The iPad Pro is long overdue for a serious update, but OLED screens aren’t coming until next year, according to a well-informed source. CC-licensed photo by Sergiy Galyonkin 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. Oh, now you’re back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How Google made the world go viral • The Verge

Ryan Broderick:

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[Anil] Dash is one of the web’s earliest bloggers. In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.” Since then, Dash has written extensively over the years on the impact platform optimization has had on the way the internet works. As he sees it, Google’s advertising tools [introduced in 2003-4] gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet. 

“At that point it was really clear where the next 20 years were going to go,” he said.

Google Answers closed in 2006. Google Reader shut down in 2013, taking with it the last vestiges of the blogosphere. Search inside of Google Groups has repeatedly broken over the years. Blogger still works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more recently, TikTok. 

Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google’s results but for Reddit content. Google’s place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago.

On top of it all, OpenAI’s massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI. 

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Broderick’s piece has the in-article headline “The end of the Googleverse” – in which he’s trying to argue, at the beginning, that Google Search has lost its centrality and power: “all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over.” But then the article heads off to talk about the history of virality as driven by Google Search. It’s slightly confused: lots of people have called Peak Google, and none been quite right. This doesn’t quite make the case either. Lots of people agree that Google Search doesn’t find the results you want in the way it used to one or two decades ago. But people still use it to the tune of billions of searches per day.
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Apple plans biggest iPad Pro update since 2018 • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

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Apple’s iPad Pro is set to get its biggest redesign since 2018, according to a new report. Slated for a launch next year, it will seek to turn around recent years’ slow tablet sales.

The information comes from Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman—as you probably could have guessed by now. Gurman claims to have knowledge of Apple’s plans, stating that the new iPad Pro will have everything from a new chip to a new screen technology, a different design, and a revamped keyboard accessory.

The new chip is obvious—that has been the standard minimum for any new iPad Pro refresh. The current iPad Pro has the M2 chip, and the new one will predictably have the M3 chip. Expect some notable performance gains—not that the M2 was too slow for most people using the iPad Pro already.

Things get a little more interesting beyond the chip upgrade, however. Gurman claims the new iPad Pro will ship with an OLED display, the same tech seen in the excellent screens on iPhones. OLED offers deeper blacks, better contrast, and richer color than the LCD screens currently in Apple’s iPad and MacBook lineups.

Gurman writes that the OLED screens are “crisper and brighter” than LCD screens, which seems odd—crispness is about resolution, which has little to do with the type of screen involved. The iPhone 14 Pro’s OLED screens are substantially brighter than the LCD screens found on most iPads, but the 12.9in iPad Pro’s Mini LED screen is about equally as bright as the OLED on an iPhone 14 Pro.

Apple previously brought Mini LED tech to the largest iPad model, the 12.9in iPad Pro. But even that can’t quite touch a great OLED screen, and it has not been available in any of the smaller tablets Apple sells.

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If anyone has managed to hit the limits of what the M2 chip can do on an iPad Pro, please write in. Editing something gigantic in Final Cut Pro, perhaps? Hard to imagine anything else managing it. But the slow schedule here shows that the iPad isn’t viewed as the most important thing any more; no longer the new hotness. And finally getting OLED – which Samsung and others have been using in tablets for years.
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Brain-computer interface enables woman with severe paralysis to speak through digital avatar • TechXplore

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Researchers at the University of California (UC) San Francisco and UC Berkeley have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI) that has enabled a woman with severe paralysis from a brainstem stroke to speak through a digital avatar.

It is the first time that either speech or facial expressions have been synthesized from brain signals. The system can also decode these signals into text at nearly 80 words per minute, a vast improvement over commercially available technology.

Edward Chang, MD, chair of neurological surgery at UCSF, who has worked on the technology, known as a brain computer interface, or BCI, for more than a decade, hopes this latest research breakthrough, appearing Aug. 23, 2023, in Nature, will lead to an FDA-approved system that enables speech from brain signals in the near future.

“Our goal is to restore a full, embodied way of communicating, which is really the most natural way for us to talk with others,” said Chang, who is a member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neuroscience and the Jeanne Robertson Distinguished Professor in Psychiatry. “These advancements bring us much closer to making this a real solution for patients.”

Chang’s team previously demonstrated it was possible to decode brain signals into text in a man who had also experienced a brainstem stroke many years earlier. The current study demonstrates something more ambitious: decoding brain signals into the richness of speech, along with the movements that animate a person’s face during conversation.

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Qualcomm’s ‘Holy Grail’: generative AI is coming to phones soon • CNET

David Lumb:

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Generative AI like ChatGPT and Midjourney have dazzled imaginations and disrupted industries, but their debut has mostly been limited to browser windows on desktop computers. Next year, you’ll be able to make use of generative AI on the go once premium phones launch with Qualcomm’s top-tier chips inside.

Phones have used AI for years to touch up photos and improve autocorrect, but generative AI tools could bring the next level of enhancements to the mobile experience. Qualcomm is building generative AI into its next generation of premium chips, which are set to debut at its annual Qualcomm Summit in Hawaii in late October. 

Summit attendees will get to experience firsthand what generative AI will bring to phones, but Qualcomm senior vice president of product management Ziad Asghar described to CNET why users should get excited for on-device AI. For one, having access to a user’s data — driving patterns, restaurant searches, photos and more — all in one place will make solutions generated by AI in your phone much more customized and helpful than general responses from cloud-based generative AI. 

“I think that’s going to be the holy grail,” Asghar said. “That’s the true promise that makes us really excited about where this technology can go.”

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Er.. you can already download apps to do this for the iPhone, and there are tons of Midjourney and other AI apps on the Google Play store. Nor do I like Asghar’s description of what the on-device AI is going to be used for: “having access to a user’s data” as a starting point.
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Why today’s chatbots are weird, argumentative, and wrong • IEEE Spectrum

Michael Koziol speaks to Janelle Shane, who has been running the AI Weirdness blog for years, and so has the perfect perspective on all this:

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MK: How has AIs’ weirdness changed in the past year?

Janelle Shane: They’ve gotten less weird, more coherent. Instead of being absurd and half-incomprehensible, they’ve become way more fluent and more subtly wrong in ways that are harder to detect. But—they’re a lot more accessible now. People have the chance to experiment with them themselves. So from that standpoint, the weirdness of these models is a lot more evident.

Q: You’ve written that it’s outrageous that chatbots like Google’s Bard and Bing Chat are seen as an alternative to search engines. What’s the problem?

Shane: The problem is how incorrect—and in many cases very subtly incorrect—these answers are, and you may not be able to tell at first, if it’s outside your area of expertise. The problem is the answers do look vaguely correct. But [the chatbots] are making up papers, they’re making up citations or getting facts and dates wrong, but presenting it the same way they present actual search results. I think people can get a false sense of confidence on what is really just probability-based text.

Q: You’ve noted as well that chatbots are often confidently incorrect, and even double down when challenged. What do you think is causing that?

Shane: They’re trained on books and Internet dialogues and Web pages in which humans are generally very confident about their answers. Especially in the earliest releases of these chatbots, before the engineers did some tweaking, you would get chatbots that acted like they were in an Internet argument and doubling down sounding like they’re getting very hyped up and emotional about how correct they are. I think that came straight from imitating humans in Internet arguments during training.

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How fabulous: chatbots’ refusal to be wrong stems from people arguing on the internet.
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New Twitter scam in China: sextortion scammers • Rest of World

Caiwei Chen:

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In May, Wang Zhi’an noticed something odd: Each time he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, his replies would be flooded with sexual spam within minutes. Once, the Chinese investigative journalist-in-exile made a post discussing X’s new monetization policies. A user named Zizizi963, seemingly an attractive young single woman, replied with a photo of her in lingerie and the words, “When will you come to me and mess up my bed?” Zizizi963 was one of several accounts posting sexual messages in Wang’s replies — they all had blue checkmarks, and were granted greater visibility on the platform.

Wang soon learned that these accounts were sextortion scammers. Posing as young, lonely women, they posted sexually suggestive messages on popular posts and invited users to contact them through the Telegram links in their bios. A Shenzhen-based man in his 20s reached out to Wang anonymously after falling victim himself, according to an audio interview between the two that Wang had shared on his podcast. The scammers persuaded the man to download special video-chat software for “safety reasons,” lured him into a chatroom, recorded footage of him unclothed, and then blackmailed him for money. He ended up transferring 200,000 yuan ($27,500) to the scammers to prevent his photos from being leaked.

Since April, after X introduced a new blue-check policy allowing users to buy verified badges, the platform has seen hundreds of newly verified Chinese sextortion accounts, according to Robin Li, founder of online safety software PureTwitter. They prey on Chinese users, harassing the community’s most prominent voices — often political dissidents and influential opinion leaders.

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It is a little bit difficult to feel that much sympathy for the Shenzhen-based man in his 20s: even in China, don’t they tell you about getting scammed in this sort of way?
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Bitcoin trading volume is at its lowest in more than four years • CNBC

Tanaya Macheel:

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Bitcoin’s trading volume hit its lowest level in almost five years this month as investors keep waiting for reasons to jump back into the market.

An analysis of CryptoQuant data from both spot and derivatives exchanges shows the total volume of bitcoin held on all exchanges fell earlier this month to its lowest level since 2018 and has struggled to rebound.

As of Aug. 26, bitcoin trading volume on all exchanges sat at 129,307 BTC, according to CryptoQuant. Earlier in the month, on Aug. 12, it fell to 112,317 BTC, its lowest level since Nov. 10, 2018. It’s now off the March high of 3.5 million BTC by about 94%.

“Trading volumes decrease in bear markets as retail investors leave,” Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, told CNBC. “This happened during 2022 on most exchanges. As we progress further into a bull market, the trading volume may continue to pick up.”

The price of bitcoin is still up 57% for the year and hovering at about $26,100, according to Coin Metrics.

It’s been an excruciatingly quiet summer for bitcoin traders, but seasonality only accounts for so much of it. The US regulatory crackdown on crypto combined with the end of the banking crisis in May (which accounted for much of its year-to-date gains) drove market makers and traders away – and they haven’t had a reason to return.

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When will they ever have a reason to return? The whole web3/NFT grift is dead. The only hope the bitcoin holders have is that some bigger fools will come along and take these expensive sudoku solutions off their hands.
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Hiding behind whale fatality disinformation, Big Oil works to slow offshore wind projects • CleanTechnica

Carolyn Fortuna:

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The US outer continental shelf is an ideal site for wind energy resources on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. With the public increasingly calling for more renewable energy options, offshore wind is an idea whose time has come.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) in late March, 2023 announced the release of its Offshore Wind Energy Strategy, which is intended to help meet President Biden’s goal to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind energy by 2030 and set the nation on a pathway to 110 GW or more by 2050. Deploying 30 GW of offshore wind would provide enough power for 10 million homes, support 77,000 jobs, and spur $12 billion per year in direct private investment.

Offshore wind energy will be critical for reimagining America’s clean energy economy and building it right. Offshore wind is a more cost-effective energy source than oil and gas, and it threatens the future of US fossil fuel dependence. And so Big Oil looks for scapegoats — or, in this case, whale victims.

A dozen dead whales have washed up on New York and New Jersey beaches since December, part of a longer pattern of whale deaths up and down the east coast. The deaths have led some protesters to call for an end to offshore wind development, citing — without evidence — that the sound of the boats and underwater surveying might confuse the whales.

Experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and elsewhere say they see no evidence that undersea sounds emitted during survey work for the construction of wind farms is causing whale deaths.

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There’s a whole lot of offshore wind around the UK, and no sign of increased whale deaths. (I was thinking the other day about whales, which used to be a key source of energy, which then became too expensive, with oil-based replacements taking over. But if we hadn’t had, or hadn’t found, oil? Would we have started breeding blue whales?)
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Climate change is fuelling Antarctic emperor penguin population losses • Sydney Morning Herald

Laura Chung:

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As the world goes through what some scientists believe to be its hottest year on record, emperor penguin populations in the Antarctic are suffering catastrophic losses, with no chicks surviving the spring of 2022 in four of five colonies observed for a new study.

The loss of the chicks coincides with record low sea ice coverage and was predicted as the world warmed, but the collapse in numbers has happened faster and sooner than expected, prompting fears for the future of the animal.

“Emperor penguins have no external threats except climate change and sea ice,” said the study’s lead author, Peter Fretwell, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey. “They have never been hunted, hardly any contact with humanity. It is purely climate change. You can’t put the ice back. This is a global problem. If we don’t do something we are driving them to the brink of extinction.”

The report, published in Communications Earth and Environment on Friday, examined satellite images in the Bellingshausen Sea in Antarctica between 2018 and 2022 and found that declining sea ice due to climate change resulted in breeding failure last year.

Emperor penguin colonies rely on sea ice between April and January to breed, but any change to their habitat impacts whether chicks develop waterproof feathers, and ultimately survive.

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This is either going to drive some extraordinarily rapid evolution, or – more likely – this is the final act for the emperor penguins.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Installations of solar panels in the UK can generate as much energy as the (unfinished) Hinkley C nuclear plant. CC-licensed photo by Andrew Fogg 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. Fine, thanks. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Fear the cardboard drones • The Droning Company

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Australian company SYPAQ is helping Ukraine bolster its drone fleet as the country continues its struggle to push back the Russian invasion of its nation.

However, the drones being delivered are not metallic Valkyries of air warfare. They are cardboard.

The SYPAQ Corvo is a drone constructed from waxed cardboard that can be shipped in a flat package. Assembly is simple, requiring just a glue gun, knife, pen, tape, rubber bands, and a wrench to attach the Corvo’s propeller. The Corvo can fly autonomously with a flight plan programmed via an Android tablet interface. It relies on GPS guidance when available, but should GPS be jammed by Russian electronic-warfare defenses, the Corvo’s control software can determine its position from its speed and heading. The drone is launched from a simple catapult and has a range of 74 miles.

SYPAQ has not shared any additional specs for the Corvo, nor how much each drone costs, when they will be delivered, or how many they are supplying the Ukraine forces. 

While the Australian Army uses the Corvo to deliver small and urgently needed supplies, the Ukrainian forces are giving it another job entirely: Surveillance, reconnaissance, and intelligence missions. In the future, the Corvo could be further adapted to deploy bombs.

Of course, cardboard is not as tough as some other materials, so the Corvo’s mission lifespan may be short. However, other, more robust and low-cost materials such as plywood could conceivably be incorporated into the drone’s airframe.

SYPAQ is currently working on swarming software that could spell trouble for enemies when thousands of inexpensive and expendable Corvo drones descend on a target. That’s a lot of drones, but an entire fleet of Corvos likely costs significantly less than one $20 million Reaper. 

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This article is from March – so sue me! – but with Ukraine’s drone attacks on Moscow and other Russian targets making news more recently, it could be that this is what they’re succeeding with.
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Climate change: mapping in 3D where the earth will become uninhabitable • Berliner Morgenpost

Ida Flik, André Pätzold and Benja Zehr:

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Lethal heat, flooded coastlines, powerful hurricanes, water scarcity: climate models show that by the end of the century, life as normal won’t be possible in many places. Find out where populations are projected to be hit hardest with our 3D interactive visualisation.

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It’s a nifty visualisation, but it looks forward to the year 2100. Even the youngest reader of this article will be hitting their 80th year by then. Projections that will spur people to action need to have a shorter time range. Climate change is like the worst sort of pension: one that’s going to take everything away, and it’ll be too late if you don’t act now.
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Generative AI and intellectual property • Benedict Evans

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I think most people understand that if I post a link to a news story on my Facebook feed and tell my friends to read it, it’s absurd for the newspaper to demand payment for this. A newspaper, indeed, doesn’t pay a restaurant a percentage when it writes a review. If I can ask ChatGPT to read ten newspaper websites and give me a summary of today’s headlines, or explain a big story to me, then suddenly the newspapers’ complaint becomes a lot more reasonable – now the tech company really is ‘using the news’. Unsurprisingly, as soon as ChatGPT announced that it had its own web crawler, news sites started blocking it.

But just as for my ‘make me something like the top ten hits’ example, ChatGPT would not be reproducing the content itself, and indeed I could ask an intern to read the papers for me and give a summary (I often describe AI as giving you infinite interns). That might be breaking the self-declared terms of service, but summaries (as opposed to extracts) are not generally considered to be covered by copyright – indeed, no-one has ever suggested this newsletter is breaking the copyright of the sites I link to. 

Does that mean we’ll decide this isn’t a problem? The answer probably has very little to do what that today’s law happens to say today in one or another country. Rather, one way to think about this might be that AI makes practical at a massive scale things that were previously only possible on a small scale. This might be the difference between the police carrying wanted pictures in their pockets and the police putting face recognition cameras on every street corner – a difference in scale can be a difference in principle. What outcomes do we want? What do we want the law to be? What can it be?

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This is a typically thoughtful piece: Evans’s preference for realism and practicality over sweeping statements makes him unusual among most commentators on topics like this, perhaps because he isn’t gurning for attention.
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Movie Maths

This neat little site is a sort-of recommendation system for films. So if you want something that’s a cross between “The Endless Summer” (classic film of surfers searching for the perfect wave) and Alien, what about Lilo & Stitch (destructive city-destroying child-friendly alien touches down in Hawaii)?

Simon Carryer, who did the maths bit, explains how it works in a Medium article, though you’ll need a membership there to read it.
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Organised crime gang steals hard drive containing vital evidence against Channel people smugglers • LBC

Will Taylor:

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Important evidence about people-smuggling across the Channel has been stolen and it is suspected an organised crime gang is responsible.

Aviation fuel worth about £30,000 and tools were also stolen from Lydd airport, in southern Kent, which contains the control room for drones that watch for small boats. These record migrant crossings via camera and that footage is used to prosecute criminals and help target gangs who bring them over the sea.

A hard drive that was held in a safe in a hangar was stolen in the raid on August 1. It contained footage of crossings from previous days. The clips had not been forwarded to Border Force or other organisations like the National Crime Agency.

Although the fuel was taken, the aeroplane and four drones based at Lydd were unaffected. They were thoroughly examined to ensure they were safe to use.

The raiders managed to break in by climbing over a fence and then cut through tarpaulin outside the hangar using a knife.

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In its way, very Mission Impossible-y: “we’ve got to find the hard drive that’s got the surveillance footage of the boat crossing!” Except this is done by people who will exploit the most desperate survivors for the last of their money and put them in boats that might kill them. The OCG aspect is emphasised by the fact that they stole tools. Sure, they came for the hard drive, but tools are tools, you know?
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Scammers cash in on Worldcoin’s Kenya launch • Rest of World

Martin Siele:

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For the hundreds of thousands who signed up for Worldcoin in Kenya, the Sam Altman-backed global blockchain project couldn’t have come at a better time.

With the country in the throes of an inflation crisis, Worldcoin made a big splash, signing up an estimated 350,000 people before the government stopped the project’s rollout over data protection concerns on August 2. The biggest attraction for many Kenyans who had their eyeballs scanned was the free sign-up bonus of 25 Worldcoin tokens, currently worth around 6,988 Kenyan shillings ($48.75).

But once the coins were in their accounts, getting the money proved harder than they expected. The Worldcoin app offers no direct cash withdrawal option, unlike the mobile money apps used by 96% of Kenyan households. Within days of the launch, Worldcoin was forced to suspend the registration of new users in Kenya as the government launched an investigation into its compliance with data protection laws. To get their cash, Kenyans had to sell their coins through cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, or find a buyer in Kenya’s informal crypto economy.

“Many of those who signed up don’t know how crypto works exactly or how to sell the Worldcoin tokens they received through exchanges like Binance,” Mathew Morang’a, a day trader based in Nakuru, Kenya, who has dealt in cryptocurrencies since 2020, told Rest of World. “They just want to get the money quickly, in the most straightforward way.”

Since the government decision, traders like Morang’a have flooded social media platforms including WhatsApp, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook with offers to purchase Worldcoin. A spot check by Rest of World found that most traders were offering between 200–250 Kenyan shillings ($1.40–$1.74) per Worldcoin token (WLD), against its current price of 279 shillings ($1.95) — enabling them to profit as much as 78.8 shillings (55 cents) on each token.

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Guess it means that we find the actual value of Worldcoin. It doesn’t seem very high. And we seem still to be trying to shake off the whole “web 3” thing still.
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UK homes install ‘record number’ of solar panels and heat pumps • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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British households are making more green energy upgrades than ever before after installing a record number of solar panels and heat pumps in the first half of the year, according to the industry’s official standards body.

The industry figures show there were more green energy installations in June than in previous years.

On average, more than 17,000 households installed solar panels every month this year, while the number of homes installing heat pumps reached 3,000 a month for the first time, according to the data.

Each month of 2023 was a record month for battery technologies, as installation figures consistently surpassed the month before, bringing the total number of batteries installed in homes and businesses across the UK to more than 1,000 in 2023 so far.

The industry’s accreditation body, MCS, said the green energy boom has put households on track to install more renewable energy than the last record set in 2012, when many raced to install solar panels before government subsidies were reduced.

Ian Rippin, the chief executive of MCS, said: “As the cost of energy continues to grow, we are seeing more people turn to renewable technology to generate their own energy and heat at home.”

Small-scale renewable energy installations at homes and businesses across the UK now have a total capacity of 4 gigawatts (GW), greater than the nuclear power plant under construction at Hinkley Point and almost double the capacity of Europe’s biggest gas power plant near Pembroke in Wales.

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(Hinkley Point C is a 3.2GW plant.) Of course the criticism will be that these panels don’t generate this energy all the time, which is true – but microgeneration (as this is called) has the potential to be colossal. All it takes is a bit of political will. The battery and panel prices will fall in line.
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China’s 40-year boom is over. What comes next? • WSJ

Lingling Wei and Stella Yifan Xie:

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For decades, China powered its economy by investing in factories, skyscrapers and roads. The model sparked an extraordinary period of growth that lifted China out of poverty and turned it into a global giant whose export prowess washed across the globe.

Now the model is broken.

What worked when China was playing catch-up makes less sense now that the country is drowning in debt and running out of things to build. Parts of China are saddled with under-used bridges and airports. Millions of apartments are unoccupied. Returns on investment have sharply declined.

Signs of trouble extend beyond China’s dismal economic data to distant provinces, including Yunnan in the southwest, which recently said it would spend millions of dollars to build a new Covid-19 quarantine facility, nearly the size of three football fields, despite China having ended its “zero-Covid” policy months ago, and long after the world moved on from the pandemic.

Other localities are doing the same. With private investment weak and exports flagging, officials say they have little choice but to keep borrowing and building to stimulate their economies.

Economists now believe China is entering an era of much slower growth, made worse by unfavourable demographics and a widening divide with the US and its allies, which is jeopardizing foreign investment and trade. Rather than just a period of economic weakness, this could be the dimming of a long era.

“We’re witnessing a gearshift in what has been the most dramatic trajectory in economic history,” said Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor who specializes in economic crises.  

What will the future look like? The International Monetary Fund puts China’s GDP growth at below 4% in the coming years, less than half of its tally for most of the past four decades. Capital Economics, a London-based research firm, figures China’s trend growth has slowed to 3% from 5% in 2019, and will fall to around 2% in 2030.

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Slowing growth? Call Liz Truss! But seriously, this poses huge questions for the world economy. (The link should hop you over the WSJ paywall.)
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Apple lends support to California State Right to Repair bill • TechCrunch

Brian Heater:

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In a surprise move, Apple this week penned a letter to California state senator Susan Talamantes Eggman, voicing support for SB 244, a “right to repair” bill currently making its way through Sacramento’s State Capitol building.

Apple has, of course, softened its stance on right to repair legislation in recent years, including last year’s addition of a Self Service Repair program. The offering, which was viewed by many as a preemptive measure against looming state and federal legislation, provides users with rental tools to repair iPhones and Macs at home.

SB 244 is fairly expansive; it includes consumer electronics (phones, laptops, etc.) and appliances (microwaves, washing machines, etc.), though a few exceptions have been carved out, including game consoles and alarm systems. The rational for those appear to be piracy and security, respectively. It shares a good deal (including the proposed name) with the Right to Repair Act, which went into effect in Minnesota this May.

In the letter, Apple expresses its support on the grounds of offering consumers the ability to repair their devices safely, without risking privacy or data issues.

“Apple supports California’s Right to Repair Act so all Californians have even greater access to repairs while also protecting their safety, security, and privacy,” the company says in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “We create our products to last and, if they ever need to be repaired, Apple customers have a growing range of safe, high-quality repair options.”

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Certainly, you can repair it yourself if you have the eyesight of a hawk and the fingers of a surgeon. Or just pay someone else to do it. Not sure how much difference this will truly make, so perhaps Apple feels there’s nothing to lose or gain in reality, but a bit of PR to gain.
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“I’ve always dreamed of having a dongle to charge my car” • The Verge

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge :

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Notable Verge traitor [she left The Verge to join the Wall Street Journal] Joanna Stern has been in the market for an EV for the past few months. (I know because she keeps texting me about it.) Like any true reviewer, she solved her problem by taking the the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, and the Tesla Model Y head-to-head on a road trip — and called up Marques Brownlee for a little advice along the way.

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Stern is always good, and this is a typically good video review. Electric cars are coming!

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A surprisingly high percentage of people leave subtitles on when watching TV of any sort, research has found. CC-licensed photo by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier 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 blogpost at the Social Warming Substack due at about 0845. It’s about research – or the impending absence of it.

The Overspill is going on a two-week break. By the end of which there should be some news in the world of technology.

A selection of 11 links for you. What did he say? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A new frontier for travel scammers: AI-generated guidebooks • The New York Times

Seth Kugel and Stephen Hiltner:

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In March, as she planned for an upcoming trip to France, Amy Kolsky, an experienced international traveler who lives in Bucks County, Pa., visited Amazon.com and typed in a few search terms: travel, guidebook, France. Titles from a handful of trusted brands appeared near the top of the page: Rick Steves, Fodor’s, Lonely Planet. Also among the top search results was the highly rated “France Travel Guide,” by Mike Steves, who, according to an Amazon author page, is a renowned travel writer.

“I was immediately drawn by all the amazing reviews,” said Ms. Kolsky, 53, referring to what she saw at that time: universal raves and more than 100 five-star ratings. The guide promised itineraries and recommendations from locals. Its price tag — $16.99, compared with $25.49 for Rick Steves’s book on France — also caught Ms. Kolsky’s attention. She quickly ordered a paperback copy, printed by Amazon’s on-demand service.

When it arrived, Ms. Kolsky was disappointed by its vague descriptions, repetitive text and lack of itineraries. “It seemed like the guy just went on the internet, copied a whole bunch of information from Wikipedia and just pasted it in,” she said. She returned it and left a scathing one-star review.

Though she didn’t know it at the time, Ms. Kolsky had fallen victim to a new form of travel scam: shoddy guidebooks that appear to be compiled with the help of generative artificial intelligence, self-published and bolstered by sham reviews, that have proliferated in recent months on Amazon.

The books are the result of a swirling mix of modern tools: A.I. apps that can produce text and fake portraits; websites with a seemingly endless array of stock photos and graphics; self-publishing platforms — like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing — with few guardrails against the use of A.I.; and the ability to solicit, purchase and post phony online reviews, which runs counter to Amazon’s policies and may soon face increased regulation from the Federal Trade Commission.

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Really fighting against an inexorable wave here. Where next?
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Detroit police changing facial-recognition policy after pregnant woman says she was wrongly charged • Associated Press via NBC News

»

Detroit’s police chief said he’s setting new policies on the use of facial-recognition technology, after a woman who was eight months pregnant said she was wrongly charged with robbery and carjacking in a case that was ultimately dismissed by prosecutors.

The technology, which was used on images taken from gas station video, produced leads in the case but was followed by “very poor” police work, Chief James White said.

“We want to ensure that nothing like this happens again,” White said on Wednesday.

His comments came two days after the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan announced a lawsuit on behalf of Porcha Woodruff, a 32-year-old Black woman, who was arrested in February while trying to get children ready for school. There have been two similar lawsuits against Detroit.

Woodruff was identified as a suspect in a January robbery and carjacking through facial-recognition technology. She denied any role. The Wayne County prosecutor’s office said charges later were dropped because the victim did not appear in court.

White said his officers will not be allowed “to use facial-recognition-derived images in a photographic lineup. Period.”

He said two captains must review arrest warrants when facial technology is used in a case, among other changes. The new policies will be presented to the Detroit Police Board of Commissioners.

White said there must be other evidence, outside the technology, for police to believe a suspect had the “means, ability and opportunity to commit the crime.”

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Good to know they can change quickly sometimes.
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Volume down, subtitles on: 51% of us read along with our favourite shows • PC Magazine

Chandra Steele:

»

You’re either a subtitles person or you’re not. But increasingly, people are. Preply followed up on its subtitle-use survey of Americans from 2022 and found a 5% rise, to 58%, in how many people use captioning more than they used to.

Now, just over half (51%) of those surveyed say they use subtitles most of the time. If you’re thinking this habit could be the purview of older folks who are having a hard time hearing—well, 96% of Gen Z survey respondents said they impose words over what they’re watching. 

Netflix watchers are using captioning the most; 52% of survey respondents say they turn the feature on while they’re watching. Subtitles help 81% of people better comprehend what they’re watching. A significant part of the time (70%), people use subtitles to understand foreign accents, particularly if a speaker is Scottish, which poses a problem for Outlander fans. 

Preply found that Americans have a hard time understanding their own language when someone has a Scottish accent (47%), an Irish accent (20%), a British accent (13%), a South African accent (12%), an Australian accent (5%), and even a Southern US accent (3%). So those who watching Derry Girls, Downton Abbey, and Ozark are adjusting their settings to follow along.

Background music is a reason 61% of viewers give for not being able to hear dialogue in shows and movies, along with muddled audio (15%). And a lot of streaming content was either created for theater speakers or mixed to fit the varying specs between streamers. Adding to the problem: the variations in television and tablet speakers.

Finally, a quarter of those who turn on subtitles do so because a specific actor is hard to understand. We’re looking at you, Tom Hardy. His character Bane’s voice in The Dark Knight Rises might be Hardy’s most infamously baffling choice, but even when he’s speaking without a mask, audiences find him mostly incomprehensible.

«

So basically Americans can’t understand non-American accents. (Ozark, though?)

This all bolsters the case for TVs having subtitles on by default – which helps children. If any still watch TV.
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Muon discovery moves physicists one step closer to a theoretical showdown • The New York Times

Katrina Miller:

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Scientists are putting to the test the Standard Model, a grand theory that encompasses all of nature’s known particles and forces. Although the Standard Model has successfully predicted the outcome of countless experiments, physicists have long had a hunch that its framework is incomplete. The theory fails to account for gravity, and it also can’t explain dark matter (the glue holding our universe together), or dark energy (the force pulling it apart).

One of many ways that researchers are looking for physics beyond the Standard Model is by studying muons. As heavier cousins of the electron, muons are unstable, surviving just two-millionths of a second before decaying into lighter particles. They also act like tiny bar magnets: Place a muon in a magnetic field, and it will wobble around like a top. The speed of that motion depends on a property of the muon called the magnetic moment, which physicists abbreviate as g.

In theory, g should exactly equal 2. But physicists know that this value gets ruffled by the “quantum foam” of virtual particles that blip in and out of existence and prevent empty space from being truly empty. These transient particles change the rate of the muon’s wobble. By taking stock of all the forces and particles in the Standard Model, physicists can predict how much g will be offset. They call this deviation g-2.

But if there are unknown particles at play, experimental measurements of g will not match this prediction. “And that’s what makes the muon so exciting to study,” Dr. Binney said. “It’s sensitive to all of the particles that exist, even the ones that we don’t know about yet.” Any difference between theory and experiment, she added, means new physics is on the horizon.

To measure g-2, researchers at Fermilab generated a beam of muons and steered it into a 50-foot-diameter, doughnut-shaped magnet, the inside brimming with virtual particles that were popping into reality. As the muons raced around the ring, detectors along its edge recorded how fast they were wobbling.

Using 40 billion muons — five times as much data as the researchers had in 2021 — the team measured g-2 to be 0.00233184110, a one-tenth of 1% deviation from 2. The result has a precision of 0.2 parts per million. That’s like measuring the distance between New York City and Chicago with an uncertainty of only 10 inches, Dr. Pitts said.

«

However, that doesn’t necessarily confirm the Standard Model. There’s more to come on this. (Miller, who wrote the piece, has a PhD in particle physics. Useful.)
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How Apple lost the K-12 education market to Google • Business Insider

Michael Gartenberg used to work for Apple, in its marketing department (having moved there from Gartner, the research company):

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Apple once worked hard to position the iPad as its offering for education. (Remember the 2017 “What’s a computer?” commercial where a school-aged kid spends the day, including doing homework, on the iPad? Or the “Your next computer is not a computer” ad where two high schoolers use their iPads to compete for class president?)

But as one principal of a relatively affluent private school pointed out to me, the cost of an iPad — along with a Magic Keyboard (cover folio keyboards did not meet their needs), plus an Apple pencil — was the equivalent of at least three comparable Chromebooks that could be used by more than one student. Chromebooks are also much easier to repair or replace and log back in. There’s no need for the complex restore process that Apple uses, particularly for iOS devices.

One of Apple’s biggest pushes to make the iPad the standard device used in K-12 schools was back in 2013 when the Los Angeles school system signed a contract to purchase $1 billion worth of devices. I worked at Apple at the time, and that contract was viewed as a huge win and was expected to be the first of many deals that would propel iPads into classrooms across the country. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite turn out that way.

The initial $30m contract was expected to expand to about $500m as the project rolled out over the following year. An additional $500m was to be used to expand internet access and other infrastructure issues at schools. Costs rose quickly as the need for peripherals such as keyboards became apparent, and critics noted that the iPad model the district agreed to buy was already superseded by newer, more capable devices sold at retail stores.

«

The Chromebook, and Google’s related cloud offerings, were always going to be better suited to schools than the iPad, simply on grounds of cost and form factor.
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X CEO Linda Yaccarino explains reason for getting rid of Twitter name • CNBC

Rohan Goswami:

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Yaccarino, who started the job in June, said Musk has been working up to this [branding change] since buying Twitter late last year.

“Think about what’s happened since the acquisition,” she said. “Experiences and evolution into long-form video and articles, subscribe to your favorite creators, who are now earning a real living on the platform. You look at video, and soon you’ll be able to make video chat calls without having to give your phone number to anyone on the platform.”

Yaccarino also highlighted the company’s plans to enable payments between users and friends and creators.

“The rebrand represented really a liberation from Twitter,” she said. “A liberation that allowed us to evolve past a legacy mindset and thinking. And to reimagine how everyone, how everyone on Spaces who’s listening, everybody who’s watching around the world. It’s going to change how we congregate, how we entertain, how we transact all in one platform.”

…Yaccarino said she has “autonomy” under Musk, adding that advertisers should be comfortable returning to the platform.

“Mine and Elon’s roles are very clear,” she said.

Yaccarino pointed to the post, announcing her hiring, where Musk underscored his continued control over product design and new technology.

“Elon is working on accelerating the rebrand and working on the future,” Yaccarino said. “And I’m responsible for the rest. Running the company, from partnerships to legal to sales to finance.”

«

At one stage in the interview she talks about “tweets”, which just goes to show how incredibly powerful the old brand works. She’s talking delusional junk, but at least we have clarity now: she’ll just say any old thing.

And the video calls, presumably tied to your handle? One can already think of tons of ways for that to go wrong. (How do you decide who’s allowed to call you? Anyone? Any follower? Only selected people? It will surely be a boon to the pornspambots, but not sure the rest of us are that keen: we have enough video call avenues already.)
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Meta’s news blackout sparks some Canadian advertisers to boycott • Mashable

Christianna Silva:

»

Stingray Group announced on Tuesday that it will “immediately suspend” all advertising on Facebook and Instagram in Canada. Stingray, which is a Montreal-based music and video content company, said the move is in response to Meta blocking news content in Canada.

“We cannot tolerate Meta’s recent decision to block news from Canadian news media publishers and their potential implications for Canadian news content,” Eric Boyko, co-founder and chief executive officer of Stingray, told MarketWatch. “As a result, we have decided to pause our advertising on Facebook and Instagram.”

Stingray is just the most recent company in Canada to pull advertising from Meta. It follows the British Columbia government, the Canadian federal government, the Quebec and Ottawa governments, and other governments in Canada that also pulled advertising from Meta. Quebec worker’s union also suspended all advertising, along with Canadian telecoms operator Quebecor and Cogeco, which runs radio stations in Quebec, according to Reuters. 

«

Absolutely no indication of how much money Stingray spends on Facebook advertising annually in Canada, which seems like a worthwhile question for MarketWatch or Mashable to have asked. Its market cap is ~$250m, which isn’t nothing, but I doubt Facebook is going to melt in terror at this. Publicity stunt.
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ABC exiting Twitter: Australia’s national broadcaster shuts down almost all accounts on Elon Musk’s X • The Guardian

Amanda Meade:

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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is shutting down almost all of its official accounts on Twitter – now known as X under Elon Musk’s ownership – citing “toxic interactions”, cost and better interaction with ABC content on other social media platforms.

There will only be four remaining official accounts for Australia’s public broadcaster: @abcnews, @abcsport, @abcchinese and the master @abcaustralia account. ABC Chinese reaches Chinese-speaking audiences on X.

“Starting from today, other ABC accounts will be discontinued,” the ABC managing director, David Anderson, has told staff. Musk responded to the move by accusing the ABC of embracing censorship.

Anderson said the closure of the Insiders, News Breakfast and ABC Politics accounts earlier this year limited the amount of toxic interactions, which had grown more prevalent under Musk and made engagement with the shows more positive.

Several high-profile ABC journalists left Twitter after being subjected to abuse, including News Breakfast host Lisa Millar and Australian Story host Leigh Sales.

“We also found that closing individual program accounts helps limit the exposure of team members to the toxic interactions that unfortunately are becoming more prevalent on X,” Anderson said.

«

“Musk responded to the move by accusing the ABC of embracing censorship” is absolutely classic.
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Are reports of StackOverflow’s fall greatly exaggerated? • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz:

»

The post [last week] stated Stack Overflow has lost about 50% of its traffic. However, the traffic data turned out to not account for a Google Analytics change. Allowing for this, the drop would be 35%. Still, the most worrying part of the statistics is not traffic, but the drop in questions asked and upvotes.

I pinged engineers at Stack Overflow to get their thoughts about what’s happening. What they said is that they are not seeing so dramatic a drop, internally, and that data shared with the most active contributors is inaccurate. I also reached out via official channels to Stack Overflow, and here’s what the company told me (the company later published a blog post with some of the below data included):

• 5%: the company wrote “overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022.”
• 14%: the sharp decrease in traffic in April 2023. The company said: “we can likely attribute this to developers trying GPT-4 after it was released in March.”
• 14%: this is by how much search engine traffic is down, year-on-year.
• A predictable rise and fall, as with any sudden change. When global lockdowns started in 2020, Stack Overflow saw a spike and then a decrease in cloud migration questions and security-related ones. I sense the company is not surprised that AI had an impact on traffic and the types of questions.
• Q&A activity is definitely down: the company is aware of this metric taking a dive, and said they’re actively working to address it.

…Could we see the fall of public Q&A sites as AI tools rise? A striking statistic is just how much the volume of questions asked has dropped. It’s not as if people have fewer questions, it’s just that developers are typing these questions into AI tools, instead.

«

Developers have definitely been the quickest – alongside journalists (or publishers) – to adopt generative AI. And we’re already seeing the effects.

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Google’s search box changed the meaning of information • WIRED

Elan Ullendorff:

»

I HAVE A theory of technology that places every informational product on a spectrum from Physician to Librarian.

The Physician’s primary aim is to protect you from context. In diagnosing or treating you, they draw on years of training, research, and personal experience, but rather than presenting that information to you in its raw form, they condense and synthesize. This is for good reason: When you go to a doctor’s office, your primary aim is not to have your curiosity sparked or to dive into primary sources; you want answers, in the form of diagnosis or treatment. The Physician saves you time and shelters you from information that might be misconstrued or unnecessarily anxiety-provoking.

In contrast, the Librarian’s primary aim is to point you toward context. In answering your questions, they draw on years of training, research, and personal experience, and they use that to pull you into a conversation with a knowledge system, and with the humans behind that knowledge system. The Librarian may save you time in the short term by getting you to a destination more quickly. But in the long term, their hope is that the destination will reveal itself to be a portal. They find thought enriching, rather than laborious, and understand their expertise to be in wayfinding rather than solutions. Sometimes you ask a Librarian a question and they point you to a book that is an answer to a question you didn’t even think to ask. Sometimes you walk over to the stacks to retrieve the book, only for a different book to catch your eye instead. This too is success to the Librarian.

There are book reviews that say “I read this so you don’t have to” (Physician), and others that say “I read this and you should too” (Librarian). There are apps that put you in a perpetual state of simmering, unrealized wanderlust from the comfort of your couch (Physician) and others that inspire you to get up and go (Librarian).

A search engine, at its core, is a product that tries to help you visit pages made by humans, quintessentially Librarian. In a 2004 Playboy interview, Google cofounder Larry page was unequivocal in his assertion that he wanted to “get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible.” But over the past 10 years, let’s just say Google has gone to medical school. The answer is king; a mere link is nothing more than failure of technology.

«

This is just the prelude; the essay (which it is) deserves to be read in full, especially for its concern about “the soft apocalypse of truth”. One can also ask: why do we trust a human to direct us correctly to the truth, but not an algorithm which watches which links people follow searching for the truth?
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Phil Mickelson’s gambling losses totalled nearly $100m, former associate alleges in new book • GolfDigest.com

Billy Walters is one of the most successful sports gamblers of all time, and now he’s writing an autobiography – which includes his experience forming a betting partnership with US pro golfer Phil Mickelson :

»

In late September 2012, Phil called me from Medinah Country Club just outside Chicago, site of the 39th Ryder Cup matches between the United States and Europe. He was feeling supremely confident that the American squad led by Tiger Woods, Bubba Watson, and Phil himself was about to reclaim the Cup from the Euros. He was so confident that he asked me to place a $400,000 wager for him on the U.S. team to win.

I could not believe what I was hearing.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?” I told him. “Don’t you remember what happened to Pete Rose?” The former Cincinnati Reds manager was banned from baseball for betting on his own team. “You’re seen as a modern-day Arnold Palmer,” I added. “You’d risk all that for this? I want no part of it.”

“Alright, alright,” he replied.

I have no idea whether Phil placed the bet elsewhere. Hopefully, he came to his senses, especially considering the “Miracle at Medinah.” Trailing 10-6 going into the final day of singles matches, the Europeans pulled off the greatest comeback in Ryder Cup history. They won eight matches and tied one to beat the Americans by a single point, 14½ to 13½.

«

Walters’s revelations are stunning – though read to the end of this extract and then marvel at how he is able to maintain such an even tone. (This may be why he is so successful at sports betting.)

I’ve never understood gambling on sports; as a participant, I don’t need any further incentive to want to win; as a spectator, I don’t want to hand over my money to the whims of fate, and isn’t the outcome of the competition itself enough excitement? For sports gamblers, evidently not. It’s a mental space I can’t grasp.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Hunga-Tonga volcanic eruption was one of the biggest recorded – but the aftermath has had surprisingly little effect on the climate. CC-licensed photo by James St. John on Flickr.

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

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

Eight months pregnant and arrested after false facial recognition match • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

»

Porcha Woodruff was getting her two daughters ready for school when six police officers showed up at her door in Detroit. They asked her to step outside because she was under arrest for robbery and carjacking.

“Are you kidding?” she recalled saying to the officers. Ms. Woodruff, 32, said she gestured at her stomach to indicate how ill-equipped she was to commit such a crime: She was eight months pregnant.

Handcuffed in front of her home on a Thursday morning last February, leaving her crying children with her fiancé, Ms. Woodruff was taken to the Detroit Detention Center. She said she was held for 11 hours, questioned about a crime she said she had no knowledge of, and had her iPhone seized to be searched for evidence.

“I was having contractions in the holding cell. My back was sending me sharp pains. I was having spasms. I think I was probably having a panic attack,” said Ms. Woodruff, a licensed aesthetician and nursing school student. “I was hurting, sitting on those concrete benches.”

After being charged in court with robbery and carjacking, Ms. Woodruff was released that evening on a $100,000 personal bond. In an interview, she said she went straight to the hospital where she was diagnosed with dehydration and given two bags of intravenous fluids. A month later, the Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her.

The ordeal started with an automated facial recognition search, according to an investigator’s report from the Detroit Police Department. Ms. Woodruff is the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology used by police to match an unknown offender’s face to a photo in a database. All six people have been Black; Ms. Woodruff is the first woman to report it happening to her.

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American police. Truly the example for us all: the example of how not to do it.
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The internet speech case that the US Supreme Court can’t dodge • WIRED

Jeff Kosseff:

»

Despite their reluctance to decide lofty cyber issues, there is a good chance that another internet law dispute will come before the justices in the next year. And this time, it will be difficult for them to avoid directly deciding the issue and having a huge impact on how the internet looks for decades to come.

The disputes involve two similar Texas and Florida laws which both restrict platforms from moderating certain speech and require transparency about user content policies. The Texas law, for example, states that large social media platforms “may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person” based on viewpoints or the users’ location. NetChoice, a group representing tech companies, has challenged both laws.

Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit struck down Florida’s moderation restrictions. Judge Kevin Newsom wrote that platforms’ content moderation choices “constitute protected exercises of editorial judgment,” so the law likely violates the First Amendment. But later that year, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the Texas law. “Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote.

The Florida and Texas laws are not identical, but it is impossible to reconcile the courts’ opinions. In the Eleventh Circuit, tech companies have a First Amendment right to moderate user content as they see fit. In the Fifth Circuit, they do not. Lawyers refer to this problem—having different legal rules depending on what part of the country you’re in—as a “circuit split.” And a circuit split is particularly problematic for issues involving the internet, which reaches across state borders.

The Supreme Court receives more than 7,000 requests to review lower court decisions each year, and typically grants less than 1% of them. But the chances of the Supreme Court reviewing the NetChoice cases are greater than those of an average dispute.

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I’d love to think SCOTUS will robustly uphold Section 230, but I’d rather the opportunity didn’t come up. Clarence Thomas is definitely against it. And he’s not even the most bonkers of them.
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CNET deletes thousands of old articles to game Google search • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

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Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned.

Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks. A CNET representative confirmed that the company was culling stories but declined to share exactly how many it has taken down. The move adds to recent controversies over CNET’s editorial strategy, which has included layoffs and experiments with error-riddled articles written by AI chatbots.

…Many companies live or die by their performance on Google Search, but Google is tight-lipped about the workings of its algorithms. SEO [search engine optimisation, of both site and stories] is now one of the primary drivers of editorial strategy in the journalism and media business. News sites and media companies often base their entire editorial strategies on SEO best practices, some of which amount to trial and error and guessing games.

Google does not recommend deleting articles just because they’re considered “older,” said Danny Sullivan, the company’s Public Liaison for Google Search. In fact, the practice is something Google has advised against for years. After Gizmodo’s request for comment, Sullivan posted a series of tweets on the subject.

“Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn’t like ‘old’ content? That’s not a thing! Our guidance doesn’t encourage this,” Sullivan tweeted.

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It’s funny how our modern age still has its own version of astrology/ cargo cults (“we do this thing and pray that the good vibes follow”) for search, and is just developing another one, with AI prompts for illustrations.
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The two bets • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf (who has been reading back issues of WIRED magazine so you don’t have to):

»

what’s more important for the purpose of this essay is why WIRED, circa 1997, decided to reach back to a 1990 academic bet and canonize Julian Simon as one of their patron saints. Simon was a third-rate business administration professor, furious that the world never hailed him as a first-class economist. He also, ohbytheway, believed that there was an infinite supply of copper because, at the right price point, humankind would just figure out how to transmute copper from other metals. (Sabin, p. 132)

The guy was a crank and a malcontent. His relationship to the “digital generation” that WIRED typically elevated to hero-status was slim at best. But he had chosen the right enemies. Julian Simon’s bet [against doomster environmentalist Paul Ehrlich] was a useful shorthand for “see, things are getting better. Government regulations never solve anything. A new era of abundance is arriving now, and anyone who disagrees is a fool or a liar.”

And that, more than advances in interconnected computing devices, was the story that WIRED wanted to tell.

…There’s an old saying from my activist days: “environmentalists are the only people predicting the future who want to be wrong.”

It would be so nice if the libertarian techno-optimism of the 90s been actually been right. What a wonderful world that would be. I would love for my kids to be growing up in the world they imagined we were building. But does anyone honestly believe that?

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Fabulously entertaining, as Karpf’s essays all are.
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It’s so over. Now what? • Macroscience

Tim Hwang:

»

Consider LK-99 [the turns-out-not-to-be room temperature ambient pressure superconductor] as a global spasm of participatory science. ArXiv served as a launchpad for disseminating an exciting research opportunity beyond the strictures of traditional scientific publishing. Social media opened up the game, enabling seasoned experts, attention-seeking ignoramuses, weirdo basement tinkerers, and competing laboratories all to push, prod, attack, and defend the opportunity. 

The result? More rapid and comprehensive scrutiny of a scientific claim than would have happened through traditional scholarly channels. We also got widespread experimental replication, an inarguably important but low-prestige and frequently underinvested-in part of the usual academic pipeline. 

We can also praise LK-99 from the point of view of public pedagogy. It served to massively advance public awareness of the importance of materials science in everyday life. In the public mind, it affirmed replication as a fundamental building block of scientific validity. It highlighted the idea of science as accessible and belonging to the public, rather than the exclusive province of a scholarly high priesthood. 

Despite these silver linings, it is easy to dismiss the fervor around LK-99 because it runs so against the grain of what we expect of science. We expect sober institutions run by established experts, carefully crafting experiments and publishing heavily reviewed results over a period of years. This is science as a slow-moving chess game, with a final, conclusive result of “true” or “false” being rendered to the public at the end of the process.

This was not LK-99. LK-99 was all about obsessively checking the prediction markets and a genuinely beautiful Wikipedia page every hour, gleefully and inanely shouting “we’re so back” and “it’s so over” as each new bit of data or speculation shifted the marginal epistemological balance. LK-99 was Gamestop Science, AMC Science, Meme Science.

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Some science moves slowly, some science – like this one – moves fast. Meme science, indeed.
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PayPal crypto chief Jose Fernandez da Ponte on battling Tether, USDC

MacKenzie Sigalos and Jordan Smith:

»

PayPal has become the first major US fintech company to offer its own crypto token with a dollar-pegged stablecoin known as PayPal USD, making big promises of how it can move money between millions of crypto investors. 

The company is entering an extremely crowded market already dominated by stablecoins like tether and USDC, at a time when the hype over cryptocurrency has largely fizzled and prices have been mostly stable with no big run-ups since 2022.

But the company’s chief crypto exec tells CNBC that the payment processor is confident in its timing – and its competitive advantage in the space.

“Stablecoins are the killer application for blockchains right now,” said Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s senior vice president and general manager of blockchain, crypto, and digital currencies. 

“There are inherent advantages in cost, programmability, settlement time,” continued da Ponte, adding that the market is primed for new entrants that are fully backed – and unlike tether, fully regulated. 

“Stablecoins are something that we cannot just sit out,” da Ponte added.

…But many of the people who deal in stablecoins don’t necessarily want safe. They want an easier way of doing business, especially internationally.

“It’s just an alternative payments network, built on top of the commercial bank system,” Nic Carter, founding partner at Castle Island Ventures, previously told CNBC. “It’s like open banking on steroids. It is very interoperable, it is relatively transparent, and in theory, you can get faster settlement and faster cross-border settlement, because it’s not encumbered [by making a claim on a central bank].”

«

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US special counsel obtained search warrant for Trump’s Twitter account • The Guardian

Kari Paul and agencies:

»

The US special counsel who is investigating Donald Trump obtained a search warrant for the former president’s Twitter account, and the social media platform delayed complying, a court filing on Wednesday showed.

The delay in compliance prompted a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.

The filing says the team of US special counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter, which recently rebranded to X, to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant.

The filing says prosecutors got the search warrant after a court “found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses”. The court found that disclosing the warrant could risk that Trump would “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior”, according to the filing.

It’s unclear what information Smith may have sought from Trump’s Twitter account. Possibilities include data about when and where the posts were written, their engagement and the identities of other accounts that reposted Trump’s content.

Twitter objected to the non-disclosure agreement, saying four days after the compliance deadline that it would not produce any of the account information, according to the ruling.

«

I’d imagine they were looking for direct messages from people connected to the attack on the Capitol. Seems an obvious avenue to investigate. And that’s $350k Twitter won’t get back.
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A woman was attacked by a snake that fell from the sky. Then a hawk dived in • The New York Times

Chang Che:

»

One should never get in the way of a hawk and its prey.

Peggy Jones learned that lesson in a most unwitting way on July 25 as she and her husband were finishing a day of yard work on a six-acre property that they own in Silsbee, Texas, about 100 miles northeast of Houston.

First, in an improbable occurrence, a snake fell from the clear blue sky, wrapping itself tightly around Ms. Jones’s right forearm. “I immediately screamed and started swinging my arm to shake the snake off,” Ms. Jones, 64, said in an interview. “I was screaming, ‘Jesus, help me, please, Jesus, help me!’”

The snake wrapped itself around her arm more tightly. It hissed and lunged at her face, at times striking her glasses. But then, Ms. Jones realized, the snake, too, was an unwitting victim. A brown-and-white hawk flying overhead had fumbled and dropped the four-and-a-half-foot-long scaly creature. The hawk quickly joined the fracas, swooping down to wrench its serpentine dinner from Ms. Jones’ arm.

The hawk snatched, scratched and jabbed at her arm “three to four times,” to reclaim its meal, Ms. Jones recalled. Each time, its powerful talons slashed her forearm. At one point, the bird dragged Ms. Jones’s arm up into the air. On the fourth try, it successfully uncoiled the snake and flew away. The “horrific” ordeal, Ms. Jones said, lasted about 15 to 20 seconds, and left her arm scratched, bruised and punctured.

…Her nightmares vary. Some are a rehash of the encounter, Ms. Jones said, while others are stranger.

“Sometimes I’m in a room and there’s snakes on the wall and snakes on the ceiling and snakes all over the floor,” she said.

«

All she needs is a son called Indiana to whom she tells the tale. Perfect origin story.
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The climate impact of the Hunga-Tonga volcanic eruption • The Climate Brink

Andrew Dessler:

»

Volcanoes play a key role in the Earth’s climate. On geologic time scales, they are a key regulator of the carbon cycle that regulates atmospheric carbon dioxide. On shorter time scales, eruptions can also have profound, temporary impacts.

In January 2022, Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai (hereafter, HT) erupted in one of the most dramatic geologic events in recorded history. The eruption of HT sent sulfur and water vapour deep into the stratosphere. The spectacular nature of this event has led many climate deniers to proclaim that this is why it’s so hot this summer. Let’s dig into that claim.

…The eruption of the HT volcano was unusual in that it also injected a massive amount of water vapour into the stratosphere. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, so this injection of water will tend to warm the climate.

[After citing three papers which suggest there will be really minimal warming from HT] …You’re probably wondering why the huge amount of water injected into the stratosphere isn’t warming the climate much. The reason is where the water went: most of the water was sent really high into the stratosphere, above 25 km. At that height, water has a minimal effect on the climate.

…The impact of HT is something that we understand reasonably well and everything we know suggests that it will have a very small impact on the global climate — in fact, it’s as likely to be cooling the climate as it is to be warming it. If you’re sweating right now, don’t blame HT. Blame fossil fuels.

«

Just so you know when you bump into someone talking nonsense about the climate.
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Culture vultures • ROUGH TYPE

Nick Carr:

»

there is something ominous about a superbillionaire taking over what had become a sort of public square, a centre of discourse, for crying out loud, and doing with it what he pleases, including some pretty perverted acts. I mean, that X logo? Virginia Heffernan compares it to “the skull and crossbones on cartoon bottles of poison.” To me, it looks like something that a cop might spray-paint on a floor to mark the spot where a corpse lay before it was removed—the corpse in this case being the bird’s.

Musk’s toying dismemberment of Twitter feels even more unsettling in the wake of the announcement yesterday that private-equity giant KKR is buying Simon & Schuster, publisher of Catch-22 and Den of Thieves, among other worthy titles, for a measly billion and a half. Says S&S CEO Jon Karp: “They plan to invest in us and make us even greater than we already are. What more could a publishing company want?” That would have made a funny tweet.

Both gambits are asset plays, or, maybe a better term, asset undertakings. I don’t understand everything Musk’s doing—manic episodes have their own logic—but he does get an established social-media platform and a big pile of content to feed into the large language model he’s building at xAI. (Fun game: connect the Xs.) KKR gets its own pile of content to, uh, leverage. Its intentions probably aren’t entirely literary.

Well-turned sentences had a decent run, but after TikTok they’ve become depreciating assets. Traditional word-based culture—and, sure, I’ll stick Twitter into that category—is beginning to look like a feeding ground for vultures. Tell Colleen Hoover [S&S author of It Ends with Us] to turn out the lights when she leaves.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A USB-C connector on the next iPhone is all but confirmed by the latest leaked pictures. CC-licensed photo by ajay_suresh on Flickr.

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

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

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

Why ChatGPT is getting dumber at basic math • WSJ

Josh Zumbrun:

»

new research released this week reveals a fundamental challenge of developing artificial intelligence: ChatGPT has become worse at performing certain basic math operations.

The researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley said the deterioration is an example of a phenomenon known to AI developers as drift, where attempts to improve one part of the enormously complex AI models make other parts of the models perform worse.

“Changing it in one direction can worsen it in other directions,” said James Zou, a Stanford professor who is affiliated with the school’s AI lab and is one of the authors of the new research. “It makes it very challenging to consistently improve.”

…They gave the chatbot a basic task: identify whether a particular number is a prime number. This is the sort of math problem that is complicated for people but simple for computers.

Is 17,077 prime? Is 17,947 prime? Unless you are a savant you can’t work this out in your head, but it is easy for computers to evaluate. A computer can just brute force the problem—try dividing by two, three, five, etc., and see if anything works.

To track performance, the researchers fed ChatGPT 1,000 different numbers. In March, the premium GPT-4, correctly identified whether 84% of the numbers were prime or not. (Pretty mediocre performance for a computer, frankly.) By June its success rate had dropped to 51%.

Across eight different tasks, GPT-4 became worse at six of them. GPT-3.5 improved on six measures, but remained worse than its advanced sibling at most of the tasks.

«

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.
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Air pollution linked to rise in antibiotic resistance that imperils human health • The Guardian

Andrew Gregory:

»

The main drivers are still the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which are used to treat infections. But the study suggests the problem is being worsened by rising levels of air pollution.

The study did not look at the science of why the two might be linked. Evidence suggests that particulate matter PM2.5 can contain antibiotic-resistant bacteria and resistance genes, which may be transferred between environments and inhaled directly by humans, the authors said.

Air pollution is already the single largest environmental risk to public health. Long-term exposure to air pollution is associated with chronic conditions such as heart disease, asthma and lung cancer, reducing life expectancy.

Short-term exposure to high pollution levels can cause coughing, wheezing and asthma attacks, and is leading to increased hospital and GP attendances worldwide.

Curbing air pollution could help reduce antibiotic resistance, according to the study, the first in-depth global analysis of possible links between the two. It also said that controlling air pollution could greatly reduce deaths and economic costs stemming from antibiotic-resistant infections.

The lead author, Prof Hong Chen of Zhejiang University in China, said: “Antibiotic resistance and air pollution are each in their own right among the greatest threats to global health.

“Until now, we didn’t have a clear picture of the possible links between the two, but this work suggests the benefits of controlling air pollution could be twofold: not only will it reduce the harmful effects of poor air quality, it could also play a major role in combatting the rise and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”

«

Published in the Lancet Planetary Health journal. This is a rather counterintuitive result, to be honest, and makes one wonder if it’s just a correlation, rather than a causation.
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The Reddit protest is finally over. Reddit won • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

»

The last major holdouts in the massive protest against Reddit’s controversial API pricing have relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the beloved TV host in certain dissident subreddits. It marks the end of months of fighting, which included site-wide blackouts. Now it seems the battle has come to a close. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.

In June, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman decided to start charging for API access, establishing a fee for third-party apps that integrate with Reddit’s social network. That cut off essential tools used by the site’s legion of unpaid moderators. Immediately, tensions ran high. Moderators saw the change as a destructive and greedy cash grab, and more than 8,000 subreddits set themselves to private in protest, including many of Reddit’s largest communities, making it near-impossible to access their content. That action was so significant that a Google executive said in a private meeting it made search results worse.

…“More than a month has passed, and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people’s attention has shifted to other things,” an r/aww moderator wrote in a post about the rule change.

According to Reddark, a site that tracks the subreddit protest, 1,843 of the original 8,829 protesting communities are still dark. But most of these are small communities, and today only protesting subreddit with over 10 million subscribers is r/fitness.

«

People underestimate corporate patience.
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‘Limitless’ energy: how floating solar panels near the equator could power future population hotspots • The Conversation

Andrew Blakers and David Firnando Silalahi:

»

Vast arrays of solar panels floating on calm seas near the Equator could provide effectively unlimited solar energy to densely populated countries in Southeast Asia and West Africa.

Our new research shows offshore solar in Indonesia alone could generate about 35,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar energy a year, which is similar to current global electricity production (30,000TWh per year).

And while most of the world’s oceans experience storms, some regions at the Equator are relatively still and peaceful. So relatively inexpensive engineering structures could suffice to protect offshore floating solar panels.

Our high-resolution global heat maps show the Indonesian archipelago and equatorial West Africa near Nigeria have the greatest potential for offshore floating solar arrays.

On current trends, the global economy will be largely decarbonised and electrified by 2050, supported by vast amounts of solar and wind energy.

About 70 square kilometres of solar panels can provide all the energy requirements of a million affluent people in a zero-carbon economy. The panels can be placed on rooftops, in arid areas, colocated with agriculture, or floated on water bodies.

But countries with high population densities, such as Nigeria and Indonesia, will have limited space for solar energy harvesting.

«

Nice idea, though I wonder a bit about what all that lovely salt water would do to the silicon. Have the authors heard of boats? They tend to need a lot of looking after. Even in calm waters.
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It’s time to change how we cover Elon Musk • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

By now, we have countless examples of Musk making an announcement and walking it back. In February, for example, Musk said the company would begin sharing ad revenue with creators “today” — an announcement that was widely covered. After issuing just one payment last month to a small, hand-picked group of creators last month, the company said that it had gotten too many applications and would have to delay the start of payments indefinitely.

And even when Musk does deliver, the fine print is sometimes enough to ruin the whole proposition. Last week, for example, the company said it would make good on a promise to let subscribers to X Premium — formerly Twitter Blue — hide their verified checkmarks, which have become a badge of dishonor and mockery among the wider user base.

But as Ivan Mehta noted at TechCrunch, quoting from the company’s help page, “hiding” in this case is a relative term. Emphasis mine:

»

“As a subscriber, you can choose to hide your checkmark on your account. The check mark will be hidden on your profile and posts. The checkmark may still appear in some places and some features could still reveal you have an active subscription. Some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden. We will continue to evolve this feature to make it better for you,” the page reads.

«

Given the hold he has on the popular imagination, these “Musk says” posts aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon. (In fact, once generative AI can credibly spit out 300 words of context underneath anything he might say, I imagine we’ll see more of them.)

But if “Musk says” posts are going to exist, they ought to be much more skeptical than the ones we’ve seen lately. For starters, assume that anything he says about a prospective fight with Zuckerberg isn’t true unless Zuckerberg or Meta confirm it.

And about those lawsuits? Maybe wait until X covers a single user’s legal bills before giving it ink.

«

It is exhausting to point out that if what he says is accurate, we’d have people walking on Mars right now.
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Tracking AI-enabled misinformation: over 400 ‘unreliable AI-generated news’ websites (and counting), plus the top false narratives generated by AI tools • NewsGuard

»

From unreliable AI-generated news outlets operating with little to no human oversight, to fabricated images produced by AI image generators, the rollout of generative artificial intelligence tools has been a boon to content farms and misinformation purveyors alike. 

This AI Tracking Center is intended to highlight the ways that generative AI has been deployed to turbocharge misinformation operations and unreliable news. The Center includes a selection of NewsGuard’s reports, insights, and debunks related to artificial intelligence. 

To date, NewsGuard’s team has identified 408 Unreliable AI-Generated News and information websites, labeled “UAINs,” spanning 14 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Turkish.

These websites typically have generic names, such as iBusiness Day, Ireland Top News, and Daily Time Update, which to a consumer appear to be established news sites. This obscures that the sites operate with little to no human oversight and publish articles written largely or entirely by bots — rather than presenting traditionally created and edited journalism, with human oversight. The sites have churned out dozens and in some cases hundreds of generic articles, about a range of subjects including politics, technology, entertainment, and travel. The articles have sometimes included false claims, such as celebrity death hoaxes, fabricated events, and articles presenting old events as if they just occurred. 

…In addition to the sites included in the Tracker, NewsGuard analysts also identified a Chinese-government run disinformation website using AI-generated text as authority for the false claim that the U.S. operates a bioweapons lab in Kazakhstan infecting camels to endanger people in China.

«

Newsguard first started doing this report in May. At that time it identified 50 sites. An extra 350 in a couple of months? And of course the revenue model is programmatic advertising.
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USB-C confirmed for the iPhone 15 in new leaked part images • Macworld

Michael Simon:

»

We’ve known that the iPhone is switching to USB-C for a while now, but there was always a possibility that Apple would stick with Lightning for one more year. Based on the latest leaked images, however, Apple is all-in on USB-C for the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro models, with USB-C parts for the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, and iPhone 15 Pro Max all shown in a leaked image by X user fix Apple. The account doesn’t have much of a track record for Apple leaks but they have recently begun posting pictures and videos of iPhone 15 parts and assembly.

While the USB-C port is slightly bigger than Lightning, it shouldn’t affect the thickness of the iPhone or the design, though Apple is expected to adopt curved edges for the first time since the iPhone 11.

With the switch to USB-C, nearly all of Apple’s devices will have adopted the new standard, with only AirPods, Mac accessories, and the iPhone SE remaining aside from older iPhones and the 9th-gen iPad. Apple is expected to continue selling the iPhone 13 and 14 for two more years, so Lighting isn’t going anywhere just yet.

«

I very much expect that in the presentation, Apple will tout the superior data speeds of USB-C compared to Lightning: 40Gbps v 480Mbps, or more than 80x faster. For some years, the cameras on the iPhone have been able to record at 4K 60fps, but getting that data off is really slow: a minute is 700MB, or 11 seconds of top-speed downloading (which you’re unlikely to get).

It won’t say that the EU’s requirement to have USB-C for charging had anything to do with it.
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YouTube experiments with AI auto-generated video summaries • TechCrunch

Lauren Forristal:

»

YouTube is running a new test to auto-generate video summaries with the use of AI. As noted on the support page, the summaries have begun appearing on the watch and search pages, but are only available for a limited number of English-language videos and viewers.

The video platform explains that the AI auto-generated summaries provide a quick overview of a video, letting the user decide if it’s the right one for them. However, YouTube also notes, “While we hope these summaries are helpful and give you a quick overview of what a video is about, they do not replace video descriptions (which are written by creators!).”

No screenshots of the experiment were shared, so we’re not sure how viewers will differentiate a user-created video summary from one that was written by AI.

AI-powered YouTube video summarizer tools already exist, including Clipnote.ai, Skipit.ai and Scrivvy, among others. However, some YouTube creators say these tools fail to summarize longer videos.

“On my longer videos, it was complete nonsense,” wrote one Reddit user about Clipnote.ai. “It mostly just copied the first lines of what I had in my description. It basically served zero purpose. I was just curious to see if it could write a better description than I did, but it sadly performed horribly.”

«

Wonder how quickly people will just give over to letting the AI write it. I’d imagine it’ll be pretty quick, especially if they can do a quick edit afterwards to bring it up to scratch.
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AI comes for YouTube’s thumbnail industry • Rest of World

Nilesh Christopher:

»

For YouTubers, thumbnails are serious business, as they can make or break a videos’ reach. Top creators such as MrBeast test up to 20 different thumbnail variations on a single video, paying designers a reported $10,000 for a single video. This has spawned a microeconomy of freelance YouTube thumbnails artists around the world, who hone their design skills to attract clicks.

Designers and artists who spoke with Rest of World said they’re treating the rise of text-to-image generation AI tools such as Midjourney and AlphaCTR with a mix of anxiety and curiosity. Rest of World spoke to four YouTube thumbnail artists in India, Qatar, and France who said they have either already incorporated, or will soon incorporate, AI tools such as Midjourney or Photoshop’s Generative Fill into their workflows.

“I’ve heard from so many junior artists who are absolutely petrified because they’ve gone to university; they’ve put years of work and resources and experience into this skill that, quite frankly, may not ever get used,” U.K.-based senior digital designer Edd Coates told Rest of World. “From a technical standpoint, what we’re talking about is a piece of software that you have fed other people’s work into, and then that software is generating work that will replace the people who you’ve taken the work from.” Coates said it’s his responsibility as a senior digital designer in the gaming industry to push back against the use of such tools.

«

AI-generated summaries, AI-generated thumbnails. This stuff is seeping into the world and displacing things we were hardly aware of.
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MPs fiddled with voter ID as electoral data security burned • The Guardian

Heather Stewart, in an analysis of the story about the UK’s Electoral Commission being hacked:

»

It turns out that while Conservative ministers were spending hours of parliamentary time in 2021-22 introducing requirements for voters to produce ID at polling stations – to protect elections against a threat most experts believed was negligible – the Electoral Commission was being hacked by “hostile actors”.

These hackers, who have not been identified and whose motivations are unclear, were able to access the data, such as home addresses, of millions of voters, many of whom choose not to make that information publicly available.

It took the commission – the body charged with upholding the integrity of the election system – almost a year to announce the breach; a delay it explained by saying it needed to “remove the actors and their access to our system” and put extra security in place, before going public.

The commission’s chief executive, Shaun McNally, is correct when he says accessing the electoral register is a long way from being able to directly influence a poll. In the UK, there are no electronic voting machines to hack – voting is still done with pencil and paper, and counting takes place in town halls under the beady eyes of party observers.

As McNally put it: “The UK’s democratic process is significantly dispersed and key aspects of it remain based on paper documentation and counting. This means it would be very hard to use a cyber-attack to influence the process.”

«

My realisation when writing a book about hacking was that, when it comes to being hacked, there are two sorts of organisations: those that have been hacked, and those that are going to be hacked. It’s hard to think there’s a lot of value in the raw data; a more intriguing possibility, raised by a former head of GCHQ, is that by comparing who’s in the register with who’s known to be at an address, you can find “hidden” people. It feels like a huge slog – very Slough House – but perhaps with a big payoff in spook terms.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Florida, top-flight electric golf carts are increasingly being used as second “cars” for short shopping trips and other brief journeys. CC-licensed photo by Daniel M. HendricksDaniel M. Hendricks 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. Fore! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Zoom tells staff to come into the office at least two days a week • The Guardian

Tom Ambrose:

»

It was the poster child for remote working and may have made more gains from people able to work from home during the pandemic than any other company, but even Zoom has told its staff to come into the office more often.

The company, which became a household name during Covid lockdowns because of the popularity of its video-conferencing tools, has told employees to travel in at least two days a week.

The policy will apply to those living a “commutable distance” – within 50 miles of the office.

The office working mandate is part of what the company has described as “structured hybrid approach” affecting its 8,000 employees at 12 offices worldwide, including in the UK where it has about 200 staff and offices in central London.

Many companies have brought in rules related to remote working after pandemic restrictions ended. However, Zoom held out on bringing in any formal guidance, perhaps because of its reputation as a figurehead for employees working flexibly and remotely.

Its share price rocketed from $89 (£70) before the start of the pandemic to a high of $559 in October 2020 as Covid lockdowns forced many workers to remain at home. The shares have since fallen to $68 as people trickled back to offices and rivals expanded.

A spokesperson said: “We believe that a structured hybrid approach – meaning a set number of days employees that live near an office need to be on site – is most effective for Zoom. As a company, we are in a better position to use our own technologies, continue to innovate, and support our global customers.

“We’ll continue to leverage the entire Zoom platform to keep our employees and dispersed teams connected and working efficiently.”

«

Ahead of the pandemic, we wouldn’t have been in the least surprised by a software company wanting its staff to come in to the office. Now, of course, because it’s Zoom, and they talked once about allowing people to work remotely forever..
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The surprising rise of electric golf carts as ‘second cars’ in the US • Electrek

Micah Toll:

»

Electric golf carts have reaped the benefits of this technological revolution, becoming far more than just golf course cruisers. Today’s models boast improved battery life from compact lithium-ion batteries, increased power with higher quality brushless electric motors, and a surprising array of creature comfort options. Want a lifted electric golf cart with a sound system? That’s no longer a custom job – you can buy fancy carts right out of the dealer catalog.

Modern electric golf carts now offer smooth and silent rides with ranges sufficient to cover daily short commutes comfortably. There’s no gasoline engine to require regular maintenance. There’s no little red gas can to keep around the garage. And there’s not even the old problem of the cart dying in the middle of the street because the old-school lead acid batteries went kaput. Today’s electric golf carts are a significant step up with quality lithium batteries and high-power motors.

That convenience, combined with the increasing popularity of ordinances that scores of towns have passed to make golf carts legal on smaller public roads, has helped many families replace the need for a second car.

I recently visited Babcock Ranch in Florida, a planned town where a large number of the homes are actually built with golf cart parking. Check out the home below, which features a second smaller garage designed for a golf cart. Planners already knew that residents would likely be getting around by cart and built the homes accordingly. The town square has nearly as many golf carts buzzing around as cars, and the local supermarkets and restaurants have parking lots full of carts.

It’s just one example showing that it may be difficult to entirely wrestle cars away from Americans, but what were once two-car families are often turning into one-car and one-golf-cart families and saving money along the way.

«

Needs good weather, but actually: not a bad idea.
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US scientists repeat fusion power breakthrough • Financial Times

Tom Wilson and Alice Hancock:

»

Initial data from the July experiment indicated an energy output greater than 3.5MJ, two of the people with knowledge of the preliminary results said. That energy would be roughly sufficient to power a household iron for an hour.

Achieving net energy gain has been seen for decades as a crucial step in proving that commercial fusion power stations are possible. However, there are still several hurdles to overcome.

Energy gain in this context only compares the energy generated to the energy in the lasers, not to the total amount of energy pulled off the grid to power the system, which is much higher. Scientists estimate that commercial fusion will require reactions that generate between 30 and 100 times the energy in the lasers.

The NIF also makes a maximum of one shot a day, whereas an internal confinement power plant would probably need to complete several shots a second.

However, the improved result at NIF, coming “only eight months” after the initial breakthrough, was a further sign that the pace of progress was increasing, said one of the people with knowledge of the results.

«

Did you spot it? The energy output was about 3.5MJ, but everything required to do this consumes at least 100MJ, maybe 300MJ. It’s nowhere near net energy gain. And nowhere near happening fast enough. Still 20 years away.
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Report: Apple buys every 3nm chip that TSMC can make for next-gen iPhones and Macs • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

»

It’s been rumoured for several months now that Apple will be using a new 3nm [nanometre] manufacturing process from Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) for its next-generation chips, including M3 series processors for Macs and the A17 Bionic for some next-gen iPhones. But new reporting from The Information illuminates some of the favourable terms that Apple has secured to keep its costs down: Apple places huge chip orders worth billions of dollars, and in return, TSMC eats the cost of defective processor dies.

At a very high level, chip companies use large silicon wafers to create multiple chips at once, and the wafer is then sliced into many individual processor dies. It’s normal, especially early in the life of an all-new manufacturing process, for many of those dies to end up with defects—either they don’t work at all, or they don’t perform to the specifications of the company that ordered them.

Normally, chip designers would have to pay for each individual die whether it worked or not; that’s a major reason why companies sell cut-down or “binned” chips that run at lower clock speeds or have parts switched off. That way, they can recover some money from a defective die instead of none. Apple’s orders with TSMC are apparently large enough that TSMC can afford not to charge Apple for defective dies.

The savings can be quite substantial for a new manufacturing process. The Information says that roughly 70% of early 3nm dies have been usable, though this number can change based on the chip being manufactured and does generally go up over time as processes are improved.

The Information says that Apple was responsible for 23% of the $72bn that TSMC made in 2022, making Apple “by far TSMC’s largest customer.” Reports have been circulating for months that Apple has bought up all of TSMC’s 3nm manufacturing capacity in the short term, and The Information reports that TSMC’s 3nm technology will be exclusive to Apple for “roughly a year” before there will be capacity to allow any other companies to use it.

«

Reminds me of when Apple cornered the market for flash memory when it was planning the iPod nano in 2004-5. That 70% figure sounds quite high to me – are there any industry metrics to compare it to?
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I’m a screenwriter. These AI jokes give me nightmares • Time

Simon Rich is a screenwriter:

»

OpenAI spent a ton of time and money training ChatGPT to be as predictable, conformist, and non-threatening as possible. It’s a great corporate tool and it would make a terrible staff writer.

But OpenAI has some programs that are the exact inverse. For example, Dan showed me one that predates ChatGPT called code-davinci-002, and while its name does suck, its writing ability does not.

Taste is subjective, so you be the judge. Try to identify which of the following parody headlines were written by the Onion and which ones were generated by code-davinci-002:

“Experts Warn that War in Ukraine Could Become Even More Boring.”

“Budget of New Batman Movie Swells to $200M as Director Insists on Using Real Batman”

“Story of Woman Who Rescues Shelter Dog With Severely Matted Fur Will Inspire You to Open a New Tab and Visit Another Website”

“Phil Spector’s Lawyer: ‘My Client Is A Psychopath Who Probably Killed Lana Clarkson’”

“Rural Town Up in Arms Over Depiction in Summer Blockbuster ‘Cowfuckers’”

The answer: they were all written by code-davinci-002.

I can’t speak for every writer in the WGA [Writer’s Guild of America, currently on strike], particularly not the really good ones. But I’m not sure I personally could beat these jokes’ quality, and certainly not instantaneously, for free. Based on the secret stuff Dan’s shown me, I think it’s only a matter of time before AI will be able to beat any writer in a blind creative taste test. I’d peg it at about five years.

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The building that moved: how did they move an 11,000-ton telephone exchange without suspending its operations? • ArchDaily

Ignacio Rodriguez:

»

In November 1930, in Indiana, United States, one of the great feats of modern engineering was executed: a team of architects and engineers moved an 11,000-ton (22-million pound) telephone exchange without ever suspending its operations either basic supplies for the 600 employees who worked inside.

In order to comprehend this milestone, we have to go back to 1888, when the architecture firm Vonnegut, Bohn & Mueller (later known as Vonnegut & Bohn) was founded in Indianapolis by German-American architects Bernard Vonnegut and Arthur Bohn.

In 1907, Vonnegut, Bohn & Mueller designed the Indiana Bell Building in Evansville, a 7-story building for the Central Union Telephone Company; an Art-Deco building later included in 1982 in the National Register of Historic Places of the United States for being part of the historical identity of Indianapolis as part of the German-American architectural legacy of the city.

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Yes, I have linked to this before. But previously I hadn’t spotted the detail about Vonnegut. That’s not a common name. And indeed, if you read the story..
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LK-99, the would-be “room temperature superconductor,” explained • Vox

Dylan Matthews:

»

Room-temperature superconducting, if possible, opens the door to staggering technological breakthroughs. It could make transmitting electricity much more efficient; result in faster-charging and higher-capacity electrical batteries; enable practical carbon-free nuclear fusion energy; and make quantum computing — computers capable of solving problems too complex for even the fastest existing computers — feasible at a much larger scale.

A widely useful, easy-to-manufacture superconductor capable of running at normal temperatures would be an enormous breakthrough. Several commentators have compared it to the 1947 invention of the transistor, a technology without which the decades of subsequent progress in computing would not have been possible. Even if LK-99 itself is not that breakthrough, its emergence has revived public interest in superconducting generally, and serves as a useful reminder of how valuable progress in this area could be.

… Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES), by contrast, is just a looping superconductor wire: a circular superconductor that electrons spin around endlessly, never encountering resistance. It’s just an electric current that keeps going and going and going indefinitely, with no loss.

The ability of these systems to instantaneously release a huge amount of power makes them useful as a backup in cases where there’s a sudden loss of power from more ordinary sources. Right now, though, the huge energy required to keep such systems at a low enough temperature that superconducting happens makes their applications limited.

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It’s a good piece, though I paused a bit at this: Dylan Matthews is a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section. Who then says in the second paragraph that a week or so ago he knew nothing about superconductors. Wow.

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Don’t check the clock! 15 ways to get back to sleep when you wake at 3am • The Guardian

Emine Saner:

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Time moves differently in the middle of the night. Hours can drag one moment, then race by the next, catapulting you between chronic boredom and violent panic that morning is clawing at the curtains. Yet, though it may not feel like it in the moment, it is entirely normal to wake up. “The natural human sleep pattern is not a consolidated eight hours,” says Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford University, and author of Life Time: The new science of the body clock, and how it can revolutionise your sleep and health.

Still, it’s not pleasant to lie awake in the early hours worrying about everything from climate catastrophe to whether that was an inappropriate joke to put on that group chat, or whether you’ll ever sleep again – especially if it happens regularly. Here is some expert advice on how to stay calm plus what to do so that – hopefully – sleep will follow.

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The advice I once heard was that if you can’t get to sleep, simply relax and don’t worry about not being asleep. Being relaxed does the same job as sleep. Weirdly, you’ll then get to sleep. But there is good advice here too: especially not to look at the clock or your phone.
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South Africa now has over 10 gw of wind & solar generation capacity • CleanTechnica

Remeredzai Joseph Kuhudzai:

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South Africa needs new generation capacity ASAP. While Eskom is working to bring up some of its plants’ performance, as well as work towards new electricity generation plants, one quick way of adding some capacity to the mix is from independent power producers through large utility-scale solar and wind plants. South Africa started off well in this area over a decade ago with its Renewable Independent Power Producer Programme (REIPPP), which is aimed at bringing additional megawatts onto the country’s electricity system through private sector investment in wind, biomass, and small hydro, among others. Since its inception, the REIPPP has successfully added 6,280.2 MW to South Africa’s energy mix.

Eskom’s recent system status update shows the following:
REIPPP Current Installed Capacity (MW):
• Concentrated solar: 500 MW
• Utility-scale solar PV: 2,286 MW
• Wind (Eskom plus Independent Power Producers): 3,443 MW
• Total, including other renewables: 6,280 MW

This is some pretty good progress. These numbers could have been even better had it not been for some delays in awarding some competitive bid rounds over the years. Another factor slowing this down is the lack of grid capacity in some provinces as the available grid capacity to accommodate new renewable power plants has been almost exhausted. South Africa therefore needs to work on expanding and upgrading its transmission and distribution network asap. This is something the government is urgently looking into, and I hope there will be some action asap.

Another quick way to add some capacity is through tens of thousands of distributed solar PV plants on the roofs, carparks, and ground mounts of homes and businesses. We saw how quickly this can add some important capacity in Vietnam, and also how much rooftop solar has been added to over 3 million rooftops in Australia. Now we have some good news from South Africa, as Eskom reckons that there is now about 4,412 MW of solar PV installed in the South African C&I and residential sectors. That’s 4.4 GW of awesome distributed solar.

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Microgeneration is often underestimated, but with prices falling it’s become important.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The grip that Elon Musk’s Starlink has on satellite comms is worrying some analysts. CC-licensed photo by Steve Jurvetson 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.

Did you miss last Friday’s post at the Social Warming Substack? It’s about Threads, again. Free signup.

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

With Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite dominance is raising global alarms • The New York Times

Adam Satariano, Scott Reinhard, Cade Metz, Sheera Frenkel and Malika Khurana:

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On March 17, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the leader of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, dialed into a call to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Over the secure line, the two military leaders conferred on air defense systems, real-time battlefield assessments and shared intelligence on Russia’s military losses.

They also talked about Elon Musk.

General Zaluzhnyi raised the topic of Starlink, the satellite internet technology made by Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, three people with knowledge of the conversation said. Ukraine’s battlefield decisions depended on the continued use of Starlink for communications, General Zaluzhnyi said, and his country wanted to ensure access and discuss how to cover the cost of the service.

General Zaluzhnyi also asked if the United States had an assessment of Mr. Musk, who has sprawling business interests and murky politics — to which American officials gave no answer.

Mr. Musk, who leads SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, has become the most dominant player in space as he has steadily amassed power over the strategically significant field of satellite internet. Yet faced with little regulation and oversight, his erratic and personality-driven style has increasingly worried militaries and political leaders around the world, with the tech billionaire sometimes wielding his authority in unpredictable ways.

Since 2019, Mr. Musk has sent SpaceX rockets into space nearly every week that deliver dozens of sofa-size satellites into orbit. The satellites communicate with terminals on Earth, so they can beam high-speed internet to nearly every corner of the planet. Today, more than 4,500 Starlink satellites are in the skies, accounting for more than 50% of all active satellites.

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As Musk would say: concerning. It is like something out of a James Bond movie, or some sci-fi dystopia plot exposition.
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Even the over-60s are abandoning broadcast TV – and I fear for the future of pop culture • The Guardian

Scott Bryan:

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there is no denying that traditional TV watching is on a downward trajectory, which makes my heart sink. We have a lot to lose if it goes away. For one thing, its format and structure is an artform. Programmes are masterfully curated by schedulers who still keep the timings of big shows under wraps until close to transmission so rivals don’t find out. It might seem old hat, but the limited scope of the schedule means that someone has done the hardest work narrowing down what to watch for you. We might have nearly all the greatest television ever made at our disposal, but the abundance of choice can be bewildering.

Despite the hype of streaming, releasing all the episodes of a series at once can derail the collective viewing experience and cause shows to drop out of pop culture relevance prematurely. Some viewers race ahead while others watch more slowly. Take last month’s highly anticipated release of the second season of American comedy-drama The Bear to Disney+. With all of the episodes being released at once, it is often unclear to viewers where their friends and colleagues are up to in the plot, making watercooler chats or social media conversations about specific moments harder to come by. The Bear received a five-star review in the Guardian. But beyond critics’ first impressions, the media are equally in the dark about how many people are watching and where they are up to (or even if anyone is still watching at all, since some streamers don’t share viewing figures), which means that the hype can subside quickly.

It never used to be this complicated. There is something to be said for the simplicity of watching live TV; and knowing that everyone in the country is at the same point in the story, from the prime minister to your mum, can be a real thrill. Cult TV moments become national talking points, from that scene in the kitchen in the finale of Happy Valley to everyone going ugh at the end of Line of Duty.

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Ofcom data shows broadcast TV in the UK having its biggest recorded annual decline. But as he says, it’s the simultaneous moments that pull us together, and streaming services can’t do that (though notice how some streaming services – Apple, Disney+ – parcel out episodes weekly). Sports remains the best for this sort of unity.
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Martin Shkreli now has a medical AI chatbot—much to experts’ concern • Fast Company

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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Martin Shkreli, the convicted fraudster best known for hiking the price of a lifesaving pharmaceutical, has been getting into the AI game—and he’s already making enemies on the internet.

Shkreli was sentenced in 2018 to seven years in jail for two counts of securities fraud and one count of securities fraud conspiracy. He was released early from prison in September 2022, and in April 2023 launched Dr. Gupta, a medical AI chatbot that The Daily Beast called “a medical and legal nightmare.”

Shkreli has been feuding with researchers this week over the validity of his new AI product. After Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher at Hugging Face, claimed that “[large language models] shouldn’t be used to give medical advice,” Shkreli went on the offensive, calling her an “AI Karen.” He also (seemingly jokingly) threatened critics on Twitter. 

The social media scuffles have highlighted broader concerns about both the use of AI in healthcare settings, and about the risks of a platform handling personalized health data being run by someone with Shkreli’s checkered past. “Generative language models are, by design, badly suited for medical diagnosis,” Luccioni tells Fast Company. “They simply generate the most plausible text based on user inputs, which can result in entirely false and misleading information being provided. Diagnostic medicine also involves taking into account patient characteristics such as their medical history, which language models simply can’t do in their current form.”

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I’d have thought “why not try this AI medicine system back by a convicted fraudster” would be enough to get people to dump it like a hot potato, but some people seem to find such decisions difficult.
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Cyberattack causes multiple hospitals to shut emergency rooms and divert ambulances • CBS News

Khristopher Brooks:

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Cybercriminals attacked the computer systems of a California-based health care provider causing emergency rooms in multiple states to close and ambulance services to be redirected.

The ransomware attack happened at Prospect Medical Holdings of Los Angeles, which has hospitals and clinics in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Texas. Prospect Medical is investigating how the breach happened and is working on resolving the issue, the company said in a statement Friday. 

“Prospect Medical Holdings, Inc. recently experienced a data security incident that has disrupted our operations,” the company said in a statement. “Upon learning of this, we took our systems offline to protect them and launched an investigation with the help of third-party cybersecurity specialists. While our investigation continues, we are focused on addressing the pressing needs of our patients as we work diligently to return to normal operations as quickly as possible.”

The FBI said late Friday that it has also launched an investigation into the breach.

“We continue to encourage anyone who thinks they are a victim of this incident to report to ic3.gov or your local FBI field office,” the agency said in a statement. 

Officials with the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, the nurses’ union at Crozer-Chester Medical System in Springfield, say the hospital has reverted to a paper system because most of the computers are offline, CBS News reported. The computers are unlikely to be back online until next week, according to the labor group. 

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This stuff still happens; it’s just become a background noise. One in which people may die. But now imagine though if you had people who were reliant on an AI to do diagnosis, and that got ransomwared too.
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SoftBank sues IRL over ‘elaborate scheme’ that swallowed $150m • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

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SoftBank once invested in social app IRL at a $1.1bn valuation. Now, the Japanese investment firm is suing the defunct company for fraud, alleging $150m in damages.

IRL was supposedly poised to become an event organizing alternative for Gen Z, who are using Facebook less and less. Its self-reported numbers were impressive enough to solicit a $170m Series C led by SoftBank in 2021, but earlier this summer, an internal investigation by IRL’s board of directors found that 95% of the app’s users were fake.

In its legal complaint, SoftBank explains that it was moved to invest in IRL because of its impressive user numbers; the app claimed it had been downloaded by 25% of U.S. teens under 28 years old and was growing at a 400% year-over-year rate. But per the IRL board’s investigation, none of these figures were accurate.

Investors don’t always do their due diligence, but SoftBank claims it wouldn’t have been possible to verify IRL’s fake user numbers, since it had “prepared for SoftBank’s due diligence and structured IRL’s business so that SoftBank could not discover evidence of their fraud.” SoftBank explains in detail its attempts at conducting due diligence before forking over a nine-figure sum.

Per SoftBank’s claims, IRL was spending tens of thousands of dollars on proxy services to fraudulently inflate IRL’s user data with bots. SoftBank also accused IRL of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to a secret firm operated by IRL’s head of Growth to cover up this scheme.

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Former CEO and five of his siblings and cousins named as defendants in the complaint. This one seems likely to run and run, and it’s hard to think Softbank will ever see any of its money back.
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UK offshore wind at ‘tipping point’ as funding crisis threatens industry • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

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Offshore wind developers have experienced soaring construction costs as inflation has raged. At the same time, the government has been trying to hold down electricity prices through the contract for difference (CfD) scheme designed to provide investors with certainty over new projects.

For the latest bidding round, which concludes in September, the government set a maximum price of £44 per megawatt hour based on 2012 prices – similar to the previous round that took place before many of the inflationary pressures hit.

Alarm over the mismatch has been increased by the decision of Swedish energy company Vattenfall to stop work on the multibillion-pound Norfolk Boreas windfarm, designed to power the equivalent of 1.5m British homes. It said the project was no longer profitable. Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, was confronted over the issue during a Downing Street gathering last week.

Offshore wind is key to government climate targets. It is committed to decarbonising the electricity system by 2035 and achieving net zero by 2050. It is banking on a near-quadrupling of offshore wind from about 14 gigawatts to 50 gigawatts by 2030.

Jan Matthiesen, head of offshore wind at the Carbon Trust thinktank, said: “The UK offshore wind industry is at a tipping point. The maximum prices set are now too low. Last month, we saw Vattenfall withdraw from the Norfolk Boreas windfarm. This may be the first of many if bold and swift action is not taken.”

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Maybe they could start building onshore turbines? This government’s utter inability to get anything done, and to get the National Grid to upgrade the grid as is needed, is putting us further behind every day.
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America’s most tech-forward city has doubts about self-driving cars • WSJ

Meghan Bobrowsky and Miles Kruppa:

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A city of about 800,000 people, San Francisco has already played host to thousands of self-driving car test miles, and some residents are regular users. Now the companies want to offer ride-hailing businesses that can compete with Lyft and Uber.

If the companies get their wishes, San Francisco will become ground zero for one of the first big urban experiments in transportation using autonomous vehicles. The city, now known for its tech population, has also been a hub for political protest, flower children and fierce guardians of the city’s character.

The California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates passenger transportation, is scheduled to vote this month on whether to allow GM’s Cruise to expand its presence in San Francisco and to allow it and Alphabet’s Waymo to charge for rides at all times. The vote has been delayed twice, and the agency will hold a hearing next week to hear responses from the companies to a list of safety concerns.

“We think that autonomous vehicles are amazing and we believe that someday they will be safer than human drivers,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, director of transportation for San Francisco’s transit authority. “So far, the industry has not demonstrated that.”

Cruise and Waymo are fighting back. Executives at both companies have begun presenting their pitches to the public and government officials with greater urgency, armed with data they say shows the safety benefits of their vehicles.

…Cruise and Waymo have burned through billions of dollars in their attempts to build on-demand taxi services, which they hope will eventually produce greater profits without the need for human drivers. So far, their businesses have produced minimal revenue.

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Elon Musk’s X can’t send Blue subscribers their ad revenue-sharing payouts on time • The Verge

Richard Lawler:

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In news that isn’t very surprising given the recent history of Twitter, which Elon Musk is currently rebranding to X, the company won’t be able to make some promised payments on time. The X Support account says that because its “Ads Revenue Sharing” program is so popular, “We need a bit more time to review everything for the next payout and aim to get all eligible accounts paid as soon as possible.”

…That’s not exactly what you’d want to hear from a program touting itself as “part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on X,” and the key to Elon Musk’s X dream for an app that handles banking, stock trading, and other vital financial features. Musk announced the revenue-sharing plan in February, and the company sent out the first round of payments for eligible accounts (with paid verification via Twitter Blue or Verified organizations, 15 million “organic” impressions in the last three months, and at least 500 followers) a couple of weeks ago before opening up registration to more people.

However, hearing that payments aren’t arriving is familiar news to a number of people and organizations involved with X / Twitter since Musk’s takeover. That includes landlords of buildings used by Twitter in San Francisco and London or former employees of Twitter Africa who complain they were “ghosted” and left without promised severance payments.

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So Twitter, which wants to do payments processing for all its hundreds of millions of users, is struggling to do payments processing? One can predict everything that’s going to happen after every announcement by simply looking back at what happened the last time.
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Bad behavior at ‘Barbenheimer’ reflects a worrying trend • The Washington Post

Sofia Andrade and Janay Kingsberry:

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“Barbenheimer” — the twin release of blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — may have broken box office records and brought people out to the theaters in droves, but it also highlighted a very real problem: some people seem to have forgotten how to go to the movies, with widespread reports of drunken outbursts, rampant cellphone use and exhibitionism.

At a “Barbie” showing at an AMC theater in Washington on Sunday, a man wearing a pink tank top and body glitter loudly identified with the Kens onscreen. Throughout the film — and despite multiple shushes — he would cheer, sing or stand up and pump his fist from his front-section seat whenever the Kens rallied against the Barbies. He apologized to the audience at one point, explaining that he was “wasted” but nevertheless continued disrupting the show until the film’s climax, at which point he got into a slap fight with an acquaintance sitting beside him. (A representative for AMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Online, stories of unruly or otherwise disrespectful guests at screenings over the past few weeks have gone viral. In one particularly memorable video from what appears to be a “Barbie” screening in Brazil, a woman violently pushes another woman to the floor. The ensuing fight plays out as Billie Eilish’s “Barbie” song (“I used to float, now I just fall down”) plays in the background.

The bad behavior wasn’t limited to energized “Barbie” audiences, either: “Saw ‘Oppenheimer’ last night in one of the worst behaved crowds I’ve ever been in, multiple camera flashes throughout, people in front of us scrolling TikTok half way thru the film,” user @silvergelpen wrote this weekend on Twitter, which has recently been renamed X. “If you don’t have the attention span for a 3 hour movie don’t leave the house to attend one.”

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Not sure this is only restricted to the US, but perhaps it’s a bit more extreme there. See also the next link, which seems to find things wrong in the US… but in a totally different way. (Thanks G for the link.)

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Why America is going backward: being the richest nation in history isn’t enough • Salon.com

Mike Lofgren:

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If you were transported roughly 80 years back in time, to the house where your grandparents or great-grandparents lived around 1940 (assuming they were Americans and did not live in Appalachia or the Deep South), they would most likely have had indoor plumbing, electric lights, perhaps a washing machine and a refrigerator. Quite possibly a radio, a phone and a car in the driveway as well. It might seem a bit retrograde without high-speed internet and big-screen TV, but in general terms it would be recognizable. But if we time-travelled back another 80 years before that, virtually none of those amenities were found in American houses, and life would seem unbearably primitive from today’s perspective.

[Author of “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”, Robert] Gordon’s thesis is that these inventions, being one-time events, caused a historically unusual economic growth spurt but that over time, the marginal productivity improvements resulting from the inventions tapered off. Modern IT developments like the cell phone and the internet have not had nearly the same impact in terms of improving living standards. 

He makes a persuasive case about American economic trends as they relate to invention and productivity, but there is something missing: the international context. Other developed countries also experienced their post-World War II growth spurts: les Trente Glorieuses in France, the Wirtschaftswunder in Germany, il miracolo economico in Italy, or the Japanese economic miracle. Productivity growth was even higher in those countries at those times than in the US, because they started from a much lower baseline after the war’s destruction.

Furthermore, like the US, all those countries experienced a downturn in growth after 1970 (mainly due to the 1973 oil embargo). In recent decades their productivity has mostly been poorer than that of the US Indeed, US median income remains well above that of most developed countries (not counting offshore banking islands and other anomalies). Yet they have overtaken America, and generally pulled far ahead, in the important quality of life measures I cited earlier. How can America be so rich financially and so poor in quality of life? Gordon suggests, certainly correctly, that rising income inequality played a role. But that dodges the question: why specifically did this happen in the United States?

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Lofgren’s (or maybe Gordon’s, it’s a little unclear) take is that it’s because of the rise of unintellectual “influencers”, and the appetite of a significant chunk of the US population for authoritarianism. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Reducing pollution from ships has cut the clouds they produce – which is helping to warm the planet faster, unfortunately. CC-licensed photo by NASA Earth Observatory on Flickr.

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

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

China considers limiting kids’ smartphone time to two hours per day • Engadget

Jon Fingas:

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China might put further limits on kids’ smartphone use. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has proposed draft rules that would cap the phone time of children under 18 to a maximum of two hours per day. That’s only for 16- and 17-year-olds, too. Youth between eight and 15 would be limited to one hour per day, while those under eight would have 40 minutes.

The draft would also bar any use between 10pm and 6am. Phones would need to have an easy-to-access mode that lets parents restrict what kids see and permit internet providers to show age-appropriate content. Children under three would be limited to songs and other forms of audio, while those 12 and up can see educational and news material. There would be exceptions for regulated educational content and emergency services.

As with previous measures, the proposal is meant to curb addictive behaviour in children. The Chinese government is concerned prolonged use of mobile devices, games and services may be detrimental to kids’ development. The country already limits young people to three hours of online video game time per week, and then only on weekends and public holidays. 

The draft is still open to public consultation and isn’t guaranteed to pass. There are also questions about implementation.

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Google can now alert you when your private contact info appears online • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Google is making it a lot easier to find and remove your contact information from its search results. The company will now send out notifications when it finds your address, phone number, or email on the web, allowing you to review and request the removal of that information from Search.

All this takes place from Google’s “results about you” dashboard on mobile and web, which it first rolled out last September. With the update, you can find your information on Google without actually having to conduct the search yourself. Once you input your personal information, the dashboard will automatically pull up websites that contain any matches, letting you review each webpage it appears on and then submit a request to remove it.

This marks a pretty big improvement, as Google previously required you to search for your personal information yourself and then manually request its removal.

If you’re concerned about your information popping up on Google in the future, you can also enable push notifications that will alert you to any new results that appear — something it first announced it would do last year. You can also track your requests from Google’s hub, which shows your in-progress, approved, denied, and undone requests.

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Helpful. Though of course it implies you telling Google all your private contact information. However it’s only available in the US – probably for privacy reasons.
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Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses fail to catch on • WSJ

Salvador Rodriguez and Joanna Stern:

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The Ray-Ban smart glasses launched by Meta Platforms almost two years ago have struggled to catch on with owners, many of whom appear to be using the devices infrequently, according to internal company data.

Less than 10% of the Ray-Ban Stories purchased since the product’s launch in September 2021 are used actively by purchasers, according to a company document from February reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Meta sold a total of 300,000 of the wearable devices through February, but the company only had about 27,000 monthly active users. 

The device, an important part of Meta’s hardware strategy, allows users to take photos and listen to music with the frames of their glasses, among other features. It has experienced a 13% return rate, according to the document.

Among the top drivers of poor user experience were issues with connectivity, problems with some of the hardware features including battery life, inability for users to import media from the devices, issues with the audio on the product and problems with voice commands for the smart glasses, according to the document. 

“We’ll also need to better understand why users stop using their glasses, how to ensure we are encouraging new feature adoption, and ultimately how to keep our users engaged and retained,” the document said. 

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Like you, I’m thinking: Ray-Ban smart glasses? Sold by Facebook/Meta? Indeed: September 2021. Effectively a copy of Snapchat’s Spectacles, which also haven’t set the world on fire.
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‘We’re changing the clouds’: an unforeseen test of geoengineering is fuelling record ocean warmth • Science

Paul Voosen:

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“This year it’s been crazy,” says Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The obvious and primary driver of this trend is society’s emissions of greenhouse gases, which trap heat that the oceans steadily absorb. Another influence has been recent weather, especially stalled high-pressure systems that suppress cloud formation and allow the oceans to bake in the Sun.

But researchers are now waking up to another factor, one that could be filed under the category of unintended consequences: disappearing clouds known as ship tracks. Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulphur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulphate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”

By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.

The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says.

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Argh. We reduce pollution from ships and it makes things worse?
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Norway projects a cautionary tale about carbon capture and storage, report says • The Straits Times

David Fogarty:

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Big CCS [carbon capture and storage] projects are planned around the globe, including in Malaysia and Indonesia, while Shell Singapore said in 2022 that it was exploring shipping CO2 captured from its operations in the Republic to Brunei for storage.

The renewed focus on CCS has angered climate activists and climate-vulnerable developing nations, who say it is a false solution because it will still lead to higher CO2 emissions, accelerating climate change. Burning fossil fuels is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions heating up the planet.

Mr Hauber [of the IEEFA think tank] looked at the Sleipner and Snohvit offshore CCS projects in Norway, which capture CO2 from natural gas production and pipe it back underground.

Sleipner began in 1996 and is the world’s longest-running CCS project, while Snohvit began in 2008. Together, they have sequestered about 22 million tonnes of CO2 since they started operation.

Both have proven to be major challenges for Norwegian energy firm Equinor, which runs them.

At Sleipner, CO2 is injected more than 1km under the seabed. In 1999, CO2 unexpectedly began migrating in large amounts into a previously unknown upper layer. A thick layer of rock prevented the gas from leaking to the surface.

Snohvit’s problem was different. Within 18 months of its operation, the target storage area proved unable to take the projected amount of CO2. Equinor had to find new CO2 storage areas and in 2016 invested in another injection site.

“Even after extensive sampling and study, geological realities can be different from engineering plans,” said the report.

«

There was a time when I had high hopes for CCS. It wasn’t that long ago, geologically speaking.
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Under-30 South Korea survey: 85% bought Android as first phone; now 53% on iOS • Counterpoint Research

Sujeong Lim:

»

About 85% of South Korean smartphone users aged less than 30 used Android phones such as Samsung and LG as their first smartphones, according to a consumer survey conducted by Counterpoint Research among 1,000 users in the first half of 2023. However, about 53% of them said that they were currently using an iPhone, suggesting that many Android phone users had switched to iPhones during replacement.

The reason why Android phones account for a very high proportion of first-time smartphone purchases in South Korea is that most users in that age group, particularly adolescence, give priority to the preference of those with real purchasing power, such as parents, when buying their first smartphone. During the survey, the largest number of respondents opted for “Recommendation from family or friends” when asked why they used an Android as their first smartphone.

As for the reason for switching from an Android phone to an iPhone, respondents cited “Performance” (32%) and “Brand image” (31%) as the first and second priorities. In particular, in terms of performance, satisfaction and expectation with the camera had the greatest impact on the purchase decision.

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South Korea, in case anyone’s forgotten, is Samsung’s home; its fortress. The idea that significant numbers of the under-30s are defecting to iOS is, frankly, a bit astonishing. But it shows that Apple’s focus on camera performance keeps paying off. The smartphone wars feel a long time back; but Apple seems to be winning all the ongoing skirmishes.
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Advertising has reached a new low in the age of podcasts • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

»

In his recent softball interview with [Ron] DeSantis, [Russell] Brand interrupted to plug a particular brand of men’s underwear. “It’s getting hot out there, and I don’t know about you Ron, but I’m getting pretty hot down there,” Brand said. “Summertime is not an issue if you wear Sheath underwear . . . There’s something for everyone’s testicles and penis.” He then proceeded to give his followers a very special 20-per-cent-off code.

This is by no means the most egregious recent example of this type of advertising I have come across. Unlike the conventional adverts made by advertising agencies, these “host-read” adverts are delivered by the presenter of a given podcast or YouTube channel, and so usually have a chatty, improvisational feel to them. This makes them particularly effective, and also means that they are often virtually indistinguishable from the content they are inserted into.

At the beginning of a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, an in-person interview with Tel-Aviv-based thinker and writer Yuval Noah Harari, the host talked solemnly about some of his experiences during his trip. “I’ve travelled to some very difficult areas of the Middle East over the last two days,” he said. “It’s been a real challenge — emotionally, psychologically, physically, just all of it. The reality of war and peace, cruelty and hope, all of it together is just sobering. Sobering.”

Fridman had already read out adverts for five different podcast sponsors, and we were now eight minutes into the podcast. “If I wasn’t already grateful it makes me truly grateful to be alive, to be healthy, to have the people I love in my life,” he continued. “Anyway as part of that difficult journey it’s nice to have little tokens of home with me and AG1 is certainly that.”

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Very definitely what the 30-second skip-forward button was designed for. (The article’s free to read.)
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AudioCraft: A simple one-stop shop for audio modeling

»

Imagine a professional musician being able to explore new compositions without having to play a single note on an instrument. Or an indie game developer populating virtual worlds with realistic sound effects and ambient noise on a shoestring budget. Or a small business owner adding a soundtrack to their latest Instagram post with ease. That’s the promise of AudioCraft — our simple framework that generates high-quality, realistic audio and music from text-based user inputs after training on raw audio signals as opposed to MIDI or piano rolls.

AudioCraft consists of three models: MusicGen, AudioGen, and EnCodec. MusicGen, which was trained with Meta-owned and specifically licensed music, generates music from text-based user inputs, while AudioGen, which was trained on public sound effects, generates audio from text-based user inputs. Today, we’re excited to release an improved version of our EnCodec decoder, which allows for higher quality music generation with fewer artifacts; our pre-trained AudioGen model, which lets you generate environmental sounds and sound effects like a dog barking, cars honking, or footsteps on a wooden floor; and all of the AudioCraft model weights and code.

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It does this from text. Scroll down the page for a few examples. It’s going to be harder and harder to trust anything we hear without time-coded footage.
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IBM open sources the largest NASA AI model on Hugging Face • IBM Research Blog

Kim Martineau:

»

Climate change poses numerous risks. The need to understand quickly and clearly how Earth’s landscape is changing is one reason IBM set out six months ago in a collaboration with NASA to build an AI model that could speed up the analysis of satellite images and boost scientific discovery. Another motivator was the desire to make nearly 250,000 terabytes of NASA mission data accessible to more people.

To further both goals, IBM is now making its foundation model public through the open-source AI platform, Hugging Face. It’s the largest geospatial model to be hosted on Hugging Face and the first open-source AI foundation model NASA has collaborated to build. And, it can analyze geospatial data up to four times faster than state-of-the-art deep-learning models, with half as much labeled data, IBM has estimated.

A commercial version of the model, part of IBM’s AI and data platform watsonx, will be available through the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS) later this year.

“AI remains a science-driven field, and science can only progress through information sharing and collaboration,” said Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at Hugging Face. “This is why open-source AI and the open release of models and datasets are so fundamental to the continued progress of AI, and making sure the technology will benefit as many people as possible.”

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This seems like something important, but the scale of it feels beyond me.
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LK-99 is fuelling a DIY superconductivity race • WIRED

Gergory Barker:

»

All that Andrew McCalip wanted for his 34th birthday was a shipment of red phosphorus. It was a tough request—the substance happens to be an ingredient for cooking meth and is controlled by the US Drug Enforcement Agency—but also an essential one, if McCalip was going to realize his dream of making a room-temperature superconductor, a holy grail of condensed matter physics, in his startup’s lab over the next week. It required four ingredients, and so far he had access to three.

His followers on X (that is, Twitter, post-rebrand), offered ideas: He could melt down the heads of a pile of matchsticks, or try to buy it in pure form off Etsy, where the DEA might not be looking. Others offered connections to Eastern European suppliers. They were deeply invested in his effort. Like McCalip, many had learned about a possible superconductor called LK-99 earlier that week through a post on Hacker News, which linked to an Arxiv preprint in which a trio of South Korean researchers had claimed a discovery that, in their words, “opens a new era for humankind.” Now McCalip was among those racing to replicate it.

[Explanation of superconductivity cut. You know, don’t you.]
…On X and Reddit, large language models went by the wayside. The new star was condensed matter physics. Online betting markets were spun up (the odds: not particularly good). Anons with a strangely sophisticated knowledge of electronic band structure went to war with techno-optimistic influencers cheering on an apparent resurgence of technological progress.

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Good backgrounder on what it takes to try to replicate a superconductor.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The latest models of Tesla’s 3 and Y cars have one tiny problem: in a few cases, the steering gives up, the US NHTSA says. CC-licensed photo by Panagiotis Katoikos 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. Driven mad. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Zero resistance measured in a new LK-99 replication at Southeast University in Nanjing China • NextBigFuture.com

Brian Wang:

»

A team of scientists from the Physics Department of Southeast University, a top university in Nanjing, China, have reported measuring 0 resistance in a sample of LK-99 they synthesized from scratch. Claimed to have synthesized LK-99 and to have measured superconductivity up to a temperature of 110 kelvin. Claimed to have observed an abrupt drop in resistance between ~300K and 220K, aligning with the Korean LKK team’s results. Claimed to have confirmed structural consistency with x-ray diffraction.

From the video:
• They measure 0 resistance at 110K (-163C) using the four-point probe method. 0 resistance at this high of a temperature at ambient pressure is a new discovery in materials science
• They also claim a transition in and out of zero resistance state depending on a strongly applied magnetic field – a classic characteristic of superconductivity
• The sample they synthesized is reported to have much higher purity than the original Korean team of LKK
• They note an interesting and abrupt drop in resistance, by several orders of magnitude, between ~300 and 220K (approx values from the graph). This is currently unexplained, but is in rough agreement with LKK – i.e., LKK may have been measuring this higher-temperature ‘drop’ which was two orders of magnitude
• They retain the claim that this is not absolute conclusive proof of superconductivity, but it is suggestive of very interesting electronic properties in this material.

«

Liquid nitrogen boils at 77K, so this is pretty high temperature behaviour. Still unclear what is possible at room temperature, though.
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This summer is pointing us toward uncharted territory • The New York Times

David Wallace-Wells:

»

On opposite ends of the planet, temperatures recorded in the North Atlantic and sea ice measured near the South Pole, tracked so far from recent trends that you might embarrass yourself simply stating the size of the anomaly — a four sigma event in the temperatures of the North Atlantic, meaning that, given a stable climate and a normal distribution of chance, it should be expected about once every few hundred years and perhaps a six sigma event for Antarctic sea ice, meaning we should expect to see it, at least according to the simplified math, only once every 7.5 million years.

At a certain point, that math just gets silly, telling you perhaps more about the improper way you might have structured the comparison than about the size of the anomaly itself. But you can measure the anomalies in other ways, such as by noting the hot-tub ocean temperatures off the Florida Keys, a year’s worth of rain falling in 36 hours in parts of Beijing or 100-degree temperatures in the mountains of Chile or that there is an Argentina-size gap between this year’s Antarctic sea ice and the typical extent. And the fact that we are seeing these gob-smacking anomalies at all is a sign that the historical framework implied by terms like “seven sigma” and “500-year storm,” imperfect in the best of times, no longer applies to the world we live in now.

The environmental journalist Juliet Eilperin called the ocean temperatures “beyond belief”; The Washington Post reported that they had “baffled scientists.” Contemplating the trajectory of Arctic sea ice, the atmospheric scientist Zack Labe wrote memorably about how often he finds himself answering questions about the state of the science these days by saying, “I don’t know.” And for all the uncertainty, many of those watching the changes unfold have a queasy intuition that we may be entering a new climatic regime — and perhaps inching closer to some quite concerning tipping points.

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I’m afraid I can find no good news on this topic.
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The lose-lose-lose-lose bill C-18 outcome: Meta blocking news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada • Michael Geist

»

For months, supporters of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, assured the [Canadian] government that Meta and Google were bluffing when they warned that a bill based on mandated payments for links was unworkable and they would comply with it by removing links to news from their platforms. However, what has been readily apparent for months became reality yesterday: Meta is now actively blocking news links and sharing on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. The announcement does not reference Threads, but it would not surprise if news links are ultimately blocked on that platform as well. The company says that the blocking will take several weeks to fully roll out to all users, suggesting that it has learned from the over-blocking mistakes made in Australia and is proceeding more cautiously in Canada. By the end of the month, the world’s largest social media platform will become a news desert in Canada, with links to all news – both Canadian and foreign – blocked on the platform.

It is worth revisiting that it was only a couple of months ago that some industry leaders, lobbyists, and academics were assuring the [Canadian] Senate that the Meta threat was just a bluff.

«

Clearly, not a bluff, and if Google follows suit then Canada is going to essentially roll back to 1997 in how well it’s able to spread news. This bill never looked like a good idea. Apparently the Australian version of this is less onerous, which made Facebook and Google just about accept it there.
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Ponzi scheme E-Creator targeted desperate workers • Rest of World

Kimberly Mutandiro:

»

Dumi, a 26-year-old from Harare’s Mbare township, had been unemployed for about two years this past May when he heard of E-Creator, a company that paid people to write positive reviews on e-commerce platforms like Zalando and Lazada.

The job sounded almost too good to be true: Dumi would have to go through a range of products on E-Creator’s website — items like sling bags or backpacks — and write reviews for 10 of them. This would earn him $4 a day. Dumi, who spoke to Rest of World under a pseudonym, estimated it’d take him less than 20 minutes to complete the task daily.

The only catch was that he would first need to invest $15 from his own pocket. But Dumi said he did so without concern, drawn by the prospect of making money. 

During the first two weeks at this job, E-Creator kept prompting him to invest incremental amounts of $15. By June, he had deposited $112 into the e-wallet on E-Creator, and that’s when things suddenly went downhill.

On June 30, Dumi woke up to find his E-Creator account frozen. He had $250 in his wallet that he could no longer withdraw. Within days, scores of other Zimbabweans had taken to social media to complain about their money being stuck with E-Creator. Local reports alerted the public to a statement posted on E-Creator’s website: The company claimed its director, Zhao Jiaotong, had disappeared. More reports claimed he had run off with over $1m, obtained from scamming people like Dumi.

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Sad but true: Zimbabweans are desperate for work – any kind of work – and this sort of thing drags them in.
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Steering problems place Tesla under NHTSA scrutiny again • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened another investigation into steering issues in Tesla vehicles – the second such probe the agency has launched this year.

The NHTSA opened its latest investigation after receiving 12 complaints from 2023 Tesla Model 3 and Y owners complaining of loss of steering control that frequently occurred along with an on-screen message alerting drivers that “power steering assist is reduced or disabled.”

“Five reports indicate an inability to steer the vehicle. Seven additional reports cite loss of power steering resulting in increased effort to control the vehicle,” the NHTSA said in its investigation document.

Along with 12 complaints, the NHTSA said the issue resulted in one accident, which appears to have affected a 2023 Model 3 owner in May. “Car steering felt stuck and slid off the road which resulted in crashing into a tree,” the Model 3 owner reported. “Tesla features did not help stay in the lane or break in an emergency.”

A look through the reports submitted by 2023 Model 3 and Model Y owners indicates repeated issues in which steering wheels on the models would lock up at random, both while driving and at a stop.

«

That all sounds very undesirable. Even if it’s a loss of hydraulics in the power steering system, that would be pretty terrifying if you were going at any speed.
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Nvidia AI image personalization method fits on a floppy disk and takes four minutes to train • Decrypt

Jose Antonio Lanz:

»

In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI art creation tools, Nvidia researchers have introduced an innovative new text-to-image personalization method called Perfusion. But it’s not a million-dollar super heavyweight model like its competitors. With a size of just 100KB and a 4-minute training time, Perfusion allows significant creative flexibility in portraying personalized concepts while maintaining their identity.

Perfusion was presented in a research paper created by Nvidia and the Tel-Aviv University in Israel. Despite its small size, it’s able to outperform tweaking methods used by leading AI art generators like Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion v1.5, the newly released Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), and MidJourney in terms of efficiency of specific editions.

The main new idea in Perfusion is called “Key-Locking.” This works by connecting new concepts that a user wants to add, like a specific cat or chair, to a more general category during image generation. For example, the cat would be linked to the broader idea of a “feline.”

This helps avoid overfitting, which is when the model gets too narrowly tuned to the exact training examples. Overfitting makes it hard for the AI to generate new creative versions of the concept.

By tying the new cat to the general notion of a feline, the model can portray the cat in many different poses, appearances, and surroundings. But it still retains the essential “catness” that makes it look like the intended cat, not just any random feline.

So in simple terms, Key-Locking lets the AI flexibly portray personalized concepts while keeping their core identity. It’s like giving an artist the following directions: “Draw my cat Tom, while sleeping, playing with yarn, and sniffing flowers.”

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Only question now is where I find a floppy disk to put it on.
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Generative AI services pulled from Apple App Store in China ahead of new regulations • TechCrunch

Rita Liao:

»

Multiple generative AI apps have been removed from Apple’s China App Store, two weeks ahead of the country’s new generative AI regulations that are set to take effect on August 15.

The move came after Chinese developers received notices from Apple informing them of their apps’ removal. In its letter to OpenCat, a native ChatGPT client, Apple cited “content that is illegal in China” as the reason for pulling the app.

In July, China announced a set of measures to regulate generative AI services, including API providers. The rules require AI apps operating in China to obtain an administrative license, which is reflected in Apple’s removal notice.

“As you may know, the government has been tightening regulations associated with deep synthesis technologies (DST) and generative AI services, including ChatGPT. DST must fulfill permitting requirements to operate in China, including securing a license from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT),” Apple said to OpenCat. “Based on our review, your app is associated with ChatGPT, which does not have requisite permits to operate in China.”

The popular tech blogger @foxshuo tweeted screenshots showing supposedly more than 100 AI apps that have been removed from the China App Store. TechCrunch confirmed that several of those apps indeed couldn’t be found in the China App Store.

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Twitter Blue subscribers can now hide their blue checks • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Twitter Blue, which Elon Musk is currently rebranding to X Blue, now includes the option to hide the notorious blue checkmark. Twitter Blue subscribers recently started noticing the “hide your blue checkmark” option on the web and in mobile apps, offering the ability to hide that they’re paying for Twitter and avoid memes about how “this mf paid for twitter.”

“The checkmark will be hidden on your profile and posts,” notes a Twitter support article. “The checkmark may still appear in some places and some features could still reveal you have an active subscription. Some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden.”

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You pay so that you can look like all the other people who don’t pay? More and more mad.
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Uber’s business is finally making money after years of losses • WSJ

Preetika Rana:

»

Uber Technologies UBER -5.68%decrease; red down pointing triangle posted its first-ever operating profit in the second quarter, a milestone in its long-term efforts to stem losses in its businesses carrying people and delivering food.

The results for the three months through June were driven by solid growth in both of Uber’s core businesses, as the number of rides in the U.S. and Canada surpassed prepandemic levels for the first time and demand for delivery stayed strong despite restaurant reopenings.

The quarter was the first since Uber’s 2009 founding that it reported its underlying operations were profitable. The easy availability of capital for much of the past decade had Uber and others burning tens of billions of dollars in an attempt to gain market share.

From 2016 through the first quarter of this year, Uber has collectively reported close to $30 billion in operating losses, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“For most of our history, profitable wasn’t the first thing that came up when you asked someone about Uber,” Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said on a Tuesday call with analysts. “In fact, many observers over the years boldly claimed that we would never make any money…But we knew they were wrong,” he added.

«

It’s 12 paragraphs before you actually get the numbers:

»

Uber posted a profit of $394m during the second quarter, compared with a loss of $2.60bn a year earlier. That came in better than the $18m loss that analysts polled by FactSet had expected and was driven predominantly by its operating profit, which totaled $326m. Wall Street expects Uber to continue recording an operating profit for the rest of the year.

Uber’s revenue rose 14% to $9.23bn, a slight miss from what analysts had expected. Its gross bookings—or the total value of transactions on its app—grew 16% to $33.60bn, beating expectations.

«

So that’s a 4% profit; an operating profit of 3.5%. It’s going to be a long time before all those sunk losses are paid off.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Edinburgh, limiting vehicle speeds to 20mph dramatically reduced deaths and injuries. And now the PM wants.. to increase them again? CC-licensed photo by Eli Christman 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. Whoa, horsey. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A room-temperature superconductor? New developments • Science

Derek Lowe is updating this page:

»

As of this morning, there are (as yet not really verified) reports of replication from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. At least, a video has been posted showed what could be a sample of LK-99 levitating over a magnet due to the Meissner effect, and in different orientations relative to the magnet itself. That’s important, because a (merely!) paramagnetic material can levitate in a sufficiently strong field (as can diamagnetic materials like water droplets and frogs), but these can come back to a particular orientation like a compass needle.

Superconductors are “perfect diamagnets”, excluding all magnetic fields, and that’s a big difference. The “Meissner effect” that everyone has been hearing about so much is observed when a material first becomes superconductive at the right temperature and expels whatever magnetic fields were penetrating it at the time. All this said, we’re having to take the video on the statements of whoever made/released it, and there are other possible explanations for the it that do not involve room-temperature superconductivity. I will be very happy if this is a real replication, but I’m not taking the day off yet to celebrate just based on this.

And even though I’m usually more of an experimental-results guy than a theory guy, two other new preprints interest me greatly. One is from a team at the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, and the other is from Sinéad Griffin at Lawrence Berkeley. Both start from the reported X-ray structural data of LK-99 and look at its predicted behavior via density functional theory (DFT) calculations. And they come to very similar conclusions: it could work.

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He concludes that he’s “guardedly optimistic” at this point.
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Study: insect protein slows weight gain, boosts health status in obese mice • Medical Xpress

Lauren Quinn:

»

A new study in mice from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign suggests replacing traditional protein sources with mealworms in high-fat diets could slow weight gain, improve immune response, reduce inflammation, enhance energy metabolism, and beneficially alter the ratio of good to bad cholesterol.

“In addition to more dietary fiber, nutritionists also recommend eating more high-quality proteins as part of a weight management plan. We knew from an earlier study in roosters that mealworms are a high quality, highly digestible protein source that’s also environmentally sustainable,” said lead study author Kelly Swanson, professor in the Department of Animal Sciences and interim director of the Division of Nutritional Sciences, both in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at U. of I.

Swanson’s team fed mice a high-fat diet (46% calories from fat) with casein, a protein from dairy, for 12 weeks before switching to the alternative proteins. Another group, the control, consumed a lean diet with casein throughout the experiment. By the time mealworms were introduced, the high-fat diet group was obese and experiencing metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions increasing risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and other health problems.

The mice then started eating two types of mealworms in a dried, powdered form similar to flour, substituting either 50% or 100% of the casein in the diet. During and after 8 weeks on the experimental diets, the research team measured body weight, body composition, blood metabolites, and gene expression of the liver and adipose (fat) tissue.

Mealworm protein didn’t cause obese mice to lose weight, but their rate of weight gain slowed relative to mice consuming high-fat diets with casein.

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It’s the mealworms or Ozempic! Somehow I’m not confident people will go for the mealworms.
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News Corp using AI to produce 3,000 Australian local news stories a week • The Guardian

Amanda Meade:

»

News Corp Australia is producing 3,000 articles a week using generative artificial intelligence, executive chair Michael Miller has revealed.

Miller told the World News Media Congress in Taipei that a team of four staff use the technology to generate thousands of local stories each week on weather, fuel prices and traffic conditions, according to a report in Mediaweek.

The unit, Data Local, is led by News Corp’s data journalism editor Peter Judd and many of the stories carry his byline.

The unit supplements the copy written by reporters for the companies’ 75 “hyperlocal” mastheads across the country including in Penrith, Lismore, Fairfield, Bundaberg and Cairns.

Stories such as “Where to find the cheapest fuel in Penrith” are created using AI but overseen by journalists, according to a spokesperson from News Corp. There is no disclosure on the page that the reports are compiled using AI.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup
The spokesperson confirmed Miller had made the comments at a conference last month and said it would be more accurate to describe the “3,000 articles” as providing service information.

“For example, for some years now we have used automation to update local fuel prices several times daily as well as daily court lists, traffic and weather, death and funeral notices,” the spokesperson said.

“I’d stress that all such information and decisions are overseen by working journalists from the Data Local team.”

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It’s all coming up AI journalism, isn’t it? Aftonbladet yesterday, and now this and the next link which brings it closer to (your British) home.
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Editor’s letter: Nottinghamshire Live launches AI trial • Nottinghamshire Live

Natalie Fahy:

»

At Nottinghamshire Live we always aim to give our readers the best experience. Whether that’s being first with breaking news, or offering you insight and opinion on what’s going on in your neighbourhood, we pride ourselves on being the biggest and most trusted source of news in Nottinghamshire.

We also like to try and take advantage of new developments in our industry when the opportunity presents, and if we think it will be right for us and for readers.

That’s the reason I am writing to you today: to let you know about a new experiment we are running across our site involving Artificial Intelligence tools.

You might see a bullet point summary at the top of some of our longer articles, which we hope will help you get a sense of what you’re about to read and improve the experience for you.

These have been generated using an AI tool, and will always be checked over by a news editor before being added to articles. Any article published with this summary will have a sentence at the bottom to let you know AI has been used too. You can see one of the first ones we tried here.

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My 2p: the summary almost doubles the length of the article. But at least it’s accurate.
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Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

»

The impact of food on greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions can slip under the radar. In a survey in Britain last year, the share of respondents saying that “producing plants and meat on farms” was a “significant contributor” to climate change was the lowest among ten listed activities. Yet two papers published this year in Nature Food find that food, especially beef, creates more GHGs than previously thought. Forgoing steaks may be one of the most efficient ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

In 2019 the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the global food system was responsible for 21-37% of GHG emissions. This March researchers from the European Commission and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Office released a study with a central estimate near the top of this range. It attributed 34% of GHGs produced in 2015 to food.

This elevated share stems in part from accounting choices. The paper assigns the full impact of deforestation to the agriculture that results from it; includes emissions after food is sold (such as from waste and cooking); and counts non-food crops like cotton. But even when the authors excluded embedded emissions from sources like transport and packaging, they still found that agriculture generated 24% of GHGs. According to the World Resources Institute (a research group), cars, trains, ships and planes produce a total of 16%.

Another recent paper, by Xiaoming Xu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and eight co-authors, allocates this impact among 171 crops and 16 animal products. It finds that animal-based foods account for 57% of agricultural ghgs, versus 29% for food from plants. Beef and cow’s milk alone made up 34%. Combined with the earlier study’s results, this implies that cattle produce 12% of GHG emissions.

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If we are going to eat meat.. chicken?
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TikTok has pushed Chinese propaganda ads to millions across Europe • Forbes

Iain Martin and Emily Baker-White:

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TikTok has served up a flood of ads from Chinese state propaganda outlets to millions of Europeans in recent months, according to a new ad library published by the company on July 20. The promotions range in topic from defenses of Chinese Covid-19 lockdowns to adorable cats playing on the Great Wall of China to efforts to recast the country’s Xinjiang region — where it has persecuted and detained more than one million mostly Muslim Uyghurs — as a spectacular tourist destination.

An analysis of the ad library conducted by Forbes showed that as of Wednesday, July 26, more than 1,000 ads from Chinese state media outlets like People’s Daily and CGTN have run on the platform since October 2022. They have been served to millions of users across Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The ad library does not yet display data on ads presented to users in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries outside of Europe.

Much of the content advertised by China state media on TikTok focused on frequent talking points from its TV, radio and print outlets that tout China’s economy, technology and cultural heritage. References to Xinjiang, where the U.S. government have branded the Chinese government’s campaign of mass repression, imprisonment and “reeducation” as a genocide, appeared in 92 of the 124 adverts promoted by one state media account.

One ad, shown in March, was paid for by China News International and featured a man doing a traditional dance under the caption “Xinjiang is a good place!”

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So we’re worried about the content that TikTok is pushing to us, and we’re worried about the adverts that TikTok is pushing to us. Good job, everyone.
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Twitter threatens to sue Center for Countering Digital Hate over research • The New York Times

Sheera Frenkel and Ryan Mac:

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In a blog post Monday evening, X announced that it had filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate for “actively working to prevent free expression.” The suit was filed in federal court in the Northern District of California.

Twitter’s advertising business has been struggling under the ownership of Mr. Musk, who bought the company last year. US ad revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88m, down 59% from a year earlier. Advertisers may have been spooked by Mr. Musk’s changes to the social network, including the removal of rules of what can or can’t be said on the service and more ads featuring online gambling and marijuana products.

In May, Mr. Musk hired Linda Yaccarino, a former top advertising executive for NBCUniversal, to become Twitter’s chief executive.

The letter was at least the third legal threat or action by X Corp. in the last two months. In May, it sent a letter to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, accusing the tech giant of improperly using its data. This month, it also sent a letter to Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, saying it had copied Twitter’s trade secrets when creating Threads, a new social app.

X also sued Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a leading corporate law firm, this month over what it said were unjust payments related to Mr. Musk’s $44bn acquisition of Twitter.

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The update here is Twitter actually suing, after exchanging nastygrams over the weekend. Quite the collection of lawsuits it’s collecting there.
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Mitch McConnell’s ‘sandbag’ moment stokes anxiety over US gerontocracy • Financial Times

Lauren Fedor:

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McConnell, who had a lengthy absence from the Senate this year after suffering a fall at an event at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Washington, is far from the US Senate’s oldest member. That title belongs to Dianne Feinstein, the 90-year-old California Democrat. Chuck Grassley, the Republican senior senator from Iowa, is 89.

Feinstein’s age has been a particular cause for consternation after the Democratic lawmaker was absent from Congress for an extended period following a bout of shingles. She has appeared strikingly frail since returning to Capitol Hill and doubts over her cognitive abilities linger.

This week, she looked confused about what to do during a committee hearing, until a Democratic colleague, Patty Murray of Washington, instructed her to “just say ‘aye’”.

Meanwhile, at 80 years old, Biden has set the record for the oldest person elected US president. He will be 86 at the end of his second four-year term if he wins re-election.

Biden’s age and insinuations about his mental acuity have become a regular theme in Republican attacks on the president, especially on social media, even though the party’s frontrunner Donald Trump is just three years younger than the president.

In a Harvard Caps/Harris poll of about 2,000 registered voters this month 68% — including 43% of Democrats — thought Biden was “showing he is too old to be president”, up from 66% in June.

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Does an ageing population deserve ageing politicians? Surely not this old.
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Supermarket plastic bag charge has led to 98% drop in use in England, data shows • The Guardian

Damien Gayle:

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Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015.

Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday.

Rebecca Pow, the minister for environmental quality and resilience, said the policy had “helped to stop billions of single-use carrier bags littering our neighbourhoods or heading to landfill”. The government claimed the average person in England now bought just two single-use carrier bags a year from major retailers.

Campaigners welcomed the finding but said the statistic did not account for all types of plastic bag . They also questioned the timing of the announcement, made as experts said plans for 100 new North Sea oil and gas wells, announced the same day by the prime minister would “send a wrecking ball through the UK’s climate commitments”.

A 5p charge for carrier bags was introduced in English supermarkets in 2015. In 2021, the charge was increased to 10p and extended to all businesses. Since then, the number of plastic bags used across all retailers had fallen 35%, from 627m in 2019-20 to 406m in 2022-23, Defra said.

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Interesting to see how things have changed. Back in 2014, Surfers Against Sewage were campaigning for the charge to be introduced, and for exemptions not to be allowed. The problem was they had to persuade the new Secretary of State for the Environment – at the time, a certain Liz Truss. Whatever happened to her, I wonder.
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Slowing city traffic cuts road deaths by a quarter, study shows • NIHR

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Restricting a city’s speed limits to 20mph can reduce road deaths by almost a quarter, NIHR-funded research finds. [NIHR = National Institute of Health and Care Research]

Accident rates across Edinburgh fell without extra traffic-calming measures and police patrols. Serious injuries fell by a third too, the study showed. Replacing speed limit signs improved road safety and enhanced residents’ quality of life. The speed limit scheme was cost-effective, researchers say.

Before the new restrictions, 45 out of 100 cars in Edinburgh travelled above 25 mph. One year later, the figure had dropped to 31. Average speeds on affected roads also fell.

The number of collisions in one year fell by 40% to 367, and there were 409 fewer casualties – a drop of 39%. Fatalities dropped by 23% and serious injuries fell by 33%.

Experts at Edinburgh University led the study. It is the UK’s most extensive evaluation of 20mph speed limits so far. They worked with local and national traffic authorities to gauge the effectiveness of 20mph restrictions. The City of Edinburgh Council introduced the speed limits scheme in 2016.

The scheme applied to 80% of Edinburgh’s streets aiming to cut accidents. It aimed to encourage more walking and cycling and create more pleasant neighbourhoods. Researchers also assessed a smaller scheme in Belfast. This found reducing traffic speed also helps create better quality environments.

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This was published back in October 2022, but seems relevant as Rishi Sunak appears hell-bent on raising the speed limit to 50 in those locations. The study is here, and covers 2000 to 2018 – so not including the pandemic.
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