tell them detailed information about every ingredient, including the farm the meat is from, nutritional information and the carbon footprint.

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A UPC-A barcode is 12 digits (including a checkdigit), so 100 billion possible values. A QR code can hold 3kb of data: 7,089 numbers or 4,269 alphanumeric characters.

Related: Apple uses microscopic QR codes on its screens to track manufacturing. Also: five common QR code scams.
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Apple says software bug and certain apps causing iPhone overheating • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Apple has identified the causes of an overheating problem with its latest iPhone series, including a software bug and using certain apps.

The tech company said it would issue an update to fix the bug in its iOS 17 software and was working with developers whose apps had overloaded its handsets. Apple took action after users of its iPhone Pro and iPhone Pro Max products had complained that they had become too hot during use, reaching temperatures of more than 43C (110F) in some cases.

“We have identified a few conditions which can cause iPhone to run warmer than expected,” said Apple in a statement.

The company said on Saturday that it was working on an update to the iOS17 system that powers the iPhone 15 lineup to prevent the devices from becoming uncomfortably hot and was working with apps that were running in ways “causing them to overload the system”.

Apple added that there might also be issues during initial use of the phone. “The device may feel warmer during the first few days after setting up or restoring the device because of increased background activity,” the company said.

Instagram, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, modified its app last week to prevent it from heating up the device on the latest iPhone operating system.

«

So this is Heatgate. Apparently with the new phones there’s also Lipgate (a barely discernible height difference between the screen and case) and Casegate (people don’t like the “Fine Woven” synthetic cases). Fairly routine year for iPhone introductions.
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‘We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world • The Guardian

Stephen Buranyi:

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Before the publication of [professor Kohei] Oda’s paper in 2016, no one knew that bacteria capable of digesting plastic existed. Now, we have one solidly documented case. Given that we have discovered only a tiny fraction of microbial life, a far better candidate might be out there. In engineering terms, we may currently be trying to squeeze elite racing performance out of a Toyota Yaris engine, when somewhere, yet to be discovered, there is the bacterial equivalent of a Ferrari. “This is something we constantly struggle with,” says Beckham. “Do we go back to the well to search and see if nature has the solution? Or do we take the small footholds we have to the lab and work on them now?”

This question has led to a boom in what is known as bioprospecting. Like panning for gold in a river, bioprospectors travel the world looking to discover interesting and potentially lucrative microbes. In 2019, a team at Gwangju National University in South Korea took a construction drilling rig to the municipal dump outside town, and drilled 15 metres under the trash trenches to reveal decades-old plastic garbage. In it, Prof Soo-Jin Yeom and her students found a variety of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that appeared to be able to survive using polyethylene bags as food. Yeom’s team is now studying which enzymes the bacterium might be using, and whether it is really able to metabolise the plastic.

In vast mangrove swamps on the coastlines of Vietnam and Thailand, Simon Cragg, a microbiologist from the University of Portsmouth, is hunting for other potential PET-eating microbes. “The plastic-degrading enzymes we’ve already seen are quite similar to natural enzymes that degrade the coatings of plant leaves,” he told me. “Mangroves have a similar waterproof coating in their roots, and the swamps, sadly, also contain a shocking amount of plastic tangled up in them.” His hope is that bacteria capable of degrading the mangrove roots will be able to make the jump to plastic.

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Though our concern is that it’ll go out of control. Tricky balance.
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Disney+ to begin cracking down on password sharing in Canada in November • Mobile Syrup

Bradly Shankar:

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Disney will begin cracking down on password sharing in Canada as of November 1st, 2023.

In an email sent to the service’s Canadian subscribers on Tuesday evening, the company outlined updates to its Subscriber Agreement.

While Disney begins the email by saying new terms have been put forth to coincide with the November 1st launch of its ad-supported membership, it also notes that it is now “implementing restrictions on account sharing.” While Disney’s previous terms also stated that users can’t share their accounts, it never enforced this.

…Interestingly, Disney opens this account sharing section by mentioning “unless otherwise permitted by your Service Tier.” Netflix, the first streamer to crack down on free password sharing, allows those subscribed to its higher tiers to pay an additional $7.99/month to add on ‘Extra Members,’ people outside of their household who can access your account. Therefore, it remains to be seen whether Disney intends to permit those subscribed to certain Disney+ memberships (“Service Tiers”) to do something similar.

It’s worth noting that Disney CEO Bob Iger had confirmed in August that the company would indeed crack down on password sharing, but he indicated this would likely take place next year.

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First they came for the Brazilian Netflix password sharers.. anyway, as before, totally predictable: at the margin, this will increase the number of subscribers. Everything is being tightened up.
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The age of AI is a time for antitrust • Fast Company

Luther Lowe:

»

Allowing Google to hardwire its AI technology into its search engine is also a massive risk to the open web. When you search for a business, learn about a new topic, or shop for a product, Google plans to give you the answer it thinks you want—without clear or conspicuous attribution.

That has enormous implications. By remixing copied answers from various parts of the internet un-cited, Google is killing the original function of its search engine: to refer users to other websites. Anyone who puts their own content on the web should be alarmed by the “plagiarism engine” that Google wants to impose on us. And that’s putting aside the genuine concern that the answers are sometimes objectively wrong.

Publishers face a Hobson’s Choice when it comes to “opting out” of services like Bard: Until recently, in order to remove your data from Bard, you had to entirely remove yourself from the index that powers Google’s search engine. If a website opts out, does its historical data Bard has presumably already trained on get purged? Could opting out of Bard hurt a website’s ranking in Google? Google doesn’t say.

Google’s rollout of Bard is the latest chapter of a well-worn Big Tech playbook. Big companies use their incumbent power to kill competition in developing technologies, thereby depriving consumers of choice and undermining innovation in the economy. But that’s Big Tech’s business model. Amazon has a well-documented track record of selling knock-off versions of its best-selling products—undercutting the small businesses that sell on its platform. And Google has been accused of distorting its search results to favor its own “Shopping” service. The poor track record by the largest players to give themselves preferential treatment as a way to extend their dominance is not good news for AI startups hoping to offer fresh services that make us all less dependent on today’s tech giants.

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Lowe is not a totally impartial observer on this: he was, until Friday, working for Yelp, which has repeatedly accused Google of abusing its search monopoly by grabbing data from Yelp. But, that being said, you still have to find coherent arguments against his.
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The Raspberry Pi 5 is finally here • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Powering the brain of the Raspberry Pi 5 is a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor that runs at 2.4GHz, allowing for two to three times the performance boost when compared to the four-year-old Raspberry Pi 4. The device also comes with an 800MHz VideoCore VII graphics chip that the Raspberry Pi Foundation says offers a “substantial uplift” in graphics performance.

I got to try out the device for myself. While I didn’t have time to do much tinkering with it, I found that it boots up pretty quickly, while also loading webpages fast when compared to my older Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. It does get pretty hot, but luckily, Raspberry Pi sent over an active cooling component that I could mount directly on the board.

Additionally, the Raspberry Pi 5 features a component made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for the first time: the southbridge, also known as a part of the chipset that helps the device communicate with peripherals. With the RP1 southbridge, the Raspberry Pi Foundation says the microcomputer “delivers a step change in peripheral performance and functionality,” enabling faster transfer speeds to external UAS drives and other peripherals.

It also opens up two four-lane 1.5Gbps MIPI transceivers that let you connect up to two cameras or displays. There’s also a new single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface for the first time, offering support for “high-bandwidth peripherals.”

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Up to the fifth generation and I still can’t think of anything I’d want to do with one. Also: “powering the brain of the Raspberry Pi is a 64-bit…”? It’s either powering, or it’s the brain. Oh, and it gets hot, does it? Fancy.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Women runners are setting new records at longer distances, with the marathon the latest to go. What’s behind their newfound success? (It’s not drugs.) CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer on Flickr.

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

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

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

What will replace smartphones? Experts reveal the unsettling reality • Inverse

Marc Saltzman:

»

The near future is even more impressive. Humane’s AI Pin, for example, is a small device you can attach to your shirt or jacket, and it works as a nonphysical smartphone by projecting calls, messages, and info from apps onto a surface (like your hand). As covered by Inverse, this “clothing-based wearable” houses a microphone for hearing your requests, speakers for relaying info (like a smart speaker), and cameras to scan surroundings (in one demo, a chocolate bar is held up to the device and the AI reads its contents and caloric information).

Powered by artificial intelligence, this screenless solution will also have location data and contextual awareness, so you can ask it to tell you the weather or give you directions to walk to the closest Dunkin’ Donuts.

That’s Humane’s grand vision to make everyone more present with reality again, according to the company. “For the human-technology relationship to actually evolve beyond screens, we need something radically different,” said Imran Chaudhri, Humane’s chairman and president, during a TED Talk introducing the “screenless, seamless, sensing” wearable device.

The AI Pin hasn’t launched yet, and nobody outside of the company has used it, so it’s impossible to say whether the wearable is a smartphone replacement or not. It is the most hyped phone alternative, though, simply because Humane’s ranks consist of so many ex-Apple veterans who designed iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and Macs.

Similarly, Alexa-powered glasses called Echo Frames can be activated with its wake word and serve as a personal assistant on the go — but they also require a nearby smartphone to do the heavy lifting, via a Bluetooth connection.

…“I don’t think it’ll be a one-size-fits-all scenario but likely a combination of ambient computing, where things around us and a combination of wearables and other devices around us, with or without screens, as well as putting something on our face,” says [Creative Strategies president, Carolina] Milanesi, with a laugh.

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I don’t think Humane will get any takeup. Ambient computing, sure (already here); smart glasses, surely. When is a different question.
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India’s weather influencers are faster than official channels • Rest of World

Raksha Kumar:

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One reason for the weather influencers’ success is their hyperlocal approach. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) publishes its weather predictions for entire districts, across a radius of hundreds of kilometres, while people are seeking “data that is zoomed in,” Kirthiga Murugesan, a crop-weather modelling enthusiast and a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, told Rest of World.

Umashankar Das is a scientist at the IMD’s branch in the eastern city of Bhubaneswar. He told Rest of World the state does not have the manpower or resources to do the kind of localized work that weather influencers do, contributing to their popularity among the public. “If IMD gives out data that contradicts the predictions of the local weather predictor, they tend to believe the local person,” Das said.

Murugesan is testing a weather model that collects data every four kilometers in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. She shares it with local farmers on a WhatsApp group daily and alerts them to changes in the weather patterns. “If a farmer puts fertilizer in his crop and it rains, it is a waste of his money,” said Murugesan, whose father is a sugarcane and rice farmer in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur district.

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“Weather influencers” (not people who influence the weather, but who other people think are worth listening to) are a thing now.
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Computer science is no longer the safe major • The Atlantic

Kelli María Korducki:

»

computer-science degrees, and certainly not English, have long been sold to college students as among the safest paths toward 21st-century job security. Coding jobs are plentiful across industries, and the pay is good—even after the tech layoffs of the past year. The average starting salary for someone with a computer-science degree is significantly higher than that of a mid-career English graduate, according to the Federal Reserve; at Google, an entry-level software engineer reportedly makes $184,000, and that doesn’t include the free meals, massages, and other perks.

Perhaps nothing has defined higher education over the past two decades more than the rise of computer science and STEM. Since 2016, enrollment in undergraduate computer-science programs has increased nearly 49 percent. Meanwhile, humanities enrollments across the United States have withered at a clip—in some cases, shrinking entire departments to nonexistence.

But that was before the age of generative AI. ChatGPT and other chatbots can do more than compose full essays in an instant; they can also write lines of code in any number of programming languages. You can’t just type make me a video game into ChatGPT and get something that’s playable on the other end, but many programmers have now developed rudimentary smartphone apps coded by AI. In the ultimate irony, software engineers helped create AI, and now they are the American workers who think it will have the biggest impact on their livelihoods, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. So much for learning to code.

ChatGPT cannot yet write a better essay than a human author can, nor can it code better than a garden-variety developer, but something has changed even in the 10 months since its introduction.

«

The question isn’t “will AI take over programming?” (it won’t) but “will average pay rates go down, and if so, how far?”
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Facebook let Indian pressure, and its profits, stop removal of violent content • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn and Gerry Shih:

»

Nearly three years ago, Facebook’s propaganda hunters uncovered a vast social media influence operation that used hundreds of fake accounts to praise the Indian army’s crackdown in the restive border region of Kashmir and accuse Kashmiri journalists of separatism and sedition.

What they found next was explosive: the network was operated by the Indian army’s Chinar Corps, a storied unit garrisoned in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, the heart of Indian Kashmir and one of the most militarized regions in the world.

But when the US-based supervisor of Facebook’s Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) unit told colleagues in India that the unit wanted to delete the network’s pages, executives in the New Delhi office pushed back. They warned against antagonizing the government of a sovereign nation over actions in territory it controls. They said they needed to consult local lawyers. They worried they could be imprisoned for treason.

Those objections staved off action for a full year while the Indian army unit continued to spread disinformation that put Kashmiri journalists in danger. The deadlock was resolved only when top Facebook executives intervened and ordered the fake accounts deleted.

“It was open-and-shut” that the Chinar Corps had violated Facebook’s rules against using fictional personas to surreptitiously promote a narrative, said an employee who worked on the Kashmir project. “That was the moment that almost broke CIB and almost made a bunch of us quit.”

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On the plus side, the execs in the US did the right thing: some years of getting it wrong have finally sunk in. But clearly, people in-country are still scared of ramifications.
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Why Linda Yaccarino took on the wildest job in Silicon Valley • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

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Musk, according to multiple former and current staffers, runs X from his iPhone. To break through, do not send him attachments or documents or spreadsheets. Put everything inside the body of the email. Find a way to make a simple graph fit inside the text box. Take screenshots and embed them. This is what survivors at X have learnt.

For many of the self-selecting group who signed up to the mandatory pledge to adhere to his “hardcore” working culture, going the distance at X has essentially meant adjusting to the working practices of one man. For Yaccarino, the calculation will be a similar one. “The smart thing for her to do is let Elon be Elon and work with it,” says a person with knowledge of their working relationship. “That’s the trade off of getting the CEO role she’s always wanted.”

Early on, Musk brought in a team of executives and staffers from elsewhere in his business empire, including Tesla and The Boring Company, to help steady the ship. Formally, they were dubbed the “transition team”. Informally, they were known as the “goons”, according to ex-staffers. Holdovers found Musk has no tolerance for people who make nonsensical statements in order to sound smart. If you do not know something, admit it, they were told by longtime Musk employees. (Then, tell him you will get back to him on the matter in a reasonable number of hours.) They discovered he cares about working with people who are directly responsible for tasks. (Middle managers were among the first laid off when Musk took the reins.)

Unwavering loyalty is a given. Musk is intensely paranoid about the risk of “saboteurs”, disenchanted employees who might deliberately harm the company. Suril Kantaria, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who headed finance as part of the transition team, reporting directly to Musk, says the billionaire has a “unique ability” to “create extreme urgency” that gets his team focused. “Wartime at any company is hard, but under Elon it’s next-level intense.”

«

It’s a long piece principally about Yaccarino, but with little bits like this. She seems surprised, Murphy says, that anyone would ask about what it’s like to work with Musk. Kinda sorta related: “NFL issues statement in response to placement of its ads on white nationalist Twitter/X pages“.
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X can’t get story straight on election disinformation team • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

It’s only been a day since rumours began swirling that X, formerly Twitter, had disabled features allowing users to report election misinformation, and the confusion hasn’t been cleared up by duelling statements from platform owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino.

Responding to researcher claims that X had eliminated the ability to report posts for election misinformation – or disinformation of any kind, based on this reporter’s look at the current post reporting options on X – Musk said yesterday that he had axed the entire team.

“Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone,” Musk posted on X. His statement goes beyond claims from unnamed Twitter insiders who told The Information that half the election integrity team, including its chief, had been chopped.

X CEO Yaccarino had an entirely different take when speaking at Vox’s Code Conference yesterday. Asked why X had cut the team, Yaccarino said it hadn’t. “It’s an issue we take very seriously,” Yaccarino reportedly said.

“And contrary to the comments that were made, there is a robust and growing team at X that is wrapping their arms around election integrity,” she added. Note that Yaccarino didn’t indicate whether it’s the same team that exists now.

«

It’s just bonkers. I wouldn’t trust Yaccarino to have any idea, though I suspect the final clause is right: the election integrity team has been axed, and the task dumped on someone else’s desk.
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‘When I saw her time, I pinched myself!’ – why women’s running records are being smashed • The Guardian

Kate Carter:

»

Manufacturers have thrown money at their R&D departments to catch up. The latest salvo was fired on Sunday when [Tigist] Assefa set her [women’s marathon world] record while wearing a pair of Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1s, Adidas’s lightest shoe yet, a limited number of which were available through a special draw this week at £400. They last just one marathon.

Environmental implications aside, for the running purist, the existence of supershoes has devalued the pursuit of records. While technology may always advance, they say, such is this step-change that it renders new times entirely meaningless.

But shoes are not the only new tech. There is also wave light technology – small flashing lights placed into the side of athletics tracks that can be set to a specific pace. It means that athletes gunning for a track record know they are on target, lap after grinding lap. Some complain that human pacers are better, others that any pacing at all is “against the spirit of the sport”.

“Technology across so many sports gets better as time passes,” says a former top British marathon runner, Richard Nerurkar. “And that’s what happened in athletics. We just have to accept that, and celebrate the achievements of these athletes, who are now able to run even faster because of technology.”

But to put performances (and times) purely down to shoes is to do athletes a disservice. You can’t just put on these shoes and become a world-beater. Elite runners train hard, month after month, year after year to reach new heights. And in fact, height may be the relevant word when it comes to east African dominance of the sport: most Ethiopians and Kenyans live and train at high altitude, where the lack of oxygen in the air forces the body to increase its red blood cell count. It means that when they return to sea level, they usually find performance is improved for a short period. That’s why elite athletes from around the world go to high-altitude training camps when preparing for big races.

But why are so many women’s records being broken now?

«

The answer seems to be: more participation, especially by younger runners, attracted by the growing prizemoney. But technology is certainly playing a part too.
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Solar and wind farms can easily power the UK by 2050, scientists say • The Times

Adam Vaughan:

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Wind and solar power could comfortably supply all the UK’s energy needs by the middle of the century, according to a University of Oxford team.

The researchers calculated that the two renewable technologies could power the nation even after making a conservative estimate that accounted for the amount of land and sea available, energy storage needs, economics and a high future demand for energy.

The analysis found that the UK has enough wind and solar resources to generate 2,896 terawatt hours a year by 2050, or almost ten times today’s electricity needs.

The vast majority, 73%, would come from offshore wind farms, followed by utility-scale solar in fields at 19%. The Solar Energy Industries Association defines a solar project as utility-scale if it generates greater than 1 megawatt of solar energy.

Onshore wind farms, which the government this month promised to unblock in England by changing planning barriers, would supply about 7%.

Solar on rooftops would provide less than 1%, because it was assumed the technology would be largely confined to the south of Britain and only for south-facing rooftops.

The paper by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment said wind and solar had been underestimated in Great Britain, and “predominant narratives that renewables are too expensive or impractical are wildly out of date”.

«

Speaking of which…

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True cost of Net Zero for every household in Britain revealed amid PM’s green slowdown • The Sun

Ryan Sabey:

»

Households face a net zero bill of £6,070 every year until 2050 despite Rishi Sunak’s green slowdown, it was claimed last night.

A study reveals the price tag could be more than triple official estimates and hit £4.5 trillion — 12 times the cost of Covid.

Report author Ewen Stewart says the public is “left in the dark” over the true cost which could plunge the UK into a financial meltdown.

The economist warned: “The UK’s approach is legally enforcing with little regard to the wider economic and societal impacts.”

The report by the Civitas think tank claims that the independent Climate Change Committee has vastly under- estimated costings.

It says the realistic cost of power generation, which includes doubling electricity output, will be £883bn plus £639bn in financing costs.

«

This is included as an example of how absolute nonsense can get written up. The report’s author made a stunning mistake: he took the cost of installing a single wind turbine (around £1.3m per megawatt) and then three lines later said that was the cost per HOUR of the electricity it generates. Given that a turbine will have a lifespan of about 20 years, and there are 8,760 hours in a year, you can imagine that this overestimates the cost of wind by A LOT.

Yet I can’t find any news articles rebutting the Civitas report. Perhaps nobody thought it worth bothering with. But it got mentions in The Sun (widely read) and The Times (read, arguably, by decision makers). If junk like this poisons the discourse, we have a problem. Even worse: Stewart was warned by Simon Evans, an energy and environment journalist, that he had it wrong before publication. Evans’s Twitter thread on the whole farrago is worth reading. (Available here on a single page without requiring Twitter login.)

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UK go-ahead for North Sea oil and gas field angers environmental groups • The Guardian

Mark Sweney and Matthew Taylor:

»

Simon Francis, the coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said: “Hidden in the small print of the deal is that this project can only go ahead thanks to a massive tax break the government is giving to international oil and gas giant Equinor.

“Households struggling with their energy bills will be shocked that the new energy secretary has chosen to hand a multibillion-pound tax break to this Norwegian firm … Figures show that more North Sea production will only give us an extra year of domestic gas, which will be charged to struggling households at global market prices.”

Claire Coutinho, the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, said the UK needed to “be pragmatic”, with oil and gas forecast to still be needed for a quarter of the country’s energy needs in 2050.

“We will not play politics with our energy security,” she posted on X. “The choice we face is this: do we shut down our own oil and gas leaving us reliant on foreign regimes? Do we lose 200,000 jobs across the UK? Do we import fuel with much higher carbon footprints instead? And lose billions in tax revenue?

“We are a world leader at reducing carbon emissions but as much as we will be ambitious, we must be pragmatic.”

«

Francis’s comment about the tax break refers to a story from April about the project:

»

Equinor, the state-owned Norwegian company behind Rosebank, could receive an estimated £3.75bn of tax breaks and tax-funded incentives towards the estimated £4.1bn cost of the development, owing to loopholes in the government’s windfall tax on North Sea fossil fuels, according to estimates from the campaign group Uplift. About 80% of the fossil fuels produced by Rosebank are likely to be exploited, and the development could turn into a net loss of £100m to the UK taxpayer. [Emphasis added – Overspill Ed.]

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Cuba, getting an iPhone or other Apple product repaired is quite the challenge. But there are those who rise to it. CC-licensed photo by Pedro Szekely on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Eh, it’ll wipe off. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon faces antitrust lawsuit from FTC, US states • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski, Will Oremus and Trisha Thadani:

»

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Amazon on Tuesday alleging that the company abused its powers to squeeze merchants and thwart rivals — resulting in higher prices and lower-quality goods for the tens of millions of American households who regularly shop at the company’s online superstore.

Merchants who rely on Amazon to stay in business are forced to pay a range of fees that trickle down to consumers, the FTC argues in the suit. “Pay-to-play advertisements” clog its store and “[degrade] the services” it provides customers, the regulators allege.

The long-awaited lawsuit, filed in Western District of Washington court, marks a historic political test of one of the world’s most influential companies — as well as the regulators who have promised for years to rein in its allegedly monopolistic practices.

FTC Chair Lina Khan’s meteoric rise to the helm of the antitrust enforcement agency has been closely tied to the e-commerce company. She gained national attention while still a law school student for a paper titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” arguing the e-commerce giant evades scrutiny because of the relatively narrow way the courts have interpreted antitrust law. Her paper has been at the center of a broader political movement that argues monopoly law should be more creatively and aggressively enforced, extending beyond the prices consumers pay.

«

There’s 172 pages of the lawsuit. (Enjoy!) Ben Thompson has an analysis (free to read) of the lawsuit, which to me boils down to “it’s going to be hard to prove antitrust via monopoly on this”.
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An old master? No, it’s an image AI just knocked up … and it can’t be copyrighted • The Guardian

Edward Helmore:

»

The use of AI in art is facing a setback after a ruling that an award-winning image could not be copyrighted because it was not made sufficiently by humans.

The decision, delivered by the US copyright office review board, found that Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial, an AI-generated image that won first place at the 2022 Colorado state fair annual art competition, was not eligible because copyright protection “excludes works produced by non-humans”.

Artist Jason Allen claimed his use of the online AI-platform Midjourney allowed him to claim authorship of the image because he “entered a series of prompts, adjusted the scene, selected portions to focus on, and dictated the tone of the image”. But the board ruled that “if all of a work’s ‘traditional elements of authorship’ were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship, and the Office will not register it”.

Allen told the Pueblo Chieftain local newspaper that he “wanted to make a statement using artificial intelligence artwork. I feel like I accomplished that, and I’m not going to apologise for it.”

The decision comes as writers, actors, musicians and photographers claim AI is threatening their jobs, and follows a similar ruling last month in a US federal court that an image created by an AI computer system owned by Stephen Thaler could not be copyrighted because human beings are an “essential part of a valid copyright claim”.

US courts are now routinely referring to human authorship requirements under copyright law, noting, in a case called Urantia Found. v. Kristen Maaherra that “it is not creations of divine beings that the copyright laws were intended to protect.”

«

How fascinating that AI systems are, in the eyes of the court, “divine beings”. For those worried about AI taking over the world, that might be enough to put the fear of.. gods into them.
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Microsoft is going nuclear to power its AI ambitions • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

Data centres already use a hell of a lot of electricity, which could thwart the company’s climate goals unless it can find clean sources of energy. Energy-hungry AI makes that an even bigger challenge for the company to overcome. AI dominated Microsoft’s Surface event last week.

Nuclear energy doesn’t create greenhouse gas emissions. Even so, it could also open up a whole new can of worms when it comes to handling radioactive waste and building up a uranium supply chain. The role nuclear energy ought to play in combatting climate change is still hotly debated, but Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, has long been a big fan of the technology.

Based on the new job listing, it looks like Microsoft is betting on advanced nuclear reactors to be the answer. The job posting says it’s hiring someone to “lead project initiatives for all aspects of nuclear energy infrastructure for global growth.”

Microsoft is specifically looking for someone who can roll out a plan for small modular reactors (SMR). All the hype around nuclear these days is around these next-generation reactors. Unlike their older, much larger predecessors, these modular reactors are supposed to be easier and cheaper to build. For comparison, the last large nuclear reactor to be built in the US finally came on line this summer roughly $17bn over budget after seven years of delays.

«

Would be nice if Microsoft were to prove SMRs’ feasibility.
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The first foldable PC era is unfolding • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Lenovo launched the first foldable laptop in 2020, but the first real era of foldable PCs is only starting to unfold now. Today, LG became the latest OEM to announce a foldable-screen laptop, right after HP announced its first attempt, the Spectre Foldable PC, earlier this month.

LG only announced the Gram Fold in South Korea thus far. LG didn’t immediately respond when I asked if it has plans to release the machine in the US.

A Google translation of LG’s Korean announcement said the laptop is 9.4-mm (0.37in) thick when unfolded and used like a 17in tablet. Alternatively, the OLED PC can be folded in half to use like an approximately 12.2in laptop. In the latter form, a virtual keyboard can appear on the bottom screen, and you can dock a Bluetooth keyboard to the bottom screen or pair a keyboard with the system wirelessly. The screen has 1920×2560 pixels for a pixel density of 188.2 pixels per inch.

One draw of foldable PCs is supposed to be portability. The Gram Fold weighs 2.76lb (1.25kg), which is even lighter than LG’s latest Gram clamshell laptop (2.9lb, 1.32kg).

LG said the Gram Fold will release on October 4 for 4.99m won (about $3,726).

«

I really don’t get the point. The screen being foldable is.. no different from a standard laptop, surely. The product and in-use shots in the picture don’t change my opinion. Foldables, both in phones and in laptops, seem a distraction: done because they can be, not because they’re more useful.
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Hydrogen cars are dead as projects are scrapped and refueling prices go through the roof • autoevolution

Cristian Agatie:

»

Although battery-electric vehicles have proved they are the best to replace ICE vehicles, many people still expect a miracle fuel to save the combustion engine. For many, this miracle fuel is hydrogen, a gas that promises to burn with zero carbon emissions. Hydrogen is also the most abundant element on Earth, so it looked like the perfect solution for decarbonization. Well, things didn’t pan out the way hydrogen proponents have imagined.

Hydrogen vehicles are still an exotic appearance due to their sky-high prices, whereas hydrogen proved a nightmare to produce, transport, and store. This is why hydrogen refueling stations are confined to small areas, like California in the US, and clean fuel prices are too high to make sense economically. Still, this didn’t prevent car companies like Toyota from pouring billions into hydrogen vehicle development. Today, most hydrogen FCEV vehicles in California are Toyota Mirai, which is owed chiefly to Toyota heavily subsidizing the hydrogen refueling costs.

Shell, the biggest oil company in the world and one significant supplier of hydrogen fuel for both heavy-duty and passenger vehicles, started a year ago to close its car-focused hydrogen filling stations across the globe. The move culminated in August when Shell announced closing all its car-focused filling stations in California while only keeping three heavy-duty stations. These stations were located in San Francisco (two), Sacramento, Berkeley, and Citrus Heights.

Shell went a step further and scrapped plans to build 48 new hydrogen filling stations in California for which it had been awarded a $41m grant. No money has changed hands yet, and the oil giant formally rejected the funding in July, citing “political and economic uncertainty.” At this stage, Shell has no plans to build and operate additional light-duty vehicle fueling stations in California. Considering that Shell closed all its hydrogen stations in the UK last year, we can safely assume the trend is here to stay.

«

Won’t be long before plans to replace natural gas with hydrogen are scrapped too. Been tried, doesn’t work. The oil companies like it because they can crack oil to make hydrogen. It’s a bad idea.
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Cuba’s underground Apple technicians are thriving • Rest of World

Lidia Hernández-Tapia:

»

Even though prohibition limiting the exportation, re-exportation, sale, and supply of Apple products to Cuba was eased in 2015, getting a hold of, operating, and maintaining them can still be a challenge. This is in part because basic replacement parts are difficult to import, since they cannot be purchased directly from Apple. It’s not just hardware, either: Downloading apps or software updates is tricky because Cuban IP addresses are blocked. And setting up a new Apple ID with two-factor verification requires a phone number from outside Cuba.

García Padrón is part of an exclusive circle of Apple enthusiasts who are defying Cuba’s constraints to create profitable repair businesses. In little more than a decade, these Cuban Apple technicians have evolved from casual tinkerers to a small yet thriving community of celebrity repairers, respected by locals and foreigners alike.

The absence of official Apple stores and product resellers in Cuba has fostered a community-driven ecosystem that relies on unofficial suppliers and a transnational network of individuals who can travel abroad to buy hardware replacement parts. Technicians told Rest of World there are only a handful of Apple repair shops in Cuba, mostly clustered in Havana; it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact number as there are no official statistics.

Orlando Gutiérrez is one Cuban trailblazer who opened Meca Móvil, his own iPhone repair shop in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood. Finding an Android repairperson, he told Rest of World, is easy enough. “You might even find a few on a single block,” he said. “But a Mac technician is the holy grail.”

«

Fabulous story. ROW really is excellent at finding novel angles on what could otherwise be tired stories.
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BT begins big switchover ahead of analog phone sunset • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

BT has revealed details on its UK-wide rollout schedule as it switches over from analog phone lines to a digital voice service to hit the deadline of retiring the analog service by the end of 2025.

The former state-owned telecoms giant, which still operates the bulk of Britain’s telco infrastructure, has previously flagged up plans to switch from the old analog phone lines to internet-based voice calls operating over a fiber network.

BT said that pilots of the switchover in Salisbury (Wiltshire) and Mildenhall (Suffolk) were successful, and it is now beginning the next phase in the rollout of its new home phone service, “Digital Voice,” on a region-by-region basis.

This kicked off with the East Midlands in July, then Yorkshire and the Humber region in August and Northern Ireland in September. The future schedule will cover London and the North West of England this autumn, followed by the South East, West Midlands, East Anglia and Wales in spring 2024. Scotland, the North East and South West of England will be switched during the summer of 2024.

…While many people these days use mobile phones rather than a landline for calls, there have been concerns voiced about those who still rely on one, such as more elderly citizens or those with a healthcare pendant that can be used to call for help in an emergency. In the latter case, a power cut could mean the phone service is unavailable.

BT said it won’t be “proactively switching” – an amazing piece of terminology – anyone with a healthcare pendant, those who only use a landline or have no mobile signal, or customers that have disclosed additional needs, where the company is aware of this situation.

«

I bet this will be the source of a fair bit of NIMBYism when it happens. I wonder if it will be an election issue at all.
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The plot of all objects in the universe • Kottke

Jason Kottke:

»

You just have to admire a chart that casually purports to show every single thing in the Universe in one simple 2D plot. The chart in question is from a piece in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Physics with the understated title of “All objects and some questions“.

»

In Fig. 2, we plot all the composite objects in the Universe: protons, atoms, life forms, asteroids, moons, planets, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, giant voids, and the Universe itself. Humans are represented by a mass of 70 kg and a radius of 50 cm (we assume sphericity), while whales are represented by a mass of 10^5 kg and a radius of 7 m.

«

The “sub-Planckian unknown” and “forbidden by gravity” sections of the chart makes the “quantum uncertainty” section seem downright normal — the paper collectively calls these “unphysical regions”. Lovely turns of phrase all.

But what does it all mean? My physics is too rusty to say, but I thought one of the authors’ conjectures was particularly intriguing: “Our plot of all objects also seems to suggest that the Universe is a black hole.” Huh, cool.

«

The paper is indeed interesting, but it’s the plot (shown at the Kottke post or the paper) which is most fascinating: there are spaces of “quantum uncertainty” which intersects with “forbidden by gravity” (the latter where something can’t be so small and also have more than a certain mass; black holes lie at its boundary). Essentially it’s a physics paper saying “here be dragons” – well, instantons.
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Cory Doctorow: Silicon Valley is now a world of ‘lumbering behemoths’ • Fast Company

Wilfred Chan interviews Cory Doctorow, whose new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation has just come out:

»

Fast Company: You were once more of a techno-optimist. But you argue in your new book that decades of trying to turn Big Tech into “better tech” have been a failure, and it’s time to cut the tech companies down to size. Was there a turning point when you realized the industry needed systemic change? 

Cory Doctorow: It was more of a process than a turning point. 

There used to be a time when the tech sector could be described as a bunch of “fast companies,” right? They would use the interoperability that’s latent in all digital technology and they would specifically target whatever pain points the incumbent had introduced. If incumbents were making money by showing you ads, they made an ad blocker. If incumbents were making money by charging gigantic margins on hard drives, they made cheaper hard drives.

Over time, we went from an internet where tech companies more or less had their users’ backs, to an internet where tech companies are colluding to take as big a bite as possible out of those users. We do not have fast companies anymore; we have lumbering behemoths. If you’ve started a fast company, it’s probably just a fake startup that you’re hoping to get acqui-hired by one of the big giants, which is something that used to be illegal.

As these companies grew more concentrated, they were able to collude and convince courts and regulators and lawmakers that it was time to get rid of the kind of interoperability, the reverse engineering that had been a feature of technology since the very beginning, and move into a new era in which no one was allowed to do anything to a tech platform that their shareholders wouldn’t appreciate. And that the government should step in to use the state’s courts to punish anyone who disagrees. That’s how we got to the world that we’re in today.

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In a nutshell.
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San Francisco techies are living in small pods for $700/month • SF Standard

Joshua Bote:

»

The average rent for a one-bedroom San Francisco apartment is $3,040 a month, according to Zillow. Staying in a $700-per-month pod, therefore, is a way to live in San Francisco on the cheap, [Chicago native Christian] Lewis said, without being locked into a pricey yearlong lease. It’s also, he contends, better than an Airbnb—Lewis says he booked “a dump” of a short-term rental on the platform and found it uninhabitable. (He also would rather not live in a shared apartment with roommates.)

The Mint Plaza pod space evokes a co-op, or a much, much more cramped version of those micro-apartments that have popped up throughout the Bay Area. Comparisons to the Hong Kong-style “coffin homes” are not entirely inaccurate. But in Lewis’ words, it’s a form of “minimalist living” for young, unattached people coming in and out of San Francisco. And Wi-Fi and utilities are included.

“For $700, you have workspaces and an office and a place to sleep, so that’s pretty great,” he said. “It’s downtown.”

Back to the pods: They’re each 4 feet high, 3½ feet wide, and long enough to fit a twin-size mattress. It’s comfortable enough for Lewis, who is 5 foot 9. (Lewis jokes that I should report that he’s an inch taller so that he can boast about it on the dating apps. I do not oblige.)

Lewis advises that I take my sneakers off before he takes me to observe the sleeping pods.

You don’t want to disturb anyone who could be asleep, he explains, as we inch toward the stacks of pods on Thursday afternoon. Each is sheathed with a black curtain as the main mode of privacy. There are about 20 of them, stacked in twos like bunks.

«

Similar things in Tokyo, I think, though without the potential upside of getting into an AI startup in SF.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, went extinct decades ago – but now their RNA has been sequenced, in a first. CC-licensed photo by State Library of New South Wales 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak • OpenAI

»

We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT. They offer a new, more intuitive type of interface by allowing you to have a voice conversation or show ChatGPT what you’re talking about.

Voice and image give you more ways to use ChatGPT in your life. Snap a picture of a landmark while traveling and have a live conversation about what’s interesting about it. When you’re home, snap pictures of your fridge and pantry to figure out what’s for dinner (and ask follow up questions for a step by step recipe). After dinner, help your child with a math problem by taking a photo, circling the problem set, and having it share hints with both of you.

We’re rolling out voice and images in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise users over the next two weeks. Voice is coming on iOS and Android (opt-in in your settings) and images will be available on all platforms.

You can now use voice to engage in a back-and-forth conversation with your assistant. Speak with it on the go, request a bedtime story for your family, or settle a dinner table debate.

…The new voice technology—capable of crafting realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech—opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications. However, these capabilities also present new risks, such as the potential for malicious actors to impersonate public figures or commit fraud.

This is why we are using this technology to power a specific use case—voice chat. Voice chat was created with voice actors we have directly worked with. We’re also collaborating in a similar way with others.

«

Faintly concerning. Also I wouldn’t trust ChatGPT to settle a dinner table debate. It would just be an invitation to lower ourselves deeper into the ocean of misinformation.
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Erotica, Atwood, and ‘For Dummies’: the books behind Meta’s generative AI • The Atlantic

Alex Reisner:

»

Books play a crucial role in the training of generative-AI systems. Their long, thematically consistent paragraphs provide information about how to construct long, thematically consistent paragraphs—something that’s essential to creating the illusion of intelligence. Consequently, tech companies use huge data sets of books, typically without permission, purchase, or licensing. (Lawyers for Meta argued in a recent court filing that neither outputs from the company’s generative AI nor the model itself are “substantially similar” to existing books.)

In its training process, a generative-AI system essentially builds a giant map of English words—the distance between two words correlates with how often they appear near each other in the training text. The final system, known as a large language model, will produce more plausible responses for subjects that appear more often in its training text. (For further details on this process, you can read about transformer architecture, the innovation that precipitated the boom in large language models such as LLaMA and ChatGPT.) A system trained primarily on the Western canon, for example, will produce poor answers to questions about Eastern literature. This is just one reason it’s important to understand the training data used by these models, and why it’s troubling that there is generally so little transparency.

«

You can find out whether a book you wrote (🙋‍♂️) or someone you know wrote is in the database. It’s hungry for fiction and non-fiction. The point about long paragraphs being useful for creating the illusion of intelligence is very apt.
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Meta pays £149m to break London office lease • Financial Times

Joshua Oliver and Cristina Criddle:

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Meta has paid £149m to break its lease on a major London development near Regent’s Park as hybrid working prompts big tech groups to pull back on office space.

British Land, which owns the building at 1 Triton Square, on Tuesday flagged a short-term hit to earnings as it will now have to find a new tenant for the eight-storey building in a challenging London office market.

“It is a staggering amount of money. In my 20 years, I can’t think of a tenant paying [so much] to give back space they don’t occupy,” said Matthew Saperia, analyst at Peel Hunt.

The news is the latest sign of Big Tech’s determination to reduce costs by cutting office space as more staff work from home. The contraction has hit cities such as San Francisco that rely heavily on tech companies. Office tenants and European markets including Dublin and London have not been spared.

Colm Lauder, real estate analyst at Goodbody, estimated Meta was now proposing to sublet or surrender close to 1m sq ft of office space in Europe, mostly in London and Dublin.

…Meta never moved into 1 Triton Square but let the space in 2021 following a major refurbishment. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has embarked on dramatic cuts to the company of tens of thousands of staff, he has also committed to shrinking its office space, with hybrid workers asked to share desks.

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Macron launches ‘ecological plan’ to end France’s use of fossil fuels by 2030 • The Guardian

Kim Willsher:

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Emmanuel Macron has unveiled a national “ecological plan” to reduce France’s greenhouse gas emissions by 55% and end the use of fossil fuels by 2030.

Speaking after a special ministerial council at the Elysée, the French president said an extra €10bn (£8.7bn) would be put towards the 50-point programme, which he described as “ecology à la Française”.

The plan was aimed at addressing the climate crisis while ensuring that France remained competitive in agriculture and industry, said Macron.

It was essential, he said, that “France reduces our dependence on so-called fossil fuels, coal, petrol and gas, which we don’t produce any more but on which we depend”. The aim, he added, was to reduce this dependence from 60% to 40% by 2030.

“The priority that we have set is that by January 2027 we will have totally ended the use of coal for our electricity production,” he said.

Other measures in the plan include the acceleration of electric car production, with brakes on gas boilers, though the president stopped short of a total ban. It also includes new projects for offshore windfarms, the opening of several electric battery factories in northern France, a map to establish where natural resources can be found in France, including hydrogen gas and essential elements for lithium batteries, and €700m state investment in the regional train network.

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Quite the contrast with Snooze Button” Sunak, who thinks pausing something doesn’t mean it will take any longer to do.
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Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year • BBC News

Lora Jones:

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Amazon is set to introduce adverts to its Prime Video streaming service in 2024 as it seeks to put more cash into creating TV shows and films.

UK Prime customers, along with those in the US, Germany and Canada, will see ads early next year unless they subscribe for an “ad-free” option at an additional cost. In a statement, Amazon said Prime Video still offered “very compelling value”. It follows similar moves by rivals including Disney+ and Netflix.

Amazon said that the ads would be introduced across France, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Australia later in 2024. It will roll out the “ad-free” subscription tier for an extra $2.99 (£2.44) per month for Prime subscribers in the United States. Pricing for other countries will be announced at a later date, Amazon said.

At the moment, a Prime subscription, which includes free one-day delivery on goods as well as access to its streaming service, costs £8.99 per month, or £95 a year, in the UK.

“To continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time, starting in 2024, Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements in the UK,” Amazon said.

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Feels like a bait-and-switch, doesn’t it. The BBC TV licence, which provides access to multiple ad-free TV channels and also to a big news website and multiple radio channels (though the latter two don’t require a licence) feels like comparatively good value at £159 annually, fixed for some time.
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In-depth Q&A: Can ‘carbon offsets’ help to tackle climate change? • Carbon Brief

Josh Gabbatiss, Daisy Dunne, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Orla Dwyer, Molly Lempriere, Yanine Quiroz, Ayesha Tandon, Dr Giuliana Viglione, Joe Goodman, Tom Pearson, and Tom Prater:

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According to Carbon Brief analysis of data from the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, just 3% of offsets on the four largest voluntary offset registries involve removing CO2 – all from tree-planting projects.

Many available offsets have been labelled “junk” or “hot air” because they result from carbon-market design flaws and do not represent real emissions reductions.
The ideas and experiments with carbon offsets and trading trace back at least half a century, as outlined in the timeline of the 60-year history of carbon offsets.

Over the years, offset projects have been dogged by allegations of land conflicts, human rights abuses, hampering conservation and furthering coal use and pollution.

They have been decried as a “false solution” by activists. Negotiations over new carbon markets under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement have seen a sustained outcry for not delivering mitigation at scale, threatening Indigenous rights and “carbon colonialism”.

Meanwhile, companies claiming carbon neutrality using voluntary offsets have been increasingly called out and restrained from making “greenwashing” claims. (See: Why is there a risk of greenwashing with carbon offsets?)

The central problem of carbon offsetting is summarised by Robert Mendelsohn, a forest policy and economics professor at Yale School of the Environment. Reflecting on the achievements of carbon offsets, he tells Carbon Brief: “They have not changed behaviour and so they have not led to any reduction of carbon in the atmosphere…They have achieved zero mitigation.”

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There’s a whole week-long look at the reality of carbon offsets. Worth a bookmark.
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Google antitrust trial spills details on deals with Apple, Samsung • WSJ

Miles Kruppa:

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Apple began licensing Google’s search engine for the 2003 release of its Safari web browser. Google in 2005 offered Apple a portion of advertising revenue if it made the search engine the default choice on desktop computers.

Two years later, Apple asked Google for an amendment to the contract that would allow it to present users with several options for the default search engine, according to an email presented by the Justice Department. Apple approached Yahoo about participating in the setup.

In response, Google told Apple: “No default—no revenue share,” according to an internal email chain that included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin. Apple dropped the idea and hasn’t raised it again, said DOJ lead trial attorney Kenneth Dintzer.

A Google spokesman pointed to a previous statement saying the company competes for default placement so that users can easily access its services, and Apple has said it picks Google because it is the best search engine. Apple declined to comment.

…In 2021, Google analyzed the potential hit if Apple switched to another default search-engine provider, according to an internal email presented in court, calling it a “Code Red” scenario.

Google also tussled with Samsung about changes the smartphone company had made to its mobile web browser. The design tweaks made it easier for users to switch default search engines, according to testimony from Antonio Rangel, a behavioral economics professor called by the DOJ.

Google protested, telling Samsung it had violated their agreement, and the phone maker rolled back the change, Rangel said. Samsung didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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Of course, the level of Google’s concern about Apple defecting is easy to evaluate: it’s measured in the billions of dollars that it pays Apple every year to be the Safari default.
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The world’s biggest crypto firm is melting down • WSJ via MSN

Patricia Kowsmann, Caitlin Ostroff and Angus Berwick:

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After FTX crashed, the world of crypto seemed to belong to the largest exchange, Binance. Less than a year later, Binance is the one in distress.

Under threat of enforcement actions by US agencies, Binance’s empire is quaking. Over the past three months, more than a dozen senior executives have left, and the exchange has laid off at least 1,500 employees this year to cut costs and prepare for a decline in business. And while Binance still looms large in crypto, its dominance is dwindling. 

Binance now handles about half of all trades where cryptocurrencies are directly bought and sold, down from about 70% at the start of the year, according to data provider Kaiko.

What happens to Binance will have immense implications for the crypto industry because the exchange is so big. Industry players and watchers say other exchanges would fill the void if Binance were to collapse. But in the short term, liquidity in the market could evaporate, driving the price of tokens sharply down.

One institutional trader told The Wall Street Journal that his company has conducted fire drills to withdraw its assets from Binance quickly in the event of a meltdown. 

Yi He, Binance’s co-founder and chief marketing officer, vowed to overcome the troubles in a message to Binance staff last month.

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I’d have thought that the biggest firm in crypto was Tether, which basically keeps the whole shenanigans afloat. The problem for all these crypto firms will be the extent to which they’re wrapped up with extremely shady, prone-to-violence people when everything starts going south.
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Tasmanian tiger RNA is first to be recovered from an extinct animal • Nature

Miryan Naddaf:

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For the first time, researchers have sequenced RNA from an extinct animal species — the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus).

Using muscle and skin samples from a 132-year-old museum specimen, scientists isolated millions of RNA sequences. This genetic material provides information about the animal’s genes and the proteins that were made in its cells and tissues. The findings, published in Genome Research1, offer hope that RNA locked up in the world’s museum collections could provide new insights into long-dead species.

Being able to look at RNA in particular “opens up a whole new potential source of information”, says Oliver Smith, a geneticist at the medical-diagnostics company Micropathology in Coventry, UK. “As opposed to looking at what a genome is, we can look at what the genome does.”

…Obtaining RNA from historical samples is challenging because unlike DNA — which is highly stable and has been extracted from extinct species that lived more than one million years ago — RNA rapidly breaks down into smaller fragments. “Outside of living cells, it’s believed to be degraded or destroyed in minutes,” says study co-author Marc Friedländer, a geneticist at Stockholm University.

The team developed a protocol specifically for extracting ancient RNA from tissue samples, adapting standard methods that are used on fresher samples. Nevertheless, “it was surprising that we found these authentic RNA sequences in this mummified Tasmanian tiger”, says Friedländer.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified