Does nobody remember Ananova, the first AI newsreader, launched 23 years ago this month? CC-licensed photo by Nick Richards on Flickr.

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

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

A.I. pop culture is already here • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

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In a 2022 interview, David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, used the phrase “aesthetic accelerationism” to describe the profusion of generated imagery enabled by public AI tools. It evokes a world in which every style, every idea, and every possible remix is generated as fast and frictionlessly as possible, and the successful ones stick and get attention, like “Harry Potter by Balenciaga” and the swagged-out Pope.

It may be less because they are artistically great than because they solved some formula of attention. Perhaps the successful creation is unimaginably bizarre, the seamless merging of two unrelated things. Or it’s driven by the fascination of the perfect replica, something that we know isn’t real but which is easy to see or briefly perceive as such, like a trompe-l’oeil painting.

For the past few days, I’ve been looping a new hip-hop track over and over. It’s called “Savages,” by the French outfit AllttA. The song is sweetly nostalgic, with synthesized strings and a snare backbeat; it features what sounds like Jay-Z trading verses with AllttA’s Mr. J. Medeiros in a throwback style.

But, of course, it’s not Jay-Z; it’s an AI model of his voice, used, presumably, without the artist’s permission. It’s another example of illusory realism. The human-written song is good on its own, and would be perfectly fine without the fake Jay-Z, but the familiar voice adds something ineffably compelling to the track, making it sound like an unreleased B-side from the nineteen-nineties. It has more than two hundred thousand plays on YouTube. “The thought of enjoying this and it’s AI is beyond me,” one user wrote in the comments. I feel the same kind of existential confusion. It sticks in my brain like an unsolved puzzle. I don’t care that it’s not actually Jay-Z, in large part because the AI quality is good enough that I, a non-expert, can barely tell the difference.

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More recently there’s the AI “Drake vs The Weeknd” song (sorry, not my bag). But this is what I meant by the AI tsunami, which I wrote, good grief, back in August last year, before ChatGPT was a thing and when the AI illustrators were still using crayons: for now, the creation is being prompted in the first place by humans (on shrooms, in the case of the swagged Pope), but give it just enough time – less than you might think – and the human will just be the gatekeeper, and then the person standing in the face of the tsunami.
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Reddit moderators brace for a ChatGPT spam apocalypse • Vice

Laurie Clarke:

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The two-million-strong AskHistorians forum allows non-expert Redditors to submit questions about history topics, and receive in-depth answers from historians. Recent popular posts have probed the hive mind on whether the stress of being “on time” is a modern concept; what a medieval scribe would’ve done if the monastery cat left an inky paw print on their vellum; and how Genghis Khan got fiber in his diet. 

Shortly after ChatGPT launched, the forum was experiencing five to 10 ChatGPT posts per day, says [forum moderator and postdoc associate at Cornell University, Sarah] Gilbert, which soon ramped up as more people found out about the tool. The frequency has tapered off now, which the team believes may be a consequence of how rigorously they’ve dealt with AI-produced content: even if the posts aren’t being deleted for being written by ChatGPT, they tend to violate the sub’s standards for quality.

The moderators suspect some ChatGPT posts are aimed at “testing” the mods, or seeing what the user can get away with. Other comments are clearly part of astroturfing and spamming campaigns, or engaged in “karma farming,” where accounts are set up to accumulate upvotes over time, giving them the appearance of being authentic, so that they can be deployed for more nefarious purposes later on.

But it’s not just one well-moderated forum encountering the issue. In fact, Reddit’s ChatGPT-powered bot problem is “pretty bad” right now, according to a Reddit moderator with knowledge of the platform’s wider moderation systems, who wished to remain anonymous. Several hundred accounts have already been removed from the site, and more are being discovered daily, they said, adding that most of the removals are being done manually because Reddit’s automated systems struggle with AI-created content. Reddit declined to offer any comment on this. 

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Predictable. We’re going to need really sophisticated CAPTCHAs to defeat this.
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The fascinating and evolving story of bacteria and cancer • Ground Truths

Eric Topol:

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It was medical dogma: cancer tissue is sterile. That’s what we had learned and taught in medical school for decades even though bacteria were detected in tumours more than 100 years ago. When studies were reported asserting that bacteria were present in tumour tissue, they were consistently debunked as representing contaminants.

Then came new tools that include single-cell sequencing and sophisticated spatial profiling (I’ll describe more on this later) providing high-resolution portraits of tumours. The new dogma is that bacteria have a pervasive (yet variable) presence within and across solid tumours—the ”presence of intratumoural bacteria being designated a hallmark of cancer.” Furthermore, where bacteria are more apt to be found within tumour regions, T cell recruitment and function is suppressed. These regions of tumour are micro-niches exhibiting immune evasion.

Just as that had been determined, there was a new twist this week: engineering bacteria to induce a potent T cell immune response to kill the tumour. This can be viewed as the polar opposite. Instead of bacteria improving a tumour’s ability to duck our immune response and spread, this represents clever ways to genetically manipulate bacteria (aka “designer bugs”) to make it considerably more antigenic, a new route to immunotherapy.

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This is indeed fascinating, and really new: the presence of bacteria not being contamination, but something else, was only confirmed in 2020. Now they’re being used against the tumours. It also shows how deeply enmeshed our cells and bodies are with bacteria.
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Ford commits to continued CarPlay support as GM, Tesla, and Rivian face backlash for holding out • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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As companies like GM and Rivian face a backlash for failing to adopt Apple’s CarPlay platform, Ford is doing the exact opposite. In a statement to 9to5Mac, Ford explained its reasoning for supporting CarPlay…and it has us pondering the future of Ford’s relationship with Apple and next-gen CarPlay.

Ford is using its commitment to CarPlay as a selling point over other EVs [electric vehicles] from the likes of GM, Tesla, and Rivian. In the last two weeks, GM revealed that it will no longer support CarPlay in its EVs, starting with 2024 model-year vehicles, while Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe doubled down on his company’s resistance to CarPlay.

GM’s decision and Scaringe’s comments have faced widespread backlash from CarPlay fans. Tesla, of course, also continues to be a CarPlay holdout, and there’s no indication that it will ever change.
In a statement to 9to5Mac on Thursday, Ford made it clear that it has no plans to abandon CarPlay, unlike some of its counterparts.

“We continue to offer Apple CarPlay and Android Auto because customers love the capability that enables easy access and control of their smartphone apps – especially our EV customers because some EVs currently do not offer the features,” a spokesperson said.

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This does raise the question of whether CarPlay and Android Auto are really essential to the experience, or whether the EV makers such as Rivian and Tesla can nail the software stack so well that nobody will worry about using their phone for messages, maps, or music/podcasts – and will find Bluetooth does the job well enough. Far from a “backlash”, I think it’s all still to play for: possibly if enough people become acquainted with CarPlay/Android Auto in their present cars, they’ll demand it in the EVs. But I wouldn’t take that as absolutely given.
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Kuwait unveiled its first AI-powered news presenter. Could it be an ethics nightmare? • AFP/Euronews

Sophia Khatsenkova :

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A media outlet in Kuwait is launching its first virtual news presenter using artificial intelligence (AI). Named “Fedha,” the AI anchor made her debut on the Twitter account of Kuwait News.

The deputy editor-in-chief for Kuwait News told AFP the move tested AI’s potential to offer “new and innovative content” and the virtual anchor might be used to present news bulletins.

The presenter’s blonde hair and light-coloured eyes reflect the country’s diverse population of Kuwaitis and expats, according to the editor.

…But the rapid rise of AI globally has also sparked fears over its potential to spread disinformation and erode trust in mainstream media, according to Brandi Geurkink, strategy and technology advisor at Reset.

Kuwait ranked 158 out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders 2022 World Press Freedom Index. 

Experts are raising questions about whether replacing humans with AI could lead to less freedom of expression for reporters in the country. 

“I think that news broadcasting was of last bastion of truth for a lot of people to be able to see a person’s face, hear their voice and understand who this person is and whether I trust them, is important,” said Geurkink in an interview with Euronews.

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Oh suuuure they chose the blonde hair to fit in with the “diverse population”. The idea that you need humans to discern whether something’s true is a strange one. People on TV (politicians) lie to you all the time.

Also, does nobody remember Ananova? An AI newsreader wayyy back in the day: 23 years ago this month. (Went nowhere.)
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More than half of journalists could be set to leave Twitter, survey says • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

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According to a Semrush ranking, Twitter is only the 16th most popular social media network generally with 436 million users – some way behind Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp, Instagram, Wechat, Tiktok and Youtube which all have ore than one billion active monthly users.

And when asked if they have considered leaving Twitter in the last year some 50% of the journalist respondents said yes versus 44% who said no and 7% who were not sure.

The utility of Twitter for journalists is made clear in the survey. Of those who use the platform, some 83% use it to follow the news, 78% use it to promote their work and 69% use it to find sources.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter in October journalists were already concerned about safety on the platform. Female journalists in particular have been subjected to threats and abuse on social media, with Twitter among the most challenging platforms – largely due to the presence of anonymous “trolls”.

Concerns about the future of Twitter have been ramped up by the platform’s plan to charge journalists and news organisations for “verified” status. Previously, blue-tick verifications were seen as a way of curbing fake news and promoting genuine sources.

But news publishers are now being issued with a bill for more than £1,000 a month to retain their verified status on the platform.

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Journalists who were surveyed cited “follow the news” (83%), “promote my work” (78%), “find sources” (69%), “connect with other journalists” (67%), “connect with my audience/readers” (61%), plus “discover new voices” (48%) and “share my opinion” (43%). I think “considered leaving” is about as reliable as those celebrities who, before elections, say they’ll leave the country if X gets in, and are found still there when X has been in charge for years.
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Dumping iron nanoparticles into the oceans might save the planet

Kristin Houser:

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We know from natural events in the past that increasing the amount of iron in these seas can dramatically increase the growth of phytoplankton. When iron-rich ash from volcanic eruptions has fallen on the ocean’s surface, it has triggered phytoplankton blooms large enough to see from space.

This knowledge led oceanographer John Martin to put forth something called the “iron hypothesis,” which suggests that “fertilizing” the ocean with iron could increase the amount of carbon-sucking phytoplankton — theoretically enough to cool the entire Earth. “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age,” he famously quipped during a lecture in 1988.

In 1993, shortly after Martin’s death, his colleagues at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories tested the hypothesis by increasing the concentration of iron over 64 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. They then observed the area for 10 days and saw the amount of plant biomass double.

“All biological indicators confirmed an increased rate of phytoplankton production in response to the addition of iron,” they wrote in a paper detailing the experiment.

…In 2009, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory tracked the impact of a major ocean fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica by measuring carbon particles 800 meters below the surface of the water in the area for a year — and their findings were less than encouraging.

“Just adding iron to the ocean hasn’t been demonstrated as a good plan for storing atmospheric carbon,” said researcher Jim Bishop. “What counts is the carbon that reaches the deep sea, and a lot of the carbon tied up in plankton blooms appears not to sink very fast or very far.”

While researchers are still trying to figure out why that is, there are a number of theories, including ones centered on the feeding habits of creatures that live off phytoplankton and the presence of iron-binding organic compounds in ocean water. 

Some climate scientists aren’t ready to give up on the idea of ocean fertilization just yet, though.

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When you read what their plans are, though – specially coated nanoparticles! – you realise that they should. “Boil-the-ocean” plans abound. The oceans remain unboiled.
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Israeli spyware maker Quadream closes, fires all employees • Haaretz

Omer Benjakob:

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The cyberoffensive company QuaDream, which operates from Israel and specializes in hacking iPhones on behalf of government clients, called its employees in for a pre-termination hearing on Sunday.

For several months, the company has been undergoing significant downsizing, even losing entire teams to competitors, as Israel continues to curtail the sale of local spyware in wake of U.S. pressure.

Last week, Citizen Lab, which focuses on human rights and technology, published a report revealing that QuaDream’s spy software was used against journalists and dissidents around the world. According to people familiar with the local cyber arms industry, the report, as well as lack of sales and Israeli regulations, caused the company to halt its operations in Israel.

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“Lack of sales” for a spyware company that hacks iPhones? Either Apple is getting better all the time, or they weren’t that good at it. Coin flip between them.
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Russia claims bots are caught only 1% of the time, Discord leak says • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

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The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known, boosting lies about Ukraine’s military and the side effects of vaccines with hundreds of thousands of fake online accounts, according to documents recently leaked on the chat app Discord.

The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1% of the time, one document says.

That claim, described here for the first time, drew alarm from former government officials and experts inside and outside social media companies contacted for this article.

“Google and Meta and others are trying to stop this, and Russia is trying to get better. The figure that you are citing suggests that Russia is winning,” said Thomas Rid, a disinformation scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He added that the 1% claim was probably exaggerated or misleading.

Many of the 10 current and former intelligence and tech safety specialists interviewed for this article cautioned that the Russian agency whose claims helped form the basis for the leaked document may have exaggerated its success rate.

But even if Russia’s fake accounts escaped detection only 90% of the time instead of 99%, that would indicate Russia has become far more proficient at disseminating its views to unknowing consumers than in 2016, when it combined bot accounts with human propagandists and hacking to try to influence the course of the U.S. presidential election, the experts said.

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(Thanks Matthew for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: one short, one long.
Short: “rodomontade” means “boastful or inflated talk/behaviour”; it is not synonymous with “quotidian” (everyday or mundane, which is the meaning I was reaching for. Thanks Jason.)

Longer: Rodrigo from Brazil writes re the Brazil/Twitter article yesterday: “Last Monday, Ministry of Justice met with social platforms. A Mexican lawyer from Twitter (because Brazil’s Twitter was closed) shocked everyone by saying pictures of users glorying school shooters weren’t violating its terms of use. (Flávio Dino’s quote from Bloomberg was a response to this.)

“Article here (please use an online translator).

“Twitter is a cesspool of hatred since ever, but it got worse with Musk. A few days before Santa Catarina shooting, a teenage from São Paulo killed a teacher. He announced and was incentivized on Twitter. Here’s a good report on this.”

Could the technology that created ChatGPT help us understand sperm whales’ language? And would we know what they meant if it could? CC-licensed photo by Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith 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 was another post at the Social Warming Substack last Friday: it’s about how the flywheel of Twitter is slowing down.

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

It’s not just the Discord leak. Group chats are the internet’s new chaos machine • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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In every group chat, no matter the size, participants fall into informal roles. There is usually a leader—a person whose posting frequency drives the group or sets the agenda. Often, there are lurkers who rarely chime in. Different chats, depending on the size, develop their own sets of social rules and hierarchies. “The key to every group chat is mutually assured destruction,” the New York Times reporter Astead Herndon tweeted in 2021. “If you’re the only one dropping tea, you’re at risk. [If] one person is a little too silent, they gotta go.” Larger group chats are not immune to the more toxic dynamics of social media, where competition for attention and herd behavior cause infighting, splintering, and back-channeling.

According to the [Washington] Post’s reporting, [21-year-old Jack] Teixeira was fixated on capturing the attention of—and winning approval from—his Discord community. “He got upset” when people in the chat ignored his long, detailed summaries of classified documents, and he threatened to stop posting altogether, one server member told the newspaper. Eventually, Teixiera started sharing photos of the classified documents with the chat because they were more engaging. As the national-security reporter Spencer Ackerman wrote this week, Teixeira “didn’t leak for patriotism, principle, or even money.” His motivation was far less aspirational but, as Ackerman notes, it was “uncomfortably familiar”: He was showing off for the group chat.

Group chats aren’t just good for triggering geopolitical crises—they’re also an effective means to start a bank run, as the world learned last month. The investor panic that led to the swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March was effectively caused by runaway group-chat dynamics. “It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” a start-up founder told Bloomberg in March. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.”

…This presents a major issue: Unlike traditional social media or even forums and message boards, group chats are nearly impossible to monitor. As law enforcement, journalists, and researchers have learned, trying to track extremist groups such as QAnon or right-wing militias is much harder when they retreat to smaller, private chat apps.

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Elon Musk just shut down automation for important public safety accounts • Mashable

Matt Binder:

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Since acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk maintained that one of his major objectives was to eliminate the bots.

Last night, Twitter did just that. One problem, though: The bots blocked are the good ones.
Numerous public service Twitter accounts have lost their ability to automatically post breaking news and events. Twitter has been removing API access, which allows many of these accounts to post in an authorised way by the platform, as it switches to Musk’s new high-priced paid API system.

Many of these affected Twitter accounts have automated updates, but aren’t the type of hands-off bot accounts that some may think of when they hear the term “bot.” 

For example, numerous National Weather Service accounts that provide consistent updates, both automated and manually posted by humans, shared that they could no longer provide their up-to-the-minute, potentially life-saving updates.

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Would it be too contrarian to say that if you’re getting your weather alerts from Twitter, you’re doing it wrong? It seems to me that it was only ever making up space, and that nobody’s really going to miss those ones. But there are lots of rodomontade bots posting far less important (or not at all important) information that people are going to miss.
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Twitter clashes with Brazil over school violence posts • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Andrew Rosati, Rachel Gamarski and Daniel Carvalho:

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A sudden spike in killings in education centers across Brazil — where school shootings are uncommon — prompted authorities this week to clamp down on social media companies that were hosting messages that lauded the attacks.

Twitter, which has espoused a free-speech ethos since being taken over by billionaire Elon Musk last year, initially resisted over 500 requests from Brazil’s Justice Ministry to take down posts and profiles. The stance sparked widespread backlash and the issuing of an executive decree late Wednesday that threatens Twitter and other platforms with fines — or even a potential ban for failure to comply.

“A child’s life is worth more than all the terms of use in all the platforms,” Justice Minister Flavio Dino said Wednesday evening in Brasilia after announcing the decree.

The Justice Ministry’s offensive comes as the nation is still reeling from the murder of four children caused by a hatchet-wielding man at a daycare center in southern state of Santa Catarina this month.

Investigators often point to the existence of active groups in the far-reaches of the Internet that celebrate such attacks as one of the reason violence in schools keeps multiplying.

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. Internet activists and enraged Twitter users struck back at the website with posts containing #TwitterApoiaMassacres, or Twitter supports massacres, which later appeared to be blocked on the platform.

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Fun how Bloomberg has to explain that “school shootings are uncommon” for its American audience. Of course Brazil is now run by Lula, not Bolsonaro; the latter delighted in stirring up trouble online. For Twitter, though, the question is: what did it really do wrong? There’s no clear indication that the attacks were inspired by Twitter users. The reference the authorities are using is Columbine – another US school massacre.
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Artist refuses prize after his AI image wins at top photo contest • PetaPixel

Michael Zhang:

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A photographer has stirred up fresh controversy and debate after his artificial intelligence (AI) image won first prize at one of the world’s most prestigious photography competitions. He has since declined to accept the prize while the contest has remained silent on the matter.

Berlin-based “photomedia artist” Boris Eldagsen participated this year in the World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Awards, a leading photo contest that offers prizes that include $5,000 cash, Sony camera equipment, a trip to London for the awards ceremony, and/or worldwide publicity through a book and exhibition.

Eldagsen submitted an image titled THE ELECTRICIAN to the Creative category of the 2023 Open competition. It picture appears to be a portrait of two women captured with a photographic process from the early days of photography.

The photo is part of a series titled PSEUDOMNESIA: Fake Memories that Eldagsen has been working on since 2022.

“PSEUDOMNESIA is the Latin term for pseudo memory, a fake memory, such as a spurious recollection of events that never took place, as opposed to a memory that is merely inaccurate,” the artist writes on the project page. “The following images have been co-produced by the means of AI (artificial intelligence) image generators.

“Using the visual language of the 1940s, Boris Eldagsen produces his images as fake memories of a past, that never existed, that no one photographed. These images were imagined by language and re-edited more between 20 to 40 times through AI image generators, combining ‘inpainting’, ‘outpainting’, and ‘prompt whispering’ techniques.

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Eldagsen’s picture is very impressive: you won’t be saying “AI can’t do hands/fingers” any more. But he argues that it’s not a photo, so shouldn’t win a photo contest.

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Low heat pump uptake ‘an embarrassment’ • The Times

Andrew Ellson:

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A flagship green energy scheme to encourage homeowners to ditch their gas boilers has been branded an “embarrassment” after uptake in the first year was only a third of the planned level.

The government’s boiler upgrade scheme had a budget of £150m to subsidise 30,000 ground or air source heat pump and biomass boiler installations between its launch in May last year and the end of March this year. Yet figures published by the energy regulator Ofgem show that fewer than 10,000 installations were completed under the scheme in this period.

Ministers have set a target of 600,000 heat pump installations a year within the next five years and the sale of gas boilers will be banned by 2035.

Heat pumps work by drawing heat from the air or ground to provide hot water and central heating.

An air source pump can cost between £7,000 and £14,000 to buy and install, while a ground source pump costs between £15,000 and £35,000. The government scheme provides a subsidy of between £5,000 and £6,000 depending on the type of system used. In addition to the grant, there is no VAT on installation, offering a further saving of thousands of pounds.

…[Mike Foster, chief executive of the trade body the Energy and Utilities Alliance which represents the heating and hot water industry] said: “It takes a certain type of genius to fail to give away £150 million of taxpayers’ money and this wretched scheme looks like it has done just that. When will the government actually listen to the people, the majority of whom simply cannot afford a heat pump, subsidised or not.

“It does little for carbon saving compared to investment on insulation. It does not help people keep bills low. It takes from the poor to give to the wealthy and it is an embarrassment of a policy.”

He added: “More taxpayer-subsidised heat pumps have probably been fitted in Cornish holiday homes than the whole of Britain’s second city, Birmingham. That is shameful. People are still hurting with high energy bills, insulating the homes of those most in need should be the priority, not giving hard-earned taxpayers’ cash to those who were going to buy a heat pump anyway. It’s utterly wasteful.”

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Probably they would work better in (generally warm) Cornwall than (rather less generally warm) Birmingham, but the “hot water industry” rep has a point. Insulation would be a better idea.
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Montana lawmakers approve statewide ban on TikTok • WSJ

Meghan Bobrowsky and Stu Woo:

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Montana lawmakers on Friday approved a first-of-its-kind bill to ban TikTok across the state, setting the stage for future court battles that could determine the fate of the popular, Chinese-owned social-media app in the US.

The Montana House voted 54-43 to send the bill to Gov. Greg Gianforte’s desk. The governor’s office declined to say whether he would sign the bill but noted Mr. Gianforte had previously banned TikTok on government-issued devices and urged the state university system to do the same.

The bill said the ban would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024. It would prohibit TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., from operating within the state, and would also bar app stores from offering TikTok within the state. It would fine any entity violating this law $10,000 per violation. It is unclear how some elements of the legislation would be enforced.

…The bill’s authors ahead of the vote said they expect legal challenges that could ultimately reach the US Supreme Court should Mr. Gianforte sign the legislation.

Critics including the American Civil Liberties Union said the bill amounts to censorship and violates free-speech rights protected under the First Amendment.

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Nobody is quite sure how this would work: how can Apple or Google know that someone’s in Montana (pop. 1 million, area 147,040 square miles)? What if someone downloads it while out of state and comes back into the state? Would ISPs have to block it? What about people using VPNs? As ever, the internet is mighty uncooperative with laws that try to limit it geographically.
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Toward understanding the communication in sperm whales • ScienceDirect

Jacob Andreas et al from various academic institutions think it might be possible to use a Large Language Model approach to translate sperm whale speech:

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the recent state-of-the-art Transformer models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) was pre-trained on a large language corpus comprising over 10^11 data points. While unsupervised structure discovery is also possible without self-supervised representation learning, recent studies have also shown that unsupervised structure discovery can provide benefits.

It is difficult to make an exact analogy between tokens in human languages and whale vocalizations. And, for comparison, the Dominica Sperm Whale Project (DSWP) dataset contains less than 10^4 coda clicks collected over a longitudinal study since 2005. It is thus apparent that one of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communications using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets capturing a wide range of attributes.

Secondly, human linguistic corpora are easier to deal with because they are typically pre-analyzed (i.e., already presented in the form of words or letters) and verification against ground truth is available, whereas in bioacoustic communication data, the relevant units must be inferred bottom-up with no ground truth available. Given this highly complex learning objective, we expect larger datasets will facilitate the discovery of meaning-carrying units.

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It’s ambitious, but I’m reminded of the Wittgenstein saying: if a lion could speak, we could not understand it. A sperm whale’s world and motivations are so different from ours that it would be almost impossible to find the interface between them.
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How nerds (almost) took over the world • Financial Times

Self-confessed nerd Stephen Bush:

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The new Dungeons & Dragons film sums up the cultural moment. If you’ve seen a Marvel superhero film you’ll be familiar with the approach it takes: a lot of quips and self-consciously ironic dialogue. It is hardly a classic of modern cinema but it is not actively bad either. But while it shares a setting and captures something of the anarchic feeling of a session playing Dungeons & Dragons, the interest in what makes a game of Dungeons & Dragons “fun” feels wholly absent from the film. Instead what we are treated to is a dutiful run-through of some of the franchise’s most famous locations and spells.

That might be the most harmful consequence of nerds’ greater purchasing power: that instead of seeking new things to do with old stories, much of our common culture is dominated by low-quality remakes, made to secure a fast buck rather than to tell a good story.

We nerds are drivers of the problem, too. Sometimes it can appear that the thing we dislike most of all is someone making the thing we love more accessible or widely known. The TikToker Francis Bourgeois — real name Luke Nicolson — is castigated for being an insufficiently “real” trainspotter and for making money out of his hobby by appearing in adverts for Gucci, despite engaging millions of new fans in the trainspotting world. Star Wars fans appear to be divided between those who complain when the franchise simply replays the hits of the past as in The Rise of Skywalker, and those who become bitterly angry when it doesn’t, as in The Last Jedi: sometimes the biggest thing the nerd dollar does is pay to keep things exactly as they are.

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The dreadful inertia of the Nerd Franchises – Marvel, Star Wars, Lord of the sodding Rings – really has squashed culture. The escapees from beneath it, notably Succession, intentionally restrict themselves: you won’t see spinoffs or prequels because they’re sufficient unto themselves.
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The end of faking it in Silicon Valley • The New York Times

Erin Griffith:

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Not only has funding dried up for cash-burning startups over the last year, but now, fraud is also in the air, as investors scrutinize startup claims more closely and a tech downturn reveals who has been taking the industry’s “fake it till you make it” ethos too far.

Take what happened in the past two weeks: Charlie Javice, the founder of the financial aid startup Frank, was arrested, accused of falsifying customer data. A jury found Rishi Shah, a co-founder of the advertising software startup Outcome Health, guilty of defrauding customers and investors. And a judge ordered Elizabeth Holmes, the founder who defrauded investors at her blood testing startup Theranos, to begin an 11-year prison sentence on April 27.

Those developments follow the February arrests of Carlos Watson, the founder of Ozy Media, and Christopher Kirchner, the founder of software company Slync, both accused of defrauding investors. Still to come is the fraud trial of Manish Lachwani, a co-founder of the software startup HeadSpin, set to begin in May, and that of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who faces 13 fraud charges later this year.

Taken together, the chorus of charges, convictions and sentences have created a feeling that the startup world’s fast and loose fakery actually has consequences. Despite this generation’s many high-profile scandals (Uber, WeWork) and downfalls (Juicero), few startup founders, aside from Ms. Holmes, ever faced criminal charges for pushing the boundaries of business puffery as they disrupted us into the future.

«

Actions have consequences? This is incredible.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A coroner has warned that millions of people are at risk of death if they use full-face snorkelling masks. CC-licensed photo by Enrico Strocchi 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. Try another. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Air National Guardsman arrested as FBI searches his home • The New York Times

Aric Toler, Michael Schwirtz, Haley Willis, Riley Mellen, Christiaan Triebert, Malachy Browne, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Julian E. Barnes:

»

Although gaming friends would not identify the leader of an online group linked to the leak of classified United States intelligence files, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The New York Times led toward Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

An online gaming profile in Airman Teixeira’s name connected him to photographs of the location where leaked documents were photographed — a kitchen countertop inside his childhood home.

An image shows a leaked document on a background that appears to be a textured countertop above a white tile floor.

The granite countertop bearing a distinctive pattern and white floor tiles are visible in the margins of some of the leaked intelligence briefings. The same interior décor is visible in photographs of the family home posted online by one of Airman Teixeira’s immediate relatives.

Mr. Teixeira was arrested by the FBI in North Dighton, Massachusetts, on Thursday afternoon.

«

The main link is to the full-length story with everything about yesterday’s arrest, but this is the part that is most relevant. On Tuesday, bellingcat said that “Creases can be seen on the documents with items, such as a hunter’s scope box and some Gorilla Glue visible in the background of those dated from early March”. To which I commented that “With details like that, bellingcat will probably pin down precisely when and where they were photographed in a few days.”

The top byline on Thursday’s story above: Aric Toler of bellingcat.
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Streaming services urged to clamp down on AI-generated music • Financial Times

Anna Nicolaou:

»

Universal Music Group has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.

UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists.

AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests “left and right”, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology.

“We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists,” UMG wrote to online platforms in March, in emails viewed by the FT.

“This next generation of technology poses significant issues,” said a person close to the situation. “Much of [generative AI] is trained on popular music. You could say: compose a song that has the lyrics to be like Taylor Swift, but the vocals to be in the style of Bruno Mars, but I want the theme to be more Harry Styles. The output you get is due to the fact the AI has been trained on those artists’ intellectual property.” 

«

Much like the claim that Getty is bringing against Stable Diffusion on roughly this basis: it was trained on our content, so it’s breaking our copyright. (I’m not convinced Getty will prevail, but there’s a long way to go yet.)
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Google will shut down Currents, the work-focused Google Plus replacement • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

»

Google has announced that it’ll shut down Currents, which was introduced in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus for G Suite. In a blog post, the company says it’s “planning to wind down” Currents, and that it’ll push the people who were using it to Spaces, which is sort of like Google Chat’s version of a Slack channel or Discord room.

Google says that it’s making the change so users won’t have to work in a “separate, siloed destination” — instead, they’ll be using Chat and Spaces, which will soon be prominently integrated into Gmail. The company promises it’s going to make Spaces a more suitable replacement over the next year, saying it’ll “deliver new capabilities” like “support for larger communities and leadership communication, investments in advanced search, tools for content moderation, and more.”

…Currents hasn’t gotten a lot of love from Google. I was only able to find three blog posts about it on Google’s Workspace Updates site — the one announcing it, one in 2020 announcing that it was widely available, and the one from Thursday announcing it was being shut down. It was included on Google’s main list of apps that come with Workspace at one point according to the WayBack Machine, but it seems like it was removed sometime in November 2021.

«

Another one bites the dust. Along with some of the job cuts, maybe Google could figure out how to focus on products and iteratively improve them, rather than binning them and expecting people to migrate. Microsoft has managed it with Teams, for example.
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The US cracked a $3.4bn crypto heist—and bitcoin’s anonymity • WSJ

Robert McMillan:

»

[James] Zhong moved the stolen bitcoins [accrued via a bug in the Silk Road dark web site] from one account to another for eight years to cover his tracks. By late 2021, the red-hot crypto market had raised the value of his trove to $3.4bn [from $600,000 when he exploited it in 2012]. He still lived in a modest house in Athens, Ga., and dressed in shorts and T-shirts. He also had a lake-house getaway in Gainesville, Ga., a Lamborghini sports car and a $150,000 Tesla.

In November 2021, federal agents surprised Mr. Zhong with a search warrant and found the digital keys to his crypto fortune hidden in a basement floor safe and a popcorn tin in the bathroom. Mr. Zhong, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday in New York federal court, where prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of less than two years.

Mr. Zhong’s case is one of the highest-profile examples of how federal authorities have pierced the veil of blockchain transactions. Private and government investigators can now identify wallet addresses associated with terrorists, drug traffickers, money launderers and cybercriminals, all of which were supposed to be anonymous. 

Law-enforcement agencies, working with cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain-analytics companies, have compiled data gleaned from earlier investigations, including the Silk Road case, to map the flow of cryptocurrency transactions across criminal networks worldwide. In the past two years, the US has seized more than $10bn worth of digital currency through successful prosecutions, according to the Internal Revenue Service—in essence, by following the money. Instead of subpoenas to banks or other financial institutions, investigators can look to the blockchain for an instant snapshot of the money trail. 

«

So bitcoin turns out to be the extremely nonymous currency, because it hasn’t expanded into real-world uses, which means that any time someone tries to cash out to useful currency, the exchanges are obliged to keep details of who’s doing the transaction. And they’ll get people with badges knocking at the door. (Link should work for free.)
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Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee: tech exec’s alleged killer also worked in tech • Mission Local

Joe Eskenazi:

»

Mission Local is informed that the San Francisco Police Department early this morning made an arrest in the April 4 killing of tech executive Bob Lee, following an operation undertaken outside the city’s borders. The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew.

We are told that police today were dispatched to Emeryville with a warrant to arrest a man named Nima Momeni. The name and Emeryville address SFPD officers traveled to correspond with this man, the owner of a company called Expand IT.

Multiple police sources have described the predawn knifing last week, which left the 43-year-old Lee dead in a deserted section of downtown San Francisco, as neither a robbery attempt nor a random attack. 

Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect. 

Some manner of confrontation allegedly commenced while both men were in the vehicle, and potentially continued after Lee exited the car. Police allege that Momeni stabbed Lee multiple times with a knife that was recovered not far from the spot on the 300 block of Main Street to which officers initially responded. 

«

Lee’s killing stirred up lots of strong feelings among the tech community: he was clearly widely adored by many who had encountered him. Yet there were details about the stabbing that were out of kilter: why was he out on his own at 3am, in a relatively safe part of the city, and had he really been stabbed randomly, given that nothing had been stolen from him?

The usual assumption about murder – you were killed by someone you know – seems to have prevailed.
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Twitter to let users access stocks, crypto via eToro in finance push • CNBC

Ryan Browne:

»

Twitter will let its users access stocks, cryptocurrencies and other financial assets through a partnership with eToro, a social trading company.

Starting Thursday, a new feature will be rolled out on the Twitter app. It will allow users to view market charts on an expanded range of financial instruments and buy and sell stocks and other assets from eToro, the company told CNBC exclusively.

Currently, it’s already possible to view real-time trading data from TradingView on index funds like the S&P 500 and shares of some companies such as Tesla. That can be done using Twitter’s “cashtags” feature — you search for a ticker symbol and insert dollar sign in front of it, after which the app will show you price information from TradingView using an API (application programming interface).

With the eToro partnership, Twitter cashtags will be expanded to cover far more instruments and asset classes, an eToro spokesperson told CNBC.

You’ll also be able to click a button that says “view on eToro,” which takes you through to eToro’s site, and then buy and sell assets on its platform. EToro uses TradingView as its market data partner.

«

Chasing the stonk (sic) market. This will wipe out the crypto scams, right?
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Elon Musk’s free-speech charade is over • The Atlantic

Adam Serwer:

»

until Musk bought Twitter late last year, conservatives were arguing that the company’s moderation decisions violated the First Amendment, even though Twitter is a private company and not part of the government. Now that Musk is using his editorial discretion as owner of the company to promote people and ideas he supports—primarily right-wing influencers—and diminish the reach of those he does not, the constitutional emergency has subsided. At least until his allies and defenders on Substack found themselves unable to promote their work on Twitter, free speech had been restored, because “free speech” here simply means that right-wing ideas and arguments are favoured. This outcome—that Twitter under Musk would favour right-wing content—was predictable, and I’m saying that because I wrote last April that that’s what would happen.

The episode reveals something important about the way that many conservative jurists and legal scholars now approach the principle of free speech. Florida and Texas passed laws prohibiting social-media companies from moderating user-generated content, in retaliation for what they characterized as liberal “censorship.” A federal judge appointed by Trump, Andrew Oldham, then upheld the Texas law with a ruling that scoffed at the idea that “editorial discretion” constituted a “freestanding category of First-Amendment-protected expression” and insisted that the platforms’ moderation decisions did not qualify for that protection.

«

Hypocrisy on a gigantic scale. It’s what Musk does best.
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The mounting human and environmental costs of generative AI • Ars Technica

Sasha Luccioni is a researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face:

»

For large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, we’ve gone from around 100 million parameters in 2018 to 500 billion in 2023 with Google’s PaLM model. The theory behind this growth is that models with more parameters should have better performance, even on tasks they were not initially trained on, although this hypothesis remains unproven.

Bigger models typically take longer to train, which means they also need more GPUs, which cost more money, so only a select few organizations are able to train them. Estimates put the training cost of GPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters, at $4.6m—out of reach for the majority of companies and organisations. (It’s worth noting that the cost of training models is dropping in some cases, such as in the case of LLaMA, the recent model trained by Meta.)

This creates a digital divide in the AI community between those who can train the most cutting-edge LLMs (mostly Big Tech companies and rich institutions in the Global North) and those who can’t (nonprofit organisations, startups, and anyone without access to a supercomputer or millions in cloud credits).

Building and deploying these behemoths requires a lot of planetary resources: rare metals for manufacturing GPUs, water to cool huge data centers, energy to keep those data centres running 24/7 on a planetary scale… all of these are often overlooked in favour of focusing on the future potential of the resulting models.

«

$4.6m doesn’t sound wildly beyond the funding possibilities of some Silicon Valley startups. But increasingly I feel like we’re heading towards IBM president Thomas Watson’s prediction from 1943 – “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Oh, but what computers.
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Full-face snorkel caused death of Red Sea tourist • The Times

Jonathan Ames:

»

Full-face snorkel masks could be putting millions of people at risk, a coroner has warned after the death of a British tourist in Egypt.

Angela Kearn, an experienced snorkeller, collapsed and died at a Red Sea resort while using equipment from the retailer Decathlon, an inquest was told. A coroner found that she had developed immersion pulmonary oedema — a concentration of fluid in her lungs — and that the mask “contributed” to her difficulties.

Kearn, 63, had recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure and was taking hormone replacement therapy to relieve symptoms of menopause, the inquest was told. She was unaware that this made her vulnerable when using the mask, a point that was allegedly not made clear in the packaging.

Caroline Topping, the assistant coroner for Surrey, has written to the General Medical Council, National Trading Standards and Decathlon in the UK to raise concerns about the potential threat the masks pose. An estimated 16 million people have bought them.

In a prevention of future deaths report, Topping wrote: “Many millions of the full-face masks have been sold and the safety concerns about their use by those with ongoing cardiovascular and respiratory issues has not been widely publicised or brought to the attention of those who already own the masks.”

«

Sixteen million. Even if the death rate is only one in a million, that’s 16 avoidable deaths. To make matters worse, there’s no British Standard for these masks – so you don’t know how safe or dangerous they might be for you.
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Teens don’t care as much about VR as tech companies do • Fortune

Prarthana Prakash:

»

Digitally obsessed teens are a target market for companies selling virtual reality headsets that transport users into entirely new worlds. But it turns out, the younger set isn’t particularly interested—even though tech companies are spending billions on VR. 

Very few teens use VR devices daily, according to a study published Tuesday by investment bank Piper Sandler. The bank surveyed over 5,600 US teens and found that close to a third of them owned VR devices, but only 4% use them every day and only 14% use them every week. 

“To us, the lukewarm usage demonstrates that VR remains ‘early days’ and that these devices are less important than smartphones,” Piper Sandler analysts said in their report.

The report noted that between the second half of last year and now, use of VR devices has remained flat. Compared to the same time last year, use has actually dropped to 14% compared to 17%. 

Piper Sandler’s results reflect the relatively slow adoption of VR among younger people given that 95% of teens in the US own smartphones and 80% own gaming consoles, according to Pew Research.

«

OK, you could have said this about smartphone ahead of the iPhone’s launch, and about tablets ahead of the iPad’s launch, and about wireless headphones ahead of the Airpods’ launch. Even so, this doesn’t feel like a market waiting to happen.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the Ukraine conflict, Russia’s tanks have been particularly vulnerable to mines. But why, when they have protective systems to destroy them? CC-licensed photo by manhhai on Flickr.

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

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

Elon Musk BBC interview: Twitter boss on layoffs, misinfo and sleeping in the office • BBC News

James Clayton:

»

Running Twitter has been “quite painful” and “a rollercoaster”, Elon Musk has said, in a hastily arranged live interview with the BBC.

The multi-billionaire entrepreneur also said he would sell the company if the right person came along.

Mr Musk, who also runs car maker Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, bought Twitter for $44bn (£35.4bn) in October.

The interview from the firm’s HQ in San Francisco covered the mass lay-offs, misinformation and his work habits.

But he admitted he only went through with the takeover because a judge was about to force him to make the purchase. And he confirmed Twitter will change its newly added label for the BBC’s account from “government funded media” to say it is “publicly funded” instead.

During the conversation – in which Mr Musk tried to do the interviewing as much as the other way around – he defended his running of the company.

Asked whether he had any regrets about buying Twitter, the world’s second richest man said the “pain level has been extremely high, this hasn’t been some kind of party”.

Talking about his time at the helm so far, Mr Musk said: “It’s not been boring. It’s been quite a rollercoaster.” It has been “really quite a stressful situation over the last several months”, he added, but said he still felt that buying the company was the right thing to do.

«

The most expensive example of buyer’s regret ever. As you’d expect, the BBC filleted the scoop. Musk predictably enough sought to turn the tables on Clayton during the interview, demanding to have examples of hate speech when Clayton said it was on the rise. (Poor preparation by Clayton, to be honest; but he had been taken by surprise when Musk abruptly agreed to the interview.) Clayton concluded in a radio interview that Musk “has a puerile sense of humour”. Puerile sense of everything, really, as the interview and all the rest demonstrates.
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NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media’ • NPR

David Folkenflik:

»

Most of NPR’s funding comes from corporate and individual supporters and grants. It also receives significant programming fees from member stations. Those stations, in turn, receive about 13% of their funds from the CPB and other state and federal government sources.

It isn’t clear that a withdrawal from Twitter will materially affect NPR’s ability to reach an online audience. NPR’s primary Twitter account has 8.8 million followers — more than a million more than follow the network on Facebook. Yet Facebook is a much bigger platform, and NPR’s Facebook posts often are far more likely to spur engagement or click-throughs to NPR’s own website. NPR Music has almost 10 times more followers on YouTube than it does on Twitter, and the video platform serves as one of the primary conduits for its popular Tiny Desk Series.

NPR’s decision follows a week of public acrimony, as Musk has used his platform to cast doubt on the legitimacy of major news organizations.

«

Quite the burn from NPR: we’re really big but it’s Twitter that got small. Now let’s see how things go as the network effect unravels and the flywheel slows down.
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Why so many Russian tanks fall prey to Ukrainian mines • The Economist

»

Tank crews have various ways of navigating minefields in relative safety. Since the Second World War they have made safe lanes with rollers that are pushed ahead of the vehicle to set off mines. In theory, one tank in each Russian platoon should use a KMT (koleinyi minnyi tral or tracked mine trawl) which has rollers to set off pressure mines, plough blades to push buried mines out of the way and an electromagnetic device to trigger magnetic ones. But tank crews do not seem to trust their efficacy. One widely circulated video shows a Russian tank being blown up when its KMT fails to detonate a mine. Many Russian tank crews reportedly dumped their KMT last summer.

Platoons without KMTs rely on specialist engineer units to clear their way. Russian engineers have BMR-3MS mine ploughs or UR-77 Meteorits, which launch explosive cables to blast a clear path 90 metres long and six metres wide. In theory these provide safe routes through minefields. But tank drivers may panic under enemy fire and drive out of the lane. If defenders knock out the lead vehicle in a column it blocks the path, forcing those behind it to leave the safe route or reverse under fire. Britain’s Ministry of Defence has said that during the battle for Vuhledar Ukrainian forces fired RAAM rounds into lanes cleared by Russian engineers.

Russia’s inability to punch through minefields has seriously hampered its offensives. In the coming weeks, Ukraine will need to show mastery of what Russia has not.

«

In my first year at university one of the study topics on my course was a branch of mathematics about how energy moves in fields of specific shapes. I mentioned this proudly to my father, who had done Mathematics at university and then gone into the civil service in the early 1940s.

“Oh yes,” he replied. “We used that method in the Second World War to calculate whether heavy mats rolled in front of tanks would set off all the mines in an area, or if some might be missed due to predictable variations in the energy distribution.”

Don’t let them tell you higher maths doesn’t have real-world applications.
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Galactic revelations: molecular precursors of life discovered in the Perseus Cloud • Scitech Daily

»

Susan Iglesias-Groth, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and Martina Marín-Dobrincic, of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, have discovered the presence of numerous prebiotic molecules in the star formation region IC348 of the Perseus Molecular Cloud, a young star cluster some 2-3 million years old.  

Some of these biological molecules are considered essential building bricks for the construction of more complex molecules such as amino acids, which formed the genetic code of ancient microorganisms, and brought about the flourishing of life on Earth. Getting to know the distribution and the abundances of these precursor molecules in regions where planets are very probably forming is an important challenge for astrophysics.

The Perseus Cloud is one of the closest star-forming regions to the Solar System. Many of its stars are young, and have protoplanetary discs where the physical processes which give rise to planets can take place. “It is an extraordinary laboratory of organic chemistry” explains Iglesias-Groth, who in 2019 found fullerenes in the same cloud. These are complex molecules of pure carbon that often occur as building blocks for the key molecules of life.

In the inner part of this region the new research has detected common molecules such as molecular hydrogen (H2), hydroxyl (OH), water (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2) and ammonia (NH3) as well as several carbon-bearing molecules which could play an important role in the production of more complex hydrocarbons and prebiotic molecules, such as hydrogen cyanide (HCN), acetylene (C2H2), diacetylene (C4H2), cyanoacetylene (HC3N), cyanobutadiyne (HC5N), ethane (C2H6), hexatriyne (C6H2) and benzene (C6H6).

The data also show the presence of more complex molecules such as the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and the fullerenes C60 and C70.

«

Mix into soup, warm for a few billion years, voila!
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People are sick and tired of all their subscriptions • WSJ

Rachel Wolfe and Imani Moise:

»

We’re finally reckoning with our expensive subscription habits.

For two straight quarters, cancellations have outpaced new subscriptions for digital memberships, food-of-the-month clubs and a host of other purchases, according to personal finance app Rocket Money. Streaming services have been particularly impacted, with cancellations for Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max and others up 49% in 2022 from the previous year, according to subscriber-measurement firm Antenna.  

“People are taking stock of their subscriptions and trying not to make the same mistakes they made in 2022 given that budgets are getting a lot tighter,” said Courtney Alev, consumer financial advocate at Credit Karma. 

The decision to cancel had been building up for some time, financial analysts said. Even though inflation cooled last month to its lowest level in nearly two years, budgets continue to be squeezed by higher prices.

About a third of respondents to a December Credit Karma survey said their biggest financial mistake last year was paying for services they never used. Americans were also paying about $133 more than the $86 they thought they were paying for subscriptions each month, according to a 2022 survey from market research firm C+R Research. 

Retiree John Ritzinger, 72 years old, said canceling subscriptions he never used would spare him needing to penny pinch at the grocery store.   

First to go was the satellite radio in two cars he never drove, saving him $45 a month. Next, the MotorTrend magazines that lived in an unread stack on the coffee table and a $1,000 annual, dining-only membership to his local Dayton, Ohio, country club in favor of ordinary restaurants. Stopping the $750-a-year pest control service was more of a debate with his wife.

«

Yes, I know, it’s the WSJ, which has been a subscription service since it went online. But the link should be free to read. The amounts that people are spending without really realising it is quite shocking. Even so, America really is the Land of the Unasked-For Extra, where stuff gets added on to your bill unless you watch like a hawk. (Thanks G for the link.)
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YouTube’s top creators are burning out and breaking down en masse • Polygon

Julia Alexander:

»

[Elle] Mills announced on Twitter that she was taking a break from YouTube and social media. She couldn’t keep up with the pressure, and told her fans that while she was safe, and in good hands, she needed time to recuperate and remember why she loved making videos in the first place.

Sam Sheffer, a popular YouTuber who burst into the spotlight after appearing in multiple Casey Neistat videos, recently took a break from Twitter for similar reasons. In his own video, Neistat addressed Mills’s questions about why she was so unhappy when everything she ever wanted was finally coming together.

“I’ve often talked about the pressures of being a YouTuber and it’s a tricky thing to talk about because to find success on YouTube is to live the dream,” Neistat said. “Like, this is the ultimate. And if you achieve this kind of success on this platform, which so many people try to do, like, how dare you complain about it? It is difficult to talk about because unless you’ve been in this position, I think it’s challenging to empathize with it.”

The backlash to YouTubers and Twitch streamers who publicly take time away from the spotlight shows its face in almost any comments section about mental health and creators. Their fans are mostly supportive, telling their favorite creators to take time and work on their mental health, but most people who don’t keep up with the day-to-day uploads or aren’t as tuned in to YouTube culture have trouble sympathizing.

…There’s a pressure for YouTubers to remain in the spotlight. This is something that PewDiePie, who uploads at least once a day, has said the rigorous pace of YouTube video creation led him to his own obsessions with the platform. Those obsessions turn into eventual dismay over producing and not enjoying the one thing that made him successful.

«

So predictable that the unrelenting nature of it, and the competition, would lead to this.
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ChatGPT – where can it go on iOS, iPadOS and macOS? • iMore

Daryl Baxter:

»

It’s hard to imagine Apple not acknowledging AI at WWDC, so we asked [independent developer Hidde van der] Ploeg what he would like to see from Apple to take [his ChatGPT app for the Watch and iPhone] Petey even further. “I would love to get access to those great new Siri voices. The ones we’re getting as developers now feel quite old. Live Activities on watchOS would be amazing too, as it shows value on Petey for iOS.”

Finally, as we’ve used Petey on Apple Watch since its launch, we’ve realized that it could be a great tool to use ChatGPT for accessibility – it could tell the user what’s nearby or if any appliances are on nearby, that should be switched off.

We asked Ploeg if he also thought there was a future for Petey with accessibility. “I think AI will be great at making complex things understandable. Focussing on Watch, we could look at really quickly getting answers to complex questions and or being able to translate complex health-related insights to be easier to understand. Machine Learning always has been great for this, but access to data has always been the hardest part.”

With more and more trained models being available for developers, it will be interesting to see where things will go. The only thing I’m a bit scared of is being Sherlocked by a great new version of Siri (you can’t beat integration like that). However, the Siri brand really needs a shot in the arm, and I will always try to explore new ways of solving problems. So if anything, I’m excited!”

Jordi Bruin has built two ChatGPT apps – MacGPT (opens in new tab) and MacWhisper (opens in new tab) – that ‘Mac-ify’ the AI experience, but help in different ways. MacGPT lets you bring up the AI through a Spotlight bar, the Menubar, or the app. You can chat with it for suggestions and advice, and you can use it with the faster and more refined ChatGPT-4 if you wish.

You can drag and drop audio files into MacWhisper and the app will use ChatGPT to transcribe them, and you can jump back and forth in the transcription to copy and paste certain sections.

“I compare it to having access to a new API or framework from Apple after a big iOS or macOS update,” Bruin told me. “Using APIs such as ChatGPT makes it possible to add certain features that would not easily be possible before.”

«

Impressive how these apps are integrating the functionality.
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I wanted to scream at other parents: ‘You don’t know how lucky you are’ • The Guardian

Tim Jonze:

»

In the summer of 2017, I’d been losing weight and feeling low, and my GP had rather reluctantly sent me for a blood test. At the follow-up, she explained how it had all come back “normal”, and it was only when I pointed to her computer screen and said: “So what does that big red cross mean, then?” that she said: “Oh, that’s just your platelets … they are a little bit high, I suppose. Would you like another test, just to be sure?”

There was a lot of this kind of thing, because nobody suspects blood cancer in a healthy-looking man in his 30s. During a bladder scan following a urine infection, a nurse slid the cold, jelly-laden device over my abdomen and gasped: “Oh!” – which is not something you want a nurse to gasp while conducting a bladder scan. “Are you aware that you have a massive spleen?” she asked. “It’s three times as big as it should be, and it’s pushing your liver and kidneys right around your back.” This didn’t sound ideal.

Still, nothing much happened, and I carried on trying to get on with life with my high platelets and my gigantic spleen and an increasing anxiety weighing on my shoulders. Every time I Googled these symptoms, the search results failed to reassure me. I worried that I had something seriously wrong with me. The fact that I had spent my life worrying I had something seriously wrong with me (but inevitably didn’t) was only faintly reassuring. When I told a friend that my jeans were starting to fall down, he joked that this would be the last time he saw me. But when I finally got an urgent referral letter through the post, my wife Helen Jane stopped saying: “So how’s your pretend cancer today?”

«

This is a long read, but so worthwhile.
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Make Something Wonderful • Steve Jobs

There’s an amazing new ebook/website with extracts from Steve Jobs’s speeches and correspondence. (If you view in a browser, it can take a while to pull in all the book. Or you can just download the file. Or it’s available free on Apple Books.)

I was struck by this early reminiscence from his childhood, which he gave in an oral history to the Smithsonian in 1995 about how he got properly interested in electronics and manufacturing through his experience of DIY assemblies called Heathkits:

»

These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together, and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and colour coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself.

I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of operation. But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean, you looked at a television set, and you would think, “I haven’t built one of those—but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog, and I’ve built two other Heathkits, so I could build a television set.”

Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous degree of self-confidence that, through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

«

One lesson I’ve always tried (not always successfully) to impress on my children is that “everything is a system” – even biological things. Once you understand the necessity for things to work together, you can diagnose why things aren’t happening by tracing forward or backward through the system.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Would you have guessed that Google has too many staplers? But according to its CFO, that’s one place where economies are needed. CC-licensed photo by Eric E Castro 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 11 links for you. Fewer staples too? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

This high schooler invented colour-changing sutures to detect infection • Smithsonian Magazine

Theresa Machemer:

»

Healthy human skin is naturally acidic, with a pH around five. But when a wound becomes infected, its pH goes up to about nine. Changes in pH can be detected without electronics; many fruits and vegetables are natural indicators that change colour at different pH levels.

“I found that beets changed colour at the perfect pH point,” says [Iowa City West High School pupil Dasia] Taylor. Bright red beet juice turns dark purple at a pH of nine. “That’s perfect for an infected wound. And so, I was like, ‘Oh, okay. So beets is where it’s at.’”

Next, Taylor had to find a suture thread that would hold onto the dye. She tested ten different materials, including standard suture thread, for how well they picked up and held the dye, whether the dye changed colour when its pH changed, and how their thickness compared to standard suture thread. After her school transitioned to remote learning, she could spend four or five hours in the lab on an asynchronous lesson day, running experiments.

A cotton-polyester blend checked all the boxes. After five minutes under an infection-like pH, the cotton-polyester thread changes from bright red to dark purple. After three days, the purple fades to light gray.

Working with an eye on equity in global health, she hopes that the colour-changing sutures will someday help patients detect surgical site infections as early as possible so that they can seek medical care when it has the most impact. Taylor plans to patent her invention. In the meantime, she’s waiting for her final college admissions results.

“To get to the Top 40, this is like post-doctoral work that these kids are doing,” says Maya Ajmera, the president and CEO of the Society for Science, which runs the Science Talent Search. This year’s top prizes went to a matching algorithm that can find pairs in an infinite pool of options, a computer model that can help identify useful compounds for pharmaceutical research and a sustainable drinking water filtration system.

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This is utterly brilliant.
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Global PC shipments suffered a drop of 33% in Q1 2023 • Canalys

»

The first quarter of 2023 brought further turmoil to the global PC market, with total shipments of desktops and notebooks declining 33% to 54m units, representing the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit annual declines. The weak holiday season toward the end of 2022 extended into the new year as demand for PC remained muted and the channel pushed forward with inventory clearance as a key priority. Of the product categories, notebook shipments suffered a large decline, falling 34% year-on-year to 41.8m units. Desktop shipments performed slightly better, undergoing a 28% decline to 12.1m units.

…39% of partners surveyed by Canalys in January 2023 reported having more than five weeks of PC inventory, with 18% reporting nine weeks or more. Meanwhile, demand across all customer segments remains dampened, with more pressure arising from further interest rate increases in the US, Europe and other markets, where reducing inflation is a top priority.

«

Nine weeks of inventory heading into a 12-week quarter means you’re carrying a lot of baggage. Canalys reckons that Apple’s sales dropped 45%, more than any other PC maker. Which is possible, but Apple sells a lot through its own stores rather than third parties. We’ll only know when the financial results come out later this month.

Oddly, the analysts rush to publish PC numbers as soon as the quarter ends, but always wait for the financials before publishing their smartphone sales estimates.
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Apple shifts headset production from Pegatron to Luxshare • Apple Insider

Malcolm Owen:

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Apple’s production partner for the long-rumored VR and AR headset has changed, with long-time AirPods assembler Pegatron out in favor of Luxshare.

Apple was expected to introduce its AR/VR headset during WWDC, but at the end of March, it had reportedly pushed back the mass production schedule by one or two months. It now seems that the delay is due to changes in assembly partner.

According to DigiTimes, Apple was going to employ Pegatron as the exclusive assembly partner of the headset. However, Apple allegedly asked Pegatron in March to give up manufacturing duties and the assembly operations to Luxshare.

It is believed that the change occurred due to Pegatron shifting its production capacity away from China into other regions. Moves said to trigger the shift include selling a manufacturing facility in Shanghai to Luxshare.

«

Ah, so the headset is “delayed” already? My anticipation for something not happening at WWDC is even greater.
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SIG Sauer P320, a popular handgun with police, is firing on its own • The Washington Post

Champe Barton and Tom Jackman:

»

The P320 is one of the nation’s most popular handguns. A variant of the weapon is the standard-issue sidearm for every branch of the U.S. military. Since the gun’s introduction to the commercial market in 2014, manufacturer SIG Sauer has sold the P320 to hundreds of thousands of civilians, and it has been used by officers at more than a thousand law enforcement agencies across the nation, court records show.

It has also gruesomely injured scores of people who say the gun has a potentially deadly defect.
More than 100 people allege that their P320 pistols discharged when they did not pull the trigger, an eight-month investigation by The Washington Post and The Trace has found. At least 80 people were wounded in the shootings, which date to 2016.

«

Guns don’t kill people, people… no, actually, it really is the guns.
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The real-world costs of the digital race for bitcoin • The New York Times

Gabriel JX Dance:

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In Texas, where 10 of the 34 mines are connected to the state’s grid, the increased demand has caused electric bills for power customers to rise nearly 5%, or $1.8bn per year, according to a simulation performed for The Times by the energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

The additional power use across the country also causes as much carbon pollution as adding 3.5m gas-powered cars to America’s roads, according to an analysis by WattTime, a nonprofit tech company. Many of the Bitcoin operations promote themselves as environmentally friendly and set up in areas rich with renewable energy, but their power needs are far too great to be satisfied by those sources alone. As a result, they have become a boon for the fossil fuel industry: WattTime found that coal and natural gas plants kick in to meet 85% of the demand these Bitcoin operations add to their grids.

…In some states, notably New York, Pennsylvania and Texas, Bitcoin operators’ revenue can ultimately come from other power customers. The clearest example is Texas, where Bitcoin companies are paid by the grid operator for promising to quickly power down if necessary to prevent blackouts.

…Many academics who study the energy industry said Bitcoin mining was undoubtedly having significant environmental effects.

“They’re adding hundreds of megawatts of new demand when we already face the need to rapidly cut fossil power,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton professor who studies electrical grid emissions. “If you care about climate change, then that’s a problem.”

«

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What happens when ChatGPT lies about real people? • The Washington Post

Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus:

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One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list.

The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: no such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said he’d never been accused of harassing a student.

A regular commentator in the media, Turley had sometimes asked for corrections in news stories. But this time, there was no journalist or editor to call — and no way to correct the record.

“It was quite chilling,” he said in an interview with The Post. “An allegation of this kind is incredibly harmful.”
Turley’s experience is a case study in the pitfalls of the latest wave of language bots, which have captured mainstream attention with their ability to write computer code, craft poems and hold eerily humanlike conversations. But this creativity can also be an engine for erroneous claims; the models can misrepresent key facts with great flourish, even fabricating primary sources to back up their claims.

«

On its face this sounds like an easy case to make. Chatbot publishes something that’s untrue; untrue thing is libellous (in that anyone who reads it would have a lowered opinion of the person). Except: libel requires knowledge of what’s true and what isn’t. Chatbots don’t have that knowledge. And their operators didn’t put that data in. However, that doesn’t mean judges will take the same view.

Quite possibly the next step will be to stop using the names of live people in output. Can’t libel the dead.
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Google to save money on employee laptops, services and staplers • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

In separate documents viewed by CNBC, Google said it’s cutting back on fitness classes, staplers, tape and the frequency of laptop replacements for employees.

One of the company’s important objectives for 2023 is to “deliver durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency.” Porat said in the email. “All PAs and Functions are working toward this,” she said, referring to product areas. OKR stands for objectives and key results.

The latest cost-cutting measures come as Alphabet-owned Google continues its most severe era of cost cuts in its almost two decades as a public company. The company said in January that it was eliminating 12,000 jobs, representing about 6% of its workforce, to reckon with slowing sales growth following record head count growth.

Cuts have shown up in other ways. The company declined to pay the remainder of laid-off employees’ maternity and medical leaves, CNBC previously reported.

In her recent email, Porat said the layoffs were “the hardest decisions we’ve had to make as a company.”

“This work is particularly vital because of our recent growth, the challenging economic environment, and our incredible investment opportunities to drive technology forward — particularly in AI,” Porat’s email said.

Porat referred to the year 2008 twice in her email.

«

Google staff are the first to suffer from AI taking people’s jobs: it’s so expensive they have to be sacrificed.

Also note that the paperless office definitely hasn’t happened. Staplers, eh.
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Before meeting with Elon Musk, top advertisers privately debate his “racist rhetoric” • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

[Elon] Musk is slated to speak on April 18 at the Possible conference from MMA Global, the premier digital marketing association. He’ll be interviewed by NBCU ad chief Linda Yaccarino and make the case that advertisers — who have abandoned Twitter because they don’t believe it’s a safe place to advertise — should return.

But a private email thread among the organization’s board members, obtained by Semafor, suggests he will face a skeptical audience. Top advertisers, including McDonald’s and Colgate-Palmolive, are concerned that Musk’s comments about race and the platform’s openness to racist speech have rendered Twitter toxic.

“For many communities, his willingness to leverage success and personal financial resources to further an agenda under the guise of freedom of speech is perpetuating racism resulting [in] direct threats to their communities and a potential for brand safety compromise we should all be concerned about,” wrote McDonald’s chief marketing and customer experience officer, Tariq Hassan.  “Further, all of us who lead our brand’s investments across platforms were required to navigate a situation post-acquisition that objectively can only be characterized as ranging from chaos to moments of irresponsibility.”

Colgate-Palmolive’s vice president and general manager of consumer experience and growth, Diana Haussling, wrote to the group that she was “both excited for the success of the conference while also mindful of the harmful and often racist rhetoric of Elon Musk.”

«

Twitter is trying to set up private meetings between advertisers and Musk after his appearance, as you’d expect, but he may not be that good at playing the supplicant, particularly at a time when budgets are tightening.
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Musk’s Twitter on collision course with Europe, with exit possible • EURACTIV.com

Luca Bertuzzi:

»

According to a source involved in the Code of Practice, Twitter’s withdrawal from Europe would not be surprising since its engagement with the Code has been steadily fading, and its capacity to keep up with commitments is no longer guaranteed.

Whilst the Code is a voluntary agreement, it will become binding under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s brand-new content moderation rulebook. The landmark legislation will introduce a strict regime for very large online platforms, those with more than 45 million users in the EU, by this autumn.

Failing to comply with the EU law could lead to hefty fines, up to 6% of the company’s global annual turnover, or even a complete ban in case of repeated offences.

Musk and other senior company officers have kept a reassuring tone with EU officials, and Twitter has not contested the designation as a very large online platform. Still, the company has been moving in the opposite direction, dismantling the existing transparency and safety features.

“Sooner or later, Twitter will have to decide whether to comply with the DSA,” an EU official told EURACTIV.

That decisive moment might come later in the year when very large online platforms must publish their first risk assessment to be vetted by external auditors.

“Twitter has no capacity to start undertaking the required risk assessments. If they produce nothing, they are probably done in Europe,” Rebekah Tromble, director of the George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics, told EURACTIV.

«

Musk tweeted about having had a “good meeting” with Thierry Breton, one of the EU commissioners, back in January. We’ll see how that works out.
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Ice Ice MATRIX • YouTube

»

Welcome to the future, where anything is possible and you never know what to believe. On one hand, you may be convinced we somehow assembled the original cast of The Matrix along side the ghost of Wilford Brimley to record one of the greatest rap covers of all time. On the other hand, you may find it more believable that we’ve been experimenting with AI voice trainers and lip flap technology in a way that will eventually open up some new doors for how we make videos. You have to admit, either option kind of rules.

</blockquote

This is an amazing piece of deepfakery which also lets you hear the lyrics of Ice Ice Baby, now classified as a valuable historical document. Well, a historical document. (Via Benedict Evans.)
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Cardiff flat owner gets tax bills for 11,000 Chinese firms • BBC News

»

When Dylan Davies went to check his post last November, 580 brown envelopes fell to the floor.

Over the next six months he got tax bills for 11,000 Chinese companies after they fraudulently used his Cardiff address to register for VAT.

“It’s been horrendous,” said Mr Davies, who got letters from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) demanding tax amounting to £500,000.

HMRC admitted the situation did not raise alarm bells at the tax office.

“You’d think there’d be a systems with the technology today that would have picked it up immediately,” Mr Davies said. He told the police and HMRC but the brown letters just kept coming.

When letters from debt collection agencies started to arrive, he got even more worried that bailiffs may come “charging the door down” and feared that the amount of money involved meant his property could be taken.

He said HRMC only started to take notice when he took his concerns to BBC Wales consumer programme X-Ray.

The head of HMRC admitted the problem in a letter to the Commons public accounts committee.
Permanent secretary Jim Harra said: “2,356 of the businesses have a tax debt and we have acted to prevent any further contact with this address in relation to these debts.” Mr Harra said investigations “so far have found no evidence of fraud or fraudulent intent” and 70% of the businesses registered to Mr Davies’s address operated in online marketplaces.

«

Strange how they all chose his address: there must be something particular about it. And why all at once? Did one company in China decide to use his address, and lots of others followed suit quickly?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The profusion of weather apps hasn’t led to a concomitant improvement in forecasts. Why not? CC-licensed photo by Markus Binzegger on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Wrap up warm, or not. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why are weather apps still so bad? • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

Weather apps are not all the same. There are tens of thousands of them, from the simply designed Apple Weather to the expensive, complex, data-rich Windy.App. But all of these forecasts are working off of similar data, which are pulled from places such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

Traditional meteorologists interpret these models based on their training as well as their gut instinct and past regional weather patterns, and different weather apps and services tend to use their own secret sauce of algorithms to divine their predictions. On an average day, you’re probably going to see a similar forecast from app to app and on television. But when it comes to how people feel about weather apps, these edge cases—which usually take place during severe weather events—are what stick in a person’s mind. “Eighty% of the year, a weather app is going to work fine,” Matt Lanza, a forecaster who runs Houston’s Space City Weather, told me. “But it’s that 20% where people get burned that’s a problem.”

No people on the planet have a more tortured and conflicted relationship with weather apps than those who interpret forecasting models for a living. “My wife is married to a meteorologist, and she will straight up question me if her favorite weather app says something different than my forecast,” Lanza told me. “That’s how ingrained these services have become in most peoples’ lives.” The basic issue with weather apps, he argues, is that many of them remove a crucial component of a good, reliable forecast: a human interpreter who can relay caveats about models or offer a range of outcomes instead of a definitive forecast.

…What people seem to be looking for in a weather app is something they can justify blindly trusting and letting into their lives—after all, it’s often the first thing you check when you roll over in bed in the morning. According to the 56,400 ratings of Carrot in Apple’s App Store, its die-hard fans find the app entertaining and even endearing. “Love my psychotic, yet surprisingly accurate weather app,” one five-star review reads. Although many people need reliable forecasting, true loyalty comes from a weather app that makes people feel good when they open it.

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From Discord to 4chan: the improbable journey of a US intelligence leak • bellingcat

Aric Toler:

»

Bellingcat has seen evidence that some documents [detailing a planned Ukrainian offensive against Russian forces] dated to January could have been posted online even earlier, although it is unclear exactly when. Bellingcat also spoke to three members of the Discord community where the images had been posted who claimed that many more documents had been shared across other Discord servers in recent months.

As the channels were deleted following the controversy generated by the leaked documents, Bellingcat has not been able to confirm this claim. 

Bizarrely, the Discord channels in which the documents dated from March were posted focused on the Minecraft computer game and fandom for a Filipino YouTube celebrity. They then spread to other sites such as the imageboard 4Chan before appearing on Telegram, Twitter and then major media publishers around the world in recent days.

Ukrainian officials have cast doubt on the veracity of the documents, with Mykhailo Podolyak, the adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, stating on Telegram that he believes Russia is behind the purported leak. But US security officials quoted by the New York Times appeared to hint at their authenticity.

Russian Presidential spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told CNN that the documents showed the extent of US and NATO involvement in Ukraine. Yet one pro-Russian Telegram channel that has been providing updates on the conflict wasn’t convinced and said it was possible the documents could be Western disinformation.

The documents appear to detail events and offer analysis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine up until March 2023.

None of the documents seen by Bellingcat had been scanned but rather had been photographed. Creases can be seen on the documents with items, such as a hunter’s scope box and some Gorilla Glue visible in the background of those dated from early March. This appears to indicate that at least some of the documents were photographed in the same location. 

«

With details like that, bellingcat will probably pin down precisely when and where they were photographed in a few days. There’s a suggestion that the documents were published as part of a row between two Minecraft participants about who knew the most about the Ukrainian conflict.
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Europe is bracing for (another) devastating drought • WIRED UK

Chris Baraniuk:

»

What happens during the next few months will really matter. Abundant rainfall could ease the situation and stave off the worst-case scenario. But Europe needs a lot. “We’re talking about a sea, a sea’s worth of water,” says Hannah Cloke at the University of Reading in the UK. In terms of volume, hundreds of millions of cubic liters of rain would have to fall across the continent to fill the deficit, she estimates. It would have to amount to higher-than-average rainfall for France and certain other places, including parts of the UK. The chances of that are, unfortunately, not high.

The UK’s weather agency, the Met Office, estimates there’s a 10% chance of a wetter-than-average March, April, and May. Conversely, there’s a 30% chance that this period will be drier than average—and that is 1.5x the normal chance at this time of year. The Met Office stresses that this is a “broad outlook,” and there might still be patches of very wet weather even if it remains dry overall.

Any rain that does fall also has to fall in the right way and in the right places. “There’s always this chance that if we do get it all in two days, we see some very serious floods,” says Cloke. “What we want is to see sustained, reasonably gentle rain over the next few months.” 

Another important factor is how hot it gets this summer, says Cammalleri. Heat waves push up water consumption and increase evaporation rates. He indicates that European forecasts do not suggest that temperatures will be quite as blisteringly hot as last year—though there is some uncertainty there too.

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Twitter fails to report some political ads after promising transparency • POLITICO

Jessica Piper:

»

Twitter has failed to disclose some political ads running on its site since early March, according to a review of its activity by POLITICO. At least three promoted fundraising tweets were not included in Twitter’s own data, seemingly contradicting the company’s policies and raising doubts about the integrity of the platform’s data and how many other political ads could go unreported.

The tweets identified by POLITICO spanned politicians from both parties, including the accounts of Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), and Adam Frisch, the Democrat who is again challenging Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s 3rd District this cycle.

Stefanik’s tweet, which promised the opportunity to win a signed MAGA hat, included a link to her joint fundraising committee’s WinRed page, where users could donate. The tweets from Fetterman and Frisch included links to their respective campaign’s ActBlue pages. All three were labeled as “promoted” in users’ feeds and would seem to fall under Twitter’s political content policy, which allows for political ads — defined to include several types of promoted political content, including tweets that “solicit financial support” — but says they will be subject to public disclosure.

The lack of disclosure casts doubt on all of the political advertising data released by the platform and makes it hard to assess which groups are using Twitter to fundraise or sway voters ahead of 2024. It also highlights the hodgepodge of voluntary transparency efforts that experts say falls short when it comes to informing voters about who is trying to influence them online.

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Applying Hanlon’s Razor to the absolute mess that is Twitter, I’ll go with cockup over conspiracy.
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Twitter: BBC objects to ‘government funded media’ label • BBC News

James Clayton:

»

The BBC is objecting to a new label describing it as “government funded media” on its main Twitter account.

The corporation has contacted the social media giant over the designation on the @BBC account to resolve the issue “as soon as possible”.

“The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee,” it said.

Elon Musk said he believed the BBC was one of the “least biased” outlets. When BBC News highlighted to the Twitter boss that the corporation was licence fee-funded, Mr Musk responded in an email, asking: “Is the Twitter label accurate?”

He also appeared to suggest he was considering providing a label that would link to “exact funding sources”. It is not clear whether this would apply to other media outlets too.

In a separate email seeking to clarify his earlier comments, Mr Musk wrote: “We are aiming for maximum transparency and accuracy. Linking to ownership and source of funds probably makes sense. I do think media organizations should be self-aware and not falsely claim the complete absence of bias. …All organizations have bias, some obviously much more than others. I should note that I follow BBC News on Twitter, because I think it is among the least biased.”

The level of the £159 ($197) annual licence fee – which is required by law to watch live TV broadcasts or live streaming in the UK – is set by the government, but paid for by individual UK households.

While the @BBC account, which has 2.2m followers, has been given the label, much larger accounts associated with the BBC’s news and sport output are not currently being described in the same way.

«

As ever, Musk can’t even screw things up well. Expect this row to rumble on: the BBC is annoyed.
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Researchers develop mRNA-based treatment for peanut allergy • Interesting Engineering

Mrigakshi Dixit:

»

Nearly three million Americans are said to be allergic to peanuts and tree nuts. Not just this, approximately one in every fifty children suffers from peanut allergies, which can sometimes result in a fatal immune reaction. 

However, there is some good news for you. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) are developing the first mRNA-based medicine to treat peanut allergies. The treatment has been inspired by the way mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines function.

“As far as we can find, mRNA has never been used for an allergic disease. We’ve shown that our platform can work to calm peanut allergies, and we believe it may be able to do the same for other allergens, in food and drugs, as well as autoimmune conditions,” said Dr. André Nel, the paper’s co-corresponding author, in a statement. 

For this treatment, they delivered the mRNA inside a nanoparticle to the liver, where it targeted specific cells to tolerate peanut proteins. The nanoparticles were tested on mice, which demonstrated that the medicine not only reversed peanut allergies but also prevented the development of severe conditions.

Several trials on mice revealed that the nanoparticle treatment was able to improve the animal’s peanut tolerance. 

According to the authors, with a few more lab studies, the nanoparticle treatment could be ready for clinical trials within three years.

«

Mice get all the good stuff first. But: good to see mRNA applications expanding.
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Paris votes overwhelmingly to ban shared e-scooters • TechCrunch

Rebecca Bellan:

»

In a major blow to shared micromobility companies Lime, Dott and Tier, Paris has voted to ban rental e-scooters from its streets. Many in the industry fear the move in Paris, where free-floating scooters initially took off in 2018, will have ripple effects in other cities.

Paris has been one of the most heavily regulated e-scooter markets, something companies have pointed to as an example of how they can play nice with cities. Yet, despite limiting scooter top speeds to as slow as 10 kilometers per hour (about 6 miles per hour) and requiring riders to use dedicated parking areas or pay fines, Paris has become the first city to completely reverse its policy on offering contracts to shared micromobility companies.

In a referendum on Sunday organized by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, Paris residents voted 89% against keeping shared e-scooters in the city. The three companies that pay for contracts to operate in the City of Light will have to pull their fleets — a total of 15,000 e-scooters — out of the city by September 1.

«

Brutal. But when you consider how lethal Paris’s roads and pavements are already, you wouldn’t want its residents (or visitors) careening around on those scooters as well.
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New Orleans teens’ Pythagorean proof gains compelling backing • The Guardian

Ramon Antonio Vargas:

»

As of Friday, [schoolgirls Calcea Rujean] Johnson and [Ne’Kiya] Jackson did not appear to have widely released their proof. The American Mathematical Society has only said it has encouraged the pair to submit their work to a peer-reviewed journal. But a YouTube account, MathTrain, reconstructed the proof using slides from Johnson and Jackson’s presentation visible in the WWL report.

Lozano-Robledo reviewed MathTrain’s reconstruction, broke it down in his own video and concluded that the students had done what they said.

In a follow-up video, he summarized how the proof involved “a fractal of similar triangles” as well as “infinite series” to compute the shapes’ sides.

“It’s so ingenious,” Lozano-Robledo said. “The proof itself is just so beautiful and so elegant.”

But Lozano-Robledo also said people who pointed to at least one other trigonometric, noncircular proof of Pythagoras’s theory were correct to do so.

Jason Zimba, then at Bennington College in Vermont, established in 2009 that sin2x+cos2x=1 could be derived independently of the Pythagorean theorem, though he took a different route.

In text under his video, Lozano-Robledo said it was not Johnson and Jackson’s fault that people had the impression they were claiming to have done something not done in more than 2,000 years. He said the students did not say that in their abstract.

«

Nice to see this progressing.
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Why movies today look so dark today, in theaters and at home • Polygon

A.B. Allen:

»

Take, for instance, Wes Craven’s 1996 horror classic Scream — a film often remarked on for just how lit everything in it is at all times. An early scene depicts protagonist Sidney Prescott embracing her boyfriend Billy Loomis in the wake of a terrifying home invasion and her near-death at the hands of a masked killer. After Sidney throws her arms around Billy, Craven cuts to a tight close-up on Billy’s face, which is illuminated by a harsh, ominous, icy-cool light that telegraphs his sinister intentions.

But where is that light coming from? The bedroom they’re in has no lamps switched on. Could it be the moon? Hard to justify, as the only windows in the space are behind Billy, and the light we’re staring at is so much brighter and closer than the moon could ever be. So what on Earth is that light?

The answer is, simply enough, nothing. Craven often didn’t feel any real need to rationalize why a bright light would suddenly appear one second before disappearing again in the following shot. It’s a purely stylistic choice, employed for that one moment to cast doubt on Billy’s trustworthiness in the audience’s mind. It’s an extremely stagey choice that fits neatly within the larger series’ heightened, melodramatic style. Scream wouldn’t really be Scream without it.

The hyper-lit style was a staple of cinematography in American films during the ’90s, and like all trends, it eventually fell out of fashion — in this case, a few years after Scream hit theaters. The 2000s saw filmmakers embracing more directional, shadowy lighting styles, evoking a grittier, more “grounded” aesthetic while retaining a sense of classic Hollywood polish. The 2010s featured another huge shift in style, this time toward hyper-naturalism. Even broad, big-budget blockbusters like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 embraced a look torn straight from indie cinema. Not only are the lights in that film always motivated, they’re realistic.

Where earlier films might have used the presence of the moon or a table lamp to justify much brighter lighting, movies like Deathly Hallows, Interstellar, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes let the light of a lamp simply look like a lamp. That resulted in darker, more directionally lit sets.

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Nice to have it explained so simply.
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How AI could disrupt video-gaming • The Economist

»

Gamemakers showed off their latest ai tricks at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month. Ubisoft, a French developer of blockbusters such as “Assassin’s Creed”, unveiled Ghostwriter, a tool that generates dialogue for in-game characters. Roblox, an American platform for diy games, launched one that draws materials from text commands, like “stained glass”, and an autocomplete helper for programmers. A few weeks earlier Straight4 Studios previewed a new driving game, “GTR Revival”, with personalised racing commentary delivered by ai.

AI represents an “explosion of opportunity”, believes Steve Collins, technology chief of King, which makes “Candy Crush Saga”, a hit mobile game. King, which bought an AI firm called Peltarion last year, uses AI to gauge levels’ difficulty. “It’s like having a million players at your disposal,” says Mr Collins. This year Electronic Arts, another big gamemaker, and Google both received patents for using AI in game testing. Unity, a game-development “engine”, plans a marketplace for developers to trade AI tools. Danny Lange, Unity’s head of AI, hopes it will “put creators of all resource levels on a more equal playing-field”.

Making a game is already easier than it was: nearly 13,000 titles were published last year on Steam, a games platform, almost double the number in 2017. Gaming may soon resemble the music and video industries, in which most new content on Spotify or YouTube is user-generated. One games executive predicts that small firms will be the quickest to work out what new genres are made possible by AI. Last month Raja Koduri, an executive at Intel, left the chipmaker to found an AI-gaming startup.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A significant proportion of men are red/green colourblind – but modern web design makes little allowance for them. CC-licensed photo by Jam Willem Doormembal 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 was another post last Friday at the Social Warming Substack: TikTok, Instagram and the lessons never learnt. Free signup.

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

ChatGPT leaking Samsung chip secrets is the tip of the iceberg • EENews Europe

Peter Clarke:

»

Apparently engineers and other workers at many companies are recruiting ChatGPT to work for them, to write software and prepare reports for example. This is sometimes with, and sometimes without, their employers’ approval.

The Digitimes report mentions three specific cases of leaks caused by engineers sharing information with ChatGPT. In one case an engineer uploaded faulty code and asked ChatGPT to find the fault and optimize the software. But as a result the source code became part of ChatGPT’s database and learning materials.

Another case was where ChatGPT was asked to take the minutes of meeting. By default the discussion and exactly who attended the meeting – both confidential – were stored on the ChatGPT database and thus ChatGPT was able to divulge the material to anyone who asked.

As a result of such events, Samsung, SK Hynix, LG and many other companies are scrambling to either ban or draw up guidelines for the use of ChatGPT and other AI chatbot services in the workplace, according to The Korea Times.

The Korea Times seemed to confirm Samsung’s mishaps and said that a message on an in-company bulletin had been posted calling attention to the misuse of ChatGPT. SK Hynix has blocked the use of ChatGPT on its internal computer network and employees must obtain security approval before using ChatGPT, the newspaper said.

The newspaper also quoted Kim Dae-jong, a professor of business administration at Sejong University, saying that the use of ChatGPT in the workplace was spreading.

«

The original report about Samsung workers leaking secrets to ChatGPT (which might want to know them) is said to have appeared in Digitimes. I’ve drawn a blank.
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Samsung forecasts a shocking 96% drop in profits for Q1 2023 • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Samsung’s next quarter is shaping up to be even worse than Samsung’s last quarter, which was already at an eight-year low. The company warned investors today that it’s a shocking 95.8% year-over-year drop in operating profit for Q1 2023. If that expectation holds, this will be the company’s worst quarter since 2009, which dates back to the company’s pre-smartphone era.

Samsung doesn’t have much explanation for the drop other than a weakening economy and lowered demand for chips. Preliminary results have the company making only 600bn won ($450m) in profit for Q1 2023, compared to 14.12trn won in profit ($10.7bn) for Q1 2022.

While phones and TVs are probably Samsung’s biggest consumer-facing products, the company’s nigh-invisible component business makes up most of Samsung’s profits. Components like RAM and NAND storage chips don’t just ship in Samsung products, but also land in most other phones, laptops, desktops, TVs, and other electronics from Samsung’s competitors. A DigiTimes breakdown of Samsung’s business for 2022 has the memory division at 55% of profits, mobile at 22%, and displays at 11%, so Samsung’s profits mostly go up and down with the memory business.

«

Lower chip demand means worse economies of scale. But the worst since 2009? That’s going back a long way. But you can expect that it’s going to come back. Samsung is, in its way, the most determined animal in the technology world.
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DPReview closure: an update • Digital Photography Review

Scott Everett is general manager of DPReview:

»

Dear readers,

We’ve received a lot of questions about what’s next for the site. We hear your concerns about losing the content that has been carefully curated over the years, and want to assure you that the content will remain available as an archive.

We’ve also heard that you need more time to access the site, so we’re going to keep publishing some more stories while we work on archiving.

Thank you to this community and the support you’ve shown us over the years.

«

Hard to know if this is happening because of the outcry, or was planned all along. But you’d think if it had been planned earlier, they would have said it along with the news of the closure.
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Introducing Substack Notes • Substack

Hamish McKenzie:

»

While Notes may look like familiar social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. This changes everything. 

The lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed is attention. In legacy social networks, people get rewarded for creating content that goes viral within the context of the feed, regardless of whether or not people value it, locking readers in a perpetual scroll. Almost all the attendant financial rewards then go to the owner of the platform. 

By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing worthy work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content.

As we develop Notes, we will focus on building a system that lets people control the contours and boundaries of their subscription universe so that it is easy to keep trolls out and even easier to let valuable contributors in. The goal here is not to create a perfectly sanitized information environment, but to set the conditions for constructive discussion where there is enough common ground to seek understanding while holding onto the worthwhile tension needed for great art and new ideas. It won’t feel like the social media we know today.

Many of us have grown so used to talk of hellsites and doomscrolling—while wondering if social media is driving us mad—that we have forgotten that the internet can be good.

«

Which is why Elon Musk has thrown all pretence of “free speech” out of the window (not that he hasn’t many times already) and first blocked Substack links from being posted, and then saw them labelled as “malware”. Perhaps that will have changed by now. Who knows.
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Time set for national mobile phone emergency alert test • BBC News

Brian Wheeler:

»

A siren will go off on nearly every smartphone in the UK on Sunday 23 April, the government has announced.

The 10 seconds of sound and vibration at 15:00 BST will test a new emergency alerts system.
The test had originally been planned for the early evening but was moved to avoid clashing with an FA Cup semi-final, which kicks off at 16:30.

The government was also keen to avoid a clash with the London Marathon, which starts at 09:30 on that Sunday.

The alert system will be used to warn of extreme weather events, such as flash floods or wildfires. It could also be used during terror incidents or civil defence emergencies if the UK was under attack.
The minister in charge of the system, Oliver Dowden, said it would be used only in situations where there was an immediate risk to life.

«

Such a diary clash! Marathon and the FA Cup final. When is there time to momentarily terrify all the population?
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Who has contributed most to global warming? • Sustainability By Numbers

Hannah Ritchie:

»

we can look at how much warming each country has contributed to date. This is the sum of warming caused by emissions of all three gases, and from all sources.

You can see these contributions in the map – or use our interactive chart to explore the data in more detail. If you’re screaming that this should be in per capita terms, I hear you and address this at the end.

The rankings of countries probably won’t surprise you. Countries with large populations such as China and India are among the top contributors. The United States and the European Union, with long histories of fossil fuel burning and rich lifestyles, are also up there.

The US has caused 0.28°C of warming, followed by China at 0.2°C, and the EU at 0.17°C.

As a share of total warming, that puts the US at 17%, China at 12%, and the EU at 10%.

A final note: if you’re looking at the warming caused by your country and thinking “that’s so tiny, why do we even bother?” you might want to read my recent article on why ‘negligible emitters’ really do matter.

«

The per capita question is, as she points out, complicated because how do you measure population, which keeps changing? Today’s number isn’t the same as the number when the emissions were happening.
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Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud • bioRxiv

Saul Justin Newman:

»

The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers.

Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. In the UK, Italy, Japan, and France remarkable longevity is instead predicted by regional poverty, old-age poverty, material deprivation, low incomes, high crime rates, a remote region of birth, worse health, and fewer 90+ year old people.

In addition, supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five: patterns indicative of widespread fraud and error.

«

In other words, those people over 100? Often just faked. The full PDF is fun towards the end (para 745 onward) when it poses the question of how you’d determine how old someone is when they’re really old.
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This is what it looks like to be colourblind • The Verge

Andy Baio:

»

About 8% of men, roughly 1 in 12, have some form of colour vision deficiency. (It’s hereditary, so figures will vary from region to region.) My mom’s colour vision is even worse than mine, which is very unusual: only about 0.5% of women globally are colourblind, about 1 in 200.

I’ve had a lot of conversations about my colourblindness with people who aren’t colorblind. (Pro tip: when you meet a colourblind person, don’t repeatedly point to things and ask what colour they are.) It seems like the very idea of colourblindness is hard for them to visualize. 

Despite what many think, I can see most colours! My world isn’t a black-and-white movie. Achromatopsia, or total colourblindness, is much more rare, affecting about 1 in 30,000 people. (Unless you were born on the Pingelap atoll in the South Pacific, where 10% of the population have inherited the gene.) 

Ninety-nine% of colourblind people, like me, have a form of red-green colourblindness. I was born with the most common type, deuteranopia, a genetic mutation that affects the ability of the green-sensitive cones in my eyes to absorb light.

As a result, some hues of green and red look like each other, converging on a muddy brown. Other colours, like shades of purple and blue, bright orange and green, or even pink and grey, can look very similar. People with other kinds of colourblindness will confuse different colours.

For example, at a glance, barring other context clues like texture and toppings, avocado toast and peanut butter toast look pretty much the same to me.

Apparently, this is nauseating to people? That’s my life.

Because red and green are complementary colours opposite one another on the colour wheel, they’ve become the default colours for every designer who wants to represent opposites: true and false, high and low, stop and go.

Inconveniently, these are also the two colours most likely to be mixed up by people with colour vision deficiencies.

I wish every designer in the world understood this and would switch to, say, red and blue for opposing colours. But I know that won’t happen: the cultural meaning is too ingrained.

«

Although in the UK the danger of colourblind (male) electricians was realised after WW2, and mains plug wiring changed from red (live)/ black (neutral)/ green (earth) to brown (L)/ blue (N)/ yellow green (E). (First applied 1969, yet not universal until 2004.)It can be done.
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Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars • Nasa Hubble Site

»

The universe is so capricious that even the slightest things that might go unnoticed could have profound implications. That’s what happened to Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum when he was looking through Hubble Space Telescope images and noticed a suspected blemish that looked like a scratch on photographic film. For Hubble’s electronic cameras, cosmic rays skimming along the detector look like “scratches.”

But once spectroscopy was done on the oddball streak van Dokkum realized it was really a 200,000-light-year-long chain of young blue stars located over halfway across the universe. Van Dokkum and his colleagues believe that it stretches between a runaway monster black hole and the galaxy from which it was ejected.

The black hole must be compressing gas along its wake, which condenses to form stars. Nothing like it has ever been seen anywhere else in the universe before.

«

You can read the preprint paper. Plus there isn’t just one of these: there’s another one heading in the exact opposite direction, doing just the same.
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Google will drop Dropcam and Nest Secure in 2024 • The Verge

Nathan Edwards:

»

Google is ending support for the Dropcam and the Nest Secure home security system in one year, on April 8th, 2024. They are among the few remaining Nest products that haven’t been brought over to Google Home, and their demise hints that the new Google Home app might almost be here. At least, no more than a year away. Surely.

Google is also winding down the last few legacy Works with Nest connections, but not ‘til September 29th.

Existing Dropcam cameras will keep working until April 8th, 2024, after which you won’t be able to access them from the Nest app. To soften the blow, Google’s offering a free indoor wired Nest Cam to Dropcam owners who subscribe to Nest Aware. Nonsubscribers will get a 50 percent-off coupon. The promotion runs until May 7, 2024, so you can keep using your Dropcam until it stops working.

The Dropcam (fka Dropcam HD) came out in 2012, and the Dropcam Pro in 2013. Then, Google bought Nest, and Nest bought Dropcam. In 2015, Google spun Nest out when it formed Alphabet, and for a while, Google and Nest were both making smart home products. Then, Google reabsorbed Nest in 2018, and there’s been a whole lot of messy business trying to integrate Nest products into the Google Home app — and killing off the ones that can’t be integrated.

Now that it’s dropping Dropcam and Nest Secure, the Nest Protect smart smoke alarms are the only Nest App-only devices left, and Google has promised to bring them to the new Google Home app. The updated app has been in public preview since October, and there’s still no firm date, but it must be getting close, right?

«

Ten years seems like a fair run – but it’s hardly as if the need for home security cameras has gone away. It’s all a bit messy: Nest, Dropcam, Google Home? Google’s hardware strategy is still in pieces.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Fishing for walleyes in Lake Erie can be fun. Though some over-competitive anglers take it too far. CC-licensed photo by Tom Hart 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 at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time: it’s about something social networks keep ignoring.

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

Twitter cuts off Substack embeds and starts suspending bots • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

»

Writers trying to embed tweets in their Substack stories are in for a rude surprise: after pasting a link to the site, a message pops up saying that “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts” and explaining that the company is working on a fix. The unfortunate situation comes on the heels of Substack announcing Notes, a Twitter competitor.

The issue could cause problems for writers who want to talk about what’s going on with Twitter in their newsletters or about things that are happening on the platform. While screenshots of tweets could work in some cases, they’re less trustworthy because they don’t provide a direct link to the source. Screenshots also won’t help you if you’re trying to, say, embed a video that someone posted on Twitter. (And Twitter seems to be at least somewhat interested in becoming a video platform given that several Blue perks relate to making the video uploading experience better.)

…Substack spokesperson Helen Tobin didn’t comment on whether the issues were caused by changes to Twitter’s API when I asked, instead sharing the same statement tweeted by the company. If they are, though, it would be far from the only platform affected by Twitter’s new API policies, which were announced a week ago.

Since then, various companies have been notifying users that they have to cut out or paywall certain features that interacted with Twitter, and many people who have run bots on the platform have been posting about how they can no longer post like they used to.

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Slowly but surely, Twitter is cutting itself off from the web. Not surprising. We seem to be moving into a new era of the internet, where information doesn’t want to be free at all.
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The Bitcoin white paper is hidden in every modern copy of macOS • Waxy.org

Andy Baio:

»

While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.

I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them. The file is found in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version, Ventura (13.3), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier.

See for yourself: if you’re on a Mac, open a Terminal and type the following command:

open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

[Be sure to put the \ in “Image\ Capture” so the terminal reads the space as part of the location.]

If you’re on macOS 10.14 or later, the Bitcoin PDF should immediately open in Preview.

(If you’re not comfortable with Terminal, open Finder and click on Macintosh HD, then open the System→Library→Image Capture→Devices folder. Control-click on VirtualScanner.app and Show Package Contents, open the Contents→Resources folder inside, then open simpledoc.pdf.)

«

Confirmed: it’s an oddity, living in a folder with a couple of setup sheets that you might use on a scanner. No doubt it will soon vanish in an update, having been discovered, and the reasons for its existence will become one of those Apple fairytales, known only to the chosen few. The, er, chatbot Eliza used to lurk somewhere in the Mac depths, but has long since been purged.
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Online ads are serving us lousy, overpriced goods • The New York Times

Julia Angwin:

»

it turns out that targeted ads aren’t helping consumers, either. Last year, researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Virginia Tech presented a study of the consumer welfare implications of targeted ads. The results were so surprising that they repeated it to make sure their findings were correct.

The new study, published online this week, confirmed the results: The targeted ads shown to another set of nearly 500 participants were pitching more expensive products from lower-quality vendors than identical products that showed up in a simple Web search.

The products shown in targeted ads were, on average, roughly 10% more expensive than what users could find by searching online. And the products were more than twice as likely to be sold by lower-quality vendors as measured by their ratings by the Better Business Bureau.

“Both studies consistently highlighted a pervasive problem of low-quality vendors in targeted ads,” write the authors, Eduardo Abraham Schnadower Mustri, a Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. student, Idris Adjerid, a professor at Virginia Tech, and Alessandro Acquisti, a professor at Carnegie Mellon. The authors posit that targeted ads may be a way for smaller vendors to reach consumers — and “a sizable portion of these vendors may in fact be undesirable to consumers because they are of lower quality.”

Quality seems to be an issue with Jeremy’s Razors, which spent the most on Facebook advertising during the 30-day period ending March 26, spending more than $800,000. When I checked Jeremy’s Facebook reviews, many customers said they liked the product’s political message [that it’s the “woke-free razor”] more than the razor itself. “If you like razors that feel like someone is pulling your facial hair out with a tweezer one at a time, then Jeremy’s Razors are your razors,” one wrote. The razor has a 2.7 star rating (out of 5) based on more than 280 reviews.

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Would be quite the turnup if all the money spent on trying to target people has just been transferred to the price of the things we’re sold.
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The Talented Doctor Ripley (GPT) • Bastiat’s Window

Robert Graboyes:

»

Medical students Faisal Elali and Leena Rachid explore the possibility of fraudulent research papers produced via ChatGPT:

»

“The feasibility of producing fabricated work, coupled with the difficult-to-detect nature of published works and the lack of AI-detection technologies, creates an opportunistic atmosphere for fraudulent research. Risks of AI-generated research include the utilization of said work to alter and implement new healthcare policies, standards of care, and interventional therapeutics.”

«

Elali and Rachid say such deceptions could be motivated by:

»

“financial gain, potential fame, promotion in academia, and curriculum vitae building, especially for medical students who are in increasingly competitive waters.”

«

A rabbinic parable warns that gossip spreads like feathers from a torn pillow in a windstorm—floating every which way and utterly irretrievable. So it may be with medical misinformation.  

In a 2016 PBS article, I described my friend Rich Schieken’s retirement after 40 years as a pediatric cardiologist and medical school professor. I asked why he retired from work that he loved, and he responded:

»

“[M]y world has changed. When I began, parents brought their sick and dying children to me. I said, ‘This is what we’ll do,’ and they said, ‘Yes, doctor.’ Nowadays, they bring 300 pages of internet printouts. When I offer a prognosis and suggest treatment, they point to the papers and ask, ‘Why not do this or this or that?’” Don’t get me wrong. This new world is better than the old one. It’s just quite a bit to get used to.”

«

But when Rich said the above words, those parents’ printouts were written by someone, and the requisite human effort somewhat limited the volume of misinformation. With ChatGPT and similar bots, that constraint vanishes.

«

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai says search to feature Chat AI • WSJ

Miles Kruppa:

»

[In February] Microsoft infused the technology behind ChatGPT into its search engine Bing, long a distant laggard to Google search. The move allowed users to engage in extended conversations with the product. Microsoft said it expected to generate $2bn in revenue for every percentage point it gained in the search market, of which Google has a more than 90% share.

Mr. Pichai’s latest comments indicate that Google plans to allow users to interact directly with the company’s large language models through its search engine. That move could upend the traditional link-based experience that has been the norm for more than two decades.

Google is testing several new search products, such as versions that allow users to ask follow-up questions to their original queries, Mr. Pichai said. The company said last month that it would begin “thoughtfully integrating LLMs into search in a deeper way,” but until now hadn’t detailed plans to offer conversational features.

Google has begun testing new AI features within Gmail and other work-related products, while Microsoft has moved to offer AI beyond Bing for use in some of its business software tools.

The stakes in the AI race in search are particularly high for Mr. Pichai. Search ads remain the biggest moneymaker for Google, bringing in $162bn of revenue last year. 

Google at times had been cautious about moving too fast with the technology, wary of radically altering the way users interact with its search engine.

…AI technology requires enormous computing power to process the calculations used to produce humanlike conversation. Mr. Pichai said Google needs to adapt its use of resources to continue its work in AI while also managing costs. For example, he said Google Brain and DeepMind—the company’s two main AI units, which have long operated separately—would work together more closely on efforts to build large algorithms.

«

It’s the latter point that really matters. If Microsoft can gain any share of search, while making it more expensive for Google to run search (as it inevitably will, adding AI to it) then that degrades Google’s core business profitability. That, in turn, limits its ability to compete in less profitable fields where Microsoft sees opportunity. (The link to the article should jump the paywall.)
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ChatGPT is making up fake Guardian articles. Here’s how we’re responding • The Guardian

Chris Moran is the Guardian’s head of editorial innovation:

»

A recent study of 1,000 students in the US found that 89% have used ChatGPT to help with a homework assignment. The technology, with all its faults, has been normalised at incredible speed, and is now at the heart of systems that act as the key point of discovery and creativity for a significant portion of the world.

Two days ago our archives team was contacted by a student asking about [a] missing article from a named journalist. There was no trace of the article in our systems. The source? ChatGPT [which told the student that the article, by the journalist, had appeared in The Guardian].

It’s easy to get sucked into the detail on generative AI, because it is inherently opaque. The ideas and implications, already explored by academics across multiple disciplines, are hugely complex, the technology is developing rapidly, and companies with huge existing market shares are integrating it as fast as they can to gain competitive advantages, disrupt each other and above all satisfy shareholders.

But the question for responsible news organisations is simple, and urgent: what can this technology do right now, and how can it benefit responsible reporting at a time when the wider information ecosystem is already under pressure from misinformation, polarisation and bad actors.

This is the question we are currently grappling with at the Guardian. And it’s why we haven’t yet announced a new format or product built on generative AI. Instead, we’ve created a working group and small engineering team to focus on learning about the technology, considering the public policy and IP questions around it, listening to academics and practitioners, talking to other organisations, consulting and training our staff, and exploring safely and responsibly how the technology performs when applied to journalistic use.

In doing this we have found that, along with asking how we can use generative AI, we are reflecting more and more on what journalism is for, and what makes it valuable.

«

This is only the beginning of the problem: what happens when people start asking ChatGPT to “write an article in the style of The Guardian and give it a headline, and byline it with the name of a journalist who works there”? Presently it’s doing the headline/byline thing. Worse is to come.
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Anglers plead guilty after claims they used fish fillets to win top contest • AP via The Guardian

»

Two men accused of stuffing fish with lead weights and fish fillets in an attempt to win thousands of dollars in an Ohio tournament last year pleaded guilty this week to charges including cheating.

The cheating allegations surfaced in September when Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament director Jason Fischer became suspicious when the fish turned in by two anglers, Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky, were significantly heavier than typical walleye.

A crowd of people at Gordon Park in Cleveland watched as Fischer cut the walleye open and found weights and walleye fillets stuffed inside.

As part of this week’s deal, Runyan and Cominsky pleaded guilty to cheating and unlawful ownership of wild animals and agreed to three-year suspensions of their fishing licenses. Cominsky also agreed to give up his bass boat worth $100,000. Prosecutors agreed to drop attempted grand theft and possessing criminal tools charges.

Both men are scheduled to be sentenced in May. Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of six months’ probation.

“This plea is the first step in teaching these crooks two basic life lessons,” Cuyahoga county prosecutor Michael O’Malley said on Monday in a statement. “Thou shall not steal, and crime does not pay.”

«

They were in line for $28,000 in prizes: the growing money in this.. sport? pastime? has prompted cheats to think of new ways to get into the money class.
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Algorithm rank validator • Cory Etzkorn

Cory Etzkorn:

»

See how your tweet performs against the open source Twitter algorithm.

«

There’s a box, into which you type. I tried: “Elon Musk? Isn’t he bad for Twitter?”

Score: -100

👎 Said bad things about Elon Musk. (-100)
👎 Too many questions. (-50)

It’s a joke, as you’ll realise if you look at the source code on Etzkorn’s Github. But given that the real algorithm uses “author_is_elon”, the joke isn’t that far from the truth.

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Why do websites have so many pop-ups? • The Verge

S.E. Smith:

»

surely, I thought, there must be a use case for pop-ups, an evidence-based explanation. I spoke with Alex Khmelevsky, head of UX at Clay, a San Francisco-based design and branding firm with clients such as Google, UPS, and Coca-Cola. Of pop-ups, he said they’re “not a good practice overall.” And yet, clients often demand them. Designers may try to suggest small changes to make them “context-based, information-based,” and less intrusive, but the client gets the final say.

I called an old colleague at the Center for American Progress to ask why opening their website doesn’t trigger the usual nonprofit tidal wave of subscribe, donate, and take action pop-ups. As vice president of digital strategy, Jamie Perez was closely involved in every step of the site’s recent redesign and ongoing development. “I trust users are doing what they want to do,” he said, noting friction frustrates people trying to grab data or read an article. He wants those users to return — and tell their friends. He views UX as “growing a relationship,” providing something of value rather than squeezing the most out of a single session.

Still, I’m starting to feel trapped in a web of frustration and unclosable interstitials: knowing that evidence against pop-ups is substantial, why keep using them? “The people who develop [pop-ups] have no idea about design and user experience,” commented Khmelevsky, and Buhle echoed the sentiment. “Oftentimes, decision-makers look at what’s right in front,” he said, turning to what others are using for guidance rather than stopping to reconsider. After talking to over a dozen designers and marketers, the best answer I could get was: pop-ups keep happening because other sites keep using them.

«

Which leads to the development of preferences in browsers to block popups, which is what I use all the time. Which leads to popups that get round that, which leads to plugins that block those. Eventually you just turn Javascript off. (The worst experience is mobile websites with popups whose close button is off the screen.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An amateur mathematician has made a breakthrough in the geometry of non-repeating tiling. On your bathroom wall soon? CC-licensed photo by Julian Burgess 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. You missed a bit. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

CAN Injection: keyless car theft • Canis Automotive Labs

Ken Tindell:

»

This is a detective story about how a car was stolen – and how it uncovered an epidemic of high-tech car theft. It begins with a tweet. In April 2022, my friend Ian Tabor tweeted that vandals had been at his car, pulling apart the headlight and unplugging the cables.

It seemed like pointless vandalism, the kind of thing that makes it impossible to have nice things. Then three months later it happened again.

This time the bumper was pulled away and the headlight unplugged. But it turned out neither incident was vandalism, because a couple of days later:

The car was gone. And it looks like the headlight was how it was stolen. Ian is a cybersecurity researcher in the automotive space and has previously been awarded bug bounties for finding vehicle vulnerabilities, and I initially thought from reading his tweet that this might be a trophy hack. But it turns out not: Ian’s neighbour had their Toyota Land Cruiser stolen shortly after. For Ian this is personal and he wanted to know just how they stole the car. After all, it’s got sophisticated car security systems, including an engine immobilizer. How did they drive these cars away?

«

This is a fascinating detective story about weaknesses in your car’s system, if your car is a Jeep, Maserati, Honda, Renault, Jaguar, Fiat, Peugeot, Nissan, Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, Chrysler, Cadillac, GMC – or Toyota. It’s not a “relay attack”, where the criminals ping the key inside the house, which pings back an unlock code that they capture. It’s much smarter than that.

Which raises the question: how many people are there who would have the knowledge necessary to figure out and instigate these hacks?
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Genesis Market, one of world’s largest platforms for cyber fraud, seized by police • The Record

Alexander Martin:

»

Genesis Market was seized on Tuesday in an FBI-led operation involving more than a dozen international partners, scuttling one of the most significant online criminal platforms.

Genesis — which functioned as a one-stop-shop for criminals, selling both stolen credentials and the tools to weaponize that data — has been linked to millions of financially motivated cyber incidents globally, from fraud through to ransomware attacks.

A splash page revealing the takedown, titled Operation Cookie Monster, has now replaced the login pages on Genesis Market’s websites. The organization maintained sites on the dark web and regular web.

The Record understands that a large number of arrests are being carried out globally.

Genesis Market was unique among credential marketplaces such as Russian Market or 2easy Shop, according to Alexander Leslie, an analyst at Recorded Future, the parent company of The Record.

Unlike its competitors, Genesis Market provided criminals access to “bots” or “browser fingerprints” that allowed them to impersonate victims’ web browsers — including IP addresses, session cookies, operating system information, and plugins.

These fingerprints meant the criminals could access subscription platforms such as Netflix and Amazon — as well as online banking services — without triggering security warnings: “What’s Joe doing logging in from India?” as Leslie said. Users could even bypass multi-factor authentication.

“What makes the fingerprints on Genesis Store different is that they’re emulating the victim’s browser session — bypassing these ‘flags’ by appearing, to the victim, to be indistinguishable from the actual user,” Leslie said.

«

May have affected as many as 50 million people – possibly more. There’s some suggestion that they arrested some of the people involved early on and got them to flip, and got access to the database of criminal users: about 59,000 of them.
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‘The miracle that disrupts order’: mathematicians invent new ‘einstein’ shape • The Guardian

Matthew Cantor:

»

In nature and on our bathroom walls, we typically see tile patterns that repeat in “a very predictable, regular way”, says Dr Craig Kaplan, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. What mathematicians were interested in were shapes that “guaranteed non-periodicity” – in other words, there was no way to tile them so that the overall pattern created a repeating grid.

Such a shape would be known as an aperiodic monotile, or “einstein” shape, meaning, in roughly translated German, “one shape” (and conveniently echoing the name of a certain theoretical physicist).

“There’s been a thread of beautiful mathematics over the last 60 years or so searching for ever smaller sets of shapes that do this,” Kaplan says. “The first example of an aperiodic set of shapes had over 20,000 shapes in it. And of course, mathematicians worked to get that number down over time. And the furthest we got was in the 1970s,” when the Nobel-prize winning physicist Roger Penrose found pairs of shapes that fit the bill.

Now, mathematicians appear to have found what they were looking for: a 13-sided shape they call “the hat”. The discovery was largely the work of David Smith of the East Riding of Yorkshire, who had a longstanding interest in the question and investigated the problem using an online geometry platform. Once he’d found an intriguing shape, he told the New York Times, he would cut it out of cardstock and see how he could fit the first 32 pieces together.

“I am quite persistent but I suppose I did have a bit of luck,” Smith told the Guardian in an email.

«

This is a quite fabulous piece of mathematics (here’s the draft paper) which I don’t pretend to understand. How fabulous that it should be written about by someone called Cantor.
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Stop AI stealing the show • Equity

Equity is the trade union for performers and creative practitioners:

»

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown rapidly across the audio and entertainment industry in recent years, from automated audiobooks and voice assistants to deep fake videos and text to speech tools.

But UK Intellectual Property law has failed to keep pace. And this is leading to performers being exploited.

We know that:
• Performers are having their image, voice or likeness reproduced by others, using AI technology, without their consent
• Because of loopholes in the law, performers are not being fairly paid for the reproduction of their work. And sometimes not paid at all

Performers are kept in the dark about their rights and contracts:
• 79% of performers who have undertaken AI work felt they did not have a full understanding of their performers’ rights (as set out in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988) before signing the contract
• Performers are being asked to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements without any knowledge of what the job entails
• 65% of performers think the development of AI technology poses a threat to employment opportunities in the performing arts sector. This figure rose to 93% for audio artists
• 93% of Equity members think the Government should introduce new legal protections for performers, so that a performance cannot be reproduced by AI technology without their consent.

The government is also planning to introduce a new data mining exemption, which could have catastrophic implications for UK based performers and their professional work if implemented.

«

Wise of Equity to move early on this: its members are probably the most likely to lose out first if they don’t get these sorts of protections.
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The “e-bikes are cheating” myth busted: studies disprove the claim • Cycling Electric

Mark Sutton:

»

A piece of research collaborated upon by numerous European Universities produced one of the most comprehensive bodies of electric bike user data so far, pulling on insight from 10,000 riders.

Pushing out a broad survey that measured weekly activity the researchers were over time able to prove that electric bike users were actually surpassing pedal cycle users in the amount of saddle time registered. The riders were taking longer trips and more often replacing car trips by generally reaching for the pedal-assisted bikes for journeys of a distance that would generally be faster on two wheels versus fighting traffic.

The data concluded that e-bike riders were registering significantly longer journeys at 9.4km, compared to 4.8km for cyclists, as well as higher daily averages at 8km and 5.3km, respectively.

In exercise terms that translated favourably, though pedal cyclists edged it in BMI readings, but only marginally. Cyclists were averaging a 23.8 BMI, while e-bike riders had an average of 24.8. Both of these put riders in the very typically normal range, showing that the exercise was helpful on both counts.

As the researchers put it “Physical activity levels, measured in Metabolic Equivalent Task minutes per week (MET min/wk), were similar among e-bikers and cyclists (4463 vs. 4085).”

One point worth consideration on this note is that e-bikes tend to greater attract those less physically ready for exercise, versus a pedal cycle, so the margin of closeness may be distorted somewhat. In fact, the study did note that e-bike riders did tend to be a bit older at an average of 48.1 years versus 41.4 years for the pedal cyclist.

«

Perhaps the latter point for two reasons: they’re feeling the struggle of an unaided bicycle more, and they’re a bit more affluent.
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China plans to ban exports of rare earth magnet tech • The Japan News

Seima Oki:

»

China is considering banning the export of technologies used to produce high-performance rare earth magnets deployed in electric vehicles, wind turbine motors and other products, citing “national security” as a reason, it has been learned.

With the global trend toward decarbonization driving a shift toward the use of electric motors, China is believed to be seeking to seize control of the magnet supply chain and establish dominance in the burgeoning environment sector.

Beijing is currently in the process of revising its Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export — a list of manufacturing and other industrial technologies subject to export controls — and released a draft of the revised catalog for public comment in December. In the draft, manufacturing technologies for high-performance magnets using such rare earth elements as neodymium and samarium cobalt were added to the export ban. The solicitation of comments ceased late January and the revisions are expected to be adopted as early as this year.

Rare earth magnets are key components in motors that use electricity and magnetic force to generate rotation. In addition to EVs, they are widely used in aircraft—including military planes—and industrial items including robots, mobile phones and air conditioners. Use of such magnets is expected to increase along with semiconductors and storage cells. The Japanese government is reportedly concerned about the potentially massive impact a magnet supply disruption could have on various public and economic activities.

China is estimated to hold an about 84% share of the global market in neodymium magnets and an over 90% interest in samarium cobalt magnets. Japan, meanwhile, has about 15% of the neodymium magnet market and a less-than-10% share of that for samarium cobalt.

«

The Second Cold War enters a new phase.
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Meta to debut ad-creating generative AI this year, CTO says • Nikkei Asia

Kazuyuki Okudaira:

»

Facebook owner Meta intends to commercialize its proprietary generative artificial intelligence by December, joining Google in finding practical applications for the tech.

The company, which began full-scale AI research in 2013, stands out along with Google in the number of studies published.

“We’ve been investing in artificial intelligence for over a decade, and have one of the leading research institutes in the world,” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, told Nikkei in an exclusive interview on Wednesday in Tokyo. “We certainly have a large research organization, hundreds of people.”

Meta announced in February that it would establish a new organization to develop generative AI, but this is the first time it has indicated a timeline for commercialization.

The technology, which can instantly create sentences and graphics, has already been commercialized by ChatGPT creator OpenAI of the US. But Bosworth insists Meta remains on the technology’s cutting edge.

“We feel very confident that … we are at the very forefront,” he said. “Quite a few of the techniques that are in large language model development were pioneered [by] our teams.

“[I] expect we’ll start seeing some of them [commercialization of the tech] this year. We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy. It’s probably the area that I’m spending the most time [in], as well as Mark Zuckerberg and [Chief Product Officer] Chris Cox.”

«

I wonder where it’ll be used? To make the metaverse more welcoming? It’s not as if Facebook is big on either selling services or selling hardware.
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Why journalists can’t quit Twitter • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

In December, I predicted that 2023 would be the year that the media would begin its divorce from Twitter. “Elon Musk’s continued promotion of right-wing causes and personalities will push away more and more high-profile users, who find themselves increasingly put off by his shock-jock antics and whim-based approach to content moderation,” I wrote. “Alternative platforms like Mastodon, while smaller and less intuitive to use, offer a safe haven to more and more people — particularly journalists — looking for off-ramps. By the end of 2023, Twitter no longer sets the daily news agenda by default for the entire US press.”

Almost four months later, this prediction looks more and more wobbly. The first part has more or less come true: journalists are put off by Musk’s antics, and dunk on him daily. But those same journalists — along with a bunch of people Musk arbitrarily suspended, fired, or laid off — continue to tweet just the same, propping up the service with their quips and sports tweets and food photos just as they always have. And while some of the company’s competitors show intermittent signs on life, none has taken on the feeling of a daily must-visit in the way Twitter did and still does.

«

Willie Sutton didn’t actually say he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is”; it was because “I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life”. For journalists, that’s a lot of what Twitter gives them: validation, visibility with colleagues, and, used well, an endless source of stories. So I think Newton misses the point here.

Journalists will stop coming to Twitter when other journalists stop going there, and when there aren’t any people using it. And I don’t see either happening. Even in the days when the Fail Whale was a regular occurrence, and there were fewer people sharing less, it was a must-use. Since then, it’s become more reliable and more popular.
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Twitter adds ‘state-affiliated media’ label to NPR account putting it on par with Russia Today • Forbes

Matt Novak:

»

Twitter added a warning to NPR’s Twitter account on Tuesday, declaring it as “state-affiliated media,” a label that’s typically been reserved for foreign media outlets that represent the official views of the government, like Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua.

In fact, several people on Twitter pointed out that the social media company specifically said that news outlets like NPR are not state-affiliated media because they have editorial independence, despite getting some funds from the government.

“State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution,” Twitter’s Help Center reads.

The explanation on Twitter’s website went on to call out NPR as an outlet that didn’t deserve the state-affiliated label. At least until recently.

“Accounts belonging to state-affiliated media entities, their editors-in-chief, and/or their prominent staff may be labeled. State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy,” the Help Center continued.

That’s what it used to say as of Tuesday morning, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The website still mentions the BBC but the reference to NPR was deleted sometime Tuesday.

«

At a guess, this is more of Musk’s capricious, snide behaviour. The antipathy may become mutual: there are probably some outlets which would love to dub him “failed billionaire” or “former billionaire”. I also suspect he’s being egged on in this by some of his coterie of venture capitalists.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The iPod shuffle was the ultimate expression of our modern love of playing songs out of order – because we like being surprised. CC-licensed photo by Cristiano Betta 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

TikTok fined £12.7m for illegally processing children’s data • The Guardian

Alex Hern and Aletha Adu:

»

TikTok has been fined £12.7m for illegally processing the data of 1.4 million children under 13 who were using its platform without parental consent, Britain’s data watchdog said.

The information commissioner said the China-owned video app had done “very little, if anything” to check who was using the platform and remove underage users, despite internal warnings the firm was flouting its own terms and conditions.

“Our findings were that TikTok were not doing enough to prevent under-13s accessing their platform, they were not doing enough when they became aware of under-13s to get rid of them, and they were not doing enough to detect under-13s on there,” John Edwards told the Guardian on Tuesday. “They assure us that they are now doing more.”

The fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) comes weeks after the app was banned from UK government phones amid security concerns. It is fast becoming a flashpoint for the UK’s handling of big tech and Chinese influence.

After the announcement of the fine, one of the largest the watchdog has given, Rishi Sunak was accused of moving too slowly in taking action against TikTok – and was called “naive for assuming TikTok could ever regulate itself”.

UK data protection law does not have a strict ban on children using the internet but requires organisations that use the personal data of children to obtain consent from their parents or carers. TikTok itself bans those under 13 in its terms and conditions. The failure to enforce age limits led to “up to 1.4 million UK children” under 13 using the platform as of 2020, the ICO estimated.

«

Social media firms never, never, ever enforce age rules. Because it’s so much more profitable not to.
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The mixed-up history of the shuffle button • The Verge

Natalie Weiner:

»

It’s not clear who initially decided to integrate that new technology of randomness into music. “In the first Philips player, shuffle was not available…Which company came first? I do not know,” Kees Schouhamer Immink, a pioneering Philips scientist who worked on the earliest CD players, told me by email. But very soon after the frontiers of music consumption shifted from analog to digital with the introduction of those first CD players in 1982, random playback was touted as one of the device’s best features. (There were sophisticated tape players that also had random playback functions by the early ’80s, but every selection had to be preprogrammed by the user — plus, the analog nature of tape playback would make the time between tracks fairly significant.)

“Do the Sony Shuffle!” shouted one 1986 advertisement for the Sony CDP-45. “It makes old CDs new!” But what anticipated the contemporary shuffle experience was the introduction of players that held multiple CDs; rather than just hearing a CD you owned play in an order you couldn’t predict, you could put a few that you liked together and, well, shuffle them, replicating the leanback experience of listening to the radio (or, as was still quite new at that time, a live DJ) without hearing any of the stuff you didn’t like. “Having a Sony CDP-C10 Disc Jockey in your home really is like having your own personal disc jockey,” another advertisement put it. “Ten hours of uninterrupted music enjoyment for hassle-free parties or background music in restaurants or shops.” 

…Shuffle satisfied the human attraction to novelty and surprise. With randomness, there is possibility: it makes sense, then, that the first literal shuffle buttons were on ’70s-era handheld blackjack games for shuffling the virtual deck. When you put a playlist, or your library, on shuffle, you might get lucky and hear exactly the thing you want to hear with the added satisfaction of not knowing it was coming.

«

Fabulous idea for a feature. That paragraph above captures what we love about shuffle: the surprise of the familiar yet unexpected. (Why shuffle an album you’ve never heard before?) It’s the same thing for the brain as slot machines.
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“Blurred Lines,” harbinger of doom • Pitchfork

Jayson Greene:

»

Indeed, the implications of a “Blurred Lines” loss [in its copyright defence against the Marvin Gaye estate] was frightening enough to spur an amicus brief that included John Oates, Hans Zimmer, and Rivers Cuomo among its 200 signatories. “By eliminating any meaningful standard for drawing the line between permissible inspiration and unlawful copying, the judgment is certain to stifle creativity and impede the creative process,” read the brief. It was not enough. The appeals court ruled again in favor of the Gaye Estate, and Williams and Thicke were ordered to pay $5.3 million in damages in July 2015. 

The fallout from the decision was incalculable. By demonstrating the value of a high-profile lawsuit against a massive pop song, the “Blurred Lines” case helped underline the potential financial upside to owning catalogs like Gaye’s. If the stampede of venture capitalists competing to snap up beloved artist catalogs—from Otis Redding to James Brown to Smokey Robinson—proceeded from a specific assumption, it’s that whoever owns the assets gets to demand payment. 

Now, when pop songs are recorded, they routinely pass through a forensic musicological analysis for any possible similarities to other songs, old or new, often with preemptive songwriter credits handed out as a result. A much more common practice, seen everywhere from hits by Nicki Minaj to Saweetie to Bebe Rexha and Jack Harlow, is to sample a large chunk of a beloved song wholesale, which ensures bigger checks to publishers and downplays the threat of litigation.

«

This is a long but very worthwhile read about a song you may have forgotten about, even though it was colossal 10 years ago. Notably, it shows how everyone who was involved with it became in some way tainted by it.
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Google flags apps made by popular Chinese e-commerce giant as malware • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

Google has flagged several apps made by a Chinese e-commerce giant as malware, alerting users who had them installed, and suspended the company’s official app.

In the last couple of weeks, multiple Chinese security researchers have accused Pinduoduo, a rising e-commerce giant that boasts almost 800 million active users, of making apps for Android that contain malware designed to monitor users.

Ed Fernandez, a Google spokesperson, said that “off-Play versions of this app that have been found to contain malware have been enforced on via Google Play Protect,” referring to apps that are not on Google Play.

Effectively, Google has set Google Play Protect, its Android security mechanism, to block users from installing these malicious apps, and warn those who have them already installed, prompting them to uninstall the apps.

Fernandez added that Google has suspended Pinduoduo’s official app on the Play Store “for security concerns while we continue our investigation.”

Requesting anonymity, a security researcher alerted TechCrunch of the claims against the apps, and said their analysis also found that the apps were exploiting several zero-day exploits to hack users.

«

Unsurprisingly, Pinduoduo denies the claims. Not blocked in China, because Google Play isn’t available in China (Google is blocked there; it’s all open source Android).
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Have we fallen out of love with Wordle? • BBC News

Harry Low:

»

In October 2021, about 5,000 people visited Brooklyn-based Mr Wardle’s site. When the alumnus of Royal Holloway, University of London sold up to the NYT on 31 January 2022, the monthly figure stood at 45m.

Wordle was by now spawning daily updates in chat groups (including one featuring Hollywood stars Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Bradley Cooper), fuelling the competitive instincts of families and friends and prompting stern warnings about the bad etiquette of giving spoilers.

It even helped to end a 17-hour hostage ordeal and became the most Googled word of 2022.

Head of games at the New York Times Jonathan Knight (longest streak: 48) says there’s still a huge interest in Wordle although Google Trends data suggests it is now a third as popular as it was at its peak.

“I can’t disclose specific numbers but tens of millions of people play every week,” he says. “We are still seeing a pretty high level of audience engagement and I would say we’re pleased with it. It’s obviously come down off of its viral craze as any viral game will, and games that go viral like that don’t come along that often.

“They often sort of pop and drop – and this one definitely hasn’t.”

«

Hard to figure, but tens of millions per week vs 45m per month sounds like it’s shrinking down to a hardcore group. Though quite a large one.
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Nigel Lawson’s economic ‘success’ was an oil-fuelled illusion • openDemocracy

Adam Ramsay:

»

By the end of the 1970s… North Sea oil started to come on stream. By the mid-1980s, when Lawson was chancellor, 10% of annual government revenue, or £18bn a year, came directly from North Sea oil.

Just as significantly, the oil boom played a vital role in delivering the Big Bang in the City of London, for which Lawson usually gets both credit and blame, with money flooding in to invest in Britain’s new hydrocarbon glut. Of course, his radical deregulations played a role, too, allowing banking whiz kids to build these new investments into the vast credit-card houses which came tumbling down in 2008. But without the oil, it’s hard to see why that money would have been flowing in in the first place.

As the US Department for Energy said in 1989, “the growth of North Sea oil revenues is the most important fiscal development in the British economy in the 1980s”.

How the revenue from that oil was spent – squandered on under-priced privatisations and tax cuts for the rich, buying Tory election victories rather than investing in long-term prosperity – is the real Lawson legacy we should be talking about. But, outside Scotland, that conversation always seems to be missed.

Not by Lawson himself, of course. He seemed to retain a gratitude to the oil industry over the decades after he resigned as chancellor. A leading figure in the movement to deny the science of climate change, he led the climate-denying lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, using his significant media presence and reputation across Tory Britain to sow doubt about atmospheric physics and delay much-needed action on climate change.

When we remember him, it shouldn’t be for the endlessly repeated false history about his time as chancellor. It should be for his own lies, since then, and the damage they have done.

«

If you need persuading of this point, the Institute of Fiscal Studies has a helpful graph showing North Sea revenues as a proportion of UK GDP over time.
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Groupon, down 99.4% from its IPO, gets a new CEO • Techcrunch

Ingrid Lunden:

»

A dozen years ago, Groupon shot to fame popularizing the online group buying format, confidently rejecting a $6bn acquisition offer from Google and instead going public with a $17.8bn market cap. The company today says it has 14 million active users, but almost consistently for the last decade, its financial position has been in a slow decline — with stagnation in its core business model, little success in efforts to diversify, declining revenues and ongoing losses.

And today comes the latest chapter in that story. The Chicago-based company, which today has a market cap of just $103m (a drop of 99.4% from its public market debut), has appointed Dusan Senkypl, a current board member, as interim CEO. Senkypl will run the company. From the Czech Republic.

…Groupon specifically has faced a host of challenges over the years. The very concept of group buying is structured on the concept of hype, which may have been a fateful, less-than-promising starting point. Even early on, and despite the predictions of it being a threat to Google and Amazon, others debated whether it could rightly be considered a “tech” company. But beyond this, Groupon — despite making more than 40 acquisitions, including a host of clones across international markets, plus a number of interesting e-commerce and fintech businesses — failed to find other hooks to diversify itself.

Meanwhile, a key marketing route for the company — email — died a small death when Google changed how subscription emails were categorized (and could be more easily ignored).

«

It would be very easy to see this as the spurned buyer taking action to squash the annoying would-be rival, wouldn’t it.
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‘Recent photo’ of Julian Assange was actually generated by AI • Full Fact

Grace Rahman:

»

There are some clues the image is not a genuine photograph.

Guillaume Brossard, co-founder of the French website Hoaxbuster pointed out that Mr Assange’s close allies, including his wife, are active on Twitter but had not shared the image.

Mr Brossard also noted that details in the hair, ear and unmatching sleeve colours of the image did not look realistic.

The image also has a prominent watermark saying “photo property of ‘E’”. Using Google to search for the image, the earliest instance of the image appearing online comes from a Twitter user posting it on 30 March. This user has previously referred to themselves as E in other seemingly AI-generated images.

German tabloid newspaper Bild interviewed the user, who told the publication he had made the photo of Julian Assange using Midjourney, an AI programme which allows people to generate images using prompts. 

Midjourney was also the app used to create fake images of the Pope wearing a puffer coat and former US President Donald Trump apparently being arrested that recently went viral. 

The Twitter user who created the image of Mr Assange told Bild: “My intention was to create an image based on the documented happenings around Julian.”

He added: “It was designed to evoke a visceral response and to accurately represent what the public could not otherwise bear witness to.”

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Deepfakes 1 (the pope), establishment 1.
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Police call handlers used fake system for eight years • BBC News

Mark Daly:

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One of Scotland’s main police control rooms used a fake system to manipulate response time targets for eight years, according to documents seen by the BBC.
Thousands of calls to the Bilston Glen control room were allocated to a fictitious call sign known as DUMY.

Internal systems would register that the calls had been passed to officers – but instead they were parked on a list.

This meant a police vehicle would not have been dispatched quickly to calls which had been judged as high priority. It appears that many calls were not attended at all.

The practice, according to official police documents, was designed to “provide artificial levels of incident management performance”.

The documents reveal that the DUMY call sign was used at Bilston Glen in Loanhead, Midlothian, from at least 2007 until the system was discovered in 2015 and stopped.

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On Twitter, it was pointed out that this is a classic example of Goodhart’s Law: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. (Charles Goodhart was an economist; he developed the idea in a 1975 article about monetary policy, but we’re all living with the effects all the time.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified