The US Air Force has tested a crewed F-16 in a dogfight against one flown by machine learning, offering a preview of future warfare. CC-licensed photo by Airwolfhound on Flickr.

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

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

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

AI is now dogfighting with fighter pilots in the air • The War Zone

Joseph Trevithick:

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Last year, the uniquely modified F-16 test jet known as the X-62A, flying in a fully autonomous mode, took part in a first-of-its-kind dogfight against a crewed F-16, the US military has announced. This breakthrough test flight, during which a pilot was in the X-62A’s cockpit as a failsafe, was the culmination of a series of milestones that led 2023 to be the year that “made machine learning a reality in the air,” according to one official. These developments are a potentially game-changing means to an end that will feed directly into future advanced uncrewed aircraft programs like the US Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft effort.

Details about the autonomous air-to-air test flight were included in a new video about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program and its achievements in 2023. The U.S. Air Force, through the Air Force Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), is a key participant in the ACE effort. A wide array of industry and academic partners are also involved in ACE. This includes Shield AI, which acquired Heron Systems in 2021. Heron developed the artificial intelligence (AI) ‘pilot’ that won DARPA’s AlphaDogfight Trials the preceding year, which were conducted in an entirely digital environment, and subsequently fed directly into ACE.

“2023 was the year ACE made machine learning a reality in the air,” Air Force Lt. Col. Ryan Hefron, the ACE program manager, says in the newly released video, seen in full below.

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Seems like Top Gun: Maverick was released just in time. In the future, Tom Cruise and team would be up against entirely faceless machines. (Which is of course the plot of the latest Mission: Impossible films..)
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Redwood Material’s Nevada EV battery recycling facility attempts to rival China • Bloomberg

Tom Randall:

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In the scrublands of western Nevada, Tesla co-founder JB Straubel stood on a bluff overlooking several acres of neatly stacked packs of used-up lithium-ion batteries, out of place against the puffs of sagebrush dotting the undulating hills. As if on cue, a giant tumbleweed rolled by. It was the last Friday of March, and Straubel had just struck black gold.

Earlier that day, his battery-recycling company, Redwood Materials, flipped the switch on its first commercial-scale line producing a fine black powder essential to electric vehicle batteries. Known as cathode active material, it’s responsible for a third of the cost of a battery. Redwood plans to manufacture enough of the stuff to build more than 1.3 million EVs a year by 2028, in addition to other battery components that have never been made in the US before.

It’s a turning point for a US battery supply chain that’s currently beholden to China. The world’s second-biggest economy controls 70% of the planet’s lithium refining capacity and as much as 95% of production for other crucial materials needed to make EVs, according to BloombergNEF. Redwood is attempting to break that stranglehold by creating a domestic loop using recycled critical metals.

“The responsibility weighs on me,” Straubel said. “I remember feeling it in the early days at Tesla, when the other manufacturers hadn’t done crap yet, and we had a very palpable sense of holding the flag and running out into the field and saying ‘EVs are the future!’ We felt that if we failed, well, nobody’s going to follow. This is a little déjà vu.”

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Fascinating story about battery recycling: huge potential for reusing materials and minimising the need for new mining. (Free link to read.)
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Google fires 28 employees after protest over Israel cloud contract • The Verge

Alex Heath:

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Google fired 28 employees in connection with sit-in protests at two of its offices this week, according to an internal memo obtained by The Verge. The firings come after nine employees were suspended and then arrested in New York and California on Tuesday.

The fired employees were involved in protesting Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2bn Israeli government cloud contract that also includes Amazon. Some of them occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian until they were forcibly removed by law enforcement. Last month, Google fired another employee for protesting the contract during a company presentation in Israel.

In a memo sent to all employees on Wednesday, Chris Rackow, Google’s head of global security, said that “behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it.”

…He also warned that the company would take more action if needed: “The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing. If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again. The company takes this extremely seriously, and we will continue to apply our longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior — up to and including termination.”

In a response statement, the “No Tech for Apartheid” group behind the protests called Google’s firings a “flagrant act of retaliation.”

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Um, yes? The group wrote a Medium post in which they also said that “Google workers have the right to peacefully protest about terms and conditions of our labour.” Absolutely true, but ideally not in the offices during working hours. One can have a discussion about whether a company is a psychopath which bends executives to its will (generally, make money), but a sit-in feels like having one’s cake and eating it (or at least getting paid enough to buy said cake).
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Power-hungry AI is putting the hurt on global electricity supply • FT via Ars Technica

Camilla Hodgson:

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Amazon, Microsoft, and Google parent Alphabet are investing billions of dollars in computing infrastructure as they seek to build out their AI capabilities, including in data centres that typically take several years to plan and construct.

But some of the most popular places for building the facilities, such as northern Virginia, are facing capacity constraints which, in turn, are driving a search for suitable sites in growing data centre markets globally.

“Demand for data centres has always been there, but it’s never been like this,” said Pankaj Sharma, executive vice president at Schneider Electric’s data centre division.

At present, “we probably don’t have enough capacity available” to run all the facilities that will be required globally by 2030, said Sharma, whose unit is working with chipmaker Nvidia to design centres optimized for AI workloads.

“One of the limitations of deploying [chips] in the new AI economy is going to be … where do we build the data centres and how do we get the power,” said Daniel Golding, chief technology officer at Appleby Strategy Group and a former data centre executive at Google. “At some point the reality of the [electricity] grid is going to get in the way of AI.”

The power supply issue has also fuelled concerns about the latest technology boom’s environmental impact.

Countries worldwide need to meet renewable energy commitments and electrify sectors such as transportation in response to accelerating climate change. To support these changes, many nations will need to reform their electricity grids, according to analysts.

The demands on the power grid are “top of mind” for Amazon, said the company’s sustainability chief, Kara Hurst, adding that she was “regularly in conversation” with US officials about the issue.

…Research group Dgtl Infra has estimated that global data centre capital expenditure will surpass $225bn in 2024. Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang said this year that $1 trillion worth of data centres would need to be built in the next several years to support generative AI, which is power intensive and involves the processing of enormous volumes of information.

…US data centre electricity consumption is expected to grow from 4% to 6% of total demand by 2026, while the AI industry is forecast to expand “exponentially” and consume at least 10 times its 2023 demand by 2026, said the International Energy Agency.

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Limitless AI: a new wearable gadget, and app, for remembering your meetings • The Verge

David Pierce:

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The Limitless Pendant doesn’t exactly scream “AI.” As Dan Siroker, the CEO of the company behind the new device, lifts it up to show me over Zoom, the round, rubbery-looking gizmo reminds me more of an old-school clippable Fitbit. But what Siroker is actually showing me is a device that can be clipped onto your shirt or worn on a string around your neck that is meant to record everything you hear — and then use AI to help you remember and make sense of it.

The Limitless Pendant is part of the whole Limitless system, which the company is launching today. (Oh, and in case you’re wondering: yes, it’s very much a reference to the movie.) Siroker’s last AI product, Rewind, was an app that ran on your computer and would record your screen and other data in order to help you remember every tab, every song, every meeting, everything you do on your computer. (When the company first teased the Limitless Pendant, it was actually called the Rewind Pendant.) Limitless has similar aims, but instead of just running on your computer, it’s meant to collect data in the cloud and the real world, too, and make it all available to you on any device. Rewind is still around, for the folks who want the all-local, one-computer approach — but Siroker says the cross-platform opportunity is much bigger.

“The core job to be done is initially around meetings,” Siroker tells me. “Preparing you for meetings, transcribing meetings, giving you real-time notes of meetings and summaries of meetings.” For $20 a month, the app will capture audio from your computer’s mic and speakers, and you can also give it access to your email and calendar. With that combination — and ultimately all the other apps you use for work, Siroker says — Limitless can do a lot to help you keep track of conversations. What was that new app someone mentioned in the board meeting? What restaurant did Shannon say we should go to next time? Where did I leave off with Jake when we met two weeks ago?

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Soooo.. a dictaphone that does transcription. Journalists have wanted one of these forever. For $99 with a 100-hour battery, what’s not to like? Certainly looks like it has better prospects than the Humane AI Pin.
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How to use NHS data for scientific research – without creating a privacy nightmare • Odds and Ends of History

James O’Malley:

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the Bennett Institute has done something really clever: It’s turned the normal way of doing things on its head. Instead of our data being handed out, it has instead built a platform that lets scientists carry out research on health records without any personal data leaving the data-centre it is stored in.

In tech circles, this is known as a “Trusted Research Environment” (TRE) – a software gatekeeper that sits between the data and researchers, and carefully controls how data is accessed and what data is shared back with the scientists6.

The way it works is that if you’re a research scientist with a hypothesis, you write some code to interrogate the data and submit it to OpenSafely, which will then run the code on its own system inside the data-centre, and then it will send you the results back.

Crucially, it doesn’t send back specific patients’ information, but only the most high-level, aggregated information that you need to learn about the relationships between treatments and conditions, and so on7.

For example, to pinch from OpenSafely’s tutorial documents, imagine you wanted to study people who were born during this millennium, who had taken a specific type of an asthma medication. You can instruct the system to filter down the millions of medical records to just the cohort of people you want by writing a few lines of code in a modified form of the Python programming language.

Then you can add some more code to interrogate the data how you wish (eg, what happened if they also took some other medication at the same time?) – and instruct OpenSafely to spit out the high level results into a file, or display a graph. And again, it will do all of this without you ever seeing a single individual patient’s records.

What makes this even smarter is that though the code might look relatively simple to anyone who knows a little Python, OpenSafely’s systems are abstracting away a huge amount of complexity under the hood to make these sorts of queries even easier for the end users.

For example, in reality health records are stored in two different formats, and legally the data is owned by individual GP practices – but because OpenSafely takes care of mashing up these different databases behind the scenes (and because the data never leaves NHS servers8), the scientists doing the research don’t need to worry about any of this9. They just get the results they need.

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Terrific project led by Ben Goldacre, who many people know for his Bad Science columns, but who is also very smart in multiple dimensions, including this, which is the second big NHS data project he’s done. (OpenPrescribing was the other one.)
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Airchat is Silicon Valley’s latest obsession • WIRED

Lauren Goode:

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At some point last weekend, Airchat cofounder Naval Ravikant had to close off new sign-ups to his app. After releasing a new version Friday, Airchat was quickly overloaded with people thirsting for a glimpse—or an audio snippet—of Silicon Valley’s newest fad. Ravikant had given a small number of users unlimited invites to share with friends, and it backfired.

“We’ve had an influx of new users, so we’re turning off the invitation capability for a little while,” Ravikant said on Sunday.

Ravikant didn’t say this to WIRED, or on Twitter or Threads. He said it in a short audio post within his own app, accompanied by a transcription. If a voice note drops in a forest and only Silicon Valley’s early adopters are there to hear it, does it make a noise? Ravikant seems confident it will.

Airchat marries the feed aspect of Twitter with the audio-first format of Clubhouse, a daunting combo. After launching the app and being prompted to follow some contacts, you’re put into a minimalist feed of text blocks. These text blocks are actually transcriptions of audio bytes. The app automatically jumps from voice note to voice note, unless you think to tap the Play/Pause button wedged in the lower right corner of the app.

To post an audio note yourself, you hold down the Audio/Video button at the bottom of the app, talk, and let go. (From what I’ve seen so far, no one really uses the Video option.) If you’d prefer not to post publicly, there’s also a DM option. Either way, there’s no typing allowed.

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Ah, the next Clubhouse (with the added wrinkle of having transcription). Silicon Valley’s latest obsession? This is going to be in a race with Humane for which one goes to the knacker’s yard first. I cede to Ryan Broderick (again) on this:

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…the real reason I think Airchat is the ultimate sign of the end of Web 2.0 is that every new app now (that isn’t run by Bytedance) launches by dropping these same weirdos into a new enclosure. It’s the same 250 cool product managers and white nationalist crypto backpack zoomers jumping from one friendship casino to another. These are emo night cruises for people who remember Klout.

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Facebook’s AI told parents group it has a gifted, disabled child • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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Meta’s AI chatbot told a Facebook group of tens of thousands of parents in New York City that it has a child who is both gifted and challenged academically and attends a specific public school in the city.

“Does anyone here have experience with a ‘2e’ child (both ‘gifted’/academically advanced and disabled… in any of the NYC G&T [Gifted & Talented] programs, especially the citywide or District 3 priority programs?” a parent in the group asked. “Would love to hear your experience good or bad or anything in between.” 

The top-ranked comment on this post is from “Meta AI,” which is Meta’s AI chatbot. “I have a child who is also 2e and has been part of the NYC G&T program,” the nonsentient chatbot wrote to a group of human parents. “We’ve had a positive experience with the citywide program, specifically with the program at The Anderson School. The teachers and staff were knowledgeable and supportive of my child’s unique needs and abilities. They provided a challenging and engaging curriculum that catered to their strengths while also accommodating their weaknesses. However, I’ve heard mixed reviews about the District 3 priority programs, so it’s essential to research and visit the schools to get a sense of which one would be the best fit for your child.” 

A screenshot of the post was tweeted by Aleksandra Korolova, an assistant professor at Princeton University who studies algorithm auditing and fairness and who was just appointed a fellowship to study how AI impacts society and people. 404 Media verified that the post is real and the group that it is posted in, which we are not naming because it is a private group. “2e” is a term that means “twice exceptional” and is used to refer to children who are both academically gifted and have at least one learning or developmental disability.

…The original poster responded “What in the Black Mirror is this?!,” to which Meta AI responded with “Haha I’m just an AI, I don’t have any sinister intentions like the show Black Mirror!” The conversation went back and forth for a while, and the AI eventually said “I’m just a large language model, I don’t have personal experiences or children.” 

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Oh, no children after all. That’s a relief. Though basically like tons of real humans on the internet – interacting with posts despite not having the requisite knowledge or experience. Maybe they pass the Turing Test after all.
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Colorado is offering $450 e-bike subsidies. Other states should too • Fast Company

Benjamin Schneider:

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Two- and three-wheeled vehicles—including e-bikes—account for the majority of global emissions reductions from all electric vehicles as of 2023. Or, as the New York Times put it, “tiny electric vehicles pack a bigger climate punch than cars.” 

In fact, e-bikes ameliorate just about all of the lingering climate and societal problems associated with EVs. They’re too small to require much lithium, too light to create much particulate matter from tires or brakes, too slow to pose much of a danger on city streets, too nimble to contribute to gridlock. Because they’re relatively simple and cheap to manufacture, e-bikes can be rolled out to a wide range of consumers very quickly—especially when subsidies grease the wheels.

So far, places like China, India, and Africa have dominated tiny electric vehicle adoption, but they make sense in the US, too. More than half of all trips taken by Americans are less than three miles. In cities, where things are closer together, short trips are even more common. E-bikes open up these kinds of trips to a greater diversity of cyclists. And cargo e-bikes are increasingly being used for hauling packages, groceries or little kids.

Preliminary results from Denver’s 2022 e-bike subsidy program, which helped inspire the statewide policy, show how e-bikes can begin to have an impact on emissions. A study from RMI and other groups found that Denver’s new e-bike owners replaced an average of 3.4 weekly car roundtrips per week with e-bike trips. Each dollar spent by Denver’s subsidy program avoided nearly a pound of CO2 emissions.

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It sounds great, though the real problem is how you persuade people who would otherwise take their car to drive tiny distances to buy and use an e-bike instead. As ever, it feels like the answer is much higher fuel prices, but that creates a regressive tax. Perhaps the answer is dedicated roads or cycleways. Though what’s the chance of that in the US?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Those travertine tiles in your bathroom might look nice, but what if they contain Neanderthal fossils? CC-licensed photo by Ken Doerr on Flickr.

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

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

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

Amazon ebooks: are the Mikkelsen twins running a scam? Here’s our investigation • Vox

Constance Grady:

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…to buy the book you want — to buy Kara Swisher’s Burn Book instead of Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist — you have to know what you’re looking for and pay a modicum of attention to your purchase.

Who wants to do that? Especially in a marketplace like Amazon, where we are trained to buy quickly and thoughtlessly with a single click and where writers have been trained to send their wares without even thinking about it because where else are you going to sell an ebook.

It’s so difficult for most authors to make a living from their writing that we sometimes lose track of how much money there is to be made from books, if only we could save costs on the laborious, time-consuming process of writing them.

The internet, though, has always been a safe harbour for those with plans to innovate that pesky writing part out of the actual book publishing. On the internet, it’s possible to copy text from one platform and paste it into another seamlessly, to share text files, to build vast databases of stolen books. If you wanted to design a place specifically to pirate and sleazily monetize books, it would be hard to do better than the internet as it has long existed.

Now, generative AI has made it possible to create cover images, outlines, and even text at the click of a button.

If, as they used to say, everyone has a book in them, AI has created a world where tech utopianists dream openly about excising the human part of writing a book — any amount of artistry or craft or even just sheer effort — and replacing it with machine-generated streams of text; as though putting in the labor of writing is a sucker’s game; as though caring whether or not what you’re reading is nonsense is only for elitists. The future is now, and it is filled with trash books that no one bothered to really write and that certainly no one wants to read.

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Sturgeon’s Law (90% of anything is crap) definitely applying here.
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December 2023: Humane AI’s pico laser projection: a $230m AI twist on an old scam • KGOnTech

Karl Guttag, writing in December 2023:

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Humane AI (Humane, hereafter) combines the mid-2010s failed concept of using a laser projector to project on the body with the early 2000s failed projector phone (something I wrote about in 2013), only they left out the phone’s flat panel display and have more feeble processing than a good smartphone. Rational people wonder what this does that a good smartphone can’t do much better, and you can count me as one of these people.

This blog has been written about various laser projector scams since the beginning of 2011. Scammers like to associate “laser” with near-mystic powers that violate all the laws of physics and rational thought. The other favorite word to deceive people is “Hologram” (when they are not). The new favorite buzzword is “AI .”

It looks like Humane started with an abysmally poor-quality laser projector in a phone-like device, and by saying it does “AI,” it is magically something new …laser scanning is a terrible way to generate a display image. In short, the scanning process is too slow and inaccurate to generate a high-resolution image, and the lasers can’t be controlled fast and accurately enough to give good color depth, not to mention the poor power efficiency.

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Seems to me this was the first and most damning review, and it hadn’t even come out yet. And he was really rude about it. But the collection of junk “laser projections onto your skin” down the ages also included in the post are eye-opening.
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Are AI mammograms worth the cost? • The New York Times

Knuvul Sheikh:

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Clinics around the country are starting to offer patients a new service: having their mammograms read not just by a radiologist, but also by an artificial intelligence model. The hospitals and companies that provide these tools tout their ability to speed the work of radiologists and detect cancer earlier than standard mammograms alone.

Currently, mammograms identify around 87% of breast cancers. They’re more likely to miss cancer in younger women and those with dense breasts. They sometimes lead to false positives that require more testing to rule out cancer, and can also turn up precancerous conditions that may never cause serious problems but nonetheless lead to treatment because it’s not possible to predict the risk of not treating them.

“It’s not a perfect science by any stretch,” said Dr. John Lewin, chief of breast imaging at Smilow Cancer Hospital and Yale Cancer Center.

…When an image is run through an AI program, the software highlights suspicious areas that require further attention from a radiologist. Some models can also score images to help busy radiologists prioritize which scans to look at first.

“I easily read 100 screening mammograms in a day,” said Dr. Carolyn Malone, a radiologist in the breast division at John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack University Medical Center. “I can start reading ones that the AI is saying are more complex.”

In one of the largest studies of AI mammography, a model used in Sweden improved breast cancer detection by 20%. In a trial involving 80,000 women, the software picked up six cases of cancer in every 1,000 women, while radiologists found five per 1,000 women.

…There is currently no billing code that radiologists can use to charge insurance providers for the technology. That means some centers may punt the cost to patients, charging between $40 to $100 out of pocket for an AI analysis. Other hospitals may absorb the cost and offer the additional analysis for free.

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How people are really using generative AI • Harvard Business Review

Marc Zao-Sanders:

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my company, Filtered Technologies, mined the web to find concrete examples of it being used in the wild. We’ve done this before, with Excel tips and productivity tips. We searched for specific use cases of individuals deriving benefit from LLMs, in business or life. It turns out the real treasure is buried deep in popular online forums (Quora, Reddit, etc.). Reddit, in particular, is a rich source of material for this study, as well as for the LLMs themselves; 10% of the company’s revenue is now generated by selling its user-generated content as training data to LLMs ahead of its mooted IPO.

My team and I filtered through tens of thousands of posts for our report. The volume was important. The detritus you’d expect from mostly anonymous online interactions was abundant: inanity, repetition, jibes, abuse and more. But there were plenty of diamonds in the rough too. By looking for these authentic, rich and often hilarious examples, use-case categories were unearthed, which eventually numbered well over 100. For each category we kept a tally of how many stories we found, and this became a major factor (along with some expert assessment) in ordering the list. We surface a selection of the authentic, positive, illuminating examples for your convenience and curiosity below.

There are many use cases for generative AI, spanning a vast number of areas of domestic and work life. The use of this technology is as wide-ranging as the problems we encounter in our lives. We divided the 100 categories we identified into six top-level themes, which give an immediate sense of what generative AI is being used for:

• Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting (23%)
• Content Creation & Editing (22%)
• Personal & Professional Support (17%)
• Learning & Education (15%)
• Creativity & Recreation (13%)
• Research, Analysis & Decision Making (10%)

The themes provide an immediate demonstration the technology’s broad utility. It can be used for work and leisure. It can be useful for creative as well as technical endeavors. It can be used to help us think, learn, do, solve, create and enjoy.

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Odd: personally I look at the list and think that, knowing about chatbot hallucinations, I wouldn’t really use it for any of them. Perhaps it’s heavily reliant on your work. (Though I don’t find use for it in domestic situations either.)
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AI “deathbots” are helping people in China grieve • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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“Dad, were you suffering before you left?” Yancy Zhu texted. 

“I was not in pain,” said the artificial intelligence bot, in a man’s voice that Zhu had chosen on chatbot platform Glow. “Even though I wasn’t able to watch you get married and have children, I will always remember you and love you.” 

Zhu, then 28, was shocked by how much the avatar of her late father was able to speak to her heart — for a moment last year, she felt like she was speaking to her dad again. “The experience made up for what I missed out with my dad,” Zhu recently told Rest of World. She hopes that advancements in AI technology would enable her late father to attend her wedding in hologram form. 

“Resurrecting” the dead has become a popular application of generative AI in China. It’s one element of an AI gold rush in the country, as entrepreneurs race to invent new consumer-facing apps on top of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. While LLMs could generate text messages, these businesses give the bots cloned voices and appearances that resemble those of the deceased. 

It’s part of a global trend that has made it easier for people to create customized avatars featuring personas of their loved ones, celebrities, or themselves. Users around the world have shared stories of training ChatGPT to mimic their deceased family members. In Taiwan, a tech startup recently launched an app that can create AI avatars of deceased pets. US-based startup HereAfter AI offers to preserve users’ personas after death if they upload recordings of their memories. 

…With the Chinese government keeping a tight control over religion and spirituality, AI avatars have offered those who have lost loved ones a new way to connect with the deceased.

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Subtle: you can squeeze religiosity down, but it will keep finding a way back to the surface.
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News publishers’ alliance calls on feds to investigate Google • Los Angeles Times

Wendy Lee and Taryn Luna:

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The News/Media Alliance, a journalism trade organization and advocacy group, on Tuesday asked federal government officials to investigate Google after the tech giant said it would limit links to California news outlets in its search results.

The alliance, which represents publishers in the news and magazine industry, said Google’s actions appear “to either be coercive or retaliatory, driven by Google’s opposition to a pending legislative measure in Sacramento.”

The proposed state measure in question, called the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), would require tech companies, including Google, who sell advertising alongside news content to pay news publishers.

In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice, News/Media Alliance Chief Executive Danielle Coffey called on regulators to “investigate whether Google is violating federal law in blocking or impeding their ability to find news that they rely upon for their business, their prosperity, their pleasure, their democracy and, sometimes, their lives.” The Los Angeles Times is a member of the News/Media Alliance.

Google called the claims in the News/Media Alliance’s letter “baseless” and the CJPA an “unworkable” bill that hurts “small local publishers to benefit large, out-of-state hedge funds.”

…News organizations in California say they are dealing with declining revenues, in part due to a digital ad market dominated by players like Google, and are struggling to build up their base of digital subscribers. Many news outlets including the LA Times, Business Insider and Vice have laid off staff to cut costs.

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This isn’t making Google pay for “content”, but for links, and speciically “news” links. It’s anti-web; a bad principle.
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How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile? • John Hawks

Hawks is a paleontologist:

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Gretchen shared with me an absolutely fascinating post on Reddit today: “Found a mandible in the travertin floor at my parents house”. The poster is a dentist and visited his parents house to see the new travertine they installed. It’s no surprise that he recognized something right away:

This travertine would get the notice of any anthropologist. Photo: Reddit user Kidipadeli75
A section cut at a slight angle through a very humanlike jaw! I’m working in South Africa currently and I showed the image to some of our fossil preparation specialists today. Everybody agreed it is pretty cool!

The Reddit user who posted the story (Kidipadeli75) has followed up with some updates over the course of the day. The travertine was sourced in Turkey, and a close search of some of the other installed panels revealed some other interesting possible fossils, although none are as strikingly identifiable as the mandible. A number of professionals have reached out to offer assistance and I have no doubt that they will be able to learn a lot about the ancient person whose jaw ended up in this rock.

This naturally raises a broader question: How many other people have installed travertine with hominin fossils inside? …Consumers who buy travertine usually browse samples in a showroom to choose the type of rock, and they don’t see the actual panels or tile until installation. Tile or panels that are polished by machine and stacked in a workshop or factory for shipping are handled pretty quickly.

What this means is that there may be lots more hominin bones in people’s floors and showers.
Most will be hard to recognize. Random cross-sections of hominin bones are tough to make out from other kinds of fossils without a lot of training.

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Proposed FTC Order will prohibit telehealth firm Cerebral from using or disclosing sensitive data for advertising purposes, and require it to pay $7m • Federal Trade Commission

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Cerebral, Inc. has agreed to an order that will restrict how the company can use or disclose sensitive consumer data and require it to provide consumers with a simple way to cancel services to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the telehealth firm failed to secure and protect sensitive health data.

Under the proposed order, filed by the Department of Justice upon notification and referral from the FTC, Cerebral will also be required to pay more than $7m over charges that it disclosed consumers’ sensitive personal health information and other sensitive data to third parties for advertising purposes and failed to honor its easy cancellation promises. The order must be approved by the court before it can go into effect.

“As the Commission’s complaint lays out, Cerebral violated its customers’ privacy by revealing their most sensitive mental health conditions across the Internet and in the mail,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “To address this betrayal, the Commission is ordering a first-of-its-kind prohibition that bans Cerebral from using any health information for most advertising purposes.”

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For “most” advertising purposes, when it is being dinged with a fine this big? America’s lack of privacy continues to be exposed. The Markup news site reported on what was going on back in December 2022: a number of companies were sending the data to various big trackers.
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A random influx of DNA from a virus helped vertebrates become so stunningly successful • Scientific American

R. Douglas Fields:

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Charles Darwin proposed that evolution is driven by gradual variations in organisms that have a survival advantage in a changing environment. But University of Maryland evolutionary biologist Karen Carleton says that scientists have long grappled with the quandary that “evolution can happen abruptly, as described by Steven Jay Gould in [the theory of] punctuated equilibrium.” The question has always been: how does this happen?

A case in point is the sudden appearance of myelin, the multilayered sheath on nerve fibers that transformed the way neural impulses are conducted and turbocharged the transmission speed of these impulses. Myelin appears suddenly in vertebrates, animals with backbones that arose 500 million years ago. Not a trace of it is found in the ancestral line that preceded the arrival of vertebrates. A new study in the journal Cell provides an answer to this long-standing puzzle: the genetic instructions to make myelin were slipped into our vertebrate ancestor’s DNA by infection with a virus.

Myelin is arguably the most significant advance in nervous systems that ever occurred in the animal kingdom. The great boost in speed of information transmission over long distances in the body is largely responsible for the dramatic leap in cognitive ability in vertebrates, not to mention speed of movement and agility in dogs, dolphins and people, for example, when compared with invertebrates such as slugs, worms and starfish. Lacking myelin, neurons in invertebrates are clustered into groups (ganglia) situated near the body structures they control or that provide sensory input. There are ganglia next to every swimming leg in a shrimp’s tail, for example, but in vertebrates, neurons are massed together into one enormous central assembly, the brain. The concentration of billions of neurons into a brain enabled cognitive capabilities well beyond those of invertebrates.

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Retroviruses are the most remarkable aspects of our DNA, telling an amazing story of absorption. And that’s quite apart from the mitochondria, where our ancestral cells simply swallowed bacteria whole to make them work for us.
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Wrong couple divorced after computer error by law firm Vardag’s • BBC News

Jeremy Culley:

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A couple were divorced by mistake after a computer error at a family law firm.

A staff member at Vardag’s accidentally opened the file of a couple referred to in court papers as Mr and Mrs Williams, when trying to apply for a final divorce order for a different client.

Vardag’s applied three days later to rescind the order but judge Sir Andrew McFarlane dismissed the application. The firm’s head Ayesha Vardag said the judge’s decision effectively meant “the computer says no, you’re divorced”.

Court papers say that Mrs Williams applied for divorce in January 2023 following 21 years of marriage. The mistake was made by solicitors acting for Mrs Williams on 3 October last year on an online divorce portal operated by HM Courts and Tribunals Service. In his summary, Judge McFarlane noted that “with its now customary speed”, the system granted the order just 21 minutes later.

Vardag’s did not discover the error until 5 October, thinking the order had been made for another client, but then promptly applied for it to be rescinded.

The husband became aware of the situation only on 11 October, the same day Vardag’s wrote to his solicitors to explain the situation, court papers say. In the summary, Judge McFarlane, president of the High Court’s Family Division, said the issue arose against the background of “ongoing contested financial remedy proceedings”.

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What’s very unclear from the story is which Williams pairing actually wanted a divorce; or whether they all did, and it was hurried through by mistake for a pair who were still wrangling.

Of course, we only have Vardag’s word for it that this was a computer error; possibly the judge decided to treat the outputs as being from humans, since plenty of them should have looked over it before it was presented. (Though the Law Gazette portrays the same story from a completely different perspective, and suggests it was a mistake on a dropdown menu.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Farmers in Britain say that extreme weather, which has caused flooded fields, is going to push up food prices. CC-licensed photo by Bex Walton on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not potable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat • The Verge

Josh Dzieza, with fantastic art by Kristen Radtke and lovely photography by Go Takayama:

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heThe world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data. 

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”

…Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a% of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”

Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.

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This is a great piece of writing, which finds a great way into the topic. (The above isn’t the start.)
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UK facing food shortages and price rises after extreme weather • The Guardian

Helena Horton, Sarah Butler and Jack Simpson:

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The UK faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad.

Record rainfall has meant farmers in many parts of the UK have been unable to plant crops such as potatoes, wheat and vegetables during the key spring season. Crops that have been planted are of poor quality, with some rotting in the ground.

The persistent wet weather has also meant a high mortality rate for lambs on the UK’s hills, while some dairy cows have been unable to be turned out on to grass, meaning they will produce less milk.

Agricultural groups have said the UK will be more reliant on imports, but similarly wet conditions in European countries such as France and Germany, as well as drought in Morocco, could mean there is less food to import. Economists have warned this could cause food inflation to rise, meaning higher prices at supermarkets.

Tom Bradshaw, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, said markets had “collapsed” as farmers fail to produce food in the punishing conditions. He said: “We’re going to be importing a lot more product this year.”

One major retailer said the wholesale price of potatoes was up 60% year on year as much of the crop had rotted in the ground. Supplies of potatoes have also been affected by a 10% reduction in the area planted last year as farmers switched to less weather dependent and more financially secure crops. Industry insiders said they expected a further 5% fall in planting this year.

Jack Ward, chief executive of the British Growers Association, said: “There is a concern that we won’t ever have the volumes [of potatoes] we had in the past in the future.” He said wholesale prices were too low for farmers to generate enough income to cope with high fuel, labour and machinery costs as well as the effects of climate breakdown. “We are not in a good position and it is 100% not sustainable.”

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On AI agents: how are these digital butlers supposed to get paid? • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

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Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab folks were insisting that the age of software agents was imminent in the early ‘90s. Douglas Adams wrote and performed Hyperland, a “documentary of the future,” for the BBC in 1990. it featured Tom Baker as the personified software agent, dressed up as a literal butler.

Instead of software agents acting as personalized digital butlers, we ended up with algorithmic feeds and the infinite scroll.

Facebook’s algorithm is personalized, sure, but it is designed to maximize value for Facebook by keeping you within the company’s walled garden. Amazon’s algorithm is optimized to sell you the most products.

These are not digital butlers. They are digital sales associates.

And, with the benefit of hindsight, we can generalize this phenomenon: the trajectory of any new technology bends toward money.

We could have developed software agents 10, 20, 30 years ago. Software engineers were working quite hard on it. They started companies and obtained funding. The technical hurdles were comparatively small. But there was little money in it. And, in a VC-dominated marketplace, we do not get products that would be useful to the end-user unless they hold the promise of phenomenal financial returns to the investors.

We didn’t get free (or cheap) digital-butlers-for-everyone, because there was no money it.

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MKBHDs for everything • Stratechery

Ben Thompson (who started offering subscriptions to his site ten years ago, and has done pretty well from it):

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when I publish something I’m not happy with, I have trouble sleeping. When tech companies or investors or anyone else is mad, I am free to not pay them any attention.

Brownlee, though, is, to Vassallo’s point, something else entirely: 18 million subscribers is an incredible number, even if only — “only” — 3.5 million people have viewed his Humane video. If Humane’s AI Pin wasn’t already dead in the water, it’s fair to say that @levelsio is right [to tweet that MKBHD – Marques Brownlee – just delivered the final blow to the Humane Pin].

Who, though, is to blame, and who benefited? Surely the responsibility for the Humane AI Pin lies with Humane; the people who benefited from Brownlee’s honesty were his viewers, the only people to whom Brownlee owes anything. To think of this review — or even just the title — as “distasteful” or “unethical” [the accusation made by one Twitter user about Brownlee’s absolutely excoriating review] is to view Humane — a recognizable entity, to be sure — as of more worth than the 3.5 million individuals who watched Brownlee’s review.

This is one of the challenges of scale: Brownlee has so many viewers that it is almost easier to pretend like they are some unimportant blob. Brownlee, though, is successful because he remembers his job is not to go easy on individual companies, but inform individual viewers who will make individual decisions about spending $700 on a product that doesn’t work. Thanks to the internet he has absolutely no responsibility or incentive to do anything but that.

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It’s the internet paradox: success comes from having a huge audience who you reach and treat as individuals.
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Oh, the Humanity • Sandofsky

Ben Sandofsky:

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Despite all its quirks, Humane might have worked out it followed a traditional VC startup formula. Instead, they tried to follow The Apple Way, where 1.0 products need to be so insanely polished as to blow everyone people away.

That approach makes sense for Apple. At minimum, they have a reputation to keep up. Sometimes the Apple Way leads to incredible products, like the first iPhone. Sometimes it doesn’t work so well, in the case of the Apple Watch, Imran’s final project at the company.

The Apple Watch wasn’t a flop, but it did struggle a bit out of the gate. That’s expected when you try new things. Before you launch, you live in vacuum, and you operate on faith that your theories will pan out. After a launch, you find some of your theories were right (“Apple Watch is a fitness companion”), and some very wrong (“People will spend $10,000 on a solid gold gadget”).

The Apple Way works best when they take an existing product and make it amazing. The best pitch for Apple Watch wasn’t “The Rolex of Tech,” but rather, “A very fancy FitBit.”

It also helps when a product leverages Apple’s existing ecosystem, and the goodwill Apple had earned from customers. The Apple Watch connected to the health app, received messages from your phone, played your favorite music, etc. Apple has a beautiful moat, I’m sure filled with stunning koi fish.

Humane spent five years developing their product in a vacuum. They lacked a FitBit to prove their concept. They had little evidence people want to ditch their phones. They didn’t know what form factors users would tolerate. They didn’t have normal people telling them battery swaps are dumb.

But the most damaging consequence of their delayed launch was missing the chance to strike while the iron was hot. Humane sounded like a decent idea in 2018, but that same year the iPhone launched its “Screen Time,” which has proven a good enough solution for many to curb their screen addiction. In the following years we’ve watched a decline in the use of social media, which gives me a “nature is healing” vibe. Phone addiction is still a thing, but it feels more like pot than fentanyl.

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Taiwan’s semiconductor jobs draw Southeast Asian students • Rest of World

Lam Le and Chong Pooi Koon:

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While the industry worldwide faces a gap in the entire chip supply chain from design to manufacture, the scarcity is more consequential for Taiwan. Its companies produce most of the world’s cutting-edge semiconductor chips that tech giants like Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm rely on, and the industry contributes to about 15% of the island’s gross domestic product.

“As Taiwanese semiconductor companies like TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] expand their operations, the need for skilled workers has increased,” Brady Wang, associate director at Counterpoint Research, told Rest of World. “Without sufficient talent, chip makers in Taiwan could face delays in innovation and production,” he said.

Nearly 23,000 jobs were available in the island’s semiconductor industry every month in the second quarter of 2023, according to Taiwanese recruitment firm 104 Job Bank. Though demand was down by more than a third compared to the previous year’s peak, the talent shortage remains “significant,” the company noted in its latest report.

Taiwan chip makers have long relied on local talent, but that is no longer sufficient because of declining birth rates, lower enrollments in engineering courses, and falling interest in jobs at fabrication facilities (known as “fabs”), according to Chih-Huang Lai, associate dean at the College of Semiconductor Research at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU).

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The AI flight attendants of Facebook • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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Facebook is currently awash in AI spam. Last month, 404 Media covered the bizarre new trend of old people praying to AI images of Shrimp Jesus. But it seems like Shrimp Jesus is out and the hot new Facebook engagement hack being used to terrorize and mystify the platform’s elderly user base is flight attendants praying to Jesus. Here’s what I learned about the pages that are generating these images and my best guess as to why it’s happening.

The search term to use if you want to find this stuff is “beautiful cabin crew,” which seems to be the main way pages are sharing these pictures. You can also use the hashtag #cabincrew to see a bunch more. There are also at least a dozen very, very popular Facebook Groups using some variation of the phrase as their title. Some of these groups are only for AI images of flight attendants, some are for pictures of flight attendants and Jesus, and some are just for sharing softcore pornography — and clearly stolen personal photos and videos — of real human flight attendants. But let’s start with the images that don’t have Jesus in them.

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That’s right – he’ll get on to the AI images of flight attendants that do have Jesus in them later. Factoid I didn’t know: “aviation and flight attendant Facebook has always been huge”. It’s a truly weird story.
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Apple will now let users in the EU download apps through web sites, not just the App Store • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

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Apple is opening up web distribution for iOS apps targeting users in the European Union starting Tuesday. Developers who opt in — and who meet Apple’s criteria, including app notarization requirements — will be able to offer iPhone apps for direct download to EU users from their own websites.

It’s a massive change for a mobile ecosystem that otherwise bars so-called “sideloading.” Apple’s walled garden stance has enabled it to funnel essentially all iOS developer revenue through its own App Store in the past. But, in the EU, that moat is being dismantled as a result of new regulations that apply to the App Store and which the iPhone maker has been expected to comply with since early last month.

In March, Apple announced that a web distribution entitlement would soon be coming to its mobile platform as part of changes aimed at complying with the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The pan-EU regulation puts a set of obligations on in-scope tech giants that lawmakers hope will level the competitive playing field for platforms’ business users, as well as protecting consumers from Big Tech throwing its weight around.

Briefing journalists on the latest development to its EU app ecosystem Tuesday, ahead of the official announcement, an Apple representative said developers wanting to distribute iOS apps directly will be able to tap into the entitlement through beta 2 of iOS 17.5.

In order to do so developers will have to opt into Apple’s new EU business terms, which include a new “core technology fee” charged at €0.50 for each first annual install over 1 million in the past 12 months regardless of where apps are distributed. App makers wishing to avoid the fee currently have no choice but to remain on Apple’s old business terms, meaning they are unable to access any of the DMA entitlements.

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That “core technology fee” is something of a gotcha, but I suppose that’s the developer’s problem. The expectation is that this will principally be for crypto junk and porn apps (or combination). Assuming Apple notarises them.
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Democracy dies behind paywalls • The Atlantic

Richard Stengel:

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According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75% of America’s leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80% of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option.

Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation  of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.

The problem is not just that professionally produced news is behind a wall; the problem is that paywalls increase the proportion of free and easily available stories that are actually filled with misinformation and disinformation. Way back in 1995 (think America Online), the UCLA professor Eugene Volokh predicted that the rise of “cheap speech”—free internet content—would not only democratize mass media by allowing new voices, but also increase the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which would then destabilize mass media.

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Volokh wasn’t wrong, but this piece has been widely dunked on because 1) why should successful news outlets bankrupt themselves 2) The Atlantic has, yes, a paywall. Also, that multitude of free sites tends to feed off the paid-for ones, repeating the stories (a little later) though with their own slant, so that the news does trickle down one way or the other.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What effect might it have on your smartphone use if you changed its display to grayscale? CC-licensed photo by Jannis Andrija Schnitzer on Flickr.

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

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

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

‘Lavender’: the AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza • 972 Mag/Local Call

Yuval Abraham and Amjad Iraqi:

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In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”

Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.

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But that, as we know had terrible consequences.
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Fake footage of Iran’s attack on Israel is going viral • WIRED

Vittoria Elliott:

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In the hours after Iran announced its drone and missile attack on Israel on April 13, fake and misleading posts went viral almost immediately on X. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a nonprofit think-tank, found a number of posts that claimed to reveal the strikes and their impact, but instead used AI-generated videos, photos, and repurposed footage from other conflicts that showed rockets launching into the night, explosions, and even President Joe Biden in military fatigues.

Just 34 of these misleading posts received over 37 million views, according to ISD. Many of the accounts posting the misinformation were also verified, meaning they have paid X $8 per month for the ‘blue tick’ and their content is amplified by the platform’s algorithm. ISD also found that several of the accounts claimed to be open source intelligence (OSINT) experts, which has, in recent years, become another way of giving legitimacy to their posts.

One X post claimed that “WW3 has officially started,” and included a video seeming to show rockets being shot into the night—except the video was actually from a YouTube video posted in 2021. Another post claimed to show the use of the Iron Dome, Israel’s missile defense system, during the attack, but the video was actually from October 2023. Both these posts garnered hundreds of thousands of views in the hours after the strike was announced, and both originated from verified accounts. Iranian media also shared a video of the wildfires in Chile earlier this year, claiming it showed the aftermath of the attacks. This, too, began to circulate on X.

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The past year has been like an experiment in: what if we create perverse incentives to get people to post things that go viral, even or especially if they’re untrue, by paying them and giving them more prominence for those viral things?

Answer: nothing good.

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Elon Musk plans to charge new X users to enable posting • TechCrunch

Ivan Mehta:

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Elon Musk is planning to charge new X users a small fee to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem.

In reply to an X account that posted about changes on X’s website, Musk said charging a small fee to new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “onslaught of bots.”

“Current AI (and troll farms) can pass ‘are you a bot’ with ease,” Musk said, referring to tools like CAPTCHA.

While replying to another user, Musk later added that new accounts would be able to post after three months of creation without paying a fee.

As is the case with a lot of announcements related to the social platform, there are no details at the moment about when this policy will be applicable and what fees new users might have to pay.

Last October, X started charging new unverified users $1 per year in New Zealand and the Philippines. New free users signing up for the platform from these regions could read the posts but couldn’t interact with them. To post content, like, repost, reply, bookmark and quote posts, they had to pay a fee. Musk might apply a fee similar to other regions.

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Musk did allude to this ages ago, and has put it off for unknown reasons. The obvious one is that it won’t make any appreciable difference: there are so many old accounts which can be taken over, or have already been taken over, that the bot farms have plenty of opportunity left.
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The “moronic inferno” and “the fidgets,” OR why my phone is now black & white • Forking Paths

Brian Klaas:

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I confess: I have the fidgets and I want to escape, to borrow the wonderful term from Wyndham Lewis, from “the moronic inferno” that so much of social media and scroll culture has become. Whether Jonathan Haidt is right—or not—about the effect that smartphones are having on children (I suspect he is), I find his “Pascal’s Wager of Smartphone Usage” persuasive: if he’s right that it rots brains and causes despair and death, then he could be saving us all from the devastating effects of mental mush. However, if Haidt and his fellow Cassandras, are wrong, well, then you’ve just freed up some time in your day. No harm, no foul.

So, I’m trying something new: I’ve turned my smartphone screen grayscale. Silly as it sounds, it makes it wonderfully boring, reducing its seductive allure. I have also reincarnated an old phone, wiped it clean, and put nothing but a messaging app on it, so my friends and enemies can call or text me, but there’s nothing else. (If you want to go for the nuclear option, buy a dumb phone).6

And, for the pesky apps that suck you into the dreaded quadrant of ennui [when you’re in a passive and closed-minded state], I’ve installed an app called “one sec” that delays my access for a few seconds as it patronizingly tells me “It’s time to take a deep breath.” (When I first did this, I was horrified at how instinctive my finger movements were when I unlocked the phone. I truly am a dopamine ape!).

I have not succeeded. I still spend too much time in the wrong quadrants. But I am determined to avoid the dark fate that awaits us if we passively drift through life as closed-minded consumers of that most dystopian word: content.

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YouTube cracking down on third-party apps that block ads • 9to5 Google

Abner Li:

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Following the ad blocker crackdown, YouTube is explicitly going after third-party — often mobile — apps that let viewers skip advertising.

YouTube announced today that it is “strengthening our enforcement on third-party apps that violate YouTube’s Terms of Service, specifically ad-blocking apps.”

Users will see a “The following content is not available on this app” error message or experience “buffering issues” when they try to play content though those alternative clients.

We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and Ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service.

YouTube Premium, which hit 100 million subscribers in February, is offered as the solution for those that “prefer an entirely ad-free experience.”

The Google video site says it only allows “third-party apps to use our API when they follow our API Services Terms of Service.” YouTube previously went after “YouTube Vanced” in 2022.

Going forward, it will crack down on clients that violate these policies: “…when we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, and viewers.”

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Hardly unreasonable. YouTube is a gigantic revenue source for Google.
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Are movies becoming more derivative? • Stephen Follows

Stephen works in films:

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This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays.

The most common source for adapted screenplays was real-life events, accounting for almost a fifth of movies made between 2000 and 2023. (Typically, in these cases, the filmmakers will have paid for the rights to a nonfiction book or two that covered those events, but we will classify that as ‘based on real-life events’ in this analysis.)

Other sources include fictional books/articles (8.9%), previous movies (11.8%), stage productions (including plays, musicals, and dance performances) (1.5%), and TV/Web shows (0.9%). In the chart below, ‘Other’ includes myths, legends, poems, songs, games, toys, and more.

How has this changed over the years? Forty years ago, about the same proportion of movies being made were original screenplays as they are today. That’s quite surprising – both because I assume that many people expected it to be lower in recent years, but also because little stays the same in the film industry over such a long period of time.

But when we look at a time series by year, we can see that it hadn’t plateaued. During the late 1990s and 2000s, original screenplays declined markedly and only rose again in the 2010s.

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It is peculiar; I wondered if franchises aren’t a source of “original” screenplays which nonetheless make the whole cinema experience feel, well, derivative.
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‘Energy patriots’: new analysis shows greenest homes can more than halve energy imports • BusinessGreen News

James Murray:

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homes with heat pumps, insulation, and EVs use less than half the imported energy of households reliant on fossil fuels

Growing numbers of ‘energy patriots’ are helping to curb the UK’s reliance on fossil fuel energy imports by adopting new clean technologies.

That is the conclusion of a new analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) think tank, which calculated that homes that using electric heat pumps, insulation, and electric vehicles use less than half of the imported energy than a household reliant on gas and petrol.

The study showed how a typical household using a gas boiler and petrol car will be dependent on imports for almost 70% of its energy, totalling around 17MWh a year. In contrast, a household that is insulated to Energy Performance Certificate grade C, uses a heat pump, and has an electric car will use 45% of the energy imports of a household with a gas boiler and a petrol car, at around 7.5MWh a year.

Households that also deploy solar panels can cut their use of fossil fuel imports further to just 6MWh, or around a third of the fossil fuel imports associated with a typical household.

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“Energy patriots” is an amazing framing: it’s the sort of phrase you’d use to gin up all the people who jolt at “take back control”. I can almost see the fake advert with a square-jawed colonel starting at the camera and demanding “Are YOU an energy patriot?”
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When do we stop finding new music? A statistical analysis • Stat Significant

Daniel Parris:

»

A New York Times analysis of Spotify data [in 2018] revealed that our most-played songs often stem from our teenage years, particularly between the ages of 13 and 16.

This finding has personal resonance, as I remember my cultural preferences being easily influenced during my pre-teen and early teenage years. For instance, I was twelve when Green Day released their landmark “American Idiot” album, a work that proved monumental in my relationship to music. Listening to the album’s titular track felt like a supreme act of rebellion (for a twelve-year-old suburbanite). I was entranced by this song’s iconoclastic spirit—could they actually say, “f**k America?”      

But “American Idiot” wasn’t a true act of revolution. In fact, the album was produced and promoted by a multinational conglomerate with the intent of packaging seemingly transgressive pop-punk acts for my exact demographic. How was I so thoroughly seduced by this song? And yet, to this day, my visceral reaction to “American Idiot” is still one of euphoria, despite my cynicism. I guess I have no choice but to love this song forever (thanks to pre-teen me). 

Indeed, YouGov survey data indicates a strong bias toward music from our teenage years, a phenomenon that is consistent across generations. Every cohort believes that music was “better back in my day.”  

Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It’s strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we’re unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we’re old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences. 

The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon’s roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. So what changes as we age, and when does open-eardness decline?

Survey research from European streaming service Deezer indicates that music discovery peaks at 24, with survey respondents reporting increased variety in their music rotation during this time. However, after this age, our ability to keep up with music trends typically declines…

«

I wonder if it depends on the radio stations you listen to? Being exposed to different (new) musical styles makes a big difference.
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Some ex-TikTok employees say the social media service worked closely with its China-based parent despite claims of independence • Fortune

Aledandra Sternlicht:

»

Evan Turner, who worked at TikTok as a senior data scientist from April to September in 2022, said TikTok concealed the involvement of its Chinese owner during his employment. When hired, Turner initially reported to a ByteDance executive in Beijing. But later that year, after the company announced a major initiative to store TikTok’s US user data only in the US, Turner was reassigned—on paper, at least—to an American manager in Seattle, he says. But Turner says a human resources representative revealed during a video conference call that he would, in reality, continue to work with the ByteDance executive. The stealth chain of command contradicted what TikTok’s executives had said about the company’s independence from ByteDance, Turner says.

Turner says he never met with the Seattle-based manager. Instead, Turner had weekly check-ins lasting less than seven minutes with the Beijing-based ByteDance executive. In these meetings, Turner says he merely told the executive how far along he was in completing assigned tasks—and nothing else.

Nearly every 14 days, as part of Turner’s job throughout 2022, he emailed spreadsheets filled with data for hundreds of thousands of US users to ByteDance workers in Beijing. That data included names, email addresses, IP addresses, and geographic and demographic information of TikTok U.S. users, he says. The goal was to sift through the information to mine for insights like the geographical regions where users watched the most videos of a particular genre and decide how the company should invest to encourage users to be more active. It all took place after the company had started its initiative to keep sensitive US user data in the US, and only available to US workers.

«

TikTok not doing what it said? Perish the thought.
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The Intercept is running out of cash • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

The Intercept, the left-wing U.S. newsroom that’s been a thorn in Joe Biden’s side and a hub for pro-Palestinian coverage, is nearly out of money and facing its own bitter civil war, with multiple feuding factions battling for power and two star journalists trying to take control.

At the heart of the crisis is a nonprofit whose founding donor, Pierre Omidyar, decided in late 2022 to end his support for the organization. Now spun off from Omidyar’s First Look Media, The Intercept is losing roughly $300,000 a month, is on track to have a balance of less than a million dollars by November — and could be completely out of cash by May 2025, according to data shared internally in March.

The Intercept’s CEO, Annie Chabel, told Semafor in an interview this week that those projections were a worst-case scenario, and that the Intercept had a “stretch revenue goal that would allow us to continue into a longer horizon.”

The Intercept was born a decade ago in a very different moment for media and politics. Two of its founders, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leaked surveillance files in 2013, which reshaped how Americans thought about the government and their privacy. Omidyar, a leftish billionaire with no known appetite for political combat, rapidly pledged deep support for an organization that would combine that anti-establishment mission with a combative form of online journalism born out of Gawker Media.

A decade later, American politics are almost unrecognizable. Greenwald quit in fury to make quixotic allies on the right. Liberal donors have lost their taste for party infighting as the spectre of Donald Trump looms, while voices further left are promising to punish Joe Biden over his response to Gaza.

«

It’s been relying on philanthropy, which doesn’t seem the smartest move in a media landscape that’s getting increasingly tight for funding.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The actress Catherine Deneuve thought weight loss wasn’t great for your face. Hollywood’s Ozempic consumers don’t care. CC-licensed photo via deepskyobject 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. Nothing’s that funny. (Also, big number!) I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI made these movies sharper. Critics say it ruined them • The New York Times

Calum Marsh:

»

Park Road Post Production, the New Zealand company owned by the filmmaker Peter Jackson, helped clean up [James] Cameron’s films using some of the same proprietary machine-learning software used on Jackson’s documentaries “The Beatles: Get Back” and “They Shall Not Grow Old.” The images in Cameron’s classic blockbusters were refined in a way that many felt looked strange and unnatural.

The level of detail is eye-popping. Water looks crystalline; colors are bright and vivid, while blacks are deep and inky. Some surfaces, however, do look a little glossy, with a buffed sheen that appears almost lacquered. It can be hard to pinpoint what is changed. But there does seem to be a difference, and depending on the viewer, it can feel slightly uncanny.

“It just looks weird, in ways that I have difficulty describing,” the journalist Chris Person said of these releases. “It’s plasticine, smooth, embossed at the edges. Skin texture doesn’t look correct. It all looks a little unreal.”

Person is among a number of viewers who are skeptical of the need to use AI to “enhance” the appearance of films that seemed to look fine to begin with. Although he said that there were “legitimate use cases” for AI in restoration, such as when a film’s original negative has been lost or badly damaged, he suspected that with something like “True Lies,” they were “using it just because they can.”

The recent Cameron releases, and particularly “True Lies,” have become the subject of intense scrutiny and fervent debate online. Home video reviewers have described it as an overly sanitized presentation, with one faulting its “routinely odd-looking images” and another arguing that it appears “almost artificial.”

«

Complaining about how a Cameron film looks seems like the ultimate wasted breath (the principal problem is the whole film), but the comparison pictures in the article between the streaming version (uncleaned) and the Blu-ray reissue (cleaned) make it look like the streaming version is way better.

But, hey, AI!
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Government spyware is another reason to use an ad blocker • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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Ad blockers might seem like an unlikely defense in the fight against spyware, but new reporting casts fresh light on how spyware makers are weaponizing online ads to allow governments to conduct surveillance.

Spyware makers are reportedly capable of locating and stealthily infecting specific targets with spyware using banner ads.

One of the startups that worked on an ad-based spyware infection system is Intellexa, a European company that develops the Predator spyware. Predator is able to access the full contents of a target’s phone in real time.

According to documents seen by Israeli news outlet Haaretz, Intellexa presented a proof-of-concept system in 2022 called Aladdin that enabled the planting of phone spyware through online ads. The documents included a demo of the Aladdin system with technical explanations on how the spyware infects its targets and examples of malicious ads: by “seemingly targeting graphic designers and activists with job offers, through which the spyware will be introduced to their device,” Haaretz reported.

It’s unclear if Aladdin was fully developed or was sold to government customers.

Another private Israeli company called Insanet succeeded in developing an ad-based infection system capable of locating an individual within an advertising network, Haaretz revealed last year.

Online ads help website owners, including this one, generate revenue. But online ad exchanges can be abused to push malicious code to a target’s device.

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“I have to use an ad blocker, I might be a government target.”
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Hollywood has ‘Ozempic face’: why you can look 10 years older after going all in on the slimming drug • EL PAÍS English

Amaia Odriozola:

»

Ozempic has just put a new name on the pre-existing practice of sudden weight loss. “It’s a term that has been used in various articles to refer to the facial skeletization that can be generated after loss of significant weight, from at least 17 to 22 pounds,” explains aesthetic doctor Mar Mira, who is the co-director of Madrid’s Clínica Mira+Cueto.

According to Mira, our face contains different structures, among which are deep and superficial fat compartments, which decrease with any kind of overall weight loss, not just drug-assisted slimdowns. “It is always more evident in thin faces that have seen significant weight loss, since in overweight or obese patients, weight loss does not usually result in significant facial skeletonization. However, shadows underneath the cheeks may be accentuated by reabsorption of fat compartments, and facial flaccidity can become more pronounced around the jowls and jaw line due to the loss of temporal and preauricular fat compartments, which are usually the first to be reabsorbed during the aging process.” The doctor says that patients who come to her office with these concerns say that their appearance “starts to look tired, or that sagging has become accentuated.”

As Dr. Celia Gonzalo, a physician specializing in endocrinology and nutrition at Neolife Medical Group, explains to EL PAÍS, “sudden and significant decrease in facial fat can accentuate expression lines, cheekbones and also cause sagging in the cheek area. In short, for some people it can result in an older-looking appearance.”

“Loss of facial volume can be one of the signs of aging given that, as we get older, we have less capacity for cellular regeneration, the musculoskeletal system changes, muscle mass and bone density decreases, as does collagen and elastin production, which leads to changes in our skin, like a loss of smoothness and ability to hold up internal tissues as well as the appearance of wrinkles,” says Dr. Gema Pérez Sevilla, a maxillofacial surgeon and expert in facial aesthetic medicine, who has a clinic in Madrid. “Major weight loss affects the whole body, including the face, and can definitely impact volume in the jowls and cheeks, among other places.”

«

The piece starts with a quote by Catherine Deneuve: “At a certain age, you have to choose between your face or your ass.” (As in, minimal fat behind makes your face look older; nice plumpness up front isn’t welcome behind.) I think she chose the former?
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Losing my phone while abroad nearly cost me my health • Android Police

Nirave Gondhia:

»

Most diabetics check their blood sugar up to three times per day using a finger stick where you prick your finger and place it on a test strip. I hated this, as there’s no context to the number it gives you, which is taken at a random snapshot of the day. Instead, I’ve been using a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) for the past three years. I’m using the Dexcom G7 CGM, which syncs with my phone to give me a snapshot every five minutes. It also tells me if it’s trending up, down, etc, and can alert me when I go high or low (both of which are very bad, the latter being more so).

A CGM is the only way I track my diabetes. My sugar goes low overnight, which can be life-threatening, and my CGM sends me warning alarms when it’s running low so I can correct it. Low blood sugar overnight that isn’t being monitored is a medical emergency.

When my phone was stolen [at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona by a pickpocket], I assumed it would be easy: walk into an Apple Store to get a replacement, restore from backup, and be good to go. The Apple process was a whole saga in and of itself — you can read about that in our AppleCare+ Theft and Loss review — but my CGM was where I suffered the most.

Upon setting up a temporary iPhone I borrowed from a friend, I couldn’t sign into the app for my CGM. As it turns out, the same hardware is used across every region, and Dexcom limits or enables certain features based on the region in your account. When you sign in to the app for the first time, it checks your geolocation, and if it doesn’t match the country of your account, you won’t be able to use that account.

In the modern technology-focused world we live in, this felt silly to me, but as it turns out, that’s the same across both Dexcom and Abbott (the other major CGM maker). Dexcom’s only solution was for me to make a new account, except it needed me to wait five days until I arrived back in the UK, thanks to the same geolocation requirement.

Thanks to the Galaxy S24 Ultra and its AI smarts, I could converse with a pharmacist in Barcelona, but without a prescription, they couldn’t sell me anything to check my blood sugar. The result was five very frantic days involving a lot of guesswork.

«

Region-locking seems like insanity, and dangerous for health apps. You’d think that the system would at least recognise that you’re authorised to sign in based on where you’re registered.
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Global warming is coming for your home • The Economist

»

Think about the places vulnerable to climate change, and you might picture rice paddies in Bangladesh or low-lying islands in the Pacific. But another, more surprising answer ought to be your own house. About a tenth of the world’s residential property by value is under threat from global warming—including many houses that are nowhere near the coast. From tornadoes battering midwestern American suburbs to tennis-ball-size hailstones smashing the roofs of Italian villas, the severe weather brought about by greenhouse gas emissions is shaking the foundations of the world’s most important asset class.

The potential costs stem from policies designed to reduce the emissions of houses as well as from climate-related damage. They are enormous. By one estimate, climate change and the fight against it could wipe out 9% of the value of the world’s housing by 2050—which amounts to $25trn, not much less than America’s annual gdp. It is a huge bill hanging over people’s lives and the global financial system. And it looks destined to trigger an almighty fight over who should pay up.

Homeowners are one candidate. But if you look at property markets today, they do not seem to be bearing the costs. House prices show little sign of adjusting to climate risk. In Miami, the subject of much worrying about rising sea levels, they have increased by four-fifths this decade, much more than the American average. Moreover, because the impact of climate change is still uncertain, many owners may not have known how much of a risk they were taking when they bought their homes.

Yet if taxpayers cough up instead, they will bail out well-heeled owners and blunt helpful incentives to adapt to the looming threat.

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For The Economist, it’s absolute agony where some gigantic event (and let’s agree, climate change is one of those) might require government action involving taxes and payments against something that can’t be absolutely quantified now.
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Geothermal power heats up • Knowable Magazine

Katarina Zimmer:

»

Geothermal energy works best with two things: heat, plus rock that is permeable enough to carry water. In places where molten rock sizzles close to the surface, water will seep through porous volcanic rock, warm up and bubble upward as hot water, steam or both.

If the water or steam is hot enough — ideally at least around 300 degrees Fahrenheit — it can be extracted from the ground and used to power generators for electricity. In Kenya, nearly 50% of electricity generated comes from geothermal. Iceland gets 25% of its electricity from this source, while New Zealand gets about 18% and the state of California, 6%.

Some natural geothermal resources are still untapped, such as in the western United States, says geologist Ann Robertson-Tait, president of GeothermEx, a geothermal energy consulting division at the oilfield services company SLB. But by and large, we’re running out of natural, high-quality geothermal resources, pushing experts to consider ways of extracting geothermal energy from areas where the energy is much harder to access. “There’s so much heat in the Earth,” Robertson-Tait says. But, she adds, “much of it is locked inside rock that isn’t permeable.”

Tapping that heat requires deep drilling and creating cracks in these non-volcanic, dense rocks to allow water to flow through them. Since 1970, engineers have been developing “enhanced geothermal systems” (EGS) that do just that, applying methods similar to the hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — used to suck oil and gas out of deep rocks. Water is pumped at high pressure into wells, up to several miles deep, to blast cracks into the rocks. The cracked rock and water create an underground radiator where water heats before rising to the surface through a second well. Dozens of such EGS installations have been built in the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan — most of them experimental and government-funded — with mixed success.

«

That statistic about Kenya is amazing, though the International Energy Agency is weirdly eager for more of its energy generation to come from oil and coal.
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Google to cut thousands of search quality rater jobs after dropping contract with Appen • Search Engine Land

Barry Schwartz:

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Appen, an Australian data services company that Google contracted with for a large number of its third-party search quality raters, was notified by Google that its contract is ending on March 19. Appen said it had no prior notice and the cancellation would result in a loss of $82.8m of revenue at a gross margin of 26% for the company.

Google’s quality raters assess the quality of the Google search results. They do not directly influence the search results, and quality raters cannot downgrade or upgrade a specific site in Google Search.

Search quality rater guidelines “are used by our search raters to help evaluate the performance of our various search ranking systems, and their ratings don’t directly influence ranking,” according to Google. “The guidelines share important considerations for what content is helpful for people when using Google Search. Our page on how to create helpful, people-first content summarizes these concepts for creators to help them self-assess their own content to be successful in Google Search,” the company added.

What it means. Appen is one of a few sources that Google uses to contract quality raters. It seems, based on the almost $83m revenue, that Google contracted Appen for a couple of thousand raters. Google has written it has about 16,000 search quality raters, so those employed by Appen represent a significant portion of the total quality raters contracted.

«

The apparent outcome of this is that plagiarised or AI-generated articles are starting to rank higher, some people think. Does the average user think Google search has deteriorated? If they do, have they ever tried a different search engine? (I suspect the answers are “maybe” and “no”.)
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Actors are making thousands of dollars through fake video podcast ads • Bloomberg

Ashley Carman:

»

In these clips, [MJ] Wolfe sits in front of a microphone so you, the viewer, think you’ve happened upon a podcast midway through the show. He might be looking off camera, like he’s speaking to someone else in the studio, or wearing headphones. There could be a neon sign hung up on a brick wall behind him, à la Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Wolfe talks up a product, casually mentioning its benefits and why he loves it. Maybe you’ll think this podcast feels slightly excessive in its enthusiasm for a particular thing, but TikTok’s content onslaught doesn’t leave much time for questioning. The takeaway is, here’s a passionate person speaking authoritatively on a podcast.

In reality, these clips aren’t coming from podcasts. In fact, Wolfe is being paid $195 for each of these one-minute advertisements designed to look like a podcast. On the freelance service website Fiverr, where he sells his service to brands, Wolfe claims: “I will make a ugc podcast video ad,” or a user-generated content ad, using the client’s own script to talk about the product.

(The custom neon sign is an upcharge.)

These styles of ads are Wolfe’s most popular offering and account for a quarter of his earnings, he tells me in an interview. His online ad business brings in anywhere from $9,000 to $16,000 a month, he says.

“It doesn’t feel like trying to pitch” an audience something, he says about why he thinks brands like this style of ad. “It instantly generates more authority.”

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As the saying goes: if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.
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The Google One VPN service is heading to the Google graveyard • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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Google is shutting down its VPN by Google One service, according to a vague customer email seen by Android Authority, less than four years after it was rolled out in October 2020. The email doesn’t specify when this will happen, only that the VPN service will be discontinued “later this year.” 

Subscription prices for Google One’s VPN start at $1.99, with availability on Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows. The company told 9to5Google that it is killing the service because “people simply weren’t using it.” Perhaps its customers were simply spoilt for choice, given this is actually one of three VPN services provided by Google alongside the VPN offerings still available via Google Fi, and Pixel devices from the Pixel 7 on up.

VPN by Google One is the latest offering to get tossed into the infamous “Google Graveyard” just weeks after the Google One cloud storage service announced it had hit a 100 million subscriber milestone.

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Sure is crowded in the Google graveyard. But also absolutely classic that Google has, or soon will have had, three VPN offerings.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The woolly mammoth could make a comeback by 2028, and one company has a plan for how to monetise it. CC-licensed photo by Bjorn on Flickr.

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

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

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

Humane Ai Pin review: too clunky, too limited • WIRED

Julian Chokkattu:

»

I increasingly began to doubt the accuracy of the information the Humane wearable was providing. My mom told me to avoid high-fructose corn syrup right as my dad handed me a bottle of Malta Goya—she said the sweetener in it was banned in California. The Ai Pin agreed with this when I asked it. However, California did not ban it; the state banned four food additives last year, none of which are high-fructose corn syrup.

On my parents’ TV screen, an image of a temple popped up on the Chromecast’s screensaver. My dad asked where it was, so I positioned my Ai Pin toward the screen and said, “Look and tell me where this picture is from.” The answer? Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I didn’t have a specific reason to doubt this, but because the Pin doesn’t have a proper screen, there’s no way to verify it. I launched Google Lens on my phone, pointed the camera at the screen, and … well, the temple is the Phraya Nakhon Cave in Thailand. The images in the Google search matched perfectly with the screensaver.

Not being able to fully trust the results from the Ai Pin’s Ai Mic and Vision features (the latter is still in beta) is just one problem with this wearable computer. Unfortunately, there’s not much else to do with it as it’s missing a great many features. The Humane Ai Pin could be an interesting gadget a year from now after promised software updates, but at the moment it’s a party trick.

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And this is one of the kinder reviews. Engadget was pretty brutal. However, The Verge: even more so. Shall we start the sweepstake on when Humane is going to close its doors or get acquihired?
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Elon Musk’s X botched an attempt to replace “twitter.com” links with “x.com” • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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Elon Musk’s clumsy brand shift from Twitter to X caused a potentially big problem this week when the social network started automatically changing “twitter.com” to “x.com” in links. The automatic text replacement reportedly applied to any URL ending in “twitter.com” even if it wasn’t actually a twitter.com link.

The change apparently went live on X’s app for iOS, but not on the web version. It seems to have been a problem for a day or two before the company fixed the automatic text replacement so that it wouldn’t affect non-Twitter.com domains.

Security reporter Brian Krebs called the move “a gift to phishers” in an article yesterday. It was a phishing risk because scammers could register a domain name like “netflitwitter.com,” which would appear as “netflix.com” in posts on X, but clicking the link would take a user to netflitwitter.com.

“A search at DomainTools.com shows at least 60 domain names have been registered over the past two days for domains ending in ‘twitter.com,’ although research so far shows the majority of these domains have been registered ‘defensively’ by private individuals to prevent the domains from being purchased by scammers,” Krebs wrote.

Even if the change had been implemented smoothly, auto-replacing “twitter.com” with “x.com” doesn’t do much to help Musk cement his branding shift because x.com still redirects to twitter.com.

One of the newly registered domain names inspired by X’s text replacement is the example mentioned above. Navigating to netflitwitter.com will show you a message that says, “This domain has been acquired to prevent its use for malicious purposes.” The webpage was set up by X user @yuyu0127_ and goes on to say:

»

As of April 8, 2024, the iOS Twitter (now X) client automatically replaces the text “twitter.com” in posts with “x.com” as part of its functionality. Therefore, for example, a URL that appears to be “netflix.com” will actually redirect to “netflitwitter.com” when clicked.
Please be aware that there is a potential for this feature to be exploited in the future, by acquiring domains containing “twitter.com” to lead users to malicious pages. This domain, “netflitwitter.com,” has been acquired for protective purposes to prevent its use for such malicious activities.

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Macs to get AI-focussed M4 chips starting in late 2024 • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple will begin updating its Mac lineup with M4 chips in late 2024, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The M4 chip will be focused on improving performance for artificial intelligence capabilities.

Last year, Apple introduced the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips all at once in October, so it’s possible we could see the M4 lineup come during the same time frame. Gurman says that the entire Mac lineup is slated to get the M4 across late 2024 and early 2025.

The iMac, low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro, high-end 14-inch MacBook Pro, 16-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini machines will be updated with M4 chips first, followed by the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models in spring 2025, the Mac Studio in mid-2025, and the Mac Pro later in 2025.

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AI chips, AI chips everywhere. (And the Mac Pro too.)
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Can chatbots hold meaningful conversations? • Nautilus

Elena Kazamia:

»

Arseny Moskvichev dreams of the day he can have a meaningful conversation with artificial intelligence. “By meaningful, I mean a conversation that has the power to change you,” says the cognitive and computer scientist. “The problem,” says Moskvichev, “is that LLMs are complete amnesiacs. They only have so much context they can attend to. If you’re out of this context, they forget everything you spoke about with them.”

Even the most advanced chatbots can only process about 16,000 words of text within a prompt when in conversation with a human user. This is called a “context window.” And they can’t connect the information they receive during different “conversations” with a human, or build a storyline.

To help chatbots learn to hold life-changing conversations, and to improve their comprehension of the deep complexities of context—of the webs of relationships between people, events, and timelines that govern human lives—Moskvichev and his colleagues are teaching them to read novels, the way we might learn to read them in high school literature classes.

The act of reading a novel might seem like a relaxing pastime, but it requires a nuanced intelligence. We use memory and complex, layered comprehension to follow multiple characters through twisting plots, scene changes, and narrative. And while we might not think about it, the average novel averages around 80,000 words. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, for instance, runs at 82,000 words, while The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E. DuBois, totals around 72,000. The Little Prince, a children’s book, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, has around 17,000 words. All those words gradually build a story we hold and examine in our minds. But such skills are currently out of reach to Large Language Models (LLMs) like Open AI’s ChatGPT, which can process text but cannot be said to read the way we do.

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A “conversation that can change you”? Shouldn’t Moskvichev just cut out the middleman and read lots of novels? (Or listen to them as audiobooks?)
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AI-generated pornography will disrupt the adult content industry and raise new ethical concerns • The Conversation

Simon Dubé and Valerie Lapointe:

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Advancements in machine learning and AI algorithms for image and video production have contributed to the growth of websites for AI-generated pornography, commonly referred to as AI porn.

The mass production of AI porn has significant ethical and social implications. It can offer an unprecedented quantity of customizable sexual stimuli tailored to users’ preferences while drastically cutting down production costs.

On one hand, these new tools enable content creators to produce diverse erotica and allow widespread access to personalized sexual stimuli that meet people’s needs and desires, thereby enhancing their sex life and well-being.

On the other hand, it could lead to problematic overuse of pornography, the spread of deepfakes, and the production of illegal content, such as child pornography.

AI porn also has labour implications, and could create copyright issues as well as impact the jobs of sex workers and adult content creators.

In all likelihood, the impact of AI porn will be more nuanced: some users will benefit, while others may be negatively impacted by it. However, the pace of technological developments leaves little time to plan and research how to harmoniously integrate this new technology into our lives. Like in many other sectors, we are not ready for AI porn.

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I dunno, I bet there’s a demographic that’s extremely ready for AI porn. (Dubé is a research fellow at Indiana University, Lapointe is a PhD candidate in psychology at Quebec University.)
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Colossal Biosciences has made headlines as the de-extinction startup primed to bring back the woolly mammoth. Here’s its business model • Fortune

Allie Garfinkle:

»

I’m like everyone else, and am obsessed with the idea of seeing a woolly mammoth. But what I really wanted to know was: how do you make money doing it? Thankfully, the answer’s not the woolly mammoth meatball—that’s a project cooked up by a different company focused on lab-grown meat. Colossal’s mammoth monetization model emphasizes two near-to-medium term efforts, and a longer-term play.

Let’s start with the near-term: “There’s consumer education, where we already get billions of media impressions,” said [CEO and founder Ben] Lamm. “We’re doing a docuseries, and we do lots of different educational content. Transparently, those do make money…Then, the midterm is the technology companies that we spin out, as we monetize, but those take a while to get to the point where they’re successful.”

…the longer-term strategy is tied to Colossal’s already-extensive conservation efforts. “De-extinction and species preservation are connected,” said Lamm. “Sometimes people want to separate out species preservation, conservation, and I say, no, they’re all one thing.”

Colossal’s conservation efforts are wide-ranging. For example, the startup is currently working with the University of Alaska and University of Stockholm on one of the largest-ever studies focused on radiocarbon dating mammoths. Likewise, Colossal last year joined the BioRescue group working to save the northern white rhino from extinction. And, there’s the Victorian grassland earless dragon—a miniscule Australian lizard believed to be extinct in 1969. The lizard was recently rediscovered in the wild, and Colossal’s set up a breeding and release colony with the Melbourne Zoo devoted to the fetching little reptile.

Lamm even envisions getting a piece of the carbon credit market, which is projected to be as big as $2.4 trillion by 2027, according to some estimates. “In the long-term, if we get to sustainable populations of, say, the Thylacine [Tasmanian tiger] in southern Australia, we’ll get government subsidies, carbon credits, biodiversity credits.”

«

Hm. I feel like the woolly mammoth meatball might be a more solid market. That, and hunting rights.
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AWS resource restrictions point to datacenter power issues • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

Datacenter power issues in Ireland may be coming to a head amid reports from customers that Amazon is restricting resources users can spin up in that nation, even directing them to other AWS regions across Europe instead.

Energy consumed by datacenters is a growing concern, especially in places such as Ireland where there are clusters of facilities around Dublin that already account for a significant share of the country’s energy supply. This may be leading to restrictions on how much infrastructure can be used, given the power requirements. According to Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO), power usage by datacenters increased by 31% between 2021 and 2022, hitting 18% of the total metered electricity consumption.

A recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that if unchecked, this could grow to 32% of Ireland’s electricity by 2026.

AWS users have informed The Register that there are sometimes limits on the resources that they can access in its Ireland bit barn, home to Amazon’s eu-west-1 region, especially with power-hungry instances that make use of GPUs to accelerate workloads such as AI.

“You cannot spin up GPU nodes in AWS Dublin as those locations are maxed out power-wise. There is reserved capacity for EC2 just in case,” one source told us. “If you have a problem with that, AWS Europe will point you at spare capacity in Sweden and other parts of the EU.”

We asked AWS about these issues, but when it finally responded the company was somewhat evasive.

«

The Irish power grid operator was also evasive. When both organisations are evasive like that, you can take it as confirmation that yes, you’re right.
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AWS told to pay $525m in cloud storage patent suit • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

A jury has ordered Amazon Web Services to pay $525m for infringing distributed data storage patents in a case brought by a technology outfit called Kove IO.

Kove, which styles itself as a pioneer in high-performance computer storage and data management technologies, filed its original complaint [PDF] in 2018. It claims that AWS is infringing on three Kove-held patents in cloud services, such as the Amazon S3 storage platform, as well as in its DynamoDB database service, and in other related products and services.

The trial came to a close on Wednesday (April 10), with the jury finding in favor of Kove and awarding it damages of over half a billion dollars. AWS said it intends to appeal the verdict, which acknowledged that the company had not willfully infringed on the patents in question.

The technology at the center of the case relates to distributed hash tables, a decentralized system used to store and retrieve data, with the data in this instance being the location information for specific data files in a scale-out data storage platform.

«

Not sure it really matters whether you meant to infringe the patents; it’s just the fact of the infringement. Wonder if this company is also going after Google and Microsoft.
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‘Help’ written in palm fronds assists US forces in rescuing Micronesians stranded on tiny island • Stars and Stripes

Joseph Ditzler:

»

The men, all in their 40s, set sail from Polowat Atoll, Micronesia, on March 31 in a small, open 20-foot skiff powered by an outboard motor, according to a news release from Coast Guard Forces Micronesia, Sector Guam. The men had experience navigating in those seas.

The skiff was damaged, though the release did not specify how or when, and the motor rendered inoperative.

A week later, on April 6, a relative “reported her three uncles had not returned from Pikelot Atoll,” approximately 115 miles northwest of Polowat Atoll, a part of Chuuk State in the Federated States of Micronesia.

Pikelot, a low coral island covered with palm trees and shrubs, is a speck just 2½ miles long and 1¾ miles wide in a search area the Coast Guard described as 78,800 square miles of the South Pacific.

Joint Rescue Sub-Center Guam mobilized a search that drew a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft from Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, and the Guam-based Coast Guard cutter Oliver Henry.

The Poseidon crew found the three Sunday thanks to a message they left on the Pikelot beach.

“In a remarkable testament to their will to be found, the mariners spelled out ‘HELP’ on the beach using palm leaves, a crucial factor in their discovery,” Coast Guard Lt. Chelsea Garcia, the search and rescue mission coordinator, said in the release. “This act of ingenuity was pivotal in guiding rescue efforts directly to their location.”

«

There’s one really big question in my mind. Really big. Why did they spell HELP when they could have made SOS much bigger with the same number of fronds? (The picture shows that it’s a properly tiny atoll. They were lucky.) As the story points out, some previous stranded people did use SOS. Worked for them.
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Instagram will automatically blur nudes in direct messages • 404 Media

Samantha Cole:

»

Instagram will soon start testing blurring nudes in direct messages, according to an announcement from Meta on Wednesday. It will use “on-device machine learning” to detect nudes, and is aimed at stopping sextortion schemes that target teenagers, the company wrote.

The “nudity protection” feature will detect nudes in direct messages and automatically blur them, both when you’re getting a nude sent to you and when you’re attempting to send one to someone else. Users will also see a popup message that says, “Take care when sharing sensitive photos. The photo is blurred because nudity protection is turned on. Others can screenshot or forward your photos without you knowing. You can unsend a photo if you change your mind, but there’s a chance others have already seen it.”

Because the processing is performed on device, Meta says its detection will still work on end-to-end encrypted chats, with Meta not having access to the images themselves unless a user reports them. 

The feature will be turned on by default for users under the age of 18, and adults will get a notification “encouraging” them to turn it on. “This feature is designed not only to protect people from seeing unwanted nudity in their DMs, but also to protect them from scammers who may send nude images to trick people into sending their own images in return,” the announcement says. 

…Meanwhile, Meta lets AI-generated fake influencers that steal real women’s images run rampant on Instagram and can’t stop even the most obvious catfish romance scams happening on the platform—and on Facebook, people are constantly being tricked by AI-generated content into believing it’s real.

«

Have to admire Cole pointing out the non-thing that Meta has achieved here: how much of a problem are nude pics in DMs? Meta doesn’t say, though it does say

»

we’re also developing technology to help identify where accounts may potentially be engaging in sextortion scams, based on a range of signals that could indicate sextortion behavior. While these signals aren’t necessarily evidence that an account has broken our rules, we’re taking precautionary steps to help prevent these accounts from finding and interacting with teen accounts.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Developers will no longer be paid by Amazon to make Alexa apps. If we’re honest, voice-activated tubes haven’t been a huge success. CC-licensed photo by Smart Home Perfected on Flickr.

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

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

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

America is sick of swiping • The Atlantic

Lora Kelley:

»

By 2017, about five years after Tinder introduced the swipe, more than a quarter of different-sex couples were meeting on apps and dating websites, according to a study led by the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. Suddenly, saying “We met on Hinge” was as normal as saying “We met in college” or “We met through a friend.”

The share of couples meeting on apps has remained pretty consistent in the years since his 2017 study, Rosenfeld told me. But these days, the mood around dating apps has soured. As the apps seek to woo a new generation of daters, TikTok abounds with complaints about how hard it is to find a date on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Grindr, and all the rest. The novelty of swiping has worn off, and there hasn’t been a major innovation beyond it. As they push more paid features, the platforms themselves are facing rocky finances and stalling growth. Dating apps once looked like the foundation of American romance. Now the cracks are starting to show.

In 2022, a Pew Research Center survey found that about half of people have a positive experience with online dating, down from October 2019. With little success on the apps, a small but enthusiastic slice of singles are reaching for speed dating and matchmakers. Even the big dating apps seem aware that they are facing a crisis of public enthusiasm. A spokesperson for Hinge told me that Gen Z is its fastest-growing user segment, though the CEO of Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and Hinge, has gone on the defensive. Last week, he published an op-ed headlined “Dating apps are the best place to find love, no matter what you see on TikTok.” A spokesperson for Bumble told me that the company is “​​actively looking at how we can make dating fun again.”

«

The pandemic had a big, negative effect; the question is what the recovery looks like.
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India’s electric rickshaws are leaving EVs in the dust • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

»

At a small factory just north of Delhi, a welder named Ram Baran spends several hours each day training his coworkers in metal cutting, molding, and shaping bodies of three-wheeler electric vehicles.

Baran is not an engineer by education. He started working at the factory in 2017 as a helper — dusting, cleaning, and organizing items. A year later, he got the opportunity to upskill and get trained in welding by Chinese engineers. Nearly 80% of Baran’s 200 co-workers have followed a similar trajectory. “[They] taught us all the work,” Baran told Rest of World. “They taught us welding — how to put the parts and cut them. Over time, I picked up the work and got promoted. Now, our people can also teach these things.” 

Each month, this upskilled team at the factory in Sonipat — 40 kilometers from New Delhi — produces bodies and chassis for nearly 5,000 three-wheeler EVs, locally known as e-rickshaws, for the New Delhi-based YC Electric, India’s second-largest manufacturer in the segment. In 2023, YC Electric alone sold over 40,600 e-rickshaws, while 82,500 electric cars were sold in the country.

Even as India awaits its first Tesla, these humble e-rickshaws made by workers like Baran are powering an EV revolution in the country. In the last decade, around 1.73 million three-wheeler EVs have been sold in India. Just last month, around 500 manufacturers — most of them homegrown — sold over 44,000 e-rickshaws, compared to less than 6,800 electric cars sold during the month.

«

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MIT License text becomes viral “sad girl” piano ballad generated by AI • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

We’ve come a long way since primitive AI music generators in 2022. Today, AI tools like Suno.ai allow any series of words to become song lyrics, including inside jokes (as you’ll see below). On Wednesday, prompt engineer Riley Goodside tweeted an AI-generated song created with the prompt “sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License,” and it began to circulate widely in the AI community online.

The MIT License is a famous permissive software license created in the late 1980s, frequently used in open source projects. “My favorite part of this is ~1:25 it nails ‘WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY’ with a beautiful Imogen Heap-style glissando then immediately pronounces ‘FITNESS’ as ‘fistiff,'” Goodside wrote on X.

«

Suitable background music while you’re programming, I guess.
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Fairphone’s Fairbuds are true wireless earbuds with repairable design and user-replaceable batteries • Liliputing

Brad Linder:

»

Dutch smartphone maker Fairphone has made a name for itself by building sustainable products that are meant to last a long time. That’s because the company’s phones have user-repairable designs and the company sells spare parts (and sometimes even hardware upgrades).

Last year the company expanded into the wireless audio space with the launch of premium over-ear, wireless, noise-cancelling headphones called the Fairbuds XL that also have a modular, repairable design. Now the company is doing it again, but this time smaller. The Fairbuds are a pair of true wireless earbuds featuring sustainable design elements.

…The earbuds offer up to six hours of battery life and they come with a charging case that gives you another 20 hours of use between charges. And Fairphone offers iOS and Android apps that let you adjust EQ, install firmware updates, and make other changes.

…All told, the company offers seven repairable/replaceable components for the Fairbuds:

• Earbud (left)
• Earbud (right)
• Earbud battery and silicon ring kit
• Earbud tips
• Charging case outer shell
• Charging case core
• Charging case battery

«

I thought that sure, it’s all replaceable, but it’s going to cost a ton. Nope: €149. (Europe-only. Not sure if that includes the UK.)
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Peloton is a media company now, with media company problems • The Verge

Victoria Song:

»

Loyal fans and a sticky product should equal piles and piles of money. Instead, Peloton’s valuation has dropped about 97% since its pandemic high. It’s managed to turn it around a bit — Peloton’s revenue has been steadily clawing its way back for the past year, even if it’s falling short of investor targets.

But it’s not rolling in cash. Some of that might be because it’s not always clear what Peloton views its product to be.

The company’s leadership maintains that hardware will always be a key part of its strategy, and to be fair, there’s a common through line when you speak to the Peloton diehards.

“It reduces friction working out and when I remember working out with Apple Fitness Plus, like, I didn’t even have a place to put my iPhone,” says Oz, a longtime Peloton user who switched from Apple’s exercise service once he moved to the suburbs. “I think when it comes to fitness, you just want the least amount of friction because you’re already kind of having a hard time wanting to do it.”

…Last year, Peloton also rebranded its app, launching three app-only subscription tiers to lure people into its ecosystem. When Lululemon decided to call it quits with the Mirror, another rival for strength, pilates, and yoga, Peloton swooped in with a five-year deal to share content between the two brands. As Lululemon parachutes out of the connected fitness business, its users will get access to Peloton classes. Along that vein, Peloton closed out 2023 by allowing some subscribers to pair the app with third-party treadmills. It kicked off 2024 by announcing it’s bringing shortform content to TikTok, with the hope of boosting the profiles of its lesser-known instructors. 

For better or worse, Peloton is increasingly morphing into a streaming service. A hardware company has to figure out supply chain logistics, but shipping a workable product is 90% of the challenge. A media company has to do that and churn out high-quality content consistently. And that’s not exactly an easy thing to pull off.  Keeping your audience engaged is the stuff executives lose sleep over.  Peloton doesn’t want to be a media company — I mean, who can afford that in this economy? — but a lot of its problems sure look like media company problems.

«

Hardware company problems quickly transform into media company problems, because there’s no margin in hardware alone.
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Americans increasingly using ChatGPT, but few trust its 2024 election information • Pew Research Center

Colleen McClain:

»

Most Americans still haven’t used the chatbot, despite the uptick since our July 2023 survey on this topic. But some groups remain far more likely to have used it than others.

Adults under 30 stand out: 43% of these young adults have used ChatGPT, up 10 percentage points since last summer. Use of the chatbot is also up slightly among those ages 30 to 49 and 50 to 64. Still, these groups remain less likely than their younger peers to have used the technology. Just 6% of Americans 65 and up have used ChatGPT.

Highly educated adults are most likely to have used ChatGPT: 37% of those with a postgraduate or other advanced degree have done so, up 8 points since July 2023. This group is more likely to have used ChatGPT than those with a bachelor’s degree only (29%), some college experience (23%) or a high school diploma or less (12%).

Since March 2023, we’ve also tracked three potential reasons Americans might use ChatGPT: for work, to learn something new or for entertainment.

…With more people using ChatGPT, we also wanted to understand whether Americans trust the information they get from it, particularly in the context of US politics.

About four-in-ten Americans (38%) don’t trust the information that comes from ChatGPT about the 2024 US presidential election – that is, they say they have not too much trust (18%) or no trust at all (20%).

A mere 2% have a great deal or quite a bit of trust, while 10% have some trust.

«

I find it bizarre that anyone would ask ChatGPT anything about current events. Clearly people haven’t been informed enough about its hallucinations.
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China’s EV and solar boom is a capitalist win for communism • Bloomberg via Deccan Herald

David Fickling:

»

There’s a comforting but erroneous explanation for why your solar panels, home battery and electric car are increasingly likely to be made in China.

The economy is awash in easy money from state banks; its renewable manufacturers are undercutting rivals everywhere else in the world; ergo, China’s comparative advantage isn’t scale, cost efficiencies or innovative prowess, but the availability of cheap government subsidies.

In the EV industry “everybody has an endless supply of loans and support from the local government,” the Financial Times quoted Jörg Wuttke, former president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, as saying in a recent article.

That theory provides a compelling justification for trade restrictions. If Chinese manufacturers are only surviving thanks to a drip feed of government cash, there’s no way for overseas rivals to compete. Best, then, to use tariffs, investigations and other hurdles to exclude their products altogether, and give homegrown competitors a chance.

It’s a persuasive narrative because swathes of China’s economy really do run this way.

…To be sure, Chinese manufacturers still enjoy powerful advantages. Generous and consistent purchase support for EVs and solar panels gives owners confidence to invest aggressively, just as the same policies do in Europe and the US.

…It would be comforting if China’s success in clean tech was a result of easy credit from a communist state. In truth, though, this boom is a capitalist success story on a grand scale.

«

Essentially, pointing out that the green revolution in China is not about state funding; it’s about a big, big market.
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WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires multiservice messaging app Beeper for $125m • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

WordPress.com owner Automattic is acquiring Beeper, the company behind the iMessage-on-Android solution that was referenced by the Department of Justice in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The deal, which was for $125m according to sources close to the matter, is Automattic’s second acquisition of a cross-platform messaging solution after buying Texts.com last October.

That acquisition made Texts.com founder Kishan Bagaria Automattic’s new head of Messaging, a role that will now be held by Beeper founder Eric Migicovsky, previously the founder of the Pebble smartwatch and a Y Combinator partner.

Reached for comment, Automattic said it has started the process of onboarding the Beeper team and is “excited about the progress made” so far but couldn’t yet share more about its organizational updates, or what Bagaria’s new title would be. However, we’re told he is staying to work on Beeper as well.

Beeper and Texts.com’s teams of 25 and 15, respectively, will join together to take the best of each company’s product and merge it into one platform, according to Migicovsky.

“[Texts.com] built an amazing app that’s more desktop-centric and iOS-centric,” he said. “So we’ll be folding the best parts of those into our app. But going forward, the Beeper brand will apply to all of the messaging efforts at Automattic,” he said…

…The deal, which closed on April 1, represents a big bet from Automattic: that the future of messaging will be open source and will work across services, instead of being tied up in proprietary platforms, like Meta’s WhatsApp or Apple’s iMessage.

«

As the story mentions, Migicovsky has his record at Pebble to lean on as well as the troublemaking at Beeper. But what on earth is Automattic’s strategy? It’s beginning to look like a sprawl: it also owns Tumblr, which isn’t making it any money. And we already have plenty of messaging services, thanks.
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Amazon to stop paying developers to create apps for Alexa • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Matt Day:

»

Amazon.com Inc. will no longer pay developers to create applications for Alexa, scrapping a key element of the company’s effort to build a flourishing app store for its voice-activated digital assistant.

Amazon recently told participants of the Alexa Developer Rewards Program, which cut monthly checks to builders of popular Alexa apps, that the offering would end at the end of June.

“Developers like you have and will play a critical role in the success of Alexa and we appreciate your continued engagement,” said the notice, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. Amazon is also winding down a program that offered free credits for Alexa developers to power their programs with Amazon Web Services, according to a notice posted on a company website.

Despite losing the direct payments, developers can still monetize their efforts with in-app purchases.

Alexa, which powers Echo smart speakers and other devices, helped popularize voice assistants when it debuted almost a decade ago, letting users summon weather and news reports, play games and more.

The company has since sold millions of Alexa-powered gadgets, but the technology appears far from the cutting-edge amid an explosion in chatbots using generative artificial intelligence. Amazon is working to add more generative AI capabilities to the software.

«

Remarkable that Amazon paid developers, though I bet they’re happy to have banked the cash. Voice tubes are really looking like a dead end, aren’t they. Google removed third-party voice apps in 2022.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Claims by Google’s DeepMind to have discovered millions of new crystal forms don’t stand up to closer examination, scientists say. CC-licensed photo by Paul Hudson on Flickr.

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

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

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

Millions are using TikTok parent ByteDance’s homework app Gauth • Forbes

Emily Baker-White:

»

Gauth AI, an app that uses generative AI to help school-aged children do their homework, has surged in popularity in recent months, skyrocketing to #2 in the Education category in both Apple and Google’s app stores. Owned by ByteDance, it has been downloaded more than 10 million times on Android phones alone, and until recently, its website boasted that it had supported more than 200 million students. But its Chinese ownership could pose problems as TikTok — the most famous app owned by ByteDance — fights for its life against lawmakers in Washington D.C.

Unlike TikTok, Gauth is an educational app, designed specifically to help users with their homework. To use it, you take a photo of a homework assignment — like a sheet of math problems, for example — and watch as AI solves the problems for you. Upon downloading the app, the first prompt you receive is a request for permission to use the camera. The app appears similar to a China-based ByteDance app known as “Hippo Learning.”

In addition to AI help, Gauth also offers a paid “Plus” version, which connects students with tutors in a given subject area. “We have fifty thousands of experts and dedicated experts ready to help you 24/7 with multiple subjects,” says the app description in the Apple app store. Gauth solicits tutors through a website, gauthexpert.com, where it offers payment of up to $1500 per month for tutors with expertise in math, chemistry, physics, or biology. ByteDance spokesperson Mike Hughes told Forbes that tutors are based in the United States, India, the Philippines and portions of Africa.

«

It has an LLM (of course!) but it’s powered by OpenAI’s chatbot. With all of this, though, I can’t help always thinking of the Philip K Dick story War Game.
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TikTok’s unwritten rules for Israel-Gaza ads sparked internal outrage • Forbes

Alexandra S. Levine:

»

Among a number of ads created by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, the leading volunteer organization campaigning for the release of those taken captive, was one that showed 12-year-old Noam Avigdori boogying to an electronic dance music track. Another featured 47-year-old Elad Katzir cheering in a stadium filled with green-clad sports fans.

They both ended the same way, with text saying: “On October 7th, hundreds of innocent civilians were taken hostage by Hamas. Bring them home now.”

But TikTok rejected the advertisements throughout October, according to Dorit Gvili, an ad executive who oversaw social media for the Forum. TikTok top brass previously considered ads about hostages to be against company policy, according to internal material from October obtained by Forbes and two TikTok sources familiar with the matter.

In the months that followed, local TikTok representatives explained in conversations with the Forum that their various ads had been declined because they included visuals that were “triggering,” text that was “triggering,” mentions of Hamas (prohibited under TikTok’s advertising rules related to terrorism), and explicit references to the hostages, Gvili said. The group could compromise on the first three pieces, she added, but not the final one. “You cannot talk about the hostages without using the word hostages,” Gvili explained.

Ads depicting the war’s growing and devastating toll in Gaza, meanwhile, had been running regularly across the platform since the earliest weeks of the conflict, TikTok’s Ad Library for Europe shows. They included videos from humanitarian relief groups like the United Nations World Food Programme, Human Appeal and Save the Children—showing hospitals in chaos, smoke rising from bombs and buildings reduced to rubble—as well as one-offs from unknown users who’d paid to run ads, many of them graphic.

«

The disparity thus leading to big ructions inside the company: “The problem hit especially close to home for employees in Israel because a beloved TikTok department head there has a sibling among the kidnapped, they said.”

Truly this conflict is cursed: everyone it touches is sadder than before – at best.
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Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists • The Guardian

Jonathan Watts:

»

Another month, another global heat record that has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health.

Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1ºC higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68ºC higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released on Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58C above pre-industrial levels.

This, at least temporarily, exceeds the 1.5ºC benchmark set as a target in the Paris climate agreement but that landmark deal will not be considered breached unless this trend continues on a decadal scale.

The UK Met Office previously predicted the 1.5ºC goal could be surpassed over the period of a year and other leading climate monitoring organisations said the current levels of heating remain within the bounds anticipated by computer models.

However the sharp increase in temperatures over the past year has surprised many scientists, and prompted concerns about a possible acceleration of heating.

«

Scientists are very worried about the acceleration possibility: that could cause all sorts of feedback loops. Or indeed we might be seeing those loops getting underway. The climate news is not good.
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The backdoor in xz-utils has been removed (CVE-2024-3094). · tukaani-project/xz@e93e13c · GitHub

»

While the backdoor was inactive (and thus harmless) without inserting a small trigger code into the build system when the source package was created, it’s good to remove this anyway:

• The executable payloads were embedded as binary blobs in the test files. This was a blatant violation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

• On machines that see lots bots poking at the SSH port, the backdoor noticeably increased CPU load, resulting in degraded user experience and thus overwhelmingly negative user feedback.

• The maintainer who added the backdoor has disappeared.

• Backdoors are bad for security.

«

I particularly like the last two for their bluntness. But the xz-utils saga (which happened last week, so lost to this collection) does raise the very obvious question, still unanswered: where else might this be happening? Or have happened? If one state actor has been foiled, might others from the same state, or a different one, be or have been, at work?

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She stole $54m from her town. Then something unexpected happened • POLITICO

Kathy Gilsinan:

»

It was the spring of 2012 and nearly three weeks had passed since police had marched Rita Crundwell, the town’s well-liked comptroller, out the door of that very same building in handcuffs. In that time, the magnitude of her betrayal had grown clearer, and more dumbfounding: at first the feds believed she’d “misappropriated” $30m from the coffers of this small town of about 16,000, but now the figure was close to $54m. The place previously best-known as Ronald Reagan’s childhood home, site of the Petunia Festival and the Catfish Capital of Illinois, was now also the home of the largest municipal fraud in United States history.

What had so enraged the citizens of Dixon was that until late 2011, no one seemed to notice this theft – for some 20 years. Dixon’s finances had not only passed annual independent audits but also audit reviews by the state of Illinois. The bank that handled city accounts had never flagged anything amiss.

Yes, the city had struggled financially, then-Mayor Jim Burke acknowledged at the press conference announcing Crundwell’s arrest in April 2012, but Dixon was no different than many other communities around the country: Declining tax revenues, tardy payments from the state, rising health care costs and infrastructure investments all added up, he said, to a “plausible reason for the financial problems our community is facing.”

Burke did not note that all of this had happened as Crundwell herself was building a nationally renowned horse-breeding empire, racking up awards and riches while only making about $80,000 a year in her day job. Burke vowed to help the FBI investigate and recover the assets. He did not take questions [at a public meeting].

Crundwell’s arrest itself had begun to answer many of the more basic questions: why city budgets had faced such steep cuts for years; why some municipal vehicles had holes in the floors and the ambulance spewed smoke; why sidewalks were crumbling and pipes disrepaired to the degree that, within a few years after Crundwell’s arrest, a sinkhole would open up on West 7th Street like some kind of ham-handed metaphor for disappearing taxpayer dollars.

«

Absolutely stereotypically, Crundwell was caught because she went on holiday, and someone else came in to look after the money. A fun tale of bad administration. (Consider whether the same could happen in your organisation. Some make the accounts people take enforced holidays for just this reason.)
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Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

Microsoft will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the US tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine.

The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft’s tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app Slack.

Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. Rivals, however, said packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. The company started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on Oct. 1 last year.

“To ensure clarity for our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardise their purchasing across geographies.”

After the Justice Department sued Microsoft in 1998 for using its dominance of the Windows platform to stifle competition from rival web browsers, the company eventually made concessions that loosened its control of what software computer manufacturers could install on their products.

«

As Benedict Evans observed, even if this is the desired outcome, it’s taken far too long: seven years since the integration, which exploited Microsoft’s dominance in Office, and was obviously an anti-competitive move against Slack. A truly competent regulator would spot that move and be straight on the phone to Microsoft threatening big fines or demanding a standstill.

Still, at least it’s preempted a US Department of Justice lawsuit in 2030.
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Insurers are spying on your home from the sky • WSJ

Jean Eaglesham:

»

Cindy Picos was dropped by her home insurer last month. The reason: aerial photos of her roof, which her insurer refused to let her see.

“I thought they had the wrong house,” said Picos, who lives in northern California. “Our roof is in fine shape.” 

Her insurer said its images showed her roof had “lived its life expectancy.” Picos paid for an independent inspection that found the roof had another 10 years of life. Her insurer declined to reconsider its decision.

Across the US, insurance companies are using aerial images of homes as a tool to ditch properties seen as higher risk. 

Nearly every building in the country is being photographed, often without the owner’s knowledge. Companies are deploying drones, manned airplanes and high-altitude balloons to take images of properties. No place is shielded: the industry-funded Geospatial Insurance Consortium has an airplane imagery program it says covers 99% of the US population. 

The array of photos is being sorted by computer models to spy out underwriting no-nos, such as damaged roof shingles, yard debris, overhanging tree branches and undeclared swimming pools or trampolines. The red-flagged images are providing insurers with ammunition for nonrenewal notices nationwide.

“We’ve seen a dramatic increase across the country in reports from consumers who’ve been dropped by their insurers on the basis of an aerial image,” said Amy Bach, executive director of consumer group United Policyholders. 

The increasingly sophisticated use of flyby photos comes as home insurers nationwide scramble to “derisk” their property portfolios, dropping less-than-perfect homes in an effort to recover from big underwriting losses.

«

You’re thinking: examining those photos must take a huge amount of time, surely? And yet there’s no mention of machine learning being used (which I expected). Can’t be far behind, though. Could it happen in Europe (or the UK)? Would GDPR and its post-Brexit version block it? I don’t know.
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Artificial intelligence driving materials discovery? Perspective on the article: scaling deep learning for materials discovery • Chemistry of Materials

Anthony Cheetham and Ram Seshadri:

»

The recent report from a group of scientists at Google who employ a combination of existing data sets, high-throughput density functional theory calculations of structural stability, and the tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to propose new compounds is an exciting advance. We examine the claims of this work here, unfortunately finding scant evidence for compounds that fulfill the trifecta of novelty, credibility, and utility.

While the methods adopted in this work appear to hold promise, there is clearly a great need to incorporate domain expertise in materials synthesis and crystallography.

«

The back reference here is to a Google DeepMind claim from November 2023 that it had an AI tool that “helped discover 2.2 million new crystals”. The researchers examined the first 250 and found lots of bizarre misdescriptions, plus “a recurrent issue that is found throughout the GNoME database, which is that many of the entries are based upon the ordering of metal ions that are unlikely to be ordered in the real world”.

Stochastic parrots.
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The Up-Goer Five Text Editor: explain hard concepts using only the top 1,000 words

Well, this is my attempt to explain the three body problem using only the top thousand – er, the top ten hundred most-used words. I was quite surprised that the last word was allowed. See how you get on explaining things as if to simpletons.
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‘3 Body Problem’: what social media reaction says about China • The New York Times

Li Yuan:

»

The Netflix series portrays China as a scientific giant, speaking to the universe. Mr. Liu’s vast imagination and his probing of the nature of good and evil are key to his books’ success.

He doesn’t seem to view China or even the Earth as exceptional. In a television interview in 2022, he said that the crises described in any science fiction novel are shared “by humanity as a whole.” He added, “From the perspective of the universe, we are all part of a whole.”

The Netflix series adopted a Chinese word – “Santi,” or three body – as the alien’s name. The book’s English translation uses “Trisolarian.” When was the last time that a Chinese word made it into the global pop culture? But few people celebrated that on Chinese social media.

Instead, many comments zeroed in on how unflatteringly China is portrayed and how few Chinese elements are included in the series. Netflix isn’t available in China but viewers flocked to see pirated versions of “3 Body Problem.”

The story in the Netflix version takes place mainly in Britain, not Beijing. The actors are racially diverse, including Latino, Black, white, South Asian and Chinese. Some comments call the diverse casting “American-style political correctness,” while others question why the series casts ethnic Chinese only as villains or poor people, which is not true.

If their main complaint about the Netflix adaptation is that the creators took too much liberty with the plot and the main characters, their other major complaint is that the opening scene about the Cultural Revolution is too truthful or too violent.

Some doubted the necessity of mentioning the political event at all. Others accused the show of exaggerating the level of violence in the struggle session [shown at the start of the first episode, showing a professor being beaten and killed in front of a crowd during the Cultural Revolution].

«

Rather like the events of Tiananmen Square, there’s a desire not to remember the brutal acts that have led to the present day. Everything is techno-utopian, as the writer says.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The arrival of superhuman Go-playing AI has actually improved top-level play. Might that happen in other fields too? CC-licensed photo by Chad Miller on Flickr.

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After AI beat them, professional go players got better and more creative • Escaping Flatland

Henrik Karlsson:

»

For many decades, it seemed professional Go players had reached a hard limit on how well it is possible to play. They were not getting better. Decision quality was largely plateaued from 1950 to the mid-2010s.

Then, in May 2016, DeepMind demonstrated AlphaGo, an AI that could beat the best human Go players. This is how the humans reacted: [graphic shows abrupt rise in “decision quality” of professional players’ moves].

After a few years, the weakest professional players were better than the strongest players before AI. The strongest players pushed beyond what had been thought possible.

Or were they cheating by using the AI? No. They really were getting better.

And it wasn’t simply that they imitated the AI, in a mechanical way. They got more creative, too. There was an uptick in historically novel moves and sequences. Shin et al calculate about 40% of the improvement came from moves that could have been memorized by studying the AI. But moves that deviated from what the AI would do also improved, and these “human moves” accounted for 60% of the improvement.

My guess is that AlphaGo’s success forced the humans to reevaluate certain moves and abandon weak heuristics. This let them see possibilities that had been missed before.

Something is considered impossible. Then somebody does it. Soon it is standard. This is a common pattern. Until Roger Bannister ran the 4-minute mile, the best runners clustered just above 4 minutes for decades. A few months later Bannister was no longer the only runner to do a 4-minute mile. These days, high schoolers do it. The same story can be told about the French composer Pierre Boulez. His music was considered unplayable until recordings started circulating on YouTube and elsewhere. Now it is standard repertoire at concert houses.

The recent development in Go suggests that superhuman AI systems can have this effect, too. They can prove something is possible and lift people up. This doesn’t mean that AI systems will not displace humans at many tasks, and it doesn’t mean that humans can always adapt to keep up with the systems—in fact, the human Go players are not keeping up. But the flourishing of creativity and skills tells us something about what might happen at the tail end of the human skill distribution when more AI systems come online.

«

What’s important, Karlsson points out, is that the AI needs to explain how why some moves are suboptimal; otherwise we’re just guessing.
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“Social order could collapse” in AI era, two top Japan companies say • WSJ

Peter Landers:

»

Japan’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative artificial intelligence, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, or NTT, and Yomiuri Shimbun Group Holdings made the proposal in an AI manifesto to be released Monday. Combined with a law passed in March by the European Parliament restricting some uses of AI, the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing.

The Japanese companies’ manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology. Without giving specifics, it said AI tools have already begun to damage human dignity because the tools are sometimes designed to seize users’ attention without regard to morals or accuracy.

Unless AI is restrained, “in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars,” the manifesto said.

It said Japan should take measures immediately in response, including laws to protect elections and national security from abuse of generative AI.

«

That’s definitely the way to get your office memo noticed: say that a new tech could cause the collapse of civilisation. Lots of IT administrators wishing they’d used that line about Dropbox, Slack and Teams, no doubt.
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Elon Musk threatens to disobey court order over banned profiles • FT via Ars Technica

Bryan Harris and Hannah Murphy:

»

Brazil’s attorney general has demanded “urgent regulation” of social media sites after Elon Musk threatened to disobey a court order banning certain profiles on his X platform and after he called for a Supreme Court justice to “resign or be impeached.”

“It is urgent to regulate social networks,” said Jorge Messias. “We cannot live in a society in which billionaires domiciled abroad have control of social networks and put themselves in a position to violate the rule of law, failing to comply with court orders and threatening our authorities.”

The comments came after X’s global government affairs team posted that it “has been forced by court decisions to block certain popular accounts in Brazil…We do not know the reasons these blocking orders have been issued [and] we are prohibited from saying which court or judge issued the order, or on what grounds.”

The profiles are probably linked to far-right movements, which have found fertile ground on X and other social media platforms, including Telegram.

Musk suggested the court orders came from Alexandre De Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who has been a vocal advocate of cracking down on anti-democratic content online, particularly following riots on January 8 last year when thousands of far-right demonstrators stormed government buildings in Brasília.

Musk, the billionaire owner of X, vowed on Sunday to “publish everything demanded by [De Moraes] and how those requests violate Brazilian law.” He called for Moraes to “resign or be impeached” and said the judge had “brazenly and repeatedly betrayed the constitution and people of Brazil.”

…Musk’s latest comments echo talking points of Brazil’s far-right, which has long accused De Moraes and the Supreme Court of censorship and running a “judicial dictatorship.”

De Moraes is widely considered to have played a role in protecting Brazilian democracy during the 2022 presidential election, when the president at the time, Jair Bolsonaro, was spreading unsubstantiated claims about the integrity of the electoral system. De Moraes also took a hard line in the aftermath of the Brasília riots, handing down lengthy sentences and accusing the demonstrators of trying to launch a coup.

Orlando Silva, a lawmaker aligned with the government, said Musk had disrespected the judiciary and that in response he would propose legislation setting out a “responsibilities regime for these digital platforms.”

«

Really impossible to know who the bad actor is here. Could it be both?
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Microsoft is confident Windows on Arm could finally beat Apple • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for “AI PCs” next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks.

After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft’s latest consumer-focused Surface hardware.

Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it’s planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI PCs will have “faster app emulation than Rosetta 2” — the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel processors to Apple’s own processors.

«

Aren’t we a long way past the point where these sorts of comparisons persuade anyone about anything? Your choice of computer is going to be more about the ecosystem; plus the internet effectively began pulling down the barriers between Windows and macOS in the late 1990s.

Still, this must also bring Windows running on M-series Macs closer. Doesn’t it?
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Just you and the universe • The Atlantic

Marina Koren:

»

A total solar eclipse …requires no embellishment or interpretation. You don’t need an expert to decipher “the un-sunlike sun,” as the astronomer Maria Mitchell described it during her own eclipse experience in 1878. You don’t need a solar physicist by your side to experience the wonder of the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which peeks out from behind the moon as it sends light shimmering in waves across the skin of your arms and the grass at your feet. And even without a sense of sight, eclipses are visceral: Some birds cease chirping; watchful humans will hoot and holler. And when the sun temporarily stops warming the Earth, the air suddenly grows chillier.

In their easy perceptibility, eclipses can make us keenly aware of the universe’s machinations. Rarely do we consider sunrises and sunsets for what they actually represent: the movement of a giant rocky planet rotating on its axis, toward and away from its parent star. When I admire a full moon or a gleaming crescent, I don’t think at all about the orbital mechanics that produce our satellite’s shifting appearance. Such spectacles are clear-cut signs of a universe in motion, but a total solar eclipse provides unignorable proof.

The scenes of an eclipse unfold within minutes, transitioning smoothly from one set to another, as if guided by an invisible stagehand. They make one very aware of the fact that, as Andy Rash, an illustrator of a children’s book about eclipses, put it to me recently, “you’re watching giant objects move around and hide one behind the other.”

«

The descriptions of totality, and the photos, have given me a hankering to experience one: XKCD says there’s a big, big difference between partial (done that) and total. (XKCD: “a partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky.”)
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The total eclipse shows us how important solar energy is to the US • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

All 50 states will experience some degree of disruption to solar power generation during the eclipse, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). It forecasts a whopping 93% peak power reduction from solar panels within the Texas grid, where the solar eclipse will first cross into the US before slicing a diagonal path across the nation toward Maine. Peak power reduction is expected to reach 71% within the eastern power grid and 45% in the western grid.

The eclipse only reaches “totality,” when the Sun is completely blocked by the Moon, for several minutes in each location. But a partial eclipse can persist for several hours. While solar generation falls, electricity demand is expected to rise. Households and businesses with photovoltaic panels won’t be able to depend on their own solar systems as much — they’ll need to rely more on the grid.

That kind of mismatch in supply and demand is what can lead to outages. Grid managers have had a lot of time to prepare for this eclipse, so experts aren’t expecting any blackouts. Hydropower and gas are supposed to make up for most of the the shortfall in solar energy. NREL expects gas to cover about 30% of the loss in utility-scale solar generation.

«

Phew, thought we might not get a solar eclipse story desperately trying to wedge something in for a moment there. The effect is comparable to heavy cloud, which has been known to happen in the sky.
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ClickWheel JS – a Javascript Library

»

Cursors and touch screens are inefficient tools to navigate the web.
We built ClickWheel.js, to bring the web into a more civilized age.

Scroll with the click wheel to give it a try.

Remember this is an iPod click wheel. Click and scroll around in a circle just like on an iPod

«

Works better on mobile than desktop (guess why). Isn’t very finished – they haven’t considered what “MENU” should take you to (the hamburger menu perhaps?), what the select button in the middle should do (follow a link?), and the purpose of the back, skip and play/pause buttons is lost.
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Global PC shipments return to growth and pre-pandemic volumes in the first quarter of 2024 • IDC

»

After two years of decline, the worldwide traditional PC market returned to growth during the first quarter of 2024 (1Q24) with 59.8m shipments, growing 1.5% year over year, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker.

Growth was largely achieved due to easy year-over-year comparisons as the market declined 28.7% during the first quarter of 2023, which was the lowest point in PC history. In addition, global PC shipments finally returned to pre-pandemic levels as 1Q24 volumes rivalled those seen in 1Q19 when 60.5m units were shipped.

With inflation numbers trending down, PC shipments have begun to recover in most regions, leading to growth in the Americas as well as Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). However, the deflationary pressures in China directly impacted the global PC market. As the largest consumer of desktop PCs, weak demand in China led to yet another quarter of declines for global desktop shipments, which already faced pressure from notebooks as the preferred form factor.

“Despite China’s struggles, the recovery is expected to continue in 2024 as newer AI PCs hit shelves later this year and as commercial buyers begin refreshing the PCs that were purchased during the pandemic,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers.

«

Ah yes, “AI PCs”, the latest saviour of the PC market, which has been hopping from saviour to saviour for more than a decade now. (Side note: IDC gives Apple an 8.1% sales share, which would have sounded frankly bonkers 15 years ago.)
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Music has just changed forever and we should be freaking out more about it • Odd and Ends of History

James O’Malley:

»

I’ve written before about how even if AI was to develop no further than its capabilities today, it is already world changing, as it represents billions of small, marginal gains in productivity.

And I think similar is the case for AI-generated music like with Suno. Even if AI music doesn’t improve any further, it already represents a profound change to the music industry.

And like the high status jobs I describe above, I don’t think it will make a huge difference at the “top” of the industry. Taylor Swift, Coldplay and, regrettably, U2, will continue to release albums and sell out stadiums. No one is going to stop you somehow enjoying Bono’s music.

But where I do think AI will make a difference are the billion other lower-grade circumstances when music is playing. If you need background music for your corporate health and safety training video, or you need a theme-tune for your podcast, then it is a no-brainer to use AI instead of paying an expensive musician.

For better or worse then, AI will become the ubiquitous source of, essentially, “elevator music”, for the entire world, and it will have terrible consequences for many people working in the music industry today. Musicians who earn a living making adverts or taking commissions from el-cheapo outsourcing websites like Fiverr are basically fucked – just like “low-level” visual artists and copywriters are by Midjourney and ChatGPT.

«

This post is isn’t paywalled, but this is the key part: if AI can write music, does that mean it’s going to take over the music business? I think not – it can’t do live gigs, it can’t create that parasocial feeling that people like to have with their musical heroes. Sure, it can do some of the Muzak function – the Muzak company might be interested in buying Suno – but humans and music are far bigger than just writing tracks.
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Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon competition hit by AI controversy • Bleeding Cool

Rich Johnston:

»

Pink Floyd has announced the winners of its The Dark Side of The Moon animation competition, which coincided with the album’s fiftieth anniversary. They invited a new generation of animators to create music videos for any of the album’s ten songs, with judges Nick Mason, Kyle Alba, Gerald Scarfe, Sarah Smith, Daisy Jacobs, Harry Pearce, Terry Gilliam, Alan Yentob, and Anton Corbijn.

“Given that it was the 50th anniversary of the album, and with the band’s history of working with animation both in videos and on stage, we felt this needed to be acknowledged,” said Pink Floyd’s long-time creative consultant Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell. “It was a huge success with over 900 films being entered and the process of elimination for the judges was very complex. They eventually came up with the final 10 and I can only say they were brilliant choices and representative of the diverse styles of entries that all gave deep respect to the legacy of the band.”

Ten winners were announced by Nick Mason. However there may be an issue with one of them. The winning video by Damián Gaume for Any Colour You Like was created, according to Gaume, using Stable Diffusion AI software. There was an immediate backlash and reaction against this video online, which overshadowed the other nine winners and the planned overall winners intended to be announced [on Monday]. Some condemned Gerald Scarfe, one of the judges, especially as the cartoonist and animator most associated with Pink Floyd’s album and movie Another Brick In The Wall, which included intricate hand drawn animation, based on his cartoons, and considered a true classic.

«

Consider that it was just 18 months ago that people were upset about an AI illustration winning a prize. Now it’s video. Judge for yourself:

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you want to locate all the occurrences of a British place name, a new online tool will help you. CC-licensed photo by David Howard 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. Yes hi elbow works thanks. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI keeps going wrong. What if it can’t be fixed? • Financial Times

Henry Mance:

»

On their podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna try to pick apart AI bombast — including a Google executive’s claim that computers have already obtained artificial general intelligence, and a Goldman Sachs prediction that AI will replace one-quarter of current work. 

“It’s true that these things can extrude plausible-sounding text on a very wide variety of topics, but that’s general mimicry that isn’t necessarily worth anything,” says Bender. “The burden of proof lies with the people making the extraordinary claims . . . No one is saying AI is hype, we’re saying that your claims of AI are hype.”

[Computer scientist] Gary Marcus suggests performance may get worse: LLMs produce untrustworthy output, which is then sucked back into other LLMs. The models become permanently contaminated. Scientific journals’ peer-review processes will be overwhelmed, “leading to a precipitous drop in reputation”, Marcus wrote recently.

The sceptics’ other recourse is to ask whether people are actually using AI. How many people do you know who use ChatGPT regularly? “I wish it could do the boring parts of my job for me, but it can’t,” says [former games journalist, now tech publicist and tech sceptic Ed] Zitron. Marcus has picked up on a prediction that AI was so good at analysing MRI and CT scans that it would put radiologists out of work. In 2022, he wrote that: “Not a single radiologist has been replaced.” 

There are other examples. Zitron cites a study by Boston Consulting Group, which found that consultants who used ChatGPT to help solve business problems performed 23% worse than those who didn’t use it. (BCG did find that the tool increased performance in product innovation by 40%.) 

Plenty of the public are in effect AI sceptics. Roughly one-third of Americans say that AI will make outcomes better for patients, another third say it will make outcomes worse, and the rest say it won’t make much difference. 

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What India can tell us about Netflix’s future • Rest of World

Russell Brandom:

»

Netflix’s pricing model is just poorly suited to what Indian consumers want — and as long as it’s charging customers $6 a month, it’s going to be outflanked by local competitors.

It’s an important test case for Netflix as the company enters into a new phase. We’re far past the software-as-a-service days when Netflix had an actual advantage in streaming video online, an advantage that scaled relatively smoothly across regions. Now, Netflix’s main advantage is its library and the sheer volume of money it can invest in content. A $250 billion market cap means it can overwhelm the local entertainment industry, even in countries like South Korea that already have well-developed studio systems. 

But throwing money around isn’t always enough. In one recent case, Netflix paid top dollar to hire the comedy star Kapil Sharma — only for his fan base to declare the new show too expensive to watch. Netflix’s strategy may result in a healthy library of local content and an industry reputation as a big spender, but if it doesn’t translate into new subscriptions, it will be hard to gain too much of a foothold. The same dynamic is already playing out in Africa, where Netflix was recently outpaced by the local rival Showmax.

To be fair, none of this is an immediate problem for Netflix. Premium pricing means more money, even without massive subscriber growth, and the company is worth more than it’s ever been. Ad-supported rivals like Meta and Google took a beating when ad markets cratered earlier this year, which made investors love Netflix’s approach that much more. 

But the Indian test case suggests there are real limits to how much Netflix can grow outside the West — at least without real changes. In the long term, Netflix is facing off against Disney to be the first truly global content studio — and winning over markets like India is an important step on the journey.

«

That’s another reason why the ad-supported tier of Netflix makes a lot of sense. In a country that is incredibly price-sensitive, it might be sensible to have a zero-price, all-ads tier.
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X’s AI chatbot Grok made up a fake trending headline about Iran attacking Israel • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

A shocking story was promoted on the “front page” or main feed of Elon Musk’s X on Thursday: “Iran Strikes Tel Aviv with Heavy Missiles,” read the headline. 

This would certainly be a worrying world news development. Earlier that week, Israel had conducted an airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria, killing two generals as well as other officers. Retaliation from Iran seemed like a plausible occurrence.

But, there was one major problem: Iran did not attack Israel. The headline was fake.

Even more concerning, the fake headline was apparently generated by X’s own official AI chatbot, Grok, and then promoted by X’s trending news product, Explore, on the very first day of an updated version of the feature.

…Based on our observations, it appears that the topic started trending because of a sudden uptick of blue checkmark accounts (users who pay a monthly subscription to X for Premium features including the verification badge) spamming the same copy-and-paste misinformation about Iran attacking Israel. The curated posts provided by X were full of these verified accounts spreading this fake news alongside an unverified video depicting explosions.

From there, it appears X’s algorithms noticed a potential story trend within these users’ posts, and an Explore story page was created. We can deduce from X’s own claims about its inner workings that Grok must have then created an official-looking written narrative, along with a catchy headline. It did all this based on select users sharing fake news, in an automated attempt to provide context for what the platform itself seemed to assume was a real story.

«

Ah, so the real problem is not quite “AI made up a story from nowhere” but “humans made up a story from nowhere, and there weren’t any humans in the loop to tamp down the misplaced algorithmic amplification”. Too many humans of the wrong sort, too few of the right sort.
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The second demographic transition • Maximum Progress

Maxwell Tabarrok:

»

One theory of fertility decline says it’s all about opportunity costs, especially for women. Rising labor productivity and expanded career opportunities for potential parents make each hour of their time and each forgone career path much more valuable. Higher income potential also makes it cheaper for parents to gain utility by using financial resources to improve their children’s quality of life compared to investing time in having more kids. Simultaneously, economic growth raises the returns to these financial investments in quality (e.g education).

In addition to higher incomes, people today have more diverse and exciting options for leisure. DINKs [dual income, no kids couples] can go to Trader Joes and workout classes on the weekend, play video games, watch Netflix, and go on international vacations.

These rising opportunity costs accumulate into the large and pervasive declines in fertility that we see in the data.

If this explanation is correct, it puts a double bind on the case for economic growth. Unless AI upends the million-year old relationship between population and technological progress just in time, progress seems self defeating. The increases in labor productivity and leisure opportunities that make economic growth so important also siphon resources away from the future contributors to that growth. Empirically, the opportunity cost of having kids has grown large enough to bring fertility well below replacement levels all around the world. The opportunity cost explanation suggests we have to pick between high incomes and sustainable fertility.

Luckily, this explanation is not correct. At least not entirely.

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The good news: above household incomes of $200k, fertility is increasing. So basically we just all have to get rich.
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Apple plans new iPad Pro for early May as production ramps up overseas • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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Apple’s overseas suppliers have ramped up production of the company’s long-anticipated new iPads and a launch is planned for early May, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The release will center on revamped versions of the iPad Pro and iPad Air, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. As Bloomberg News has previously reported, the Pro models will get crisper new OLED displays — short for organic light-emitting diode — while the iPad Air will get a 12.9in screen option for the first time.

The move marks an end to the longest stretch without new models in the history of the iPad, which was first introduced by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 2010. It’s been about 18 months since the last updates — a drought that’s contributed to already-sluggish demand for tablets. Apple is betting that the new models, with faster chips and revamped accessories, can help spur a renaissance for the category.

After a run-up during the pandemic, iPad sales have fallen in each of Apple’s last two fiscal years, which run through September. They suffered an additional 25% year-over-year decline during the latest holiday period, when the devices have typically been popular gifts.

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Yeah but that decline is because Apple did exactly nothing, zero, nada to the iPad in 2023. It basically forgot about it. May is, one has to observe, a peculiar time to break out new iPads given their Christmas popularity – though as someone who would like to see an OLED iPad, no objection here.
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How Vice became “an effing clown show” • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

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According to sources, while Vice execs were spending opulently in some areas, the newsroom struggled to pay its bills. A person familiar with the company’s finances claimed that Vice delayed paying vendors until services would be shut off, at which point the company would realize they were necessary and try to figure out how to pay the bills. Among the services shut off on multiple occasions in the run-up to the bankruptcy were Getty and Pacer, two accounts crucial to any newsroom. It was particularly difficult for freelancers to get paid — a process that reportedly sometimes took months of hounding. A vendor called Wipro won a $9.9 million judgment in arbitration for unpaid bills — one of two factors that led to Vice’s eventual bankruptcy.

Three people alleged that it was not unusual for corporate credit cards to be abruptly cut off, including one person whose card was cut off. One newsroom leader reportedly paid $5,000 out of their own pocket to freelancers Vice owed. A division head allegedly created a shadow accounting system because the actual accounting department was so overwhelmed, it was impossible to know how much budget was left.

Sometimes certain lines of business weren’t told about the revenue goals they were expected to fulfill. Meanwhile, the company’s actual accounting and expense controls were messy. For instance, Vice’s digital division had expenses from NetJets — a private jet service — on its profit and loss statement, two sources told me. (A third confirmed the NetJets account existed without saying which balance sheet it was on. Two sources took credit for eventually canceling the NetJets account. “Since at least 2021, Vice has not had a NetJets account,” according to Vice spokesperson Samira Sorzano.)

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Basically, the whole thing was built on magical (financial) thinking; it just wasn’t real, in the sense of having a profit/loss account in the black. Modern journamalism.
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British Placename Mapper

Robin Wilson (who built it):

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This tool lets you visualise British place names that match certain search terms on a map.

Search terms can be used to match anywhere in the name, at the beginning or end, exactly, or using a regular expression.

Hover (tap on mobile) over a marker on the map to see its name. Click the copy button at the bottom to share your searches with others.

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Fun, and uses the Ordnance Survey Open Names data – which, I believe, came to be available through the efforts of the Free Our Data campaign culminating in 2010.
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Practically-a-book review: the Rootclaim $100,000 lab leak debate • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander:

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Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.

His method – called Rootclaim – uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it.

But the joke goes that you do Bayesian reasoning by doing normal reasoning while muttering “Bayes, Bayes, Bayes” under your breath. Nobody – not the statisticians, not Nate Silver, certainly not me – tries to do full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems. They’d be too hard to model. You’d make some philosophical mistake converting the situation into numbers, then end up much worse off than if you’d tried normal human intuition.

Rootclaim spent years working on this problem, until he was satisfied his method could avoid these kinds of pitfalls.

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This is your long read for today, but well worth it. Alexander helped set up a debate between Wilf and Peter Miller, a “physics student, programmer and mountaineer” who scraped together $100,000 for his side of the bet, backing the idea that SARS-Cov-2 did not originate from a lab leak, but from simple human-animal contact.

Now read on.
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The arrival of RCS on iPhones: what to expect • Pocket Lint

Robert Wells:

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The incorporation of RCS [Rich Communication Services] support is anticipated to bring several enhancements to communications between iPhones and Android smartphones, including:

• Enhanced quality of photos and videos
• Integration of audio messages
• Display of typing indicators
• Visibility of read receipts
• Ability to utilize Wi-Fi for messaging
• Location sharing within text threads
• Enhanced functionality in group chats, including the option for iPhone users to exit a conversation involving Android users

These contemporary features are already accessible within iMessage and many third-party messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. Unlike conventional SMS, RCS operates seamlessly over mobile data or Wi-Fi connections.

…According to Apple, RCS messages will be green like SMS messages, which is surprising since the company is already under scrutiny from the US Department of Justice and the EU for potential antitrust law violations. Fortunately, it’ll be an easy fix if courts decree that all bubbles must adhere to the same hue.

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Notice what’s missing? No? Encryption. RCS messages aren’t encrypted by default – indeed, there’s some feeling it’s by design, so governments can keep monitoring them, as with SMS – though Google does do it for RCS messages between Android phones sent through Google Messages, the Google app, because the app generate a device encryption key in the same way as WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage.

Anyway, it would be great if RCS stopped Americans whining about green bubbles. Though you know it won’t. Although it seems that more of them are taking up WhatsApp, which would be useful.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified