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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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.

«

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:

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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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

“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.

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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

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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

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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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Can AI disrupt the books business? All the signs are… no. But the reasons why are interesting. CC-licensed photo by Martin Hearn on Flickr.

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

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

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

Why generative AI won’t disrupt books • WIRED

Elizabeth Minkel:

»

Last month, Justine Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, provided a sort of bookend to Munjal’s “AI-animated books” proposal. “The three largest fanfic sites—[Archive of Our Own], Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad—get 3 billion-plus annual visits in the US alone,” she wrote. “Imagine how much bigger this market could be if you could chat with characters vs. reading static stories?” The thread was likely a reference to Character.ai, a startup that lets users chat with fictional heroes and villains; Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million funding round for the company in March. The comment also came after the revelation that large language models (LLMs) may have scraped fanfiction writers’ work—which is largely written and shared for free—causing an (understandable) uproar in many fan communities.

Setting aside the fact that fandom role-playing has been a popular practice for decades, Moore’s statements felt like a distillation of tech’s tortured relationship with narrative prose. There are many kinds of fanfiction—including an entire subgenre in which “you” are a character in the story. But those are still stories, sentences deliberately written and arranged in a way that lets you lose yourself in an authored narrative. “Imagine having such a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of reading fanfiction—let alone reading fiction more broadly,” I wrote in response to her thread. What’s so wrong with people enjoying reading plain old words on a page?

…One reason books haven’t been particularly disruptable might be that many of the people looking to “fix” things couldn’t actually articulate what was broken—whether through their failure to see the real problems facing the industry (namely, Amazon’s stranglehold), or their insistence that books are not particularly enjoyable as a medium. “It’s that arrogance, to come into a community you know nothing about, that you might have studied as you study for an MBA, and think that you can revolutionize anything,” says writer and longtime book-industry observer Maris Kreizman. “There were so many false problems that tech guys created that we didn’t actually have.”

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So classic: (figurative) tech bros thinking they know why people like something better than the people who like it do.
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Twitter accused of bullying anti-hate campaigners • BBC News

Chris Vallance:

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Since Mr Musk took over Twitter, the platform has been accused – including by former employees – of not doing enough to counter hate-speech and misinformation. Conversely, in December Mr Musk tweeted that hate speech was down by a third.

On Sunday the platform reinstated Kanye West after an almost eight-month ban for a series of offensive tweets – one of which appeared to show a symbol combining a swastika and the Star of David.

In the letter to the CCDH [Center for Countering Digital Hate], X Corp lawyer Alex Spiro rejected the campaign group’s allegations that Twitter “fails to act on 99%” of hateful messages from accounts with Twitter Blue subscriptions.

Mr Spiro criticised the organisation’s methodology, writing that “the article is little more than a series of inflammatory, misleading, and unsupported claims based on a cursory review of random tweets.”

He also alleged that CCDH was supported by funding from “X Corp’s commercial competitors, as well as government entities and their affiliates”.

The letter accused the organisation of attempting to drive away advertisers and said X Corp was considering legal action. The company has lost lost almost half of its advertising revenue since his $44bn (£33.6bn) takeover, Mr Musk revealed in July.

In its reply CCDH’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said the allegations in the “ridiculous letter” had no basis in fact but were “a disturbing effort to intimidate those who have the courage to advocate against incitement, hate speech and harmful content online”.

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Musk’s rather bizarre “free speech for me but not for thee” principles aside, it might be hard for the CCDH to prove its case; accessing the API for the full feed would be incredibly expensive. It’s working on a sample.
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More than 50m Americans under alert as heatwave persists • The Guardian

Erum Salam:

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Over 50 million Americans remain under a heat advisory in one of the hottest summers ever recorded, and a heatwave continues to affect vast parts of the country. Nasa recently confirmed June was the hottest June ever.

The hot and dry weather in the south-west of the US has set off a wave of wildfires. California and Nevada are currently battling a major fire that is uncontrolled. Another out-of-control fire that originated in Washington state has spread into Canada, forcing residents in the town of Osoyoos, British Columbia, to evacuate.

Sunday marked the 31st consecutive day where temperatures reached at least 110F (43.3C) in Phoenix, Arizona. The city’s previous record was 18 days in June 1974.

Doctors in the region reported a rise in first-, second-, and third-degree contact-burn cases, some fatal, amid extreme heat conditions. The reports of severe burn incidents came from hospitals in Arizona and Nevada, where deaths from heat-related conditions have surged.

In Texas, San Antonio hit an all-time high of 117F in June.

Bodies of water around the world are experiencing a phenomenon known as “marine heatwave”, when waters warm to unprecedented levels. A sharp rise in temperatures has been seen in the Caribbean Basin, the Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the already fragile ecosystems of marine life, particularly coral reefs. The conditions cause coral to bleach, and in many cases, die.

Andrew Baker, director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the University of Miami told the Washington Post: “This is definitely the worst bleaching event Florida has ever seen.”

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Radical ways to fix the Earth: are they magic bullets or just band-aids? • The Guardian

Robin McKie:

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“The problem is that climate change itself is already one huge experiment on our planet,” said Prof David Reiner of Cambridge University. “Now we are trying to combat that experiment with other experiments. That will have unknown consequences.

“On the other hand, I take solace from the fact that many more scientific minds are now turning to these problems, that more research is being started, and that a lot more public and private funding is going into ways of tackling global warming so there is room, in the long run, for some optimism.”

However, it is the second form of geoengineering – solar radiation modification (SRM) – that causes most unease. Among the proposed SRM projects are schemes that would scatter the upper atmosphere with tiny reflective particles, such as sulphate aerosols, which could then reflect sunlight back into space. Alternatively, this could be done by placing huge mirrors into orbit around Earth.

The problem is that such schemes would still allow carbon dioxide to build up in the planet’s atmosphere. The world might cool a little as sunlight was diminished, but how this would affect weather patterns is not clear. Carbon dioxide would still have to be removed some time in the future. More and more carbon dioxide would dissolve in the sea and ocean acidification would continue to intensify, triggering even more damage to coral reefs and other marine ecosystems.

Dismissing SRM technology, Prof Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College, London, called it “irresponsible, dangerous and a threat to the manageability” of our survival, saying: “It is not a solution but an extremely dangerous band-aid that covers up the global warming problem without healing it, creating a false and unwarranted sense of climate safety while the core of the problem continues to fester.”

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This probably means that tons of venture capital money is going to go into SRM projects, and Elon Musk will launch one.
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The fall of Stack Overflow, explained • Devmoh

Priyam:

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There are four reasons that explain the slow decline of Stack Overflow.

1. The Google Analytics Change: The first reason is actually the quickest reason. Stack Overflow hasn’t actually lost 50% of its traffic, its more like 35%. In May 2022, Google Analytics changed how a cookie was stored due to privacy laws, leading to a reported 15% loss in traffic. The link above has an update clearing this up.

2. Stack Overflow is hostile to its users: For a place to ask questions, Stack Overflow is surprisingly one of the most toxic and hostile forums on the internet, but in a passive-aggressive way. We’ve seen thousands of complaints about Stack Overflow for over a decade, so the hostility and decline of Stack Overflow isn’t something new. 

There are hundreds of Reddit posts about Stack Overflow’s hostility. People have been talking about the “Decline of Stack Overflow” for almost a decade now. But it seems to have finally stuck.

This was from 14 YEARS ago! 2009! The site its linking too doesn’t even exist anymore.
Often, if you try to ask a question on Stack Overflow, it’ll get marked as a duplicate with a link to a question that is absolutely not a duplicate. Or the duplicate will be to a question that was never answered. 

Other times, valid questions will get downvoted. If you try to answer, you get downvoted. If you try to post a comment.. wait, you can’t! Because you don’t have enough karma.

For a community that is so gate-kept through imaginary Internet points, there is an incredible amount of disrespect on the forums not through just voting, but also through people commenting, such as people passive-aggressively calling you dumb.

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Other reasons: Google’s ranking Stack Overflow lower; and yes, AI is having an effect on it. Since November, traffic has fallen a lot.
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Facebook to unmask anonymous Dutch user accused of repeated defamatory posts • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Starting today, Facebook users may feel a little less safe posting anonymously. The Court of the Hague in The Netherlands ruled that Meta Ireland must unmask an anonymous user accused of defaming the claimant, a male Facebook user who allegedly manipulated and made secret recordings of women he dated.

The anonymous Facebook user posted the allegedly defamatory statements in at least two private Facebook groups dedicated to discussing dating experiences. The claimant could not gain access but was shown screenshots from the groups, one with about 2,600 members and one with around 61,000 members. The claimant argued that his reputation had suffered from the repeated postings that included photos of the man and alleged screenshots of his texts.

The claimant tried to get Meta to remove the posts, but Meta responded with an email saying that it would not do so because “it is not clear to us that the content you reported is unlawful as defamation.”

At that point, Meta suggested that the man contact the anonymous user directly to resolve the matter, triggering the lawsuit against Meta. Initially, the claimant asked the court to order Meta to delete the posts, identify the anonymous user, and flag any posts in other private Facebook groups that could defame the claimant.

While arguing the case, Meta had defended the anonymous user’s right to freedom of expression, but the court decided that the claimant—whose name is redacted in court documents—deserved an opportunity to challenge the allegedly defamatory statements.

Partly for that reason, the court ordered Meta to provide “basic subscriber information” on the anonymous user, including their username, as well as any names, email addresses, or phone numbers associated with their Facebook account.

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Generative AI and the future of work in America • McKinsey

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• By 2030, activities that account for up to 30% of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated—a trend accelerated by generative AI. However, we see generative AI enhancing the way STEM, creative, and business and legal professionals work rather than eliminating a significant number of jobs outright. Automation’s biggest effects are likely to hit other job categories. Office support, customer service, and food service employment could continue to decline.

• Federal investment to address climate and infrastructure, as well as structural shifts, will also alter labor demand. The net-zero transition will shift employment away from oil, gas, and automotive manufacturing and into green industries for a modest net gain in employment. Infrastructure projects will increase demand in construction, which is already short almost 400,000 workers today. We also see increased demand for healthcare workers as the population ages, plus gains in transportation services due to e-commerce.

• An additional 12 million occupational transitions may be needed by 2030. As people leave shrinking occupations, the economy could reweight toward higher-wage jobs. Workers in lower-wage jobs are up to 14 times more likely to need to change occupations than those in highest-wage positions, and most will need additional skills to do so successfully. Women are 1.5 times [ie 50%? – Overspill Ed.] more likely to need to move into new occupations than men.

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There’s a graphic, a fair way further down, showing how much McKinsey thinks is going to be done by generative AI across multiple sectors. The biggest (forecast) changes are in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), education and workforce training, and creative and arts management.
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War in Ukraine spurs revolution in drone warfare using AI • The Washington Post

John Hudson and Kostiantyn Khudov:

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Ukraine, which is known for agriculture and other heavy industry, is not an obvious setting for drone innovation. The exigencies of war, however, have turned the country into a kind of super lab of invention, attracting investment from vaunted business luminaries including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. More than 200 Ukrainian companies involved in drone production are now working hand-in-glove with military units on the front lines to tweak and augment drones to improve their ability to kill and spy on the enemy.

“This is a 24/7 technology race,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview at his office in Kyiv, the capital. “The challenge is that every product in every category must be changed daily to gain an advantage.”

Fedorov, 32, is in charge of Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” program, an effort to maximize Kyiv’s use of reconnaissance and attack drones to offset Russia’s big advantage in air and artillery power.

The program has assisted private companies in training more than 10,000 drone operators in the past year, with the goal of training an additional 10,000 over the next six months.

Russia’s air force is estimated to be 10 times larger than Ukraine’s, but Kyiv has kept much of it grounded after shooting down several fighter jets in the opening days of the conflict. Drones have allowed Ukraine to surveil and hit sensitive targets far behind enemy lines while improving the accuracy of its conventional artillery.

Drones have far less firepower than fighter jets, however, which is why Kyiv has requested F-16s and other big-ticket items such as ATACMS (shorthand for Army Tactical Missile System) long-range missile systems. In the meantime, cultivating a domestic drone industry is a top priority.

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Threads has to change user habits to compete with Twitter • Quartz

Scott Nover:

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Joseph Bayer, an assistant professor at Ohio State University’s school of communication, says that Twitter and Instagram are culturally very different spaces, but also not necessarily overlapping networks. Instagram is more centered around shopping, influencers, and visuals, while Twitter is centered more around news, sports, and its Black community. “It depends how much overlap people have in their Twitter and Instagram,” he said. “These are very different networks.”

Bayer wasn’t surprised that I keep forgetting about Threads. In order to switch fully from Twitter to Threads, I would need to reap social rewards from Threads. And he’s noticed that engagement on the app—such as likes, reposts, and replies—still seem paltry as compared to Twitter.

But he also said that I’m not just talking about building a new habit with Threads, but also ditching an old one with Twitter. “Even if you remove some of the rewards—which, for many people, it’s become much more of a mixture of positive, negative, and neutral rewards—you’re still driven to that because you have hard-wired that automatic behavior,” Bayer said. “There are certain cues you’ve developed, whether it’s boredom or anxiety or just fear of missing out on some new idea or informational lens that triggers you automatically without any deliberation.”

There’s one other big reason that Maddox, on the other hand, thinks users might be struggling with when they use Threads: app fatigue, which happens when users get tired from using too many apps—and too many new apps.

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App fatigue is definitely a thing. Plus the huge overlap in content, which makes you wonder why you’re on this app rather than that one. When social media was new, there was a lot less content to pick from; it was a new and expanding frontier. Not any more.
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Who paid for a mysterious spy tool? The FBI, an FBI inquiry found • The New York Times

Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman:

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When The New York Times reported in April that a contractor had purchased and deployed a spying tool made by NSO, the contentious Israeli hacking firm, for use by the US government, White House officials said they were unaware of the contract and put the FBI in charge of figuring out who might have been using the technology.

After an investigation, the FBI uncovered at least part of the answer: it was the FBI.

The deal for the surveillance tool between the contractor, Riva Networks, and NSO was completed in November 2021. Only days before, the Biden administration had put NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, which effectively banned US firms from doing business with the company. For years, NSO’s spyware had been abused by governments around the world.

This particular tool, known as Landmark, allowed government officials to track people in Mexico without their knowledge or consent.

The FBI now says that it used the tool unwittingly and that Riva Networks misled the bureau. Once the agency discovered in late April that Riva had used the spying tool on its behalf, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, terminated the contract, according to US officials.

But many questions remain. Why did the FBI hire this contractor — which the bureau had previously authorized to purchase a different NSO tool under a cover name — for sensitive information-gathering operations outside the United States? And why was there apparently so little oversight?

«

Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. A bit amazing that the ban didn’t percolate through, though. (Thanks G for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

From 2025, line judges will be surplus at top men’s tennis events: they’re being replaced by cameras. CC-licensed photo by Carine06 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.

Mark Zuckerberg: Threads users down by more than a half • BBC News

Tom Singleton:

»

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg says its new social media platform, Threads, has lost more than half its users.

The Twitter rival rocketed to more than 100 million users within five days of its launch earlier this month.

But Mr Zuckerberg has acknowledged those numbers have now tumbled. “If you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” he said.

Mr Zuckerberg – who made the comments in a call to employees, heard by the Reuters news agency – described the situation as “normal” and said he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the app.

Threads was criticised for the limited functionality it had when it launched. Meta has since added new features, such as separate “following” and “for you”‘ feeds, and increased scope to translate posts into different languages. The company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, told staff it was now focused on adding more “retention-driving hooks” to draw people back to the platform.

He gave the example of “making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads”. The two platforms are closely tied – in order to sign up for Threads, users must have an Instagram account.

Mr Zuckerberg also updated employees on the company’s enormous bet on a yet-to-be-created virtual reality world, called the Metaverse. He said work on the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology that would power it was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track”, adding that he didn’t anticipate it going mainstream until the next decade.

«

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OpenAI quietly shuts down its AI detection tool • Decrypt

Jason Nelson:

»

In January, artificial intelligence powerhouse OpenAI announced a tool that could save the world—or at least preserve the sanity of professors and teachers—by detecting whether a piece of content had been created using generative AI tools like its own ChatGPT.

Half a year later, that tool is dead, killed because it couldn’t do what it was designed to do.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI quietly unplugged its AI detection tool, AI Classifier, last week because of “its low rate of accuracy,” the firm said. The explanation was not in a new announcement, but added in a note added to the blog post that first announced the tool. The link to OpenAI’s classifier is no longer available.

“We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated,” OpenAI wrote.

New tools allowing the use of increasingly sophisticated AI come online almost daily and have created a cottage industry of AI detectors.

OpenAI announced the launch of its AI Classifier claiming it could distinguish between text written by a human and an AI. Even then, however, OpenAI called the classifier “not fully reliable,” adding that the evaluations on a “challenge set” of English texts correctly identified 26% of AI-written text as “likely AI-written,” while incorrectly labeling the human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time.

OpenAI said limitations of the AI Classifier include being unreliable on text with fewer than 1,000 characters, incorrectly labelling text written by humans as written by AI, and classifiers based on neural networks performing poorly outside of their training data.

«

The arms race continues. AI generators still in the lead.
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How Sweden’s biggest daily uses ChatGPT in its newsroom • UK Press Gazette

Aisha Majid:

»

Sweden’s biggest daily news outlet has discovered it can use generative AI tools to boost time spent on its articles, especially with younger audiences.

Aftonbladet began experimenting with ChatGPT in its newsroom at the start of the year with the goal of creating a tool to help it test out what generative AI could do.

The result was an AI-generated article summary that readers can choose to open within news articles. The initial results, deputy editor Martin Schori told Press Gazette, have been positive.

Unexpectedly, audiences spend longer reading articles that have summaries than those without. According to Schori, the findings surprised the newsroom, which initially thought the findings were a mistake.

Instead, Schori explained that since readers get a more general understanding of an article upfront, they are more likely to go on and read the whole text.

The summaries, called ‘Snabbversions’ (or ‘quick versions’ in English), use ChatGPT owner OpenAI’s API and are integrated into Aftonbladet’s CMS.

Snabbversions, which have already been rolled out into many of Aftonbladet’s published news and sports articles, have also proven popular with the title’s younger audience. Nearly 40% of younger readers opt to read the summaries.

«

In case you’re wondering, yes, they do get a human to check over the summary. And consider that this is getting ChatGPT to do a summary in Swedish – which is not its most effective language.
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Japan’s population drops by nearly 800,000 with falls in every prefecture for the first time • The Guardian

Gavin Blair:

»

Every one of Japan’s 47 prefectures posted a population drop in 2022, while the total number of Japanese people fell by nearly 800,000. The figures released by the Japan’s internal affairs ministry mark two new unwelcome records for a nation sailing into uncharted demographic territory, but on a course many other countries are set to follow.

Japan’s prime minister has called the trend a crisis and vowed to tackle the situation. But national policies have so far failed to dent population decline, though concerted efforts by a sprinkling of small towns have had some effect.

Wednesday’s new data showed deaths hit a record high of more than 1.56 million while there were just 771,000 births in Japan in 2022, the first time the number of newborns has fallen below 800,000 since records began.

Even an all-time high increase in foreign residents of more than 10%, to 2.99 million, couldn’t halt a slide in the total population, which has declined for 14 years in a row to 122.42 million in 2022.

In January, prime minister Fumio Kishida said that addressing the birthrate was “now or never” and warned, “Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions.”

Japan’s ageing population is already affecting nearly every aspect of society. More than half of all municipalities are designated as depopulated districts, schools are closing and more than 1.2 million small businesses have owners aged about 70 with no successor.

«

Read the rest of the article for some amazing detail about the yakuza (Japan’s version of the Mafia) and, er, senior porn. But overall, 14 years of decline? That’s a dystopia we don’t think about often.
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Britain is a developing country • Consumer Surplus

Sam Bowman:

»

The UK is thinking like a frontier economy when it should be thinking like a developing country. We’re well off by global standards, but poor by the standards of the frontier. And how rich we get mostly won’t be determined by the Great Stagnation, but by more mundane factors like the cost of energy, the supply of housing and infrastructure, and returns on capital investment.

In a way this is optimistic: the UK has a policy problem, not a fundamental scientific one. 

But there is one problem. There is virtually no recognition of how bad things are among British elites. Stefan Dercon, author of Gambling on Development, has a theory about what allows developing countries to experience sustained economic growth: they need their elites to come to an agreement to pursue it. The reforms needed to grow are painful and unpopular in the short-run. Regimes that do them without an “elite bargain” behind them are opening themselves up to being removed. Similarly, when one party in the UK proposes planning liberalisation, almost inevitably the others swing heavily Nimbyish.

In the UK, the preoccupations of the “elite” – by which I mean the people, left and right, in politics, government and media whose views shape those of the country – are with things like Net Zero (above all), inequality, obesity, delivering Brexit, regulating Big Tech, data ethics and privacy, cutting immigration, gender and racial pay gaps, and other priorities that are either unrelated to, or diametrically opposed to, making the country richer. If growth gets mentioned at all it is usually to support some unfunded and poorly targeted tax cut. On the flip side, every proposed tax or spending cut is assessed in terms of its distributional impact, not its effect on growth.

«

There’s a lot of easily absorbed detail in this post, which at the same time sets out the problem very simply. There’s a lot of ground to make up, and we’ve essentially been going backwards for years – perhaps decades.
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Electronic Line Calling Live to be adopted across the Association of Tennis Professionals (Men’s) Tour • ATP Tour

»

The ATP has announced Tour-wide adoption of Electronic Line Calling Live (ELC Live) from 2025. The advanced officiating technology covers all court lines for ‘out’ calls throughout matches, a role traditionally carried out by on-court line judges.

This significant officiating update follows several seasons during which a combination of ELC Live, ELC Review and on-court line judges has been used at ATP Tour events. The move is set to optimise accuracy and consistency across tournaments, match courts and surfaces, for players competing in both main draw and qualifying events. The decision was supported by extensive research conducted by ATP across tennis stakeholders, including fans, which identified accuracy and consistency as the most important factors in assessing different line-calling systems.

All-court ELC Live coverage will also deliver comprehensive player and ball tracking across the whole Tour, leading to an unprecedented level of data for player-performance analysis and the development of new statistics in the game in collaboration with Tennis Data Innovations (TDI), in addition to future commercialisation opportunities.

«

I missed this when it was announced in April. That gives them about 18 months. One already gets “Hawkeye” replays for many big tournaments, and the US Open used ELC throughout in 2022. I’d love to see an analysis of ELC v humans (the latter being cheaper, of course, but less accurate). How soon before the umpire is a robot too, since the only job will be to call the score and, occasionally, the trainer?
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The economic cost of Houston’s heat: ‘I don’t want to be here anymore’ • WSJ

Rachel Wolfe and Amara Omeokwe:

»

Houstonians pride themselves on how they tolerate heat. This summer, the heat has become intolerable. 

Businesses and residents in America’s fourth-largest city have moved much of life indoors, changing work and spending habits. Some residents say they are reminded of quarantining during the pandemic’s early days: ordering in groceries, avoiding social commitments and looking for ways to stay entertained from the couch. 

The result is a dent to the local economy that could become an annual pattern if summers stay hotter for longer. 

“This year is different, people are staying home,” said Barbara Stewart, a professor of human development and consumer sciences at the University of Houston.

At Buffalo Bayou Brewing, a taproom and restaurant in the Heights neighborhood, fewer people are coming to the restaurant during the day, said Jonathan Horowitz, chief revenue and strategy officer. Earlier this month, the restaurant purchased two new portable cooling units to put behind the rooftop deck’s bar to better keep staff cool. 

He estimates revenue during the heat wave is down roughly 10% compared with the same time in 2022. 

“It seems like the time frame of this kind of heat has expanded beyond what it used to be,” Horowitz said. “We always had 100-degree days, but when you have 100-degree days for two months straight, that’s different.”

Employees at small- and medium-size businesses in the tourism, arts and entertainment and sports and recreation industries in Texas averaged 19.6 hours on the job a week between mid-June and mid-July, a 20% decline from the average during comparable weeks from 2019 to 2022, according to an analysis from Luke Pardue, an economist at payroll platform Gusto. 

«

“If” summers stay hotter for longer? What are you expecting to happen, WSJ? Climate change to suddenly go into reverse?
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U.S. heat waves prompt surge in use of natural gas, a fossil fuel • The Washington Post

Timothy Puko:

»

There’s a big winner in the record heat waves baking the United States, China and other countries — fossil fuels.

The United States is setting records for natural gas consumption this week at the power plants that keep the nation’s air conditioners humming, according to estimates from S&P Global Commodity Insights. In China, power plants are burning more coal to keep up with electricity needs, helping to feed a record pace in demand this year for the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide, the International Energy Agency said Thursday.

That demand is feeding what the Paris energy watchdog calls a “vicious cycle” that further boosts world temperatures. As heat waves multiply and intensify, it creates more demand for fossil fuels, which add to the greenhouse-gas emissions that intensify extreme heat around the world.

The world’s power grids are still too reliant on gas and coal, complicating efforts by the Biden administration and other governments to phase down their use. Despite climate commitments, governments face immediate imperatives to prevent power blackouts and skyrocketing energy prices to cool buildings and protect people from life-threatening conditions.

“The projection for how much energy you need is higher and higher because the cooling needs to go up,” said Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “There are these tragic ironies all over the climate space.”

«

But Lord David Frost said we’d all “adapt” to higher temperatures! That’s not “adapting”!
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Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse • Blockworks

Andrew Bailey and Nick Almond:

»

Worldcoin — a new financial system connected to sensitive biometric information, mostly harvested from poor people — sure sounds like a terrible idea.

“Terrible” doesn’t do it justice.

Worldcoin will need to assemble a vast database of iris data. But not everyone is eager to gaze into an Orb. In the bootstrapping phase, at least, you had to pay people to scan their eyes. And so Worldcoin turned to the global south — home to the cheapest eyeballs — and played a dark game of ‘what will people do for money?’

Incredibly, Worldcoin was unprepared for an obvious consequence of this rollout strategy: A black market for verified credentials. You can now seemingly buy a World ID for as little as $30. Anyone, then, with more than $30 on hand can command more than one digital identity (although Worldcoin is aware of this issue and has proposed solutions to resolve it). Connecting real people to digital identities is a thorny puzzle. 

Worldcoin does not fix this. And it’s unlikely it ever can, since nothing in the design can stop professional sybil attackers farming eyeballs on the ground level through nefarious means.

This does not inspire trust in the system or its designers. And yet trust is what they demand. Worldcoin’s promotional materials are full of promises — to delete sensitive biometric information, or keep it hidden from view, or not use it in nefarious ways. One blog post (quoted here; the original appears to have been changed since initial release) put it this way: “During our field-testing phase, we are collecting and securely storing more data than we will upon its completion… We will delete all the biometric data we have collected during field testing once our algorithms are fully-trained.”

«

If the crypto websites don’t like your project, you’ve really got a problem, haven’t you. Though the question of whether Worldcoin will discover if two irises are (functionally) identical, rather as fingerprints can be, remains to be answered. Molly White (of Web3IsGoingJustGreat) has much the same view.
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Typo leaks millions of US military emails to Mali web operator • Financial Times

Jacob Judah, Chris Cook, Mehul Srivastava, Max Harlow and Felicia Schwartz:

»

Millions of US military emails have been misdirected to Mali through a “typo leak” that has exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers.

Despite repeated warnings over a decade, a steady flow of email traffic continues to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, as a result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix to all US military email addresses.

The problem was first identified almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali’s country domain.

Zuurbier has been collecting misdirected emails since January in an effort to persuade the US to take the issue seriously. He holds close to 117,000 misdirected messages — almost 1,000 arrived on Wednesday alone. In a letter he sent to the US in early July, Zuurbier wrote: “This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.”

One misdirected email included the travel itinerary of General James McConville, the US army’s chief of staff, and his delegation as they prepared for a trip to Indonesia earlier this year
Control of the .ML domain will revert on Monday from Zuurbier to Mali’s government, which is closely allied with Russia. When Zuurbier’s 10-year management contract expires, Malian authorities will be able to gather the misdirected emails. The Malian government did not respond to requests for comment.

«

This was roughly two weeks ago, but I can’t find any update on it. Has Mali got it all? Has it given it back? On tenterhooks now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sales of foldable phones (like Samsung’s Galaxy Fold) might hit 100m annually by 2027 – if Apple joins in soon. Don’t hold your breath, though. CC-licensed photo by HS You on Flickr.

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

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

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

Big AI won’t stop election deepfakes with watermarks • WIRED

Vittoria Elliott:

»

Last week the major AI companies, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, promised the US government that they would try to mitigate the harms that could be caused by their technologies. But it’s unlikely to stem the coming tide of AI-generated content and the confusion that it could bring.

The White House says the companies’ “voluntary commitment” includes “developing robust technical mechanisms to ensure that users know when content is AI generated, such as a watermarking system,” as part of the effort to prevent AI from being used for “fraud and deception.”

But experts who spoke to WIRED say the commitments are half measures. “There’s not going to be a really simple yes or no on whether something is AI-generated or not, even with watermarks,” says Sam Gregory, program director at the nonprofit Witness, which helps people use technology to promote human rights.

Watermarking is commonly used by picture agencies and newswires to prevent images from being used without permission—and payment.

But when it comes to the variety of content that AI can generate, and the many models that already exist, things get more complicated. As of yet, there is no standard for watermarking, meaning that each company is using a different method. Dall-E, for instance, uses a visible watermark (and a quick Google search will find you many tutorials on how to remove it), whereas other services might default to metadata, or pixel-level watermarks that are not visible to users. While some of these methods might be hard to undo, others, like visual watermarks, can sometimes become ineffective when an image is resized.

“There’s going to be ways in which you can corrupt the watermarks,” Gregory says.

«

Yes, this is the obvious problem. Does no watermark mean no problem? Of course not. Answers? None so far.
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Meta’s Threads needs a policy for election disinformation, voting groups say • NPR

Dara Kerr:

»

“If you have that many people, you have a great responsibility to the people that are on the platform,” said Andrea Hailey, CEO of Vote.org. “What we’re asking for here is a real plan, knowing that we’re only a few months out from presidential primaries, and that very soon the presidential election will be on our doorstep.”

The voting rights groups say they have cause for concern. During the past few elections, disinformation involving voter registration, polling places and political candidates was rampant on social media. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how that company used Facebook to target and manipulate swing voters. And in 2020, mentions of “stolen election” and “voter fraud” skyrocketed after President Joe Biden won the presidency.

“Misinformation, like social media itself, has gotten considerably more sophisticated,” said Bond Benton, communications associate professor who studies misinformation at Montclair State University. “There are ways that you can manipulate and game the system to get misinformation seen by a lot of people very rapidly. And if you’re not investing to prevent and curtail that, it’s going to find its way through.”

Meta has election disinformation policies for Facebook and Instagram, but it hasn’t published any specifically for Threads. A company spokesman told NPR that Facebook’s rules apply to Threads. So, for example, people can’t post false claims about voter registration. He also said Meta is looking at additional ways to address misinformation in future updates to the Threads app.

The voting rights groups say Threads needs a stand-alone policy. Otherwise, it’s unclear how the rules will be implemented and enforced.

«

I don’t follow how, if Meta says it will use Facebook’s rules on misinformation, that isn’t sufficient for Threads. It seems like that would cover everything – at least as far as the Facebook policy really does cover anything at all.
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‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record • The Guardian

Ajit Niranjan:

»

The era of global warming has ended and “the era of global boiling has arrived”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said after scientists confirmed July was on track to be the world’s hottest month on record.

“Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning,” Guterres said. “It is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and avoid the very worst of climate change. But only with dramatic, immediate climate action.”

Guterres’s comments came after scientists confirmed on Thursday that the past three weeks have been the hottest since records began and July is on track to be the hottest month ever recorded.

Global temperatures this month have shattered records, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation programme, stoked by the burning of fossil fuels and spurring violent weather.

The steady rise in global average temperatures, driven by pollution that traps sunlight and acts like a greenhouse around the Earth, has made weather extremes worse.

“Humanity is in the hot seat,” Guterres told a press conference on Thursday. “For vast parts of North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, it is a cruel summer. For the entire planet, it is a disaster. And for scientists, it is unequivocal – humans are to blame.

«

Scary. Now we need a superconductor so that we can power CO2 extraction machines all over the place. Else we’re just heading rapidly to what William Gibson called “the Jackpot”. It’s not something you want to win.
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“Diamagnetism is the most likely explanation” • Twitter

Alex Kaplan has been gathering reactions and analysis of LK-99, the allegedly superconducting material made by a Korean team:

»

CMTC [Condensed Matter Theory Center] probably takes the cake at predicting diamagnetism as the most likely explanation. Consider these videos of flux pinning (perfect diamagnetism) vs. moderate diamagnetism. Which one does LK-99 remind you of?

Other susceptibility data points also indicate diamagnetism.

«

Kaplan/CMTC point out too that LK-99 has higher resistance than copper, which is not really what you want from a superconductor.

Still awaiting attempted replication, but the scrutiny so far isn’t encouraging for a dramatic scientific breakthrough. (Everything has diamagnetism.) So.. no easy solution to CO2.
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Millionaire crypto influencer found dismembered in suitcase • NY Post

Ben Cost:

»

Police have launched a murder investigation after the dismembered remains of missing millionaire Fernando Pérez Algaba, 41, were discovered by a group of children in Argentina over the weekend.

The grisly case came to light after the kids found a red suitcase filled with body parts while playing by a stream in the town of Ingeniero Budge, Buenos Aires Province, on Sunday, Jam Press reported.

The children’s parents notified the Buenos Aires police, who inspected the package and reportedly found the victim’s legs and forearm inside, discovering another whole arm in the stream. On Wednesday, authorities discovered the missing head and torso, El País reported.

The body parts were cleanly amputated, suggesting the work of a professional, local media reported. Meanwhile, a subsequent autopsy revealed that the victim had been shot three times before the dismemberment.

Police identified Algaba by his fingerprints and also by distinctive tattoos on the body parts. The entrepreneur had been declared missing since last Tuesday.

The businessman had accumulated millions renting luxury vehicles and selling cryptocurrency, which he frequently advertised to his 900,000 followers on Instagram. The influencer, who lived in Barcelona, Spain, had reportedly been staying in Argentina for a week prior to his alleged murder.

Police have arrested one suspect in connection with Algaba’s death. And while the motive behind the alleged murder remains unclear, authorities suspect that the influencer was killed over his numerous debts…He had reportedly run afoul of the Barra Bravas, a violent gang heavily involved in Argentina’s soccer scene, which reportedly demanded that he pay them a $40,000 loan.

“If something happens to me, everyone is already warned,” he wrote in a message.

«

The moral, sadly, isn’t too hard to infer. One can only hope that the children weren’t too badly traumatised.
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Rewarding chatbots for real-world engagement with millions of users • ArXiv

A 14-strong team from Chai Research, Seamless Capital and the University of Cambridge’s Machine Intelligence Laboratory:

»

The emergence of pretrained large language models has led to the deployment of a range of social chatbots for chitchat. Although these chatbots demonstrate language ability and fluency, they are not guaranteed to be engaging and can struggle to retain users. This work investigates the development of social chatbots that prioritize user engagement to enhance retention, specifically examining the use of human feedback to efficiently develop highly engaging chatbots.

The proposed approach uses automatic pseudo-labels collected from user interactions to train a reward model that can be used to reject low-scoring sample responses generated by the chatbot model at inference time. Intuitive evaluation metrics, such as mean conversation length (MCL), are introduced as proxies to measure the level of engagement of deployed chatbots.

A/B testing on groups of 10,000 new daily chatbot users on the Chai Research platform shows that this approach increases the MCL by up to 70%, which translates to a more than 30% increase in user retention for a GPT-J 6B model.

«

It really is the world of Her, where the protagonist suddenly discovers that “his” AI has been talking to thousands, even millions of other people all the time.
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Intel stock rallies on surprise earnings as PC, data-center sales beat – MarketWatch

Wallace Witkowski:

»

Intel Corp. shares surged in the extended session Thursday after the chip maker posted a surprise profit as PC and data-center sales came in better than expected.

Intel shares surged as much as 7% after hours, following a 0.6% rise to close the regular session at $34.55.

The company reported second-quarter net income of $1.48bn, or 35 cents a share, versus a loss of $454m, or 11 cents a share, in the year-ago period.

After adjusting for restructuring charges and other items, Intel reported 13 cents a share, versus net income of 29 cents a share a year ago.

Revenue fell to $12.95bn from $15.32bn in the year-ago period, and adjusted gross margins came in at 39.8% .

Intel had forecast an adjusted second-quarter loss of 4 cents a share on revenue of about $11.5bn to $12.5bn for the current period, and adjusted gross margins of about 33.2% for the quarter.

«

If you read the actual Intel press release, pretty much every number is down, apart from Foundry Services; the profit seems to have been pulled from a hat. ntel’s not out of the woods yet.
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Global foldable smartphone shipments to cross 100 million by 2027 • Counterpoint Research

»

Global foldable smartphone shipments are expected to pass the 100-million mark by 2027, according to Counterpoint Research’s latest Global Foldable Smartphone Tracker and Forecast, with Samsung and Apple accounting for the biggest market share.

Commenting on growth expectations, Research Director Tom Kang said, “At the moment, foldables remain niche. But it is an important segment for brands looking to maintain leadership in innovation and a premium market presence.”

Kang added, “Samsung and the Chinese OEMs have been very active, especially in their home markets, with China emerging as the biggest market globally last year. If you want to make it in foldables, you have to make it there.”

Senior analyst Jene Park said, “In the long term, we are waiting to see what Apple does. We are looking at 2025 as the possible year of iPhone’s foldable debut, which could provide another growth spurt for the segment.”

«

Ah, so it’s a forecast that depends on Apple entering that market. Samsung would no doubt be delighted: another customer for its foldable screens. But if that timeline is going to happen, Apple would be designing such a phone now (there’s a two-year timeline), and one might expect to start hearing little noises about Samsung increasing its foldable screen capacity. So keep an eye on that. I’m sceptical: I think Apple has plenty on its plate with the Vision Pro next year, and its followup in 2025, and foldables remain unproven.
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Facebook’s algorithm is ‘influential’ but doesn’t necessarily change beliefs, researchers say • The New York Times

Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel:

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The algorithms powering Facebook and Instagram, which drive what billions of people see on the social networks, have been in the cross hairs of lawmakers, activists and regulators for years. Many have called for the algorithms to be abolished to stem the spread of viral misinformation and to prevent the inflammation of political divisions.

But four new studies published on Thursday — including one that examined the data of 208 million Americans who used Facebook in the 2020 presidential election — complicate that narrative.

In the papers, researchers from the University of Texas, New York University, Princeton and other institutions found that removing some key functions of the social platforms’ algorithms had “no measurable effects” on people’s political beliefs. In one experiment on Facebook’s algorithm, people’s knowledge of political news declined when their ability to reshare posts was removed, the researchers said.

At the same time, the consumption of political news on Facebook and Instagram was highly segregated by ideology, according to another study: 97% of the links to “untrustworthy” news stories on the apps during the 2020 election were read by users who identified as conservative and largely engaged with right-wing content, the research found.

The studies, which were published in the journals Science and Nature, provide a contradictory and nuanced picture of how Americans have been using — and have been affected by — two of the world’s biggest social platforms.

«

No simple solution in sight. Meanwhile, let’s try Threads! Though a Wired writeup of the studies says we prefer algorithmic feeds, actually.
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Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints • Reuters

Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu:

»

In March, Alexandre Ponsin set out on a family road trip from Colorado to California in his newly purchased Tesla, a used 2021 Model 3. He expected to get something close to the electric sport sedan’s advertised driving range: 353 miles on a fully charged battery.

He soon realized he was sometimes getting less than half that much range, particularly in cold weather – such severe underperformance that he was convinced the car had a serious defect.

“We’re looking at the range, and you literally see the number decrease in front of your eyes,” he said of his dashboard range meter.

Ponsin contacted Tesla and booked a service appointment in California. He later received two text messages, telling him that “remote diagnostics” had determined his battery was fine, and then: “We would like to cancel your visit.”

What Ponsin didn’t know was that Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible.

The Austin, Texas-based electric carmaker deployed the team because its service centers were inundated with appointments from owners who had expected better performance based on the company’s advertised estimates and the projections displayed by the in-dash range meters of the cars themselves, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks. The team often closed hundreds of cases a week and staffers were tracked on their average number of diverted appointments per day.

Managers told the employees that they were saving Tesla about $1,000 for every canceled appointment, the people said. Another goal was to ease the pressure on service centers, some of which had long waits for appointments.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sales of the Oculus Quest VR headset helped Meta’s Reality Labs to $276m in revenue last quarter. But not a profit. CC-licensed photo by Rémy Metalograms 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. Metachorus? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

What AI teaches us about good writing • NOEMA

Laura Hartenberger:

»

Writing that consistently adheres to convention is effective because its predictability makes it easy to read. If you expect to find the main point of a paragraph in its opening, you can read faster than if you had to spend time hunting for it.

But simply abiding by the rules doesn’t make excellent writing — it makes conventional, unremarkable writing, the kind usually found in business reports, policy memos and research articles. In his review of AI-generated novel “Death of an Author,” Dwight Garner describes the prose as having “the crabwise gait of a Wikipedia entry.” Even when a user prompts ChatGPT to include specific grammatical errors or to stray from certain norms, its writing tends to carry a certain flatness. By design, the program relapses to a rhetorical median, its deviations mechanical whereas ours are organic.

That’s not to say that convention flattens prose. In fact, convention lies at the root of much of the best writing — it’s rare to see acclaimed texts that stray dramatically from grammatical and stylistic norms.

Structural convention also underlies much of what we call good writing. Most prize-winning literature innovates within classic story arcs: Aristotle’s three-act structure (beginning, middle and end); Freytag’s five-stage structure (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution); or a screenwriter’s six categories of dramatic conflict (conflict with self; with others; with society; with nature; with the supernatural; and with the machine).

Indeed, the fact that AI, which is trained to detect and replicate underlying patterns in our writing, can produce such coherent prose is a testament to just how much we rely on convention, both at the sentence and structural level.

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Just see if you could ever prompt a chatbot to come up with such a perfect phrase as “the crabwise gait of a Wikipedia entry”.
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Europe and US heatwaves near ‘impossible’ without climate change • BBC News

Georgina Rannard:

»

The heatwaves battering Europe and the US in July would have been “virtually impossible” without human-induced climate change, a scientific study says.

Global warming from burning fossil fuels also made the heatwave affecting parts of China 50 times more likely.

Climate change meant the heatwave in southern Europe was 2.5C hotter, the study finds.

Almost all societies remain unprepared for deadly extreme heat, experts warn.

The study’s authors say its findings highlight the importance of the world adapting to higher temperatures because they are no longer “rare”.

“Heat is among the deadliest types of disaster,” says Julie Arrighi from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and also one of the authors.

Countries must build heat-resistant homes, create “cool centres” for people to find shelter, and find ways to cool cities including planting more trees, she says.

In July, temperature records were broken in parts of China, the southern US and Spain. Millions of people spent days under red alerts for extreme heat.

Experts say extreme heat can be a very serious threat to life, especially among the elderly. According to one study, more than 61,000 people were estimated to have died from heat-related causes during last year’s heatwaves in Europe.

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Deniers/minimalists retort that more people die from cold. To which the answer is better insulation, not stuffing the atmosphere with carbon.
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Uncharted territory: do AI girlfriend apps promote unhealthy expectations for human relationships? • The Guardian

Josh Taylor:

»

When you sign up for the Eva AI app, it prompts you to create the “perfect partner”, giving you options like “hot, funny, bold”, “shy, modest, considerate” or “smart, strict, rational”. It will also ask if you want to opt in to sending explicit messages and photos.

“Creating a perfect partner that you control and meets your every need is really frightening,” said Tara Hunter, the acting CEO for Full Stop Australia, which supports victims of domestic or family violence. “Given what we know already that the drivers of gender-based violence are those ingrained cultural beliefs that men can control women, that is really problematic.”

Dr Belinda Barnet, a senior lecturer in media at Swinburne University, said the apps cater to a need, but, as with much AI, it will depend on what rules guide the system and how it is trained.

“It’s completely unknown what the effects are,” Barnet said. “With respect to relationship apps and AI, you can see that it fits a really profound social need [but] I think we need more regulation, particularly around how these systems are trained.”

Having a relationship with an AI whose functions are set at the whim of a company also has its drawbacks. Replika’s parent company Luka Inc faced a backlash from users earlier this year when the company hastily removed erotic roleplay functions, a move which many of the company’s users found akin to gutting the Rep’s personality.

Users on the subreddit compared the change to the grief felt at the death of a friend. The moderator on the subreddit noted users were feeling “anger, grief, anxiety, despair, depression, [and] sadness” at the news.

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Meta’s Reality Labs has lost more than $21 billion since start of 2022 • CNBC

Jonathan Vanian:

»

Meta reported second-quarter earnings on Wednesday and said that its Reality Labs unit, which develops virtual reality and augmented reality technologies needed to power the metaverse, logged a $3.7bn operating loss.

The unit recorded $276m in second-quarter sales, down from the $339m in revenue it brought during the first quarter. Analysts polled by StreetAccount were projecting Reality Labs to record $421m in sales off $3.5bn in operating losses.

Shares of Meta were up about 5% after it reported an 11% pop in revenue as advertising rebounded and the company issued an uplifting sales forecast for the third quarter. It shows that Meta is still very much an ad company with a big cost center.

Last year, Meta’s Reality Labs unit lost a total of $13.7bn while bringing in $2.16bn in revenue, which is driven in part by the company’s sales of Quest-branded VR headsets. Reality Labs lost $3.99bn during the first quarter. That puts its total losses at about $21.3bn since the beginning of last year.

Meta said in its earnings report that it expects operating losses in its Reality Labs unit “to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem.”

«

Meanwhile Apple’s going to sell its headset in limited numbers, for $3,500 each, making a profit on each one, and move towards making the Vision division (aha) profitable. Spending so far on the Vision Pro is surely into the billions down the years. But would it be close to $21bn? Facebook/Meta might want to consider how it’s spending its money.

That revenue from Quest VR headsets, though: if all the $276m revenue is from selling $300 headsets, that’s about 0.9m sold. Tolerable? But depends a lot on what “driven in part” means about revenue.
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Embattled physicist files patent for unprecedented ambient superconductor • Science

Robert Service:

»

Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, has drawn headlines and controversy for his claims of concocting materials that superconduct at room temperature—despite the limitation that they would require extreme pressures to work. His latest creation would be by far his most sensational yet—although he has not sought any attention for it. In a little-noticed patent filing, Dias claims to have made a material that superconducts not only at room temperature, but also ambient pressure.

If true, the discovery would be profound, igniting a host of applications, such as transmission lines that conduct electricity without losses, hyperefficient computer chips, and cheaper levitating trains. “We cannot even imagine how impactful it would be,” says Eva Zurek, a superconductivity theorist at the University at Buffalo. Such a material would also force a major rethink of the physics at play, as current theories cannot account for superconductivity under fully ambient conditions.

But scientists who have been critical of Dias’s data and methods in his previous claims don’t believe his latest work either. “I’m highly skeptical,” says James Hamlin, a superconductivity researcher at the University of Florida, who believes any superconducting behavior reported in the patent filing could be the result of broken electrical contacts in the devices used to characterize the material.

«

All superconductivity, all the time.
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The latest mega-breakthrough on room-temperature superconductors is probably nonsense

Stuart Ritchie:

»

If we were to invent a superconductor that didn’t require these low temperatures and high pressures, all bets would be off: we’d have ultra-efficient power grids, saving vast amounts of energy; we’d have cheaper medical imaging; we’d have more low-friction, super-fast “maglev” trains that float above the tracks; and we might even be able to develop ultra-fast quantum computers. A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor has long been something of a Holy Grail for scientists.

But this is a scientific field that’s seen many false dawns, and has seen itself descend into serious controversy. Just yesterday, it was reported that the journal Physical Review Letters was planning to retract a paper by a physicist who’d already had a paper on room-temperature superconductors retracted from the journal Nature in 2021. In the Nature case, a crucial analysis was found to be seriously flawed; in the newer case (which wasn’t specifically focused on superconductors), it appears that some data had been falsified or fabricated.

…The i contacted several of the UK’s top superconductor physicists and asked for their opinion on the new studies [from South Korea, linked here yesterday].

Professors Susannah Speller and Chris Grovenor, of the University of Oxford’s Department of Materials, jointly told i that the reports were “interesting, but not wholly convincing”. If the material really was a room-temperature superconductor, they argued, there are features one would expect to see in the data. One thing that’s clear is that there’s a “sharp drop” in resistivity, which is consistent with superconductivity. But we should also observe the material’s magnetisation changing (for the Meissner effect-related reasons discussed above), and its specific heat capacity, too. “Neither of these features,” say professors Speller and Grovenor, “is evident in the data presented.”

“It is too early to say that we have been presented with compelling evidence for superconductivity in these samples,” they argued.

«

Wait for the replication attempts. As the Korean researchers included a second paper on essentially how to make their material, it shouldn’t take long. Derek Lowe in Science, who follows the topic, reckons furnaces will have been busy already making samples of LK-99, as it’s known.
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The Westminster-Big Tech revolving door keeps spinning • POLITICO

Tom Bristow and Laurie Clarke:

»

Seeking influence in the corridors of power, Big Tech firms can’t get enough of Britain’s leading politicos. From former policy advisers to ex-spin doctors and even the odd journalist, the Big Tech ranks are now dotted with Westminster insiders from across the political spectrum. POLITICO takes you through some of the leading lights.

«

Surprising number of British politicians and spindoctors there who have gone to work for Big Tech. You will surely have heard of one, maybe two, but if you’ve heard of more than five (out of the 22) you’re very clued in.

And guess which company has the most of the 22: Meta, Amazon, Uber, TikTok, Palantir, OnlyFans, Google, Deliveroo or Zoom?
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Elon Musk takes @x handle from its original user. He got zero dollars for it • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

Musk now has the @x handle. What happened? Did Musk reach out to [co-founder of event photo company Orange Photography, Gene X.] Hwang? Did Hwang cash in and get a paycheck from the company for the handle as some on social media have speculated?

No, the company just took it from him.

“[I] got an email basically saying they are taking it,” Hwang told Mashable in an email exchange.

Hwang previously told Mashable he was waiting for Twitter (or X now) to contact him so he wasn’t previously in contact with the company. He hadn’t heard from X before that. There was no back-and-forth discussion. The email came from the generic support@twitter.com email address and not from a specific employee within the company.

Musk’s company is within its right to take the username. Barring trademark issues, users don’t have rights to specific handles according to most social media companies’ terms of service. However, with reports that Twitter had been considering launching a service where users could bid on unused, rare handles, some users had thought the company would offer Hwang something.

According to Hwang, the company now formerly known as Twitter did offer “an alternative handle with the history of the @x account” so that his original account, complete with its posts and followers, could live on and continue to be used.

What short, catchy username did Musk’s company change Hwang’s handle to? @x12345678998765.

«

I guess @x12345678998764 was taken. It’s remarkable if Hwang has managed to hang on to that handle for any length of time even without Musk about: hackers adore getting hold of those rare handles on any social media platform and will use all sort of measures to achieve their aim. Or you can buy the whole shebang for $44bn, of course.
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Elon Musk’s rebranded Twitter cuts ad prices • WSJ

Suzanne Vranica and Patience Haggin:

»

The social network formerly known as Twitter is offering new incentives on certain ad formats in the US and UK and warning brands that they will lose their verified status unless they reach certain spending thresholds, emails sent this week to advertisers and viewed by The Wall Street Journal show.

The company, which makes most of its money from advertising, has struggled to draw new ad commitments under Musk’s ownership in part because brands are concerned about Musk’s approach to management and content moderation. The advertising industry is also in a slump, and several media companies have begun offering brands discounts.

X this week began offering some advertisers reduced pricing on video ads that run alongside a list of trending topics in X’s “Explore” tab, according to emails viewed by the Journal. Such ads give brands 24-hour placement atop the site’s list of trending topics.

It is offering 50% off any new bookings of those ads until July 31, among other discounts. “The goal of these discounts is to help our advertisers gain reach during crucial moments on Twitter such as the Women’s World Cup,” one of the emails read.

X also warned advertisers that beginning Aug. 7, brands’ accounts will lose their verification—a gold check mark that indicates their account truly represents their brand—if they haven’t spent at least $1,000 on ads in the previous 30 days or $6,000 on ads in the previous 180 days, according to the email.

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TwitterVersion2IsGoingJustGreat.com
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A group in Korea claims to have invented a room-temperature, ambient pressure superconductor. Big if true! CC-licensed photo by MIKI Yoshihito 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 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

NUJ expresses ‘grave concern’ over AI-generated story on refugees published by regional news group • The Journal (Ireland)

Diarmuid Pepper:

»

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has expressed “grave concern” over an article generated by artificial intelligence (AI) about refugees published this morning on the websites of several regional newspapers.

The article, with the headline, “OPINION: Should refugees in Ireland go home?”, was published by Iconic Media’s digital titles. Its byline – a line at the top of an article that usually gives the author’s name – said “AI Generated”.

A disclaimer at the top of the article stated: “NOTE: This article was written by ChatGPT – an artificial intelligence chatbot. It was asked: Should refugees in Ireland go home?”

Around lunchtime, the headline of the article was updated to state ”Can we trust Artificial Intelligence?”. The disclaimer was also updated to include: “Here is an example of a piece of content powered by AI. We’d be interested to hear your views.” However, the text of the article remained the same.

Seamus Dooley, the Irish secretary of the NUJ, expressed “grave concern at the use of AI-generated material in this fashion”.

The Journal has contacted Iconic Media Group for comment but has not yet received a response.

Dooley said the article disclaimer “confirms the limitations of AI in terms of providing informed research and analysis”. He criticised the article’s “classic clickbait” headline.

“Asylum seekers granted refugee status in Ireland under international law are granted a new home and the notion of asking if they should ‘go home’ seems intended to fuel a debate similar to that generated in the UK,” Dooley said.

He added: “While the article seems relatively benign, the question is loaded and is a classic trope.”

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Some really stupid decisions get made inside newspapers, but this one is astonishing. Again, it must have gone through at least three levels – someone commissions it, someone does it, someone sub-edits it (and maybe puts it on the site). And nobody said “Errrr..is this.. you know.. wise?”
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The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor • Arxiv.org

Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim and Young-Wan Kwon from South Korea’s Quantum Energy Research Centre and Korea University’s graduate school of converging science and technology:

»

For the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor (Tc≥400 K, 127∘C) working at ambient pressure with a modified lead-apatite (LK-99) structure. The superconductivity of LK-99 is proved with the Critical temperature (Tc), Zero-resistivity, Critical current (Ic), Critical magnetic field (Hc), and the Meissner effect.

The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure. The shrinkage is caused by Cu2+ substitution of Pb2+(2) ions in the insulating network of Pb(2)-phosphate and it generates the stress. It concurrently transfers to Pb(1) of the cylindrical column resulting in distortion of the cylindrical column interface, which creates superconducting quantum wells (SQWs) in the interface.

«

The authors end their paper by saying “We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind.” Well, yeah, absolutely – once others replicate it. Which very much remains to be done: we’ve had so many false starts. But worth noting. Thanks Adewale Aadetugbo for the link – potentially the most important one here ever!
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The arrival of the eSIM is altering how consumers interact with operators • Opensignal

Andrey Popov:

»

While eSIM adoption in the mobile market has been arriving for some time, Apple’s move to make eSIM the only option for iPhone 14 range in the U.S. is propelling the worldwide shift towards eSIM technology. Opensignal’s latest analysis reveals a significant surge in the proportion of users switching their operator among those who use an eSIM across seven examined markets – Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the U.K. and the U.S.

The switch from physical to embedded SIM cards threatens to alter how consumers switch operators and encourages operators to adopt new tactics to retain and acquire users, for example operators can offer network trials from within an app that provisions an eSIM immediately. eSIM also means the risks to operators of dual SIM devices that have long been common in many international markets are arriving in operator-controlled markets too, such as the U.S. and South Korea. Even on smartphones sold by operators, eSIM support is usually present in addition to a physical SIM, making them dual-SIM devices.

Google added eSIM-support to the Pixel range in 2017, Samsung added eSIM support to 2019’s Galaxy S20 flagship. While Apple first added eSIM to their phones in 2018 with the iPhone Xs, it switched to selling exclusively eSIM models in the U.S. with the iPhone 14 range in late 2022. South Korea is also a special case – eSIM support for domestic customers only began in mid-2022, before this point it was only available to international travelers. Notably, Samsung responded by introducing eSIM to a selection of its flagship devices in the home market, which had not been previously available there.

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Highly recommend an eSIM if you’re travelling somewhere with pricey roaming. They can work out much cheaper. Just don’t activate them too soon.
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Peer raises prospect House of Lords could be replaced by bots ‘with deeper knowledge and lower running costs’ • Sky News

Faye Brown:

»

The House of Lords could be replaced by bots with “higher productivity, deeper knowledge and lower running costs”, a peer warned as the debate continues over the risks of artificial intelligence (AI).

Lord Londesborough said AI will soon be advanced enough to deliver his speeches in his voice by analysing and processing the comments he has made on parliament’s live TV feed.

He asked the upper chamber if the prospect of being replaced by “peer bots” is either an “exciting” or an “alarming” one, before raising concerns about the impact AI could have on millions of workers in the UK.

The hereditary peer’s comments came during the latest debate in parliament on the development of advanced AI, associated risks and potential approaches to regulation within the UK and internationally.

Lord Londesborough, an independent crossbencher, said he was “briefly tempted to outsource my AI speech to a chatbot and to see if anybody noticed”.

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Might have a better attendance record. But how would they vote?
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As actors strike for AI protections, Netflix lists $900,000 AI job • The Intercept

Ken Klippenstein:

»

As Hollywood executives insist it is “just not realistic” to pay actors — 87% of whom earn less than $26,000 — more, they are spending lavishly on AI programs.

While entertainment firms like Disney have declined to go into specifics about the nature of their investments in artificial intelligence, job postings and financial disclosures reviewed by The Intercept reveal new details about the extent of these companies’ embrace of the technology.

In one case, Netflix is offering as much as $900,000 for a single AI product manager.

…“So $900k/yr per soldier in their godless AI army, when that amount of earnings could qualify thirty-five actors and their families for SAG-AFTRA health insurance, is just ghoulish,” actor Rob Delaney, who had a lead role in the “Black Mirror” episode, told The Intercept. “Having been poor and rich in this business, I can assure you there’s enough money to go around; it’s just about priorities.”

Among the striking actors’ demands are protections against their scanned likeness being manipulated by AI without adequate compensation for the actors.

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TETRA radio code encryption has a flaw: a backdoor • WIRED

Ki Zetter:

»

For more than 25 years, a technology used for critical data and voice radio communications around the world has been shrouded in secrecy to prevent anyone from closely scrutinizing its security properties for vulnerabilities. But now it’s finally getting a public airing thanks to a small group of researchers in the Netherlands who got their hands on its viscera and found serious flaws, including a deliberate backdoor.

The backdoor, known for years by vendors that sold the technology but not necessarily by customers, exists in an encryption algorithm baked into radios sold for commercial use in critical infrastructure. It’s used to transmit encrypted data and commands in pipelines, railways, the electric grid, mass transit, and freight trains. It would allow someone to snoop on communications to learn how a system works, then potentially send commands to the radios that could trigger blackouts, halt gas pipeline flows, or reroute trains.

Researchers found a second vulnerability in a different part of the same radio technology that is used in more specialized systems sold exclusively to police forces, prison personnel, military, intelligence agencies, and emergency services, such as the C2000 communication system used by Dutch police, fire brigades, ambulance services, and Ministry of Defense for mission-critical voice and data communications. The flaw would let someone decrypt encrypted voice and data communications and send fraudulent messages to spread misinformation or redirect personnel and forces during critical times.

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What. What the whatting what. An intentional backdoor known to the vendors?!
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TSMC delays Arizona factory set to build chips for iPhones and AI • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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The world’s biggest chipmaker is pushing back the start of 4nm chip production at its new facility in Phoenix, Arizona, to 2025, blaming labour shortages. Apple has said that it intends to eventually source chips for its iPhones and MacBook models from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) plant in the US, while Nvidia and AMD have also committed to using its production capacity.

The chipmaker’s first Phoenix-based fab, which began construction in 2021, was originally projected to start producing 4nm chips next year. A second fab that will produce smaller, more complex 3nm chips is scheduled to open in 2026.

During the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday, TSMC chairman Mark Liu said that the company was “encountering certain challenges, as there is an insufficient amount of skilled workers with the specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility” in the US

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About a decade ago Tim Cook gave an interview to a select group of folks at The Guardian, and one of the points he made about why Apple manufactures so much (at that time, essentially everything) in China was that compared to everywhere else, including the US, it was so much easier to find skilled workers. That hasn’t changed, it seems.
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Antarctic sea ice levels dive in ‘five-sigma event’, as experts flag worsening consequences for planet • ABC News

Alexandra Alvaro:

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This winter has confirmed what scientists had feared — the sea ice around Antarctica is in sharp decline, with experts now concerned it may not recover.

Earlier this year, scientists observed an all-time low in the amount of sea ice around the icy continent, following all-time lows in 2016, 2017 and 2022.

Usually, the ice has been able to recover in winter, when Antarctica is reliably dark and cold. But this year is different. For the first time, the sea ice extent has been unable to substantially recover this winter, leaving scientists baffled.

Physical oceanographer Edward Doddridge has been communicating with scientists and the community about the drastic changes happening around Antarctica. He said vast regions of the Antarctic coastline were ice free for the first time in the observational record.

“To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Dr Doddridge said. “For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it’s five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years. It’s gobsmacking.”

Sea ice is important for a number of reasons. First, it helps regulate Earth’s temperature through something called ice-albedo feedback, where the ice reflects the Sun’s heat back into space, helping to regulate the temperature of the planet.

“If there’s less ice, then the sunlight that hits the ocean’s surface is absorbed instead of being reflected out into space,” Dr Doddridge said.

Second, the annual cycle of freeze and melt drives global currents that transport nutrient-rich water into the rest of the ocean, feeding ecosystems.

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It would be nice to have some good climate news. There just isn’t any. And yet there are those who are utterly sure that the twin forces of capitalism and technology will, finger-snap, solve it all! Unfortunately I think of a different sort of finger snap.
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A decade ago, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Now he’s paying attention to it again • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson:

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During his tenure as executive editor at The Washington Post, Martin Baron ran into a persistent problem.

Jeff Bezos had purchased The Post for $250m in 2013, less than a year after Mr. Baron had taken over. Mr. Bezos, who arrived at media ownership after founding Amazon and remaking online shopping, wanted his top editor to transform the newspaper from a regional news organization into a truly global one.

But Mr. Bezos, whose representatives kept an eye on the budget, didn’t believe The Post needed to add many new editors to accomplish that task. Reporters were classified as “direct” employees and editors as “indirect” — and his preference was to keep the “indirect” numbers down.

So, Mr. Baron came up with a workaround, according to his coming memoir. “To avoid setting off alarms up the line, my deputies and I would strip the word ‘editor’ from proposed new positions whenever possible,” Mr. Baron writes. “‘Analyst’ or ‘strategist’ were among the limited set of workarounds.”

These days, Mr. Bezos knows more about the news business. And in recent months, he has become more involved with The Post’s operations, stepping in as staff morale cratered and the business struggled.

Mr. Bezos has said he wants The Post to be profitable, but it is unlikely to reach that target this year. The Post is on a pace to lose about $100m in 2023, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s finances; two other people briefed on the situation said the company was expecting to miss its forecasts for ad revenue this year.

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Twitter’s rebrand to X is destined to fail, critics say • Fast Company

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

The move “makes no sense,” tweeted True Ventures partner emeritus Om Malik. “I mean, what is the name ‘Twitter’ then. And why should you ‘tweet?’” By rebranding Twitter as X, Musk breaks the connection between the name of the platform and what people do on it. It seems unlikely that people will refer to sharing Xs or re-Xing any time soon. (Contacted to comment for this story, Twitter’s press office email autoresponded to say “We’ll get back to you soon.”)

Yet Musk still seems keen on foisting X branding on everything. The grand ambition stems from his first company, payments firm X.com, which brought him his initial fortune, and lingers on via the Twitter rebrand and the launch of his new AI company xAI. Musk fans will point to the fact that the media—as evidenced by this very story—now refers to Zuckerberg’s company as Meta (rather than Facebook) as evidence that Twitter’s rebrand to X could work. However, that overlooks the fact that journalists are, by nature of their jobs, required to call companies (and people, for that matter) by their latest, official names. It also overlooks the fact that the majority of the public still calls Zuckerberg’s company Facebook. Likewise, Google’s 2015 rebranding of its parent company to Alphabet is one that both journalists and the general public have by now essentially ignored.

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I don’t think this rebrand is going to stick. Twitter isn’t gaining users; the ones it has were signed up before this. So you’re pushing against the inertia of absolutely everyone.
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Redditors prank AI-powered news mill with “Glorbo” in World of Warcraft • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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On Thursday, a Reddit user named kaefer_kriegerin posted a fake announcement on the World of Warcraft subreddit about the introduction of “Glorbo” to the game. Glorbo isn’t real, but the post successfully exposed a website that scrapes Reddit for news in an automated fashion with little human oversight.

Not long after the trick post appeared, an article about Glorbo surfaced on “The Portal,” a gaming news content mill run by Z League, a company that offers cash prizes for playing in gaming tournaments. The Z League article mindlessly regurgitates the Reddit post and adds nonsensical details. Its author, “Lucy Reed” (likely a fictitious name for a bot), authored over 80 articles that same day.

Members of the World of Warcraft subreddit recently noticed that this kind of automated content scraping of Reddit has been taking place, prompting several of them to try to game the bots and get their posts featured on sites like The Portal.

Titled “I’m so excited they finally introduced Glorbo!!!” the original Reddit trap post provides little detail about what Glorbo is meant to be, and likely for good reason…

A human reading this Reddit post would likely catch factual errors within, such as a reference to Hearthstone in 1994 (the game came out in 2014) and a nod to “major bot operated news websites.” The presence of these elements would seem to preclude a human being responsible for the Z League article on The Portal.

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